Her bright eyes caught Jack’s and he quickly proffered his hand. ‘Frau Dr Hoffman. Pleased to meet you at last.’
‘Call me Heidi,’ she said in beautifully precise English, with the clipped accent of the 1930s. ‘You must be Jack Howard. It is such a pleasure to meet you. Maurice used to tell me about you when he visited during his school holidays, but by then I’d moved back to Germany and he never did bring you along. I was delighted when Maurice phoned to tell me you would be joining us. Ever since reading your Atlantis book, I’ve wanted to bring you here to show you some symbols. My son Hans sketched them once, but I can’t find his drawings now.’ She took a tissue out of her sleeve and dabbed one eye. Jack saw that her hands were shaking. He glanced across at Hiebermeyer. So that was it. Some symbols. The place was filled with symbols, every kind of device the Nazis had come across, including at least three different runic sequences that Jack could see. Some were genuine transcriptions of medieval runes; others clearly were made up. There were bound to be a few that looked like those they had discovered five years ago in Atlantis. For a moment Jack wondered if he was about to be sucked into the world of fringe archaeology, of so-called evidence collated by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, picked from disparate sources and then arranged together in an apparently convincing whole. For all of the reality of their discovery in the Black Sea, he knew there would always be those who preferred to inhabit this parallel world, where the dream of Atlantis would remain just beyond reach.
‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, glancing again at Jack. ‘When did you come here before? When Hans was a boy?’
She put away her tissue. ‘Once, when he was a high-school student, to try to interest him in a mystery. But of course I had been here before, when I first came to this chamber and the vault below and saw what I am going to show you now. Have you told Dr Howard about Ernst?’
‘He knows as much as I know.’
She took a deep breath, shuddering slightly, then composed herself. ‘Himmler brought us here on a celebratory tour after Ernst had been awarded the oak leaves and swords cluster to his Knight’s Cross. We were the perfect image of the Nazi couple, the war hero and his blonde Aryan wife, heavily pregnant. Only it was a charade, of course. We were taken first to this chamber, where Ernst was anointed an honorary knight. I thought Himmler was about to induct him into the SS, which would have been the worst horror for Ernst. Fortunately, Himmler said it was more important for the time being that he remain a shining star of the Luftwaffe.’
‘You always told me he only thought of the men in his squadron, Aunt Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said quietly. ‘That was where his loyalty lay, and to you and Hans.’
Her eyes filled with tears again, and she wiped them. ‘It seems just like yesterday. I feel as if I could walk out of this wheelchair into the sun of the courtyard, see little Hans and hold Ernst by the hand. They were days of happiness, but it was a time of horror. In truth I cannot go back to them, even in my mind’s eye. When I shut my eyes, I only see again the horrors that I myself witnessed.’
She shuddered again, then held her hands tight on the armrests of the chair. ‘Now, we must go down the stairs, to the vault below.’ She raised herself with a walking stick that had been leaning on her wheelchair. The two men quickly took an arm each, and walked alongside her as she moved slowly to the spiral staircase, where Hiebermeyer led, with Jack taking up the rear. In a few minutes they had reached the bottom. They were in a gloomy beehive-shaped chamber, about eight metres high, positioned directly below the SS Generals’ Room and dug into the bedrock. Heidi pointed up to the vault with her stick. ‘There’s a swastika in the apex, directly below the Sonnenrad sun symbol in the floor above,’ she said. ‘The vault’s based on the shape of a Mycenaean Greek tomb, the so-called Treasury of Atreus at the ancient site of Mycenae. Himmler was obsessed with warrior kings of the ancient past. This vault is really a shrine to Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks who attacked Troy, the hero of another war between West and East.’ She brought down her cane and tapped on a marble slab in the centre of the floor. ‘If you look under this, you’ll see why.’
She sat down abruptly on a wooden bench beside the wall. Jack stared at the floor, but saw nothing in the closely fitted marble slabs to suggest an opening. Hiebermeyer knelt down and put his hand on the slab she had tapped. ‘How do you know anything’s here, Aunt Heidi?’
‘Because Himmler showed it to me. Ernst regarded all of Himmler’s archaeology as occult, and found a ready excuse that day to avoid the tour by volunteering to fly Nazi officials who accompanied us over the site of the castle to see Himmler’s grandiose construction scheme from the air. Himmler brought me down here alone. I never told Ernst what I saw; he would have scoffed at it. Himmler was very proud of this chamber. It was meant to be a kind of holy of holies, and a burial vault for the ashes of the greatest SS heroes. His top SS officers were meant to come and swear allegiance over the object buried below. But only a select few knew what it was.’
‘Is it still here?’
‘You can see where it rested.’ She tapped her stick against the wall behind her, then tapped it again, as if trying the find the right spot. The second tap produced a hollow sound, and where Hiebermeyer had been looking, an octagonal slab of marble about the size of a large dinner plate rose a few inches out of the floor. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m probably the only one left who knows how to do that. Even the curators of this place don’t know this is here. Go on, Maurice, pull it out.’
Hiebermeyer got down on all fours, grasping the block by two recessed handles on either side. He lifted it up and set it down beside the hole. Jack took out a Mini Maglite and knelt beside him. About six inches below was a ring of symbols, surrounding a hollow shape cut into the rock. Jack peered closely at the shape, panning his torch over it, then looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
Hiebermeyer was staring at it. ‘Incredible.’
Jack’s mind raced. A reverse swastika. It was the same as the shape in the bunker laboratory door. And it was the shape he had seen six months before in the strongbox he and Costas had retrieved from deep inside the mine in Poland, the shape of an object that Saumerre had so coveted but which had remained elusive.
‘It was for the ancient Trojan palladion,’ Heidi said. ‘At first I thought the palladion must be another fake, but I came to believe it was genuine. We all knew the swastika was an ancient shape, and had been found decorating pottery at Troy. Himmler told me that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the palladion in the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where it had been looted from a temple at Troy. It was the most sacred Trojan object, dating back thousands of years before the fall of Troy, supposedly a gift from the sky god. It was meteoritic on one side, gold on the other. It’s gone now, though I don’t know where. But I brought you here to see the symbols around the edge of the hollow.’
Jack peered more closely. There were two circular rings of symbols, the first one close to the lip of the hole, the second inside and below the first ring, obscured in shadow. The symbols on the upper ring were similar to the ones they had seen in the hall above. ‘They’re runes,’ he murmured. ‘Eight of them altogether. Some look like the Futhark, the Scandinavian runes of the Middle Ages. But there are other symbols too, presumably Nazi additions. I can see two swastikas.’
Heidi pointed with her stick. ‘They’re the creation of Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s occult guru. He retained some of the original Scandinavian runes, but added some with no historical precedent as runes but based on other ancient symbols. As well as the swastikas, you can see those two symbols of a crossed ring, derived from the Phoenician symbol t th.’
Hiebermeyer looked at Heidi. ‘These SS runes have Roman letter equivalents, don’t they?’
She nodded. ‘Entirely made up by Wiligut, but applied consistently. The t th symbol means T, and the Hakenkreuz, the swastika, means A. And you can see the Sig rune for the letter S, familiar enough from the SS insignia. The other three symbols a
re the Heilszeichen rune for L, the Odal rune for N and the Leben rune for I.’
Jack stared again, panning his torch from symbol to symbol, then running over it again. ‘Good God,’ he said under his breath. ‘They spell out ATLANTIS.’
‘Now look at the second ring of symbols,’ she said.
Jack panned his torch deeper into the hole and stared, his heart pounding. ‘It’s incredible,’ he whispered.
‘What is it?’ Hiebermeyer said.
Jack sat back, his mind racing. ‘The symbols Costas’ ROV photographed two days ago on that cave wall in Atlantis, the ones that Katya is working on intepreting.’ He took out his iPhone, pressed a few keys and passed it to Hiebermeyer, who stared at the image on the screen and then squatted down, looking at the rock-cut symbols in the marble and then at the screen again. ‘There are twenty-six symbols on your screen. Each one of the eight symbols here in the rock is represented. They’re the same.’
‘You recognize them?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s the Stone Age code.’ He looked at Heidi. ‘These symbols are found on cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic, most extensively in the famous caves in France and Spain. What does seem incredible is that they are virtually identical across the world.’ He showed her the screen, pointing. ‘The zigzag lines, the clusters of dots, the parallel lines are all found in rock art in North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia. Some scholars have tried to argue that these are just common jottings that the artists could have invented independently, but that doesn’t wash with me.’
‘You think these symbols could have spread around the world from one origin?’ she murmured.
Hiebermeyer nodded emphatically. ‘We know people moved huge distances in the Ice Age: across the Bering Strait and to South America at least twenty thousand years ago, and from Asia to Australia at least thirty thousand years before that. Armchair scholars who dispute the idea look at maps and see apparently insurmountable barriers in the seas and deserts and mountain ranges, whereas those like Jack who’ve tried to retrace the routes realize that the sea especially is often an aid rather than a hindrance to long-distance travel.’
‘What’s the date range of the symbols?’ she asked.
‘Towards the end of the last Ice Age, from about twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. But they could have survived as relic symbols after the Ice Age, maybe in rituals.’
‘At least until 6000 BC,’ Jack said quietly, getting down on his knees and shining his Maglite at the far side of the recess. He took his iPhone back from Hiebermeyer, stared at it and then shone the torch again. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’
He straightened up and smiled broadly. Hiebermeyer pushed up his little round glasses and peered back. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’
‘I’ve just seen one I recognize above all others. It’s astonishing.’
Hiebermeyer followed his gaze. The torch lit up a symbol like a garden rake, a single slash with four lines coming off it at right angles. ‘Is this what I think it is?’
Jack scrolled down his screen. ‘It’s symbol number twenty-three in the Stone Age alphabet, what they call “pectiform”, from the Latin for comb-shaped, with short lines extending off a single line. According to Katya’s email to me summarizing the code, it’s quite rare, only occurring at five per cent of the cave sites. But it first occurs in the oldest groups, twenty-five thousand years ago.’ He tapped the screen again, and showed it to Heidi. ‘That’s why I’m so excited.’
The screen showed the cover of Jack’s monograph publication on Atlantis, based on their discovery of the site five years before. In the centre was the symbol they had first seen on the papyrus that Hiebermeyer had discovered in the Egyptian desert, the account by the ancient Greek traveller Solon of his visit to the Egyptian high priest who had told him the story of Atlantis. It was the symbol that Jack and Costas had found on the golden disc from the Bronze Age shipwreck, a disc they realized had been created in Atlantis more than five thousand years earlier, before the citadel had been drowned by the rising waters of the Black Sea. Heidi peered at it, then at Jack. ‘The symbol here is a mirror image of the Stone Age symbol. It’s as if that pectiform symbol had been flipped over.’
Jack nodded. ‘You won’t believe it, but my colleague Costas and I saw this very symbol underwater at Atlantis during our dive, on a stone pillar at the entrance to a tunnel into the site. We call it the Atlantis symbol. We believe it was shaped like that in the form of two wings, and was meant to represent an eagle or a vulture, a sacred bird. And it also served as a map, like a labyrinth. Five years ago, we were able to follow the shape of the symbol in the tunnels and galleries in the rock of the volcano that formed the summit of the citadel, until we reached the holy of holies.’
‘The place you and Costas revisited a few days ago,’ Hiebermeyer said.
Jack nodded. ‘Unfortunately the volcano decided to heat up just as we were about to enter the chamber. But we did manage to photograph a section of the wall containing these other symbols, clearly much older. I believe that this older Stone Age code and the newer Atlantis script were the preserve of priests and shamans, rather than a widespread writing system. That these two scripts should exist side by side fits in with some extraordinary ideas we’ve been developing about the dawn of civilization. On the one hand, the Atlanteans would have retained something of the rituals and beliefs of their Ice Age ancestors, particularly shamanistic rituals involving animals and the hunt. That’s what we see in the Palaeolithic cave art, where the symbols first appear. On the other hand, early farmers were developing new belief systems. The old animal gods of the spirit world were being eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods, created when people were beginning to see that they could determine their own destiny. The new script, its sacred meaning, may have been tied up with that. The period when Atlantis was destroyed may have been a time of tension and even bloody conflict between the two belief systems, between shamans of the old ways and priests of the new. When we went back to Atlantis, I wanted to find out who those new gods were.’
Hiebermeyer pointed to the symbols in the floor. ‘And now the big mystery. How on earth did these Stone Age symbols get here?’
Jack paused. ‘I’ve just been thinking about that. The Palaeolithic cave art of France and the Pyrenees, at famous sites such as Lascaux, was known by the 1930s. Given the Ahnenerbe obsession with runes and symbols, it makes sense that they would have cast their net that wide. They would have known about the great antiquity of the caves, and might have associated the symbols with the fantasy of Aryan origins. It would have been fitting to reproduce those symbols in this secret place, this Nazi holy of holies, really a kind of sacred cave too.’
Heidi looked at him. ‘You’re right. I myself knew the scholar who had been to the Lascaux cave, a secretive Ahnenerbe expedition that took place after the occupation of France in 1940. He penetrated further into the caves than anyone has done since, and found many paintings with animal art and these symbols. Back at Wewelsburg, the SS ideologues assembled the symbols as evidence not just of Aryan ancestors, but of Atlantis. Their theory was that the survivors of Atlantis huddled in the caves, where they sought refuge after the flood. That day here with Ernst we attended an indoctrination lecture on Atlantis, given by an acquaintance of Ernst’s from university days who insisted that he come along. It was a clever lecture, not occult nonsense, and I remembered enough from my schooling in the classics to know that the lecturer was talking sensibly about Plato. But it was there that I first saw the symbols, the same ones I was to see that afternoon down here with Himmler. The lecturer showed us some slides taken by the primitive underwater cameras of the time revealing symbols incised on what seemed to be a cavern wall. He said it was the most astonishing discovery ever made by the Ahnenerbe, in conditions of great danger to the divers.’
‘Divers,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Where was it?’
‘The location was not revealed. He showed a picture of an underwater habit
at that had been secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient, an early version of the ones Captain Cousteau and his divers used in the 1960s and 1970s. It was very rudimentary by comparison, like two bathyspheres joined together. He said the divers used it as a base for their explorations, but I doubted it. I thought the habitat was too small for that, and afterwards wondered if it had been some kind of storage facility. I remember seeing fish, tropical fish. I took up scuba-diving myself in the 1950s, and often went to the Caribbean and the Red Sea. It could have been one of those places, or somewhere else in the tropics. Remember, the Ahnenerbe got everywhere, especially in the late 1930s, leading up to the war.’
Jack squatted down, and peered at Heidi. ‘When you were down here with Himmler, did you actually see the palladion?’
‘Only briefly. He treated it like the Holy Grail. Another man came down to lift it from that hollow and show it to us, an unpleasant Nazi named Dr Unverzagt, who was its custodian. I saw it for long enough to notice that it had symbols around the edge. There was no doubt in my mind that they were genuine, as old as the time when the gold was melded to the meteorite and the metal was forged into the swastika shape, far back in prehistory. The symbols on the palladion were exactly the same as the symbols that Himmler had carved into the marble in front of you.’
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