Jack stared at the image. ‘The Mayan pyramid of Palenque, in the Yucatan?’
‘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 plastered 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
M aurice 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.