The Gods of Atlantis

PART 3
15

Wewelsburg Castle, Germany

Jack swung his legs out of the car and stood in the car park, stretching his arms and savouring the cool morning air. Even though he had not gone inside the Nazi bunker in the forest the day before, he still felt as if some of that horror were clinging to him, filling his lungs as it had filled the lungs of the first Allied soldiers who had entered the death camp beside the bunker almost seventy years before. He took another deep breath, then watched as Maurice Hiebermeyer clambered out of the car on the driver’s side, adjusting his trousers around his ample waist and pushing his little round glasses up his nose, then picking up a shoulder bag and coming round to stand beside him. For Maurice, the bunker experience had been far worse, not only for the sheer horror of what he had seen but also because of his German background, and Jack knew that his intense focus on planning their visit today had been a way of pushing away an experience that had unsettled him, something that Jack himself had found difficult to watch.

Together the two men stared up at the great bulk of the castle in front of them, its off-white masonry stark against the blue sky. It looked unreal, as if it had just been completed, too good to be true. Jack had to remind himself that he was not in England, where so many castles were ruins; in Germany, castles like this had been continuously occupied through to modern times. He caught sight of the name at the entrance to the car park: Wewelsburg. This castle was a special case, reinvented in the twentieth century as the bastion of a new knightly order, an odious fantasy in one man’s mind and the centrepiece of his dream of world domination.

‘The castle’s early medieval originally,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘When Heinrich Himmler bought Wewelsburg in 1934, he set about transforming it into his fantasy SS order-castle. From 1939, the slave labour used in the reconstruction came from a concentration camp set up nearby at Niederhagen, eventually including Soviet prisoners of war as well as Jews. Over a thousand of them were worked to death. A thousand. It was everywhere, you know, everywhere in Nazi Germany, the taint of racism and slave labour. Since being in that bunker, I can’t look at anything from that period without feeling physically sick. I can’t believe that I never felt that before. I think the whole of Germany must have been in a state of shock after the war, for years afterwards, even my generation.’ He looked down, distraught for a moment, and then took a deep breath and shook himself, clearing his throat and pointing to the walls. ‘The most dramatic transformation of the castle was where we’re meeting my aunt Heidi, in the so-called Obergruppenfuhrersaal, the SS Generals’ Room in the North Tower. It’s a kind of perverse realization of King Arthur’s Camelot, where Himmler’s top SS generals would meet as if they were latter-day Knights of the Round Table.’

‘Have you been here before?’ Jack said.

‘Once, when I was a child.’ Hiebermeyer glanced at his watch, then leaned back against the car. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes until I said we would meet her. I wanted to fill you in on a few things before we go into the castle. You and I have known each other since we were boys, and we know pretty well everything in each other’s minds, but this is a chapter I’ve kept mostly to myself. We could go to the cafe?’

‘Here is good.’

‘Okay. Probably best not to be overheard. Do you remember at boarding school in England when I did a presentation on the Nazis and archaeology? A pretty edgy subject for a German boy in those days, but my parents’ estate was in Westphalia, near here, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it all.’

‘As I recall, the main excitement was a story you’d unearthed about a German expedition to Egypt to uncover a fabulous treasure of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Something you didn’t tell the class about in your presentation, but you did tell me in secret later that day.’

‘Still a big one on our to-do list, very big,’ Hiebermeyer said, the old glint in his eyes back for a moment. ‘But it wasn’t just about following up treasure stories. I also wanted to distil the true archaeology from the nonsense. Himmler was influenced by a mystic named Karl Maria Wiligut, who convinced him that Westphalia would be the site of an apocalyptic battle between East and West, one in which the West would triumph and the River Rhine would run red with blood. At the time, people made the mistake of dismissing Himmler’s fantasies as harmless nonsense, even some fellow Nazis. But like his anti-Semitism, all his obsessions had a horrible fallout in real life. It was Himmler who pushed Hitler to launch Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in 1941, and there’s no doubt he would have incited Hitler by regaling him with the story of that mythical showdown between East and West.’

‘And yet when it came to the Rhine running red with blood, it was the Western Allies who were the enemy, and this time the Germans were doomed to defeat.’

Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘Yet even that showdown may have been preordained by Himmler, and I don’t mean in mythology. The more I studied him, the more it seemed as if he were willing the Reich to self-destruction. He was Hitler’s right-hand man, in many ways the brains behind the Nazi ideology. It was he who engineered the Holocaust, with ruthless efficiency and attention to detail. He was capable of the kind of cold-headed and practical decision-making that mostly eluded Hitler. Yet it was Himmler who pushed Hitler to make some of his more catastrophic decisions, above all the invasion of Russia. That single decision doomed the Third Reich. I began to look again at Himmler’s obsession with the occult, with all the absurd symbolism and ritual, and to me it seemed more and more like a smokescreen. It was almost as if he had wanted the higher echelons of the Nazi party to treat him as something of a joke, in order to keep them from poisoning Hitler against him and to retain the ear of the Fuhrer, to make sure he was there to influence the most important decision-making. If he’d exposed too much of his rational side, others in the party might have warned Hitler that he was a threat, a possible Fuhrer-in-waiting.’

‘These are some pretty radical ideas for a boy archaeologist,’ Jack said.

Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I felt a need to tackle my own past, my family’s, that of Germany. For me, it was not just a matter of acknowledgement, but of questioning.’ He gestured up at the castle again. ‘This place seemed to represent the dichotomy in my mind about Himmler. On the one hand, Wewelsburg is a Nazi fairy tale, a kind of perverse Disneyland. From that viewpoint, it’s easy to walk in there and dismiss all the occult symbolism as absurd. On the other hand, it was the stronghold of an empire Himmler had carved out for himself, the ideological headquarters of the SS and the focus of the Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. In 1941, Himmler even declared that Wewelsburg would become the centre of the Third Reich. That might seem little more than a grandiose statement of his ambitions for his cult, but it could also be read at face value. When he said it, some must have known his mind, a hard core of followers, perhaps a secret cadre within the SS. His pronouncement may even have signalled the beginning of the process he had been building towards since acquiring this place years before the war even began. It came in 1941, just at the start of Operation Barbarossa, the beginning of the countdown to apocalypse.’

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Are you suggesting that Himmler engineered that? And that he was setting up a rival Reich?’

Hiebermeyer paused. ‘A kind of shadow Reich. But not here, no longer at Wewelsburg. That was part of the smokescreen too. He would have known perfectly well that the castle would not survive the fall of Hitler, that it would be taken by the Allies. And the idea in those final days of April 1945, when he tried to negotiate with the Americans – that Himmler really saw the Third Reich as viable, with himself at the helm, fighting alongside the Western Allies against the Russians – has always seemed to me to be at odds with the man’s cunning intelligence. Nor do I believe that he was fuelled by the fantasy of some kind of miracle deliverance that sustained the remaining Nazis in Berlin in those final dark days. I began to think that he had another scheme, and that he had only been trying to buy time, perhaps for a plan of escape to some other secret base that required a few days more to pull off, with the hours suddenly running short as the Red Army closed in.’

‘And by April 1945, Wewelsburg was already in American hands.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘But Camelot’s a movable feast. With so much focus on the ideology and mystique, Himmler could persuade his followers that the bricks and mortar had become less important. A new order-castle could be built elsewhere. Gangsters always have more than one hideaway. I began to think that his vision for a future Wewelsburg lay beyond Germany, beyond Europe. But there I left it. When we were at school, in the 1970s, there was still a lot of speculation about top Nazis who might have escaped to places like Argentina and Brazil, men who for decades may have contemplated a resurgent Reich. There were dozens of novels and investigative books and films. For me to have speculated about Himmler in that way would just have added to the slush pile on some literary agent’s floor.’

‘Especially as Himmler had committed suicide in British custody in May 1945,’ Jack said.

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Something didn’t go quite to plan for him in those final few days after Hitler’s own suicide, when Himmler was on the run. He’d been at Grand Admiral Donitz’s headquarters at Plon, close to the last surviving U-boat pens, and I can’t help feeling there was a connection. There have always been rumours about U-boats taking fleeing Nazis away.’

‘And that’s why you were so interested in those Ahnenerbe expeditions? Because you thought Himmler was really searching for a new Camelot?’

‘I came to believe that the expeditions weren’t just about finding evidence for Aryan roots, for anything that could be hijacked and slotted into the Nazi foundation myth. They were about shoring up the future. Specifically, about shoring up Himmler’s future. But this was not just about refounding Camelot. This was about something more grandiose, more audacious. Remember, this was a man who brazenly stated that Wewelsburg was to be the centre of the world. Wherever he was going, even if it involved no bricks and mortar, even if the archaeology he so yearned for was elusive, made up, he would preside over his new citadel of power, the one that had driven him to send out expeditions searching for evidence of the greatest lost civilization. Not Camelot, but Atlantis. Atlantis refounded.’ Hiebermeyer nodded at the edifice in front of them. ‘Because I believed that Himmler’s fantasies overlaid a ruthless practicality, I felt that he was looking for more than just a bolthole. There had to be some basis for continuing power, something that would allow him to pursue his dream of world domination. I began to think about the wonder-weapons in production at the end of the war. The German atomic research programme seems unlikely; by April 1945, Himmler would have known about the Manhattan Project – the Allied effort to produce the first atomic bomb – and realized that the threat of a single nuclear bomb, even if the Germans had one ready, would not have been enough to bring the world to its knees. Gas or chemical weapons would never have been practical, requiring aircraft or missiles or artillery for delivery. That left one possibility: a biological weapon.’

Jack stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘Good God. The bunker. You think that wasn’t about some apocalyptic scheme of Hitler’s to take the world with him, but a plan for post-war global threat by Himmler.’

‘It fits the bill exactly. The Spanish flu virus would be the perfect weapon. A single phial would have been enough, a threat to release it in one large city. And it seems consistent with what we can make out of the secretive nature of the experiments at the bunker, the SS involvement, the Agamemnon Code, which seems to have activated a chain of agents. I believe that Himmler had been planning to take the virus with him to his secret destination, or to have an agent do it for him in advance, and that was what he had been trying to arrange in those final days.’

‘Your aunt Heidi,’ Jack murmured. ‘Wasn’t she a scientist?’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘A toxicologist. She’d been a biochemistry student when the Nazis came to power, and then worked as a medical researcher in a hospital in Berlin until her son Hans was born. I know that she gave herself up to the British near Plon, where she was hiding with Hans. She was evidently seen as a good catch, and was given a succession of research positions in England, where she remained until retiring back to Germany in the 1970s.’

‘Her son was the one who joined the Baader-Meinhof gang?’

‘He died in an explosion in 1972. He’d been a brilliant student, but had been seduced by the anarchists. Aunt Heidi once told me she saw it as part of the legacy of the Nazis, the damage wrought on the next generation. I don’t think she’s ever got over it, especially after losing her husband too, in the war.’

‘The Stuka pilot? I remember you talking about him.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Ernst Hoffman. One of the top tank-busters of the war. Knight’s Grand Cross with oak leaves and swords. He was grounded after being wounded on the Russian front, and was posted as some kind of attache in Berlin. Aunt Heidi said he disappeared like so many others in the final Soviet onslaught, presumed killed.’

‘So why does Heidi want us to meet here now?’

Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I’m not sure. But there was a connection with Himmler, something that dogged Ernst right to the end. Heidi told me that as a boy, he’d seen a newsreel of an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet showing biplanes flying over the Himalayas, and had written to Himmler to volunteer as a pilot. After that, Himmler took an undue interest in his Luftwaffe exploits, and arranged his final posting to Berlin, where Ernst was feted as a war hero. Several years before that, it was Himmler who had organized the party where Ernst had first met Heidi. Himmler brought his favourites to Wewelsburg, and maybe Ernst and Heidi came with him. There must be something here she wants us to see.’ He looked at his watch, and stood up. ‘It’s a quarter to eleven. We’d better be on time.’

Fifteen minutes later Jack and Hiebermeyer stood at the entrance to the Obergruppenfuhrersaal, the SS Generals’ Hall, on the ground floor of the north tower of the castle. It was a stark room, devoid of furniture or wall hangings, focusing the eye entirely on the architecture and the pattern in the floor. Surrounding the open central space of the chamber were twelve columns joined by a groin vault, and between them lay deeply recessed apses with tall windows. The daylight coming through the windows illuminated the symbol in the centre of the floor, a green marble Sonnenrad sunwheel with a central axis of gold. Jack knew that this had been the epicentre of Himmler’s vision for Wewelsburg, the place where he had summoned his twelve top SS generals for ideological preparation before Operation Barbarossa in 1941. He heard a low electric hum, and a wheelchair appeared from one of the window niches. Sitting in it was an elegant woman wearing a flowery dress, her white hair done in the fashion of the 1930s. She had a striking face, with high cheekbones and startlingly blue eyes. She waved at Hiebermeyer, who bounded over and kissed her forehead. ‘Heidi,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘ Meine liebe Tante.’

Her bright eyes caught Jack’s and he quickly proffered his hand. ‘Frau Dr Hoffman. Pleased to meet you at last.’

‘Call me Heidi,’ she said in beautifully precise English, with the clipped accent of the 1930s. ‘You must be Jack Howard. It is such a pleasure to meet you. Maurice used to tell me about you when he visited during his school holidays, but by then I’d moved back to Germany and he never did bring you along. I was delighted when Maurice phoned to tell me you would be joining us. Ever since reading your Atlantis book, I’ve wanted to bring you here to show you some symbols. My son Hans sketched them once, but I can’t find his drawings now.’ She took a tissue out of her sleeve and dabbed one eye. Jack saw that her hands were shaking. He glanced across at Hiebermeyer. So that was it. Some symbols. The place was filled with symbols, every kind of device the Nazis had come across, including at least three different runic sequences that Jack could see. Some were genuine transcriptions of medieval runes; others clearly were made up. There were bound to be a few that looked like those they had discovered five years ago in Atlantis. For a moment Jack wondered if he was about to be sucked into the world of fringe archaeology, of so-called evidence collated by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, picked from disparate sources and then arranged together in an apparently convincing whole. For all of the reality of their discovery in the Black Sea, he knew there would always be those who preferred to inhabit this parallel world, where the dream of Atlantis would remain just beyond reach.

‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, glancing again at Jack. ‘When did you come here before? When Hans was a boy?’

She put away her tissue. ‘Once, when he was a high-school student, to try to interest him in a mystery. But of course I had been here before, when I first came to this chamber and the vault below and saw what I am going to show you now. Have you told Dr Howard about Ernst?’

‘He knows as much as I know.’

She took a deep breath, shuddering slightly, then composed herself. ‘Himmler brought us here on a celebratory tour after Ernst had been awarded the oak leaves and swords cluster to his Knight’s Cross. We were the perfect image of the Nazi couple, the war hero and his blonde Aryan wife, heavily pregnant. Only it was a charade, of course. We were taken first to this chamber, where Ernst was anointed an honorary knight. I thought Himmler was about to induct him into the SS, which would have been the worst horror for Ernst. Fortunately, Himmler said it was more important for the time being that he remain a shining star of the Luftwaffe.’

‘You always told me he only thought of the men in his squadron, Aunt Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said quietly. ‘That was where his loyalty lay, and to you and Hans.’

Her eyes filled with tears again, and she wiped them. ‘It seems just like yesterday. I feel as if I could walk out of this wheelchair into the sun of the courtyard, see little Hans and hold Ernst by the hand. They were days of happiness, but it was a time of horror. In truth I cannot go back to them, even in my mind’s eye. When I shut my eyes, I only see again the horrors that I myself witnessed.’

She shuddered again, then held her hands tight on the armrests of the chair. ‘Now, we must go down the stairs, to the vault below.’ She raised herself with a walking stick that had been leaning on her wheelchair. The two men quickly took an arm each, and walked alongside her as she moved slowly to the spiral staircase, where Hiebermeyer led, with Jack taking up the rear. In a few minutes they had reached the bottom. They were in a gloomy beehive-shaped chamber, about eight metres high, positioned directly below the SS Generals’ Room and dug into the bedrock. Heidi pointed up to the vault with her stick. ‘There’s a swastika in the apex, directly below the Sonnenrad sun symbol in the floor above,’ she said. ‘The vault’s based on the shape of a Mycenaean Greek tomb, the so-called Treasury of Atreus at the ancient site of Mycenae. Himmler was obsessed with warrior kings of the ancient past. This vault is really a shrine to Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks who attacked Troy, the hero of another war between West and East.’ She brought down her cane and tapped on a marble slab in the centre of the floor. ‘If you look under this, you’ll see why.’

She sat down abruptly on a wooden bench beside the wall. Jack stared at the floor, but saw nothing in the closely fitted marble slabs to suggest an opening. Hiebermeyer knelt down and put his hand on the slab she had tapped. ‘How do you know anything’s here, Aunt Heidi?’

‘Because Himmler showed it to me. Ernst regarded all of Himmler’s archaeology as occult, and found a ready excuse that day to avoid the tour by volunteering to fly Nazi officials who accompanied us over the site of the castle to see Himmler’s grandiose construction scheme from the air. Himmler brought me down here alone. I never told Ernst what I saw; he would have scoffed at it. Himmler was very proud of this chamber. It was meant to be a kind of holy of holies, and a burial vault for the ashes of the greatest SS heroes. His top SS officers were meant to come and swear allegiance over the object buried below. But only a select few knew what it was.’

‘Is it still here?’

‘You can see where it rested.’ She tapped her stick against the wall behind her, then tapped it again, as if trying the find the right spot. The second tap produced a hollow sound, and where Hiebermeyer had been looking, an octagonal slab of marble about the size of a large dinner plate rose a few inches out of the floor. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m probably the only one left who knows how to do that. Even the curators of this place don’t know this is here. Go on, Maurice, pull it out.’

Hiebermeyer got down on all fours, grasping the block by two recessed handles on either side. He lifted it up and set it down beside the hole. Jack took out a Mini Maglite and knelt beside him. About six inches below was a ring of symbols, surrounding a hollow shape cut into the rock. Jack peered closely at the shape, panning his torch over it, then looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

Hiebermeyer was staring at it. ‘Incredible.’

Jack’s mind raced. A reverse swastika. It was the same as the shape in the bunker laboratory door. And it was the shape he had seen six months before in the strongbox he and Costas had retrieved from deep inside the mine in Poland, the shape of an object that Saumerre had so coveted but which had remained elusive.

‘It was for the ancient Trojan palladion,’ Heidi said. ‘At first I thought the palladion must be another fake, but I came to believe it was genuine. We all knew the swastika was an ancient shape, and had been found decorating pottery at Troy. Himmler told me that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the palladion in the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where it had been looted from a temple at Troy. It was the most sacred Trojan object, dating back thousands of years before the fall of Troy, supposedly a gift from the sky god. It was meteoritic on one side, gold on the other. It’s gone now, though I don’t know where. But I brought you here to see the symbols around the edge of the hollow.’

Jack peered more closely. There were two circular rings of symbols, the first one close to the lip of the hole, the second inside and below the first ring, obscured in shadow. The symbols on the upper ring were similar to the ones they had seen in the hall above. ‘They’re runes,’ he murmured. ‘Eight of them altogether. Some look like the Futhark, the Scandinavian runes of the Middle Ages. But there are other symbols too, presumably Nazi additions. I can see two swastikas.’

Heidi pointed with her stick. ‘They’re the creation of Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s occult guru. He retained some of the original Scandinavian runes, but added some with no historical precedent as runes but based on other ancient symbols. As well as the swastikas, you can see those two symbols of a crossed ring, derived from the Phoenician symbol t th.’

Hiebermeyer looked at Heidi. ‘These SS runes have Roman letter equivalents, don’t they?’

She nodded. ‘Entirely made up by Wiligut, but applied consistently. The t th symbol means T, and the Hakenkreuz, the swastika, means A. And you can see the Sig rune for the letter S, familiar enough from the SS insignia. The other three symbols are the Heilszeichen rune for L, the Odal rune for N and the Leben rune for I.’

Jack stared again, panning his torch from symbol to symbol, then running over it again. ‘Good God,’ he said under his breath. ‘They spell out ATLANTIS.’

‘Now look at the second ring of symbols,’ she said.

Jack panned his torch deeper into the hole and stared, his heart pounding. ‘It’s incredible,’ he whispered.

‘What is it?’ Hiebermeyer said.

Jack sat back, his mind racing. ‘The symbols Costas’ ROV photographed two days ago on that cave wall in Atlantis, the ones that Katya is working on intepreting.’ He took out his iPhone, pressed a few keys and passed it to Hiebermeyer, who stared at the image on the screen and then squatted down, looking at the rock-cut symbols in the marble and then at the screen again. ‘There are twenty-six symbols on your screen. Each one of the eight symbols here in the rock is represented. They’re the same.’

‘You recognize them?’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s the Stone Age code.’ He looked at Heidi. ‘These symbols are found on cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic, most extensively in the famous caves in France and Spain. What does seem incredible is that they are virtually identical across the world.’ He showed her the screen, pointing. ‘The zigzag lines, the clusters of dots, the parallel lines are all found in rock art in North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia. Some scholars have tried to argue that these are just common jottings that the artists could have invented independently, but that doesn’t wash with me.’

‘You think these symbols could have spread around the world from one origin?’ she murmured.

Hiebermeyer nodded emphatically. ‘We know people moved huge distances in the Ice Age: across the Bering Strait and to South America at least twenty thousand years ago, and from Asia to Australia at least thirty thousand years before that. Armchair scholars who dispute the idea look at maps and see apparently insurmountable barriers in the seas and deserts and mountain ranges, whereas those like Jack who’ve tried to retrace the routes realize that the sea especially is often an aid rather than a hindrance to long-distance travel.’

‘What’s the date range of the symbols?’ she asked.

‘Towards the end of the last Ice Age, from about twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. But they could have survived as relic symbols after the Ice Age, maybe in rituals.’

‘At least until 6000 BC,’ Jack said quietly, getting down on his knees and shining his Maglite at the far side of the recess. He took his iPhone back from Hiebermeyer, stared at it and then shone the torch again. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

He straightened up and smiled broadly. Hiebermeyer pushed up his little round glasses and peered back. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’

‘I’ve just seen one I recognize above all others. It’s astonishing.’

Hiebermeyer followed his gaze. The torch lit up a symbol like a garden rake, a single slash with four lines coming off it at right angles. ‘Is this what I think it is?’

Jack scrolled down his screen. ‘It’s symbol number twenty-three in the Stone Age alphabet, what they call “pectiform”, from the Latin for comb-shaped, with short lines extending off a single line. According to Katya’s email to me summarizing the code, it’s quite rare, only occurring at five per cent of the cave sites. But it first occurs in the oldest groups, twenty-five thousand years ago.’ He tapped the screen again, and showed it to Heidi. ‘That’s why I’m so excited.’

The screen showed the cover of Jack’s monograph publication on Atlantis, based on their discovery of the site five years before. In the centre was the symbol they had first seen on the papyrus that Hiebermeyer had discovered in the Egyptian desert, the account by the ancient Greek traveller Solon of his visit to the Egyptian high priest who had told him the story of Atlantis. It was the symbol that Jack and Costas had found on the golden disc from the Bronze Age shipwreck, a disc they realized had been created in Atlantis more than five thousand years earlier, before the citadel had been drowned by the rising waters of the Black Sea. Heidi peered at it, then at Jack. ‘The symbol here is a mirror image of the Stone Age symbol. It’s as if that pectiform symbol had been flipped over.’

Jack nodded. ‘You won’t believe it, but my colleague Costas and I saw this very symbol underwater at Atlantis during our dive, on a stone pillar at the entrance to a tunnel into the site. We call it the Atlantis symbol. We believe it was shaped like that in the form of two wings, and was meant to represent an eagle or a vulture, a sacred bird. And it also served as a map, like a labyrinth. Five years ago, we were able to follow the shape of the symbol in the tunnels and galleries in the rock of the volcano that formed the summit of the citadel, until we reached the holy of holies.’

‘The place you and Costas revisited a few days ago,’ Hiebermeyer said.

Jack nodded. ‘Unfortunately the volcano decided to heat up just as we were about to enter the chamber. But we did manage to photograph a section of the wall containing these other symbols, clearly much older. I believe that this older Stone Age code and the newer Atlantis script were the preserve of priests and shamans, rather than a widespread writing system. That these two scripts should exist side by side fits in with some extraordinary ideas we’ve been developing about the dawn of civilization. On the one hand, the Atlanteans would have retained something of the rituals and beliefs of their Ice Age ancestors, particularly shamanistic rituals involving animals and the hunt. That’s what we see in the Palaeolithic cave art, where the symbols first appear. On the other hand, early farmers were developing new belief systems. The old animal gods of the spirit world were being eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods, created when people were beginning to see that they could determine their own destiny. The new script, its sacred meaning, may have been tied up with that. The period when Atlantis was destroyed may have been a time of tension and even bloody conflict between the two belief systems, between shamans of the old ways and priests of the new. When we went back to Atlantis, I wanted to find out who those new gods were.’

Hiebermeyer pointed to the symbols in the floor. ‘And now the big mystery. How on earth did these Stone Age symbols get here?’

Jack paused. ‘I’ve just been thinking about that. The Palaeolithic cave art of France and the Pyrenees, at famous sites such as Lascaux, was known by the 1930s. Given the Ahnenerbe obsession with runes and symbols, it makes sense that they would have cast their net that wide. They would have known about the great antiquity of the caves, and might have associated the symbols with the fantasy of Aryan origins. It would have been fitting to reproduce those symbols in this secret place, this Nazi holy of holies, really a kind of sacred cave too.’

Heidi looked at him. ‘You’re right. I myself knew the scholar who had been to the Lascaux cave, a secretive Ahnenerbe expedition that took place after the occupation of France in 1940. He penetrated further into the caves than anyone has done since, and found many paintings with animal art and these symbols. Back at Wewelsburg, the SS ideologues assembled the symbols as evidence not just of Aryan ancestors, but of Atlantis. Their theory was that the survivors of Atlantis huddled in the caves, where they sought refuge after the flood. That day here with Ernst we attended an indoctrination lecture on Atlantis, given by an acquaintance of Ernst’s from university days who insisted that he come along. It was a clever lecture, not occult nonsense, and I remembered enough from my schooling in the classics to know that the lecturer was talking sensibly about Plato. But it was there that I first saw the symbols, the same ones I was to see that afternoon down here with Himmler. The lecturer showed us some slides taken by the primitive underwater cameras of the time revealing symbols incised on what seemed to be a cavern wall. He said it was the most astonishing discovery ever made by the Ahnenerbe, in conditions of great danger to the divers.’

‘Divers,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Where was it?’

‘The location was not revealed. He showed a picture of an underwater habitat that had been secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient, an early version of the ones Captain Cousteau and his divers used in the 1960s and 1970s. It was very rudimentary by comparison, like two bathyspheres joined together. He said the divers used it as a base for their explorations, but I doubted it. I thought the habitat was too small for that, and afterwards wondered if it had been some kind of storage facility. I remember seeing fish, tropical fish. I took up scuba-diving myself in the 1950s, and often went to the Caribbean and the Red Sea. It could have been one of those places, or somewhere else in the tropics. Remember, the Ahnenerbe got everywhere, especially in the late 1930s, leading up to the war.’

Jack squatted down, and peered at Heidi. ‘When you were down here with Himmler, did you actually see the palladion?’

‘Only briefly. He treated it like the Holy Grail. Another man came down to lift it from that hollow and show it to us, an unpleasant Nazi named Dr Unverzagt, who was its custodian. I saw it for long enough to notice that it had symbols around the edge. There was no doubt in my mind that they were genuine, as old as the time when the gold was melded to the meteorite and the metal was forged into the swastika shape, far back in prehistory. The symbols on the palladion were exactly the same as the symbols that Himmler had carved into the marble in front of you.’

‘Including that early Atlantis symbol?’ Hiebermeyer asked.

‘I remember it vividly on the edge of the palladion. There was no other symbol quite like it.’

Jack looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘We’ve got some brainstorming to do.’

‘You start.’

‘The palladion, the most sacred symbol of ancient Troy, was taken by Agamemnon to Mycenae, where it was buried in the Royal Grave Circle and then discovered by Heinrich Schliemann. He hid it away under his house in Athens, where it was discovered by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe men and brought here.’

‘Right,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘The palladion was meteoritic in origin, exactly in accordance with the ancient Trojan legend that it had been the gift of the sky god. Meteorites are most easily found on ice, suggesting that the original artefact was in the hands of the ancestors of the Trojans long before the time of the recorded citadel, perhaps as far back as the end of the Ice Age, when the glaciers were close to northern Greece and the Black Sea. Some time between then and Bronze Age Troy, the meteorite was fashioned into the swastika shape and melded with gold, when it had those symbols added.’

‘Symbols of the Ice Age.’

‘Symbols exactly identical to those found at Atlantis, the first great civilization after the Ice Age, whose inhabitants fled with their belongings after the glacial meltwaters finally flooded the Black Sea basin in the sixth millennium BC.’

‘And their first landfall to the west would have been the Dardanelles, and the site of Troy.’

Hiebermeyer slapped his thigh. ‘Troy was founded by the Atlanteans.’

‘The palladion came from Atlantis.’

‘Bingo,’ Hiebermeyer said triumphantly.

‘The only question is, how could Himmler’s people possibly have associated it with Atlantis?’ Jack murmured.

‘I think it goes back to what I was telling you before we met up with Heidi. The Ahnenerbe collected a lot of real-life artefacts, some of them extraordinary treasures like the palladion, but then assembled them into a story according to their own mythology. Yet by accident, or sometimes by design – because there were occasional genuine scholars involved – some of that held a shadow of the truth. Behind the Aryan obsession lay a reality that we ourselves are uncovering, the spread of early Neolithic culture in prehistory, the advance of agriculture and Indo-European language, something we now know goes back to the diaspora of Atlanteans from the Black Sea. And behind the Nazi idea of a worldwide precursor civilization lies the truth of a people we know did profoundly influence the rise of civilization elsewhere. I’m certain that Himmler could have had no evidence that the palladion came from Atlantis or the meaning of that pectiform symbol, but sealing this sacred artefact in a hole surrounded by the word Atlantis in fake Nazi runes is exactly what we should expect.’

‘And in their search for Atlantis, the Ahnenerbe chanced on a place where someone who could only have come from Atlantis inscribed those symbols into a cavern wall, underwater and somewhere in the tropics,’ Jack murmured. ‘With the symbols being identical to those inscribed on the palladion, it must have convinced them that the place those divers had found held huge significance. And they may have been right.’

He turned to Heidi. ‘Is there anything more you can tell us about the palladion? Anything you remember from when you saw it?’

She looked pensive, and then clasped her stick. ‘It had peculiar magnetic properties. The meteoritic iron was strangely affected by changes in the earth’s magnetic field, becoming dramatically heavier at certain places. For Himmler, this seemed to add to the mystique. The marble hollow in the floor has a magnet embedded in it, and when it was activated, only the palladion could unlock it. Himmler enjoyed the fact that the palladion was stuck there like Excalibur embedded in the rock, another Arthurian fantasy. It apparently had a unique magnetic signature.’

Jack stared at Hiebermeyer. He remembered the shape in the bunker door. The palladion was a key. He looked back at Heidi. ‘Anything else?’

She paused, and then looked Jack full in the face. Her eyes were moist again, and she suddenly seemed very old. ‘I need to get out of here now. I need to leave this grim place, and feel the sun on my face.’

‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, concern in his voice. ‘Let’s get you back to your wheelchair immediately, and we’ll go out into the courtyard.’

She rose unsteadily, then put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s, staying him. She looked at Jack again. ‘There is something else,’ she whispered. ‘Something I’ve never told anyone, not even my son. I know where you’ve seen the shape of that reverse swastika before.’

‘Tante Heidi?’ Hiebermeyer said.

‘You’ve seen it in the bunker in the forest.’

Jack stared at her. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘In the door of that horrible death chamber. I was there too, in the autumn of 1944. You know that I was a toxicologist. I was one of the scientists who worked there. That’s my terrible secret. When you called and told me about the discovery of a lost art cache in a bunker beneath the NATO base, Maurice, I knew what was also there and that you would find it. That’s really why I called you here now. I had to tell you what I knew, a truth I had hoped would remain buried in that bunker and die with me. I will tell you everything now. But first I need the sunlight.’