CORPS OF ROYAL ENGINEERS
178th TUNNELLING COMPANY
12 May 1942
Your Majesty,
During our excavations of Arrow Street an unusual chamber was found. It appears to be the holy chamber of the Altar. Photographs are enclosed.
The men who found it were duly executed.
Brigadier James Conn Jr
Chief Royal Engineer
Alby had not been in London when Jack and the others had gathered there with Iolanthe, so he hadn’t seen this document till now.
If he had been in London then, he would have spotted the telltale words right away: 178th tunnelling company and Arrow Street.
‘Oh, no way,’ Alby said to the empty room around him. ‘They spelt the street name wrong . . .’
He grabbed his iPhone and pulled up, of all things, some holiday snaps from his European vacation; the solo trip he’d taken on summer break during which he’d visited a bunch of European destinations: Venice, Rome, Paris and the Rock of Gibraltar.
Alby had loved the Rock.
He had marvelled at its sheer bulk—four hundred metres of towering solid rock rising up from the Mediterranean Sea—and its singular shape. Its western flank was gently slanted while its eastern face was almost perfectly vertical, giving it the shape of an enormous sundial.
Alby had also loved reading about its long and rich history.
Dangling off the bottom of Spain—in sight of Alfonso X’s summer palace in San Roque and about five days’ sail from Judea—looking out over the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa on the far shore, for five thousand years it had marked the end of the known world.
Over the millennia, it had been held by the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors and the Spanish, until finally, under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, it was granted to the British Crown in perpetuity.
To the fury of Spain, it remains British territory to this day, complete with British immigration personnel and passport kiosks at its little airport and land entry. Britain interprets the words in perpetuity literally.
While everyone had heard the phrase ‘as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar’, what few people knew was that the Rock of Gibraltar was not that solid at all.
It was honeycombed with tunnels: thirty-five miles of them. While many of the tunnels went back to Roman times, it was the British who had tunnelled the most beneath and through the Rock. The peak of their tunnelling activity had been during World War II when the prospect of the Nazis storming Gibraltar had been a very real one.
Alby brought up one of his photos: it showed him smiling as he stood in front of an underground street sign: AROW STREET.
AROW Street was a tunnel at Gibraltar, a long supply tunnel dug by the 178th Tunnelling Company of the Royal Engineers in 1942. It was named after the initials of the commanding officer of that company, Lt Colonel Arthur Robert Owen Williams—A.R.O.W.—hence the unusual spelling.
But somewhere along the way—maybe when the letter was retyped for presentation to the king—the word had been respelled…incorrectly. Only someone who had been there would know this.
Alby leaned back in his chair.
During the digging of AROW Street, the Royal Engineers had evidently come across a strange chamber, a chamber the Chief Royal Engineer called ‘the holy chamber of the Altar’. And then he’d executed the poor troops who’d found it.
An altar the size of a mountain.
The Rock of Gibraltar was almost five hundred metres tall . . .
. . . above the surface of the sea.
Alby scrambled to find some kind of cross-section of the Rock, showing its full shape both above and below the water’s surface.
He found one and he gasped.
The immense landform the world knew as the Rock of Gibraltar was literally the peak of a much larger mountain that plunged underwater for at least another kilometre. If, at some time, the Mediterranean Sea had been lower, or even dry, the Rock would have been a towering mountain dominating the area.
‘No wonder the Altar hasn’t been found,’ Alby said to himself. ‘It’s been covered over by the sea for thousands of years. The Rock of Gibraltar is the Altar of the Cosmos.’
SPHINX’S MANSION &
THE ANCIENT LIGHTHOUSE
The north coast of Morocco
Mediterranean Sea
1 December, 0700 hours
As the day of the ritual dawned, Lily awoke in a multi-levelled mansion looking out at a stunning and most unique view.
The mansion belonged to Sphinx and it sat in a commanding position atop a high cliff on the Moroccan coast, facing both north and west.
As for the view, it was unique because it took in two continents: Africa and Europe.
Sphinx’s luxurious home had been positioned—long, long ago—in such a way that it looked out over the Strait of Gibraltar, the gateway to the Mediterranean Sea, where Europe was separated from Africa by only ten miles of water.
The mansion had a helipad, a short airstrip, a six-car garage and, down at the water’s edge, a dock that housed Sphinx’s 130-foot cruiser.
There was one other feature of the remote mansion worth mentioning: standing a short way out from the high rocky cliff, rising out of the sea, was a stupendous tower of greystone easily three hundred feet high.
To the uninitiated, it appeared to be a natural rock formation, but to those with royal knowledge it would be instantly recognised as having been fashioned by hands of old from the curious substance known as liquid stone.
The towering finger of rock had been moulded into the shape of a lighthouse, with a lantern room at its summit. In the lantern room, a modern electric light rotated at night, keeping ships—and the curious—away from the shore.
Around noon, Sphinx sent for Lily and she joined him in the main lounge of his mansion.
She gazed out at the view: to her left was Morocco, the tip of Africa; to her right, Spain, the southern edge of Europe.
The mighty Rock of Gibraltar could be seen on the other side of the strait, even though it was ten miles distant. Its hazy bulk loomed on the horizon, half a kilometre high.
‘For nearly five thousand years, this strait was the most strategic body of water in the world,’ Sphinx said, standing beside Lily, also taking in the view. ‘It was only with the advent of flight and aerial warfare that its significance waned.’
Lily said nothing.
‘Today we call it the Strait of Gibraltar, but it has gone by many names. The Great Dam of the Ancients. The Gateway of Atlas. Atlantis.’
Lily cocked her head at the word.
The most famous lost city of them all.
‘People have the wrong idea about Atlantis,’ Sphinx added. ‘It wasn’t, as Plato wrote, an island city ruled by a proud and arrogant people that was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood because of its hubris.
‘It was a society of proud and arrogant people that managed a dam, the greatest dam ever built.
‘For it wasn’t one dam, it was actually five, a series of five cascading dams that stretched across this strait, holding the Atlantic Ocean at bay. Strangely enough, in the 1920s, a German architect named Herman Sörgel proposed building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar to dry up the Mediterranean and create more land. His five step-dams were surprisingly similar to the actual Atlantean Dam. I have a sketch of Sörgel’s dam here.’
Sphinx guided Lily to a framed picture on the wall of the lounge.
Lily peered at the image.
She saw five dams spanning the Strait as broad step-like weirs. At the bottom right-hand corner of the image, she saw the Rock of Gibraltar with its massive underwater bulk exposed.
The German architect’s concept was a project of mind-boggling scale. If the Atlantean dams had been anything like it, then they must have been simply astonishing.
‘But then came the day the top two dams cracked in their middles and the ocean exploded through their walls, flooding the Mediterranean and creating the twin myths of the end of Atlantis and of the Great Flood that is found in every major religion on Earth.’
‘When exactly was that?’ Lily asked. ‘Atlantis myths talk of the Atlanteans lording over Egypt and Athens.’
Sphinx shrugged. ‘Best guess? Around 12,000 years ago. Stone sampling dates it to around the same time as the carving of the Great Sphinx in 10,000 B.C.E.’
Lily turned to face him. ‘I was told that you were the guardian of the City of Atlas. Doesn’t that mean you’re supposed to live in its watchtower?’
‘It does.’
Lily looked at the mansion around her again. Her eyes landed on the stone lighthouse outside.
‘This is the watchtower?’ she said. ‘This mansion is the entrance to Atlantis?’
Sphinx smiled, his pale eyes shining.
‘My dear girl, this mansion and its lighthouse, as they say, are but the tip of the iceberg.’
As one would expect of a man as wealthy and aristocratic as Sphinx, his home was both luxurious yet understated.
The floors were of Italian marble, the décor was from Paris and the artwork hanging on the walls would have been the envy of any museum: Rembrandts, Picassos, original sketches by Michelangelo, and not a few ancient artefacts including a glorious fifteen-foot-tall sandstone sphinx that looked like an exact replica of the Great Sphinx at Giza.
On one wide marble pedestal stood four scale models made from greystone.
Three stood together.
The first looked like a funnel; the second resembled a round-sided pyramid pressed up against the base of a square mountain; and the third, an hourglass. All three were intricate in their details: they were dotted with tiny staircases and swooping bridges.
Lily recalled the symbols she had seen representing the three secret cities:
These models were three-dimensional representations of them.
‘The three cities,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Sphinx said. ‘Thule, Ra and Atlas.’
The fourth model was different.
It was much larger than the models of the three secret cities, easily four times their size.
It was a sharp, triangular blade of rock, spiking into the air. It looked like a right-angled triangle, with one sloping side and one vertical side. A flat niche made a slight indent in the vertical side.
‘What is that one?’ Lily asked.
‘The Altar of the Cosmos,’ Sphinx said. ‘Like Lord Hades’s mountain-palace in the Underworld, the entire mountain has special properties. It is not one of the five iron mountains, although many over the centuries have mistakenly thought it was.’
‘It must be enormous . . .’ Lily said. ‘Why haven’t I seen it before?’
Sphinx gave her a knowing smile. ‘You have seen it. It hides in plain sight.’
He nodded at the view . . . at the Rock of Gibraltar on the far side of the Strait.
Lily looked from the model to the Rock: they were the same.
‘The Rock is the Altar of the Cosmos . . .’ she whispered.
‘Indeed it is.’
Sphinx and Lily sat down for lunch on a broad balcony overlooking the view.
It was a pleasant North African afternoon, warm and dry. On any other occasion, Lily thought, it would have been a postcard moment.
But the fact that Sphinx had brought her here against her will gave it an entirely different feel. She had goosebumps on her arms and neck. Her skin was literally crawling, she was so uncomfortable.
A silent butler attended to their every need: food, a glass of thousand-dollar Spanish wine for Sphinx, water for Lily.
As they ate, Sphinx occasionally glanced at a laptop beside him.
Then he said softly, ‘I knew your father, you know.’
Lily’s brow furrowed, confused. So far as she knew, Jack and Sphinx had never crossed paths. ‘How?’
‘I’m sorry, I should be more specific,’ Sphinx said. ‘Your real father. Your birth father. The previous Oracle of Siwa. I was actually with him on the day of your birth, twenty years ago.’
The day of her birth.
Lily had heard about it many times in her youth.
Kidnapped by a gang of fanatical Catholic priests led by Father Francisco del Piero, her mother—a sweet, gentle, unmarried woman named Malena—had been taken to a sacred volcano in Uganda.
There, in a holy chamber ringed by lava, by the light of a beam of noonday sunlight and to the beat of drums, surrounded by masked priests and armed paratroopers, Malena had given birth to Lily’s twin brother, Alexander, and in the doing, had tragically died.
The priests didn’t care for Malena one bit. They swept out of the chamber with their prize, Alexander, the new Oracle.
Moments later, Jack West Jr and his friend, Wizard, had entered the chamber. Jack had wept for Malena; he had promised to keep her safe and he’d failed.
And then, as he’d slumped beside her and touched her belly, he’d felt the kick.
Thus Lily had been born—extraordinarily, by Caesarean section, in an impromptu operation performed by Wizard and Jack, lifted from the dead body of her mother—an act unknown to the men who had abducted her brother.
Lily had seen pictures of her mother in happier times. She had been young and beautiful, with kind, innocent eyes.
But Lily had not known her father.
By all accounts, he had not been gentle or innocent.
He’d been a spoilt petulant drunk. His status as the Oracle had turned him into an entitled ass. He had died two months after Lily’s birth in what had been described to her as a ‘drunken accident’.
‘It’s strange how lives cross,’ Sphinx said. ‘Jack West was with your mother on the day of your birth and I was with your father. Getting drunk at a casino in Monaco with two-thousand-dollar-an-hour prostitutes on our laps.’
Lily bit her lip. While she didn’t like being here, she was curious now. ‘I was told he died soon after I was born in a “drunken accident”. Is that what really happened?’
‘It was a bar fight, yes,’ Sphinx said. ‘In a grubby bar near Wembley after the Cup final. Your father was drunk and dressed in the wrong team’s colours. He propositioned another man’s wife and the fellow—a huge bald ironworker—objected. Milo called him an uneducated peasant and the man headbutted him. Killed him with a single blow.’
Sphinx looked away.
‘But that’s not really right, is it? It was his gift that killed him.’
Lily remained silent; let him go on.
‘A man needs a purpose in life, a goal. Your father’s name was Milo Omari. Milo meaning grace, and Omari being the Egyptian name for one of high birth. Grace, though, was not his strong suit.
‘Like you, he was born with the ability to read the mysterious Word of Thoth. This gave him great status in the world of the four kingdoms. He was feted in palaces, toasted at dinners. But he never had to work a day in his life and it made him a spoilt man-child. Boredom led him to gambling, whorehouses and alcohol, and alcohol made him violent. He beat women, especially the prostitutes he paid for. I had to intervene a couple of times.’
Lily said quickly, ‘Did he love my mother?’
‘No,’ Sphinx said firmly. ‘Not at all. She was a means to an end.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Sphinx explained. ‘Milo was entirely uninterested in having children, until he discovered the Oracle’s other purpose. I told him that that . . . event . . . may not even happen in his lifetime, but he
would not be swayed. And so he quickly seduced Malena—a sweet impressionable maid on his household staff—and got her pregnant. His sole goal: to create a new Oracle who would take his place on the Altar of the Cosmos if it became required.’
Lily felt a chill crawl up her spine.
‘What’s this other purpose of the Oracle?’ she asked cautiously.
‘That,’ Sphinx smiled, ‘is for Kings’ Eyes Only, and you and I are not kings.’
Sphinx shrugged. ‘Your adopted father, however, is the polar opposite of your birth father. Captain West is a most impressive man. A warrior foretold in prophecy and winner of the Great Games—’
‘He’s also pretty good at Scrabble and loves animals,’ Lily said. ‘But his taste in music stinks.’
Sphinx caught himself, chastened.
‘He raised you and you love him.’
‘Best dad in the world. And he’s got the t-shirt to prove it.’
‘He has also altered history,’ Sphinx said. ‘Although to correct myself, to be perfectly accurate, it was not your father who won the Great Games, it was my cousin, King Orlando.’
‘My dad did all the work.’
‘Yet it was Orlando, as his sponsor, who was to receive the prize for winning. And by depriving Orlando of his due reward, your father has created a unique situation whereby the entire world is now there for anyone willing to seize it.’
Sphinx fell silent for a moment.
‘My own father was not so impressive,’ he said softly.
Lily waited for what came next.
‘As you may know, Orlando is my cousin,’ Sphinx said. ‘Our fathers were brothers. In fact, my father was his father’s older brother.’
Sphinx paused, letting the fact sink in.
Lily got it straight away. ‘But that would mean . . .’
‘That’s correct,’ Sphinx said. ‘My father was supposed to be the King of Land. But he was a timid man, anxious, worried by the slightest thing, woefully indecisive. After the death of Carnivore—who was childless—my father was next in line for the throne.
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