Atlantis

CHAPTER 12

The twin floodlights on either side of the Aquapods cast a brilliant swath of illumination on the seabed, the beams angled inward to converge five metres below. The light reflected off millions of particles of suspended silt as if they were passing through endless veils of speckly haze. Isolated rocky outcrops reared up and disappeared behind as they pressed on at maximum speed. To the left the bottom dropped off sharply into the abyss, the desolate grey of the sea floor sliding into a forbidding blackness devoid of all life.

The intercom crackled.

“Jack, this is Seaquest. Do you read me? Over.”

“We read you loud and clear.”

“The drone has got something.” York’s voice was edged with excitement. “You should reach its position in about five hundred metres by maintaining your present trajectory. I’m sending the co-ordinates so you can program in a fix.”

Earlier that day, the island had loomed out of the horizon like some mythical apparition. Just before Seaquest arrived, the sea had gone dead calm, an eerie lull that seemed to draw up its vapours in a ghostly pall. As the wind picked up again and curled the mist towards the barren shore, they felt like explorers who had chanced upon some lost world. With its lack of vegetation and sheer rock the island seemed old beyond belief, a craggy wasteland reduced by time and weather to its bare essence. Yet if their instincts were right, it was here that all the hopes and potential of mankind had first taken root.

They had brought Seaquest to a halt two nautical miles west of the island. For a reconnaissance towards its submerged slopes they had used a sonar drone rather than the ROV, which was limited to visual survey. For three hours now there had been nothing unusual in the sonar readout, and they had made the decision to deploy the Aquapods as well. Speed was now paramount.

Jack gave a thumbs-up to Costas, who was hugging the seabed at the 140 metre contour. They could sense each other’s excitement, a thrill of anticipation that needed no exchange of words. From the moment of the telephone call when Hiebermeyer first uttered that word from the papyrus, Jack had known they would be propelled to some greater revelation. All through the painstaking process of translation and decipherment he had felt supremely confident that this was the one, that the stars were all in alignment this time. Yet the pace of events since they cracked the code had left little time for reflection. Only days before he had been elated beyond belief by the Minoan wreck. Now they were on the cusp of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.

The Aquapods slowed to a crawl and they continued in silence, each man aware of the other through their Plexiglas domes as the yellow pods inched forward a few metres apart in the gloom.

Moments later a vista of spectral shapes began to materialize out of the haze. They had studied the images of the Neolithic village off Trabzon in anticipation of this moment. But nothing could have prepared them for the reality of entering a place which had been lost to the world for almost eight thousand years.

Suddenly it was happening.

“Slow down.” Jack spoke with bated breath. “Take a look at that.”

What had seemed strangely regular undulations in the seabed took on a new form as Jack fired a blast from his water jet to clear away the sediment. As it settled they could see the gaping mouths of a pair of huge pottery jars, buried upright side by side between low retaining walls. Another blast revealed a second pair of jars, and identical undulations continued upslope as far as they could see.

“It’s a storehouse, probably for grain,” Jack said. “They’re just like the pithoi at Knossos. Only four thousand years older.”

Suddenly a larger shape appeared before them, completely blocking their way ahead. For a moment it seemed as if they had come to the edge of the world. They were at the base of an enormous cliff extending on the same line in either direction, its sheer wall broken by ledges and fissures like a quarry face. Then they saw curious rectangular patches of pitch blackness, some at regular intervals on the same level.

They realized with amazement what they were looking at.

It was a huge conglomeration of walls and flat roofs, broken by windows and entranceways, all shrouded in a blanket of silt. It was like the Neolithic village but on a gigantic scale. The buildings rose four or five storeys, the highest blocks reached by terraces of rooftop platforms linked by stairways and ladders.

They halted their Aquapods and gazed in awe, forcing their minds to register an image that seemed more fantasy than fact.

“It’s like some huge condominium,” Costas marvelled.

Jack shut his eyes hard and then opened them again, disbelief turning to wonder as the silt stirred up by the Aquapods began to settle and reveal the unmistakable signs of human endeavour all round them.

“People got about on the rooftops, through those hatches.” His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry, but he forced himself to speak in the dispassionate tones of a professional archaeologist. “My guess is each of these blocks housed an extended family. As the group got larger they built upwards, adding timber-framed mud-brick storeys.”

As they ascended they could see the blocks were riddled by a maze of alleyways, astonishingly reminiscent of the medieval bazaars of the Middle East.

“It must have bustled with crafts and trade,” Jack said. “There’s no way these people were just farmers. They were expert potters and carpenters and metalworkers.”

He paused, staring through the Plexiglas at what looked like a ground-floor shopfront.

“Someone in this place made that gold disc.”

For several minutes they passed over more flat-roofed highrises, the dark windows staring at them like sightless eyes caught in the glare of their floodlights. About five hundred metres due east from the storehouse the conglomeration came to an abrupt end. In the murk ahead they could make out another complex, perhaps twenty metres away, and below them a space wider and more regular than the alleyways.

“It’s a road,” Jack said. “It must go down to the ancient seafront. Let’s go inland and then resume our original course.”

They veered south and followed the road gently upslope. Two hundred metres on, it was bisected by another road running east-west. They turned and followed it due east, the Aquapods maintaining an altitude of twenty metres to avoid the mass of buildings on either side.

“Extraordinary,” Jack said. “These blocks are separated by a regular grid of streets, the earliest by thousands of years.”

“Someone planned this place.”

Tutankhamun’s tomb, the palace of Knossos, the fabled walls of Troy, all the hallowed discoveries of archaeology suddenly seemed pedestrian and mundane, mere stepping stones to the marvels that now lay before them.

“Atlantis,” Costas breathed. “A few days ago I didn’t even believe it existed.” He looked across at the figure in the other Plexiglas dome. “A little thanks would be appreciated.”

Jack grinned in spite of his preoccupation with the fabulous images around them.

“OK. You pointed us in the right direction. I owe you a large gin and tonic.”

“That’s what I got last time.”

“A lifetime’s supply then.”

“Done.”

A moment later the buildings on either side suddenly disappeared and the sea floor dropped away out of sight. Fifty metres on, there was still nothing except a haze of suspended silt.

“My depth sounder shows the sea floor has dropped almost twenty metres below the level of the road,” Jack exclaimed. “I suggest we descend and backtrack to the point where the buildings disappeared.”

They increased their water ballast until the lights revealed the sea floor. It was level and featureless, unlike the undulating surface they had traversed on their way towards the western edge of the city.

A few minutes later they had returned to the point where they last saw structures. In front of them the sea floor rose abruptly at a 45-degree angle until it reached the base of the buildings and the end of the road above.

Costas moved his Aquapod forward until its ballast tanks rested on the floor just before it angled upwards. He directed a long blast from his water jet at the slope and then drew back to Jack’s position.

“Just as I thought.”

The silt cleared to reveal a stepped terrace like the seating in a theatre. Between the floor and the beginning of the terrace was a vertical wall three metres high.

“This was hewn out of living rock,” Costas said. “It’s tufa, isn’t it? The same dark stone used in ancient Rome. Lightweight but tough, easily quarried but an excellent load-bearer.”

“But we haven’t seen any masonry buildings,” Jack protested.

“There must be some pretty massive structures somewhere.”

Jack was looking closely at the features in front of them. “This is more than just a quarry. Let’s follow those terraces and see where they take us.”

Twenty minutes later they had traversed three sides of a vast sunken courtyard almost a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide. Whereas the road layout respected the line of the ancient coast, running parallel and at right angles to it, the courtyard was aligned off to the south-east. They had skirted it clockwise and were now at the south-eastern boundary opposite their starting point. Above them buildings and the road resumed exactly as they appeared on the other side of the courtyard.

“It looks like a stadium,” Costas murmured. “I remember you saying those palace courtyards in Crete were for bull-baiting, for sacrifices and other rituals.”

“The Minoan courtyards were smaller,” Jack replied. “Even the arena of the Colosseum in Rome is only eighty metres across. This is huge.” He thought for a moment. “It’s just a hunch, but before we continue along the road I’d like to see across the middle of this space.”

Inside his dome Costas nodded in agreement.

They set out across the courtyard due west. After about 150 metres, they came to a halt. Ahead of them was a mass of silt-covered stone, its shape irregular and quite unlike the courtyard boundary.

Costas fired his water jet at the rock face, shrouding his dome in silt. After a few moments his voice came over the intercom.

“It’s an outcrop left standing when the rest was quarried out.”

Jack was slowly traversing south-east along a spur which extended twenty metres from the main mass. It terminated in a rounded ledge about two metres high and five metres across. Costas followed as Jack gently cleaned the surface with his water jet, blowing away silt to reveal the bare rock.

They stared transfixed by the shape that emerged, their minds unable to acknowledge what lay before them.

“My God.”

“It’s…” Jack faltered.

“It’s a paw,” Costas whispered.

“A lion’s paw.” Jack quickly regained his composure. “This must be a gigantic statue, at least a hundred metres long and thirty metres high.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“A sphinx.”

For a moment the two men stared at each other through their domes in stupefied silence. Eventually Costas’ voice crackled over the intercom.

“Seems incredible but anything’s possible in this place. Whatever’s up there is a long way off our entry route and we wouldn’t have seen it. I’m going to check it out.”

Jack remained stationary while Costas floated upwards, gradually receding until all that was left was a diminishing halo of light. Just as that too seemed about to disappear, it came to an abrupt halt some thirty metres above the sea floor.

Jack waited anxiously for Costas to report. After more than a minute he could restrain himself no longer.

“What can you see?”

The voice that came through seemed strangely suppressed.

“Remind me. A sphinx has a lion’s body and a human head. Right?”

“Right.”

“Try this for a variant.”

Costas flicked his floodlights to full beam. The image that appeared high above was awesome and terrifying, the stuff of nightmares. It was as if a flash of lightning on a stormy night had revealed a huge beast towering over them, its features silhouetted in a spectral sheen that burst forth between rolling banks of clouds.

Jack stared up transfixed, scarcely able to register an image for which all their experience, all their years of exploration and extraordinary discovery, could provide no preparation.

It was an immense bull’s head, its huge horns sweeping up into the darkness beyond the arc of light, its snout half open as if it were about to lower its head and paw the ground before the onslaught.

After what seemed an eternity, Costas angled his Aquapod forward and panned the light down the neck of the beast, showing where it became a lion’s body.

“It’s carved from the living rock, basalt by the look of it,” he said. “The horns extend at least ten metres above the buildings. This must once have been a jutting ridge of lava that flowed down to the sea.”

He was descending more rapidly now and soon reached Jack.

“It’s facing the volcano,” he continued. “That explains the strange alignment of the courtyard. It respects the orientation of the twin peaks rather than the line of the coast, which would have been a more practical benchmark for the street layout.”

Jack quickly latched onto the significance of Costas’ words.

“And the rising sun would have shone directly between the horns and the two peaks,” he said. “It must have been a sight even the ancients could scarcely have imagined in their wildest fantasies about the lost world of Atlantis.”

The two Aquapods rose slowly together over the parapet, their water jets kicking up a storm of silt as they powered away from the floor of the courtyard. The rearing form of the giant bull-sphinx was swallowed in the darkness behind them, but the image of the colossal head with its curved horns high above remained etched in their minds.

The south-eastern perimeter was higher than the rest, rising at least ten metres vertically.

“It’s a stairway,” said Jack. “A grand entrance into the courtyard.”

The two Aquapods veered off to either side, Jack to the left and Costas to the right. Soon each appeared to the other as no more than a distant smudge of yellow in the gloom. At the top was a wide roadway, which their water jets revealed had a lustrous white surface.

“It looks like marble pavement.”

“I had no idea people quarried stone this early.” Costas was already amazed by the scale of stone extraction in the courtyard, and now here was evidence for masonry. “I thought quarrying didn’t begin until the Egyptians.”

“Stone Age hunters dug for flint to make tools, but this is the earliest evidence for precision-cut building stone. It predates the first Egyptian quarries by at least two thousand years.”

They continued silently onwards, neither able to comprehend the enormity of their find. Churned up phosphorescence billowed behind them like vapour trails. The road followed the same orientation as the courtyard, leading from the ferocious gaze of the bull-sphinx directly towards the foot of the volcano.

“I can see structures to my right,” Costas announced. “Pedestals, pillars, columns. I’m just passing one that’s square-sided, about two metres across. It towers way up out of sight. It looks like an obelisk.”

“I’m getting the same,” Jack said. “They’re laid out symmetrically, just like the Egyptian temple precincts at Luxor and Karnak.”

The floodlights revealed a succession of ghostly forms on either side of the processional way, the shapes looming into view and then disappearing like phantasms glimpsed in a swirling sandstorm. They saw altars and plinths, animal-headed statues and the carved limbs of creatures too bizarre to make out. Both men began to feel unnerved, as if they were being lured by these beckoning sentinels into a world beyond their experience.

“It’s like the entrance to Hades,” Costas murmured.

They ran the gauntlet between the eerie lines of statues, a lurking, brooding presence that seemed to reproach them for trespassing in a domain that had been theirs alone for millennia.

Moments later the pall lifted as the roadway abruptly terminated at two large structures divided by a central passageway. It was about ten metres wide, less than half the width of the roadway, and had shallow steps like those which led up from the courtyard.

“I can see squared blocks, each four or five metres long and maybe two metres high.” Costas was suddenly elated. “This is where all the quarried stone went!” He stopped just inside the passageway and used his water jet to blow silt from the base of the wall. He angled his light so it shone up the structure.

Jack was about ten metres from Costas and could see his face in the dome as he looked across.

“My turn for a recce.”

Jack vented water and began to rise, but rather than receding gradually upwards, he abruptly vanished over a rim not far above.

Several long minutes later his voice crackled over the intercom.

“Costas. Do you read me? This is incredible.”

“What is it?”

There was a pause. “Think of the most outstanding monuments of ancient Egypt.” Jack’s Aquapod reappeared as he descended back into the passageway.

“Not a pyramid.”

“You’ve got it.”

“But pyramids have sloping sides. These are vertical.”

“What you’re looking at is the base of a massive terrace,” Jack explained. “About ten metres above us it turns into a platform ten metres wide. Above that there’s another terrace with the same dimensions, then another, and so on. I went along the entire length of this side and could see the terrace continuing on the south-east side. It’s the same basic design as the first Egyptian pyramids, the stepped pyramids of the early third millennium BC.”

“How big is it?”

“That’s the difference. This is huge, more like the Great Pyramid at Giza. I’d estimate one hundred and fifty metres across the base and eighty metres high, more than halfway to sea level. It’s incredible. This must rank as the oldest and largest masonry edifice in the world.”

“And on my side?”

“Identical. A pair of giant pyramids marking the end of the processional way. Beyond this I’d expect some form of temple or a mortuary complex, maybe cut into the side of the volcano.”

Costas activated the navigational monitor which rose like a fighter pilot’s gunsight in front of him. Jack looked down as the radio-pulse modem flashed the same image to his screen.

“A recently declassified hydrographic chart,” Costas explained. “Made by a British survey vessel taking manual soundings following the Allied defeat of Ottoman Turkey at the end of the First World War. Unfortunately the Royal Navy only had a limited window before the Turkish Republic acquired control and the Soviet buildup closed the door on the Black Sea. It’s the most detailed we’ve got, but at 1 to 50,000 it only shows broad contours of bathymetry.”

“What’s your point?”

“Take a look at the island.” Costas tapped a command for a close-up view. “The only irregular features large enough to appear in the survey were those two underwater mounts up against the north-west side of the island. Strangely symmetrical, aren’t they?”

“The pyramids!” Jack’s face broke into a broad grin. “So much for our detective work. Atlantis has been marked on a chart for more than eighty years.”

They eased along the centre of the passageway, the looming pyramids with their massive, perfectly joined masonry just visible through the gloom on either side. As Jack had estimated, they passed the far corners after 150 metres. The steps continued ahead into the darkness.

The only sound as they crept forward was the whirring of the water jets as they maintained a constant altitude a metre above the sea floor.

“Look out!”

There was a sudden commotion and a muffled curse. For a split second Costas’ attention had been diverted and he had collided with an obstacle dead ahead.

“You OK?” Jack had been trailing five metres behind but now drew up abreast, his face full of concern as he peered through the whirlwind of silt.

“No obvious damage,” Costas responded. “Luckily we were only going at a snail’s pace.”

He ran a routine diagnostic on his robotic arm and floodlight array before powering back a few metres.

“Number one driving rule, always look where you’re going,” Jack told him.

“Thanks for the advice.”

“So what was it?”

They strained to see through the silt. The disturbance had reduced visibility to less than a metre, but as the sediment settled they began to make out a curious shape directly in front of them.

“It looks like an outsized bathroom mirror,” Costas said.

It was a huge disc, perhaps five metres in diameter, standing on a pedestal about two metres high.

“Let’s check for inscriptions,” Jack suggested. “You blow away the silt and I’ll hover above to see if anything shows up.”

Costas unclamped a metallic glove from his instrument panel, inserted his left arm and flexed his fingers. The robotic arm at the front of the Aquapod exactly mimicked his movements. He angled the arm down to the water jet nozzles protruding from the undercarriage and selected a pencil-sized tube. After activating the jet, he began cleaning methodically from the centre of the disc outwards, tracing ever increasing circles on the rock.

“It’s a fine-grained stone.” The voice came from the halo of yellow that was all Jack could see of Costas in the silt below. “Granite or brecchia, similar to Egyptian porphyry. Only this has greenish flecks like the lapis lacedaemonia of Sparta. It must have been a local marble submerged by the flood.”

“Can you see any inscriptions?”

“There are some linear grooves.”

Costas jetted gently back to hover alongside Jack. As the silt settled, the entire pattern was revealed.

Jack let out a whoop of joy. “Yes!”

With geometric precision the mason had carved a complex of horizontal and vertical grooves on the polished surface. In the centre was a symbol like the letter H, with a vertical line hanging from the crossbar and the sides extending in a row of short horizontal lines like the end of a garden rake.

Jack reached with his free hand into his suit and triumphantly held up a polymer copy of the gold disc for Costas to see. It was an exact replica made by laser in the Carthage Museum where the original was now safely under lock and key in the museum vault. The copy had reached Sea Venture by helicopter shortly before their own arrival.

“Brought this along just in case,” Jack said.

“Atlantis.” Costas beamed at Jack.

“This must mark the entrance.” Jack was elated but looked determinedly at his friend. “We must press on. We’ve already overextended our recce time and Seaquest will be waiting for us to reestablish contact.”

They accelerated and swooped round either side of the stone disc, but almost immediately slowed down as they confronted a sharp incline in the slope. The passageway narrowed to a steep stairway not much wider than the two Aquapods. As they began to ascend they could just make out the vertiginous rocky slopes of the volcano on either side.

Costas elevated his floodlights and peered intently ahead, mindful of his collision a few minutes before. After they had risen only a few steps he said, “There’s something strange here.”

Jack was concentrating on a series of carved animal heads that lined his side of the stairway. They seemed to be processing upwards, drawing him on, and were identically carved beside each step. At first they looked like the snarling lions of Sumerian and Egyptian art, but as he peered closer he was astonished to see they had huge incisors like the sabre-toothed tigers of the Ice Age. So much to wonder at, so much to take in, he thought.

“What is it?” he asked.

Costas’ voice was puzzled. “It’s incredibly dark above us, almost pitch black. We’ve risen to a depth of one hundred metres and should be getting more vestigial sunlight. It should be getting lighter, not darker. It must be some kind of overhang. I suggest we…Stop!” he suddenly yelled.

The Aquapods came to a halt only inches away from the obstruction.

“Christ.” Costas forcefully exhaled. “Almost did it again.”

The two men stared in open-mouthed astonishment. Above them loomed a colossal shape that extended on either side as far as they could see. It cut directly across the staircase, blocking their progress and concealing any entrance that might lie beyond.

“My God,” Jack exclaimed. “I can see rivets. It’s a shipwreck.”

His mind reeled as it rushed from deepest antiquity to the modern world, to an intrusion that seemed almost blasphemous after all they had seen.

“It must have wedged between the pyramids and the volcano.”

“Just what we need,” Jack said resignedly. “Probably First or Second World War. There are plenty of uncharted ships sunk by U-boats all over the Black Sea.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Costas had been edging his Aquapod up the curve of the hull. “See you in a moment.”

He powered off to the left almost out of sight and then swung round and returned without pausing, his floodlights angled up against the dark mass. Jack wondered how much damage had been done, how much precious time was going to be needed to get over this unwelcome new obstacle.

“Well, what is it?”

Costas drew up alongside and spoke slowly, his tone a mixture of apprehension and high excitement.

“You can forget Atlantis for a while. We’ve just found ourselves a Russian nuclear submarine.”