‘I’ll pause it here,’ Costas said, tapping a key. ‘You remember when we left this place five years ago we thought the eruption would have destroyed pretty well everything of the lower town?’
Jack nodded. ‘You said you’d need a sub-bottom profiler that could see through lava to find out what was left. A powerful low-frequency echo sounder. The stuff you’ve been tinkering with in the engineering workshop at IMU for the last five years.’
‘Not tinkering, Jack. Perfecting.’
‘Okay. Perfecting.’
The image sharpened, showing details of rock outcrops and fissures on the slopes. It was like looking at an aerial view of Mount St Helens in Washington State after the 1980 eruption, a scene of utter devastation. Along the seaward slope, where Jack remembered five years before seeing dense pueblo-style buildings, all he saw now was a great slick like a frozen mudslide, completely burying the original rocky substrate and all of the ancient structures. His heart sank as he saw the scale of the destruction. ‘It’s much worse than I feared. Those were mud-brick buildings. The lava must have destroyed everything.’
‘Well, prepare to be amazed.’
Costas tapped a key and the image transformed. The wide beds of lava constricted to narrow flows down the side of the volcano, like frozen rivers. In between Jack saw ghostly rectilinear outlines covering the slope. Costas pointed at the upper part of the screen. ‘You’re right, the lava would have destroyed all the mud-brick structures in their path. Where we dived this morning was through one of the solidified flows from five years ago, and the only structure that survived was that stone pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. But the lava flows are much narrower than we thought. When we were boring the tunnel yesterday, I used the submersible to take some core samples further down the slope, and I’ve just had a look at the results. Most of it is not lava but pyroclastic flow, solidified mud and ash. It looks as if the volcanic ash hardened with lime into a kind of hydraulic concrete, like the stuff we know the people of Atlantis used to make waterproof walls. Where the flow was pyroclastic, it didn’t destroy Atlantis. It actually preserved it.’
He tapped again, and the image sharpened further. Jack let out a low whistle. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. It was as if the flow had been peeled away to reveal intact structures beneath, a vast complex of flat-roofed buildings that seemed to have been built organically, reaching three or four storeys high and spreading up the slope of the volcano. Jack stared, shaking his head. ‘It’s fantastic. It’s like jumping back five years to when we first saw Atlantis from our Aquapods. I never thought I’d see that again.’
‘Well, we won’t be excavating it in a hurry. Even if the volcano goes quiet and we can get down there again, it’d be like mining on the moon. Roman Herculaneum was covered by pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, and they’ve only excavated one fifth of the site in two hundred and fifty years. And Herculaneum’s not under a hundred metres of water poisoned by sulphur dioxide.’
Jack was still stunned by the image. ‘More so than anything we saw five years ago, this view is incredibly similar to Neolithic houses found elsewhere.’
‘That place on the Konya plain? Catalhoyuk?’
Jack nodded. ‘About three hundred kilometres south-east of here.’ He reached over and tapped one of the thumbnails, revealing an artist’s impression of a town rising out of a plain, the structures built together like an Indian pueblo in the southern United States. ‘Do you remember I took a few days off from the excavation at Troy last month to go there? A friend of mine is leading an expedition into the Taurus mountains to the south, looking for caves that might contain paintings and other clues to their Stone Age ancestors. The excavations at Catalhoyuk in the 1960s gave the world an image of what the first Neolithic towns looked like.’
‘It dates to the same time period as Atlantis?’
Jack nodded. ‘Early Neolithic, the first period of settled farming after the end of the Ice Age, beginning about eleven thousand years ago. Atlantis was inundated by the Black Sea in the late sixth millennium BC, but the radiocarbon dates we took from timbers in the buildings five years ago show that some of these structures date at least two millennia before that. Catalhoyuk flourished in the eighth millennium BC. But there were even earlier Neolithic sites.’ He touched another thumbnail and the scene transformed to an image of a Near Eastern tell, an ancient city mound cut through by old excavation trenches with ruined walls protruding from the sections. ‘That’s Jericho, in the Jordan Valley, just north of the Dead Sea,’ he said. ‘You know the Old Testament story of Joshua leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, and coming to Jericho?’
Costas screwed up his eyes for a moment, then recited: ‘ So the people shouted when the priests blew with their trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down flat.’ He turned to Jack ruefully. ‘The benefits of a Greek Orthodox background, and then a boarding school in New York where we had to memorize passages from the Bible.’
Jack grinned at him. ‘You never cease to amaze me. Is that how you got your interest in poetry?’
‘Nope. That was the Dead Poets Society, after school. We had to join something, and I hated sports. It meant I could hide in the back row and doodle submarine engine-room layouts.’
‘Some of the poetry must have washed off on you.’
‘That’s what Jeremy says. You know, he can declaim whole passages of Shakespeare. We do it when we’re alone in the engineering lab. That’s how I got that Othello quote.’
Jack shook his head. ‘Well, I just hope some of the poetry goes into the submersibles.’
‘Exactly what Jeremy said when we finished Little Joey.’ Costas sighed. ‘Little Joey, who has made the ultimate sacrifice.’
Jack put a hand on Costas’ shoulder. ‘I really am sorry.’ He turned back to the image on the screen. ‘The excavations at Jericho during the 1950s revealed a perimeter wall around the city almost four metres high, as well as an eight-metre-high stone tower. The conventional Biblical chronology puts Joshua about the middle of the second millennium BC. But the walls of Jericho didn’t date anywhere near that time. They dated a staggering six millennia earlier, to the eighth or even the ninth millennium BC. So the archaeology tells a far more fantastic story than the Bible. The excavations at Jericho were the first to put the early Neolithic on the map, and showed that collective endeavour to make large monuments like walls and towers was possible right at the dawn of civilization, at a time when most humans still lived as hunter-gatherers.’
Costas whistled. ‘And wasn’t Jericho the site where the first of those plastered skulls was found?’
Jack nodded. ‘Just like the ones in the inner sanctum we saw today. There was a connection between these early communities across this region, a connection in their religion, their belief system. But Jericho’s at the periphery of that early Neolithic world, at the south-west tip of the so-called fertile crescent that extended up to Anatolia and down through Mesopotamia. I believe that the true heartland lay here, along the Black Sea coast before it flooded, and down into Anatolia further south. And I’m not just talking about Catalhoyuk. Two other sites have revolutionized our picture of early-Neolithic religion.’