The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  ‘And your second point?’

  ‘Thinking about the prehistoric colonization of Australia led me to Aboriginal songlines, the dreaming tracks that were used to cross the outback. If hunter-gatherers could conceptualize land routes in that way, why not at sea as well? Memorized trackways are often the most practicable routes too, and that made me think about the predictability of ocean currents and winds. I ended my lecture with a picture of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Ra expedition reed boat in the mid-Atlantic in 1969, showing how it would have been difficult to avoid being swept out to sea and towards the Caribbean once you’d sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of west Africa. I argued that the sea isn’t a barrier, it’s a great complex of highways, and nowhere was that more the case than in deep prehistory. I quoted Heyerdahl’s famous last lines from his account of the Ra expedition, that his theory about prehistoric maritime contact came about because he and his crew had actually sailed on the ocean and not on a map.’

  ‘They’d tried it out rather than sitting in an armchair theorizing,’ Costas said approvingly.

  Jack nodded. ‘And that gets us back to Atlantis. At the time of the Black Sea flood, the people of Atlantis may have been undergoing a religious revolution, but they were still not that far away from their Palaeolithic ancestors. If we’ve got it right, there were still shamans present in those final days before the flood, even if they were a beleaguered few. That knowledge of sea travel, that ability to sail off into the unknown, may not yet have been lost.’

  Costas nodded. ‘Makes a lot of sense.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘So what’s your big revelation?’

  ‘Plato.’ Lanowski laughed quietly to himself, pushed up his glasses, looked at Jack intently and chuckled again. ‘Plato, Plato, Plato.’

  Costas glanced anxiously at Jack, and then narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘All right, Jacob,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me guess. The Atlantis myth? Plato is the only surviving source. That is, except for the fragment of papyrus Maurice found in the desert that we’re looking at on the screen right now, the bit by Solon about where to find Atlantis that never got to Plato.’

  ‘Plato,’ Lanowski repeated to himself, shaking his head as if he were in the throes of some private rapture. He suddenly stared at Costas. ‘And Pythagoras.’

  Costas held his gaze. ‘Pythagoras. Let me see. Pythagoras is about geometry, right? Triangles, pyramids? Pyramids, early civilizations, Atlantis?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  Lanowski beamed at him. ‘We know from Aristotle that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras. What that means is that Plato believed there was a mathematical and even a musical structure behind everything. But instead of taking an interesting idea into hard science, the Greeks made it esoteric, using it in a mystical way and seeing Pythagorean logic in weird places. They also used it to create hidden messages of meaning. Some scholars have come to believe that Plato embedded codes in his writing to reveal his beliefs to other Pythagoreans. We’re not talking about hidden messages as we might understand a code, but about arrangements of letters and words that had a mathematical logic or – in the case of letters – could be related to the musical scale. Other Pythagoreans might recognize them, like a symbol on a ring or a secret handshake.’

  Costas looked puzzled, and jerked his finger at the screen. ‘But if it’s this papyrus you’re on about, Solon wrote it about 580 BC. Isn’t that a couple of decades before Pythagoras was even born?’

  ‘Often the names we associate with a theory are not those who invented it, and there’s good reason for thinking that ideas we call Pythagorean had their origins much earlier in Greece. If they were floating around already in Solon’s time, then a clever polymath like him would have lapped them up.’

  Jack stared at Lanowski. ‘So you think Solon may have put some kind of code in his text?’

  Lanowski pointed at the screen, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Thanks to my friend Maurice Hiebermeyer, we’ve got a scan of the very papyrus in front of us. Usually what I’m talking about can only be revealed by stichometric analysis, taking the medieval texts that are our only surviving copies of ancient works and trying to reconstruct how they would have looked on the original papyrus, based on the regular length of lines ancient scribes used. But we’ve actually got an original papyrus, with the lines exactly as Solon composed them. Almost immediately I matched his layout to the twelve-note musical scale. Look, you can see where I’ve highlighted the text, the letters alpha to lamda for the musical notes in the first letters of a line of words running diagonally through that last paragraph. That was my eureka moment. I realized that Solon had been doing what Plato later did, that there was more to this papyrus than meets the eye. So now I’ve been looking at the letters along the right and left margins, and then at criss-cross patterns, and all the other obvious geometric possibilities, and then I’ve been applying basic cryptographic analysis using letter codes. I’m convinced there are words embedded in the text.’

  ‘You know ancient Greek?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Yeah. Easy. Did it at school.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ve tried about five hundred different letter codes.’

  ‘In your head.’

  Lanowski looked nonplussed. ‘Of course. Computers can’t actually think, you know.’

  Costas leaned back. ‘But surely all you’re going to find is more patterns, more word games. Where does that get us?’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I remembered how easy it was for me to find that musical scale. Way too easy for an intellectual like Solon. I think he wanted some successor like Plato to see it and then look for what else was hidden, something we know Plato never had the chance to do because this fragment of papyrus was lost in the desert before Solon left Egypt, and he never replicated it. I love the idea that Solon might have been robbed of the gold he was going to use to pay the priest and that he suffered some kind of permanent amnesia, losing this part of his papyrus during the scuffle as well. But I think I’m taking up where Plato should have been, as someone who immediately recognizes that there must be something else hidden in the text.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain how a hidden code could be anything other than wordplay, mathematical games.’

  Lanowski looked at Costas. ‘The technique could also have been used to conceal actual words, as a code in the way we might expect.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ Jack added. ‘Why on earth would Solon bother to embed a word game in a script he’s writing in the flickering torchlight at the foot of an old priest, telling him one of the most extraordinary tales he’s ever heard? There must have been a particular purpose for concealment, and Solon wasn’t a mystic like some of those later Pythagoreans.’

  ‘There’s geometry in that page,’ Lanowski said, pointing at the screen. ‘Not in the section at the top of the papyrus, where I think he was hastily copying down a dictation from the high priest, but in that final crucial paragraph. It’s much more carefully written. Remember, Solon was translating from Egyptian into Greek as he was listening. So he was already thinking hard about language, about words. He was good at composing fast. I’ve really got to like the guy and I can see where he was coming from. He enjoyed making clever geometry out of his writing. It’s really no different from the way a creative writer today uses metaphor and simile, alliteration and assonance. Only here I think the artistry had a special reason. Imagine this: the high priest is speaking slowly, carefully, giving Solon time to transcribe what he’s saying. This was really important stuff, about the end of Atlantis, coveted information normally only passed from priest to priest. The high priest is taking a bit of a gamble telling him, perhaps induced by the promise of gold. But then he oversteps the boundary and tells Solon something really coveted, something sacred. Maybe he then regrets it and instructs Solon not to write it down.’

  ‘But Solon finds a way,’ murmured Costas.

  ‘And maybe the high priest still doesn’t trust hi
m, and it was the priest who arranged for Solon to be robbed and knocked on the head after leaving the temple that final night.’

  Costas shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. We know from what’s openly in the text that the priest told Solon a phenomenal story, something passed down over almost seven thousand years. There’s incredible detail in the descriptions of Atlantis. What else could he reveal that might suddenly seem beyond the pale, too secret to tell Solon?’

  Lanowski got up and paced in front of them, gesticulating. ‘Let’s imagine he told Solon where the Atlanteans went, something Solon wrote down at the end of the text in the corner of the papyrus that’s been ripped off. We can pretty well guess what it would have said. Troy, Greece, Crete, the coast of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, where all the early civilizations subsequently developed. But then let’s imagine there was another story. Something dark, a story of exile, of banishment. Something hinted at in later myth, but a truth that should not be told. Then I thought of the Epic of Gilgamesh.’

  ‘I think I’ve got you,’ Jack said. ‘The idea of Uta-napishtim cast away, a pariah. To a place where nobody is supposed to follow.’

  ‘And a place whose horror might have been exaggerated by the new priesthood of the early Neolithic, a priesthood who had already made people fear the unknown, the open ocean,’ Costas said. ‘Try to go there, and the ancient demons of the spirit world will arise again and haunt you.’

  ‘And carry out appalling acts half remembered, take away the children and sacrifice them to satisfy their blood lust,’ Lanowski said.

  ‘So you think Solon heard what he should not have heard, agreed not to write it down but did so, in some kind of code?’

  ‘I think the fear of that place and of the one who lurked there, a kind of nightmare shaman, may have still been felt by those priests of Egypt who were the last in the line to carry the actual story of what happened, a story that survived elsewhere only in the garbled accounts of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament. Seven thousand years on, that last shaman and what he represented still struck terror into the hearts of Egyptian priests whose gods were supposedly all-powerful, yet who could not suppress that ancient fear of the old spiritualist religion and the threat it posed to the new world of the gods.’

  ‘And?’ Jack said. ‘The code?’

  Lanowski scratched his head. ‘It’s not quite there yet. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibles. It’s what you say, Jack. A hunch. A gut feeling that I’m on to something.’

  Jack stared at him for a moment, then nodded. ‘Okay, Jacob. Email it to me when you’ve got a result.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Lanowski gave him a crooked smile, his face red with excitement, then sat back down in front of the screen and began mumbling lists of letters to himself, apparently oblivious to anyone else in the room. Jack drummed his fingers on the desk, feeling frustrated. Suddenly they were on the cusp of something big, and it was going to have to be put on hold. He tried to keep his mind on prehistoric exploration for a moment longer. The possibility of ancient voyages across the Atlantic had been a fascination of his during his student years, something he had married with Maurice Hiebermeyer’s obsession with retracing the Nazi Ahnenerbe expeditions to see whether they were ever on to anything real. It had come to fruition years later when they had crossed the North Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland, following Viking explorers. But the other main route across the Atlantic, south from the Mediterranean and across from Africa, continued to be unexplored territory for him. The African route south had been taken by the Phoenicians, but there was no certainty that they had ever intentionally struck off west. And Jack had already begun to think much earlier than that, to early prehistory, the basis for his Royal Geographical Society lecture. Only he had never associated it with an exodus from Atlantis, until now. He could only hope that the trail that was beginning to form in front of them would set up some waymarkers soon.

  ‘One final thing.’ Lanowski turned and looked at him. ‘If you want to work out where the Atlanteans went, get into the cave, Jack. And I don’t just mean metaphorically. If we’re looking for the last of the shamans, if we’re looking for Noah Uta-Napishtim, we need to be looking for somewhere he can do his thing again, somewhere like that holy sanctum in Atlantis.’

  ‘Just as long as it doesn’t take us on a psychedelic trip into a cave of the mind,’ Costas said. ‘That transatlantic current dumps you in the Caribbean, right? Sounds good to me. I want a tropical island.’

  Lanowski peered at him. ‘My girlfriend says every man needs his cave.’

  ‘And she wants to get into yours?’ Costas asked.

  ‘It’s no different from the cave you disappear into every night in the basement of the engineering department at IMU, hatching mini-ROVs.’

  ‘Don’t. Little Joey. It’s still too raw.’

  Jeremy came back into the room, stopped before reaching them and pointed. ‘Hey, Costas. Have you seen that?’

  Costas glanced back at the ROV monitor. ‘My God,’ he said hoarsely. While they had been talking, the screen had come to life. He quickly got up, pushed aside the chairs and sat down at the monitoring station, his eyes glued to the screen. Lanowski came up quickly behind him and leaned over the control panel.

  ‘There may be some electrical impulse still left that could knock the camera askew. Until we’re sure this image is recorded, let’s keep hands off the control stick.’ He tapped the keyboard, downloading the video stream, and Jack stared in astonishment at the underwater image on the monitor. He could see tendrils like monofilaments in the water, the glassy discharge from phreatic explosions. He imagined a horrifying scene directly behind the ROV, a billowing wall of lava completely sealing the entrance to the inner sanctum where he had peered in only a few hours ago. Even at this remove the view seemed confining, claustrophobic. He concentrated on the stone wall visible in the background. Like the other parts of the cave wall, it had been smoothed down, but he could just make out the ghosts of older carvings, similar to the ones that stood out starkly in front of them.

  ‘They’re symbols,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Symbols carved on the wall. And look,’ he said in hushed tones. ‘The video’s live. You can see tiny bubbles rising in the water, gas from the lava.’

  Jack stared at the symbols. They seemed to have been crudely chiselled, as if done in a hurry. There were two separate clusters, each surrounded by a circle. Altogether he counted sixteen symbols: little spirals, stick-figure hands, triangles, zigzags, open angles, half-circles, groups of dots. Some appeared in both clusters, others in one only. At the centre of one cluster was a cross like an X, and in the other a slash with lines going out from it like a garden rake, repeated twice. The symbols presented an extraordinary image, like nothing else they had seen in Atlantis, evidently carved in the dying moments of the citadel, yet almost immeasurably old to those last Atlanteans, originating far back in the Ice Age.

  ‘I recognize these,’ he said. ‘They’re found in Palaeolithic cave art. Some archaeologists have dubbed them the Stone Age code, but nobody really knows what they mean.’

  ‘Look at that one,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s like a precursor to the Atlantis symbol.’ Jack saw where Costas was pointing. Instead of the fully formed Atlantis symbol – the one that they had interpreted as the form of a spirit bird, an eagle or a vulture – this looked like one wing of a bird, a straight line with four parallel lines extending from it. The symbol appeared three times at the same sloping angle with the parallel lines going off to the left, and once the other way round with the lines going right.

  ‘Isn’t this up Katya’s street?’ Jeremy said. ‘Prehistoric symbology?’

  ‘In fact, isn’t this whole thing up her street?’ Costas said, looking quizzically at Jack. ‘She was pretty well in at the outset five years ago, our expert palaeographer, then there was all the involvement of her father the warlord in trying to get those nukes off the Russian sub that sank beside Atlantis.’

&nb
sp; Jack gave Costas a wry look. ‘That’s precisely why she’s not involved. Her father met his end here, remember? But I’ve always left the door open for her. I called her yesterday evening before I flew here from Troy, and told her that if we found any more ancient symbols at Atlantis I’d let her know.’

  ‘But you’re involved, aren’t you, Jack?’ Lanowski said, pushing his glasses up his nose and peering at Jack like a doctor. ‘It’s common knowledge at IMU. That is, when you’re not involved with Maria. Costas explained it to me.’

  Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas, and then looked back at Lanowski. ‘I’m glad to see that even the most unimportant things don’t get past your radar now, Jacob.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lanowski exclaimed, shaking his head, peering furtively at the flashing email inbox message on his computer screen. ‘Oh, but they are important, Jack. Very important. I find you just can’t get away from them.’

  Costas grinned. ‘Back to prehistoric symbology, guys.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ Lanowski said with a smile, pulling a memory stick out of his pocket and plugging it into the console. ‘I can email a still from this video to her.’

  ‘I caught her in a taxi on the way from the Institute of Palaeography in Moscow to the airport, where she was flying to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan,’ Jack replied. ‘She should be at the petroglyph site at Cholpon-Ata beside Lake Issyk-Gul by now. They’re four hours ahead of us, so it’ll be near the end of their working day.’

  ‘She’s still digging up those petroglyphs?’ Costas said, shaking his head. ‘It’s been almost two years since we were out there.’

  ‘That’s archaeology for you,’ Jack said ruefully, reaching for his tablet computer as Lanowski saved the image. ‘There are thousands of boulder carvings beside the lake and many square kilometres still to be explored. Since finding the Roman legionary inscription that took us there two years ago, she’s worked backwards in time searching for the oldest petroglyphs, back to the Neolithic and even earlier. The place wasn’t just a Silk Road site, it was a major prehistoric migration point between East and West. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if one day she found evidence of a group of early Neolithic refugees from Atlantis heading towards China.’