brush of ancient vapour, a musty waft that seemed to carry with it the distilled wisdom of the ages. Out of nowhere Jack conjured up an image of Solon the Lawmaker and the shadowy priest in the temple sanctuary at Sais. In a moment the phantasm was gone, but he was left convinced they were about to delve the inner secrets of a people who had passed out of history thousands of years before.
After a few metres they reached the end of the passageway and Jack panned his light forward. Beside him Dillen blinked as his eyes adjusted to the unaccustomed brilliance of the scene ahead.
“What is it?” Hiebermeyer could not contain his excitement. “What can you see?”
“It’s a single chamber, approximately ten metres long by six metres wide,” Jack replied in the measured tones of a professional archaeologist. “There’s a rock table in the middle and a dividing screen towards the rear. Oh, and there’s gold. Thick gold panels on the walls.”
He and Dillen stooped through the entrance and the others followed cautiously behind. Once they were all inside, Jack and Costas adjusted their flashlights to wide beam and shone them down the length of the chamber.
Jack’s laconic description scarcely did it justice. On either side the walls were embellished with massive slabs of polished gold, each two metres high and a metre across. They shone with dazzling splendour, their surfaces pristine and mirror-like in the protective atmosphere. There were ten panels altogether, five on either side of the walls, evenly spaced with a gap of half a metre between each. They were covered with markings instantly recognizable as the Atlantis symbols.
“Take a look at her,” Costas whispered.
His beam had caught a gargantuan shape towards the rear of the chamber. It was barely recognizable as human, a grotesque parody of the female form with pendulous breasts, protuberant buttocks and a bloated belly that gave the torso a nearly spherical appearance. She was flanked by life-sized bulls that faced up towards her. The tableau was like a triptych or heraldic group that screened off the rear of the chamber.
Jack stared at the colossus and then glanced at Costas. “She’s what prehistorians flatteringly call a Venus figure,” he explained with a grin. “About eighty have been found in Europe and Russia, mostly small statuettes in ivory or stone. This one’s phenomenal, the only one I know of bigger than life-size.”
“She’s a little different from the comely maidens in the passageway,” Costas observed ruefully.
“She’s not meant to be a pin-up.” Katya’s tone was gently admonishing. “Look how they haven’t even bothered to finish the feet or the arms, and the head’s just a blank. Everything’s deliberately exaggerated to emphasize fecundity and good health. She may not conform to the modern western ideal of beauty, but for people living with the constant fear of starvation, an obese woman symbolized prosperity and survival.”
“Point taken.” Costas smiled. “How old is the lady?”
“Upper Palaeolithic,” Jack replied immediately. “All the Venus figurines fall between 40,000 and 10,000 BC, the same range as the paintings in the hall of the ancestors.”
“They used to be thought of as mother goddesses,” Hiebermeyer added pensively. “But there’s no certainty Stone Age European societies were matriarchal. They’re probably best seen as fertility idols, worshipped alongside male deities as well as animal spirits and inanimate forces.”
There was a brief silence, which Jack broke. “For hundreds of thousands of years hominids lived an unchanged existence during the Old Stone Age, right up to the Neolithic revolution. It’s no surprise the Atlanteans so soon after still revered the time-honoured gods of their ancestors, the hunter-gatherers who first painted wild beasts in the hall of the ancestors during the Ice Age.”
“The ancient Israelites of the Old Testament still worshipped a fertility god,” Efram Jacobovich interjected quietly. “Even the early Christians of the Mediterranean incorporated pagan fertility deities into their rituals, sometimes in the guise of saints or the Virgin Mary. The Venus of Atlantis might not be as far from our own beliefs as we might imagine.”
The stone table in front of the statue was massive. It extended almost to the entrance, terminating just in front of them in a raised ledge capped by an irregular globular shape about a metre across. In the light reflected off the gold it seemed preternaturally white, as if it had been burnished by the countless supplicants who had come to pray before the great goddess.
“It looks like a sacred stone,” Jack speculated. “What the ancient Greeks called a
“Marking the threshold into the House of the Divine, like the bowl of holy water at the entrance to a Catholic church,” Efram suggested.
“Something like that,” Jack agreed.
“It’s definitely meteoric.” Costas was examining the bulbous form more closely. “But it’s curious, almost like a warped sheet of metal rather than a solid nodule.”
“The kind of thing Stone Age hunters might have picked up on the ice cap,” Jack mused. “Most fresh meteor fragments are found on ice because they’re easy to spot. This could be a sacred object passed down from their ancestors, another link to earliest prehistory.”
Aysha had edged her way along the far side of the table and stopped before reaching the goddess. “Come and look at this,” she exclaimed.
The two beams swept forward along the surface of the table. It was littered with slats of wood, some joined at right angles like the corners of boxes. They could make out a jumble of carpenter’s tools, familiar forms including chisels and files, awls and mallets. It looked like the paraphernalia of a cabinet-maker’s workshop, all hastily abandoned but immaculately preserved in the dust-free environment.
“This is more than it seems.” Dillen bent over beside Aysha and carefully swept the wood shavings from a raised surface facing him. It was a wooden frame like a portable lectern. As he straightened up they caught a glimpse of gold.
“It’s a copyist’s table,” he announced triumphantly. “And there’s a gold sheet on top.”
As they crowded round, they could see the upper third of the sheet was densely covered with Atlantean symbols, some aligned erratically as if done in a hurry but all separated into phrases like the Phaistos disc. From a small box at the side, Dillen held up three cigarsized stone punches, each terminating in an obverse instantly recognizable as the Mohican head, the sheaf of corn and the canoe paddle. Another one lying on the table terminated in the Atlantis symbol.
“It is identical to the inscription on the wall opposite,” Katya said. “The copyist was replicating the symbols on the second panel from the left.”
They looked where she indicated and could just make out the individual symbols, a sequence faithfully transcribed up to the twelfth line where it had been abruptly abandoned.
Efram Jacobovich remained at the head of the table. He was staring intensely at the clutter of wooden slats, clearly lost in thought. Without looking up he cleared his throat and began to recite.
“And it came to pass on the third day of the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount. And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.”
He closed his eyes and continued.
“And Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood; two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it; and he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about. And he cast for it four rings of gold, to be set by the four corners of it; even two rings upon the one side of it, and two rings upon the other side of it. And he made staves of shittim wood, and overlaid them with gold. And he put the staves into the rings by the sides of the ark, to bear the ark.”
There was a stunned silence. He looked up. “The Book of Exodus,” he explained. “Those of my faith believe God gave Moses the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, and inscribed them on tablets which were borne by the
