Lost Temple

Ten

'Are you sure you've got this right?'

They were standing in a shallow valley at the end of a dirt road. It was a pleasant spot: poplars and cypress trees shaded the stream that bubbled down the valley, while in front of them stood a neat, four-square, neoclassical building. It felt vaguely Swiss to Grant: its red-tiled roof and vigorous white walls; the fresh paint on the doors and the starched curtains in the windows. Everything seemed healthy and efficient. Everything except the smell, which festered in the valley: the eggy, noxious stink of sulphur.

'Perhaps not,' said Reed. He sounded unaccountably cheerful. 'But this is where the hot springs are. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. They've been in use since at least Roman times.'

'I hate to be the one to tell you, but a hot spring isn't the same as a volcano. Even the ancients probably knew the difference.'

Reed shrugged. 'All the legends about the foul-smelling Lemnians will have been rooted in some sort of collective memory. If this was the place where they had their shrine, they must have smelled rather unpleasant after nine days of rituals.'

They had walked the few miles from Myrina that morning. There wasn't much to be found in the town on Easter Sunday, but between them Grant and Marina had managed to scrounge a few tools, an oil lamp, a length of rope and a donkey to carry it all to the spa at Therma. Now they were there, breathing in air that seemed anything but healthy to Grant.

'So what do we do? Ask the attendant if he's found a three-thousand-year-old meteorite in the bath?' He pointed to the locked door and the dark rooms behind the lace curtains. 'It looks shut.'

'Bank Holiday.' Reed peered around. 'But the thermal springs don't rise inside the spa. The water gets piped in from somewhere. Let's have a look.'

A brief reconnaissance of the buildings didn't reveal much. They left Muir with the donkey and spread out, gradually working their way further up the valley behind the spa. The sulphurous smell faded away, drowned out by the sticky scent of wildflowers, and their pace slowed as they waded through the long grass. At the top of the valley the stream disappeared. Grant spent a fruitless quarter of an hour looking for its source but found nothing. He sat down on a rock in the sun, watching the lizards dart among the stones. The withered husk of a snakeskin lay coiled at his feet.

'What's over there?' Reed had come up behind him, his face flushed under the sunhat. He was pointing up the hill, where a mounded hilltop swelled out of the rolling landscape. The valley had hidden it, but from the ridge they could see it quite clearly. Reed took the field glasses that hung round his neck and pressed them against his spectacles, then handed them to Grant. Unsure what he was looking for, he twisted the dial until the blurred image came into focus.

'There's a cross on top of it.' It was a steel cross about six feet tall, held in place by four guy ropes. A hawk was sitting on one of the transepts, preening itself.

Grant lowered the field glasses. 'I know I'm not a historian, but aren't churches a bit later than what we're looking for?'

'Have you ever been to the Roman forum? When Christians took over the empire, they just bricked up the pagan temples and turned them into churches. You can still see the classical columns built into the walls. The Parthenon in Athens was used as a church — and a mosque when the Ottomans captured it. Buildings come and go, but sacred places have a way of persevering.'

'I suppose we can try.'

Picking their way over the loose stones, they worked their way towards the summit. From the ridge it had looked like a normal hilltop, but as they edged round its shape changed. The far side seemed to drop precipitously — then, as they came a little further, they saw that there was no far side at all. The whole face had been hollowed out under the summit, so that the hill swept over like a wave poised to break. The cavern underneath must have been at least a hundred feet high. Nestled inside, almost hidden in its shadow, was a tiny whitewashed courtyard with a church against its far wall.

'Sacred places,' murmured Reed.

Marina nodded. 'It's almost as if nature made it for this. A giant rock womb — or a furnace.'

'Even looks a bit like a volcano, if you squint,' Grant conceded.

'And look.' Marina pointed to the gatepost. On a mosaic in the wall, blue tiled letters spelt out AΓIA ΠANAΓIA on a golden background.

'Ayia Panayia,' Reed elaborated. 'A title of the Virgin Mary. It means "All Holy". It emphasises her aspect as God's partner in the conception of Jesus. If you're inclined to think heretically, you can derive it back from the ancient cults of an all-powerful, all-fertile goddess who herself gives birth to gods.' Reed saw Marina's appalled look. 'From an anthropological point of view, of course.'

They passed through the open gate into the small compound. The air went suddenly cold as they came under the shadow of the hill, and the noise around them deadened. The only sound was the splash of water, pouring from a spout in the wall shaped like a serpent's head into a marble basin. Grant sniffed it and smelled the familiar odour of rotten eggs. 'Sulphur.'

But Reed and Marina didn't hear — they were already at the church door. They tried the handle and the door swung open. Grant followed them in.

It was a simple church: a low, oblong room with plain walls, slit windows and a barrelled roof. Skeletal bundles of dried flowers quietly disintegrated in the corners, and a few red glass jars clustered on the step by the altar, though the candles they held had long since burned out. At the back of the church a single icon of the Virgin Mary stood facing towards them, her legs apart and her hands held up as if in blessing. The infant Jesus peered out at them from a golden circle in her stomach.

'If you think there's something familiar about that pose, you're entirely correct.' Reed pulled out Pemberton's battered journal and turned to an early page. An ink sketch leaped out: a wasp-waisted woman with long skirts, bared breasts and a snake writhing along her outstretched arms. 'The Minoan mother-goddess.'

'She's got better tits than the Virgin Mary,' said Grant. He didn't look at Marina, though in the corner of his eye he saw her cross herself.

'And look at the Christ figure. He seems to be inside her — in her womb.' Reed made a half-turn, taking in the whole church. 'Are you familiar with the Hindu concept of the avataram?. Aspects of the gods' incarnations change, but the underlying truths are eternal.'

Marina frowned. 'If you're going to dismiss two thousand years of Christian teaching, could you at least do it outside?'

'New religions are terrible magpies — they love to build on the foundations of the faiths they've barged out of the way. Both theologically and physically.'

'Are you proposing we demolish this church?'

'No. But we do need to do what the archaeologists do.'

"What's that?' asked Grant.

'Get to the bottom of things.'

Reed paced the length of the room, staring at the heavy stones paving the floor. Three yards back from the altar, he suddenly went down on one knee and started scrabbling at something. Marina and Grant crouched beside him. An iron ring was set flush into the floor. Reed pried it up and tugged. Nothing moved.

He turned and looked apologetically at Grant. 'Would you mind?'

Grant planted one foot on either side of the stone, crouched and heaved. The cracks around it were thick with dirt — it must have lain shut for years — but it slowly yielded to his pressure. A crack opened and Marina slid the blade of the shovel inside. Together they heaved and levered the stone away until they had opened a hole wide enough to climb through. A dark chasm loomed below.

'I wonder what's down there?'

Grant took one of the glass candle holders and dropped it through. It thudded against something hard, but didn't break. Reassured, Grant swung his legs through the hole and lowered himself down. He had only reached shoulder height when his feet touched solid ground: his head was still sticking up through the church floor and he had to wriggle down to see underneath. He struck a match.

He was standing on a beaten earth floor, in a low chamber whose dimensions seemed to be the same as the church's. All around him stone pillars sprouted out of the ground to support the church floor. Some were intact, still crowned with ornate capitals, but others had obviously snapped at some point in the past and been cemented back together, or repaired with crude fieldstones. Strands of straw scattered the ground and a few tools lay resting against the far wall. Grant could make out a masonry trowel, a bucket, a rake and a scythe. Otherwise, it was empty.

'Is there anything down there?' Reed peered in, his face almost completely blocking the light from above. At the same time Grant felt the heat of the flame burning towards his fingers. He dropped the match and was suddenly in darkness.

'Nothing except some gardening tools. There's a scythe — does that symbolise something? Death?' Grant thought of the weathervane on top of the pavilion at Lord's. 'Time?'

'The caretaker probably uses it for cutting the grass.' Reed disappeared and the blue-tinged daylight filtered back in.

'We'll have to start digging.'

They fetched the donkey. Muir came too. Grant hung the lanterns between the supporting pillars, while Marina drove a row of stakes into the ground about a yard back from the innermost wall. In the flickering lamplight they crouched on the earth floor under the altar and stared at the walls.

'The church is Byzantine,' Marina explained. 'But these foundations are Hellenistic — about 200 BC, when a lot of the mystery cults flourished.' She pointed at the crudely cut stones mortared together. A few of them seemed to be missing and layers of flat bricks filled the gaps. 'You can see where they were repaired when the church was built. But it's possible that the site goes back considerably further than that.'

She indicated the line she had staked out. 'This is the north wall of the church. But I think there's evidence that the sanctuary was reorientated during the Christian period so that its altar would face east.' She swept her arm round, pointing out each of the walls in turn. 'Do you notice anything about the south wall?'

Grant stared, trying to probe the shadowy recesses where pillars blocked the lamplight. 'The stones look smaller — and they're not as well put together.'

'Exactly.' Marina looked pleased. 'This was probably added later to partition the existing foundations into something small enough to support the church. It's likely the courtyard gives a more accurate outline of the original temple's dimensions. In which case the sanctuary would have been somewhere near here.'

'Then let's get started.'

It was slow, aching labour. Unable to stand upright, they had to stoop low and attack the packed earth with short, ungainly jabs. After a while, once the ground was broken, they evolved a system whereby Marina, Reed and Muir filled the bucket with soil, which Grant then hauled away and tipped out on the hillside. The air in the cellar, stuffy to begin with, grew stifling. Marina knotted the tails of her blouse together round her midriff, while Grant stripped off his shirt and worked bare-chested. Even Reed removed his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

Grant was just taking out another bucket of earth when something caught his eye at the foot of the hill across the valley.

'What's that?'

'What?' Reed was lying in the grass, resting while Muir spelled him. He staring right at it, though he didn't seem to have noticed. Grant could never quite be sure what he was seeing.

'There.' It came again — a series of sparkling flashes, winking at them from the edge of a ridge, near a blackened pine tree. Grant tried to count them, wondering if it could be some sort of message. But to whom?

'It might be a scrap of cigarette foil, or a piece of broken glass,' Reed suggested.

'Or someone watching us.' Grant pulled on his shirt and buckled the Webley round his waist. He made his way down the slope, picking a cautious path through the tangled scrub and loose stones. He had to watch his footing carefully; when he looked up he couldn't see the flashes any more.

He crossed a small stream at the foot of the hill and began climbing up the far side. As he got closer to the ridge he slowed. He could see the black branches of the burned pine tree poking over the escarpment above. A breeze stirred — and among the wildflowers and grasses he smelled a wisp of tobacco smoke. Someone must be there. But he heard nothing.

He crept to his left, edging his way round the ridge to try to get round the back. A butterfly flitted across his path; the bushes around him buzzed with the sounds of bees and flies. Anywhere else, it would have been a perfect day to lie back in the grass with a cold beer and a girl. He gripped the Webley tighter.

With a sudden roar a motor kicked into life on the ridge above. Forgetting caution, Grant ran the last few yards up the bank and looked down. A cloud of dust was slowly settling on the dirt track that wound away behind the next hill. Grant ran down it and round the corner — just in time to see the blur of a motorbike disappearing out of sight. He stared after it for a moment — but there was nothing he could do.

With a curse, he walked back to the hillside. A little hollow indented the slope, just behind the ridge that looked across to the hooded mountain top. A section of grass had been flattened there and half a dozen white tubes littered the ground. Grant picked one up and sniffed it, then squinted down the cardboard barrel. They were cigarette butts — but a good inch of the cigarette was hollow, as if the manufacturer had only been able to afford to fill half the tube with tobacco. Cheap tobacco at that, Grant thought, smelling it.

There was only one place Grant knew where they made such awful cigarettes. He'd smoked a few himself during his brief stint on the Eastern Front, as much for warmth as for the nicotine. The five men they'd sunk in the bay obviously hadn't been the only Russians on the island.

'They've been watching us.'

'Damn.' Muir threw his cigarette butt into the marble basin. It hissed and fizzled out. 'How long were they there for?'

Reed blinked. 'I'm afraid I never noticed them.'

'Well, pay more fucking attention from now on.' He turned to Grant. 'Do you think they'll come back?'

'Maybe. After the other night, they'll be careful about getting too close.'

'Let's hope so.'

The day grew darker. Clouds rolled in from the west, brooding over the hooded hilltop. On one of his trips to empty the bucket, Grant saw the sun low between the clouds and the sea, a furious crimson mess. The next time he emerged it was gone. Night fell, but the cellar remained in perpetual lamplit twilight. The trench against the wall was almost two feet deep now: when Grant came down the others looked like dwarves toiling in the bowels of the earth.

Work slowed. They had exposed the upper foundations and come down to a lower level, broad slabs laid without mortar. Now the ground was harder, filled with as much rubble as earth. They had to remove it piece by piece. Soon their hands were chafed raw, their nails split and their muscles in agony.

At nine o'clock they paused for supper. They sat in the courtyard, shivering slightly in the cool air, and ate the bread and cheese the hotel owner had given them that morning. There were no stars.

'How far down have we got?' asked Grant.

'Those ashlars — the big stones — are very old.' Marina had Reed's jacket wrapped round her shoulders and her eyes were glazed. 'We must be close.'

'If there's anything to find,' Reed cautioned. His earlier exuberance had vanished, broken by the sheer effort of their labour. 'It might be in another part of the temple — or this might be the wrong place altogether.'

'Only one way to be sure.' Grant took a last swig of water and picked up a spade. 'I'll dig.'

But his effort was short-lived. He had only been working for a quarter of an hour when he felt a jarring impact. He knelt in the trench, scraping away the soil with his fingers to try to find the edges of the rock he had hit. All he felt was stone. Soon, working with hands and spade, he had uncovered an unbroken rock surface that ran from one side of the trench to the other.

Marina unhooked one of the lanterns and lowered it into the hole. 'Bedrock.' She swore under her breath. 'This must have been the floor of the original temple. You can see the marks where they used chisels to level it.'

'At least we don't have to dig any deeper.' Grant let the spade drop to the ground and rubbed his blistered hands together. 'It's too late to get off the hill now. We'll have to go back in the morning.'

Grant collected the equipment and passed it out to Reed. Marina ignored them. She stood waist deep in the trench and examined the ashlar wall, occasionally sweeping away the crust of earth with a small brush. When Grant had handed up the last of the tools, he turned. Marina was crouched beside the wall, her face inches from the stone as she traced something with her finger. But it was her face that really stopped him. It shone with a fierce concentration, and her dark eyes were wide with awe.

Grant's weariness fell away in an instant. He scrambled across the low room and joined her in the trench. She didn't say anything, but grabbed his hand and pressed it against the wall. Her skin was warm against his, the stone beneath it cold. She moved his hand down the wall in a slow, sinuous arc. 'Do you feel it?'

He did — a curve of tiny ridges carved into the rock. He took his hand away and stared closely. Three thousand years had worn it down to almost nothing, little more than a shadow, but his hand had told him what to look for. He traced it again, a crescent moon turned on its side. A pair of bull's horns.

'We need to pull it out.' Marina took her pocket knife and tried to work her blade into the hairline crack along the edge of the slab.

'It must weigh a ton,' said Grant doubtfully. The stone was about a yard wide, a foot high and looked to be almost as deep. 'You'd need dynamite to get that out.'

'The Mycenaeans didn't have dynamite.' Marina kept prying away with the knife. Worried that the blade might snap, Grant stepped back out of the trench.

Muir popped his head through the hole in the church floor. 'Are you going to spend all night down there?'

'Marina thinks…'

Grant whipped round as a huge bang echoed round the cellar. Marina was in the trench holding her knife and even in the lamplight he could see her face was white as dust. A stone slab lay at her feet, shattered into three pieces by the impact on the bedrock. Above it, a dark chasm had opened in the wall.

'It was a panel.' She was trembling — she must barely have avoided being crushed by the falling slab. 'A door.'

'Someone forgot to oil the hinges.' Grant jumped down into the trench. The aperture was about the same size as the slab that had disguised it, barely high enough for a man to squeeze through. He stuck in his arm and felt around.

'It opens out a bit once you get through the wall. Not a lot, but perhaps enough to give you some wriggle room.'

He took the lantern from the edge of the trench and pushed it through the hole. The fire shone on smooth-cut stone walls, but beyond it all was darkness.

'Let's see what's inside.'