“Any progress with the translation?”
“They’re working on it, but it’s tricky because the imagery isn’t that great. We didn’t have much time before the wreck, um, blew up.”
“So I heard. And how deep were you? Costas told me about it when he was here yesterday. How many lives do you guys have?”
“That’s what I asked Costas afterward, and he said I still had lots. You remember The Lion King? Hakuna matata. It’s in the past. I look to the future.”
“You mean to another insanely dangerous dive.”
“To a lovely dive with you in less than ten meters’ depth on the Phoenician wreck. By the way, have you spoken to Aysha?”
“Just this morning. She left little Michael with her sister in London and went out to Carthage to join Maurice. She very nearly carried on back to Egypt, you know. It was Katya who put the kibosh on that during a long satellite call from Kyrgyzstan. She told Aysha that she had a responsibility now as a mother and to Maurice, and that there were plenty of others to carry on the fight against the extremists. It must be hard for Aysha, but Katya knows what she’s talking about, with her father having been a warlord and all that.
“As it turns out, Aysha’s really got stuck in at Carthage. She says it’s just like when they first worked together at the mummy necropolis in the Fayum, when she spotted the Atlantis papyrus. Maurice of course went to Carthage really only to find evidence for an early Egyptian settlement. Poor Uncle Hiemy. He can’t get over not being able to work in Egypt anymore. Anyway, what they’ve actually found is maybe even more interesting. While Maurice has been digging at the harbor entrance, their other dig at the Tophet sanctuary has produced some very old Punic inscriptions, scratched on potsherds. Some of the early alphabetic renderings might help Jeremy with his translation of the plaque.”
“Excellent. You can tell Jeremy yourself. He’s planning to drive down from Oxford today, to be here by mid-afternoon.”
“Huh. First I’ve heard of it.”
“Maybe it’s a surprise.”
“That is so not Jeremy.”
“Everything all right between you two?”
“It’s kind of hard conducting a relationship when you always seem to be at least three thousand miles apart.”
“Tell me about it,” Jack said. “Story of my life.”
“Katya spoke yesterday to Costas, who spilled the beans about your dive on Clan Macpherson. She was worried about you.”
“Katya? You must be joking. She’s a Kazakh warlord’s daughter. Nothing worries her.”
“Be serious, Dad. Just text her. Do it now.”
“I promise.”
“I’ll send the Zodiac to pick you up.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll kit up here and swim out myself. I could do with it.”
“Okay. I’ll be back in the water too. Got to go now. Out.”
Jack pocketed the receiver and squinted out to sea, spotting Rebecca leaving the cabin and helping a figure on the aft ladder of Seafire coming up from their dive. Seafire was much smaller than IMU’s two deep-ocean research vessels, Seaquest and Sea Venture, but had been designed specifically with inshore operations like this in mind, her shallow draft allowing her to anchor comfortably in these depths and her twin Vosper diesels giving her the power of a naval patrol boat should she need to egress quickly in deteriorating weather. Seafire was special to Rebecca, as she had been launched just after Rebecca had come back into Jack’s life after her mother had died, and she had been allowed to christen her. About a year ago she had quietly taken over a cabin and maintained it as her own, just as Jack did on Seaquest, another reason why he took her claim to be an environmentalist rather than an archaeologist with a pinch of salt.
He peered over the cliffs at the shore some ten meters below, seeing the sandy bottom and the dark shadows of rocks that extended underwater from the edge of the promontory. Farther out, more than halfway to Seafire, he could just make out the boiler of a steamship that had sunk upright in the cove more than a hundred years before. It was the first wreck he had ever dived on as a boy, and since then he had come here often searching the cove for other wrecks, swimming out over the boiler and sometimes seeing other parts of the hull poking through the sand on either side. The last time he had seen the wreck fully exposed had been the previous summer, snorkeling here with Rebecca, and it had given him renewed hope that the winter storms might one day reveal other treasures in the sands beyond the steamship, a site such as the one they were diving on today.
He shaded his eyes and scanned the coast, spotting familiar landmarks. For miles on either side, the reefs and sands of this shoreline were littered with wrecks, some of ships blown in from the Atlantic, others that had sought shelter along this coast and been caught by a change in the wind. Off this headland alone there were known to be at least a dozen, one of them a fabled treasure galleon yet to be found, others merchantmen and warships armed with cannon that Jack had discovered over the years concreted to reefs and half buried in the sands. But what he had really hoped for, what he had yearned to find since reading of the ancient navigators as a boy, was another kind of treasure, a wreck from the earliest period of Phoenician exploration, when traders from the Mediterranean had first made contact with the prehistoric peoples of the British Isles.
Looking to the west over the bay he could make out St. Michael’s Mount, the island where the Phoenicians were thought to have made landfall in the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles, in their quest for the precious ingredient they needed to make bronze. As a boy, Jack had pored over the nautical charts, plotting the likely location of wrecks. He knew that any ancient ship entering Mount’s Bay had faced the same risk of being caught by a westerly and wrecked against this shore as the hundreds of later ships known to have come to grief here. He had convinced himself that finding an ancient wreck would simply be a matter of time and perseverance, waiting for that one storm that would shift sand as it had never been shifted before, revealing seabed that might have been buried for centuries. All he had ever hoped for was a few shattered sherds on the shingle and concreted to the seabed, enough to show that the Phoenicians truly had sailed here, and to prove his theory correct.
And then it had happened. Three months ago, after the high seas of winter had abated, he had put on his wetsuit and snorkeled out at this very spot. He had steeled himself for disappointment, seeing that the storms had buried the steamship wreck again up to the boiler. But he had stuck with it, had refused to give up, and had swum out further than he ever had before. He had soon seen encouraging signs. The sand beyond the steamship had given way to shingle, suggesting that the sand that was normally there had been pushed into the cove and piled over the wreck, leaving the seabed further offshore less deeply silted. He swam over a cannon that he had never seen before, concreted to a rocky outcrop. And then he had seen something extraordinary. At first he had thought they were more cannon, dozens of them, but even as he dived down, he knew what he had discovered. They were amphoras, ancient cylindrical jars for wine and olive oil, exactly the type that he and Maurice had seen in the museum at Carthage when they had visited Tunisia earlier that winter. They were at least two and a half thousand years old, from the time before the rise of Rome when Carthage and her traders had vied with the Greeks for domination of the western Mediterranean, when Carthaginian seafarers were pushing the boundaries of maritime knowledge far out into the Atlantic to the north and the south.