‘There may be some electrical impulse still left that could knock the camera askew. Until we’re sure this image is recorded, let’s keep hands off the control stick.’ He tapped the keyboard, downloading the video stream, and Jack stared in astonishment at the underwater image on the monitor. He could see tendrils like monofilaments in the water, the glassy discharge from phreatic explosions. He imagined a horrifying scene directly behind the ROV, a billowing wall of lava completely sealing the entrance to the inner sanctum where he had peered in only a few hours ago. Even at this remove the view seemed confining, claustrophobic. He concentrated on the stone wall visible in the background. Like the other parts of the cave wall, it had been smoothed down, but he could just make out the ghosts of older carvings, similar to the ones that stood out starkly in front of them.
‘They’re symbols,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Symbols carved on the wall. And look,’ he said in hushed tones. ‘The video’s live. You can see tiny bubbles rising in the water, gas from the lava.’
Jack stared at the symbols. They seemed to have been crudely chiselled, as if done in a hurry. There were two separate clusters, each surrounded by a circle. Altogether he counted sixteen symbols: little spirals, stick-figure hands, triangles, zigzags, open angles, half-circles, groups of dots. Some appeared in both clusters, others in one only. At the centre of one cluster was a cross like an X, and in the other a slash with lines going out from it like a garden rake, repeated twice. The symbols presented an extraordinary image, like nothing else they had seen in Atlantis, evidently carved in the dying moments of the citadel, yet almost immeasurably old to those last Atlanteans, originating far back in the Ice Age.
‘I recognize these,’ he said. ‘They’re found in Palaeolithic cave art. Some archaeologists have dubbed them the Stone Age code, but nobody really knows what they mean.’
‘Look at that one,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s like a precursor to the Atlantis symbol.’ Jack saw where Costas was pointing. Instead of the fully formed Atlantis symbol – the one that they had interpreted as the form of a spirit bird, an eagle or a vulture – this looked like one wing of a bird, a straight line with four parallel lines extending from it. The symbol appeared three times at the same sloping angle with the parallel lines going off to the left, and once the other way round with the lines going right.
‘Isn’t this up Katya’s street?’ Jeremy said. ‘Prehistoric symbology?’
‘In fact, isn’t this whole thing up her street?’ Costas said, looking quizzically at Jack. ‘She was pretty well in at the outset five years ago, our expert palaeographer, then there was all the involvement of her father the warlord in trying to get those nukes off the Russian sub that sank beside Atlantis.’
Jack gave Costas a wry look. ‘That’s precisely why she’s not involved. Her father met his end here, remember? But I’ve always left the door open for her. I called her yesterday evening before I flew here from Troy, and told her that if we found any more ancient symbols at Atlantis I’d let her know.’
‘But you’re involved, aren’t you, Jack?’ Lanowski said, pushing his glasses up his nose and peering at Jack like a doctor. ‘It’s common knowledge at IMU. That is, when you’re not involved with Maria. Costas explained it to me.’
Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas, and then looked back at Lanowski. ‘I’m glad to see that even the most unimportant things don’t get past your radar now, Jacob.’
‘Oh,’ Lanowski exclaimed, shaking his head, peering furtively at the flashing email inbox message on his computer screen. ‘Oh, but they are important, Jack. Very important. I find you just can’t get away from them.’
Costas grinned. ‘Back to prehistoric symbology, guys.’
‘Where is she now?’ Lanowski said with a smile, pulling a memory stick out of his pocket and plugging it into the console. ‘I can email a still from this video to her.’
‘I caught her in a taxi on the way from the Institute of Palaeography in Moscow to the airport, where she was flying to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan,’ Jack replied. ‘She should be at the petroglyph site at Cholpon-Ata beside Lake Issyk-Gul by now. They’re four hours ahead of us, so it’ll be near the end of their working day.’
‘She’s still digging up those petroglyphs?’ Costas said, shaking his head. ‘It’s been almost two years since we were out there.’
‘That’s archaeology for you,’ Jack said ruefully, reaching for his tablet computer as Lanowski saved the image. ‘There are thousands of boulder carvings beside the lake and many square kilometres still to be explored. Since finding the Roman legionary inscription that took us there two years ago, she’s worked backwards in time searching for the oldest petroglyphs, back to the Neolithic and even earlier. The place wasn’t just a Silk Road site, it was a major prehistoric migration point between East and West. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if one day she found evidence of a group of early Neolithic refugees from Atlantis heading towards China.’
He took the memory stick from Lanowski, plugged it into his computer and took out his cell phone as he emailed the image. He found a saved number and then put it up to his ear, waiting. ‘During the summers, she’s out there with an international team, really well resourced after our board of directors agreed to fund the project,’ he said. ‘But out of season like now, it’s usually just her and Altamaty, like it was at the beginning.’ He suddenly looked away, putting his free hand over his other ear. ‘Hello? Altamaty? It’s Jack. I can barely hear you. It must be windy. I’ve got something for Katya.’ He strained to listen, and then took down the phone. ‘He’s digging out their laptop and getting the webcam up, and then he’ll go and find her.’
Jack activated the webcam on his own computer and propped it behind the main console keyboard so they could all see. The webcam came on line, showing a shaky image and a pair of hands, evidently propping a laptop on a rock; then the image stabilized to reveal a bleak landscape of scrub and boulders with clouds racing overhead. A face appeared, a ruggedly handsome man with Mongolian features wearing a mountaineering jacket and a Kyrgyz woollen hat. After he had adjusted the position of the laptop again, they saw him lope off beside a tractor and wave, pointing back at the computer. A few moments later a woman appeared and walked towards them, taking off a pair of gloves. She was wearing hiking boots and jeans and a down jacket, and her long black hair was tied back behind her head. She came in front of the webcam, put down a trowel and brush, took a camera from around her neck, and then adjusted the screen. She had strong eastern features too, mixed with European, and dark eyes. ‘Hello, Jack. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon. It’s cold and windy here, so let’s be quick.’ She had a deep voice and spoke with a slight American accent. She wiped her nose and rubbed her hands together, then smiled again at him. ‘I can see you’re on Seaquest II, in the operations room. Have you done the dive? I miss you.’
‘I’m here with Costas and Jeremy and Jacob Lanowski, all watching you just off screen,’ Jack replied. ‘We’ve done the dive, and we’ve just had an image from the ROV taken inside a cave we didn’t see five years ago. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Take a look at the attachment we’ve just sent you.’
She looked down to the side of the screen, evidently opening another window. Her eyes lit up and she stared for a few moments, then took out a notebook and flipped through it, holding the pages down in the wind. She stared again, and then looked back at the webcam. ‘You probably recognize these symbols from the cave at Lascaux in France,’ she said, angling her face away from the wind. ‘I know you and Maurice went there as students, because he talked to me about it. The symbols date across the entire range of Palaeolithic rock art, from about thirty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. Finding these symbols in Atlantis is completely consistent with the animal cave paintings there. The symbols appear in various numbers and combinations in caves across Europe and in rock art elsewhere, as far away as Australia and South America. Some of my colleagues believe that outside the main area in southern Europe, the similarity of the relatively small number of symbols found is just coincidence, that they were mostly simple enough for people to have invented them independently. But I don’t buy that. People moved around a lot in the Palaeolithic, and their shamans may have moved the most. If humans reached Australia by fifty thousand years ago, then they could have got anywhere else by sea, literally anywhere. To the Americas, for example, from Europe.’