The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  Jack nodded. ‘By choosing that cover, I wanted to show that Atlantis was not unique, but was part of a pattern, though one we didn’t fully understand five years ago. And it was an image of Atlantis as the people themselves saw it, the people whose minds I want to get into now.’

  ‘Okay. Then we move to that Babylonian story of the mountain of Dû-Re, the home of the gods,’ Costas continued. ‘The most prominent mountains in the region to the north of Babylonia are all volcanoes.’ He shifted his finger to the Aegean Sea to the left, between Turkey and Greece. ‘And here’s the island of Thera, the volcano that blew its top in the second millennium BC and destroyed Bronze Age civilization on Crete. Five years ago we thought that some of the priests of Atlantis could have escaped to Thera millennia before, where they may have established another sanctuary on the upper slopes of the volcano, trying to emulate what they had been forced to leave at Atlantis. You get my drift?’

  ‘We should be looking for more volcanoes.’

  ‘Not just natural volcanoes. Man-made ones.’ Costas reached for his tablet computer, ran his finger over the screen and handed it to Jack. ‘I was doing this as Macalister came in. Running a few alignments. It was just a hunch, but the similarities are striking.’ Jack glanced down at the screen. On the left was a classic volcano cross-section, showing a magma chamber coming up from the earth’s mantle with an eruption above it. On the right was a cross-section through a triangular structure, showing a horizontal passageway leading into a central chamber and above it a narrow vertical chute to a structure on the top. ‘Not just volcanoes, Jack. Pyramids.’

  Jack stared at the image. ‘The Mayan pyramid of Palenque, in the Yucatán?’

  ‘It’s the best representation of what I mean.’ The ship’s phone beside the door rang. Costas walked over to it, spoke for a minute and then returned to Jack, sitting down and peering at him. ‘What’s eating you? I know that look.’

  Jack stared at the screen a moment longer, his brow furrowed in thought. ‘There’s something momentous here, something that upsets our whole picture of the rise of civilization. It’s tied in with the origins of human conflict. Wild man versus civilized man. And I think it could have been all due to religion. At the dawn of the Neolithic, men began to turn against their ancestral ways. Until the gods won out, there must have been conflict. I’ve been thinking about the Garden of Eden again, Costas, and I’ve been seeing terrible bloodshed. To the first priest-kings, the old religion may have been a far greater threat to their power base than rival states. Religious war may be as old as civilization. And the cause was the newly created gods.’

  ‘What do you think happened here?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We have to try to understand Neolithic religion. What it was that frightened the new priests about the old.’

  ‘Well, this should help. Jeremy’s just arrived in the Lynx from Troy. Officially he’s come to do some radiocarbon dates in the lab on the ship. He thinks they’ve found a really old layer at the site, possibly Neolithic. But he’s actually here to see us. At the moment, IMU’s best imaging facility is in the excavation house at Troy, so I sent him some of our raw video data from this morning to process. He’s hopping with excitement. Says you’ve got to see it.’

  Jack glanced at his watch. ‘Okay. We’ve got just under an hour until Macalister boots me out. Just under an hour to solve the mystery of this place. Maybe to rewrite the origins of civilization.’

  ‘I’m just a simple submersibles expert, Jack. All I want is to build another ROV.’

  Jack shot him a penetrating look. ‘This may be bigger than any treasure we’ve ever hunted, Costas. We’re talking about the origin of the gods.’

  ‘So what do I say to Jeremy?’

  ‘Call him in.’

  Costas got up to go back to the phone, then turned. ‘Oh. I forgot to say. Lanowski’s coming too. He’s going to try something at the ROV monitor station. It’s Little Joey. There’s a chance he might still be transmitting.’

  Jack put his hand on Costas’ arm. ‘You’ve got to let it go.’

  ‘I’m being serious. You remember when we drove the submersible up after the dive this morning? We could see where the caldera had imploded, but I’ve looked at the mapping data that Lanowski and I did yesterday, and I reckon that the new rim lies just inside the point where you entered that chamber. It’s possible that the ROV is still intact. The volcano’s rumbling away, and the chances are the next little hiccup will take the chamber out, but it’s worth having a go.’

  ‘How could you get a signal from under all that lava?’

  ‘There might be a crack somewhere above the chamber. I remembered the electromagnetic disturbance we experienced and wondered whether that had clouded a signal. That’s where Lanowski comes in.’

  ‘Just as long as it doesn’t cause you more pain than gain.’

  ‘There’s a reason I’m doing this, Jack. When I was still tethered to the ROV while you were escaping from the chamber, I glanced at the screen inside my helmet. As soon as you cut the tether, all of the recorded imagery was lost. That’s a fault Jeremy and I need to get right for the next model. But I swear I saw something at the back of the chamber. It wasn’t cave paintings or those pillars, it was something else. If Little Joey hasn’t gone walkabout from where you left him, he might still be seeing it.’

  ‘Okay. Good. Do what you can.’

  ‘And Lanowski’s got something else he wants to show you.’

  ‘Not with his trusty portable blackboard, I hope. We haven’t got time for three-hour explanations.’

  ‘Something about going back to first principles. About not seeing the wood for the trees. About how if we want to find out where the last shamans of Atlantis went, we need to go back to what got us to Atlantis in the first place. The evidence. The clues. How it’s been staring us in the face all the time.’

  ‘Sounds a little too straightforward for Lanowski.’

  ‘Wrong. He thinks it’s too complex for the computer. He’s going to have to do the analysis in his head.’

  Jack raised his eyes. ‘That sounds like Lanowski.’ He turned back to the screen and clicked the mouse to zoom in on one of the pillars they had seen that morning, a white monolith rising starkly in front of the cave wall, the T-shaped arms extending outwards. He remembered five years ago in the flooded tunnels of Atlantis seeing lines of priests and priestesses carved in low relief on the walls, solemn, hieratic figures with braided beards and hair, wearing conical hats and carrying staffs, marching confidently forward. They had been freshly carved just before the flood, like the carvings on these pillars, and they had seemed familiar, a vision of the future, figures that would not have been out of place in Babylonia or Egypt or Bronze Age Europe. But what had happened to the old order, to the shamans who had painted images of animals in caves, a spirit world that seemed utterly at odds with those priests?

  Then he remembered the swirling shape he had seen that morning near the top of one of the pillars, crudely carved where older images had been chiselled and abraded away, yet itself fresh, done even as the flood waters rose. He moved the cursor to the top of the screen, found the carving and zoomed in. It seemed like an image from the past, from the deep prehistory of caves and shamans, yet he was convinced now that he had been right and there was a human face in it, a frightening visage like a dream image from a whirlpool. Had this been carved by those new priests to show the dark side of the spirit world, the grim tunnels that voyages of the mind could take; was it a warning to those who might wish to return to the old ways?

  Or was it a cry for help, an image carved in the face of death, in moments of terrible overwhelming fear?

  Jack felt his head reel, and closed his eyes. For a moment he had an extraordinary vision. The stone pillars no longer seemed like some ill-formed attempt at the human form, something abstract. Instead they appeared as figures half complete, as if that chamber had been inundated in the final act of transformation, as if those p
lastered skulls were about to be wrenched from the spirit world and placed atop the pillars, ancestors becoming gods. He saw a sudden act, a sweeping away of the past. He saw the spectral forms of those braided and bejewelled priests in the chamber, chipping and carving, erasing the old, and in the background the shadowy shapes of the shamans crouched against the cave wall, floating in and out of the rock like spirit animals. Then they disappeared and he saw the pillars complete, leering, terrifying: gods who now had faces, but instead of being born from the earth like those shapes in the lava, they arose from a seedbed of blood and fear.

  It was one of the most remarkable images that archaeology had ever thrown at him, but also one of the most disturbing. What had gone on inside that blocked-up chamber in those final desperate hours as the flood waters rose? He took a deep breath, then leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs and arms out, feeling every sinew and muscle in his body. He was dog tired after the dive, but he was determined to use every moment they had. He shook his head to clear the image and then looked at Costas. ‘Okay. We need the best possible people here to brainstorm this one. Call them both in.’

  6

  Near Bergen-Belsen, Lower Saxony, Germany

  Maurice Hiebermeyer stared at the image on his iPad, moving it around so that the overhead light hanging from the tent roof caught the ancient Greek lettering on the papyrus to best advantage. His technician in the excavation house at Troy had worked long hours with Jeremy Haverstock to refine the image, taking advantage of IMU’s state-of-the-art computing facilities before Hiebermeyer and his Egyptian team had decamped from Troy at the end of the season to their home base at the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria. Hiebermeyer had never been part of an IMU diving team – he was an Egyptian tombs man, not a shipwreck explorer – but Jack was his oldest friend and sparring partner, the two having first met as boys when Hiebermeyer had been sent from Germany to boarding school in England, where they had discovered a shared fascination with archaeology. After having been at Cambridge University together, they had gone their separate ways, Jack to found IMU and Hiebermeyer to Egypt eventually to found the institute in Alexandria, but Jack had made him an adjunct professor of IMU and they still met to tick off discoveries and plan future projects, just as they had done as schoolboys all those years ago.

  He looked up from the iPad for a moment, feeling a surge of satisfaction at the work his team had done at Troy. His first major excavation outside Egypt in association with IMU had been a dig at Herculaneum in Italy four years ago in search of a lost Roman library, looking for clues to early Christianity after Jack and Costas had found the shipwreck of St Paul off Sicily. But the last five months at Troy had been the longest time he had ever spent excavating outside Egypt. Both Herculaneum and Troy had been redeemed in his estimation by the discovery of Egyptian artefacts, in the case of Troy by spectacular New Kingdom sculpture that showed the extent of Egyptian influence in the late Bronze Age Aegean. He had been looking forward to some time off in the institute’s castle headquarters alongside Alexandria harbour, time to reflect on his theory that the last kings of Troy were Egyptian, relishing the heated debate that would cause with Jack and their old Cambridge mentor, Professor James Dillen, who had been excavating with them and could counter with spectacular evidence for Mycenaean Greek involvement, for Agamemnon himself having been at Troy.

  Then Hiebermeyer had received a request from the most bizarre quarter imaginable. Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident genius, a man who had never seemed to acknowledge Hiebermeyer’s existence let alone shown the slightest interest in anything Egyptian, had sent him an email requesting an urgent scan of the Atlantis papyrus. At first Hiebermeyer had baulked, reluctant to remove the centrepiece of the Alexandria museum from its case, but then he had looked again at the multispectral scans done on the papyrus fragments from Herculaneum and relented, realizing that the imaging lab at Troy provided a ready facility for processing a new scan using technology that had been unavailable when the Atlantis papyrus had been discovered five years before. Lanowski had flown out to Turkey from the UK to be on board Seaquest II, and his email had come just before the ship had sailed from Troy for the Black Sea and Atlantis; a day later – yesterday morning – Jack himself had slipped away from the wreck excavation at Troy and followed in the helicopter. Before he had left, he had taken Hiebermeyer aside and told him of his plan to dive into the volcano. Whatever Lanowski’s reasons, resurrecting the papyrus that had started the search for Atlantis nearly six years ago meant that Hiebermeyer was part of that extraordinary project again, one that he was always privately pleased to think had begun not in the Black Sea or the Aegean but in Egypt: in the Egyptian desert with an Egyptian papyrus found in the wrapping of an Egyptian mummy.

  He shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the bulky white suit half up his legs, remembering where he was. A little over an hour earlier, he had arrived by German military helicopter from Frankfurt, having flown in from Alexandria the night before. The sky had been overcast as the helicopter came in to land, with fog reducing visibility to less than two hundred metres. He had been taken from the helicopter by jeep to a large Portakabin that seemed to loom out of nowhere on the edge of the runway. As two German Bundeswehr military policemen escorted him to the entrance, he had seen a form behind the Portakabin like a grounded airship covered in camouflage netting. When he had been briefed about the bunker on the phone, he had been told about the pressurized tennis-court bubble that had been put over the excavation, sealing the outside world from any possible contamination. In the fog the place had seemed unreal, disconnected from any known points of reference, like an image in a dream.

  He had to remind himself that six months before, only a handful of people still alive had known about the bunker: Hugh Frazer, a wartime British army officer; a nameless Jewish girl who had survived the adjacent concentration camp unable to speak, and who still lived in a care home near Auschwitz in Poland, the place where her parents had been gassed; and the EU commissioner and criminal mastermind Jean-Pierre Saumerre, whose grandfather – a Marseille gangster imprisoned by the Gestapo – had worked in the camp kitchens and escaped after liberation with knowledge of a secret Nazi bunker in the nearby forest, the place under excavation now. After the war, Hugh Frazer had become a classics teacher and had taught Jack and Maurice’s Cambridge professor, James Dillen. It was Dillen’s memory of something in the teacher’s possession years before that had led him and Jack’s daughter Rebecca to Frazer’s flat in Bristol late last summer; there Frazer had told them the full story of what he had experienced in the concentration camp on that terrible day of liberation in 1945, and the disappearance of his close friend Major Mayne and an American officer somewhere in the forest nearby while they were searching for hidden works of art stolen by the Nazis, shortly before the forest was destroyed by massive Allied aerial bombing.

  Hiebermeyer had spoken to Dillen at length about Hugh Frazer the evening before at Troy, where Dillen and Jeremy Haverstock had been left to close down the excavation. Dillen had run through the events of last year, and their lead-up, to prepare Hiebermeyer for what he might find in the bunker. The spark had been a drawing he had seen as a schoolboy in Frazer’s room, a drawing he and Rebecca learned had been made by the Jewish girl in the camp and given to Mayne on that fateful day in 1945, a drawing of an extraordinary and terrifying shape she had seen in the bunker: a reverse golden swastika that might have been the ancient Trojan palladion. By chance, Frazer had recognized the image from his student days before the war digging at Mycenae in Greece. There he had been told by an elderly foreman of an artefact sounding remarkably similar that had been taken at night from the grave of Agamemnon by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia more than fifty years before, a treasure that had been concealed and that may have fallen into the hands of the Nazis in their search for ancient artefacts they associated with the revered warrior-kings of antiquity.

  Yet the discovery last year of the existence of the bunker –
and the possibility that it contained not only stolen works of art, but also the greatest lost antiquities of Troy – had also drawn in Saumerre, whose grandfather had seen enough to guess that the palladion was associated with another purpose of the bunker, its most dreadful secret. For years the grandfather and his son and grandson had waited, hoping that the NATO airbase built over the camp site after the war would be decommissioned so that they might search for the bunker. Saumerre’s conviction that the palladion itself lay in another secret Nazi storage site – deep in a flooded salt mine in Poland – had led him to kidnap Rebecca to force Jack and Costas to use their diving expertise to search for it. They had found only an empty container, but the outcome for Saumerre had been a showdown between his henchmen and Jack and Costas at Troy, where Rebecca had been rescued and Saumerre’s power to harm them further had been checked by Jack’s threat to expose his criminal empire, something Jack would only do once they were certain that Saumerre’s ability to hold others to ransom had been neutered. For decades Saumerre’s organization had been deeply involved in the search for hidden Nazi weapons, and there was no certainty what he might already have found. Hiebermeyer remembered what Jack had impressed on him in their final phone conversation yesterday, after he had spoken to Dillen: the only certainty was that Saumerre would now be watching this place with eagle eyes, and would be seeking any means possible to infiltrate the excavation to get his hands on what might lie inside.

  The months since the bunker site had been discovered last year had seen a protracted process as Jack passed his knowledge to the British secret service, eventually leading to the site being opened up a week before by a specialist British army team under NATO authority. The situation, with Saumerre still in a position of power in Brussels, seemed extremely precarious to Hiebermeyer, who had never before been so closely involved in the present-day implications of one of Jack’s projects. Apart from an IMU geophysics team who had surveyed the airfield to determine where the camp lay, he was the first IMU representative at the bunker site. Yet his family home had been less than twenty kilometres away, and what had gone on here and in many other places like it during the Nazi period had shaped his own life and his passion for revealing the truth about the past, in this case with a personal family significance that had weighed on him over the last few days as the time for his visit had drawn nearer.