Atlantis

CHAPTER 18

As Jack aligned the disc with the door the crystal seemed to be pulling him in, as if some primeval force were drawing together two halves of a whole which destiny had kept apart for too long. And sure enough, the disc mated with the crystal and slid smoothly inwards until it was flush with the doors.

“Bingo,” he said quietly.

He placed his palm on the disc and kicked hard with his fins to bring pressure to bear. Abruptly the disc sank inwards and spun rapidly clockwise, the motion causing the water to corkscrew like the wake from a propeller. As it stopped turning there was a low grinding noise, the disc disengaged and the doors swung ajar.

There was little resistance as Jack pushed the doors wide. Their view was momentarily obscured by the sheen of turbulence where ice-cold water inside mingled with the seawater around them. Jack sucked in his breath to conceal a spasm of pain, a stabbing sensation where the tear in his suit had exposed his chest to the freezing water. The other two saw his agony but knew he would rebuff their sympathy.

Costas had floated over the sill and was examining the mechanism revealed in the edge of the door.

“Fascinating,” he murmured. “The door was held by a granite beam like a crossbar, in two lengths scarfed together. The upper surface has been carved into ridges and furrows like a cog. The crystal was embedded in a stone cylinder with matching ridges. When Jack pressed the disc, the cogs engaged.”

Costas prised the disc from the crystal and passed it to Jack for safekeeping.

“How did it spin on its own?” Katya asked.

“The ends of the beam are weighted, probably inside cavities adjacent to the jambs. When the cog was engaged, the weights pulled the two lengths apart, spinning the cylinder.”

“To onlookers the automation would have seemed miraculous, the work of the gods,” Jack said.

“An impressive piece of engineering.”

“Simplicity of purpose, economy of design, durability of materials.” Costas grinned at them through his visor. “It would have won first prize hands down in the student competition at MIT when I was there.”

They turned their headlamps on full beam. The water ahead was crystal clear, free from contaminants in the thousands of years since it first seeped through the cracks in the doorway.

The light sparkled off the rock walls as their beams traversed from side to side. They were looking into a rectangular chamber the size of the torpedo room in the submarine. Immediately in front was a massive pedestal hewn from the living rock.

“It’s an altar!” Jack exclaimed. “You can see the channels where the blood spilled down the stairs outside.”

“Human sacrifice?” Costas queried.

“It has a long history among the Semitic peoples of the Near East,” Katya said. “Think of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament.”

“But never on a mass scale,” Jack countered. “The story of Abraham and Isaac is powerful precisely because it’s exceptional. The Minoans also sacrificed humans, but the only evidence is a peak sanctuary near Knossos where an earthquake toppled the temple in mid-ritual and preserved the skeleton. It was probably only ever performed in relation to catastrophes like the eruption of Thera.”

They were finning towards the pedestal in the centre of the chamber, their beams converging on the edge of the sacrificial platform. As the top came into view they were confronted by an image almost too fantastic to comprehend, a spectre that vanished like a genie as soon as they came close to it.

“Did you see what I saw?” Katya breathed.

“Extraordinary,” Costas murmured. “The bones must have disintegrated thousands of years ago, but in the stillness the calcium salts remained where they fell. The slightest disturbance and it disappeared like a puff of smoke.”

For a split second they had seen a recumbent bull, its giant shape reduced to an imprint of white streaks like a faded photographic negative. In the corners of the table they could make out holes where its limbs had been tied down before the sacrifice, the rope long since disappeared as the seawater rose and took the carcass in its icy embrace.

Jack picked up a dagger lying on one side of the table. The stone handle was incised with a fearsome beast, half bull, half eagle.

“There’s your answer,” he said softly. “The courtyard with the colossal statue by the shoreline was the world’s first bullfighting arena. The doomed animals were led up the processional way between the pyramids and then driven up the stairs to this slab. It would have been a spectacular site, overlooking the entire city on the plain below, the sacrifice perhaps timed to coincide with the first flash of sunlight overhead through the twin peaks of the volcano to the horns of the bull-sphinx in the courtyard far below. The whole city must have come to a standstill.”

He paused and looked at the other two solemnly through his visor. “We’ve just borne witness to the final sacrifice, the last desperate attempt by the priests to repel the rising seas before the doors to this chamber were locked shut for all time.”

They finned over the altar and headed towards a yawning black hole in the rear of the chamber. The shimmer grew more intense as they swam forward, the light from their headlamps sparkling off the walls as if they were billowing curtains of crystal and gold.

“Golden-walled Atlantis,” Jack said quietly.

Just before they reached the portal, Costas veered off to the right, his beam reduced to a narrow orb as he closed in on the wall.

“It’s iron pyrites, fool’s gold.” His voice was hushed in awe. “The crystals are so large and close-set they look like gold plate until you get close up.”

“But the island’s volcanic, made of igneous rock,” Katya said.

“Mainly basalt,” Costas agreed. “Molten magma that cooled too quickly for mineral crystals to form. The basalt between the cliff and the ancient shoreline was low in silica so cooled slowly as it flowed out over the limestone substrate. Further up it formed from acidic lava rich in silica that solidified as soon as it hit the surface. In the Aquapods we saw fissures of obsidian, the black volcanic glass that forms when rhyolitic lava is quickly chilled.”

“Obsidian blades were the sharpest known until the development of high-carbon steel in the Middle Ages,” Jack said. “That dagger was obsidian.”

Costas came towards them along the back wall. “Incredible,” he mused. “Obsidian for tools, tufa for masonry, volcanic dust for mortar, salt for food preservation. Not to mention the richest farmland anywhere and a sea teeming with fish. These people had it all.”

“What about the granite in the doors?” Katya persisted.

“Also igneous,” Costas replied. “But it’s not the result of volcanic eruption. It’s an intrusive rock that forms deep in the earth’s crust as the magma slowly cools, producing crystalline structures dominated by feldspar and quartz. It’s called plutonic after the Greek god of the underworld. It was thrust upwards by plate tectonics.”

“That explains another resource,” Jack interjected. “The pressure also metamorphosed seabed limestone into marble, providing fine-grained stone for those sculptures outside. There must be outcrops lower down these slopes and on that ridge to the west.”

“We’re inside a composite volcano,” Costas continued. “A combination cinder cone and shield volcano, the lava interlayered with pyroclastic ash and rock. Think Mount Saint Helens, Vesuvius, Thera. Instead of building up behind a plug and erupting explosively the magma wells up through a folded outcrop of plutonic rock and solidifies as a basaltic shield, an event repeated every time the pressure builds up. My guess is that the deeper reaches of this rock are a seething cauldron of gas and lava that force their way through fissures to leave a honeycomb of passageways and caverns. Deep down this volcano is literally riddled with rivers of fire.”

“And the fool’s gold?” Katya asked.

“An unusually dense node of iron forced up with the granite. Slow cooling deep in the earth’s crust formed huge crystals. They’re fabulous, a unique discovery.”

They turned back for one last look at the world they were leaving. In their headlamps the water was suffused with colour, the light sparkling off the rock in a shimmer of gold.

“This chamber is a geologist’s dream,” Costas murmured reverentially. “Polish it up and you’ve got a spectacle that would dazzle any onlooker. To the priests it must have seemed a godsend. An awesome complement to the pyrotechnics of the volcano itself.”

Beyond the silhouette of the altar they could just make out the casing of the submarine at the end of the tunnel. It was a reminder of the sinister enemy that barred their way back to the world above, that their only hope of rescue for Ben and Andy lay in the pitch-blackness ahead.

Before confronting the forbidding darkness of the portal, Costas finned back to the centre of the chamber. He extracted an item from his tool belt and swam round the altar before returning, an orange tape reeling out of a spool on his backpack.

“It’s something I thought of when you were telling us of legends that hark back to conflict between the Mycenaeans and Minoans in the Bronze Age,” he explained. “When Theseus arrived at Knossos to kill the Minotaur he was given a ball of thread by Ariadne to guide him through the labyrinth. Under this rock we have no access to GPS and can only navigate by dead-reckoning with compass and depth gauge. Ariadne’s thread may be the only safety line we’ve got.”

Jack led the way out of the sacrificial chamber and through the portal, his headlamp trained on the tunnel ahead. After about ten metres the passageway narrowed and curved off to the right. He paused to let the other two draw up on either side of him, the space just wide enough to accommodate them line abreast.

They were alone in the deathly stillness of a place no human had entered since the dawn of civilization. Jack experienced a familiar surge of excitement, the burst of adrenaline briefly alleviating the debilitating effects of his wound and urging him on into the unknown.

The passageway began to snake along in alternating curves, each bend seeming to exaggerate the distance from the entrance. The experience was strangely disorientating, as if the ancient architects of this world had known the unsettling effect the absence of straight lines had on the human sense of direction.

They paused while Costas paid out the final length of tape and attached a fresh spool to his back. In the narrow confines, their lamps cast a brilliant light on the walls around them, the surface lustrous as if it had been kept polished over the millennia.

Jack finned a few metres ahead and noticed an aberration in the wall.

“I’ve got markings.”

The other two quickly swam up to join him.

“Man-made,” Costas asserted. “Chiselled into the rock. They’re just like the cartouches around those precursor hieroglyphics Hiebermeyer found on that ancient stone in the temple where Solon visited the high priest.”

Hundreds of nearly identical markings were aligned in twenty horizontal registers that extended beyond the next curve in the passageway. Each marking comprised a symbol surrounded by an oval border, the cartouche Costas had referred to. The symbols within the cartouches were rectilinear, each with a vertical stem and containing varying numbers and arrangements of horizontal bars branching off to either side.

“They look like runes,” Costas said.

“Impossible,” Katya retorted. “Runes derive from the Etruscan and Latin alphabets, from contact with the Mediterranean during the classical period. Six thousand years too late for us.”

The other two withdrew to allow her more space. She scanned one of the registers close up, then pushed away for a wider view.

“I don’t believe this is an alphabet at all,” she said. “In an alphabet there’s a direct correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, between the symbol and the unit of sound. Most alphabets have twenty to thirty symbols and few languages have more than forty significant sounds. There are too many permutations here, in the number and location of the horizontal bars. Conversely there aren’t enough for these to be logograms, where the symbol represents a word, as in Chinese.”

“Syllabic?” Costas suggested.

Katya shook her head. “The symbols on the Phaistos discs are syllabic phonograms. There’s no way the Atlanteans would have developed two syllabic systems to be used in a sacred context.”

“Prepare to be amazed.” Costas’ voice was loud and clear on the intercom even though he had disappeared round the next curve in the passageway. The other two swam towards him, their lights converging as they followed his gaze.

The symbols ended abruptly at a vertical line incised from floor to ceiling. Beyond it was a magnificent bull, its outline carved in bas-relief. It was life-sized, its enormous head with curved horns facing them, its massive body resting on a platform, its legs splayed. The eyes had been deeply carved to show the iris and were preternaturally wide, as if the beast had been caught in a moment of primordial fear.

“Of course,” Katya suddenly exclaimed. “They’re numerical!”

Jack immediately understood. “This is the sacrificial ritual in the entrance chamber,” he enthused. “The symbols must be a tally, a record of each sacrifice.”

“They’re even arranged boustrophe-don.” Katya glanced at Costas. “As you know from modern Greek, bous means ox and strophos turning. ‘As the ox turns when ploughing a field,’ in alternate directions. Like snakes and ladders.” She pointed to the way the line framing each cartouche looped round to the one below.

Costas swivelled round to address Jack, his eyes gleaming with excitement.

“When would sacrifices have taken place?”

“Events associated with the harvest and the seasons. Summer and winter solstices, the coming of spring, thanksgiving for crops.”

“The lunar cycle?” Costas prompted.

“Very possibly,” Jack replied. “The interval between full moons was probably the first exact measurement of time ever made. The difference between the lunar and solar year really mattered to people dependent on knowing where they were in the crop cycle. The synodic cycle, the lunar cycle, falls short of the solar year by eleven days, so an additional month is intercalated every three or four years. Celestial observations to measure the difference were probably carried out at the Minoan peak sancturies. I’ll bet there’s an observatory here as well.”

Costas pointed to a curious set of symbols directly above the bull.

“That’s why I ask,” he said.

What had at first seemed an abstract embellishment suddenly took on new meaning. Immediately above the animal’s spine was a roundel about two palm widths across. On either side a succession of mirror images fanned out symmetrically, first a half-roundel, then a quarter-roundel and finally a single curved line.

“Behold the lunar cycle,” Costas proclaimed. “New moon, quarter moon, half moon, full moon, then the same in reverse.”

“The gold disc,” Jack said softly. “It was a lunar symbol. The obverse represents the full moon, the elliptical profile depicts the moon as it passes through its monthly cycle.”

He did not need to take out the disc for them to know he was right, that the lentoid shape exactly matched the concave depression of the roundel carved in the rock above them.

Costas swam a few metres to the left of the bull, the mass of wall carvings laid out in front of him like some exotic eastern carpet.

“The maximum number of bars on the right-hand side of each stem is six, and often the slashes continue up the left side as well. The fact that there are sometimes seven on that side almost killed my theory.”

“Which is?” Jack asked.

They could hear Costas draw a deep breath from his regulator. “Each cartouche represents a year, each horizontal bar a month. You go up the right side first, then up the left. January’s lower right, December’s upper left.”

Jack was swimming along the wall above Costas where most of the cartouches contained the maximum number of lines.

“Of course,” he exclaimed. “Those with the extra line contain thirteen altogether. They must represent years with the extra month in the lunar calendar. Look at the sequence here. The leap month occurs alternately every three and four cartouches, exactly what you’d need to keep the lunar year in step with the solar cycle.”

“How do you account for the missing months?” Katya had sunk to the floor and was examining the lower cartouches. Some contained only the vertical line, and others only one or two bars at seemingly random points on either side.

“Most sacrifices are propitiatory, right? They’re carried out in the hope of a return, some sign of favour from the gods. Where better than an active volcano? Magma outflows, seismic tremors, even rainbows caused by gas and steam.”

“So a sacrifice was always carried out at the beginning of the lunar month.” Katya had immediately followed Costas’ drift. “If a sign was observed before the next new moon then a line was carved. If not, then no marking.”

“Exactly,” Costas said. “The central part in front of Jack has many symbols, pretty well every month for twenty-five or thirty years. Then there are long periods with few symbols. My guess is we’d see a comparable pattern of volatility for this type of volcano, with several decades of activity alternating with similar periods of near dormancy. We’re not talking spectacular eruptions but more like a cauldron bubbling over before slowly filling up again.”

“To judge by the marking, the last sacrifice was in May or June, precisely the time of year for the flood indicated by the pollen analyses from Trabzon,” said Katya. “For several years before there are no markings at all. In their last ever sacrifice it looks like they got lucky.”

“They needed it,” Costas said wryly.

They stared at the final symbol, a hastily gouged marking that contrasted starkly with the careful incisions of previous years. They could scarcely imagine the terror of the people as they faced unimaginable catastrophe, desperately seeking some sign of hope before abandoning a homeland where they had prospered since history began.

Jack finned back to the opposite wall so he could take in most of the symbols at a glance.

“There are about fifteen hundred cartouches altogether,” he calculated. “Working back from a flood date of 5545 BC, that takes us to the eighth millennium BC. It’s incredible. Fifteen hundred years of continuous use, uninterrupted by war or natural disaster, a time when there were enough animals for a bull sacrifice every month. Atlantis did not spring up overnight.”

“Remember we’re only looking at a record of events since the passageway was enlarged,” Costas cautioned. “This was originally a volcanic fissure accessible from outside. I’ll bet this place was visited long before the first sacrifice.”

“We need to move,” Jack said. “We don’t know what lies ahead.”

The bull carving assumed a sinuous, elongated shape as it curved round the final bend in the wall. As they passed the tail, the passageway straightened and continued without deviation as far as their lights could penetrate. On either side niches were carved into the rock, each one a shallow bowl inside a recessed overhang like a miniature wayside shrine.

“For torches or candles, probably of tallow, animal fat,” Jack observed.

“Good to know those bull carcasses were put to some use,” Costas said.

They forged ahead. After about fifteen metres the passageway ended abruptly at three entranceways, two set obliquely on either side of the centre one. The passages beyond seemed to recede indentically into the pitch darkness of the volcano’s core.

“Another test,” Costas said bleakly.

“Not the central passageway,” Jack said. “It’s too obvious.”

Katya was peering through the right-hand entrance and the other two gravitated towards her. They crowded together at the sill and nodded wordlessly to each other. Katya pulled herself forward and took the lead. The passageway was only wide enough for two of them side by side and barely high enough to hover upright.

It continued unswervingly for twenty metres, the smooth walls giving nothing away. The gap between Katya and the other two increased as Costas stopped to add another reel to the tape that trailed behind him while Jack waited for him. He put his gloved hand to the rent on his side.

He grimaced. “The water, it’s warmer. I can feel it.”

Neither Costas nor Katya had any sense of the outside temperature in their E-suits, and until now they had seen no reason to monitor the thermometers on their consoles.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Costas said. “There must be a volcanic vent that’s boiling it up. We need to get out of here.”

They suddenly realized Katya was not responding. As Jack anxiously swam forward, the reason became apparent. His earphones crackled with a crescendo of static that would have drowned out any reception.

“Localized electromagnetic field.” Costas’ voice became clearer as he swam alongside. “Some kind of lodestone in the rock, a concentrated mineral extrusion like the fool’s gold in the entrance chamber.”

A curve to the right showed where Katya had disappeared from view. They finned rapidly, their attention fully focused on the darkness ahead. As they rounded the bend the walls changed from a lustrous polish to the rough-hewn appearance of a quarry face. The view ahead blurred and wavered like a mirage.

“It’s scalding,” Jack gasped. “I can’t go any further.”

They had passed beyond the man-made walls and were now surrounded by the jagged contours of a volcanic fissure. Katya suddenly appeared through the murk like a phantasm in a desert storm and in that split second they sensed some dark force beyond, some denizen of the deep hurtling towards them with inexorable intent.

“Go!” Katya screamed. “Back to the passageway!”

Jack reached out towards her but was thrown back by an enormous surge he was powerless to resist. All they could do was try desperately to avoid the serrated edges of the lava as they tumbled through the water at terrifying speed. Before they knew it they were back within the smooth walls of the passageway. An immense tremor left them shocked and dazed almost ten metres in from the fissure.

Katya was hyperventilating and fighting to control her breathing. Jack swam over to her and checked her equipment. For a moment, a fleeting moment, he remembered his own fear, but he firmly parcelled it away in his mind, determined that it had burned its last and was now extinguished.

“I think that was the wrong way,” she panted.

Costas righted himself and swam back a few metres to splice the tape which had been severed by the force that had nearly annihilated them. They had re-entered the zone of magnetic disturbance and his voice crackled over the intercom.

“A phreatic explosion. Happens when water hits molten lava. Cooks off like gunpowder.” He paused to catch his breath, his sentences punctuated by deep pulls on his regulator. “And this fissure’s like a gun barrel. If it hadn’t blown through a vent somewhere behind us we’d be the latest addition to the sacrificial tally.”

They quickly returned to the three entranceways. They avoided the central one, continuing to trust Jack’s instinct. As they approached the left-hand entranceway, Jack sank to the floor, suddenly overcome by a wave of nausea as his body struggled to cope with the change from searing heat to the frigid waters of the passageway.

“I’m all right,” he gasped. “Just give me a moment.”

Costas looked at him with concern and then followed Katya to the sill of the doorway. She had still not recovered from the shock and her voice was tense.

“Your turn to lead,” she said. “I want to stay beside Jack.”