‘We’ve just been discussing that,’ Jack replied. ‘So what about the Atlantis symbol? It’s fascinating. It looks as if that rake-shaped symbol is some kind of precursor.’
‘It makes perfect sense that the Atlantis symbol should have derived from a Stone Age one. Interesting that someone seems to have been trying to erase them.’
‘The big question,’ Jack said. ‘Are we looking at some kind of script? A code?’
‘That’s what I’m doing here now, at Cholpon-Ata,’ Katya replied. ‘Looking for rock inscriptions that might go that far back in prehistory. If the Stone Age symbols are a form of script, then it takes the history of writing back tens of thousands of years. I do think they have symbolic meaning, that they’re ideograms that may somehow represent the rituals carried out in those caves. The big breakthrough would be to find clear patterns of association, repeated clusters of symbols in the same order. That’s when this image from Atlantis could get really exciting.’
‘What about the clustering?’ Jack persisted. ‘Words, names?’
‘Possibly, but more as general ideograms or even mnemonics,’ she said. ‘There’s an old shaman in Altamaty’s Kyrgyz tribe who scratches simple signs like this into the sand or on a rock before he goes into a trance. The symbols by themselves don’t mean a sound or a word, but in clusters they represent the name of an ancestor, the spirit the shaman is trying to reach. They tend to be descriptive of what that ancestor had done in life, and are regarded as spirit names: “She who held the torch”, “He who would be a great hunter”. They can become generic, so that one particular ancestor becomes representative of many, and the shaman only scratches out a few of these formulae before he sets to work. What’s the context of your symbols? You said they’re in a cave.’
Jack nodded. ‘We saw animal paintings too, just out of sight. Mostly late Ice Age – leopards, bulls – rather than megafauna such as woolly mammoths, so my guess is a late-Palaeolithic origin, about twelve thousand years ago. It seems to have been some kind of open-air sanctuary with a cave backdrop.’
‘You might expect to find more of these symbols, more clusters, if it was a place for shamanistic rituals.’
‘On the screen here from the ROV we can see where other symbols, more deeply incised and clearly older, have been chiselled out and smoothed away on the surrounding rock. We think there was a religious transition going on, from shamanism to gods. It looks as if these two clusters of symbols you’re looking at were done hastily, scratched rather than carefully chiselled.’
‘Maybe as the flood waters rose,’ Katya suggested. ‘Some kind of desperate measure to evoke ancestors, perhaps. Shamans could have had those spirit names I was talking about while they were still alive, the names they were to be known by in death as their spirits were evoked. One can imagine the last shamans of Atlantis stuck in that place with the water rising and certain death ahead, knowing there would be no future shaman to call up their spirits and so scratching the symbols on that wall.’
Costas coughed. ‘What about “Noah was here”?’
‘What did you say?’ Katya demanded.
He craned his head close to Jack so the webcam caught him. ‘Noah was here. It’s just a name we’ve been bandying about. Noah and his Ark, thinking of the people who escaped from Atlantis.’
‘If Noah was a name back in the early Neolithic, it’s more likely to have been a proper name, even a nickname,’ Katya replied. ‘His real name – his spirit name – is more likely to have been something like Uta-napishtim, the name of the deluge hero in the Sumerian flood account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name Uta-napishtim is found in the earliest fragments of the flood story, dating from the dawn of Mesopotamian writing in the third millennium BC, as is the name Gilgamesh. Maybe Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh were spirit names derived from a Stone Age language now lost to us. My favourite spirit name is Sha naqba muru, meaning “He who has seen the deep”, the first line of the Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I think it’s what I’d call Jack if I were a shaman. The Mesopotamian scribes might not have known it, but the names of their heroes may have had similar spirit-name meanings in early prehistory.’
‘Wow, Katya, I wasn’t really being serious about Noah,’ Costas said.
Katya smiled. ‘A long time ago, Jack told me always to listen to Costas, because, how did he put it, Costas is good at hitting the nail on the head.’
‘Hey, that’s just about the nicest thing he’s ever said about me.’
‘The wind’s really picking up.’ Katya’s voice was nearly inaudible. ‘Jack, give me a day or so and I’ll check these symbols against my database.’
‘That would be fantastic,’ Jack said. ‘Email me whatever you get. We’re trying to piece something together here, where these people went. Not the priests, but the shamans. We want to know whether any of them might have survived to found a new Atlantis.’
Katya leaned forward. They could see the wind ruffling her hair, and she put up a hand to protect her eyes from the blowing dust. To Jack she looked utterly at home, her features at one with the landscape and the wind, and he remembered her Kyrgyz ancestry on her father’s side. She raised her voice. ‘I have to go. There’s one of those winds howling in from the east. Speaking of shamans, that one from Altamaty’s tribe calls these winds Genghis Khan’s revenge. Altamaty says thank God you and Costas didn’t actually go into that tomb under the lake two years ago, otherwise we’d have been blown to the Black Sea by now. When it’s like this, you wonder if the shamans have a point. We haven’t even got the yurt up yet. Thank Jeremy for the pictures from Troy. Rebecca’s just emailed through the one showing her at the helicopter controls, actually flying it. Pretty cool. And my love to Costas. And to Jeremy and Jacob. See you.’ She leaned forward into the screen and her hair came loose, swirling round and blotting out the view, and then the screen went blank. Jack leaned back, staring at it pensively.
‘Phew,’ Costas said. ‘Love to you too, Katya.’
‘Internet girlfriends,’ Lanowski said abstractly, looking at Jack and then narrowing his eyes at Costas. ‘They’re the best.’
‘You weren’t going to show her what else you’d found?’ Jeremy asked.
Jack shook his head. ‘Katya’s father died in that volcano five years ago, remember?’ He jerked his head back at the computer monitor with the image of the skulls. ‘He may have been a hated warlord and Katya may seem as tough as nails, but I wasn’t going to show her that.’
‘Good call,’ Lanowski said thoughtfully.
‘Rebecca’s her number-one fan,’ Jeremy said. ‘Especially after Katya taught her to shoot a Kalashnikov.’
‘She did what?’ Jack exclaimed.
‘Last summer, before we went to Troy, when Rebecca worked at Cholpon-Ata for a month. Katya and Altamaty took her hunting in the mountains. They forage for a lot of their food, you know. They think they saw a white tiger.’
‘Jesus,’ Jack muttered. ‘She didn’t say anything about that a few months later when Ben Kershaw very cautiously taught her to shoot a. 22 on the foredeck of the ship, with full hearing and eye protection and under my watchful gaze.’
‘She thought you’d be mad. But don’t worry. The kidnapping changed her a lot. I think she’ll tell you everything now. Katya really helped, too. She told Rebecca what it was like growing up as a woman in Russia around the kind of men her father dealt with, what you have to be prepared to do to hold your own. Rebecca really lapped it up. I think she’s got a role model in Katya.’