The Gods of Atlantis

5

South-eastern Black Sea, off Turkey

‘S o what went wrong?’

Scott Macalister strode into the operations room on Seaquest II and shut the door behind him. Jack swivelled his chair from the computer monitor on the central table to face him, and Costas looked up from his tablet computer beside Jack. Macalister was immaculately turned out in his reserve naval officer’s uniform, the four gold bands of a captain on his sleeves and a row of ribbons on his jacket from his years of service in the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard before joining IMU. He stood square in the centre of the room, his white officer’s cap tucked under one arm and the other arm behind his back.

‘What went right,’ Costas replied, ‘is that we collected more data on the volcano than we could ever have got using remote sensing. You’ve seen some of the images already, and the lab guys are processing the rest now. My immediate assessment of the danger level went straight to Lanowski to put in his report for the Turkish authorities as soon as I’d finished it in the recompression chamber about an hour ago.’

Jack leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked up at Macalister pensively. ‘What went wrong was that we took a big gamble, and escaped by the skin of our teeth. If it hadn’t been for the crack in the rock that allowed us to escape, we’d still be down there now. You’d be having to explain our disappearance and what I was doing here. My presence would be seen by our colleagues on the international monitoring committee as a direct contravention of the agreement not to dive on the site for archaeological purposes. I know you’ve done everything you can to be shipshape for the monitoring team and they’re due here any time. I’m sorry to have put you through this.’

Macalister stood still for a moment, then relaxed his arms and tugged his beard. ‘The important thing is that Costas is right. The data on the lava flow are exceptional. The Turkish geologists already know we’ve bored a tunnel and sent down a submersible with sensing equipment. I can tell them we tried to use an ROV, and that would explain Costas’ presence. Everyone knows that IMU does not send a state-of-the-art ROV anywhere in the world without Costas Kazantzakis attached to it by an umbilical cord. That’ll also explain the departure of the Lynx this evening, carrying Costas back to the underwater excavation at Troy where Jack Howard urgently needs his help to raise the Shield of Agamemnon.’ He turned to Costas. ‘I take it the ROV is still down there in the volcano?’

Costas looked crestfallen. ‘Afraid so.’

‘As for Dr Howard, who officially isn’t here, he needs to be spirited away on the helicopter before then. We need the helipad to be clear by mid-afternoon for the arrival of the inspection team, and we need all available space to accommodate them.’ He eyed Jack sternly. ‘You okay with Mustafa Alkozen taking your cabin?’

Jack nodded. ‘We’ve done it before. He and I rotated bunk space for a month in a submarine during a joint exercise in the Mediterranean, when he was the boat’s weapons officer and I was a seconded diver from the Royal Navy. And he is IMU’s Turkish representative, so he should have the best bunk.’

‘Okay.’ Macalister pulled on his cap, turned to go and then tapped his watch. ‘Fifteen hundred hours on the helipad, right?’

Jack nodded. ‘Roger that.’

Macalister stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and gave a wry smile. ‘A wing and a prayer, Jack.’

Jack took a deep breath, then exhaled forcefully. ‘A wing and a prayer.’

‘I saw some of the images. Those rock carvings. Pretty fantastic stuff. You can show me the rest when this is over.’ Macalister walked through the doorway and was gone, leaving them listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the whir of the computer fans.

‘Phew,’ Costas said.

Jack swivelled his chair back to the monitor. ‘That reminded me of my first term in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, after Cambridge,’ he said. ‘I was always getting into trouble for stepping out of line. For taking too much initiative, I told them. My Howard seafaring ancestors were always mavericks. We’re not really designed to take orders.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ Costas said.

‘It was lucky the special forces guy at the college spotted me, otherwise I’d have been politely told to pack my bags.’

‘Macalister has got a point,’ Costas said.

Jack took another deep breath, and nodded. ‘Of course he has a point. And he’s the best damn captain we’ve ever had. I intend never to put him in that position again.’

‘You know what they say, Jack. Once you’ve taken that extra step beyond the boundary, you’ll only want to do it again.’

‘Then it’d be time for me to stand down. I can’t let my personal ambitions impede IMU’s other projects, not least ones with a major scientific and humanitarian outcome like this one. If Macalister hadn’t told us just now that our data on the volcano had made it worthwhile, I’d seriously be considering vacating my cabin for good.’

‘Don’t tell Rebecca that.’ Costas grinned. ‘She’s waiting on the sidelines ready to jump in.’

‘That’s the other factor. Every time I have a near-death experience underwater, I think of Rebecca. She’s already lost her mother.’

‘But you wouldn’t be the same person for her if you didn’t take the risks. It’s all part of the tapestry you’ve woven for yourself, Jack. What was it Othello said? “There’s magic in the web of it.”’

Jack gave a wry smile. ‘Well then I just need to keep that web from unravelling. We need to stay on the edge, not stray over it. Copy that?’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘My buddy.’ He slapped Costas on the shoulder. ‘And by the way, thanks for saving my life.’

Costas waved his hand. ‘I thought it was the other way round.’

‘Let’s get back to our images from this morning. I want as much of this wrapped up as possible before I have to leave.’ Jack turned to the computer screen, arched his back and stretched his arms. He seemed to feel every sinew and muscle in his body, and stretching released a sensation that coursed through him like a drug. He and Costas had just emerged from four hours in the recompression chamber breathing pure oxygen, but even so his system was still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from their dive. His body was willing him to go up to his cabin and lie down, but he knew that the adrenalin that was still coursing through him would keep him alert. And he knew that if he did try to rest, his mind would only return to that moment when he and Costas could have safely returned after having discovered the pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. What was it that had driven him on, driven him to risk everything? He put the thought from his mind, and refocused on the screen. The important thing was that they had less than two hours now to process the imagery from their dive, and if they let that opportunity slip, it might be weeks before they were together again on Seaquest II or at the IMU campus in England. Jack had seen astonishing things today, as astonishing as anything he had seen in his archaeological career, and he wanted those images to be in the forefront of his mind as the excavation at Troy wound down. He had gone back to Atlantis with questions, and they were still burning. Who were these people? Where had they gone? Who were their gods?

‘Jack, this is incredible. Lanowski’s just finishing his 3-D CGI map of the site. The final version should be streaming online in a few minutes.’

Costas turned back to his screen, and Jack continued staring at the image he had called up on his monitor before Macalister had come in. It was a still from the video he had taken with his helmet camera inside the volcano that morning; below it he had arranged a line of thumbnails of other Neolithic sites in the Near East that he had pulled up for comparison. The image from the morning was raw, unrefined, the foreground still specked with white where the light from his headlamp had reflected off particles in the water. But seeing it like that made it more vivid, as if he were still caught in the amazement of that moment when he had first entered the chamber. It showed the pillars standing like sentinels, three-metre-tall monoliths carved out of volcanic tufa, each one rising to a T-shape a metre or more wide. He could see animals carved in shallow relief on the pillars – lions, wild boar, scorpions and spiders, leopards and bulls. On the back wall of the cave he spotted something he had not seen on the dive: a bull’s skull fixed into a hole in the rock, half in and half out, the bone plastered over and the horns painted red. Above it was a painting of vultures swooping down on a headless human body, shaped crudely in outline; beside that were the spectral remains of painted animals, visible where they had not been hacked away and smoothed out. Not only the pillars but also the carvings on them seemed to have been freshly chiselled, sharply delineated. Out with the old, in with the new. Archaeologists had begun to talk about the Neolithic as a time of religious transition, a time when humans first conceived of gods with human characteristics, gods who were to play out all the human capacity for cruelty and greed in the mythologies of Mesopotamia and the Near East. Jack stared at the pillars. Was this where it had all begun? Was Atlantis the birthplace of the gods?

He held the mouse and dragged the image up to see the floor of the chamber. The lab analysis of the sample he had taken had just come through, showing that the stone floor had been covered in layers of terrazzo, burnt lime. Embedded within the lime was the most extraordinary sight of all: the plastered human skulls that seemed to be emerging from the ground in the same way that the bull’s skull was emerging from the rock wall. He scrolled over the other skulls, the ones without plaster, some of them fallen alongside the three stone basins he could now see, each about half a metre high and carved out of the living rock. The scattered skulls and the basins were partly covered with the calcite accretion that had settled over the floor since the inundation. It was a haunting, ghostly scene, with the pillars like rough-formed bodies standing in the background, towering over the toppled skulls. Jack tried to retain a professional detachment, but it made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. What had been going on here?

Costas slid his chair alongside, minimized the image and tapped a key. A three-dimensional lattice appeared on the screen, angled as if they were viewing it from the upper right-hand corner. The terrain mapper had been designed to project a holographic image on to the miniature screens inside their e-suit helmets, to help them navigate over seabed features in poor light conditions, using GPS, sonar, photogrammetric and other data previously fed into the computer, but here it was being used to build up a flat-screen isometric image of the site. As they watched, the grid lattice disappeared below a contoured image of the Black Sea bathymetry, zooming down to the abyssal plain in the centre of the sea and then rising up the slope towards the Turkish shore and their present position some fifteen nautical miles off the border with the Republic of Georgia. Jack saw the twin peaks of the volcano just below the surface of the sea, and then the slope where the flow of lava and other volcanic fallout had buried the ruins of the ancient city five years ago, in a terrifying eruption that had nearly cost them their lives.

‘I’ll pause it here,’ Costas said, tapping a key. ‘You remember when we left this place five years ago we thought the eruption would have destroyed pretty well everything of the lower town?’

Jack nodded. ‘You said you’d need a sub-bottom profiler that could see through lava to find out what was left. A powerful low-frequency echo sounder. The stuff you’ve been tinkering with in the engineering workshop at IMU for the last five years.’

‘Not tinkering, Jack. Perfecting.’

‘Okay. Perfecting.’

The image sharpened, showing details of rock outcrops and fissures on the slopes. It was like looking at an aerial view of Mount St Helens in Washington State after the 1980 eruption, a scene of utter devastation. Along the seaward slope, where Jack remembered five years before seeing dense pueblo-style buildings, all he saw now was a great slick like a frozen mudslide, completely burying the original rocky substrate and all of the ancient structures. His heart sank as he saw the scale of the destruction. ‘It’s much worse than I feared. Those were mud-brick buildings. The lava must have destroyed everything.’

‘Well, prepare to be amazed.’

Costas tapped a key and the image transformed. The wide beds of lava constricted to narrow flows down the side of the volcano, like frozen rivers. In between Jack saw ghostly rectilinear outlines covering the slope. Costas pointed at the upper part of the screen. ‘You’re right, the lava would have destroyed all the mud-brick structures in their path. Where we dived this morning was through one of the solidified flows from five years ago, and the only structure that survived was that stone pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. But the lava flows are much narrower than we thought. When we were boring the tunnel yesterday, I used the submersible to take some core samples further down the slope, and I’ve just had a look at the results. Most of it is not lava but pyroclastic flow, solidified mud and ash. It looks as if the volcanic ash hardened with lime into a kind of hydraulic concrete, like the stuff we know the people of Atlantis used to make waterproof walls. Where the flow was pyroclastic, it didn’t destroy Atlantis. It actually preserved it.’

He tapped again, and the image sharpened further. Jack let out a low whistle. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. It was as if the flow had been peeled away to reveal intact structures beneath, a vast complex of flat-roofed buildings that seemed to have been built organically, reaching three or four storeys high and spreading up the slope of the volcano. Jack stared, shaking his head. ‘It’s fantastic. It’s like jumping back five years to when we first saw Atlantis from our Aquapods. I never thought I’d see that again.’

‘Well, we won’t be excavating it in a hurry. Even if the volcano goes quiet and we can get down there again, it’d be like mining on the moon. Roman Herculaneum was covered by pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, and they’ve only excavated one fifth of the site in two hundred and fifty years. And Herculaneum’s not under a hundred metres of water poisoned by sulphur dioxide.’

Jack was still stunned by the image. ‘More so than anything we saw five years ago, this view is incredibly similar to Neolithic houses found elsewhere.’

‘That place on the Konya plain? Catalhoyuk?’

Jack nodded. ‘About three hundred kilometres south-east of here.’ He reached over and tapped one of the thumbnails, revealing an artist’s impression of a town rising out of a plain, the structures built together like an Indian pueblo in the southern United States. ‘Do you remember I took a few days off from the excavation at Troy last month to go there? A friend of mine is leading an expedition into the Taurus mountains to the south, looking for caves that might contain paintings and other clues to their Stone Age ancestors. The excavations at Catalhoyuk in the 1960s gave the world an image of what the first Neolithic towns looked like.’

‘It dates to the same time period as Atlantis?’

Jack nodded. ‘Early Neolithic, the first period of settled farming after the end of the Ice Age, beginning about eleven thousand years ago. Atlantis was inundated by the Black Sea in the late sixth millennium BC, but the radiocarbon dates we took from timbers in the buildings five years ago show that some of these structures date at least two millennia before that. Catalhoyuk flourished in the eighth millennium BC. But there were even earlier Neolithic sites.’ He touched another thumbnail and the scene transformed to an image of a Near Eastern tell, an ancient city mound cut through by old excavation trenches with ruined walls protruding from the sections. ‘That’s Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, just north of the Dead Sea,’ he said. ‘You know the Old Testament story of Joshua leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, and coming to Jericho?’

Costas screwed up his eyes for a moment, then recited: ‘ So the people shouted when the priests blew with their trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat.’ He turned to Jack ruefully. ‘The benefits of a Greek Orthodox background, and then a boarding school in New York where we had to memorize passages from the Bible.’

Jack grinned at him. ‘You never cease to amaze me. Is that how you got your interest in poetry?’

‘Nope. That was the Dead Poets Society, after school. We had to join something, and I hated sports. It meant I could hide in the back row and doodle submarine engine-room layouts.’

‘Some of the poetry must have washed off on you.’

‘That’s what Jeremy says. You know, he can declaim whole passages of Shakespeare. We do it when we’re alone in the engineering lab. That’s how I got that Othello quote.’

Jack shook his head. ‘Well, I just hope some of the poetry goes into the submersibles.’

‘Exactly what Jeremy said when we finished Little Joey.’ Costas sighed. ‘Little Joey, who has made the ultimate sacrifice.’

Jack put a hand on Costas’ shoulder. ‘I really am sorry.’ He turned back to the image on the screen. ‘The excavations at Jericho during the 1950s revealed a perimeter wall around the city almost four metres high, as well as an eight-metre-high stone tower. The conventional Biblical chronology puts Joshua about the middle of the second millennium BC. But the walls of Jericho didn’t date anywhere near that time. They dated a staggering six millennia earlier, to the eighth or even the ninth millennium BC. So the archaeology tells a far more fantastic story than the Bible. The excavations at Jericho were the first to put the early Neolithic on the map, and showed that collective endeavour to make large monuments like walls and towers was possible right at the dawn of civilization, at a time when most humans still lived as hunter-gatherers.’

Costas whistled. ‘And wasn’t Jericho the site where the first of those plastered skulls was found?’

Jack nodded. ‘Just like the ones in the inner sanctum we saw today. There was a connection between these early communities across this region, a connection in their religion, their belief system. But Jericho’s at the periphery of that early Neolithic world, at the south-west tip of the so-called fertile crescent that extended up to Anatolia and down through Mesopotamia. I believe that the true heartland lay here, along the Black Sea coast before it flooded, and down into Anatolia further south. And I’m not just talking about Catalhoyuk. Two other sites have revolutionized our picture of early-Neolithic religion.’

He touched another thumbnail, and Costas’ jaw dropped. ‘Holy cow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Those pillars. They’re almost identical.’ It was as if the underwater sanctum from Atlantis had been lifted out of the cave and on to dry land, and sunk in a depression in the ground to make it semi-subterranean, like a crypt. The photograph showed a partially excavated oval structure about ten metres across, with T-shaped pillars placed at intervals around a coarsely built wall. On the nearest pillars they could just make out low-relief carvings of animals and vultures, and what appeared to be a human arm.

‘That’s at Gobekli Tepe, about two hundred kilometres south of here on the Anatolian plateau,’ Jack said. He touched another thumbnail, and a similar image appeared showing a group of pillars arranged in rows within a chamber, sunk into the ground but rectilinear in shape. ‘And here’s Nevali Cori, the second site. There’s also another pillar with an arm, and a sculpture in the round showing a human head with a vulture on it.’

‘So this is why you were so excited when you saw that chamber today.’

‘It fits into a pattern. These are among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries ever made.’

‘What’s the date?’ Costas asked.

‘That’s what makes these discoveries so earth-shattering. The Gobekli Tepe complex dates to at least 9000 BC. That’s eleven thousand years old. Before the first evidence for agriculture, before the first settled towns. Even before Jericho. This place was built by hunter-gatherers. They’re even calling this the world’s first temple, the Garden of Eden. But there’s something not right about that. Temples imply worship, and that’s a modern concept. Look at the vultures, the skulls. I don’t think anything was worshipped here. I think this was a place for ceremony, for ritual, but more like an access point to the spirit world.’

‘Like the idea of an axis mundi, a portal between hell and heaven.’

‘Except that our idea of the underworld, of hell, may be an invention of the developing religions after this period, something to frighten people into compliance. It’s from then on that priest-kings began to shape religion to their own purposes, invoking human-like gods that melded in the eyes of the people with the priest-kings themselves and were worshipped as one.’

Costas gestured at the pillars. ‘How long did this place last?’

‘That’s what’s so fascinating. Gobekli Tepe wasn’t transformed into a later religious complex. Some time around 8000 BC, it was deliberately buried. Thousands of years later, the same thing happens to henges and burial mounds in prehistoric Europe. In some places it may have to do with ancestor worship, with the idea that ancestors who were first venerated in these places had become too old and distant and needed to be parcelled away, to be buried to make way for the new. But I don’t think that provides the full explanation. I think we’re looking at the eclipsing of a whole belief system, one that was somehow still threatening enough for the new priests to order the destruction of the ancient ritual places, for those sites never to be used again. I believe the turning point came with the development of the first towns and cities, with the rise of priest-kings. They came at a time of new gods, gods that were beginning to emerge in the final period at sites like Gobekli Tepe when those pillars with the arms like humans were erected.’

‘And at Atlantis maybe the same thing was happening,’ Costas suggested, tapping a thumbnail to recall the underwater image from that morning. ‘This sanctum was once open-air, on the flank of the volcano. It was once a cave with paintings, but it looks as if all that old stuff was being upgraded, with those pillars and new carvings. At the end, there was only a small entranceway through a masonry wall, and then that was blocked off. Someone was trying to obliterate it.’

‘Exactly,’ Jack enthused. ‘And all of this involves planning and manpower, whether you’re creating the site or destroying it. It doesn’t take a race of supermen to build a complex like this one, but it does take plenty of toil and organization. If this was the Garden of Eden, it wasn’t a place to lie around in and eat apples. There was a lot of quarrying involved to make those pillars, using primitive stone and antler tools. They were free-standing monoliths: they’d been quarried and dragged into position. The biggest of them is thought to weigh at least twenty tons. Twenty tons. That was my point about the walls of Jericho. Hundreds of people were brought together to work on these monuments, persuaded by some authority to carry out back-breaking and dangerous labour.’

‘So how does the date fit with Atlantis?’

‘I think what we found today is really early, older than anything else. The cave paintings in that Atlantis sanctum are Palaeolithic, at least twelve thousand years old. And five years ago we found the other cave deep in the mountainside, the one we dubbed the Hall of the Ancestors, with organic paint pigments we radiocarbon-dated back at least thirty-five thousand years, as old as the earliest cave paintings anywhere in the world. This volcano was a site of religious significance way back into the Ice Age. Shamans must have come here from miles around to go deep inside the mountain and try to access the spirit world.’

Costas nodded again at the image. ‘So at the beginning of the Neolithic, say eleven thousand years ago, you’ve got a new group arriving?’

‘I’d suggest new ideas from within, even from the shamans themselves, a new generation perhaps who could see how the world around them was changing and wanted to maintain control over it. They were people with a new religious power they could impose on the local population. People with the drive and vision of the original settlers at the site, who could translate that energy in a different way. A group whose influence soon spread far and wide over Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent, to places like Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk and Jericho.’

‘You said they had power over the local population, Jack. Is that how they built this place? Did they enslave the population?’

Jack pursed his lips. ‘It’s possible. Remember, the original people here were hunter-gatherers, the ones who found these caves and made the paintings. It’s even possible that organized agriculture was forced on them by the new priests as a way of having settled labour available to build religious monuments. That’s the kind of radical idea archaeologists started to play with when the temple at Gobekli Tepe was found, a temple older than the settlement around it, older even than the first evidence for agriculture. If we can pin that idea down, corroborate it, then Atlantis is an even bigger revelation than I could have imagined.’

‘So what’s going on at the time of the Black Sea flood?’

Jack paused. ‘When I was researching our discovery of Atlantis, I looked at all the original flood myths: the Greek myth of Deucalion, the Old Testament account of Noah, the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. There was no doubt in my mind that they all originated from the same natural catastrophe, the sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age, and more specifically the flooding of the Black Sea over the Bosporus in the sixth millennium BC. A date in the Neolithic is even hinted at in the stories. The account of Noah taking breeding pairs of animals matches what we know happened when early farmers spread from Anatolia to the islands of the Mediterranean such as Cyprus, where the excavations of Neolithic sites produce bones of animals that were not indigenous to the islands.’

‘You’re talking about domestic animals?’

Jack nodded. ‘Goats, sheep, cattle, tied down in longboats and rowed across from the mainland.’ He stared at the image of the carvings on the pillars, showing leopards and bulls. ‘But for this very early period, when animals were just beginning to be domesticated, we have to keep an open mind about that. Our focus is too often on finding an economic rationale: you take domestic animals with you because they provide food and clothing. But look at these carvings. You see bulls, yes, but are they bulls for food or bulls for ceremonies, to help shamans enter a spirit world? Were wild bulls first corralled and herded for that purpose? Did animal husbandry for food only arise later, after people had settled around these sacred sites and the corralling and breeding of animals acquired a new purpose?’

Costas leaned back, thinking. ‘I remember that the palaeoecological study done by IMU five years ago showed an abundance of wild animals in this area, plenty for hunter-gatherer groups just after the Ice Age. If you’ve got enough meat that way, why try to domesticate animals?’

‘That’s the point,’ Jack said. ‘And when there’s no economic rationale, you look to other explanations. That’s where religion comes in.’

‘So what about these pillars?’ Costas asked.

Jack paused. ‘The most intriguing group of texts I studied were the early Babylonian flood and creation myths, first written down on clay tablets in the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia. They name gods, like Enlil the all-powerful and Ishtar, goddess of love, and it’s just possible that those names originate in this period of the Neolithic. The flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh seems to derive from an earlier story, called the Atrahasis, meaning “When the gods were men”. The Atrahasis and the other early creation myths contain a group of gods called the Annunu, and sometimes another group, the Iggigi. Later they take on more character and become an established part of the Mesopotamian pantheon, but to begin with they’re nameless, faceless, like inchoate beings. They’re like these pillars, which seem to have a human form within them, half in and half out of the spirit world.’

Costas leaned forward, staring at the image. ‘The famous cave paintings at Lascaux and the other Palaeolithic sites sometimes show human hands, created in outline by the artist pressing his hand on the wall and flicking paint around it. Look at the hands on those pillars. It’s as if the sculptors had rarely represented humans before, and these are like blanks for statues, roughly shaped, with just the hands appearing, the only part of the human form they were used to representing.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t that they’d never represented humans before,’ Jack said quietly. ‘Maybe they’d never represented gods before.’

‘But you talked of the bulls as sacred. Weren’t they gods?’

‘Not worshipped, but used as a conduit by the shaman to travel to the spirit world, real flesh-and-blood animals that could become spirit animals.’

Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘So you’re suggesting that the concept of god was a Neolithic invention?’

‘It’s been nagging at me for five years. I knew the story here was more than just a fabulous archaeological discovery, a dazzling view of the foundation of civilization. There’s something here that should make us question ourselves, question the very basis of the belief systems that have kept people going for the last ten thousand years.’

Costas let out a low whistle. ‘And this all begins here.’

‘The earliest Babylonian creation myths tell how agriculture and animal husbandry were brought from a sacred mountain, a place called Du-Re, the home of the Annunu.’

‘The sacred mountain of Du-Re,’ Costas repeated slowly. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Atlantis?’

Jack took a deep breath. ‘The Babylonian creation myths always seem to look north beyond the mountains towards the uplands of Anatolia, to the places where we know cereals were first cultivated and wild animals first tamed. It was in Mesopotamia that agriculture first took off in a big way, along the arid riverbanks of the desert where irrigation and cultivation really were an economic rationale, crucial to the expansion of population where there were few wild resources. But I don’t believe those ideas just trickled down from the nearest early farming communities in Anatolia like Catalhoyuk. Big ideas don’t trickle, they move quickly. And I believe those ideas could have come with a wave of refugees from the flood on the Black Sea, with a priesthood who were on the verge of obliterating their Stone Age past, who brought with them their new gods and their new ability to control people. As for the Annunu of Babylonian myth, I think we may just be looking at them right now.’ He pointed to the pillars on the screen, then tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘I want to find out where else they went. I want to find a place where we don’t have to look back at these people through their ancestors, through all the accreted layers of later civilization, in Anatolia, the Aegean, Egypt, Mesopotamia. I want to find a place away from the cradle of civilization where some of the old priesthood may have gone, the shamans, where they may have tried to found a new Atlantis.’

Costas pressed one of the thumbnails showing a map, and stabbed a finger at the eastern part of the Black Sea, at the site of Atlantis. ‘What about this for an idea? Before the flood seven-and-a-half thousand years ago, Atlantis was the most prominent volcano in the region, a classic symmetrical cone with the distinctive twin peak where the caldera had collapsed in some ancient eruption. The level area between was built up as a ceremonial platform in the early Neolithic, leading to the entrance to the cave complex that became the inner sanctum you saw this morning.’ He moved his finger down towards the southern border of Turkey. ‘Now to Catalhoyuk. I remember reading the geological report, which showed that obsidian knives and blades found there came from the nearby extinct volcanoes of Gollu and Nenezi Dag. The obsidian had some kind of ritual significance, right?’ He reached over and picked up the large hardback volume that had been lying beside the computer, Jack’s report on the discovery of Atlantis five years before. He pointed at the image on the cover, a Neolithic wall painting that seemed to show a complex of structures below a mountain. ‘And from Catalhoyuk we have this, a painting that may show Atlantis, with the twin peak of the volcano behind the town. All of this suggests the significance of volcanoes, and especially the one here.’

Jack nodded. ‘By choosing that cover, I wanted to show that Atlantis was not unique, but was part of a pattern, though one we didn’t fully understand five years ago. And it was an image of Atlantis as the people themselves saw it, the people whose minds I want to get into now.’

‘Okay. Then we move to that Babylonian story of the mountain of Du-Re, the home of the gods,’ Costas continued. ‘The most prominent mountains in the region to the north of Babylonia are all volcanoes.’ He shifted his finger to the Aegean Sea to the left, between Turkey and Greece. ‘And here’s the island of Thera, the volcano that blew its top in the second millennium BC and destroyed Bronze Age civilization on Crete. Five years ago we thought that some of the priests of Atlantis could have escaped to Thera millennia before, where they may have established another sanctuary on the upper slopes of the volcano, trying to emulate what they had been forced to leave at Atlantis. You get my drift?’

‘We should be looking for more volcanoes.’

‘Not just natural volcanoes. Man-made ones.’ Costas reached for his tablet computer, ran his finger over the screen and handed it to Jack. ‘I was doing this as Macalister came in. Running a few alignments. It was just a hunch, but the similarities are striking.’ Jack glanced down at the screen. On the left was a classic volcano cross-section, showing a magma chamber coming up from the earth’s mantle with an eruption above it. On the right was a cross-section through a triangular structure, showing a horizontal passageway leading into a central chamber and above it a narrow vertical chute to a structure on the top. ‘Not just volcanoes, Jack. Pyramids.’

Jack stared at the image. ‘The Mayan pyramid of Palenque, in the Yucatan?’

‘It’s the best representation of what I mean.’ The ship’s phone beside the door rang. Costas walked over to it, spoke for a minute and then returned to Jack, sitting down and peering at him. ‘What’s eating you? I know that look.’

Jack stared at the screen a moment longer, his brow furrowed in thought. ‘There’s something momentous here, something that upsets our whole picture of the rise of civilization. It’s tied in with the origins of human conflict. Wild man versus civilized man. And I think it could have been all due to religion. At the dawn of the Neolithic, men began to turn against their ancestral ways. Until the gods won out, there must have been conflict. I’ve been thinking about the Garden of Eden again, Costas, and I’ve been seeing terrible bloodshed. To the first priest-kings, the old religion may have been a far greater threat to their power base than rival states. Religious war may be as old as civilization. And the cause was the newly created gods.’

‘What do you think happened here?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We have to try to understand Neolithic religion. What it was that frightened the new priests about the old.’

‘Well, this should help. Jeremy’s just arrived in the Lynx from Troy. Officially he’s come to do some radiocarbon dates in the lab on the ship. He thinks they’ve found a really old layer at the site, possibly Neolithic. But he’s actually here to see us. At the moment, IMU’s best imaging facility is in the excavation house at Troy, so I sent him some of our raw video data from this morning to process. He’s hopping with excitement. Says you’ve got to see it.’

Jack glanced at his watch. ‘Okay. We’ve got just under an hour until Macalister boots me out. Just under an hour to solve the mystery of this place. Maybe to rewrite the origins of civilization.’

‘I’m just a simple submersibles expert, Jack. All I want is to build another ROV.’

Jack shot him a penetrating look. ‘This may be bigger than any treasure we’ve ever hunted, Costas. We’re talking about the origin of the gods.’

‘So what do I say to Jeremy?’

‘Call him in.’

Costas got up to go back to the phone, then turned. ‘Oh. I forgot to say. Lanowski’s coming too. He’s going to try something at the ROV monitor station. It’s Little Joey. There’s a chance he might still be transmitting.’

Jack put his hand on Costas’ arm. ‘You’ve got to let it go.’

‘I’m being serious. You remember when we drove the submersible up after the dive this morning? We could see where the caldera had imploded, but I’ve looked at the mapping data that Lanowski and I did yesterday, and I reckon that the new rim lies just inside the point where you entered that chamber. It’s possible that the ROV is still intact. The volcano’s rumbling away, and the chances are the next little hiccup will take the chamber out, but it’s worth having a go.’

‘How could you get a signal from under all that lava?’

‘There might be a crack somewhere above the chamber. I remembered the electromagnetic disturbance we experienced and wondered whether that had clouded a signal. That’s where Lanowski comes in.’

‘Just as long as it doesn’t cause you more pain than gain.’

‘There’s a reason I’m doing this, Jack. When I was still tethered to the ROV while you were escaping from the chamber, I glanced at the screen inside my helmet. As soon as you cut the tether, all of the recorded imagery was lost. That’s a fault Jeremy and I need to get right for the next model. But I swear I saw something at the back of the chamber. It wasn’t cave paintings or those pillars, it was something else. If Little Joey hasn’t gone walkabout from where you left him, he might still be seeing it.’

‘Okay. Good. Do what you can.’

‘And Lanowski’s got something else he wants to show you.’

‘Not with his trusty portable blackboard, I hope. We haven’t got time for three-hour explanations.’

‘Something about going back to first principles. About not seeing the wood for the trees. About how if we want to find out where the last shamans of Atlantis went, we need to go back to what got us to Atlantis in the first place. The evidence. The clues. How it’s been staring us in the face all the time.’

‘Sounds a little too straightforward for Lanowski.’

‘Wrong. He thinks it’s too complex for the computer. He’s going to have to do the analysis in his head.’

Jack raised his eyes. ‘ That sounds like Lanowski.’ He turned back to the screen and clicked the mouse to zoom in on one of the pillars they had seen that morning, a white monolith rising starkly in front of the cave wall, the T-shaped arms extending outwards. He remembered five years ago in the flooded tunnels of Atlantis seeing lines of priests and priestesses carved in low relief on the walls, solemn, hieratic figures with braided beards and hair, wearing conical hats and carrying staffs, marching confidently forward. They had been freshly carved just before the flood, like the carvings on these pillars, and they had seemed familiar, a vision of the future, figures that would not have been out of place in Babylonia or Egypt or Bronze Age Europe. But what had happened to the old order, to the shamans who had painted images of animals in caves, a spirit world that seemed utterly at odds with those priests?

Then he remembered the swirling shape he had seen that morning near the top of one of the pillars, crudely carved where older images had been chiselled and abraded away, yet itself fresh, done even as the flood waters rose. He moved the cursor to the top of the screen, found the carving and zoomed in. It seemed like an image from the past, from the deep prehistory of caves and shamans, yet he was convinced now that he had been right and there was a human face in it, a frightening visage like a dream image from a whirlpool. Had this been carved by those new priests to show the dark side of the spirit world, the grim tunnels that voyages of the mind could take; was it a warning to those who might wish to return to the old ways?

Or was it a cry for help, an image carved in the face of death, in moments of terrible overwhelming fear?

Jack felt his head reel, and closed his eyes. For a moment he had an extraordinary vision. The stone pillars no longer seemed like some ill-formed attempt at the human form, something abstract. Instead they appeared as figures half complete, as if that chamber had been inundated in the final act of transformation, as if those plastered skulls were about to be wrenched from the spirit world and placed atop the pillars, ancestors becoming gods. He saw a sudden act, a sweeping away of the past. He saw the spectral forms of those braided and bejewelled priests in the chamber, chipping and carving, erasing the old, and in the background the shadowy shapes of the shamans crouched against the cave wall, floating in and out of the rock like spirit animals. Then they disappeared and he saw the pillars complete, leering, terrifying: gods who now had faces, but instead of being born from the earth like those shapes in the lava, they arose from a seedbed of blood and fear.

It was one of the most remarkable images that archaeology had ever thrown at him, but also one of the most disturbing. What had gone on inside that blocked-up chamber in those final desperate hours as the flood waters rose? He took a deep breath, then leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs and arms out, feeling every sinew and muscle in his body. He was dog tired after the dive, but he was determined to use every moment they had. He shook his head to clear the image and then looked at Costas. ‘Okay. We need the best possible people here to brainstorm this one. Call them both in.’