Costas leaned back. ‘But surely all you’re going to find is more patterns, more word games. Where does that get us?’
‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I remembered how easy it was for me to find that musical scale. Way too easy for an intellectual like Solon. I think he wanted some successor like Plato to see it and then look for what else was hidden, something we know Plato never had the chance to do because this fragment of papyrus was lost in the desert before Solon left Egypt, and he never replicated it. I love the idea that Solon might have been robbed of the gold he was going to use to pay the priest and that he suffered some kind of permanent amnesia, losing this part of his papyrus during the scuffle as well. But I think I’m taking up where Plato should have been, as someone who immediately recognizes that there must be something else hidden in the text.’
‘That still doesn’t explain how a hidden code could be anything other than wordplay, mathematical games.’
Lanowski looked at Costas. ‘The technique could also have been used to conceal actual words, as a code in the way we might expect.’
‘It makes sense,’ Jack added. ‘Why on earth would Solon bother to embed a word game in a script he’s writing in the flickering torchlight at the foot of an old priest, telling him one of the most extraordinary tales he’s ever heard? There must have been a particular purpose for concealment, and Solon wasn’t a mystic like some of those later Pythagoreans.’
‘There’s geometry in that page,’ Lanowski said, pointing at the screen. ‘Not in the section at the top of the papyrus, where I think he was hastily copying down a dictation from the high priest, but in that final crucial paragraph. It’s much more carefully written. Remember, Solon was translating from Egyptian into Greek as he was listening. So he was already thinking hard about language, about words. He was good at composing fast. I’ve really got to like the guy and I can see where he was coming from. He enjoyed making clever geometry out of his writing. It’s really no different from the way a creative writer today uses metaphor and simile, alliteration and assonance. Only here I think the artistry had a special reason. Imagine this: the high priest is speaking slowly, carefully, giving Solon time to transcribe what he’s saying. This was really important stuff, about the end of Atlantis, coveted information normally only passed from priest to priest. The high priest is taking a bit of a gamble telling him, perhaps induced by the promise of gold. But then he oversteps the boundary and tells Solon something really coveted, something sacred. Maybe he then regrets it and instructs Solon not to write it down.’
‘But Solon finds a way,’ murmured Costas.
‘And maybe the high priest still doesn’t trust him, and it was the priest who arranged for Solon to be robbed and knocked on the head after leaving the temple that final night.’
Costas shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. We know from what’s openly in the text that the priest told Solon a phenomenal story, something passed down over almost seven thousand years. There’s incredible detail in the descriptions of Atlantis. What else could he reveal that might suddenly seem beyond the pale, too secret to tell Solon?’
Lanowski got up and paced in front of them, gesticulating. ‘Let’s imagine he told Solon where the Atlanteans went, something Solon wrote down at the end of the text in the corner of the papyrus that’s been ripped off. We can pretty well guess what it would have said. Troy, Greece, Crete, the coast of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, where all the early civilizations subsequently developed. But then let’s imagine there was another story. Something dark, a story of exile, of banishment. Something hinted at in later myth, but a truth that should not be told. Then I thought of the Epic of Gilgamesh.’
‘I think I’ve got you,’ Jack said. ‘The idea of Uta-napishtim cast away, a pariah. To a place where nobody is supposed to follow.’
‘And a place whose horror might have been exaggerated by the new priesthood of the early Neolithic, a priesthood who had already made people fear the unknown, the open ocean,’ Costas said. ‘Try to go there, and the ancient demons of the spirit world will arise again and haunt you.’
‘And carry out appalling acts half remembered, take away the children and sacrifice them to satisfy their blood lust,’ Lanowski said.
‘So you think Solon heard what he should not have heard, agreed not to write it down but did so, in some kind of code?’
‘I think the fear of that place and of the one who lurked there, a kind of nightmare shaman, may have still been felt by those priests of Egypt who were the last in the line to carry the actual story of what happened, a story that survived elsewhere only in the garbled accounts of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament. Seven thousand years on, that last shaman and what he represented still struck terror into the hearts of Egyptian priests whose gods were supposedly all-powerful, yet who could not suppress that ancient fear of the old spiritualist religion and the threat it posed to the new world of the gods.’
‘And?’ Jack said. ‘The code?’
Lanowski scratched his head. ‘It’s not quite there yet. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibles. It’s what you say, Jack. A hunch. A gut feeling that I’m on to something.’
Jack stared at him for a moment, then nodded. ‘Okay, Jacob. Email it to me when you’ve got a result.’
‘Roger that.’ Lanowski gave him a crooked smile, his face red with excitement, then sat back down in front of the screen and began mumbling lists of letters to himself, apparently oblivious to anyone else in the room. Jack drummed his fingers on the desk, feeling frustrated. Suddenly they were on the cusp of something big, and it was going to have to be put on hold. He tried to keep his mind on prehistoric exploration for a moment longer. The possibility of ancient voyages across the Atlantic had been a fascination of his during his student years, something he had married with Maurice Hiebermeyer’s obsession with retracing the Nazi Ahnenerbe expeditions to see whether they were ever on to anything real. It had come to fruition years later when they had crossed the North Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland, following Viking explorers. But the other main route across the Atlantic, south from the Mediterranean and across from Africa, continued to be unexplored territory for him. The African route south had been taken by the Phoenicians, but there was no certainty that they had ever intentionally struck off west. And Jack had already begun to think much earlier than that, to early prehistory, the basis for his Royal Geographical Society lecture. Only he had never associated it with an exodus from Atlantis, until now. He could only hope that the trail that was beginning to form in front of them would set up some waymarkers soon.
‘One final thing.’ Lanowski turned and looked at him. ‘If you want to work out where the Atlanteans went, get into the cave, Jack. And I don’t just mean metaphorically. If we’re looking for the last of the shamans, if we’re looking for Noah Uta-Napishtim, we need to be looking for somewhere he can do his thing again, somewhere like that holy sanctum in Atlantis.’
‘Just as long as it doesn’t take us on a psychedelic trip into a cave of the mind,’ Costas said. ‘That transatlantic current dumps you in the Caribbean, right? Sounds good to me. I want a tropical island.’
Lanowski peered at him. ‘My girlfriend says every man needs his cave.’
‘And she wants to get into yours?’ Costas asked.
‘It’s no different from the cave you disappear into every night in the basement of the engineering department at IMU, hatching mini-ROVs.’
‘Don’t. Little Joey. It’s still too raw.’
Jeremy came back into the room, stopped before reaching them and pointed. ‘Hey, Costas. Have you seen that?’
Costas glanced back at the ROV monitor. ‘My God,’ he said hoarsely. While they had been talking, the screen had come to life. He quickly got up, pushed aside the chairs and sat down at the monitoring station, his eyes glued to the screen. Lanowski came up quickly behind him and leaned over the control panel.