The Mask of Troy

by David Gibbins

  Everyone in the room was silent, riveted. Jack clicked again, and the image changed to a page of ancient manuscript, showing lines of precise writing, many of the letters recognizably Greek. ‘This was found three months ago in the lost library of the Roman emperor Claudius at Herculaneum, in Italy. Jeremy Haverstock’s been in charge of the restoration work. As each new text is unrolled and put through X-ray fluorescence, he’s sending the digital images to Professor Dillen at Cambridge for translation. This one had Dillen speechless. In his view it’s the most important new discovery of an ancient text ever, full stop. He thinks it’s a previously unknown verse by Homer, possibly containing eyewitness details of the end of Troy. That makes it a truly fantastic find for anyone interested in the Trojan War. He thinks it’s a lost part of the Trojan epic cycle called the Ilioupersis, meaning the destruction of Troy. And this particular image shows the lines of verse that really excited me.’ He pulled out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it. ‘Here’s Dillen’s translation.’

  Look closely now: far out to sea

  From the isle of Tenedos

  The lion-prowed ship of the King of Mycenae

  Mast raised, sail spread, wind-filled,

  Dark wave singing loudly about the stern

  Brings tidings of home-strife

  To Agamemnon, unheeding, sole of purpose, back-turned, war-bent.

  Too late. Already I feel it. The west wind sharpens.

  Jack looked up. Everyone was staring at him, stunned. Costas raised his hand. ‘If that’s the ship we’re after, I thought galleys didn’t sink. No cargo, limited ballast. Wrecked galleys disperse as flotsam. That’s why we hardly ever find them.’

  Jack nodded. ‘But this time it’s different. Wait for the next two lines, the lines that put the fire under me.’ He recited from memory:

  The ship, booty-laden, weighed down with gold,

  Drives too hard down falling waves, and is no more.

  There was a collective gasp. ‘ “Weighed down with gold”,’ one of the crewmen repeated, astonished. ‘What exactly does that mean? What are we looking for?’

  Jack glanced at his watch. ‘First, Dr Lanowski.’

  The crewman kept his hand up. ‘But what are our chances?’

  Jack looked at the man, a new member of the submersibles team. He paused, then replied. ‘If you let your imagination lead you, then everything can lock together. You have to take a gamble, and believe in yourself. And this place, the Trojan War, a shipwreck of Agamemnon? Believing all that’s a big leap of faith, but it’s one I’ve taken. And I know that if I’m on the wrong track, one of you will let me know. Our chances? I think this is as good as it gets.’

  ‘With a small dose of luck,’ Costas murmured.

  Jack tapped his watch. ‘And now for some hard science.’ He gestured to Lanowski, and then quickly walked over and sat beside Costas. ‘Here goes,’ Costas whispered to him.

  Lanowski got up, dumped his overhead sheets on the table and turned round, his eyes feverish with excitement. He cleared his throat. ‘Detailed analysis of air-gun lithoseismic profiles in the north Aegean basin shows fault structures trending north-east to south-west, with the dominant structure apparently an extension of the North Anatolian fault. That’s the one across northern Turkey that causes all the earthquakes.’ He peered over his glasses at the audience, then wiped the sweat off his forehead. He gave a lopsided grin. ‘Y’all with me?’

  ‘So far so good,’ Costas whispered to Jack. ‘Didn’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘Wait for it,’ Jack whispered back.

  ‘Y’all with me? What’s with that?’ Costas whispered.

  ‘My fault, I think,’ Jack whispered. ‘Told him to be jokey.’

  Lanowski cleared his throat again, and aimed a laser pointer at the screen. ‘This is the tectonic map superimposed on the bathymetric map. As you can see, we’re over the continental platform, here.’ He aimed the pointer down. ‘The platform shows no significant internal deformation, but the slopes on the edge are shaped by marginal faults. As you can see, within the basin, higher vertical throws occur on marginal faults bordering the intermediate horst structure, with pronounced shear zones.’

  Costas nudged Jack. ‘Oh-oh.’

  Lanowski peered over his glasses again. He glared at Costas, then spoke deliberately slowly. ‘An angular unconformity occurs within the Plio-Pleistocene sequence linked to uplifted and tilted neotectonic blocks and anticlinal hinges.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Costas whispered.

  Jack shot his hand up. ‘Jacob, that puts us in the picture brilliantly. What you’re saying is that we’re not above fault structures here, but just north-west of us is an active zone that might produce localized instability.’

  Lanowski looked pleased. ‘You got it. You understood. The structural architecture shows a complex strike-slip zone, on a dextral north-east to south-west line.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Jack said, getting up quickly when he saw Lanowski picking up and shuffling his overhead transparency sheets. ‘Earthquakes. That’s what you mean. Earthquakes. And what we really want to know is, could that have happened here in 1200 BC? Enough to sink a ship?’

  Lanowski held up a transparency sheet. ‘I’ve got a whole sequence here modelling the subduction and strike-slip zones. I had to draw them by hand. It was too complex for the computer.’

  ‘Too complex for the computer,’ Costas whispered, putting his head in his hands.

  Jack looked around. ‘Anyone wants to go down to Dr Lanowski’s lab afterwards for a full exposition, queue up at the end of the briefing. I won’t be far behind.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘Right now, we’ve only got five minutes. I know you’re bursting to tell us. Your main discovery. What you were so excited about earlier.’

  Lanowski looked defiant for a moment, holding his sheet covered with a mass of red scribbles, then he sighed, nodded and put it down. He clicked the laptop, changing the screen to a new map. ‘Okay. This is a bathymetric and topographical map showing the Troad, the peninsula of Troy. You can see the Dardanelles to the north bounded by the southern edge of the Gallipoli peninsula, and to the west the little island of Tenedos and our location. What I want you to focus on is the plain in front of Troy, to the north-west, what Homer called the plain of Ilion. It’s an alluvial plain, watered by the river the ancients called the Scamander. Here’s what we think it looked like three thousand years ago.’ He clicked again, and the image changed dramatically, showing the shoreline much closer to Troy, in the shape of a basin.

  Jack aimed his own laser pointer at the shoreline close to the citadel. ‘The site of our excavation fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Right,’ Lanowski said. ‘You may think it looks like the ideal harbour, protected and close to the walls of the citadel, but you’d be wrong. The actual harbour of Troy was several kilometres to the west, on the Aegean coast south of the entrance to the Dardanelles, here.’ He pointed to it. ‘There were two reasons for this. One, the alluvial plain of the Scamander opens out on to the Dardanelles, not on to the Aegean Sea. Sailing ships coming up from Greece or Egypt would have had a hell of a time beating up against the current coming out of the Dardanelles. Two, the floodplain would have been shallow, only a couple of metres deep. Too shallow for a fully laden merchant ship.’

  ‘But deep enough for a rowed galley,’ Jack said.

  ‘And rowed galleys could easily have made their way around the headland into the Dardanelles,’ Lanowski added, stumbling over the words in his excitement.

  ‘You’re talking about the ships of the Greeks, the ships of Agamemnon?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Bingo,’ Lanowski said awkwardly, looking at Jack and then at Costas, letting out a nervous laugh. He was flushed with excitement, and his hands were shaking slightly as he shuffled his notes. ‘You asked me to give a rundown of the sedimentology. Here goes.’ He clicked the computer again, and the same map outline remained on the screen but with different colours and textures. He cleared hi
s throat. ‘The sedimentary strata begin at the bottom with Eocene turbidites and limestones, continue upward with Oligocene-Lower Miocene detritial rocks and andesitic volcanoclastics, and end with loosely consolidated sandstones of the Upper Miocene-Pliocene. Each depositional sequence consists of a lower mainly parallel-stratified sub-unit, and an upper oblique to sigmoid-oblique pro-graded sub-unit. Needless to say.’

  Costas slumped back and shut his eyes, and the others looked on in various attitudes of stunned silence. Jack nodded sagely, glancing around. ‘The questions I asked of Dr Lanowski were, first, the sedimentary characteristics of a possible shipwreck site beneath us, and, second, any abnormalities in the plain of Troy that might be pinned to the late Bronze Age.’ He nodded towards Lanowski. ‘Jacob? In layman’s terms? Please?’

  Lanowski took a deep breath. ‘Okay. The first one’s easy. There are thick silt deposits below us from the Dardanelles outflow. The downside is, any ancient shipwreck’s likely to be deeply buried. The plus is, buried wrecks can be spectacularly well-preserved. There’s all the usual scope for localized current variation, scouring channels in the sea bed, exposing strata that have been buried for millennia. That seems to account for the exceptional preservation of our Byzantine shipwreck yesterday. There’s lots of modern debris down there, especially from the 1915 Gallipolli campaign. Modern wrecks can create an obstruction in the current causing scour channels, revealing older deposits. That could be the case here.’

  ‘Okay. Excellent. And the plain of Troy?’

  ‘I’m basing it on your work fifteen years ago. Most of the sediment samples show exactly what you’d expect, typical alluvial outflow from the surrounding land and mountains, increasing as you get into the classical Greek period as a result of deforestation. But the really fascinating thing is the sample you took from the Bronze Age beach deposit. One of the strangest discoveries you made was realizing that those fragments of ship timbers were inland from their stone anchors. That’s what really piqued my interest. You may not believe this, but at Princeton and then Oxford I was on the college rowing team, and when a reconstructed Greek trireme was first trialled in Athens in the eighties I went along as a volunteer. It was a long time ago and I’m a little out of shape now, but I do know a bit about galleys and how you beach them. You do not beach them like that.’

  Costas whistled. Jack had not known, but he nodded. ‘You mean you row hard into the beach, and then take out the anchor and carry it forward.’

  ‘You didn’t find enough timber to be certain of the orientation, but I’ll wager those ships you found were back to front, with their sterns facing the shoreline. As if they’d been picked up and blown inland, and swung round on their anchor chains.’

  ‘And the sedimentology?’ Jack said. ‘What does that say?’

  ‘It’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.’ The atmosphere in the room was suddenly electric, with all eyes on Lanowski. He seemed about to burst with excitement. ‘Thank God for your careful excavation, Jack. In fact, it was Costas who took the samples. They’ve got his handwriting on them. I found them in the excavation archive, unopened.’

  ‘I remember,’ Costas said, leaning forward, staring at Lanowski intently. ‘I saw it one morning, after there’d been rain. We’d exposed what we thought was the level of the Bronze Age beach. It looked as if it was streaked, with lines of sediment coming up the beach that were denser than the underlying alluvial sediment, retaining the rainwater longer.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Lanowski said, more confidently. ‘That’s because it was different. It was offshore sediment. Sediment that had been swept up from the north Aegean basin. Swept up the very day the ships were thrown violently forward.’ He leaned back triumphantly with one elbow against the wall, swept his hair back over his forehead and beamed at Jack, nodding.

  One of the oceanographers in the front row put up her hand, a Turkish woman who had worked closely with Lanowski in the CGI lab. ‘What about this?’ she said. ‘You get an earthquake out in the north Aegean basin, the kind of thing that must have caused those fault lines. The quake sinks the ship, as described in the poem. Then the same event, maybe an aftershock or a secondary quake, causes a water surge that rises up the slope into the Dardanelles, travels over the continental shelf and hits the lagoon where the plain of Troy now lies. It’s so shallow that the surge rises up and travels far inland, as far as the walls of Troy, with enough force to lift some of the beached ships up and drive them forward.’

  ‘You’re talking about a tsunami,’ Costas murmured.

  There was a murmur from the audience. Captain Scott Macalister, the Canadian ship’s master, a genial bearded man wearing tropical whites, put up his hand and spoke. ‘A point of interest. Tsunamis and quakes are often accompanied by weather disturbance. There’s an effect on atmospheric pressure, especially when there are frequent aftershocks. I’ve been in the western Pacific when this has happened. So I’m imagining a terrifying storm accompanying the tsunami, black clouds, thunder and lightning, the waves being whipped up to whitecaps.’

  ‘Horses,’ Lanowski said, chuckling to himself. ‘Horses.’

  ‘What?’ Jack asked hesitantly. Costas gave him an alarmed look.

  ‘Horses.’ Lanowski had a mad glint in his eyes. He shook his head, laughed out loud, then murmured to himself, ‘Horses.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jack took him firmly by the shoulders and steered him back to his seat, sitting him down. He looked at everyone else. ‘I think that about does it. I’d like to thank you all very much. That’s been fantastically interesting. It’s time to get cracking.’ He kept his hands firmly on Lanowski’s shoulders. ‘And I’d especially like to thank Dr Lanowski. He’s killed two birds with one stone. He’s explained how there could be an ancient galley wreck out here, how the weather could have caused a ship to drive into the sea bed, as in the poem. And he’s explained how the Greeks may have reached the walls of Troy. Ours is a joint project, at sea and on land, and we’ve just seen how hard science can knit it all beautifully together. Brilliant. Thank you.’

  ‘Hear hear,’ Macalister said. Everyone rose from their chairs and filed out. Jack looked down at Lanowski. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I’m not mad, you know.’ Lanowski spoke quietly, his face now pale. ‘I studied ancient Greek at school. That’s what I was on about. Horses. Ippoi. That’s what the Greeks called waves, whitecaps. And it’s what they called ships. Horses.’

  ‘Horses,’ Jack repeated quietly, nodding slowly. Horses.

  ‘Horses, being driven towards the walls of Troy.’ Lanowski began muttering to himself again. Costas passed over the pile of overhead sheets and placed them firmly in Lanowski’s hands, raising him up and steering him towards the door. They watched him shuffle out, still muttering and chuckling to himself.

  Costas shook his head. ‘A genius, but crazy. You handled that well.’

  ‘Maybe not so crazy,’ Jack replied quietly. Horses. There was something there, but he couldn’t quite pin it down. Something about Homer. Something probably glaringly obvious. He put it away in his mind and looked at Costas, shaking his head. ‘And imagine him rowing.’

  Costas put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘Never second-guess anyone around here. I’ll just barge my way through the queue waiting to hear his detailed lecture. I’ll be back in a moment. We’ve got twenty minutes before kitting up. There’re a few things you need to explain to me.’

  6

  Jack watched Costas go, then took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. That had been a hell of a prep talk. He hoped to God he was right. Every time he led his crew on a chase like this it was a gamble. He Every time he led his crew on a chase like this it was a gamble. He was glad Professor Dillen had not been in the audience. Dillen might have taken him down a notch or two. But then he remembered the thrill in the professor’s voice when he had spoken over the phone of the Ilioupersis discovery, as if his entire career had found its culmination. And he remembered Dillen taking him aside at the end of his first year as an u
ndergraduate, telling him that he had seen a few others with the same passion as Jack, but none with the ability to seek out and empathize with individuals in the past, to understand what motivated them, to ally his own quest with theirs. Jack had seen something in Dillen too, in the countless hours he had spent watching him translate and analyse Homer, something more than just declaiming words from the past. It was as if Dillen inhabited the imagination of the poet, and knew Homer emotionally, not just intellectually. Jack had promised Dillen that one day they would combine to investigate a moment in history that drew on both of their talents, somewhere at a critical juncture where myth and history met. He was sure of one thing. Flying Dillen from retirement to join the excavation team at Troy had been one of the best things he had ever done.

  He stared through the open doorway at the salt-streaked window and the Turkish shoreline beyond, a hazy outline of low sandy cliffs flecked with spray. They were over there, Dillen, Hiebermeyer, the others, at fabled Troy, where the tendrils of fact and legend seemed forever to dance around each other, sometimes drawn close by a new discovery, by a fresh wave of belief, but then as quickly blown apart by doubt and uncertainty. Jack knew that history was sometimes best left that way, where the reality of events was unclear even to those who witnessed them. But Troy seemed to demand more than that. There had been a darkness here, a truth about the human condition that had lured people for generations, since archaeology was in its infancy. Jack remembered one of the first things Dillen had taught him. History was about individuals, about individual people making decisions. The cold facts of history, the artefacts that Jack cherished, were his key to getting into their minds. And he knew it was not gods who had set the Trojan War in motion, it was men. One man above all others.