Gods of Atlantis

by David J. L. Gibbins

  Schoenberg moved the torch and shone it on one side at the bottom. Jack could clearly see letters in Greek, lower-case letters with the words separated, like modern cursive script. ‘I’ve transcribed it,’

  Schoenberg murmured, ‘but you should he able to make out the original Greek. It’s quite clear.’

  Jack stared into the halo of light coming through the vel um, then reached out and held a corner to keep it stil . He realized that he was looking at the obverse

  side, seeing the text the correct way round, rather than the mirror imprint on the reverse. He counted twenty-one words in the note, in three lines. Costas took out his notepad and pencil, and stared. ‘Holy cow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you see what I see?’

  Schoenberg peered at Costas. ‘Of course. Your name, Kazantzakis. You read Greek too.’

  Jack stared at the writing. That word. His heart was pounding, but he tried to stay focused. Costas wrote it down, keeping the lower-case script of the Greek minuscules:

  . He held the notepaper up so

  Jack could see it. Atlantis. Jack’s mind flashed back to five years before, to the fragment of papyrus that Maurice Hiebermeyer had found in the mummy necropolis in Egypt, the words that had set in motion their quest for the lost city. That papyrus had been an original text of the early sixth century BC, written by the Greek travel er Solon after his visit to the high priest in the Egyptian temple at Saïs, the account that led Plato almost two centuries later to write about the legend of Atlantis in the book that became the basis for al modern speculation. Jack stared at the word, trying to remain analytical. This was a marginal note written by an unknown monk in the tenth century AD. Many monks in the Byzantine world would have known of Plato, and could have read the Atlantis story in his Critias and Timaeus. He thought of other ways the monk could have known that word. ‘The Greek word Atlantis, that exact spel ing, first appears in the Histories of Herodotus in the fifth century BC. But for him it meant Atlas, and was his name for the Western Ocean, Atlantis Thalassa, the Sea of Atlas. That’s the first time in history that the ocean is cal ed the Atlantic, and the monk could simply have been using the word Atlantis in that sense.’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first,’ Schoenberg said.

  ‘But despite its appearance so early in Herodotus, the more common Greek and Roman name for the

  Atlantic was simply Ocean. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History in the first century AD cal s it that, Oceanus. The ancients of course knew about the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the Maris Erythraei of the other periplus, but to them there was only one Ocean, the huge expanse to the west beyond the Pil ars of Hercules.’

  Costas had been peering closely at the vel um.

  Now he sat back up, clearing his throat. ‘What if al the scholars got it wrong? What if Herodotus too had heard the legend of Atlantis passed down from Solon, or at least part of it? What if Atlantis Thalassa real y does mean the Sea of Atlantis, not the Sea of Atlas?’

  Jack stared at him. ‘Because we know Atlantis was in the Black Sea. We found it.’

  Costas shook his head. ‘No. I don’t mean the original Atlantis. I mean Atlantis refounded.’

  ‘The new Atlantis,’ Schoenberg said triumphantly.

  ‘My conclusion precisely. Now you see why I was so excited.’

  Jack leaned over and peered closely, letting his eyes adjust to the faint smudges left by the ink. He took the notepad from Costas and wrote down each letter

  of

  the

  Greek:

  . Then he sat

  up and read it aloud.

  Schoenberg looked at him intently. ‘As wel as the word Atlantis, there are three proper names. The first two, Noé and Alkaios, are individuals. Alkaios was a common enough Greek name, the original name of Heracles before he became a demigod and took his mother Hera’s name. When I saw that, I wasn’t surprised, as the deeds of Heracles would have been in the mind of anyone thinking about those western extremities of the known world visited by Hanno. It was there that Heracles supposedly took the Golden Apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the

  “Ladies of the West”. But it was the first of those two names, Noé, that real y intrigued me. The accent shows that it should be read with the last letter emphasized, as “ah”.’

  ‘Noah,’ Costas said.

  Jack looked at him, stunned. Noah. It was not possible.

  Schoenberg nodded. ‘Noah of course is a name familiar from the Hebrew Old Testament, though it probably has a much older Indo-European origin.’

  Costas turned to Jack. ‘Do you remember five years ago at Atlantis joking that we’d also found the basis for the story of Noah’s Ark? You speculated that an organized exodus from Atlantis as the flood waters rose would have included breeding pairs of livestock, even the giant aurochs that they bred for sacrifice.’

  Jack stared at the notebook. ‘I don’t think I was joking. This is extraordinary.’ He slowly translated the first sentence: ‘ From here, Noah and Alkaios from Atlantis set sail to the west, to found a new city.’

  Schoenberg pointed at the vel um. ‘The word you’ve translated as “city”, polu, the Greek word polis, can mean “city-state” or “state”. The word apo, “from”, before the word Atlantis, is unambiguous, as is the word nea, “new”, before the word for city. They were going from Atlantis, to found a new city. When I saw that in 1942, I believed that the only rational explanation was that the Atlantis myth harked back to the fal of Minoan Crete in the Aegean Sea towards the end of the Bronze Age in the second mil ennium BC. Geographical y this note seemed to make sense, that these two men, Noah and Alkaios, were refugees sailing west from the Aegean through the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic Ocean, to seek lands for a new city. In classical antiquity that would have been a familiar concept, with many Greek cities in the western Mediterranean being founded as colonies of their mother city. But now, with your discovery of a Neolithic Atlantis, I revise my theory.

  The direction of travel remains the same, from the Mediterranean to the west, but it is vastly older than I could have imagined then, as old as the sixth mil ennium BC.’

  ‘That is, if this comment isn’t just a bit of fantasy made up by a medieval monk,’ Costas said.

  ‘It’s unlikely that a monk would make up anything involving a Biblical name, as that might have been seen as heresy,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘And the next line in the note clinches it.’

  Jack took a deep breath, and read what he had written on the notepad: Alkaios returned, and set up an inscription in unknown writing on the pillar. Ex Pliny.

  ‘Your translation is most interesting,’ Schoenberg murmured. ‘I translated stulobate, stylobate, as

  “plaque” or “stela”, a stone panel. But pil ar is possible, a stone pil ar.’

  ‘I must have been thinking of the Pil ars of Hercules, but actual y it does make sense,’ Jack replied.

  ‘Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century placed stone pil ars, padrões, where they made landfal , to stake claim to new land. We know that Hanno the Carthaginian left an account of his voyage on bronze plaques attached to a pil ar in Carthage, and I’ve always imagined that one day someone wil find a pil ar marking his progress down the coast of west Africa.’

  ‘Remember what you saw three days ago at Atlantis, Jack?’ Costas said.

  ‘Three days ago?’ Schoenberg exclaimed. ‘You have been to Atlantis again? He leaned forward, peering at Jack eagerly.

  Jack nodded. ‘You’re giving us your treasure, so I’l give you ours. Absolute secrecy, yes?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  ‘Costas and I were able to carry out a dive on the site under the guise of a geological assessment. The fault line’s active again and we ended up diving into a live volcano.’

  ‘A live volcano.’ Schoenberg leaned back, slapping his knee. ‘ A live volcano. I never heard of such a thing. Marvel ous. If only I could have told this to our divers
in the Ahnenerbe. But they never had the equipment you have. I believe it was the oxygen rebreathers. They were always going too deep. We lost three of them on our expedition to Iceland. I was there, waiting for them, but they never came up.’

  Jack glanced at Costas, then back at Schoenberg.

  ‘We found an extraordinary temple with carved pil ars.

  We’re sure it dates from the earliest Neolithic, eleven thousand years ago or more. My point is, these people were perfectly capable of erecting stone pil ars, and indeed had a tradition of it.’

  ‘So if this note is based on fact, we’re looking for an inscribed stone,’ Costas said.

  ‘Somewhere on the coast of west Africa,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘That narrows it down.’

  Schoenberg took the sheet of vel um and held it up to the ceiling light, peering at it closely. ‘There’s more.

  Those final words, Ex Pliny, are a shorthand to show that the source of the story is Pliny’s Natural History.

  As you can imagine, I immediately found a copy of Pliny in the Heidelberg library and went to Book 5, Chapter 1, the text that deals with west Africa and the limit of Roman knowledge. There’s the usual Pliny ragbag of facts and myths, including an account of the Hercules myth and the expedition of Hanno. He mentions the Roman emperor Claudius, his war against a local ruler in Mauretania and his founding of Roman colonies at Lixus and Traducta Julia, both probably corresponding to the old Punic outposts in that list in the Periplus of Hanno. But there was absolutely nothing in the surviving edition of Pliny to corroborate this note. If the monk had seen a reference to Atlantis, it must have been in some lost text. It was a dead end for me, as without verification I could take it no further. I put it away for decades. Until three years ago.’

  Jack looked at Schoenberg shrewdly. ‘You hoped for a lost version of Pliny’s Natural History, containing its own marginalia.’

  Schoenberg gave a slight smile, and nodded. ‘One found three years ago by Jack Howard and his team in the Vil a of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy. As I said, I’ve been a keen fol ower of your discoveries.’

  ‘Good old Claudius,’ Costas said. ‘I knew you’d mentioned him for a reason.’

  ‘Claudius had a special interest in Mauretania,’

  Schoenberg replied. ‘Poor lame Claudius was desperate for military glory, to shore up his claim to the empire. It was the main reason he invaded Britain i n AD 43. In the secret retirement you discovered he had enjoyed in Herculaneum after faking his death, he probably dwelt greatly on his place in history. In his library you found that copy of Pliny’s Natural History with the marginal note about Claudius’ meeting as a young man with Jesus of Nazareth, added to the scrol by Pliny when he appears to have spent time with his friend Claudius in those fateful final days before Vesuvius erupted. If Pliny was adding material to his text like that – told to him by Claudius – then he might also have added what Claudius knew about west Africa. Claudius had probably amassed huge amounts of information in his years working as a historian before he was reluctantly made emperor. He would have had a special interest in west Africa through his own imperial involvement in Mauretania, and particularly as the author of a history of Carthage, which would have given him considerable knowledge of Phoenician exploration along that coast. He seems to have been a magpie, much like Pliny, interested in fascinating snippets of information that others had ignored.’

  ‘If you were interested, why wait until now to contact us?’ Jack said. ‘Why not three years ago, when we revealed the discovery of the library and the copy of Pliny?’

  ‘Because I’ve been fol owing progress on your website. By the beginning of last month, I knew your palaeography team in Naples had reached the end of Book 4 of Claudius’ copy of the Natural History, so they should currently be unrol ing and photographing the first paragraphs of Book 5.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jack said, looking at his watch. ‘We have to meet our plane for the flight back. I’l put in a phone cal to Naples. If that comment about Atlantis is in Claudius’ copy, then we can surmise that it was in another copy made by Pliny in those final days, perhaps one that escaped destruction in his vil a in Stabiae or that he dispatched to Rome, a copy that was seen by that tenth-century monk. Whatever the case, if our team have found the same marginal note, it would corroborate the note in the codex and take us one huge step closer on our quest.’

  Schoenberg eyed Jack shrewdly. ‘Where do you think it would be leading you?’

  ‘For anyone leaving Lixus or Mogador and intending to go west, the current takes a very predictable southern and western swing from Cape Juby towards the Caribbean.’

  ‘Can you be more precise?’

  Jack pursed his lips. ‘My money’s on the north Caribbean, a landfal somewhere between Puerto Rico and Florida. We have another possible lead to explore, one that wil become more real if that Pliny reference can be corroborated.’

  ‘Can I help?’ Schoenberg said.

  ‘No later than tomorrow, I hope. I’l be in touch.’

  ‘I can tel you more about the Ahnenerbe. Some of the trails we were on that real y did seem to go places, and were thwarted only by the war. We could work together.’

  ‘I’l hold you to that. Tomorrow.’

  Costas got up. ‘One question. Why did you remove that page from the codex? Did you want to keep this secret, for the eyes of the Ahnenerbe only? Were you planning an expedition to find that pil ar?’

  Schoenberg shook his head. ‘It was that name, Noah. I had seen first-hand Hitler’s rage against the Jews. I had been intimate with the Nazis; I had smel ed the sweat on Hitler when he was excited, seen the glint in his eyes. Already there were book-burnings, the destruction of Jewish art. The Codex Palatinus Graecus was my passion, my life’s work, and I intended to return to it after the war. I was not the only Ahnenerbe researcher sent to the Heidelberg library; others were there to keep an eye on me. Nazi Germany was a police state, and the mentality of suspicion and counter-suspicion seeped into every corner of life. The men Himmler recruited as spies were sticklers for detail, men like himself, and would leave no stone unturned if they felt they had to check up on me. I was terrified that one of them would find this page and see that word. Anything to do with Jewish history was to be expunged. When I saw that the note had been erased by some later hand from the original text, I imagined a monk doing that because he might have been alarmed that the codex contained heretical materials, something about Noah that might contradict the Bible, but that he felt the same way that I did about the need to preserve the book. He removed the note, but didn’t see the imprint on the blank insert. If Himmler’s spies had fol owed me and seen it, there could only have been one outcome. The whole codex would have been destroyed.’

  ‘And now the time has come to reunite the page with the codex,’ Jack said.

  ‘That is my intention. If you are successful, this apparently blank page with the word Atlantis may become the greatest single treasure of the Heidelberg library.’

  Jack thought for a moment. They had got what they wanted, and there was nothing now to be lost. He needed to know for sure. ‘You said you were intimate with the Nazi inner circle. Did you know Oberst Ernst Hoffman?’

  Schoenberg went pale, then quickly regained his composure. ‘Hoffman? I knew of him, of course. He was a Luftwaffe ace, one of Hitler’s favourites.

  Perhaps I met him in Berlin. I don’t remember.’

  ‘You met him at Wewelsburg, to be precise. He was one of Himmler’s favourites too. Himmler nurtured his interest in flying.’

  Schoenberg looked discomfited. ‘Perhaps. Many officers

  passed

  through

  the

  Wewelsburg

  indoctrination school. I can hardly be expected to remember al of them. And Himmler had plenty of favourites.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Jack said coldly. ‘Actual y, you knew Hoffman before that. You were students together in Heidelberg before the war.’

 
Schoenberg raised his hands. ‘Am I being interrogated again? It was a big university. Perhaps I knew of him. But he was no scholar. He was only interested in flying.’

  ‘You had a professor who taught you both Greek.

  You excel ed at it and Hoffman didn’t, but he and the professor became fast friends. The professor was forced into the Ahnenerbe, but hated it and let drink get the better of him, then spoke too much. He was last seen being led away screaming to Goebbels’

  chamber of horrors in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Word was he was fingered by a former student of his who coveted his senior position in the Ahnenerbe hierarchy and miraculously moved into that office the next day.’

  ‘Who do you mean? How do you know this?’

  ‘Because before coming here we had a very interesting visit to Wewelsburg Castle with an expert guide. Frau Heidi Hoffman, to be precise.’

  Schoenberg swal owed hard, reached for his stick to get up and then sank back again into his chair.

  ‘Frau Hoffman. Yes. She has talked to you about the Ahnenerbe?’

  ‘She has told us a great deal.’

  Schoenberg rose again slightly on his stick, and for a moment his face was contorted in contempt. ‘You should be very careful what you believe. This woman is not to be trusted. Did you know she worked for the Lebensborn? She even volunteered herself to be impregnated

  by

  SS

  men.

  The

  Lebensborn

  programme was designed to create a new generation of the master race. Peasants fornicating with peasants. Do you know they even went to Poland to snatch children just because they were blond and blue-eyed? Being blond and blue-eyed is not enough to make you Aryan. They were Poles, for God’s sake.

  And that woman is a whore.’

  Jack nodded at Costas, then got up and fol owed him to the door. He stopped and looked back. ‘When you scoured the ancient texts, when the Ahnenerbe went to the glaciers, to the icecaps, you weren’t just looking for Atlantis, were you? There was something else. Something Reichsführer Himmler wanted.