Atlantis

rebelled until the power of logic became overwhelming.

“That date,” Costas said quietly. “We’ve seen it before.”

Jack’s voice held total conviction as he leaned towards Macleod. “I can tell you about these Indo-Europeans. They had a great citadel by the sea, a storeroom of knowledge entered by great golden doors.”

“What are you talking about?”

Jack paused and then spoke quietly. “Atlantis.”

“Jack, my friend! Good to see you.”

The deep voice came from a figure on the quayside, his dark features offset by chinos and a white shirt bearing the IMU logo.

Jack reached out and shook hands with Mustafa Alkozen as he and Costas stepped off the gangway onto the quayside. As they looked over the modern town towards the ruined citadel it was hard to imagine this had once been the capital of the Kingdom of Trebizond, the medieval offshoot of Byzantium renowned for its splendour and decadence. From earliest times the city had flourished as a hub of trade between east and west, a tradition now darkly continued in the flood of black marketeers who had arrived since the fall of the Soviet Union and provided a haven for smugglers and agents of organized crime in the east.

Malcolm Macleod had gone ahead to deal with the crowd of officials and journalists who had gathered as Sea Venture came in. They had agreed that his briefing on the Neolithic village discovery should be deliberately vague until they had carried out more exploration. They knew unscrupulous eyes would already be monitoring their work by satellite, and they were wary of giving away more than the minimum needed to satisfy the journalists. Fortunately the site lay eleven nautical miles offshore, just within territorial waters. Already the Turkish Navy fast attack craft moored on the opposite side of the harbour had been detailed to maintain round- the-clock vigilance until the investigations were complete and the site had been accorded special protection status by the Turkish government.

“Mustafa, meet our new colleague. Dr. Katya Svetlanova.”

Katya had slipped a dress over her swimsuit and was carrying a palm computer and documents case. She shook the proffered hand and smiled up at Mustafa.

“Dr. Svetlanova. Jack told me on the radio about your formidable expertise. It is my pleasure.”

Jack and Mustafa walked ahead of the other two as they made their way towards the IMU depot at the end of the quay. Jack talked quietly and intensely, filling Mustafa in on all the events since the discovery of the papyrus. He had decided to take advantage of Sea Venture’s revictualling stop to tap into the Turk’s unique expertise and bring him into the small fold of people who knew about the papyrus and the discs.

Just before entering the low-set concrete building, Jack handed over a notepad which the other man passed to his secretary as they reached the door. It contained a wish list of archaeological and diving equipment from the IMU store which Jack had compiled in the final minutes before disembarking from Sea Venture.

They were joined by Katya and Costas in front of a large steel door. After Mustafa tapped in a security code, the door swung open and he led them through a succession of laboratories and repair shops. At the far end they entered a room lined with wooden cabinets with a table in the centre.

“The chart room,” Mustafa explained to Katya. “It doubles as our operational headquarters. Please be seated.”

He opened a drawer and extracted a chart of the Aegean and southern Black Sea region, encompassing the Turkish coast all the way to its eastern border with the Republic of Georgia. He spread it out and clipped it to the table. From a small drawer underneath, he extracted a set of navigational dividers and cartographic rulers, placing them side by side as Katya set up her computer.

After a few moments she looked up. “I’m ready.”

They had agreed that Katya should give the translation of the papyrus while they tried to make sense of it on the chart.

She read slowly from the screen. “Through the islands until the sea narrows.”

“This clearly refers to the Aegean archipelago from the viewpoint of Egypt,” Jack said. “The Aegean has more than fifteen hundred islands in a confined area. On a clear day north of Crete you can’t sail anywhere without having at least one island in view.”

“So the narrows must be the Dardanelles,” Costas asserted.

“What clinches it is the next passage.” The three men looked expectantly at Katya. “Past the Cataract of Bos.”

Jack was suddenly animated. “It should have been glaringly obvious. The Bosporus, the entrance to the Black Sea.”

Costas turned to Katya, his voice edged with incredulity. “Could our word Bosporus be that ancient?”

“It dates back at least two and a half thousand years, to the time of the earliest Greek geographical writings. But it’s probably thousands of years older. Bos is Indo-European for bull.”

“Strait of the Bull,” Costas mused. “This may be a long shot, but I’m thinking of the bull symbols in that Neolithic house and from Minoan Crete. They’re quite abstract, showing the bull’s horns as a kind of saddle, a bit like a Japanese headrest. That would have been precisely the appearance of the Bosporus from the Black Sea before the flood, a great saddle gouged into a ridge high above the sea.”

Jack looked at his friend appreciatively. “You never cease to amaze me. That’s the best idea I’ve heard for a long time.”

Costas warmed to his theme. “To people who worshipped the bull the sight of all that water cascading through the horns must have seemed portentous, a sign from the gods.”

Jack nodded and turned to Katya. “So we’re in the Black Sea. What next?”

“And then twenty dromoi along the southern shore.”

Jack leaned forward. “On the face of it we have a problem. There are some records of voyage times in the Black Sea during the Roman period. One of them starts here, at what the Romans called the Maeotic Lake.” He pointed to the Sea of Azov, the lagoon beside the Crimean Peninsula. “From there it took eleven days to get to Rhodes. Only four days were spent on the Black Sea.”

Mustafa looked pensively at the map. “So a twenty-day voyage from the Bosporus, twenty dromoi or runs, would take us beyond the eastern littoral of the Black Sea.”

Costas looked crestfallen. “Maybe the early boats were slower.”

“The opposite,” said Jack. “Paddled longboats would have been faster than sailing ships, less subject to the vagaries of the winds.”

“And the inflow during the flood would have created a strong easterly current,” Mustafa said glumly. “Enough to propel a ship to the far shore in only a few days. I’m afraid Atlantis is off the map in more ways than one.”

A crushing sense of disappointment pervaded the room. Suddenly Atlantis seemed as far away as it had ever been, a story consigned to the annals of myth and fable.

“There is a solution,” Jack said slowly. “The Egyptian account is not based on their own experience. If so, they would never have described the Bosporus as a cataract, since the Mediterranean and Black Sea had equalized long before the Egyptians began to explore that far north. Instead, their source was the account handed down from the Black Sea migrants, telling of their voyage from Atlantis. The Egyptians simply reversed it.”

“Of course!” Mustafa was excited again. “From Atlantis means against the current. In describing the route to Atlantis, the Egyptians used the same voyage times they had been told for the outward journey. They could never have guessed there would be a significant difference between the two.”

Jack looked pointedly at Mustafa. “What we need is some way of estimating the speed of the current, of calculating the headway a Neolithic boat would have made against the flow. That should give us the distance for each day’s run and the measure from the Bosporus to a point of embarkation twenty days back.”

Mustafa straightened up and replied confidently, “You’ve come to the right place.”