‘Those bags,’ Harker remarked, ‘are identical to the one on the tattoo.’ He then turned back to take in more of the spectacular sight.
‘Yes, they are,’ Holtz replied. But as Harker continued to look on in wonder, it was not the bags that now gripped his attention. Of course, the statues were intoxicating in their beauty – you didn’t need to be an archaeologist to appreciate that – but there was something else that caught his attention above all else. The statues’ elliptical eyes were absolute dead ringers for the ones possessed by the strange-looking humanoid he had left back at the hospital.
It was only now that Harker turned his attention to the rest of his surroundings. The room itself was shaped like a pyramid sliced in half, with a flat wall running straight through the middle and at the far end the two statues stood in front. The three other walls, behind him and to the left and right, sloped upwards to meet at a single point in the middle of the upright one. Below them the floor appeared shiny and spotless, its polished granite surface seamless, as if cut from a single sheet of rock. And the near perfect reflection from it only served to add an extra sense of dimension to the room, like a giant, black floor mirror. The walls, however, were formed from a lighter, more crystalline type of rock and, although flat-surfaced, their glinting quality created a kind of starry effect as if gazing at a distant constellation. Without question it had been designed to impress anyone who entered. In fact, the entire room seemed designed for its effect on the point of view of anyone entering. The inward slope of the three side walls made the far wall appear as a sparkling black triangle, like a cross-section of a pyramid, with the statues standing guard in front of it. The floor was a mirrored highway to the pyramid, with the sloping walls above replicating a brilliant, star-filled sky.
Holtz now made her way further into the room and Harker, still dazzled by the sight, slowly followed her, trying to take in everything this magnificent space had to offer. There were no markings or drawings anywhere on the walls, but that was the whole point. The very room itself was the artwork.
As Harker took step after step, he noticed that his own reflection, which should have been directly beneath him, instead appeared way out in front, creating the illusion that he was walking on air. And, stranger still, barely a trace of water was left by his still drenched wetsuit.
‘The floor is porous yet it manages to maintain its shine,’ Holtz explained, clearly marvelling at the qualities of the material used. ‘We had a geologist in here who couldn’t tell us what it was, but he was convinced that it is not a naturally occurring substance. Alex… this material was made by someone.’
‘What’s a pyramid doing here in the Strait of Gibraltar?’
Holtz let out an amused chuckle. ‘This is just the apex. So far as we can tell, there’s another three floors below us, although we haven’t accessed them yet.’
‘Three floors?’ Harker realised he was repeating her words like a parrot but he really didn’t care. This dig was the most incredible place he had ever seen… And a pyramid of this quality, so far from Egypt?
‘We’ve only been able to access them so far by underwater drones, but yes.’
‘So they’re all now flooded. Because of the ship?’
‘Not sure,’ Holtz replied, clearly enjoying Harker’s enthusiasm at witnessing such a discovery. ‘But we intend to find out.’
With no further explanation she headed towards the far wall, pressed her palm against it and a seamless doorway – ten metres high – slowly swung open to reveal a room on the other side, already lit with the same vacuum bulbs he had seen so far. Harker walked over to her, glancing up at the two intimidating statues flanking the doorway and, with an ushering hand from Holtz, he took a deep breath and headed on through.
Three uplighters had been placed around the room which, unlike the previous room, had vertical walls and a flat ceiling, all perfectly smooth with the same plaster as the other rooms. Harker gazed in wonder at the fine fresco that covered them.
‘The state of the plasterwork is remarkable,’ he declared – there were no cracks anywhere to be seen – and his observation had Holtz nodding in agreement.
‘The whole place was airtight,’ she explained, and she flicked her finger from one wall to the next. ‘There was minor flooding when the ship uncovered this little baby, but so as far as we can tell this place has remained untouched since it sank into the sea.’
‘Sank?’
‘Yes, we’ve taken some ultrasounds around the whole area and at it appears at some point the limestone beneath it gave way, plunging the whole site into the strait itself. Our drone incursions revealed the lower floors sustained severe damage to the structural walls, but as you can see this area was unharmed.’
Harker now turned his attention to the host of images painted on the walls and it soon became clear he was looking at a story. The left hand wall bore a fresco of a city spread out on a number of islands, clearly a seagoing civilisation in the throes of being consumed by a giant tidal wave or tsunami. The right wall showed a peaceful green valley full of trees and vegetation, and at one end a huge tide of water cresting the mountains on either side as a foamy mass of turquoise blue water was about to come crashing down into the valley. In the foreground, groups of terrified onlookers cowered on their knees at the sight of their impending doom. A host of different animals – oxen, bears, lions and tigers – were all fleeing in different directions, and right in the middle a woman wearing a ragged-looking tunic cradled her baby protectively, with her eyes closed.
The middle wall, though, was the most fascinating of the three. Directly in the centre stood a gleaming gold pyramid with light bursting upwards from its apex, creating golden clouds which hung in a clear blue sky. On one side of the pyramid a line of men and women in tattered rags stood in a line. The old man at the very head of the queue was not dressed in rags, though, but in a brilliant, golden robe with intricate, bronze stitching, and had his hand outstretched towards the final individual on the other side of the pyramid, whose hand was also outstretched but holding a bag with handles identical to the one featured on the tattoo and on the statues in the other room. The fresco itself was an incredible piece of artwork but it was not the artist’s talent that captured Harker’s attention but rather the individual holding this bag. The strange-looking man was three times as tall as anyone else depicted, and he sported those now familiar elliptical eyes. Like the statues too, his neck muscles were tremendous and, though with the same short, stocky legs, he towered over everyone in the line before him. From his peculiar eyes a narrow beam of silvery light shone directly onto the bag itself, which he was in the process of passing down the line of waiting people to the robed man, whilst the image of a giant elliptical eye sat at the apex of the pyramid, shooting a ray of light upwards towards an orb-like planet high up in the sky above.
Harker expelled a light breath in awe as Holtz now moved closer towards him. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ she said, seeming utterly captivated by the images herself. ‘And that – the eye symbol – replicates exactly the Egyptian hieroglyphic denoting the Eye of Horus.’
‘The Egyptian god who protected the rulers of Egypt from on high,’ Harker reminded himself, before pointing up to the only area of missing plasterwork, at the top left side of the central wall. ‘What happened there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Holtz shook her head, ‘but the late Dr Khan told me it was like that when he first entered this place – a few weeks before I was invited to join the dig. We did, however, collect some loose material from the broken edges.’
From the fact that she was now chewing at her bottom lip, Harker already sensed what she was getting at. ‘Have you dated this place yet with radiocarbon testing?’
She now stared at him worriedly, and her lips trembled as if she wanted to scream out her next words. ‘We did some tests, yes, and we discovered that it’s essentially a form of cement, but not like anything we use today – or we have ever come across before, for that matter.�
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Harker was now nodding slightly, encouraging her to get to the point. ‘And how old?’
‘Ten thousand years.’
‘What?’ he gasped, genuinely shocked by this revelation. ‘But Egyptian civilisation goes back only just over five thousand.’
‘I know, and yet here we see the Eye of Horus thousands of years before it was thought to have been first used.’
‘Jesus,’ Harker muttered softly, as he now realised what this meant. ‘There was a civilisation before us – but who?’
At this Holtz looked increasingly excited. ‘Not who, Alex,’ she said, pointing to the figure holding the bag, on the left hand side of the pyramid, ‘but what.’
As Harker gazed transfixed at the thick-necked giant with elliptical eyes, Holtz moved over to the single electrical cable supplying power to the lights and prepared to unplug it, grasping it tightly in both hands.
‘And whilst your brain is melting like a fried Mars bar, take a look at this,’ she declared.
With a firm tug she pulled the connecting cables apart and, although Harker expected to be plunged into total darkness, instead the whole room was bathed in a multitude of colours, twinkling from the surface of the fresco itself.
‘My God,’ was all he managed as he stood back and visually devoured the dazzling images that radiated in a luminescent glow. Where earlier the image of the city being deluged by flood had been, another image could be seen painted over it that had been invisible under the light. It showed the same island city, but this time it was alive and thriving. Boats circled the metropolis and headed along the many waterways leading in and out of the island’s centre, and it was dotted with lighting that looked more like the electrical type of the modern era than any oil lamps of old. The opposite wall also shone brightly, but in stark contrast to the impressive island city. Instead it depicted men and women living in caves and huddled around campfires, in a scene typical of the hunter-gatherers described in history books. Deerskins, stretched over wood tanners were being tended to, as other folks guarded the outskirts of the settlement with spears.
Finally Harker turned his attention to the middle wall and what he saw there brought an unsettled feeling to the pit of his stomach. Dozens of those same figures with elliptical eyes towered above crowds of normal-sized people in chains, while giant whips were lashed down upon them as they gathered crops or cut through thick tree trunks with long, two-man saws. On one side a man was being roasted on a spit over an open fire, and on the other was a wooden cage containing numerous prisoners, each clawing at their bindings in a futile attempt to escape. On the horizon, in the centre, stood the outline of a city radiating a sunny glow composed of thin beams of light, with a procession of people heading towards it, as yet more giants stood guard looking down at them, grasping enormous swords in their hands.
Harker gave an involuntary gulp as he glanced between the contrasting images of everyday life depicted on the outer walls and these images of suffering and bondage at the centre.
Still captivated by the sight, he now noticed for the first time an additional glow coming from above and looked up to see a dazzling display of pinpricks of light on the ceiling. It took him just a few moments to realise what they were. ‘Constellations,’ he murmured in no more than a whisper.
At which point Holtz raised her arm and pointed upwards. ‘Orion’s belt, Ursa Major and the constellation of Leo,’ she explained, then moved her finger over to the star cluster in the centre of it all. ‘I used a special program to determine the date when those stars would have been in those positions, and the dates revealed are even more intriguing.’
‘When?’ Harker asked, feeling that giddiness that only growing excitement can yield.
‘Eleven thousand years ago – at least.’
This last statement was the most incredible part, and Holtz then took it upon herself to voice exactly what Harker was already thinking. ‘That’s right, Alex. Whoever created this knew exactly how the stars looked twenty thousand years ago.’
Harker turned to study the golden image of the giant holding the whip and a chill rippled through his body. ‘And who were they?’
‘They are the gods,’ Holtz replied despondently, ‘and if this image is anything to go by, they were here long before we were.’
Even though such conjecture would fit perfectly amongst the pages of a conspiracy theory magazine, even Harker had to admit it was fascinating. The construction of such architecture alone was thousands of years ahead of anything mankind had built, and the degree of knowledge needed to so accurately show the constellations far exceeded anything that ancient hunter-gatherers could have accomplished.
As Harker brooded the possibilities, Holtz set the two electrical sockets back together again and those unsettling images disappeared as the original frescos reappeared on the walls and the room was bathed in light once again.
‘And then there’s this,’ Holtz said, moving over to the left hand corner of the room and reaching down to a small clay pot with silver stars painted on its surface, into which she dipped her hand and pulled out a round gold-coloured object about six centimetres in diameter.
‘Coins. The pot is full of them,’ she explained, whereupon Harker moved over to her and took the coin from her hand. Its surface was scratched and weathered and it appeared to have been handled many times before reaching its final resting place here in the clay pot. On one side it bore that same image of the unblinking elliptical Eye of Horus, but it was the other side that truly made him feel giddy. Its surface had been engraved with exactly the same image of a bag as he had seen in the humanoid’s tattoo and, even though he couldn’t decipher it, the cuneiform script contained therein looked remarkably similar, if not the same.
‘What I’d like to know is how a symbol sealed within this place for eleven thousand years shows up now on a tattoo.’ Holtz stared at him grimly. ‘And just as importantly, who was the tattoo’s owner?’
As Harker rotated the coin between his fingers, he refused to look up at her, for he knew it was time to come clean about that strange-looking creature they had found – but without mentioning the Templars or the Mithras cult, since their involvement would only bring more questions. Instead he decided to stay focused on the more immediate aspects of whatever all this might mean.
‘What I want to know is what you think this is,’ he said, giving the gold coin in his palm another shake. ‘Is it currency of some kind?’
The look in Holtz’s eyes revealed that she knew he was sidestepping her question, but with a sigh she took his arm and drew him closer to the central fresco. She knelt beside it, pulling Harker down with her.
‘Not currency,’ she said, pointing to the man in the gold robe being offered a bag by the giant, ‘but an invitation.’
He craned his head closer to the image and spotted what she was referring to.
In the robed man’s hand a single coin was being held outwards. It could have easily been mistaken for a ring at a distance, and though too small to carry any symbols on it, in Harker’s mind it could be nothing else. ‘An invitation to what?’
‘To meet with the gods… our makers.’
He stared at her blankly, then back at the depiction of a giant staring down at the little robed man. In all of history there were three questions that had primarily occupied the human mind. Questions that, although unanswerable, nevertheless surfaced at some point in their lifetime within the minds of almost every person who ever lived.
One: Where did we come from?
Two: Are we alone in this vast cosmos?
Three: Is there something else after death?
As Harker stared at the fresco in front of him, he suddenly wondered if those first two questions might have just been answered here, and his mind began to contemplate the possibilities even as a rumbling began to shake the ground beneath him.
It was then that the explosions started.
Chapter 9
‘We have to go – now!’ Harker yelled, as
another explosion ripped through the underwater structure with such ferocity that both he and Barbara Holtz were thrown to the floor. Up above, jagged cracks began to appear in the ceiling. ‘This whole place is about to come down.’
The initial explosion had slammed both of them hard against the fresco, and even though this had left Holtz more dazed than it had himself, an absolutely firm shake of her head showed she had already recovered. ‘I’m not leaving this site,’ she insisted. ‘The earthquake will pass.’
This response was admirable but ridiculous, and so Harker grabbed her roughly by the arm and dragged both of them to their feet. ‘That’s not an earthquake,’ he explained. ‘Those are controlled charges.’ Even as he spoke the plaster of the astonishing frescos began to rupture and crumble off the walls, dislodged by the shockwave of the second blast. ‘Can’t you tell?’
Perhaps Holtz was in shock, but as Harker stared into her eyes frantically he could tell that was far from being the only reason for her refusal. She simply could not bring herself to abandon this remarkable archaeological discovery. But after a thick chunk of ceiling crashed to the floor just metres away, Harker delivered a swift, energising slap across the face that caused her eyes to suddenly brighten and any further resistance to fade.
Plumes of dust began to cloud the air and the tremors beneath them began to intensify. Harker pulled Holtz with him through the still wide open doorway and into the main chamber, just as the gigantic stone statue off to his right cracked at its base, explosively hurling fragments of stone in their direction, before lurching forwards, its immense weight succumbing to gravity.
‘Down!’ Harker yelled, and he dived off to his left, with Holtz clamped tightly to him, an instant before the stone guardian slammed down hard onto the floor and fractured into chunks, its torso eventually coming to a rest just metres from where they lay.
The impact left the glassy granite floor with a thin crack across its centre, and seawater began to spray up through the gap with such pressure that it hit the ceiling before splashing down all around them.
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