He was conscious of only one thought.
He had to call Jack.
9
C ostas took a last dejected look at the blank screen in front of the ROV monitor, and then swivelled round to join Jack in front of Lanowski’s computer. The clock showed 1415 hours, less than an hour before Jack was due on the helipad to leave Seaquest II in advance of the arrival of the inspection team. A few moments before, they had felt the ship lurch as she repositioned herself, her new location visible on the digital wall map some two nautical miles north-west of the volcano and the site of Atlantis. Captain Macalister was clearly taking few chances after the images Jack and Costas had brought back with them from their dive into the caldera that morning, but he had agreed to keep the ship within range should a minor miracle happen and the ROV spring back to life. Costas pulled his chair up until he was between the other two men and then rested his elbows on their chair backs. Jeremy had left the room to deal on the phone with an urgent problem at Troy, a statue with Egyptian hieroglyphics that had appeared just as the excavation was winding down; with Hiebermeyer preoccupied at the bunker in Germany and out of contact, Jeremy had wanted to speak to Hiebermeyer’s wife Aysha to see whether she could return from Alexandria to judge whether they should excavate now or rebury it for the next season. Costas nudged Lanowski. ‘Okay, Jacob. I’m itching to know where you think the new Atlantis might lie. We’re not getting anywhere waiting for Little Joey to reveal more about that inner sanctum. I think he’s left us for good.’
Jack pointed at the screen. ‘Remember this?’
Costas leaned forward and stared at the image, a torn brown scrap of papyrus with ancient Greek script that had been seen over the last five years by thousands of visitors who had stood in front of the original in the archaeological museum in Alexandria. ‘The Atlantis papyrus,’ he murmured. ‘The tail end of the account written by the Greek traveller Solon at the temple of Sais in the Nile delta, the part of the Atlantis story that somehow never reached Plato when he used Solon’s account to write his version of the Atlantis myth in the fifth century BC.’ He pointed to a word visible at the top of the screen, letters in Greek spelling out ATLANTIS. ‘That’s what Hiebermeyer and Aysha saw when they pulled this scrap from the mummy wrapping. I’ve never heard Maurice so excited by something that wasn’t actually Egyptian. I can still remember the look on your face when we came up from the dive on the Bronze Age shipwreck and you took his call.’
Lanowski tapped the keyboard, then sat back and craned his head round at Costas. ‘Gladstone. William Ewart Gladstone.’
Costas stared back at him. ‘Huh?’
‘British prime minister in the late nineteenth century. Does that ring a bell?’
Costas screwed up his eyes, then peered at Lanowski cautiously. ‘The guy who was so fascinated with Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy, who helped push Schliemann to international fame.’
Lanowski nodded. ‘Well, like a lot of the Victorian intelligentsia, Gladstone was also fascinated by archaeological discoveries that might illuminate the Bible, especially with the wealth of clay tablets being found at ancient Mesopotamian sites that were seen as part of the backdrop to the Old Testament. One of the most famous discoveries was the Epic of Gilgamesh.’
‘It’s what we were talking about,’ Costas said. ‘About the tension it represents between the wild and the civilized, and how it might derive from conflict between the old shamans and the new priests in the early Neolithic.’
Lanowski nodded enthusiastically. ‘For the Victorians, the biggest revelation in the Epic of Gilgamesh was the story of a flood that paralleled the Biblical deluge. Gladstone attended a lecture in 1873 at the Society for Biblical Archaeology in London, where the tablet containing the flood account was first revealed. An obsessive genius named George Smith had been sifting through thousands of tablets from Nineveh in the British Museum, and when he came across the flood tablet, he was so excited he rushed about the room and stripped naked.’
‘Don’t get any ideas, Jacob,’ Costas muttered.
Lanowski’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve already had my eureka moment. What George Smith found was the flood tablet in the version of the epic written down in the early first millennium BC, but since the nineteenth century, fragments have been found that are a lot earlier, dating to the first period of cuneiform writing in Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC. The fact that the story of Gilgamesh seems to have been well formed that early strongly suggests that it had been passed down orally for a long time before then, conceivably from as far back as the early Neolithic.’
‘And it’s the basis for the Old Testament deluge story?’
‘Or a parallel tradition, deriving from the same historical backdrop. And for my money, the Gilgamesh story is a lot more intriguing, with more pointers to the early Neolithic. Uta-napishtim, the flood hero, is a more ambiguous character than Noah. For a start, he isn’t the sole survivor of the flood, and he’s actually presented as more of an outcast. After the flood, the gods grant him immortality, but he lives on the mountain where his boat came ashore, far from the rest of humanity. It’s as if the gods’ favour comes at a price: we’ll grant you immortality and give you this mountain to live on, but don’t ever come back to our shores again. As if they owe him something, even feel guilty about him, but he’s a threat to the new world of men they lord it over and they don’t want him around. And so Gilgamesh, half-god himself, travels a huge distance across the sea to find him, to try to discover the secret of immortality. It’s then that Uta-napishtim tells him the story of the flood.’
Costas looked at him shrewdly. ‘And you’re going to suggest that this flood story contains something about a survivor from Atlantis?’
Lanowski beamed at him. ‘The character of Uta-napishtim himself could be a clue. An outcast. A shaman perhaps, the last of the old order? Gilgamesh goes a huge distance across the water to get to him. And Uta-napishtim lives on a twin-peaked mountain, called Nisir.’
‘The mountain of Du-Re was twin-peaked as well,’ Jack murmured. ‘That’s where the oldest Babylonian myths locate the birthplace of the gods.’
‘I think Du-Re was Atlantis,’ Lanowski enthused. ‘Du-Re was somewhere to the north, where the Babylonian scribes always placed their ancestors and the home of their gods, precisely where Atlantis and those other early Neolithic sites were located in relation to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But Nisir is a kind of alter-Atlantis, Atlantis reborn, a huge distance over the sea. The question is, was the sea simply a conceptual barrier, a barrier in the mind, or was it a real ocean, and if so which one?’
‘And?’
‘And that made me think of Jack’s lecture at the Royal Geographical Society last December, on prehistoric voyages of discovery. About his title, “Voyages of the mind, voyages of the body”.’
‘I missed it, I’m sorry to say,’ Costas said. ‘Too wrapped up getting Little Joey finished in time for the sea trials.’
‘Well, if I may,’ Lanowski said, looking questioningly at Jack. ‘The nub of his argument was this. We’ve had it all wrong. Great voyages of discovery didn’t begin after the rise of civilization, with trade and colonization. They began before that. Way before, as far back as the middle Palaeolithic, fifty thousand years ago or more, when we know people went great distances by sea to get to Australia, for example. Ergo, hunter-gatherers in deep prehistory had boats capable of long-distance seafaring. Hunter-gatherers ranged over huge distances on land, so why not by sea as well? By the end of the Palaeolithic – at the end of the Ice Age – just as many people were living off the sea as off the land. But the advent of farming actually stifled exploration. People moved inland, settled in one place, turned in on themselves, were enslaved by agriculture as well as by new rulers who wanted to control them, to prevent them seeing the world outside their own narrow confines, a control maybe exerted using new religious beliefs based on fear.’