The Gods of Atlantis

7

South-eastern Black Sea

J ack turned in his chair as the door to the operations room on Seaquest II opened and two men entered. One had long, lank hair swept to the side, and was unusually neatly attired in trousers and a pressed shirt that must have been dug up especially for the visit by the inspection team. Dr Jacob Lanowski was one of IMU’s most unusual assets, an engineering genius from Caltech and MIT whose capacity for lateral thinking was matched by his eccentric character. He had the pale face and shadowy eyes of someone who spent most of his waking hours hunched in front of a computer screen, whereas the tall young man beside him was bronzed and fit, wearing old army trousers and a khaki T-shirt that was still streaked with the dust of Troy. Jack had first met Jeremy Haverstock four years earlier at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford, where Jeremy had been completing a doctorate on early-medieval scripts supervised by Jack’s old girlfriend Maria de Montijo, director of the institute. After their first project together researching Viking exploration, Jack had persuaded Jeremy not to return to an academic career in America but instead to take up a position with IMU, and since then he had gone from strength to strength. Like Lanowski, he was an expert in his field but had diverse talents, exactly what Jack looked for in a team member, in Jeremy’s case a boyhood fascination with robotics engineering that had quickly cemented his friendship with Costas.

Jeremy took a portable hard drive out of his pocket and pointed to one of the computer workstations. ‘I need to get the program running,’ he said, veering off and sitting down in front of a console.

Lanowski went straight to the ROV monitoring station on the other side of the room and clamped the earphones to his head with one hand, quickly tapping the keyboard with his other. He put down the earphones and walked over to Jack and Costas. ‘I’m running a system diagnostic. It should take about fifteen minutes. Any more noise from the ROV?’ he said, peering through his little round glasses at Costas.

‘Nothing since we spoke, but I did what you said and shut everything down. I want to see how you reboot the system.’

Lanowski knelt down, reached under the table and extracted a portable blackboard, then propped it up on a chair and pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, tossing it in the air and catching it. He pushed up his glasses and gave Jack a lopsided grin, his eyes burning with anticipation, then cleared his throat and turned to the board.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ Costas said firmly, standing up and moving the blackboard back under the table. ‘Not the blackboard. Not the chalk.’

‘Just a little diagram to show how electromagnetic interference from a magma upsurge in the earth’s crust might be causing the problem with the ROV. To help you redesign the equipment so that next time it actually works.’

‘Not now, Jacob.’ Costas stood defiantly in front of the blackboard, his arms crossed. Lanowski sighed, tossed the chalk again, caught it and put it back in his pocket, then drummed his fingers on the chair beside him until Costas reached over and put his hand over Lanowski’s, stopping it.

Jeremy pushed his chair back and loped towards them. ‘Okay, that’s loading. Might be about the same time frame, fifteen minutes or so.’ He stood in front of them, as tall as Jack, and smiled broadly. ‘Boy, am I glad to see you two. From what Costas said on the phone, it sounds like you really did it this time. Diving inside a live volcano. Hard to beat that.’

‘Watch this space,’ Jack said, smiling. ‘You know that officially it didn’t happen?’

‘Captain Macalister collared me on deck as soon as I got out of the Lynx, and gave me a rundown.’

Costas reached over and slapped Jeremy on the back. ‘How’s my favourite ancient linguistics and submersibles technology expert?’

‘Excellent,’ Jeremy replied. ‘I’m really pleased with our final days at Troy. I left Professor Dillen in charge, after Maurice and his team had departed for Egypt. It was great to get Hugh Frazer out there, wasn’t it, before he passed away? It was heartbreaking when we took him to that care home in Poland to see the old lady with the harp, still sitting with it as he remembered her as a girl in that concentration camp in 1945. But he was really thrilled to be at Troy and see the wall painting Dillen discovered of Homer with his lyre. I think it brought back the joy of his time excavating with his friend Peter Mayne before the war, the strength of that friendship, their love of Homer. He and Dillen stayed up on the walls half the night declaiming passages in ancient Greek, and drinking wine from the golden cup of Agamemnon that Jack found in the shipwreck.’

‘You let them do that?’ Costas said, eyeing Jack. ‘You’ve just gone up even higher in my estimation.’

‘Far better than consigning it to a glass case,’ Jack murmured, turning to Jeremy. ‘Anything more on that Egyptian statue Maurice found?’

‘I think you’d better let him tell you about that,’ Jeremy replied. ‘He says he’s only going to reveal it when it’s cleaned up, but it’ll change our whole view of prehistory.’

Jack grinned. ‘Maurice always says that when he finds something Egyptian outside Egypt.’

Jeremy looked at Costas with concern. ‘I meant to say. About Little Joey. I’m really sorry for your loss. All those hours we spent together in the engineering lab over the winter, working on him.’

Costas looked to one side, swallowing hard. ‘I keep saying to myself that the fun’s in making the toy, not in playing with it. But it doesn’t ease the pain. Lost forever, entombed inside a volcano. I can’t even bear to say his name.’

‘But he did good work.’

Costas nodded; his voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘He did good work.’

Jack looked at Jeremy. ‘And how’s my favourite daughter?’

‘Sends her love. To Uncle Costas too.’

Lanowski was peering at Costas, and put a hand clumsily on his shoulder. ‘About the ROV. I’ve been thinking. What you need is children.’

Costas looked down at the hand, and then at Lanowski. ‘Did I hear you right? I need what?’

‘I said you need children.’

Costas gently removed the hand. ‘Of the many strange things I’ve heard you say over the years, that’s just about the strangest.’

‘I was only sharing that passion this morning with my girlfriend.’

Costas’ jaw dropped. ‘Your what?’

Lanowski reached into his shirt pocket and tossed out a picture of a raven-haired beauty. ‘She’s Brazilian. Models for Vogue. That’s how she paid her way through college. She’s got a PhD, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Jack murmured, scratching his chin.

‘And she hit on you, just like that,’ Costas said incredulously. ‘A Brazilian Vogue model with a PhD. You’ve kept that well under wraps.’

‘Well.’ Lanowski coughed, moved his long, lank fringe from his forehead, then pushed up his glasses again. ‘We haven’t actually met.’

‘You haven’t met.’

‘Well, not as such. Not hands-on.’

‘How do you know she wants children, if you haven’t actually met?’

‘Her profile says she wants children, and my profile says I want children. Do the math.’

‘Ah,’ Jack said, putting his head down to hide his expression.

‘Ah,’ Costas echoed. ‘You’ve got an internet girlfriend. Have you, um, sent her your picture?’

‘That’s why I was getting you to take a photo of me in the submersible yesterday, at the controls.’

‘I was wondering what that was all about.’

‘I just mentioned to her that submersibles were my latest thing, with my friend Costas, and she jumped on it,’ Lanowski said. ‘That’s the great thing about internet dating. You learn right away about shared passions.’

Costas nodded sagely. ‘Could have taken you years to find that out.’

‘The picture might do the trick,’ Jack murmured.

‘Well, my friend,’ Costas said, slapping Lanowski on the back, ‘you know where to find me if you need a best man.’

Lanowski looked at him gratefully, then at Jack, not batting an eyelid. ‘I’ll remember that. Now for the ROV program.’ He turned and walked quickly back to the monitoring station, sat down and put on the headphones.

Costas turned to Jack, speaking quietly. ‘Was he being serious?’

‘Lanowski’s got a brain about the size of Jodrell Bank observatory. He can spot you coming a mile off.’

‘But maybe?’

‘Maybe. Look out for the virtual-reality engagement ring.’

Jeremy ruffled his shock of blond hair. ‘About Rebecca. I knew you couldn’t make it back to Troy to see her off because of your covert diving operation here, so I went with her in the Lynx to Istanbul airport. She sent me a text as soon as she landed at JFK in New York. She’s back in school now. Her mother’s friends – her foster-parents, I should say – met her at the airport, Petra and Mikhail. Rebecca really looks forward to going back to see them, you know, to tell them about this whole new life she has with you.’

‘They’re great people,’ Jack said, sitting back. ‘After Elizabeth sent Rebecca away from Naples for her own safety as a little girl, they looked after her for almost fifteen years, until Elizabeth was killed in the Mafia hit and I learned that I had a daughter. I owe them a lot. I spent a week with them last summer after returning from Troy, on their farm in upstate New York. It was really interesting to hear for the first time about Mikhail’s background. He trained at the elite Moscow State Institute for International Relations. Officially he’s a research professor at Columbia, but he’s been on the payroll of the CIA since his defection. He’s a specialist in the early Cold War period, and we talked a lot about the Soviet conquest of Berlin in 1945. He thinks there’s more to be found out about the treasures from Troy that were taken from Berlin to Moscow after the war, and he was going to look into that for me. Rebecca wants their place in the Adirondacks to continue being her main home while she’s still at high school, using the apartment in New York City during termtime, and I’m fully behind it. All that matters to me is her happiness wherever she can find it, especially after her mother’s death. And last summer, being out in the fields and in the woods at the farm, I could see where she developed her independent streak.’

‘Maybe a bit of genetics in that too, Jack,’ Costas murmured.

‘It’s a brilliant place,’ Jeremy enthused. ‘Completely cut off by the forest. The lake at the back’s great for canoeing and fishing, isn’t it? You can camp on the island. Perfect.’

Jack raised his eyes in surprise. ‘You’ve been there too?’

Jeremy shrugged. ‘I thought you knew. You’re always running between projects, Jack. Kind of hard to pin down over the last six months. Rebecca told Mikhail and Petra I was going back to the States last autumn to spend some time with my folks. Their place is only a couple of hours away.’

‘Huh. She didn’t mention it. I suppose I’ve been a bit preoccupied. I really wanted to get the Troy excavation wrapped up by now, to clear the decks for what lies ahead. Coming back to Atlantis has been a dream of mine, but it definitely wasn’t on the cards.’ Jack paused, pursing his lips. ‘Maybe I’ve had my foot pressed a little too hard on the accelerator. After Rebecca’s kidnapping last year, I thought the best thing for both of us would be to submerge ourselves in work, to get on top of the Troy project and tie up the loose ends before we took some off-time together.’

‘Some pretty big loose ends still out there,’ Costas said quietly. ‘Have you heard from Maurice yet?’

Jack took a deep breath, then shook his head. ‘Not yet. But he should be at the bunker in Germany by now. Last week I spoke on the phone to the British army officer in charge of the excavation, which is being carried out by a NATO nuclear, biological and chemical team because of the risk of what might lie inside. The excavation is top secret and under a massive security cordon, exactly what we insisted on when I first approached my secret-service contact in London six months ago and told her what we knew. There’s a full MI6 team in charge of the Saumerre case. Officially Maurice is there to provide expert guidance on any stolen art and antiquities that might be inside the bunker, but we all know there’s more to it than that. We got in pretty deep last year, and Saumerre is playing his waiting game with us, not with the security services.’

‘What about Rebecca’s safety?’ Costas asked.

‘Saumerre won’t go anywhere near Rebecca again or anyone else in IMU as long as I threaten to expose him, but that could change if he thinks we’ve discovered what he wants in the bunker and he decides that he’s got nothing to lose.’

‘You know Ben Kershaw was with her on the flight?’ Jeremy said. ‘I had no idea until I spotted him boarding the aircraft at the last minute.’

‘He is our security chief,’ Jack said grimly. ‘After what happened last year, Ben told me he wasn’t letting her out of his sight until Saumerre was history. Ever since he took over IMU security following Peter Howe’s death out here six years ago, Ben has really come into his own. There are two others already on the ground in New York to provide round-the-clock surveillance, one ex-SAS like Ben and the other a serving MI6 agent provided by our case officer in London. Petra and Mikhail are fully aware of the situation. Mikhail was a Soviet officer in the Afghan war before he became an academic and defected with Petra, one of the reasons why Elizabeth thought he’d be a good guardian for Rebecca when her family’s Mafia connections in Naples became too much of a threat. I think he’s enjoyed turning their farm into a temporary armed compound. It doesn’t mean I rest easy, but it means I know she’s being looked after by the best people, and my presence would only be an interference as long as the security is ramped up. It means I can focus on the archaeology now.’ He paused, then looked at Jeremy quizzically. ‘Speaking of which, how did Rebecca do in the potsherd cleaning programme at Troy?’

‘Brilliantly. She discovered at least a dozen more sherds painted with the reverse-swastika pattern. It firms up your theory that it really was the symbol of ancient Troy. She stuck with it far longer than I expected, even turned down a chance for some impromptu training in the Lynx. I kept her under close supervision all the time.’

Costas coughed. ‘I’m sure you did.’

‘She’s seventeen,’ Jack said to Jeremy firmly. ‘Lots to learn. And you’re what, twenty-six?’

Costas glanced at Jack, then waved his hand breezily. ‘A year or two from now, the age difference won’t mean a thing. And as you said, Jack. Happiness wherever she can find it.’

Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas, then turned back to Jeremy with a resigned smile. He got up, put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder and guided him to a seat. ‘Okay. Let’s talk about Atlantis.’

‘Macalister asked me to remind you that the Lynx is fuelling up for your departure. The Turkish geological team is due in at 1500 hours, and the helipad needs to be clear by then.’

Jack glanced at his watch. ‘That gives us forty-five minutes.’ There was a sudden whoop from the far side of the room, and they all turned to look. Lanowski had moved from the ROV station to one of the computer consoles, its screen facing away from them. He was talking to himself, occasionally chuckling and leaning back in his chair, then leaning forward again and staring. He suddenly went ramrod straight. ‘Eureka,’ he exclaimed. ‘ Eureka.’

‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said quietly to Jack. ‘The girlfriend?’

Jack raised his voice. ‘What is it?’

Lanowski looked up. ‘Something I’ve been working on. Something I have to thank Maurice Hiebermeyer for.’

‘ Hiebermeyer? ’ Jack exclaimed. ‘I wasn’t aware that the two of you had ever exchanged a word.’

‘Email. He’s my new friend. My new best friend.’

‘What about me?’ Costas muttered.

‘Looks like you’ve been knocked off your pedestal,’ Jack replied, looking with concern at Lanowski. ‘Are you going to share with us?’

‘Of course, I’ve read everything Hiebermeyer’s ever written, and I’ve even donated two of my books to his institute in Alexandria,’ Lanowski said more to himself than to anyone else, looking at the screen as if he were talking to it. ‘Egyptology’s always been a fascination of mine. Engineering problems, mathematical problems. Pyramids, mummies, papyrus. Codes.’ He stared at them, his eyes gleaming. ‘Yes, gentlemen. Codes.’

‘What on earth is he on about?’ Costas whispered.

Jack spoke firmly. ‘What about the ROV, Jacob, what you’re actually here for?’

Lanowski kept his gaze on the monitor, but waved one arm behind him. ‘It’s running itself. If it’s still transmitting and anything shows through, it’ll appear on the big screen above the ROV station.’

‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘We’re at Atlantis, not in Egypt, and we haven’t got all day. While we’re waiting for Jeremy’s image to upload, I want to talk to you about altered consciousness.’

Lanowski continued staring at the screen, then suddenly looked up. ‘About what?’

‘Altered consciousness. Costas said that neuropsychology was another one of your fascinations.’

Lanowski tapped a key and got up, then pushed back his chair and walked over to Jack, staring at him. ‘Yes?’

‘I had a couple of interesting experiences on the dive today. First in the tunnel going down into the volcano, a strange sensation of being in a vortex. Then in the final seconds before reaching the submersible, when I was out of air. Looking back on it, I remember more of what I sensed. The instant I knew I was about to black out I saw sparkly lights all round me in a kind of lattice pattern, and then a tunnel with a light at the end that I seemed to be drifting towards, with a face appearing and multiplying all around me. The face was Costas, of course, leaning out to pull me in, and the light was the open hatch of the submersible, but the closer I swam towards it, the further away it seemed. I wanted to relax and let it draw me in.’

Lanowski nodded. ‘Anoxia, dopamine, adrenalin, fear, survival instinct. A common feature of altered-consciousness experiences is the sensation of floating underwater. And you were in a high-stress situation, and experiencing sensory deprivation. Odd thing is, it can feel good. Addictive. Diving must tap into something hard-wired in our brains. I’ve been trying to work out what makes you guys always want to go deep. It’s not just nitrogen narcosis, is it?’

‘There’s something to that,’ Jack said, leaning back again. ‘But for me it’s always been cognitive, by which I mean how my own sense of observation and analysis is ramped up by being underwater, and that’s something I relish and want to experience whenever I can. I’ve always seen diving as an interface between present and past, as if putting on the equipment and getting underwater puts you into a different state of awareness, more acute, with the pressure on time making you think quickly and opening up lots of avenues in the mind. Maurice Hiebermeyer says the same thing about going down tunnels, opening up tombs. Being in that state for only a few moments can give those critical insights that don’t always come from hours of patient excavation on land. But my experience today was a different kind of altered consciousness and made me think about the Neolithic. What I’m really interested in now is putting myself in the minds of those shamans who went down tunnels in their minds, who perhaps saw visions that we can understand in terms of neuropsychology but they interpreted as manifestations of a spirit world.’

Costas shook his head in disbelief. ‘So when you were having your near-death experience and I was saving your life, you had a blinding flash of inspiration about the Neolithic? Archaeologists never cease to amaze me.’

Lanowski flicked away his fringe and pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘When I was a first-year undergraduate at Princeton, I worked evenings in the neuropsychology lab. I needed money, and I signed on as a guinea pig.’

‘Uh-oh,’ Costas muttered. ‘This is about to explain a few things.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Lanowski said cheerfully. ‘Only a few mild opiates, and some marijuana. Far less than most students were consuming around me. And the beauty of it was, I didn’t need it. I could put myself into an altered state of consciousness without drugs.’

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas said.

‘If you really believe in the world of your visions, then the mind can easily take you there,’ Lanowski continued. ‘That’s the essence of religious experience. There’s little difference in that respect between a shaman having visions in front of a cave wall and a worshipper in a church transfixed by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Neither of them needs hallucinogenic drugs to get there. Or as in my case, you can really believe in the power of your own mind and your ability to control it.’

‘This lab you worked in,’ Costas said. ‘Let me guess. You did most of their analytical work for them too?’

‘It came out as a paper in the Journal of Cognitive Archaeology. My name isn’t in the author list because I wasn’t officially part of the team, being merely a guinea pig.’

Jack stared at him. ‘ That paper? That was your work?’

‘I was in the lab one evening and saw the garbled manuscript they were working on, so I rewrote it until it actually made sense. It was sent off the next day with each of the authors assuming the others had fixed it up. They were hardly on speaking terms anyway. My first publication, anonymously.’

Jack turned to Costas. ‘That paper’s become the launch pad for exactly what I’ve been pondering, the mind-state of people in the late Stone Age.’

Jeremy pulled a battered old book out of his pocket. ‘I’m not a neuropsychologist, but I do like poetry,’ he said. ‘What you’re describing, the religious experience, we tend to think of as rapture in the face of God. But you don’t have to believe in a god to experience rapture, to have the same sort of visions and pleasure as the believer contemplating the Virgin Mary. In deep prehistory, the experience of rapture may have been the preserve of the shaman or seer. In the West today, I’d argue that the shaman’s role is largely taken by the poet and the musician and the artist. In fact, you could say that the mark of a true gift in a poet, the poet as shaman, is whether we can see rapture in the process of creativity, and whether we can experience something of that when we read the work.’

He flipped through the book and found a page, and Costas leaned over to look. ‘Ah. “The poet who had drunk the milk of paradise”.’

Jeremy nodded. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his poem Kubla Khan. And for milk of paradise, read opium.’

Costas glanced at Jack. ‘While we were working on the ROV, Jeremy and I went through his undergraduate dissertation on Homeric imagery in the poetry of W. H. Auden. There’s all that dark imagery of the fall of Troy and modern war in “The Shield of Achilles”, and for relief we went for some eighteenth-century romantic euphoria. That meant Coleridge. This poem’s good because of the watery imagery, and I can relate it to the experience of diving in the way you were just describing.’

‘Coleridge wrote the poem one night in 1797 after what he described as a “sort of reverie” brought on by two grains of opium,’ Jeremy continued. ‘So in this case, drugs were used, but it’s the effect we’re interested in, and that fits closely with what you’re talking about. Coleridge had just been reading an account of the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan’s pleasure palace by the sea, and that seems to have made him think about creative power that works with nature and creative power that doesn’t. That’s also what made me think of the poem, the idea of a tension between two Neolithic belief worlds, the one of the shaman and the one of the gods, the one attuned to nature and the other to man. But just now I also thought of Coleridge’s dream images, and how they were like the ones Lanowski was describing. A lot of them have to do with with rivers and the sea.’ He read from the page:

‘ In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.’

Costas followed from memory:

‘ Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.’

Jeremy put his finger on some handwritten notes under the poem. ‘Coleridge wrote a letter to a friend of his, John Thelwell, about the same time he composed the poem. Listen to this: “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes.” And then he writes: “My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great – something one and indivisible.”’ Jeremy paused. ‘The metaphor of flowing water as a vehicle for the imagination is pretty widespread, and images of water are common among the Romantic poets. But this is one case where we can talk in neuro-psychological terms about altered consciousness, because Coleridge tells us himself that he’d taken opium.’

‘Coleridge himself called the poem a “psychological curiosity”,’ Costas added. ‘He also writes of a mighty fountain, spewing out huge fragments, spoken of almost as if it’s a volcano: it comes from a deep chasm, a savage place. The poem’s like a cosmology of the earth and the underworld combined with visions that come from an altered state of consciousness, visions that are familiar to us because they’re hard-wired into our brains just as Lanowski suggested.’

Jeremy shut the book and pocketed it. ‘I think it’s another way of understanding what we’re looking at in early prehistory. For too long archaeologists have assumed that ancient belief systems are somehow beyond their reach. Many early archaeologists were dogmatic about their Christianity, and shamanistic religion was regarded as the least accessible of all, a primitive, ill-formed system of spiritualism that existed before God revealed himself. But I’d argue that’s precisely where we need to go if we are to understand the origins of religion today, to look at neuropsychology. And most fascinatingly, what Coleridge was describing shows how that experience could have been intense and rapturous without the worship of gods.’

‘It’s not just in modern poetry,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘You get the same kind of imagery in the earliest literature of all, in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, where long voyages are taken over water and there’s that same juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of men. And the Epic of Gilgamesh may preserve an actual memory of the spiritualist world of the early Neolithic, a world just before the gods came into being.’

Lanowski got up, put the blackboard resolutely back on the chair and whipped out his piece of chalk. He drew a spiral on one side of the board, then turned back to them, his eyes gleaming. ‘Here you see the vision of a tunnel, a vortex. It’s the most common altered consciousness vision, and also the most common early Neolithic symbol. You find it everywhere, from the megalithic tombs of Ireland to Atlantis. The vortex can be surrounded by animal images, like Jack’s image of Costas repeatedly on the edge of his vision, but here it’s empty. You could call it a vision of pure rapture. But then something changes.’ He flourished the chalk, then drew two circles beside the first, the same size but without the spiral. ‘Think of Stonehenge. Think of the Neolithic temples. They’re circles. But what do they have inside them?’ He slashed a T shape and a pi shape on the top of the board. ‘What you’ve got, gentlemen, is gods. That’s what the trilithons at Stonehenge are. That’s what the T-shaped pillars of Gobekli Tepe and Atlantis are. And how do you depict this new type of temple, this new religion, as a symbol?’ He put the chalk in the centre of the second circle and drew a series of straight lines radiating out, turning each line sharply to the left. He swivelled back to them, his arms held out questioningly.

‘The Sonnenrad,’ Jack said quietly. ‘The ancient sun symbol, used by the Nazis as the SS symbol.’

Lanowski flourished the chalk. ‘The old vortex, hijacked. Now you see not a swirl, but the walls of the tunnel lined with these images of gods.’

‘And there’s another ancient symbol,’ Jack said quietly.

Lanowski turned and drew inside the third circle, this time only four lines intersecting, the ends turned left. Jack stared at it. The swastika. But now he saw it not as a cross at all, but as a symbol of the ascendancy of the gods; the gods who had taken over the old religion ten thousand years ago. And a horrifying modern symbol, a symbol of gods reborn, not in the depths of prehistory but in the cauldron of Europe eighty years ago.

Lanowski tossed the chalk, pocketed it and marched back to his computer workstation. ‘Just a little more time, Jack. Then I’ve got something more to show you.’

Jack looked to the ROV screen, which was still blank, and Jeremy glanced at the monitor where he had left his program loading. ‘Okay,’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘We’re in business. This is going to completely change your view of Atlantis.’

Jack and Costas followed Jeremy, who sat down in front of the monitor and glanced at Jack. ‘As soon as you surfaced from the dive, Costas emailed me the photos from your helmet camera, the ones you’ve already seen as raw images. The beauty of that camera pod is that it incorporates a miniature thermal-imaging device and GPR, ground-penetrating radar, allowing us to see beyond the visuals. It’s going to revolutionize underwater archaeology, because it’ll enable nearly instant transfer of the processed images into the diver’s helmet monitor, allowing a kind of X-ray vision. A few glitches, but Costas and I are nearly there. Meanwhile, look at this. What you’ll see is what Jack actually saw when he poked his head into that chamber, minus the reflections from his headlamp off suspended particles, which I’ve removed.’ He clicked the mouse, and an extraordinary image came on the screen, taking Jack back to that heart-pounding moment in the depths of the volcano only a few hours before.

‘Holy shit,’ Costas murmured. ‘It’s like a charnel house. Like something out of an Aztec nightmare.’

It was the image of the human skull Jack had been looking at before Jeremy and Lanowski arrived, visible in sharper detail so that they could clearly see the finger marks of the ancient sculptor in the plaster that had been formed over the bone. But behind it were rows of other skulls, far more than Jack had seen before. Jeremy opened up a toolbar and sharpened the contrast. ‘I count at least twenty-five. About half are deliberately plastered like these ones, and the rest only look as if they are because they’re covered in calcite precipitate that formed over them after they were submerged. The anoxic environment of the Black Sea accounts for the amazing preservation. Our osteologist at Troy thinks the plastered skulls are mostly older people, men and women who may have lived a full lifespan and died naturally, some of them very old. They’re perhaps the skulls of venerated elders. But the other skulls are widely varied, adults of different ages, teenagers, children. The plastered skulls are all upright in the floor, set in a layer of burnt lime. The other skulls are scattered around as if whatever ritual was happening here was abandoned partway through, as the flood waters were rising.’

Jack stared at the image that had been inches away from him underwater, seeing how the plaster had been moulded to form high cheekbones and bedding in the sockets for cowrie-shell eyes. He could see how the plastered skulls had been carefully sunk up to chin level in the lime floor. He remembered the most striking images from the Neolithic town of Catalhoyuk, of bulls’ skulls embedded in house walls, almost as if they were caught at the moment of coming through. In the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic the animals seemed to be emerging from the walls, sometimes floating in front of them, alongside haunting imprints of human hands; the plastered skulls here seemed the same, as if they represented bodies emerging from a chthonic spirit world, emissaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Costas tapped Jack’s shoulder. ‘You said plastered skulls like this had been found at other sites?’

‘At early Neolithic Jericho in Palestine,’ Jeremy interjected. ‘I was researching it on the way here. A famous skull found by Dame Kathleen Kenyon in her excavations in the 1950s.’

‘And at Catalhoyuk,’ Jack added. ‘They’re usually interpreted as evidence for a cult of the dead, for ancestor worship. But I worry about that. Worship is the wrong word, a modern word with misleading connotations. To me, this image from Atlantis suggests that they should be seen in the same way as the bulls and the other animals, as travellers between our world and a spirit world, a world entered through the rock of the volcano, through caves, through house walls. Maybe the ancestors could do this if their remains were properly treated. They were venerated, just as elders would have been when they were alive, but I don’t think they were worshipped. I don’t think the ancestors were seen as gods: that’s an idea I don’t see any clear evidence for in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.’

Jeremy nodded. ‘The ancestor theory fits in with what our bones lady thinks. The plastered skulls are all disarticulated, right? There are no neck bones attached. There’s no evidence of trauma injury. These skulls were taken from bodies that were already skeletonized.’

Jack reached for his tablet computer, dragged his fingers over the screen and showed it to Jeremy. ‘There’s a lot of vulture imagery from Atlantis and the other Neolithic sites. Look at this one: a painting of a vulture pecking at a headless corpse from Catalhoyuk. And here’s a vulture from Atlantis, from one of those stone pillars above the skulls, another image taken by my helmet camera. You can see a carving of a great bird of prey with a human arm clutched in its talons. It looks like a Mayan thunderbird, a spirit bird, but is probably meant to be a real bird of prey. I’m convinced we’re looking at evidence for sky burial – for excarnation – with bodies being exposed to be consumed by vultures like Zoroastrian sky burial today in India. That sanctum at Atlantis was originally partly open to the air beside a platform on the flank of the volcano, and I believe that sky burial was one of the functions of these temple sites before the pillars were erected. The birds may have been seen as spirit birds, and by consuming human flesh they may have been able to transport the spirits of the departed to the other world. Seeing this now, I think the Atlantis symbol may not have been an eagle as we supposed, but instead a vulture, a spirit bird.’

Jeremy nodded. ‘Now for that X-ray vision I was talking about. Prepare to be amazed.’ He zoomed in, tapped a key and sat back, and they watched while the screen repixellated. ‘This is a composite CGI of what you just saw, using the GPR data.’ The screen transformed into an image showing far more than was visible with the naked eye, shapes and artefacts that were buried beneath the lime encrustation. Costas whistled, and Jeremy pointed at the skull in the centre of the image, one that had been visible only in vague outline before. ‘This is one of the unplastered skulls, a child about nine or ten years old. Look closely and you can see that four of the neck vertebrae are still attached. You wouldn’t get that if you’d taken the skull from a properly skeletonized body, with all the ligaments gone. And then look over there, beneath the lime accretion on the floor.’

‘Holy cow,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s a complete skeleton.’

‘Nearly complete,’ Jeremy corrected. ‘And that wasn’t just dumped there. Look, you can see dark rings where the wrists were lashed together, probably copper wire. There’s a little reed flute in one of the hands. This was a fully articulated fresh corpse, with musculature and sinews intact when the waters rose and it was encased in lime. I said nearly complete. The head’s missing. And it isn’t another body. It’s the same body. The number of missing neck vertebrae match those on the child’s skull.’

Costas looked at Jeremy aghast. ‘Do you think this child was killed by being beheaded?’

‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I emailed this image to our bones lady. She zoomed in on the skull, and pointed this out. You see? It’s been bashed in on one side. And look at the shapes of the objects buried in the lime just below it. There’s some kind of mace, a stone-topped wooden hammer. And that leaf-shaped thing in the foreground is a chipped stone knife, ripple-flaked, almost certainly obsidian. You see what I’m getting at? What Costas said about the Aztecs might not be that far off the mark.’

‘That child was sacrificed,’ Costas whispered.

Jeremy zoomed out from the skull to reveal a panorama of the chamber, showing the circle of pillars and the stone basins rising up between the skulls. ‘Look at the relationship between the skeleton and the skull and that stone basin. It makes sense of the basin, don’t you think? It was an altar. A sacrificial altar.’

Jack wondered whether the basins were windows into the depths, into the underworld, some kind of visionary device. He remembered the dark red stain on his glove when he put his hand into the basin. ‘We know they sacrificed bulls, because we found the remains of one five years ago spread over a large stone table at an entrance chamber into the volcano. But this is a revelation. It’s horrifying. Human sacrifice.’

Jeremy leaned back. ‘I think that child was killed by being bludgeoned with the mace. Then it was bled from the neck into the basin, and the knife was used to behead it. Separate the head from the body, and maybe you dispatch the soul to the spirit world. Maybe the blood in the basin was a conduit, a river, fitting in with those altered-consciousness visions we were talking about. Maybe the sacrificer also travelled that river, a portal to the spirit world opened up by the act of sacrifice.’

‘With implements specifically designed for the purpose,’ Jack murmured. ‘Obsidian blades like that one have been found in caches in houses at Catalhoyuk, and have long been suspected to have symbolic significance. And those stone basins look much older than the pillars, carved out of the living rock. They were part of the ancient function of this chamber way before the flood.’

‘Wasn’t there a tradition of child sacrifice in the Near East?’ Costas said. ‘I mean the Old Testament account of Abraham and his son Isaac. And the Phoenicians, and their successors in the west Mediterranean, at Carthage. When we’ve been at the IMU museum at Carthage I’ve often walked around the tophet, where the children were supposedly sacrificed.’

‘But we know child sacrifice may have been exaggerated by the Romans,’ Jack said, staring pensively at the image. ‘It may only have been in times of extreme duress, in the case of the Carthaginians when they were faced with annihilation by the Romans.’

‘But isn’t that what we’re seeing at Atlantis?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, extreme duress? The flood waters rising, and no way out?’

That was it. And no way out. Jack remembered the walled-over chamber, the pillars freshly carved and the old paintings erased. Had this been a newly refurbished temple, on the verge of being revealed as the flood waters came, but instead used as a dungeon for the last remaining shamans, their death chamber? He stared at the skeleton. Had those people been driven in desperation to take human life, when the blood of bulls had no longer been sufficient?

‘It wasn’t just children,’ Jeremy said. ‘The osteologist reckons there are at least twelve other trussed-up bodies in there, all of them articulated skeletons and all of them decapitated. They seem to be of widely varying ages, adults and younger, probably male and female. Visionary ability is often perceived to be passed down in a family, isn’t it, from parent to child? That’s what I think we’ve got here. I think we’ve got entire families being locked in this chamber. It’s a really chilling image, like those Jewish families trapped at Masada by the Romans. It’s as Costas says: people driven to it by extreme duress.’

‘You mean driven to sacrifice?’ Costas said.

‘Call it sacrifice. Or call it assisted mass suicide.’

They were all silent for a moment, staring at the image. Costas coughed, and then spoke quietly. ‘So let me get this right. In this Garden of Eden, at the dawn of civilization, you’ve got vultures picking away at dismembered corpses. You’ve got a new order of priests that make the Jesuits of the Inquisition look like angels, forcing people to hack out limestone pillars and drag them up the volcano to make this temple, a temple to themselves, the new gods. And you’ve got an old order of shamans, off their heads on some kind of psychedelic trip, trapped in this death chamber and performing human sacrifice. And all of that while the flood waters are rising, and their world is being annihilated.’

‘The old order swept away, the new world about to dawn,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘If you look at the Old Testament account and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is represented as an act of God, an act of divine punishment. Maybe that idea was created by the new priests and became the myth. And maybe the flood was actually propitious timing for the new priests, the new gods, who were ready for the diaspora to leave and found new cities and civilizations around the ancient world.’

‘In which case,’ Costas said, ‘who was Noah? A shaman survivor?’

Jeremy paused. ‘In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Uta-napishtim is cast up on a mountain far across the waters, cut off from the world of men and their gods.’

Jack stared at Costas, his mind racing. ‘It’s possible. Maybe one of them did survive. Maybe the annihilation wasn’t complete.’

‘Maybe he was a vacillator,’ Jeremy said. ‘Maybe he had been unsure whether to stay with the old order or go with the new.’

‘Maybe he was guardian of the animals, of the bulls the shamans corralled for sacrifice, and the new priests needed him to tend those they were taking with them.’

Jack stared at the image on the screen. ‘If I could get into that chamber this morning, then someone could have got out. That hole in the wall had been made deliberately, by pulling the stones from the outside. Maybe someone dragged him out, at the last moment.’

Jack cast his mind back again to his image of those final hours. Had the shamans been sealed in, blamed perhaps for the flood, told to use all their powers to stem the waters? Or had that been a lie, and it had truly been a death chamber of the new priests’ devising? In the absence of bulls to sacrifice, sealed in that chamber and realizing they were facing certain death, had they crossed the boundary and committed the ultimate act of sacrifice? Had the new gods forced them to unspeakable horror?

Lanowski came bounding up to them, rubbing his hands. ‘Okay. I’m ready.’

Costas stared back at the wall. ‘But the ROV monitor’s still blank.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean what I’ve been working on at the computer.’ Lanowski peered at the image on the screen. ‘Oh. I nearly forgot.’ He reached into his pocket and handed Jack a crumpled slip of paper. ‘The lab technician gave this to me as I was coming in. The test results on that red stuff on your glove.’

Jack smoothed open the paper and read the report. It was exactly as he had thought. It was human blood. It had been on his glove, in the cracks and crevices, clouding the water as he rubbed it off, the seven-thousand-year-old blood of that child, perhaps, of its family, blood that had fed the pool in that basin that someone was using desperately in an effort to get into the spirit world, to escape the horror of drowning as the flood waters began to lap the chamber. For a moment Jack wished he had pulled himself further inside, up over the basin, so that he could peer into it, to glimpse what the one with the bloodied mace and the dripping knife had tried to see. But then he knew he would only have witnessed a reflection of that circle of pillars looming over the basin, radiating in the circular shape of the bowl like the spokes of the Sonnenrad in Lanowski’s drawing, flickering in whatever firelight they had left in the chamber, a fiery image of the new gods leering through the spent blood of the old order.

He glanced again at the three circular shapes Lanowski had chalked on the blackboard, from spiral to Sonnenrad to swastika. He suddenly remembered the palladion, the symbol of ancient Troy they knew had taken the swastika shape: a sacred meteorite forged and hammered into the crooked cross and melded with gold, stolen by the Greek king Agamemnon from Troy and then found by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae and secretly taken by the Nazis to Germany. He stared at the image of the swastika. ‘The star of heaven,’ he murmured. ‘ Of course.’

‘Come again?’ Lanoswki said.

‘The star of heaven,’ Jack repeated, his heart pounding with excitement. ‘It’s been staring us in the face all along. It’s in the Epic of Gilgamesh.’ He picked up his tablet computer and called up the text of the Babylonian epic. ‘It’s on the first tablet, “The Coming of Enkidu”. Gilgamesh has a dream, and tells his mother, the goddess Ninsun. Listen to this: “I walked through the night under the stars of the firmament, and one, a meteor of the stuff of Anu, fell down from heaven. I tried to lift it but it proved too heavy. All the people of Uruk came round to see it, the common people jostling and the nobles thronging to kiss its feet; and to me its attraction was like the love of a woman. They helped me, I braced my forehead and I raised it with thongs and brought it to you.”’

Jack put the tablet down. ‘It’s incredible. I’m convinced that’s the same story as the Trojan foundation myth, which recounts the origin of the palladion as a meteorite. I think both stories hark back to Atlantis: the Epic of Gilgamesh from the perspective of northern Mesopotamia, the Trojan myth from the viewpoint of those who fled Atlantis to the Dardanelles and actually took the palladion with them. The “star of heaven” was the palladion after the meteorite was forged and hammered into the shape of the swastika. Ninsun tells Gilgamesh that in the dream the star was an analogue, that in fact he was dreaming of the coming of Enkidu, the wild man he will tame and make his brother: the story may represent the tension between the first civilization, represented by Gilgamesh himself, and the ancient wildness that still survived from prehistory. It puts the palladion in a whole new context. No wonder it had such power through history, revered and feared, hijacked by the first priests of Atlantis as their new sacred symbol, and then rediscovered and given a terrible new lease of life almost ten thousand years later by the Nazis.’

Jack sat back, remembering the start of their trail six months before, a trail that had hinted at the devastating truth about the palladion and its new symbolism in a currency of evil played out in the Second World War. He looked down, staring at his palms. Six months ago he had had other blood on his hands, the blood of those who had died violently in their quest for the palladion, lives Jack had taken in his attempt to protect those closest to him. He thought of Maurice Hiebemeyer and the Nazi bunker, and a cold shiver ran through him. The swastika on the blackboard suddenly seemed to be swirling, drawing him into a different kind of history, one of horror and immolation that those first priests could scarcely have imagined. He tore himself away, and looked at Lanowski. ‘You were going to tell us something?’

Lanowski peered back, his face flushed and his eyes burning with fervour. ‘You want to know where the last shaman of Atlantis went? Where Noah went with his Ark? You want to find the new Atlantis?’

Costas and Jeremy peered at Jack. He glanced at his watch, exhaled forcefully and then looked at Lanowski. ‘Okay, Jacob. Give us what you’ve got.’