Atlantis

CHAPTER 19

The left-hand tunnel angled abruptly downwards, the walls constricting further and funnelling them into the bowels of the volcano. The image fuelled the turmoil in Jack’s system as he battled his wound. Now he also had to cope with the debilitating effects of increased pressure as they sank into the icy blackness of the tunnel.

“I can see steps chiselled out below,” Costas announced. “We’ll have to pray it levels out soon. Another ten metres and we’re gone.”

Costas anxiously monitored his depth gauge as they descended, their automatic buoyancy compensators bleeding enough air into their suits to keep them from plummeting. After a few metres the drop increased alarmingly. For a moment Jack and Katya could see nothing, their vision obscured by the cloud of bubbles from Costas’ exhaust as he sank directly beneath them.

“It’s all right,” his voice came up. “I can see a floor.”

The steps below turned to footholds as the face became vertical. Jack sank down the final few metres and landed on his knees. Katya followed.

“One hundred and sixteen metres,” Costas muttered. “That’s it for this trimix solution. Another few metres and the regulators would have aborted.”

There was no response from the other two and Costas anxiously scanned their faces for signs of nitrogen narcosis. As his eyes grew accustomed to the surroundings he realized why they were silent. The claustrophobic confines of the tunnel had given way to a vast magma chamber, its fiery contents long since dissipated to leave an elongated cavity like the hall of a medieval castle. The analogy seemed particularly apt as Costas looked back at their point of entry. The tunnel above gaped like the chute of an ancient chimney, the rock face below spreading into a recess like a baronial fireplace.

The chamber seemed an entirely natural phenomenon, its nave-like shape the result of titanic forces in the earth’s crust rather than any human agency. As Costas’ mind adjusted to the size of the room he began to see swirling patterns in the basalt on either side, a tumult of twisted shapes as if a cascading river of lava had frozen in mid-flow. Suddenly he saw what had captivated the other two. It was as if he had been presented with a brain-teaser and his mind had intuitively focused on the forms of the geology. As soon as he recognized the alternative, a fantastic scene revealed itself before his eyes. The walls were covered with a spectacular menagerie of animals painted and incised into the rock, their forms respecting the contours of the chamber and taking advantage of natural patterns in the basalt. Some were life-sized, others larger than life, but all were rendered in a highly naturalistic style that made their identification easy.

At a glance Costas could make out rhinoceros, bison, deer, horses, huge cats and bulls. There were hundreds of them, some standing alone but most in overlapping groups, image after image piled on top of each other like a reused canvas. The effect was startlingly three-dimensional, and combined with the mildly hallucinogenic effect of the nitrogen, they seemed to Costas to be alive, a mass of slavering beasts surging towards him like some wayward mirage.

“Incredible.” Jack finally broke the silence, his voice hushed with awe. “The hall of the ancestors.”

Costas shook away the phantom image and looked questioningly at his friend.

“You hinted at it,” Jack explained. “That there were people here long before those first bull sacrifices. Well, here’s your evidence. These paintings are from the Upper Palaeolithic, the final period of the Old Stone Age when people hunted big game along the edge of the glaciers. We’ve just swum back thousands of years to the first explosion of human artistic creativity, thirty-five to twelve thousand years ago.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Look at the species.”

They finned in line abreast towards the centre of the gallery, the exhaust from their breathing rising in great shrouds of silver towards the ceiling. Everywhere they aimed their headlamps, new marvels of ancient art appeared. Despite the urgent need to press on, they were drawn by the enormity of what they were seeing.

“There are no domesticates,” Katya ventured. “No cows, sheep, pigs. And some of these look like extinct species to me.”

“Exactly,” Jack said, his excitement evident. “Ice Age megafauna, outsized mammals that died out at the end of the Pleistocene ten thousand years ago. You can even identify the subspecies. This is amazing. The bulls, for example, are not modern cattle but aurochs, Bos primi-genius, a type of wild ox ancestral to domestic cattle which had disappeared in this region by the Neolithic. The rhino is the woolly rhinoceros, another extinct type that stood more than two metres tall. They looked like oversized musk ox, the only relic of Pleistocene megafauna to survive today.”

As they progressed further, an immense form came into view on the left-hand wall, its torso a natural bulge in the rock. It stood almost three times their height and had huge, sweeping tusks at least six metres long.

“A woolly mammoth!” Jack exclaimed. “Mammoths became extinct south of the Caucasus during the last interglacial, when it became too warm for them this far south. Either these artists ranged incredibly widely, up to the edge of the glaciers on the northern steppes, or we’re looking at a painting at least forty thousand years old.”

“I thought Palaeolithic cave paintings were only found in western Europe,” Katya murmured.

“Mainly in the Pyrenees and the Dordogne, most famously at Altamira and Lascaux. These are the only ones east of Italy, the first proof that European hunter-gatherers reached the shores of western Asia.”

“I take it these paintings had some kind of religious significance,” Costas said. “An animal cult, the worship of animal spirits?”

“At the dawn of art many of these representations would have had a magical quality,” Jack affirmed. “Especially if they were the work of shamans or medicine men, people who sought out places like this where their images would seem most awesome.”

“Or medicine women,” Katya interjected. “Many hunter-gatherer societies were matriarchal and worshipped a mother goddess. The women didn’t just rear children and pick berries.”

Another colossal image came into view, this time a giant male aurochs. It was mirrored by an identical image on the opposite wall, a unique arrangement that made them stand out like fearsome sentinels confronting anyone advancing through the gallery. They were crouched forward on heavily muscled forelegs and were in a state of high sexual arousal.

“They look like the sacrificial bull in the passageway,” Costas observed. “And the posture’s the same as the giant bull-sphinx in the courtyard.”

Jack was grappling with the implications of their discovery. “By the time of the flood most of these animals would have been mythical beasts of the past, the mammoth and rhinoceros being like the sphinx or griffon to later cultures. The one thread of continuity was the bull. For prehistoric hunters the rampant aurochs was the most powerful symbol of potency. For early farmers oxen were crucial as draught animals, and cattle for meat, milk and hides.”

“Are you saying the Neolithic people of Atlantis worshipped images that were already thirty thousand years old?” Costas asked incredulously.

“Not all the paintings are likely to be that old,” Jack replied. “Most galleries of cave art are not homogeneous, but represent episodic accumulations over long periods with older paintings being retouched or replaced. But even the most recent additions, from the very end of the Ice Age, must be at least twelve thousand years old, more than five thousand years before the end of Atlantis.”

“As far back for the people of Atlantis as the Bronze Age is for us,” Katya said.

“In early societies art generally survived only if it continued to have cultural or religious significance,” Jack asserted. “Up to this point all of the passageways have been squared and polished, yet the custodians of Atlantis deliberately left this chamber unaltered. These paintings were venerated as ancestral images.”

He finned over and inspected the mammoth’s immense haunch, careful not to disturb the pigments which had survived so long in the frigid stillness of the water.

“I knew Atlantis would hold extraordinary surprises,” he said. “But I never expected to find the first clear link between the beliefs of early Homo sapiens and our Neolithic ancestors, a cult of the bull that has existed since the dawn of time.” He gently pushed off, still looking at the awesome image of the mammoth. “Or to discover the earliest work of art anywhere in the world.”

They were now more than thirty metres from the entrance chute and halfway through the gallery. Above them the rock towered like a great cathedral, the ceiling a billowing vault of lava frozen in mid-flow as it surged down the walls. As the figures of the aurochs receded, more clusters of animals came into view, in places so dense they seemed like herds stampeding them head-on.

“At Lascaux there are six hundred paintings and twelve thousand etchings,” Jack murmured. “Here there must be three or four times that number. It’s sensational. It’s like stumbling across a prehistoric Louvre.”

He and Katya were so absorbed by the astonishing scenes on either side they failed to register the far end of the chamber. Costas alerted them, having swum ahead anxiously after consulting his dive computer.

“Look in front of you,” he said.

The end of the gallery was now less than ten metres away. As their headlamps played across the rock, they could see it was devoid of paintings, its surface smoothed and polished like the earlier passageways. But then they began to trace the outline of a carving. It was immense, extending at least fifteen metres across the entire wall.

Costas’ beam joined theirs and the image became complete.

“It’s a bird of prey,” Katya exclaimed.

“The outstretched eagle god,” Jack said softly.

The carving was in the same bas-relief as the sacrificial bull in the passageway. It looked remarkably similar to the imperial eagles of ancient Mesopotamia or Rome, its head arched stiffly to the right and its eye staring haughtily over a sharply downturned beak. But instead of extending outwards, the wings were angled up to the corners of the chamber. It was as if the bird was about to fall on its prey, its talons stretched almost to the floor.

“It’s later than the paintings,” Jack said. “Palaeolithic hunters didn’t have the tools to carve basalt like this. It must be contemporary with the bull carving, from the Neolithic.”

As their lights illuminated the fearsome talons they realized the eagle was poised over a series of dark entranceways along the base of the wall. There were four altogether, one under each wingtip and one under each set of talons.

“It looks as if we’ve got four choices,” Jack said.

They scanned the wall urgently for clues, aware that their time at this depth was running perilously short. They had left the submarine almost half an hour before. After they had swum the length of the wall inspecting each doorway in turn, they came together at the centre.

“They’re identical,” Katya said despondently. “It is going to be the luck of the draw again.”

“Wait a moment.” Costas was staring at the image above them, its wingtips almost lost in the cavernous heights of the chamber. “That shape. I’ve seen it somewhere before.”

The other two followed Costas’ gaze. Katya suddenly drew in her breath sharply.

“The Atlantis symbol!”

Costas was jubilant. “The shoulders and wings are the central H of the symbol. The legs are the lower spoke. The Atlantis symbol is an outstretched eagle!”

Jack excitedly produced the disc so they could see the rectilinear device impressed in the surface, an image so familiar yet until now inscrutable in its form.

“Maybe it’s like the Egyptian ankh symbol,” Katya said. “The hieroglyph of a cross with a loop above it that meant life force.”

“When I saw the sacrificial tally in the passageway I began to think the Atlantis symbol was more than just a key, that it was also a numerical device,” Costas said. “Maybe a binary code, using horizontal and vertical lines for 0 and 1, or a calculator for relating the solar and lunar cycles. But now it looks as if it’s simply a representation of the sacred eagle, an abstraction which could easily be copied on different materials because of its straight lines. Yet even so…”

“It may contain some kind of message,” Jack interjected.

“A map?”

Jack swam over to Katya. “Can you call up Dillen’s translation of the Phaistos disc?”

She swiftly detached her palm computer in its waterproof housing from her shoulder. After a few moments a paragraph began to scroll on the screen.

“Stop there.” Jack turned to Costas. “What’s our bearing?”

Costas had second-guessed his friend and was already consulting his compass. “Taking into account likely magnetic variability in the rock, I’d say this wall is oriented almost exactly east-west.”

“Right.” Jack quickly marshalled his thoughts. “Sign of the bull refers to this volcano, to the twin peaks. The outstretched eagle god is this image above us, the wings aligned precisely to the rising and setting sun. The hall of the high priests is at the rising sun. That means the eastern doorway, beneath the left wingtip.”

Costas was nodding, his eyes fixed on the symbol. “There’s more to it than that.” He took the disc from Jack, tracing the lines as he spoke. “Imagine this is a map, not a scaled representation but a diagram like a subway plan. The vertical line corresponding to the legs of the eagle is the passage leading from the door in the cliff face. These two lines halfway up the eagle’s leg are our dead-end alleys, just beyond the bull carving. We’re now at the heart of the symbol, the point from which the wings extend left and right.”

“So the two doorways in front of us lead to the neck and head of the eagle,” Jack said. “And the text on the disc has a double message, telling us not only to take the eastern door but also to follow the passageways beyond to a point corresponding with the left wingtip.”

“So where do all the other passageways lead?” Katya asked.

“My guess is most of them form a complex of tunnels and galleries like this one. Imagine a subterranean monastery, complete with cult rooms, living quarters for priests and retainers, kitchens and food storage areas, scriptoria and workshops. The Palaeolithic hunters who first came here may have noticed the symmetrical layout, a freak of nature that could be conceived as a spread-eagle pattern. Later rock-cutting may have regularized the pattern even further.”

“Unfortunately we have no time for exploration.” Costas had finned alongside Jack and was viewing his contents gauge with alarm. “The gunshot wound and exposure have aggravated your breathing rate. You’re almost down to the emergency reserve. You have enough trimix to get back to the submarine but no more. It’s your call.”

Jack’s reply was unhesitating. As long as their besiegers were in place there was no way back through the submarine. Their only chance was to find a way through the maze of tunnels to the surface.

“We go on.”

Costas looked at his friend and nodded wordlessly. Katya reached out and gripped Jack’s arm. They swam towards the left-hand doorway, casting a final glance at the cavern behind them. As their beams danced across the undulating surface the animals looked distorted and elongated, as if they had reared up and were straining to follow them, a fantastic cavalcade set to burst forth from the depths of the Ice Age.

As he reached the corner, Costas paused to fit another reel of tape. Then he swam forward to face the forbidding darkness of the passageway, Jack and Katya poised on either side of him.

“Right,” he said. “Follow me.”