The Gods of Atlantis

2

Jack stared down into the narrowing void ahead of him, keeping part of his mind on the smudge of light he knew lay some thirty metres behind them at the entrance to the tunnel. It was like a flash imprinted on his retina, and he tried to hold it there as a reminder that they had an escape route. He looked over at Costas, remembering their shared experience in the mineshaft many years before. They had let all their training and experience kick in, working the rescue methodically from the moment he had jammed his tank valve on the timber and his air had cut off. The problem for Jack was the reflection, years later: what if Costas had not been face to face with him at that moment, when he had struck the timber and dropped their only torch, plunging them into darkness?

Jack had worked hard to turn the nagging uncertainty to his advantage, convinced that it made him a better diver, more alert to danger, but always for a few moments before a dive like this one he had to go through a ritual. He shut his eyes tight, thinking about nothing, deliberately slowing his breathing, remaining spread-eagled and neutrally buoyant. After a moment he took a deep breath, opened his eyes and looked at his wrist readout, checking the depth and temperature. He felt a nudge beside him, and heard Costas’ reassuring voice. ‘You done?’

‘All set. You lead, or me?’

‘It’ll have to be you, Jack. I don’t think I could get around you now, with Little Joey hitched to my front. I’ll be about five metres behind.’

‘Roger that. I’m about to begin my descent.’

‘Watch your external temperature gauge. Remember, it should read no more than a hundred and twenty degrees. We have about sixty metres more in the tunnel before we reach the area we passed through five years ago, on the way up to the inner sanctum.’

‘You mean the magma chamber, full of red-hot lava.’

‘At least we won’t have to use our torches.’

A few years before Jack had been in an IMU submersible off the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, watching lava pour over the seaward cliffs and roll down the underwater slopes in a glowing orange mass until it had congealed. He had found it a disconcerting experience, with all his instincts telling him that the water around the lava should have boiled and vaporized, and he had wanted to reverse the submersible to avoid falling into the vacuum he felt sure would appear above the flow. And now here he was, not in a submersible but in the water himself, about to swim into the same scenario. He flexed his fingers, looking at the bulbous white Kevlar that was the only barrier between himself and whatever fiery mass lay ahead. He glanced at the readout inside his helmet, seeing the green light showing that the small electric motor running the air-conditioner unit inside his suit was functioning. He pressed his intercom. ‘Cross-check internal temperature readings.’

‘Twenty-two degrees Celsius,’ Costas replied.

‘Seems a little hot. Mine’s twenty.’

‘You’re a Viking, remember? I’m Mediterranean. And I’m keeping myself in training for that tropical island you promised.’

Jack glanced down at the clear plastic tube inside his helmet beside his mouth, leading to a freshwater bag inside the rebreather console on his back. ‘Just make sure you keep hydrated,’ he replied. ‘Remember, the more you sweat, the more likely you are to get the bends when we go back up.’

‘My thermostat’s set at twenty-two max. And I have no intention of being a boil-in-the-bag meal for whatever fiery denizen of the deep lives down here.’

Jack glanced one last time at the stone pillar to his left with the golden Atlantis symbol embedded in it, then manually expelled air from his buoyancy compensator before angling down to follow the slope of the tunnel, kicking forcefully with his fins. He could hear the hiss of the automated buoyancy control bleeding air into his suit, maintaining his buoyancy at neutral. The lamps on either side of his helmet illuminated the tunnel ahead to a distance of at least fifteen metres, showing the ragged edges of the lava where the borer had dug through and a trail of debris on the bottom where the conveyor had taken the broken material up the tunnel and out on to the flank of the volcano. Back up the tunnel the lava had mostly been p hoehoe, billowy and ropy shapes where the molten rock had quickly cooled on contact with the water, whereas in the tunnel ahead it looked like Hawaiian ‘a‘ lava, stonier and more clinky, a result of slower cooling that had left it denser and less aerated. Where the borer had cut into the harder lava, Jack could see a spiralling pattern extending down the tunnel, making it seem like a vortex. As he swam on he began to see tiny bubbles rising from the depths ahead of them, swirling up like a twisting veil.

‘That’s boiling-hot carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide, the volcano off-gassing,’ Costas said from behind him. ‘That’s the stuff that makes it poisonous to be anywhere near an eruption like this topside without breathing gear.’

Costas had swum up close behind him, and Jack saw his form reflected in the edge of his helmet. The glass visor was a flat surface set on a slight curve where it closed against the helmet, using external water pressure to make the strongest possible seal; after almost a decade using the e-suit, Jack had got used to the centimetre or so of distorted vision it created around the periphery of the glass plate. But now, seeing the elongated form of Costas’ helmet, it seemed like an optical illusion, as if the distorted image around his visor rim had become part of the walls of the tunnel beside him. He began to see multiple images as if he were looking into numerous reflecting mirrors, shifting as Costas moved his headlamp and the reflection changed. He closed his eyes, then opened them again, trying to focus on the tunnel ahead. ‘Tell me I’m not hallucinating,’ he said. ‘For a moment I was seeing multiple images of you on the edge of my visor, as if they were spiralling around the tunnel.’

‘It’s called polyapsia,’ Costas replied. ‘Lanowski’s been telling me about it. It’s a common altered-consciousness vision.’

‘You mean a psychedelic trip. That’s the last thing I want down here.’

‘You were just seeing multiple reflections, set against the apparent swirl of the tunnel ahead of us. Your mind was playing tricks on you. Lanowski thinks that’s what prehistoric people were doing in places like this, in caves and tunnels: having altered-consciousness experiences. What you’ve just seen shows how easily they could have done it. And they wouldn’t have been able to rationalize it as we can.’

Jack blinked and stared ahead, seeing the cut marks made by the titanium bit of the boring machine, then shifted his head so the reflection of Costas was no longer visible. ‘It was disconcertingly easy to fall into it.’

‘Look at it this way. You wanted to return to Atlantis, to get inside the prehistoric mind, right? To see what these people were seeing. Well, you’re doing it now. This isn’t exactly a time machine, but it’s a way of getting into their perceptions. Imagine we’re going through a kind of rocky interface like those Stone Age caves, towards the spirit world ahead of us. Being in a tunnel’s a common hallucination during near-death experiences, too.’

‘I was wondering when you were going to say that. From now on, reality rules, okay?’

‘Roger that. Now let’s get on. We’re down to eighty-five metres absolute water depth, and we don’t want to linger at these depths any longer than we have to.’

Jack felt a surge of adrenalin, suddenly excited at what might lie ahead. He checked his computer readout. Sixty-seven degrees external temperature. The slew of bubbles increased to a fizzy mass, his headlamp beams reflecting off them in a confusing maelstrom of light and colour that refracted through the bubbles, creating images that folded and unfolded. There was more width to the tunnel now, and Costas edged up along his left side, just as the tunnel gave way to a wider natural opening. Costas put his hand out into the bubbles, moving it round. ‘They’re like swirling images of animals, like those prehistoric cave paintings,’ he said. ‘I wonder if Stone Age people saw something like this in pools of water above the magma chamber, bubbles that might have reflected light coming from lava.’

‘They might also have been poisoned by the gas,’ Jack said. ‘These would definitely have been malevolent spirits.’

‘Check this out.’ Costas paused beside the left-hand wall of the tunnel, and panned his light up and down a thick streak in the lava that shone a golden colour. ‘This might explain a thing or two. It’s copper sulphide. If this is common in the lava here, then we’ve just found the source of copper for the people of this place. Those brave enough to come close to the lava might even have seen it melting.’

‘Fantastic,’ Jack exclaimed, putting his hand on the copper seam. ‘That ties up another loose end. If the source of copper was within the volcano like this, then the elite could easily have controlled it. That first spearhead or sword made of copper would have been a huge milestone in prehistory. Priest-king becomes warrior-god.’

They pushed off and swam forward, Costas now in the lead. ‘We must be on the edge of the magma chamber,’ he said. ‘All I can see is reflection off the bubbles. If there’s any lava activity ahead, we should see it with our lights off.’

They switched off their headlamps in unison. For a moment, all Jack saw was blackness, and then he became aware of little flashes in front of him, the bubbles now appearing like tiny polychrome drops of oil lit through by some distant source of light. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a hazy presence somewhere beyond, a wavering red glow that suffused the background ahead of them.

‘Holy shit,’ Costas said quietly.

‘That’s lava, isn’t it?’

‘A whole lake of it,’ Costas exclaimed, swimming forward to the lip of the tunnel. Jack followed behind and stared out at one of the most extraordinary and terrifying vistas he had ever seen. It was a vast underwater cavern, at least forty metres across. In the dark recesses above them he could see the roof of the chamber, an ugly mass of solidified lava that looked as if it had been blown upwards to harden over an empty space, leaving appendages that dripped down like malformed stalactites. But it was the scene below that was so mesmerizing. The bottom of the chamber was a seething cauldron of lava, oozing up to the surface and then solidifying quickly on contact with the water, leaving pillow-shaped undulations with lobes and toes that disgorged from the cooling crust. Jack peered directly down, through a yellow-brown haze that lay in the water like a miasma above the crust. He watched a crack open and molten lava ooze into solidifying folds resembling arms and legs, like some protean being, half human, before another surge of lava swallowed it back into the cauldron. It was as if he was looking at the birthplace of the gods, at the very fount of creation itself.

Costas pressed the control panel on his wrist to activate the video camera in front of his helmet, and moved his head slowly around to take in the scene. ‘The yellow-brown stuff is suspended glass fragments from the lava. That’s the other thing that makes it lethal to be near an eruption. You don’t want to breathe any of that in or get it sucked into your equipment. Thank God for the closed-circuit rebreathers. I make it seventy-nine degrees Celsius where we are now. We’re probably looking at over a hundred degrees down there, with the gas plumes at a hundred and fifty degrees when they hit the water.’

‘At least hot water rises, so we’re not going to fall into it.’

‘It’s those gas plumes I’m worried about, the carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. Look, there’s one over there.’ Jack watched as a spectacular white mass erupted like a geyser on the far side of the chamber, followed by a glowing lava fountain that cascaded sideways and seemed to melt part of the wall of rock on the side of the chamber. ‘That’s a solid mass of bubbles, more gas than water,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve seen plumes like that over sub-sea vents in the mid-Atlantic. Some Bermuda Triangle fanatics think that’s what causes ships to disappear. If you swam over one of those plumes, you’d drop like a stone into the lava. And did you see the wall? We’re inside the caldera of a live volcano, Jack, and it’s collapsing in on itself. It’s like those holes you dig in sand by the seashore, where the water undermines the sides. That’s what the lava’s doing underneath us now, rising even in the time we’ve been watching it.’

‘How long do you think we have?’

‘I don’t even want to think. I feel like one of those mythical heroes, finally having reached the edge of the underworld and wondering whether going on from here means no turning back.’

‘We’ve got to make a decision fast.’

‘Let’s do the geology first. It’s mainly basaltic, but I can see streaks of rhyolitic lava, viscous, silica-rich stuff that’s come from deep within the magma. That’s a major warning sign, something the vulcanologists couldn’t have known without us being here. And whatever the geologists thought about the seismic activity falling off, it looks like a lull before the storm. There’s clearly a major event brewing under the North Anatolian Fault, something that could easily extend as far west as the Bosporus and Istanbul. What we’re looking at here is enough to put the whole of northern Turkey under evacuation orders.’

‘Good enough,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He fixed his mind’s eye again on the smudge of light at the entrance to the tunnel far behind them, and turned away from the hellish scene in the cauldron. But then he caught sight of something below. A plume of bubbles had risen along the wall to their left, clearing away the brown silicate material that had obscured the rock face. Suddenly he saw a rock-cut stairway leading from below the lava up the side of the chamber. He followed it with his eyes, his heart pounding, and then saw another entrance in the wall ahead of them, twenty, maybe twenty-five metres away. He grasped Costas by the arm and pointed, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘We’ve been here before, five years ago. That’s the original rock wall from the time of Atlantis, and that’s the entranceway I remember passing. It was surmounted by the Atlantis symbol. That’s what I came here to look for, Costas, to see what’s inside. ’

Costas followed his gaze, and then turned to look at him. ‘This is the only chance you’ll have to see what’s there. We can’t go away and wait for things to cool down. That lava’s going to destroy everything here, all of the archaeology. Whatever’s inside that entranceway will be lost forever.’

‘What are the odds for a look?’

‘What’s your predicted gas supply?’

Jack glanced at his computer readout. ‘At current consumption and depth, about thirty-five minutes.’

‘Mine’s thirty. That gives us half an hour to get over there, take a look, and then return here and get back to the submersible. There’s no radio link with Seaquest II until we’re out of the tunnel. If we go out now to give them the geological rundown, we’d never get back in. Look at the rate of rise of the lava. That entrance probably won’t be there in half an hour.’

‘Will an extra half an hour make any difference to the speed of the earthquake-response team?’

Costas paused. ‘The Turkish authorities are already on Category A alert, with evacuation plans on full standby. What we’ve got to say will push them to activate, but there’ll have to be top-level government meetings in Ankara. It’s a huge decision to make. Millions of people will be disrupted.’

‘The odds for us?’

Costas swam forward and peered over the edge. ‘There’s a lot of plume activity just where we want to go. And the lava’s rising. But when have the odds ever been in our favour?’

‘What’s your call?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to test Little Joey yet. I couldn’t face Jeremy and say I hadn’t tried.’

Jack stared at the ancient entranceway, the stairs in front of it now lit up in the orange glow of the lava that was lapping the base of the rock. It was now or never. He thought about what Costas had said. Half an hour might make no difference. But that calculation depended on them escaping alive. If they never made it out and nobody knew what they had seen, that activation might never be ordered. Millions of people on standby might become millions of dead and injured and homeless. He might be about to make the most momentous decision of his career. Of his life. He stared at the ancient rock-cut entrance, his vision narrowing to a tunnel again, one that seemed to draw him forward over the burning pit in front of them.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it, and then let’s get the hell out of here.’