The Gods of Atlantis

9

C ostas took a last dejected look at the blank screen in front of the ROV monitor, and then swivelled round to join Jack in front of Lanowski’s computer. The clock showed 1415 hours, less than an hour before Jack was due on the helipad to leave Seaquest II in advance of the arrival of the inspection team. A few moments before, they had felt the ship lurch as she repositioned herself, her new location visible on the digital wall map some two nautical miles north-west of the volcano and the site of Atlantis. Captain Macalister was clearly taking few chances after the images Jack and Costas had brought back with them from their dive into the caldera that morning, but he had agreed to keep the ship within range should a minor miracle happen and the ROV spring back to life. Costas pulled his chair up until he was between the other two men and then rested his elbows on their chair backs. Jeremy had left the room to deal on the phone with an urgent problem at Troy, a statue with Egyptian hieroglyphics that had appeared just as the excavation was winding down; with Hiebermeyer preoccupied at the bunker in Germany and out of contact, Jeremy had wanted to speak to Hiebermeyer’s wife Aysha to see whether she could return from Alexandria to judge whether they should excavate now or rebury it for the next season. Costas nudged Lanowski. ‘Okay, Jacob. I’m itching to know where you think the new Atlantis might lie. We’re not getting anywhere waiting for Little Joey to reveal more about that inner sanctum. I think he’s left us for good.’

Jack pointed at the screen. ‘Remember this?’

Costas leaned forward and stared at the image, a torn brown scrap of papyrus with ancient Greek script that had been seen over the last five years by thousands of visitors who had stood in front of the original in the archaeological museum in Alexandria. ‘The Atlantis papyrus,’ he murmured. ‘The tail end of the account written by the Greek traveller Solon at the temple of Sais in the Nile delta, the part of the Atlantis story that somehow never reached Plato when he used Solon’s account to write his version of the Atlantis myth in the fifth century BC.’ He pointed to a word visible at the top of the screen, letters in Greek spelling out ATLANTIS. ‘That’s what Hiebermeyer and Aysha saw when they pulled this scrap from the mummy wrapping. I’ve never heard Maurice so excited by something that wasn’t actually Egyptian. I can still remember the look on your face when we came up from the dive on the Bronze Age shipwreck and you took his call.’

Lanowski tapped the keyboard, then sat back and craned his head round at Costas. ‘Gladstone. William Ewart Gladstone.’

Costas stared back at him. ‘Huh?’

‘British prime minister in the late nineteenth century. Does that ring a bell?’

Costas screwed up his eyes, then peered at Lanowski cautiously. ‘The guy who was so fascinated with Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy, who helped push Schliemann to international fame.’

Lanowski nodded. ‘Well, like a lot of the Victorian intelligentsia, Gladstone was also fascinated by archaeological discoveries that might illuminate the Bible, especially with the wealth of clay tablets being found at ancient Mesopotamian sites that were seen as part of the backdrop to the Old Testament. One of the most famous discoveries was the Epic of Gilgamesh.’

‘It’s what we were talking about,’ Costas said. ‘About the tension it represents between the wild and the civilized, and how it might derive from conflict between the old shamans and the new priests in the early Neolithic.’

Lanowski nodded enthusiastically. ‘For the Victorians, the biggest revelation in the Epic of Gilgamesh was the story of a flood that paralleled the Biblical deluge. Gladstone attended a lecture in 1873 at the Society for Biblical Archaeology in London, where the tablet containing the flood account was first revealed. An obsessive genius named George Smith had been sifting through thousands of tablets from Nineveh in the British Museum, and when he came across the flood tablet, he was so excited he rushed about the room and stripped naked.’

‘Don’t get any ideas, Jacob,’ Costas muttered.

Lanowski’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve already had my eureka moment. What George Smith found was the flood tablet in the version of the epic written down in the early first millennium BC, but since the nineteenth century, fragments have been found that are a lot earlier, dating to the first period of cuneiform writing in Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC. The fact that the story of Gilgamesh seems to have been well formed that early strongly suggests that it had been passed down orally for a long time before then, conceivably from as far back as the early Neolithic.’

‘And it’s the basis for the Old Testament deluge story?’

‘Or a parallel tradition, deriving from the same historical backdrop. And for my money, the Gilgamesh story is a lot more intriguing, with more pointers to the early Neolithic. Uta-napishtim, the flood hero, is a more ambiguous character than Noah. For a start, he isn’t the sole survivor of the flood, and he’s actually presented as more of an outcast. After the flood, the gods grant him immortality, but he lives on the mountain where his boat came ashore, far from the rest of humanity. It’s as if the gods’ favour comes at a price: we’ll grant you immortality and give you this mountain to live on, but don’t ever come back to our shores again. As if they owe him something, even feel guilty about him, but he’s a threat to the new world of men they lord it over and they don’t want him around. And so Gilgamesh, half-god himself, travels a huge distance across the sea to find him, to try to discover the secret of immortality. It’s then that Uta-napishtim tells him the story of the flood.’

Costas looked at him shrewdly. ‘And you’re going to suggest that this flood story contains something about a survivor from Atlantis?’

Lanowski beamed at him. ‘The character of Uta-napishtim himself could be a clue. An outcast. A shaman perhaps, the last of the old order? Gilgamesh goes a huge distance across the water to get to him. And Uta-napishtim lives on a twin-peaked mountain, called Nisir.’

‘The mountain of Du-Re was twin-peaked as well,’ Jack murmured. ‘That’s where the oldest Babylonian myths locate the birthplace of the gods.’

‘I think Du-Re was Atlantis,’ Lanowski enthused. ‘Du-Re was somewhere to the north, where the Babylonian scribes always placed their ancestors and the home of their gods, precisely where Atlantis and those other early Neolithic sites were located in relation to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But Nisir is a kind of alter-Atlantis, Atlantis reborn, a huge distance over the sea. The question is, was the sea simply a conceptual barrier, a barrier in the mind, or was it a real ocean, and if so which one?’

‘And?’

‘And that made me think of Jack’s lecture at the Royal Geographical Society last December, on prehistoric voyages of discovery. About his title, “Voyages of the mind, voyages of the body”.’

‘I missed it, I’m sorry to say,’ Costas said. ‘Too wrapped up getting Little Joey finished in time for the sea trials.’

‘Well, if I may,’ Lanowski said, looking questioningly at Jack. ‘The nub of his argument was this. We’ve had it all wrong. Great voyages of discovery didn’t begin after the rise of civilization, with trade and colonization. They began before that. Way before, as far back as the middle Palaeolithic, fifty thousand years ago or more, when we know people went great distances by sea to get to Australia, for example. Ergo, hunter-gatherers in deep prehistory had boats capable of long-distance seafaring. Hunter-gatherers ranged over huge distances on land, so why not by sea as well? By the end of the Palaeolithic – at the end of the Ice Age – just as many people were living off the sea as off the land. But the advent of farming actually stifled exploration. People moved inland, settled in one place, turned in on themselves, were enslaved by agriculture as well as by new rulers who wanted to control them, to prevent them seeing the world outside their own narrow confines, a control maybe exerted using new religious beliefs based on fear.’

‘So why voyages of the mind?’ Costas asked.

Jack leaned back. ‘That title was prescient, given what we’ve been talking about here,’ he said. ‘Now I know why Jacob was in the audience looking at me as Professor Dillen used to when I stumbled my way through a passage of ancient Greek. I’d already been doing some thinking about Palaeolithic religion, about shamanism and altered consciousness. I looked at all that in relation to seafaring in two ways. First, I read about the common altered-consciousness hallucinations of being in water, and I imagined that a real sea voyage, especially an arduous one, would be something like that. Altered states of mind are often most easily achieved under duress, right? It might have been particularly easy when the imagery of the real-life experience and the dream world seemed so close. And I wasn’t thinking that Stone Age seafarers were floating around aimlessly in a psychedelic daze, but actually that they were purposeful and destination-conscious. They were doing what they did in those caves, navigating their way into the spirit world, but this time marrying it with a real-life voyage using the stars and even navigational aids such as quartz sunstones. I began to think that the idea of early seafarers being terrified of the open sea might be an inheritance from the establishment of sedentary living in the Neolithic. The sea wasn’t the great unknown in deep prehistory. It became the great unknown when it suited rulers to stoke up the fear factor. Before that, sea voyages had given people with shamanic beliefs an experience that would have seemed familiar to them. I argued that they wouldn’t have sailed off into the unknown in fear for their lives, but quite the opposite. They may actually have relished it, and looked forward with huge excitement to what they might discover in a spiritual sense as well as in reality.’

‘And your second point?’

‘Thinking about the prehistoric colonization of Australia led me to Aboriginal songlines, the dreaming tracks that were used to cross the outback. If hunter-gatherers could conceptualize land routes in that way, why not at sea as well? Memorized trackways are often the most practicable routes too, and that made me think about the predictability of ocean currents and winds. I ended my lecture with a picture of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Ra expedition reed boat in the mid-Atlantic in 1969, showing how it would have been difficult to avoid being swept out to sea and towards the Caribbean once you’d sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of west Africa. I argued that the sea isn’t a barrier, it’s a great complex of highways, and nowhere was that more the case than in deep prehistory. I quoted Heyerdahl’s famous last lines from his account of the Ra expedition, that his theory about prehistoric maritime contact came about because he and his crew had actually sailed on the ocean and not on a map.’

‘They’d tried it out rather than sitting in an armchair theorizing,’ Costas said approvingly.

Jack nodded. ‘And that gets us back to Atlantis. At the time of the Black Sea flood, the people of Atlantis may have been undergoing a religious revolution, but they were still not that far away from their Palaeolithic ancestors. If we’ve got it right, there were still shamans present in those final days before the flood, even if they were a beleaguered few. That knowledge of sea travel, that ability to sail off into the unknown, may not yet have been lost.’

Costas nodded. ‘Makes a lot of sense.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘So what’s your big revelation?’

‘Plato.’ Lanowski laughed quietly to himself, pushed up his glasses, looked at Jack intently and chuckled again. ‘Plato, Plato, Plato.’

Costas glanced anxiously at Jack, and then narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘All right, Jacob,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me guess. The Atlantis myth? Plato is the only surviving source. That is, except for the fragment of papyrus Maurice found in the desert that we’re looking at on the screen right now, the bit by Solon about where to find Atlantis that never got to Plato.’

‘Plato,’ Lanowski repeated to himself, shaking his head as if he were in the throes of some private rapture. He suddenly stared at Costas. ‘And Pythagoras.’

Costas held his gaze. ‘Pythagoras. Let me see. Pythagoras is about geometry, right? Triangles, pyramids? Pyramids, early civilizations, Atlantis?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me.’

Lanowski beamed at him. ‘We know from Aristotle that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras. What that means is that Plato believed there was a mathematical and even a musical structure behind everything. But instead of taking an interesting idea into hard science, the Greeks made it esoteric, using it in a mystical way and seeing Pythagorean logic in weird places. They also used it to create hidden messages of meaning. Some scholars have come to believe that Plato embedded codes in his writing to reveal his beliefs to other Pythagoreans. We’re not talking about hidden messages as we might understand a code, but about arrangements of letters and words that had a mathematical logic or – in the case of letters – could be related to the musical scale. Other Pythagoreans might recognize them, like a symbol on a ring or a secret handshake.’

Costas looked puzzled, and jerked his finger at the screen. ‘But if it’s this papyrus you’re on about, Solon wrote it about 580 BC. Isn’t that a couple of decades before Pythagoras was even born?’

‘Often the names we associate with a theory are not those who invented it, and there’s good reason for thinking that ideas we call Pythagorean had their origins much earlier in Greece. If they were floating around already in Solon’s time, then a clever polymath like him would have lapped them up.’

Jack stared at Lanowski. ‘So you think Solon may have put some kind of code in his text?’

Lanowski pointed at the screen, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Thanks to my friend Maurice Hiebermeyer, we’ve got a scan of the very papyrus in front of us. Usually what I’m talking about can only be revealed by stichometric analysis, taking the medieval texts that are our only surviving copies of ancient works and trying to reconstruct how they would have looked on the original papyrus, based on the regular length of lines ancient scribes used. But we’ve actually got an original papyrus, with the lines exactly as Solon composed them. Almost immediately I matched his layout to the twelve-note musical scale. Look, you can see where I’ve highlighted the text, the letters alpha to lamda for the musical notes in the first letters of a line of words running diagonally through that last paragraph. That was my eureka moment. I realized that Solon had been doing what Plato later did, that there was more to this papyrus than meets the eye. So now I’ve been looking at the letters along the right and left margins, and then at criss-cross patterns, and all the other obvious geometric possibilities, and then I’ve been applying basic cryptographic analysis using letter codes. I’m convinced there are words embedded in the text.’

‘You know ancient Greek?’ Costas asked.

‘Yeah. Easy. Did it at school.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve tried about five hundred different letter codes.’

‘In your head.’

Lanowski looked nonplussed. ‘Of course. Computers can’t actually think, you know.’

Costas leaned back. ‘But surely all you’re going to find is more patterns, more word games. Where does that get us?’

‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I remembered how easy it was for me to find that musical scale. Way too easy for an intellectual like Solon. I think he wanted some successor like Plato to see it and then look for what else was hidden, something we know Plato never had the chance to do because this fragment of papyrus was lost in the desert before Solon left Egypt, and he never replicated it. I love the idea that Solon might have been robbed of the gold he was going to use to pay the priest and that he suffered some kind of permanent amnesia, losing this part of his papyrus during the scuffle as well. But I think I’m taking up where Plato should have been, as someone who immediately recognizes that there must be something else hidden in the text.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how a hidden code could be anything other than wordplay, mathematical games.’

Lanowski looked at Costas. ‘The technique could also have been used to conceal actual words, as a code in the way we might expect.’

‘It makes sense,’ Jack added. ‘Why on earth would Solon bother to embed a word game in a script he’s writing in the flickering torchlight at the foot of an old priest, telling him one of the most extraordinary tales he’s ever heard? There must have been a particular purpose for concealment, and Solon wasn’t a mystic like some of those later Pythagoreans.’

‘There’s geometry in that page,’ Lanowski said, pointing at the screen. ‘Not in the section at the top of the papyrus, where I think he was hastily copying down a dictation from the high priest, but in that final crucial paragraph. It’s much more carefully written. Remember, Solon was translating from Egyptian into Greek as he was listening. So he was already thinking hard about language, about words. He was good at composing fast. I’ve really got to like the guy and I can see where he was coming from. He enjoyed making clever geometry out of his writing. It’s really no different from the way a creative writer today uses metaphor and simile, alliteration and assonance. Only here I think the artistry had a special reason. Imagine this: the high priest is speaking slowly, carefully, giving Solon time to transcribe what he’s saying. This was really important stuff, about the end of Atlantis, coveted information normally only passed from priest to priest. The high priest is taking a bit of a gamble telling him, perhaps induced by the promise of gold. But then he oversteps the boundary and tells Solon something really coveted, something sacred. Maybe he then regrets it and instructs Solon not to write it down.’

‘But Solon finds a way,’ murmured Costas.

‘And maybe the high priest still doesn’t trust him, and it was the priest who arranged for Solon to be robbed and knocked on the head after leaving the temple that final night.’

Costas shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. We know from what’s openly in the text that the priest told Solon a phenomenal story, something passed down over almost seven thousand years. There’s incredible detail in the descriptions of Atlantis. What else could he reveal that might suddenly seem beyond the pale, too secret to tell Solon?’

Lanowski got up and paced in front of them, gesticulating. ‘Let’s imagine he told Solon where the Atlanteans went, something Solon wrote down at the end of the text in the corner of the papyrus that’s been ripped off. We can pretty well guess what it would have said. Troy, Greece, Crete, the coast of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, where all the early civilizations subsequently developed. But then let’s imagine there was another story. Something dark, a story of exile, of banishment. Something hinted at in later myth, but a truth that should not be told. Then I thought of the Epic of Gilgamesh.’

‘I think I’ve got you,’ Jack said. ‘The idea of Uta-napishtim cast away, a pariah. To a place where nobody is supposed to follow.’

‘And a place whose horror might have been exaggerated by the new priesthood of the early Neolithic, a priesthood who had already made people fear the unknown, the open ocean,’ Costas said. ‘Try to go there, and the ancient demons of the spirit world will arise again and haunt you.’

‘And carry out appalling acts half remembered, take away the children and sacrifice them to satisfy their blood lust,’ Lanowski said.

‘So you think Solon heard what he should not have heard, agreed not to write it down but did so, in some kind of code?’

‘I think the fear of that place and of the one who lurked there, a kind of nightmare shaman, may have still been felt by those priests of Egypt who were the last in the line to carry the actual story of what happened, a story that survived elsewhere only in the garbled accounts of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament. Seven thousand years on, that last shaman and what he represented still struck terror into the hearts of Egyptian priests whose gods were supposedly all-powerful, yet who could not suppress that ancient fear of the old spiritualist religion and the threat it posed to the new world of the gods.’

‘And?’ Jack said. ‘The code?’

Lanowski scratched his head. ‘It’s not quite there yet. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibles. It’s what you say, Jack. A hunch. A gut feeling that I’m on to something.’

Jack stared at him for a moment, then nodded. ‘Okay, Jacob. Email it to me when you’ve got a result.’

‘Roger that.’ Lanowski gave him a crooked smile, his face red with excitement, then sat back down in front of the screen and began mumbling lists of letters to himself, apparently oblivious to anyone else in the room. Jack drummed his fingers on the desk, feeling frustrated. Suddenly they were on the cusp of something big, and it was going to have to be put on hold. He tried to keep his mind on prehistoric exploration for a moment longer. The possibility of ancient voyages across the Atlantic had been a fascination of his during his student years, something he had married with Maurice Hiebermeyer’s obsession with retracing the Nazi Ahnenerbe expeditions to see whether they were ever on to anything real. It had come to fruition years later when they had crossed the North Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland, following Viking explorers. But the other main route across the Atlantic, south from the Mediterranean and across from Africa, continued to be unexplored territory for him. The African route south had been taken by the Phoenicians, but there was no certainty that they had ever intentionally struck off west. And Jack had already begun to think much earlier than that, to early prehistory, the basis for his Royal Geographical Society lecture. Only he had never associated it with an exodus from Atlantis, until now. He could only hope that the trail that was beginning to form in front of them would set up some waymarkers soon.

‘One final thing.’ Lanowski turned and looked at him. ‘If you want to work out where the Atlanteans went, get into the cave, Jack. And I don’t just mean metaphorically. If we’re looking for the last of the shamans, if we’re looking for Noah Uta-Napishtim, we need to be looking for somewhere he can do his thing again, somewhere like that holy sanctum in Atlantis.’

‘Just as long as it doesn’t take us on a psychedelic trip into a cave of the mind,’ Costas said. ‘That transatlantic current dumps you in the Caribbean, right? Sounds good to me. I want a tropical island.’

Lanowski peered at him. ‘My girlfriend says every man needs his cave.’

‘And she wants to get into yours?’ Costas asked.

‘It’s no different from the cave you disappear into every night in the basement of the engineering department at IMU, hatching mini-ROVs.’

‘Don’t. Little Joey. It’s still too raw.’

Jeremy came back into the room, stopped before reaching them and pointed. ‘Hey, Costas. Have you seen that?’

Costas glanced back at the ROV monitor. ‘My God,’ he said hoarsely. While they had been talking, the screen had come to life. He quickly got up, pushed aside the chairs and sat down at the monitoring station, his eyes glued to the screen. Lanowski came up quickly behind him and leaned over the control panel.

‘There may be some electrical impulse still left that could knock the camera askew. Until we’re sure this image is recorded, let’s keep hands off the control stick.’ He tapped the keyboard, downloading the video stream, and Jack stared in astonishment at the underwater image on the monitor. He could see tendrils like monofilaments in the water, the glassy discharge from phreatic explosions. He imagined a horrifying scene directly behind the ROV, a billowing wall of lava completely sealing the entrance to the inner sanctum where he had peered in only a few hours ago. Even at this remove the view seemed confining, claustrophobic. He concentrated on the stone wall visible in the background. Like the other parts of the cave wall, it had been smoothed down, but he could just make out the ghosts of older carvings, similar to the ones that stood out starkly in front of them.

‘They’re symbols,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Symbols carved on the wall. And look,’ he said in hushed tones. ‘The video’s live. You can see tiny bubbles rising in the water, gas from the lava.’

Jack stared at the symbols. They seemed to have been crudely chiselled, as if done in a hurry. There were two separate clusters, each surrounded by a circle. Altogether he counted sixteen symbols: little spirals, stick-figure hands, triangles, zigzags, open angles, half-circles, groups of dots. Some appeared in both clusters, others in one only. At the centre of one cluster was a cross like an X, and in the other a slash with lines going out from it like a garden rake, repeated twice. The symbols presented an extraordinary image, like nothing else they had seen in Atlantis, evidently carved in the dying moments of the citadel, yet almost immeasurably old to those last Atlanteans, originating far back in the Ice Age.

‘I recognize these,’ he said. ‘They’re found in Palaeolithic cave art. Some archaeologists have dubbed them the Stone Age code, but nobody really knows what they mean.’

‘Look at that one,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s like a precursor to the Atlantis symbol.’ Jack saw where Costas was pointing. Instead of the fully formed Atlantis symbol – the one that they had interpreted as the form of a spirit bird, an eagle or a vulture – this looked like one wing of a bird, a straight line with four parallel lines extending from it. The symbol appeared three times at the same sloping angle with the parallel lines going off to the left, and once the other way round with the lines going right.

‘Isn’t this up Katya’s street?’ Jeremy said. ‘Prehistoric symbology?’

‘In fact, isn’t this whole thing up her street?’ Costas said, looking quizzically at Jack. ‘She was pretty well in at the outset five years ago, our expert palaeographer, then there was all the involvement of her father the warlord in trying to get those nukes off the Russian sub that sank beside Atlantis.’

Jack gave Costas a wry look. ‘That’s precisely why she’s not involved. Her father met his end here, remember? But I’ve always left the door open for her. I called her yesterday evening before I flew here from Troy, and told her that if we found any more ancient symbols at Atlantis I’d let her know.’

‘But you’re involved, aren’t you, Jack?’ Lanowski said, pushing his glasses up his nose and peering at Jack like a doctor. ‘It’s common knowledge at IMU. That is, when you’re not involved with Maria. Costas explained it to me.’

Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas, and then looked back at Lanowski. ‘I’m glad to see that even the most unimportant things don’t get past your radar now, Jacob.’

‘Oh,’ Lanowski exclaimed, shaking his head, peering furtively at the flashing email inbox message on his computer screen. ‘Oh, but they are important, Jack. Very important. I find you just can’t get away from them.’

Costas grinned. ‘Back to prehistoric symbology, guys.’

‘Where is she now?’ Lanowski said with a smile, pulling a memory stick out of his pocket and plugging it into the console. ‘I can email a still from this video to her.’

‘I caught her in a taxi on the way from the Institute of Palaeography in Moscow to the airport, where she was flying to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan,’ Jack replied. ‘She should be at the petroglyph site at Cholpon-Ata beside Lake Issyk-Gul by now. They’re four hours ahead of us, so it’ll be near the end of their working day.’

‘She’s still digging up those petroglyphs?’ Costas said, shaking his head. ‘It’s been almost two years since we were out there.’

‘That’s archaeology for you,’ Jack said ruefully, reaching for his tablet computer as Lanowski saved the image. ‘There are thousands of boulder carvings beside the lake and many square kilometres still to be explored. Since finding the Roman legionary inscription that took us there two years ago, she’s worked backwards in time searching for the oldest petroglyphs, back to the Neolithic and even earlier. The place wasn’t just a Silk Road site, it was a major prehistoric migration point between East and West. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if one day she found evidence of a group of early Neolithic refugees from Atlantis heading towards China.’

He took the memory stick from Lanowski, plugged it into his computer and took out his cell phone as he emailed the image. He found a saved number and then put it up to his ear, waiting. ‘During the summers, she’s out there with an international team, really well resourced after our board of directors agreed to fund the project,’ he said. ‘But out of season like now, it’s usually just her and Altamaty, like it was at the beginning.’ He suddenly looked away, putting his free hand over his other ear. ‘Hello? Altamaty? It’s Jack. I can barely hear you. It must be windy. I’ve got something for Katya.’ He strained to listen, and then took down the phone. ‘He’s digging out their laptop and getting the webcam up, and then he’ll go and find her.’

Jack activated the webcam on his own computer and propped it behind the main console keyboard so they could all see. The webcam came on line, showing a shaky image and a pair of hands, evidently propping a laptop on a rock; then the image stabilized to reveal a bleak landscape of scrub and boulders with clouds racing overhead. A face appeared, a ruggedly handsome man with Mongolian features wearing a mountaineering jacket and a Kyrgyz woollen hat. After he had adjusted the position of the laptop again, they saw him lope off beside a tractor and wave, pointing back at the computer. A few moments later a woman appeared and walked towards them, taking off a pair of gloves. She was wearing hiking boots and jeans and a down jacket, and her long black hair was tied back behind her head. She came in front of the webcam, put down a trowel and brush, took a camera from around her neck, and then adjusted the screen. She had strong eastern features too, mixed with European, and dark eyes. ‘Hello, Jack. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon. It’s cold and windy here, so let’s be quick.’ She had a deep voice and spoke with a slight American accent. She wiped her nose and rubbed her hands together, then smiled again at him. ‘I can see you’re on Seaquest II, in the operations room. Have you done the dive? I miss you.’

‘I’m here with Costas and Jeremy and Jacob Lanowski, all watching you just off screen,’ Jack replied. ‘We’ve done the dive, and we’ve just had an image from the ROV taken inside a cave we didn’t see five years ago. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Take a look at the attachment we’ve just sent you.’

She looked down to the side of the screen, evidently opening another window. Her eyes lit up and she stared for a few moments, then took out a notebook and flipped through it, holding the pages down in the wind. She stared again, and then looked back at the webcam. ‘You probably recognize these symbols from the cave at Lascaux in France,’ she said, angling her face away from the wind. ‘I know you and Maurice went there as students, because he talked to me about it. The symbols date across the entire range of Palaeolithic rock art, from about thirty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. Finding these symbols in Atlantis is completely consistent with the animal cave paintings there. The symbols appear in various numbers and combinations in caves across Europe and in rock art elsewhere, as far away as Australia and South America. Some of my colleagues believe that outside the main area in southern Europe, the similarity of the relatively small number of symbols found is just coincidence, that they were mostly simple enough for people to have invented them independently. But I don’t buy that. People moved around a lot in the Palaeolithic, and their shamans may have moved the most. If humans reached Australia by fifty thousand years ago, then they could have got anywhere else by sea, literally anywhere. To the Americas, for example, from Europe.’

‘We’ve just been discussing that,’ Jack replied. ‘So what about the Atlantis symbol? It’s fascinating. It looks as if that rake-shaped symbol is some kind of precursor.’

‘It makes perfect sense that the Atlantis symbol should have derived from a Stone Age one. Interesting that someone seems to have been trying to erase them.’

‘The big question,’ Jack said. ‘Are we looking at some kind of script? A code?’

‘That’s what I’m doing here now, at Cholpon-Ata,’ Katya replied. ‘Looking for rock inscriptions that might go that far back in prehistory. If the Stone Age symbols are a form of script, then it takes the history of writing back tens of thousands of years. I do think they have symbolic meaning, that they’re ideograms that may somehow represent the rituals carried out in those caves. The big breakthrough would be to find clear patterns of association, repeated clusters of symbols in the same order. That’s when this image from Atlantis could get really exciting.’

‘What about the clustering?’ Jack persisted. ‘Words, names?’

‘Possibly, but more as general ideograms or even mnemonics,’ she said. ‘There’s an old shaman in Altamaty’s Kyrgyz tribe who scratches simple signs like this into the sand or on a rock before he goes into a trance. The symbols by themselves don’t mean a sound or a word, but in clusters they represent the name of an ancestor, the spirit the shaman is trying to reach. They tend to be descriptive of what that ancestor had done in life, and are regarded as spirit names: “She who held the torch”, “He who would be a great hunter”. They can become generic, so that one particular ancestor becomes representative of many, and the shaman only scratches out a few of these formulae before he sets to work. What’s the context of your symbols? You said they’re in a cave.’

Jack nodded. ‘We saw animal paintings too, just out of sight. Mostly late Ice Age – leopards, bulls – rather than megafauna such as woolly mammoths, so my guess is a late-Palaeolithic origin, about twelve thousand years ago. It seems to have been some kind of open-air sanctuary with a cave backdrop.’

‘You might expect to find more of these symbols, more clusters, if it was a place for shamanistic rituals.’

‘On the screen here from the ROV we can see where other symbols, more deeply incised and clearly older, have been chiselled out and smoothed away on the surrounding rock. We think there was a religious transition going on, from shamanism to gods. It looks as if these two clusters of symbols you’re looking at were done hastily, scratched rather than carefully chiselled.’

‘Maybe as the flood waters rose,’ Katya suggested. ‘Some kind of desperate measure to evoke ancestors, perhaps. Shamans could have had those spirit names I was talking about while they were still alive, the names they were to be known by in death as their spirits were evoked. One can imagine the last shamans of Atlantis stuck in that place with the water rising and certain death ahead, knowing there would be no future shaman to call up their spirits and so scratching the symbols on that wall.’

Costas coughed. ‘What about “Noah was here”?’

‘What did you say?’ Katya demanded.

He craned his head close to Jack so the webcam caught him. ‘Noah was here. It’s just a name we’ve been bandying about. Noah and his Ark, thinking of the people who escaped from Atlantis.’

‘If Noah was a name back in the early Neolithic, it’s more likely to have been a proper name, even a nickname,’ Katya replied. ‘His real name – his spirit name – is more likely to have been something like Uta-napishtim, the name of the deluge hero in the Sumerian flood account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name Uta-napishtim is found in the earliest fragments of the flood story, dating from the dawn of Mesopotamian writing in the third millennium BC, as is the name Gilgamesh. Maybe Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh were spirit names derived from a Stone Age language now lost to us. My favourite spirit name is Sha naqba muru, meaning “He who has seen the deep”, the first line of the Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I think it’s what I’d call Jack if I were a shaman. The Mesopotamian scribes might not have known it, but the names of their heroes may have had similar spirit-name meanings in early prehistory.’

‘Wow, Katya, I wasn’t really being serious about Noah,’ Costas said.

Katya smiled. ‘A long time ago, Jack told me always to listen to Costas, because, how did he put it, Costas is good at hitting the nail on the head.’

‘Hey, that’s just about the nicest thing he’s ever said about me.’

‘The wind’s really picking up.’ Katya’s voice was nearly inaudible. ‘Jack, give me a day or so and I’ll check these symbols against my database.’

‘That would be fantastic,’ Jack said. ‘Email me whatever you get. We’re trying to piece something together here, where these people went. Not the priests, but the shamans. We want to know whether any of them might have survived to found a new Atlantis.’

Katya leaned forward. They could see the wind ruffling her hair, and she put up a hand to protect her eyes from the blowing dust. To Jack she looked utterly at home, her features at one with the landscape and the wind, and he remembered her Kyrgyz ancestry on her father’s side. She raised her voice. ‘I have to go. There’s one of those winds howling in from the east. Speaking of shamans, that one from Altamaty’s tribe calls these winds Genghis Khan’s revenge. Altamaty says thank God you and Costas didn’t actually go into that tomb under the lake two years ago, otherwise we’d have been blown to the Black Sea by now. When it’s like this, you wonder if the shamans have a point. We haven’t even got the yurt up yet. Thank Jeremy for the pictures from Troy. Rebecca’s just emailed through the one showing her at the helicopter controls, actually flying it. Pretty cool. And my love to Costas. And to Jeremy and Jacob. See you.’ She leaned forward into the screen and her hair came loose, swirling round and blotting out the view, and then the screen went blank. Jack leaned back, staring at it pensively.

‘Phew,’ Costas said. ‘Love to you too, Katya.’

‘Internet girlfriends,’ Lanowski said abstractly, looking at Jack and then narrowing his eyes at Costas. ‘They’re the best.’

‘You weren’t going to show her what else you’d found?’ Jeremy asked.

Jack shook his head. ‘Katya’s father died in that volcano five years ago, remember?’ He jerked his head back at the computer monitor with the image of the skulls. ‘He may have been a hated warlord and Katya may seem as tough as nails, but I wasn’t going to show her that.’

‘Good call,’ Lanowski said thoughtfully.

‘Rebecca’s her number-one fan,’ Jeremy said. ‘Especially after Katya taught her to shoot a Kalashnikov.’

‘She did what?’ Jack exclaimed.

‘Last summer, before we went to Troy, when Rebecca worked at Cholpon-Ata for a month. Katya and Altamaty took her hunting in the mountains. They forage for a lot of their food, you know. They think they saw a white tiger.’

‘Jesus,’ Jack muttered. ‘She didn’t say anything about that a few months later when Ben Kershaw very cautiously taught her to shoot a. 22 on the foredeck of the ship, with full hearing and eye protection and under my watchful gaze.’

‘She thought you’d be mad. But don’t worry. The kidnapping changed her a lot. I think she’ll tell you everything now. Katya really helped, too. She told Rebecca what it was like growing up as a woman in Russia around the kind of men her father dealt with, what you have to be prepared to do to hold your own. Rebecca really lapped it up. I think she’s got a role model in Katya.’

‘Who’s Altamaty, by the way?’ Lanowski said, looking at Jack with a hint of concern on his face.

Jack stared at him. ‘What? Oh, he’s in charge of the petroglyph open-air museum. It’s a World Heritage Site now, a result of a little bit of extra lobbying from us. He’s really climbed up the ladder in the last two years. He’s also been doing some fascinating underwater work in the lake. He was a diver in Soviet special forces, and I made him a research associate of IMU. And yes, he and Katya are very good friends.’

‘And you’re not always around,’ Lanowski said cautiously.

‘Not always.’ Jack stared pointedly at the screen. ‘Now, where were we? I think we’re just about done.’ He picked up his phone and saw that the message indicator had been flashing. ‘I had this switched off while we were talking before I called Katya and someone’s left a message. Just let me listen to it and then I’m off to the helipad.’ He pushed the chair back and got up, stretching and feeling the aches from diving in his body again. He glanced back at the computer screen. It had been great to see Katya again. And secretly he was pleased to hear how much Rebecca adored her. Lanowski was right, too. His time management was out of hand. After this was over, he needed to sit on a mountainside somewhere and work out his priorities. Moving from one adrenalin-fuelled project to another was the life he was made for, but it was time to splice in some other kinds of excitement and make that a permanent fixture. It had been building up to this ever since Rebecca had appeared in his life. He needed to listen to his friends. He took a deep breath, then walked over to the other side of the room, one hand in his pocket, clicked the inbox and put the phone up to his ear. He stood still, listening intently, then slowly took the phone down, staring back at the other three. ‘That was Maurice Hiebermeyer.’ He felt numb, unable to move, as if he had just reached a tipping point. ‘He wants me to go to the bunker site in Germany right away.’

‘Any news?’ Costas said, staring at Jack.

‘He said he wasn’t going to tell me anything on the phone. And I can’t call him back, as he’s spending six hours in decontamination.’

‘Shit. That sounds bad.’

‘He said it was just routine. They all have to do it. He said now he knew what it felt like when we had to go into the recompression chamber. But I’ve never heard him sound like that before. I barely recognized his voice.’

‘It can’t have been a good experience, whatever he saw.’

‘I should never have let him take my place.’

‘You can’t be everywhere. Jack. And he insisted.’

Jack glanced at his watch. 1450 hours. ‘Time I packed my bag.’

‘How are you going to get there?’ Costas asked. ‘Maurice used the Embraer to fly from Egypt to Germany, and it’s still at Frankfurt waiting for him.’

Jack waved his phone. ‘I had a call last night from an old friend who’s just about to finish his flying career in the Royal Air Force, Paul Llewelyn. He’s spending the night at Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, and he knew I’d been excavating at Troy. He gave me a call on the off-chance that we might hook up.’

‘Didn’t he go on your first expeditions when you were undergraduates?’

Jack nodded. ‘A battered van, a home-made inflatable boat, an ancient compressor and cobbled-together diving equipment. Peter Howe was another stalwart. I always dreamed of something like this, Seaquest II, IMU, but I never imagined that the adventures we planned would attract the dark clouds we seem to be under now. Back then we didn’t have the equipment to search for Atlantis, but those were days when the world seemed like our oyster.’

‘The excitement’s still there, Jack,’ Costas said, peering at him. ‘Bigger than ever. Don’t lose hold of that. And the best projects are still to come. You’ve got a daughter to keep entertained, remember?’

Jeremy coughed. ‘I think she might see it the other way round.’

‘So what about Paul?’ Costas said.

‘He’s ferrying a Tornado GR4 back from Kandahar in Afghanistan to the UK. For years he’s been offering me a back-seat ride in a fast jet. The old NATO base next to the bunker site in Germany is still functional, and they’ve put in a skeleton ground team to deal with aircraft bringing in supplies for the excavation. The Lynx should be able to take me from here direct to Incirlik, and I’ll see whether Paul can make a small diversion on his way back to England.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ Jeremy said.

‘Fun’s probably not the right word for where Jack’s going,’ Costas murmured.

Lanowski got up and put a hand awkwardly on Jack’s shoulder. ‘Take it easy, Jack.’ He pointed at the image of the papyrus on his screen. ‘I want you back here in this ship to find out where that’s leading us.’

‘Jacob’s right,’ Costas added. ‘And remember, Saumerre can’t make a move until he has the upper hand, and he’ll only have that if he’s got hold of the weapon he thinks lies in that Nazi bunker. There’s no chance of that now, is there? The place must be locked down like Fort Knox. Once we find it and we’re certain Saumerre is neutered, then the matter is out of our hands and we can let MI6 blow his network wide open and take him down. Then we can get back to the archaeology. This has been eating away at you for months, Jack, at all of us. Let’s get it done.’ Costas turned back, looked at the ROV monitor and idly tapped the control handle. The screen lurched. He hit the handle. It lurched again. ‘Holy shit,’ he whispered.

‘What is it?’ Jack turned, followed by the others.

Costas tapped the handle again. The image wobbled. ‘It’s not just the camera that’s still working,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s Little Joey. He’s still alive.’

Lanowski quickly sat down beside Costas, tapping the keyboard and working the mouse. He nudged Costas’ hand away and held the handle himself, gently tugging it in every direction. ‘Okay,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s only the eye that’s moving, the socket holding the camera, and we’ve only got movement in one direction, at about forty-five degrees on a three-sixty-degree compass, which will take us up the rock face to the right of those symbols. The computer says it’ll only go up to an arc of forty degrees or so, which means it’ll stop after about two metres up the rock face.’ He let go and sat aside, staring at the screen.

Costas put his hand back on the handle and moved it slowly to the right. The image climbed away from the symbols, showing a smoothed section of rock wall, then a dark crack and a large protrusion with a crack on the other side. ‘It’s a boulder,’ he said. ‘Those cracks look like the edge of some kind of tunnel, and the boulder’s been wedged into it. I can’t push it any further to the right.’

‘Try going up,’ Lanowski suggested.

Costas did as he suggested, moving the stick carefully. Nothing happened. He pushed it to its maximum angle. There was a sudden blur and the image wobbled, as if the eye of the ROV were on a spring. A shimmer of bubbles and a cloud of brown filaments surged up from below, and the water wavered and blurred like heat rising in air. ‘Something bad is happening,’ Costas murmured. ‘I think the lava has just entered the chamber and has pushed into the back of the ROV, and the water’s boiling up. In that confined space there’ll be a massive phreatic explosion. I think this really is the last gasp for Little Joey.’

‘Don’t give up just yet,’ Lanowski urged. ‘Take a look at that.’

The wobbling stopped and the image stabilized. The eye of the ROV had angled upwards to the top of the boulder, to a wider crack between its upper surface and the top of the tunnel. They all stared in stunned silence.

What they saw was a scene of horror. On top of the boulder were three human skulls lying at different angles, their lower jaws wide open. The skulls were covered in the same lime concretion as the bones of the sacrificial victims on the floor of the chamber, cementing them to the top of the boulder. But it was not the image of the skulls that was so horrifying. It was what lay behind and in front of them. The skulls were articulated with other human bones, ribcages caught in the crack behind, arm bones extending over the boulder as if some awful multi-legged creature had been trying to get out. One ribcage had collapsed and several of the arms were missing hands, but the rest of the bones were joined together, evidently cemented to the rock while the sinews were still in place.

Jack stared. As if some creature had been trying to get out. It was suddenly an image of shocking clarity. These people had been alive and struggling when the flood waters rose, their last screams caught in the contorted grimaces of their skulls. And this was no accident of fate. They had been forced inside that tunnel and sealed in with the boulder. He could barely imagine what lay in the darkness beyond.

What had gone on here? Human sacrifice, mass suicide, then the last of the shamans sealed inside, doomed to an agonizing and terrifying death. Had this been the final apocalypse, the end of the old order and the beginning of the new? He remembered those stark stone pillars standing in the chamber. Had they presided over this, those new gods, like statues half formed that now would be able to reveal themselves in their final shape, wherever those who had carried out this act were destined to find landfall and hold sway over men again?

Then Jack remembered Lanowski’s chalk drawing on the blackboard: the crooked cross, the swastika, a shape that seemed to form in Jack’s mind out of the swirling images of the deep past. Now he knew that the end of the old order had been a time of appalling violence. But he also knew that those who had vanquished the old, these new priests, these gods, had not come from somewhere else, like invaders sweeping in on a wave of destruction. They had come from within. He remembered Hiebermeyer’s call, where he was going now, to a time when that cross had been resurrected to serve a new breed of gods. Suddenly the image of fear and desperation in those skeletons from seven thousand years ago seemed terrifyingly immediate.

There was a sudden jolt, and a blur. The camera appeared to move forward, as if the ROV were riding something underneath. Then there was a white flash and the screen went blank. A moment later the ship’s klaxon sounded, and a red light went on above the control-room door. ‘We’re moving again,’ Costas said. ‘Macalister must have registered another seismic disturbance, and he’ll be taking us further offshore. My guess is that’s the archaeology gone for good. That chamber’s going to be entombed in lava, Little Joey too.’

Jack sniffed the air. He thought he caught a whiff of sulphur, whether some effulgence of the volcano drawn in by the ship’s ventilators or a residue on their own bodies from the dive was unclear. Smell was the one sense he had been deprived of that morning; the dive had come to seem more like a voyage of the mind than reality. But the hint of acrid smell jolted him. Instead of a phantasm, an image now lost forever to history, the vision of those people in their death throes now seemed shockingly real. He knew that where he had to go next, the smell of death was more than just a ghostly exhalation. He realized what had been troubling him for the last six months, what had led him to block off the world around him, to totter on the edge on the dive that morning. It was not only Atlantis that had come at a price, with the death of Peter Howe five years ago. Troy had come at a price too. Six months ago they had opened up another cave from the past, another chamber with a dark revelation. It was unresolved business, and he needed to confront it head-on now. He straightened up, clicked on his phone, nodded at Jeremy and Lanowski and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Next time we meet in this room, it will be on the trail of a shaman of Atlantis who may have survived all this, a seven-thousand-year-old seafarer who might just have been called Noah. Until then, sit tight. You’ll be hearing from me.’