The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  6

  Jack leaned forward on the railing over the archaeological precinct, taking in the extraordinary scene in front of him as the morning sunlight began to pick out the alleyways and dark spaces of the Roman town below. He felt tired, as tired as he ever had been, with the sense of heaviness that always came after a deep dive. He knew that his system was still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from the dive the day before, yet the feeling also came from a profound sense of contentment. In the space of twelve hours he had moved from one of the most remarkable underwater discoveries of his career to one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, a place that had left an indelible impression on him when he had first visited as a schoolboy. Herculaneum. It had been a scorching afternoon, and he had found the frigidarium of the bathhouse, a cool, dark place where he had sat in a corner for over an hour, listening to the drip of condensation from the damp walls and conjuring up the people who had last used it almost two thousand years before. Herculaneum seemed shabbier now, neglected in places, but had changed little over the years, and it still took his breath away. He could hardly believe that they were about to be the first archaeologists in over two hundred years to excavate the place, inside the tunnel Maria and Maurice had discovered the day before.

  ‘Text message for you, Jack.’ Costas passed up the cell phone without looking. He was squatting with his back against the railing, focusing entirely on a complex systems diagram on his laptop. ‘It’s from Maria.’

  Jack read the message, and grunted. ‘Another half-hour, maybe less. Good news is, the transaction’s been done.’ He and Costas had already been waiting over an hour since landing the helicopter, time well spent showing Costas round the archaeological site, but neither of them was used to being at the beck and call of officialdom and the delay was becoming an irritation.

  Costas took back the phone, and squinted up at Jack. ‘I still can’t believe we’re doing this. Paying baksheesh. It’s like something from The French Connection.’

  ‘That’s Naples for you,’ Jack said. ‘Bandit country.’

  ‘So the idea is our money goes towards the upkeep of the site, conservation work.’ Costas turned round and gestured at a dusty roof above a crumbling ancient wall. ‘Like all the other foreign money that’s been pumped in here in the past.’

  ‘I was frank with the IMU board of directors,’ Jack said. ‘There’s no way round it. If you want to work in this place, you cough up.’

  ‘Basically, we’re paying a bribe.’

  ‘Not exactly how I put it to the board, but that’s about the size of it,’ Jack replied, looking at his watch. ‘Now we just have to wait while they confirm the electronic transfer. You may as well stick with your work for a while longer. I’m going back to the first century AD.’ Jack turned again towards the site, took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. As a child travelling around the world, he had developed an unusual imagination, an ability to use a few images to transport himself back into the distant past, almost a trance-like state. But here he hardly needed it, as the past was in front of him with extraordinary clarity, complete in almost every detail.

  Herculaneum was that rarest of archaeological sites, without the compressions and distortions of time, with little of the complex layering of history seen in most ancient ruins. Here, the city of AD 79 was so well preserved it was almost habitable, the flat-roofed structures nearly identical to the modern suburb above the edges of the excavated area. Jack’s eye moved up beyond the rooftops to the blackened cone of Vesuvius, rearing up in the background. The image seemed to epitomize the underlying continuity of the human condition, and the indomitable power of nature. He looked down at the warehouses on the ancient seafront, where masses of distorted skeletons had been found huddled together in their death agony. Then he looked up at the villas where those same people had been eating and talking and going about their daily lives a few minutes before, everything left as they had abandoned it in those final moments of horror. There was clarity here, Jack reflected, extraordinary clarity, but also opacity. Teasing older history out of this site, before those final moments, was like watching an animation deconstructed, in which the first scenes were sharp and clear, then the next vague, increasingly out of focus, until images that had been dominated by people became a shadowland, with only the artefacts standing out and the people reduced to flitting forms barely discernible in the background.

  That was the challenge for archaeologists at this place, Jack reflected, to give depth, to tell stories stretching back hours, days, years. And yet that final apocalyptic scene was a continuous draw, playing on the human fascination with death, with the macabre, the final moments of normality, what that would be like. Earlier, walking into the Roman houses with Costas, he had felt a curious unease, as if he were violating the intimate places of people who had never really left, places where he could still sense the mundane acts of the living, the private smells and sounds of the household. What had happened here had happened so quickly, quicker even than at Pompeii, that the place was still in a state of shock, frozen in that moment just before hell unleashed. Herculaneum still seemed to be reeling, as if the earthquakes of recent weeks were a nervous tremor that had begun on the night of the inferno almost two thousand years before.

  ‘That’s a hell of a view.’ Costas was standing beside him, and Jack snapped out of his reverie. ‘The past, the present, and the big bang. Says it all.’

  Jack gave a tired smile. ‘I’m glad you see it too.’

  ‘So this is all solidified mud,’ Costas said.

  ‘Mud, ash, pumice, lava, everything picked up as it snowballed down the volcano.’

  ‘Pyroclastic flow?’

  ‘You remember Pliny the Elder, who wrote about opium?’ Jack said.

  ‘You bet. The workaholic admiral. Somehow found time to write an encyclopedia.’

  ‘Well, his teenage nephew, also called Pliny, was here that day too, staying at his uncle’s villa near the naval base at Misenum. The younger Pliny survived the eruption, his uncle didn’t. Years later he wrote a letter about it to the historian Tacitus, who wanted to know how the elder Pliny died. From a natural-history viewpoint it’s one of the most important documents to survive from antiquity, maybe even more so than his uncle’s encyclopedia. It’s not only a unique eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, it’s also one of the best scientific observations ever made of a volcanic eruption until modern times.’

  ‘Sounds like a chip off the old block. His uncle would have been proud of him.’ Costas watched Jack pull a small red book from his bag, its cover worn and battered. ‘You seem to have an endless supply of those. I had no idea so much literature survived from this period.’

  ‘It’s what didn’t survive that keeps me awake at night,’ Jack said, jerking his head towards the ruins in front of them. ‘That’s what’s so tantalizing about this place. But before we go there, listen to this. It’s crucial to understanding why Herculaneum and Pompeii look the way they do.’ He held the book up so that the site and the volcano were in the background, and then began to read marked passages. ‘ “Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed.”’ He traced his finger down the page. ‘Then he describes ashes falling, “followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames”. Later he says that the darkness was blacker and denser than any ordinary night, and on Vesuvius “broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points”.’

  ‘Sound like a classic ash and pumice fallout,’ Costas said. ‘But that first bit, about the plume collapsing on itself, that’s a pyroclastic flow.’

  ‘That’s exactly the difference between the two sites. Pompeii was buried by fallout fro
m the sky, mixed with poisonous gases. Afterwards, some of the rooftops still stuck out, which is why they’re not so well preserved today. Herculaneum was buried by landslides, tons of boiling mud and volcanic material, surging over the site each time the plume collapsed until the buildings were completely buried, up to ten metres above the rooftops.’

  ‘That’s a hell of an image, Jack. And that’s what those early Christians would have seen, the ones you think were in the Phlegraean Fields, I mean. Rings of fire at the leading edge of each pyroclastic flow, coming down the mountain at terrifying speed.’

  ‘The younger Pliny was watching all that from the villa at Misenum, only a mile or so south of Cumae, the Sibyl’s cave. More or less the same vantage point.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ Costas said.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ Costas repeated. ‘The obsession with hellfire, damnation. I’ve been thinking about it. If this is the main place where Christianity spread from in the west, then they’re bound to have been affected by the experience, right? When we were flying in you mentioned the psychological fallout of the eruption. Once you’ve seen hell, you don’t forget it in a hurry. They were already halfway there in the Phlegraean Fields, living among the fumaroles and the entrance to the pagan underworld. Add a volcanic eruption, and you’ve got a pretty apocalyptic outlook. Am I right?’

  ‘For a nuts-and-bolts man, that’s a pretty fantastic idea. Ever thought of rewriting the history of Christian theology?’

  ‘Nope.’ For a moment they were quiet, both looking into the windows of the excavated Roman warehouse in front of them, dark and forbidding like the portholes of a sunken ship. ‘No survivors here,’ Costas murmured. ‘No one who stayed.’

  ‘It’s hard to know which would have been worse,’ Jack said thoughtfully. ‘Suffocated in superheated gas at Pompeii, or incinerated alive at Herculaneum.’

  ‘Come live by the sunny Bay of Naples,’ Costas murmured. ‘Today, all that happens is you get mugged or run over.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon,’ Jack said. ‘Remember that picture of the 1944 eruption? The seismologists have been talking doom and gloom for decades now, and the earthquakes are pretty ominous.’

  Costas shaded his eyes and squinted at the summit of the volcano, where the sunlight was beginning to radiate off the barren upper slopes. ‘Pliny was here? The elder one, I mean. In Herculaneum?’

  ‘According to his nephew, he took one look at the eruption and hared off in a warship towards the volcano, this side of the bay, under the mountain. It was supposedly a heroic mission to rescue a woman.’

  ‘The undoing of many a great man,’ Costas sighed.

  ‘It was hopeless. By the time he got here the shore was blocked with debris, floating pumice like sea ice. But instead of returning, he got his galley to row south to Stabiae, another town beyond Pompeii directly under the ash fallout. He stayed too long and was overcome by the fumes.’

  ‘Sounds like a Shakespearean love tragedy. Maybe he was really overcome by grief.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Jack said. ‘Not Pliny. Once he saw his girlfriend was doomed, he would have been on to something else. What he really wanted was to get close to the eruption. I can see him, notebook in hand, sniffing and identifying the sulphur, collecting pumice samples along the shoreline. At least he’d finished his Natural History.’

  ‘What with all that multi-tasking, he was probably heading for a burnout anyway.’

  Jack rolled his eyes, then caught sight of two figures making their way down the entry ramp into the site, a woman and a man. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It looks like we’re moving at last.’ He pushed off from the railing, and ruffled his hair. Maria was wearing desert boots, khaki combat trousers and a grey T-shirt, and her long black hair was tied back. She had a well-honed, lean physique, and the look suited her. Maurice Hiebermeyer was several paces behind her, a cell phone clamped to his ear, and cut a somewhat less svelte figure. He was slightly shorter than Maria, considerably overweight, and was wearing a curious assortment of safari gear over a pair of scuffed leather dress shoes. He was red faced and flustered, constantly pushing his little round glasses up his nose as he spoke into the phone. His shorts reached well below his knees and seemed perilously close to half-mast, almost miraculously free-floating.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Jack muttered to Costas. ‘Anything at all.’ He fought to keep a straight face, and glanced at Costas. ‘Anyway, you can smirk. When was the last time you looked in a mirror? You look like you’ve just walked out of six months in a submarine.’

  Hiebermeyer halted before reaching them, gesturing at the phone and turning his back on them, while Maria walked up and embraced them both. Jack closed his eyes as she pressed against him. He had missed seeing her, hearing her sonorous voice, her accent. It had been an intensive time together during the search for the menorah, and Jack had gone through the usual moments of emptiness when the expedition was over. Above all he wanted to see that she was well, that he had made the right move in suggesting that she join Hiebermeyer in Naples. Maria shot him a look from her dark eyes. ‘It’s been six weeks since I was on Seaquest, but it seems a lot longer.’

  ‘It’s the company you miss,’ Costas said, looking at her with concern.

  ‘I’ve really tried to put it all behind me,’ she said quietly, turning away from them and gazing out over the site. ‘I had a text message from Jeremy this morning, and that was the first time I’d really flashed back to our time in the Yucatán, those terrible scenes. It’s been good for me to have this new project to focus on, better than going back straight away to my medieval manuscript research at the Institute. And Jeremy’s taken care of everything in Oxford. It’s just the break he wanted, a chance to serve as acting director while still just a graduate student, and he’s brilliant at it.’

  ‘I really want him at IMU full time, you know,’ Jack said. ‘It’s only been a couple of months since he joined us on the trail of the Vikings, but already he seems like a permanent fixture. I always know when someone’s right, and the moment he walked through the IMU engineering lab and began talking to Costas about submersibles I knew that was it.’

  ‘How is my favourite new dive buddy?’ Costas said. ‘Has he told you I passed him with flying colours on his checkout dive? A real natural.’

  ‘Buried up to his neck in the lost library at Hereford Cathedral. He’s got some fantastic new stuff, Jack. Another early map, some reference to Phoenicians, I think. He’s itching to show you. And he’s had an idea for some new diving contraption, Costas. I don’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘Really?’ Costas said in hushed excitement. ‘If it’s Jeremy, it’s got to be good.’ He reached into his hip pouch for his cell phone, but Jack stopped his arm.

  ‘Not now. Bad timing.’

  Costas relented, ruefully. ‘Just keeping on the ball.’

  ‘No multi-tasking, remember? Let’s stick with where we are for now.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘I’m grateful you suggested me, Jack,’ Maria continued. ‘It’s a real privilege to be here. And an eye-opener in more ways than one. But it should have been you here from the outset.’

  ‘Then you’d never have had the pleasure of spending time with our old friend Maurice,’ Jack said with a smile. ‘I know you haven’t seen him much since Cambridge.’

  Maria sidled up to them. ‘He’s a dear man,’ she whispered, looking questioningly at Jack. ‘Isn’t he?’

  ‘He is a dear man,’ Jack replied quietly, giving her a knowing look. ‘Remember, he and I were at school together, even before we all met up at Cambridge. I had my first real adventures with him, when we were kids. You know, he’s treated like a god in Egypt, with some justification. Easily the finest field archaeologist I know. And despite appearances, he’s not one of those Egyptologists who thinks all other archaeology is beneath them. He’s tremendously knowledgeable, inquisitive across all periods and pla
ces. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a wetsuit, but he’s a perfect adjunct professor for IMU.’

  ‘So what’s with the shorts?’ she whispered.

  ‘Ah.’ Jack looked at Hiebermeyer’s backside, and struggled with his expression. ‘Genuine German Afrika Corps, circa 1940. Seemed appropriate, when he first went to Egypt and needed kit. I gave them to him as a graduation present. He gave me my British Eighth Army khaki bag. I always have it with me too.’ Jack patted the battered bag hanging against his side. ‘My fault. Sorry.’

  ‘Some suspenders would help,’ Maria whispered. ‘You know, lederhosen.’

  ‘What Jack’s saying,’ Costas said with a twinkle in his eye, ‘is that Maurice grows on you.’

  ‘He’s developed quite a lot since you knew him at Cambridge,’ Jack said.

  ‘Just as long as he doesn’t expect me to treat him like a god,’ Maria whispered, then she stood back and spoke normally. ‘Anyway, now I see what it’s like to be in Jack Howard’s shoes. I just hope I haven’t taken the steam out of your sails.’

  ‘We haven’t exactly been sunbathing on the foredeck,’ Costas said. ‘Wait until you hear what we found yesterday.’

  Hiebermeyer looked increasingly exasperated, raising his eyes and bunching his fist in the air, then suddenly he listened intently on the phone and flashed a look of relief. He nodded towards Maria, then snapped the phone shut and walked over, shaking hands quickly with Jack and Costas. ‘I thought I’d be wasting your time.’ His voice was slightly hoarse with stress, his German accent more pronounced. ‘I couldn’t believe it. All I did was step out yesterday to call you. They weren’t going to let us back in.’

  ‘Can you finger anyone?’ Jack said. ‘I might be able to exert some pressure in the archaeological superintendency.’

  ‘It’s not the archaeologists who are the problem, it’s the site guards and whoever is topping up their wages. Whoever it is also pulls the strings at the top of the archaeological superintendency. They’re always apprehensive, clamped down, even some old colleagues I know personally, and sometimes there’s real fear in their eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it. I feel as if we’re walking on very thin ground.’