‘It’s unlikely that a monk would make up anything involving a Biblical name, as that might have been seen as heresy,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘And the next line in the note clinches it.’
Jack took a deep breath, and read what he had written on the notepad: Alkaios returned, and set up an inscription in unknown writing on the pillar. Ex Pliny.
‘Your translation is most interesting,’ Schoenberg murmured. ‘I translated stulobate, stylobate, as “plaque” or “stela”, a stone panel. But pillar is possible, a stone pillar.’
‘I must have been thinking of the Pillars of Hercules, but actually it does make sense,’ Jack replied. ‘Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century placed stone pillars, padroes, where they made landfall, to stake claim to new land. We know that Hanno the Carthaginian left an account of his voyage on bronze plaques attached to a pillar in Carthage, and I’ve always imagined that one day someone will find a pillar marking his progress down the coast of west Africa.’
‘Remember what you saw three days ago at Atlantis, Jack?’ Costas said.
‘Three days ago?’ Schoenberg exclaimed. ‘You have been to Atlantis again? He leaned forward, peering at Jack eagerly.
Jack nodded. ‘You’re giving us your treasure, so I’ll give you ours. Absolute secrecy, yes?’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘Costas and I were able to carry out a dive on the site under the guise of a geological assessment. The fault line’s active again and we ended up diving into a live volcano.’
‘A live volcano.’ Schoenberg leaned back, slapping his knee. ‘ A live volcano. I never heard of such a thing. Marvellous. If only I could have told this to our divers in the Ahnenerbe. But they never had the equipment you have. I believe it was the oxygen rebreathers. They were always going too deep. We lost three of them on our expedition to Iceland. I was there, waiting for them, but they never came up.’
Jack glanced at Costas, then back at Schoenberg. ‘We found an extraordinary temple with carved pillars. We’re sure it dates from the earliest Neolithic, eleven thousand years ago or more. My point is, these people were perfectly capable of erecting stone pillars, and indeed had a tradition of it.’
‘So if this note is based on fact, we’re looking for an inscribed stone,’ Costas said.
‘Somewhere on the coast of west Africa,’ Jack murmured.
‘That narrows it down.’
Schoenberg took the sheet of vellum and held it up to the ceiling light, peering at it closely. ‘There’s more. Those final words, Ex Pliny, are a shorthand to show that the source of the story is Pliny’s Natural History. As you can imagine, I immediately found a copy of Pliny in the Heidelberg library and went to Book 5, Chapter 1, the text that deals with west Africa and the limit of Roman knowledge. There’s the usual Pliny ragbag of facts and myths, including an account of the Hercules myth and the expedition of Hanno. He mentions the Roman emperor Claudius, his war against a local ruler in Mauretania and his founding of Roman colonies at Lixus and Traducta Julia, both probably corresponding to the old Punic outposts in that list in the Periplus of Hanno. But there was absolutely nothing in the surviving edition of Pliny to corroborate this note. If the monk had seen a reference to Atlantis, it must have been in some lost text. It was a dead end for me, as without verification I could take it no further. I put it away for decades. Until three years ago.’
Jack looked at Schoenberg shrewdly. ‘You hoped for a lost version of Pliny’s Natural History, containing its own marginalia.’
Schoenberg gave a slight smile, and nodded. ‘One found three years ago by Jack Howard and his team in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy. As I said, I’ve been a keen follower of your discoveries.’
‘Good old Claudius,’ Costas said. ‘I knew you’d mentioned him for a reason.’
‘Claudius had a special interest in Mauretania,’ Schoenberg replied. ‘Poor lame Claudius was desperate for military glory, to shore up his claim to the empire. It was the main reason he invaded Britain in AD 43. In the secret retirement you discovered he had enjoyed in Herculaneum after faking his death, he probably dwelt greatly on his place in history. In his library you found that copy of Pliny’s Natural History with the marginal note about Claudius’ meeting as a young man with Jesus of Nazareth, added to the scroll by Pliny when he appears to have spent time with his friend Claudius in those fateful final days before Vesuvius erupted. If Pliny was adding material to his text like that – told to him by Claudius – then he might also have added what Claudius knew about west Africa. Claudius had probably amassed huge amounts of information in his years working as a historian before he was reluctantly made emperor. He would have had a special interest in west Africa through his own imperial involvement in Mauretania, and particularly as the author of a history of Carthage, which would have given him considerable knowledge of Phoenician exploration along that coast. He seems to have been a magpie, much like Pliny, interested in fascinating snippets of information that others had ignored.’
‘If you were interested, why wait until now to contact us?’ Jack said. ‘Why not three years ago, when we revealed the discovery of the library and the copy of Pliny?’
‘Because I’ve been following progress on your website. By the beginning of last month, I knew your palaeography team in Naples had reached the end of Book 4 of Claudius’ copy of the Natural History, so they should currently be unrolling and photographing the first paragraphs of Book 5.’
‘Okay,’ Jack said, looking at his watch. ‘We have to meet our plane for the flight back. I’ll put in a phone call to Naples. If that comment about Atlantis is in Claudius’ copy, then we can surmise that it was in another copy made by Pliny in those final days, perhaps one that escaped destruction in his villa in Stabiae or that he dispatched to Rome, a copy that was seen by that tenth-century monk. Whatever the case, if our team have found the same marginal note, it would corroborate the note in the codex and take us one huge step closer on our quest.’
Schoenberg eyed Jack shrewdly. ‘Where do you think it would be leading you?’
‘For anyone leaving Lixus or Mogador and intending to go west, the current takes a very predictable southern and western swing from Cape Juby towards the Caribbean.’
‘Can you be more precise?’
Jack pursed his lips. ‘My money’s on the north Caribbean, a landfall somewhere between Puerto Rico and Florida. We have another possible lead to explore, one that will become more real if that Pliny reference can be corroborated.’
‘Can I help?’ Schoenberg said.
‘No later than tomorrow, I hope. I’ll be in touch.’
‘I can tell you more about the Ahnenerbe. Some of the trails we were on that really did seem to go places, and were thwarted only by the war. We could work together.’
‘I’ll hold you to that. Tomorrow.’
Costas got up. ‘One question. Why did you remove that page from the codex? Did you want to keep this secret, for the eyes of the Ahnenerbe only? Were you planning an expedition to find that pillar?’
Schoenberg shook his head. ‘It was that name, Noah. I had seen first-hand Hitler’s rage against the Jews. I had been intimate with the Nazis; I had smelled the sweat on Hitler when he was excited, seen the glint in his eyes. Already there were book-burnings, the destruction of Jewish art. The Codex Palatinus Graecus was my passion, my life’s work, and I intended to return to it after the war. I was not the only Ahnenerbe researcher sent to the Heidelberg library; others were there to keep an eye on me. Nazi Germany was a police state, and the mentality of suspicion and counter-suspicion seeped into every corner of life. The men Himmler recruited as spies were sticklers for detail, men like himself, and would leave no stone unturned if they felt they had to check up on me. I was terrified that one of them would find this page and see that word. Anything to do with Jewish history was to be expunged. When I saw that the note had been erased by some later hand from the original text, I imagined a monk doing that because he might have been alarmed that the codex contained heretical materials, something about Noah that might contradict the Bible, but that he felt the same way that I did about the need to preserve the book. He removed the note, but didn’t see the imprint on the blank insert. If Himmler’s spies had followed me and seen it, there could only have been one outcome. The whole codex would have been destroyed.’