Costas waved his hand. ‘I thought it was the other way round.’
‘Let’s get back to our images from this morning. I want as much of this wrapped up as possible before I have to leave.’ Jack turned to the computer screen, arched his back and stretched his arms. He seemed to feel every sinew and muscle in his body, and stretching released a sensation that coursed through him like a drug. He and Costas had just emerged from four hours in the recompression chamber breathing pure oxygen, but even so his system was still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from their dive. His body was willing him to go up to his cabin and lie down, but he knew that the adrenalin that was still coursing through him would keep him alert. And he knew that if he did try to rest, his mind would only return to that moment when he and Costas could have safely returned after having discovered the pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. What was it that had driven him on, driven him to risk everything? He put the thought from his mind, and refocused on the screen. The important thing was that they had less than two hours now to process the imagery from their dive, and if they let that opportunity slip, it might be weeks before they were together again on Seaquest II or at the IMU campus in England. Jack had seen astonishing things today, as astonishing as anything he had seen in his archaeological career, and he wanted those images to be in the forefront of his mind as the excavation at Troy wound down. He had gone back to Atlantis with questions, and they were still burning. Who were these people? Where had they gone? Who were their gods?
‘Jack, this is incredible. Lanowski’s just finishing his 3-D CGI map of the site. The final version should be streaming online in a few minutes.’
Costas turned back to his screen, and Jack continued staring at the image he had called up on his monitor before Macalister had come in. It was a still from the video he had taken with his helmet camera inside the volcano that morning; below it he had arranged a line of thumbnails of other Neolithic sites in the Near East that he had pulled up for comparison. The image from the morning was raw, unrefined, the foreground still specked with white where the light from his headlamp had reflected off particles in the water. But seeing it like that made it more vivid, as if he were still caught in the amazement of that moment when he had first entered the chamber. It showed the pillars standing like sentinels, three-metre-tall monoliths carved out of volcanic tufa, each one rising to a T-shape a metre or more wide. He could see animals carved in shallow relief on the pillars – lions, wild boar, scorpions and spiders, leopards and bulls. On the back wall of the cave he spotted something he had not seen on the dive: a bull’s skull fixed into a hole in the rock, half in and half out, the bone plastered over and the horns painted red. Above it was a painting of vultures swooping down on a headless human body, shaped crudely in outline; beside that were the spectral remains of painted animals, visible where they had not been hacked away and smoothed out. Not only the pillars but also the carvings on them seemed to have been freshly chiselled, sharply delineated. Out with the old, in with the new. Archaeologists had begun to talk about the Neolithic as a time of religious transition, a time when humans first conceived of gods with human characteristics, gods who were to play out all the human capacity for cruelty and greed in the mythologies of Mesopotamia and the Near East. Jack stared at the pillars. Was this where it had all begun? Was Atlantis the birthplace of the gods?
He held the mouse and dragged the image up to see the floor of the chamber. The lab analysis of the sample he had taken had just come through, showing that the stone floor had been covered in layers of terrazzo, burnt lime. Embedded within the lime was the most extraordinary sight of all: the plastered human skulls that seemed to be emerging from the ground in the same way that the bull’s skull was emerging from the rock wall. He scrolled over the other skulls, the ones without plaster, some of them fallen alongside the three stone basins he could now see, each about half a metre high and carved out of the living rock. The scattered skulls and the basins were partly covered with the calcite accretion that had settled over the floor since the inundation. It was a haunting, ghostly scene, with the pillars like rough-formed bodies standing in the background, towering over the toppled skulls. Jack tried to retain a professional detachment, but it made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. What had been going on here?
Costas slid his chair alongside, minimized the image and tapped a key. A three-dimensional lattice appeared on the screen, angled as if they were viewing it from the upper right-hand corner. The terrain mapper had been designed to project a holographic image on to the miniature screens inside their e-suit helmets, to help them navigate over seabed features in poor light conditions, using GPS, sonar, photogrammetric and other data previously fed into the computer, but here it was being used to build up a flat-screen isometric image of the site. As they watched, the grid lattice disappeared below a contoured image of the Black Sea bathymetry, zooming down to the abyssal plain in the centre of the sea and then rising up the slope towards the Turkish shore and their present position some fifteen nautical miles off the border with the Republic of Georgia. Jack saw the twin peaks of the volcano just below the surface of the sea, and then the slope where the flow of lava and other volcanic fallout had buried the ruins of the ancient city five years ago, in a terrifying eruption that had nearly cost them their lives.
‘I’ll pause it here,’ Costas said, tapping a key. ‘You remember when we left this place five years ago we thought the eruption would have destroyed pretty well everything of the lower town?’
Jack nodded. ‘You said you’d need a sub-bottom profiler that could see through lava to find out what was left. A powerful low-frequency echo sounder. The stuff you’ve been tinkering with in the engineering workshop at IMU for the last five years.’
‘Not tinkering, Jack. Perfecting.’
‘Okay. Perfecting.’
The image sharpened, showing details of rock outcrops and fissures on the slopes. It was like looking at an aerial view of Mount St Helens in Washington State after the 1980 eruption, a scene of utter devastation. Along the seaward slope, where Jack remembered five years before seeing dense pueblo-style buildings, all he saw now was a great slick like a frozen mudslide, completely burying the original rocky substrate and all of the ancient structures. His heart sank as he saw the scale of the destruction. ‘It’s much worse than I feared. Those were mud-brick buildings. The lava must have destroyed everything.’
‘Well, prepare to be amazed.’
Costas tapped a key and the image transformed. The wide beds of lava constricted to narrow flows down the side of the volcano, like frozen rivers. In between Jack saw ghostly rectilinear outlines covering the slope. Costas pointed at the upper part of the screen. ‘You’re right, the lava would have destroyed all the mud-brick structures in their path. Where we dived this morning was through one of the solidified flows from five years ago, and the only structure that survived was that stone pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. But the lava flows are much narrower than we thought. When we were boring the tunnel yesterday, I used the submersible to take some core samples further down the slope, and I’ve just had a look at the results. Most of it is not lava but pyroclastic flow, solidified mud and ash. It looks as if the volcanic ash hardened with lime into a kind of hydraulic concrete, like the stuff we know the people of Atlantis used to make waterproof walls. Where the flow was pyroclastic, it didn’t destroy Atlantis. It actually preserved it.’
He tapped again, and the image sharpened further. Jack let out a low whistle. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. It was as if the flow had been peeled away to reveal intact structures beneath, a vast complex of flat-roofed buildings that seemed to have been built organically, reaching three or four storeys high and spreading up the slope of the volcano. Jack stared, shaking his head. ‘It’s fantastic. It’s like jumping back five years to when we first saw Atlantis from our Aquapods. I never thought I’d see that again.’
‘Well, we won’t be excavating it in a hurry. Even if the volcano goes quiet and we can get down there again, it’d be like mining on the moon. Roman Herculaneum was covered by pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, and they’ve only excavated one fifth of the site in two hundred and fifty years. And Herculaneum’s not under a hundred metres of water poisoned by sulphur dioxide.’
Jack was still stunned by the image. ‘More so than anything we saw five years ago, this view is incredibly similar to Neolithic houses found elsewhere.’
‘That place on the Konya plain? Catalhoyuk?’
Jack nodded. ‘About three hundred kilometres south-east of here.’ He reached over and tapped one of the thumbnails, revealing an artist’s impression of a town rising out of a plain, the structures built together like an Indian pueblo in the southern United States. ‘Do you remember I took a few days off from the excavation at Troy last month to go there? A friend of mine is leading an expedition into the Taurus mountains to the south, looking for caves that might contain paintings and other clues to their Stone Age ancestors. The excavations at Catalhoyuk in the 1960s gave the world an image of what the first Neolithic towns looked like.’
‘It dates to the same time period as Atlantis?’
Jack nodded. ‘Early Neolithic, the first period of settled farming after the end of the Ice Age, beginning about
