The Arkana Mysteries Boxed Set

by N. S. Wikarski

  The scrivener gave a knowing smile. “As I expected. None of you has a particularly strong knowledge of the area, hence the visual aid.” He rose to dim the overhead lights then returned to his seat and tapped a few keys on his keyboard.

  The monitor on the front of the table sprang to life and displayed a map. Griffin assumed full lecture mode. “Malta is the main island in an archipelago that stretches from just south of the island of Sicily to Tunisia on the North African coast.”

  Cassie squinted. “I don’t see it.”

  Griffin moved his mouse pointer over the location.

  “What, you mean that tiny little speck out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “The very same,” Griffin concurred. “It fits our riddle rather well. If one were to board a ship and head west from Turkey, one would run directly into it.”

  “In twelve days?” Erik challenged.

  Griffin sighed. “I’m not as confident of the timing as I am of the location.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to run into Sicily instead?” Cassie asked. “It’s a much bigger target.”

  “Ah, but Malta is unique,” Griffin countered. “It has some distinctive features which would have made it quite appealing to the Minoans in search of a place to bury the Bones of the Mother. The Malta archipelago was once populated by a matristic civilization. As is true of all matristic societies, it was peaceful. No evidence of weaponry, no hilltop fortifications, no signs of violent death anywhere. The inhabitants also demonstrated a deep reverence for the mother goddess. Malta and its nearest neighbor, Gozo, contain the oldest known standing stone temples in the world.”

  He switched to another image which displayed a sculpture of the lower half of a skirted human figure. The legs were heavy and egg-shaped, completely out of proportion to the tiny feet which supported them. “This is a carving of the principal deity of the culture. She was found in the Tarxien sanctuary, and her image must have originally stood almost ten feet high.”

  “And I thought that little sculpture of the lady we saw in Turkey was on the hefty side. Jeez, this one must weigh a ton.” Cassie said.

  “Quite literally,” Griffin agreed. “Her massive size was intended to express the immensity of creation. Here’s another such depiction.” The scrivener pressed his keyboard, and a new image appeared on the screen. It was a sculpture of a very rotund woman reclining on her side in an attitude of sleep. “This very famous sculpture is known as ‘The Sleeping Lady.’ She was found in the Hypogeum at Hal-Saflieni.”

  “What’s a hypogeum?” Erik asked.

  “An underground temple. In fact, Hal Saflieni is the oldest prehistoric underground temple found anywhere on the planet. It subsequently also served as a necropolis to house the bones of the dead. This statue was found in its main chamber, and the Sleeping Lady now reposes in the Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. Sculptures much like her can be found throughout the temples and cemeteries on both islands.”

  “Temples and cemeteries plural?” Erik asked guardedly.

  Griffin nodded. “Yes. There are thirty-four temples on Malta and another nine on Gozo. They all follow the same general design. Here’s an example.”

  He switched to a new image. It appeared to be an overhead view of a series of sunken chambers all adjoining each other. The caption on the screen read “Ggantija.” Griffin repeated the word aloud, pronouncing it “Jen-ti-ya.”

  “This temple is located on the island of Gozo. In Maltese, the name means ‘Giant’s Tower.’ Local legend has it that the structure was built by a female giant to be used as a place of worship. Note the shape of the temple. It consists of five apses.”

  “Five what?” Cassie asked, not sure she had heard him right.

  “Apses. An apse is a semi-circular recess. The way in which the five conjoin each other might remind one of a five-petaled cloverleaf or perhaps a highly stylized version of a human body. The lobe at the top represents the head, the two lobes in the middle are the arms, and the bottom two lobes the legs. The shape of each appendage could be described as egg-shaped or kidney-shaped if you will. It’s all in keeping with the general Maltese motif of full-bodied, rounded figures—like the half statue you’ve just seen.”

  “What’s that next to it?” Maddie asked, referring to another structure adjacent to the temple.

  “Maltese temples are usually constructed in pairs, one larger and one smaller,” Griffin replied. “They are also often differentiated by the type of stone used in construction. One darker and the other lighter. Some archaeologists have speculated that this difference in color is meant to indicate the double-goddess imagery of a mother-daughter divinity. Another theory holds that the larger of the two temples has to do with death and regeneration and the smaller with birth.”

  “When were all these built?” Cassie asked.

  Griffin paused before answering. “That’s an exceedingly interesting question. Conventional wisdom holds that the temples were constructed around 3500 BCE by tribes emigrating from Sicily. But, as is so often the case, conventional wisdom is wrong.”

  “You mean to say these temples are older than that?” Maddie sounded surprised.

  “Quite a bit older, I dare say,” the scrivener replied. “The evidence can be found in another temple on the larger island of Malta.” The screen displayed a new name. “Mnajdra.”

  “Somebody should have told those people to buy more vowels,” Cassie noted. “How the heck would you pronounce that?”

  “Eem-na-eed-ra.”

  “It still sounds strange.”

  “That’s because you’re used to pronouncing words which come from Indo-European languages—overlord languages. Maltese is not. Its roots are Semitic. Fortunately for all of us, English is the other official language of the islands.”

  “That’s a relief,” Erik said.

  Griffin forged ahead. “As I was saying, the evidence for the age of the temple comes from some interesting astronomical alignments which can still be observed there. The main entrance to Mnajdra faces east. During the spring and autumn equinoxes when days and nights are of equal length, the first rays of the sun fall on a stone slab at the rear wall of the second apse. During the winter and summer solstices when days are shortest and longest respectively, the sun illuminates the edges of two pillars on either side of the passageway connecting the main chambers.”

  “But what about precession?” Cassie objected. “After what we went through in Turkey to figure out when the sun was supposed to hit those megaliths, wouldn’t the same rule apply here? I mean, the sun can’t be shining on the same spot where it would have been when the temples were first built.”

  A hush fell over the room.

  “Good goddess!” Griffin exclaimed.

  “I don’t believe it,” Erik added.

  Cassie looked around at her companions in alarm. “What. What’d I say?”

  They all burst out laughing at her confusion.

  “You said precisely the right thing, dear girl.” Griffin beamed at her. “Well done!” He turned to the security coordinator. “Erik, I forbid you to make any disparaging remarks in future about Cassie’s intellect.”

  Erik rolled his eyes. “Like I’m the only one who thought it.” Then he smiled ruefully at the pythia. “She can be taught after all.”

  “I can catch on pretty quickly when I want to,” Cassie countered. “Remember how fast I learned that roundhouse kick? Wanna see it again?”

  Maddie intervened. “Do I have to separate you two?”

  “Nope,” Erik replied. “I’m done mocking. After her precession comment, she’s shut me up for good.”

  “If only that were true,” Cassie murmured under her breath.

  “Let’s return to the interesting topic we were discussing, shall we?” Griffin flipped to another image which showed the interior of the Mnajdra temple. “As Cassie so astutely pointed out, the earth’s wobble would have slightly changed the position at which the sun�
�s rays would have struck the inside of the temple. If one calculates backwards for the past 17,000 years, there are only two dates which would allow the sun’s light to illuminate the spot intended. The first date would have occurred in 3700 BCE and the other in 10205 BCE.”

  Maddie shrugged. “I don’t see the big deal. If the current theory is that the temples were built around 3500 BCE, whoever made that guesstimate was only off by a couple of centuries.”

  “On the contrary,” Griffin replied. “I would argue that the correct date of construction is the earlier of the two—the eleventh millennium BCE.”

  “But that’s just crazy,” the operations director countered. “Nobody was building anything this big way back then.”

  “What about that other place in Turkey,” Cassie piped up. “The one you mentioned when we were at Catal Huyuk. I can’t remember the name—but it was a lot older, wasn’t it?”

  Griffin’s mouth hung open in surprise for several seconds before he could speak. “This is indeed a day of wonders!”

  “Well I’ll be...,” Erik whispered in amazement.

  “Our pythia is quite correct,” the scrivener averred. “The temple at Gobekli Tepe which was recently unearthed on the Turkish-Syrian border is assumed to have been built around 9000 BCE. Its ancient origin is by no means unique. The Sphinx which guards the great pyramid at Giza is another example. Even as we speak, a controversy is raging as to its actual construction date, but evidence suggests a timeframe of 10000 BCE.”

  “But there’s nothing here to prove that the Maltese temples are that old,” Maddie objected.

  “Ah, but there is,” Griffin replied. He switched to a new image. It displayed a paved path and a stone archway overgrown with greenery. The image was hazy and suffused with a bluish tint.

  “Is that fog?” Maddie asked uncertainly.

  “It’s ocean water,” the scrivener replied. “The structure you’re seeing is a Maltese temple known as Gebel Gol-Bahar. It was discovered three miles off the coast of the island.”

  “You mean it sank?” Cassie gasped.

  “No, the structure is perfectly intact and rests on a plateau. The more likely explanation is that it was flooded.”

  “Flooded!” his audience said in unison.

  “Quite. The temple shows exactly the same design characteristics as the other structures on the island—the same eastern astronomical orientation as well. The only problem is that it lies twenty-six feet below sea level.”

  “Wait a minute!” Cassie exclaimed. “It must have been submerged when the Black Sea flooded. All that water rushing through the Bosporus had to come from somewhere to the west, didn’t it?” She spun around in her chair to look questioningly at Griffin.

  Even in the dimly-lit room, his approving smile was apparent. “You’re doing splendidly. Why don’t you finish explaining it to them?”

  She turned back to face her colleagues, both of whom were frowning skeptically. “It’s a domino effect. At the end of the last ice age, there was a meltdown of a gigantic sheet of ice that covered almost half of the northern hemisphere. It stands to reason that if an ice cube that big was dumping water into the Atlantic and raising the world’s ocean levels then the overflow had to go somewhere. First, it would have spilled into the Mediterranean. After that, it would have run over into the Black Sea. Before 5600 BCE, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake—after that, not so much.”

  Addressing Griffin, Maddie asked, “So you mean to say that sea level in the Mediterranean could have been fifty to a hundred feet lower than it is now?”

  “Not a mere hundred feet lower,” the scrivener replied. “About five million years ago the sea dried out entirely. The salt beds on the sea floor confirm it. Water levels in the Mediterranean have fluctuated dramatically in the time since. The western Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic when sea levels fell lower than the straits of Gibraltar. Similarly, the eastern Mediterranean may also have been cut off from the western portion of the sea when the strait of Sicily was above sea level.”

  “You’re talking about land bridges, man.” Erik sounded intrigued. “If the water level sank low enough, then Malta and the rest of the islands in the chain might have created a land bridge connecting Africa with Europe. From Tunisia through Malta and Sicily to Italy.”

  “We have ample evidence to support that theory in the fossil record,” Griffin replied. “The skeletons of animals which shouldn’t have existed in that part of the world have been found on Malta. Another land bridge existed at the Straits of Gibraltar, and at one time Great Britain was connected to Europe through a land bridge spanning the English Channel. While I’m not suggesting that the Mediterranean dried up completely after the last glacial maximum, I do believe that water levels may have been quite a bit lower than we have all been led to believe.”

  “So, the way Malta looks today is just the tip of the iceberg,” Cassie murmured half to herself.

  “Tip of the mountain, at any rate,” Griffin agreed. “The land mass of the Malta archipelago would have been much greater at one time. There would have been settlements scattered all about in low-lying areas.”

  “Anybody who liked coastal living would have gotten wiped out during the flood,” Cassie observed.

  “And not merely on Malta,” Griffin added. “There might have been as many as three super-floods while the glaciers were melting. Numerous coastal areas and land bridges around the planet may have been submerged. We’re only just now discovering underwater roads and buildings where there should be none. Damsay in the Orkney Islands, Yonaguni-Jima in Japan, an entire city twelve miles out in the Gulf of Khambat, not to mention the ancient structure buried under the ice cap in Antarctica. Scholars are at a loss to explain these phenomena because no one is considering the possibility of catastrophic global flooding.”

  “I guess disaster movies aren’t so far-fetched after all,” Cassie said half to herself.

  “If we agree that the astronomical alignment of Mnajdra implies a construction date around 10200 BCE, then the only subsequent flood powerful enough to submerge part of the island would have occurred around 5600 BCE—the same deluge which created the Black Sea. It may, in fact, be the same flood which buried the temple at Gobekli Tepe if the waters of the Mediterranean temporarily rose high enough.”

  “Maybe we should think about setting up some underwater troves,” Maddie said dryly.

  “The suggestion is less fanciful than you imagine,” Griffin countered. “We’ve recently developed technology sensitive enough to detect these underwater structures. All of them lend credence to a matristic civilization which once spanned the globe. We will need to address these finds sooner or later.”

  “I vote for later,” the operations director replied. “Right now, we’ve got more urgent issues on the table. Like what this slideshow has to do with the search for the Bones of the Mother.” Maddie’s comment brought them abruptly back to the present.

  Griffin switched off the computer and raised the lights. “Since the Minoans have already shown a predilection for megaliths as astronomical markers, it seems reasonable that they may have buried their next relic on Malta or one of the neighboring islands.”

  “I’m with you so far,” Erik agreed. “But that’s around forty temples. How do we know which one to check?”

  “It just so happens we’ve quite recently established a trove on Malta.”

  “You mean there wasn’t one there already?” Cassie was surprised. “With all the goddess artifacts that have been found on the island?”

  “The Etruscan trove keeper used to manage it,” Maddie said, “but the volume of artifacts discovered lately has forced us to give it its own trove designation. The keeper is kind of new, so I don’t know how much help she’ll be able to give.”

  “Well, at least it’s a place to start,” Erik offered hopefully.

  “And you’ll need to get started PDQ,” the operations director added.

 
“Why, what’s the rush?” Cassie asked.

  Maddie regarded her colleagues with an ominous expression. “Brace yourselves for some bad news.”

  Chapter 16 – Bad News Travels Last

  The three Arkana team members all stared at the operations director, waiting for her to explain herself.

  Maddie sighed. “I got some disturbing intel right before our meeting started, but I decided to hold off until Griffin finished his presentation. You know how rattled he gets when somebody throws him a curve ball. I wanted to hear what he had to say while he was still rational.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the scrivener said in an offended tone.

  “Never mind that,” Cassie broke in impatiently. “What’s the news already?”

  It seems Daniel is on the move.”

  “What!” Griffin gasped. “How could he be? He can’t know anything more than we do.”

  The operations director laughed mirthlessly. “You connect the dots. Since he’s implicated in Hannah’s disappearance, do you really think he wants to hang around the compound and play twenty questions with his father?”

  “Who’s Hannah?” Griffin and Eric spoke in unison.

  “You didn’t tell them about that either?” Cassie turned toward Maddie accusingly.

  “Whoa, slow down, kiddo,” Maddie made a time-out gesture with her hands. “From the minute I got here this morning, I’ve been bombarded with updates from the compound and on the phone with Faye. No time to give these guys the scoop.”

  “Who’s Hannah?” Erik repeated.

  “She’s one of Metcalf’s wives,” Cassie jumped in. “She ran away and came to hide out at my place.”

  A barrage of questions followed from both men. It took Maddie and Cassie half an hour between them to bring their colleagues up to speed about Hannah’s age, her pregnancy, what she knew about the relic quest, the mysterious lab, and the secret weapons training.

  After the explanations were given, Erik crossed his arms and let out a long breath. “One thing’s for sure, toots. You’re gonna be juggling live coals as long as she’s hanging around you.”