Atlantis

Beneath the sign of the bull lies the outstretched eagle god. At his tail here is golden-walled Atlantis, the great golden door of the citadel. His wingtips touch the rising and the setting of the sun. At the rising of the sun here is the mountain of fire and crystal. Here is the hall of the high priests…

“Stop there.” Jack turned to Costas. “What’s our bearing?”

Costas had second-guessed his friend and was already consulting his compass. “Taking into account likely magnetic variability in the rock, I’d say this wall is oriented almost exactly east-west.”

“Right.” Jack quickly marshalled his thoughts. “Sign of the bull refers to this volcano, to the twin peaks. The outstretched eagle god is this image above us, the wings aligned precisely to the rising and setting sun. The hall of the high priests is at the rising sun. That means the eastern doorway, beneath the left wingtip.”

Costas was nodding, his eyes fixed on the symbol. “There’s more to it than that.” He took the disc from Jack, tracing the lines as he spoke. “Imagine this is a map, not a scaled representation but a diagram like a subway plan. The vertical line corresponding to the legs of the eagle is the passage leading from the door in the cliff face. These two lines halfway up the eagle’s leg are our dead-end alleys, just beyond the bull carving. We’re now at the heart of the symbol, the point from which the wings extend left and right.”

“So the two doorways in front of us lead to the neck and head of the eagle,” Jack said. “And the text on the disc has a double message, telling us not only to take the eastern door but also to follow the passageways beyond to a point corresponding with the left wingtip.”

“So where do all the other passageways lead?” Katya asked.

“My guess is most of them form a complex of tunnels and galleries like this one. Imagine a subterranean monastery, complete with cult rooms, living quarters for priests and retainers, kitchens and food storage areas, scriptoria and workshops. The Palaeolithic hunters who first came here may have noticed the symmetrical layout, a freak of nature that could be conceived as a spread-eagle pattern. Later rock-cutting may have regularized the pattern even further.”

“Unfortunately we have no time for exploration.” Costas had finned alongside Jack and was viewing his contents gauge with alarm. “The gunshot wound and exposure have aggravated your breathing rate. You’re almost down to the emergency reserve. You have enough trimix to get back to the submarine but no more. It’s your call.”

Jack’s reply was unhesitating. As long as their besiegers were in place there was no way back through the submarine. Their only chance was to find a way through the maze of tunnels to the surface.

“We go on.”

Costas looked at his friend and nodded wordlessly. Katya reached out and gripped Jack’s arm. They swam towards the left-hand doorway, casting a final glance at the cavern behind them. As their beams danced across the undulating surface the animals looked distorted and elongated, as if they had reared up and were straining to follow them, a fantastic cavalcade set to burst forth from the depths of the Ice Age.

As he reached the corner, Costas paused to fit another reel of tape. Then he swam forward to face the forbidding darkness of the passageway, Jack and Katya poised on either side of him.

“Right,” he said. “Follow me.”

CHAPTER 20

Theseus, this is Ariadne. Theseus, this is Ariadne. Do you read me? Over.”

Tom York repeated the message he had relayed continuously for the past half-hour, using the code names he had agreed with Jack and the others before they departed for the submarine in the DSRV. He clicked off the mike and replaced it on the VHF receiver beside the radar console. It was now early morning and Seaquest was almost back at her original position, having shadowed the storm as it rolled towards the southern shore of the Black Sea. Even though it was almost twelve hours since they had parted ways, he was not unduly concerned. It may have taken some time to penetrate the submarine, and Costas’ laser contraption was untested. They may have decided against deploying the radio buoy from the DSRV until the surface conditions were less tumultuous.

Earlier, through IMU’s link to GCHQ Cheltenham, the UK communications and intelligence-gathering headquarters, he had determined that one of the new-generation digital terrain-mapping satellites was due overhead within the hour. They were at the edge of its purview and the window would only be five minutes, but they should get a high-resolution image of the island if the cloud lifted enough to allow an unimpeded view from the six hundred kilometre orbit trajectory. Even with visual obstruction the infrared thermal sensors would provide a detailed image, one which would be dominated by intense radiation from the volcano but might pick up the signatures of individual humans if they were far enough away from the core.

“Captain, land ahoy. South-south-west, off the starboard bow.”

With the coming of dawn he and the helmsman had moved from the virtual bridge in the command module to the deckhouse topside. As the vessel pitched and rolled he gripped the handrail and peered out through the rain- lashed window, surveying the battened-down equipment on the foredeck that had survived the onslaught. The dull light of dawn revealed a restless sea, its ragged surface crested with dying whitecaps. The horizon steadily retreated as the pall of sea fog dissipated and the sun’s rays burned through.

“Range three thousand metres,” York estimated. “Reduce your speed to one quarter and bring us round to bearing seven-five degrees.”

The crewman checked the laser distance-finder while York confirmed the GPS fix and leaned over the Admiralty Chart beside the compass binnacle. A few moments later the island came dramatically into view, its glistening surface rising to a near perfect cone.

“My God!” the crewman exclaimed. “It’s erupting!”

York replaced his dividers and snatched up a pair of binoculars. The umbrella shrouding the island was not just sea mist but a plume discharging from the volcano itself. As the cloud base rose, the plume stretched skywards like a ribbon, its upper reaches wavering to and fro before streaming south with the wind. In the middle was a truncated rainbow, a vivid streak of colour that flickered luminously as the sun broke through.

York kept his glasses trained on the spectacle for a full minute.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “There’s no particulate matter. I’ve seen this before, in the Vanuatu Islands in the South Pacific. Rainwater saturates the porous upper layers of ash and vaporizes when it comes into contact with magma, causing a plume that rises for hours after the clouds have cleared. But I’ve never seen one quite like this. The vapour appears to have been channelled into a single chimney, producing a column that looks no more than twenty metres wide.”

“If this happened in ancient times it must have seemed awesome, a supernatural event,” the crewman ventured.

“I wish Jack could see this.” York looked pensively at the waves. “It lends credence to his theory that the mountain was sacred, a place of worship like those Minoan peak sanctuaries. It would have seemed the very home of the gods.”

York raised his binoculars again to scan the volcano where it sloped down in front of them. The surface appeared desolate and lifeless, the scorched ash of the cone giving way to a barren tumult of basalt below. About halfway down he saw a line of dark patches above rectilinear features that looked like platforms or balconies. He closed his eyes briefly against the sunlight, looked again, then grunted. He put the binoculars down and walked over to the high-resolution telescope beside the binnacle, only to be interrupted by a voice at the door.

“That’s quite a sight. I assume it’s water vapour.” Peter Howe stepped onto the bridge. He was wearing green rubber boots, brown corduroys and a white roll-neck sweater, and was carrying two steaming mugs.

“You look like something out of the Battle of the Atlantic,” York said.

“Battle of the Black Sea, more like. That was a hell of a night.” Howe passed over a mug and slumped on the helmsman’s seat. His face was unshaven and lined with fatigue, the tiredness accentuating his New Zealand drawl. “I know you kept us out of the eye of the storm but we still had our work cut out stopping the gear from rolling. We