Atlantis

“It’s like some huge condominium,” Costas marvelled.

Jack shut his eyes hard and then opened them again, disbelief turning to wonder as the silt stirred up by the Aquapods began to settle and reveal the unmistakable signs of human endeavour all round them.

“People got about on the rooftops, through those hatches.” His heart was thumping, his mouth was dry, but he forced himself to speak in the dispassionate tones of a professional archaeologist. “My guess is each of these blocks housed an extended family. As the group got larger they built upwards, adding timber-framed mud-brick storeys.”

As they ascended they could see the blocks were riddled by a maze of alleyways, astonishingly reminiscent of the medieval bazaars of the Middle East.

“It must have bustled with crafts and trade,” Jack said. “There’s no way these people were just farmers. They were expert potters and carpenters and metalworkers.”

He paused, staring through the Plexiglas at what looked like a ground-floor shopfront.

“Someone in this place made that gold disc.”

For several minutes they passed over more flat-roofed highrises, the dark windows staring at them like sightless eyes caught in the glare of their floodlights. About five hundred metres due east from the storehouse the conglomeration came to an abrupt end. In the murk ahead they could make out another complex, perhaps twenty metres away, and below them a space wider and more regular than the alleyways.

“It’s a road,” Jack said. “It must go down to the ancient seafront. Let’s go inland and then resume our original course.”

They veered south and followed the road gently upslope. Two hundred metres on, it was bisected by another road running east-west. They turned and followed it due east, the Aquapods maintaining an altitude of twenty metres to avoid the mass of buildings on either side.

“Extraordinary,” Jack said. “These blocks are separated by a regular grid of streets, the earliest by thousands of years.”

“Someone planned this place.”

Tutankhamun’s tomb, the palace of Knossos, the fabled walls of Troy, all the hallowed discoveries of archaeology suddenly seemed pedestrian and mundane, mere stepping stones to the marvels that now lay before them.

“Atlantis,” Costas breathed. “A few days ago I didn’t even believe it existed.” He looked across at the figure in the other Plexiglas dome. “A little thanks would be appreciated.”

Jack grinned in spite of his preoccupation with the fabulous images around them.

“OK. You pointed us in the right direction. I owe you a large gin and tonic.”

“That’s what I got last time.”

“A lifetime’s supply then.”

“Done.”

A moment later the buildings on either side suddenly disappeared and the sea floor dropped away out of sight. Fifty metres on, there was still nothing except a haze of suspended silt.

“My depth sounder shows the sea floor has dropped almost twenty metres below the level of the road,” Jack exclaimed. “I suggest we descend and backtrack to the point where the buildings disappeared.”

They increased their water ballast until the lights revealed the sea floor. It was level and featureless, unlike the undulating surface they had traversed on their way towards the western edge of the city.

A few minutes later they had returned to the point where they last saw structures. In front of them the sea floor rose abruptly at a 45-degree angle until it reached the base of the buildings and the end of the road above.

Costas moved his Aquapod forward until its ballast tanks rested on the floor just before it angled upwards. He directed a long blast from his water jet at the slope and then drew back to Jack’s position.

“Just as I thought.”

The silt cleared to reveal a stepped terrace like the seating in a theatre. Between the floor and the beginning of the terrace was a vertical wall three metres high.

“This was hewn out of living rock,” Costas said. “It’s tufa, isn’t it? The same dark stone used in ancient Rome. Lightweight but tough, easily quarried but an excellent load-bearer.”

“But we haven’t seen any masonry buildings,” Jack protested.

“There must be some pretty massive structures somewhere.”

Jack was looking closely at the features in front of them. “This is more than just a quarry. Let’s follow those terraces and see where they take us.”

Twenty minutes later they had traversed three sides of a vast sunken courtyard almost a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide. Whereas the road layout respected the line of the ancient coast, running parallel and at right angles to it, the courtyard was aligned off to the south-east. They had skirted it clockwise and were now at the south-eastern boundary opposite their starting point. Above them buildings and the road resumed exactly as they appeared on the other side of the courtyard.

“It looks like a stadium,” Costas murmured. “I remember you saying those palace courtyards in Crete were for bull-baiting, for sacrifices and other rituals.”

“The Minoan courtyards were smaller,” Jack replied. “Even the arena of the Colosseum in Rome is only eighty metres across. This is huge.” He thought for a moment. “It’s just a hunch, but before we continue along the road I’d like to see across the middle of this space.”

Inside his dome Costas nodded in agreement.

They set out across the courtyard due west. After about 150 metres, they came to a halt. Ahead of them was a mass of silt-covered stone, its shape irregular and quite unlike the courtyard boundary.

Costas fired his water jet at the rock face, shrouding his dome in silt. After a few moments his voice came over the intercom.

“It’s an outcrop left standing when the rest was quarried out.”

Jack was slowly traversing south-east along a spur which extended twenty metres from the main mass. It terminated in a rounded ledge about two metres high and five metres across. Costas followed as Jack gently cleaned the surface with his water jet, blowing away silt to reveal the bare rock.

They stared transfixed by the shape that emerged, their minds unable to acknowledge what lay before them.

“My God.”

“It’s…” Jack faltered.

“It’s a paw,” Costas whispered.

“A lion’s paw.” Jack quickly regained his composure. “This must be a gigantic statue, at least a hundred metres long and thirty metres high.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“A sphinx.”

For a moment the two men stared at each other through their domes in stupefied silence. Eventually Costas’ voice crackled over the intercom.

“Seems incredible but anything’s possible in this place. Whatever’s up there is a long way off our entry route and we wouldn’t have seen it. I’m going to check it out.”

Jack remained stationary while Costas floated upwards, gradually receding until all that was left was a diminishing halo of light. Just as that too seemed about to disappear, it came to an abrupt halt some thirty metres above the sea floor.

Jack waited anxiously for Costas to report. After more than a minute he could restrain himself no longer.

“What can you see?”

The voice that came through seemed strangely suppressed.

“Remind me. A sphinx has a lion’s body and a human head. Right?”

“Right.”

“Try this for a variant.”

Costas flicked his floodlights to full beam. The image that appeared high above was awesome and terrifying, the stuff of nightmares. It was as if a flash of lightning on a stormy night had revealed a huge beast towering over them, its features silhouetted in a spectral sheen that burst forth between rolling banks of clouds.