the dock into the sea, and a group of men stood by wearing black IMU E-suits, all-environment dry suits that would prolong their survival even in these frigid waters should something go wrong. After a few moments the cable halted and a familiar form disengaged himself from the group with a wave.
“Good work, guys. I’ve done all I can here.”
With an agility belying his stout frame, Costas crossed the platform and on to the Zodiac, landing with a crash on the floorboards in front of Jack. He had preceded them to the berg by half an hour, and had clearly been on overdrive. He staggered up and stripped his E-suit down to the waist, sat down and cooled off for a moment, then slipped on the orange windbreaker and life jacket passed to him by the crewman.
“I’m good to go.”
The crewman pushed the Zodiac off and swung it back towards the line of the boom, driving slowly out to sea and then veering right once they had passed the buoys at the entrance. Five minutes later, the boom now out of sight and the northern edge of the berg behind them, Macleod motioned the crewman to drive a short way into the fjord and then ease back on the throttle and cut the engine. With the roar of the outboard gone everything suddenly seemed preternaturally still, an illusion of serenity, as if by crossing over the underwater threshold they had entered a fantasy world of ice, had become one with the towering crystal palaces that surrounded them.
“Don’t be deluded,” Macleod said. “There are titanic forces at work here.”
As if on cue the silence was rent by a tremendous bang, followed by a percussive shockwave through the air and an immense rushing sound as a wall of ice slid off the glacier far away on the edge of the ice cap. The noise seemed to resonate off all the bergs trapped in the fjord, an eerie chorus of competing echoes that seemed to pummel the Zodiac from every direction and then trailed off like a long sigh. In the unearthly silence that followed, the bergs around them seemed even more awesome, their own stature more puny and impotent.
“The sea’s often this placid in the summer,” the crewman said. “But it’s also the most active time for the glacier. And the warmer it gets down here, the more likely you are to get a clash with the cold air coming off the ice cap. It can happen very quickly.”
He pointed up the fjord to the eastern horizon, to a band of sky over the ice that could have been dark blue or dark grey, but their attention quickly shifted to a growler the size of a car just ahead of them. It had suddenly begun to rock from side to side, an alarming sight that seemed to defy reason on the glassy sea. Soon it rocked more and more aggressively and then tumbled over, revealing a surface sculpted smooth and sending a ripple coursing out into the fjord. The brash surged around them like a slurry of broken glass, and other growlers reared up uncomfortably close out of the depths.
“That was frightening,” Maria exclaimed.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Macleod replied. “When a big berg rolls, you might not feel much out here, but a ten-metre tidal wave can hit the shore. You don’t want to go beachcombing around here.”
“Don’t speak too soon,” Costas said. “We want our berg to stay nice and quiet for at least the next twenty- four hours.”
Jack gazed back at the creaking mass of ice and then down the fjord towards the glacier. Outside the threshold the bergs seemed to glide majestically towards the open sea, but inside it was as if they were inchoate, shackled and straining to go, their jagged edges still raw and fresh from the violence of their birth. The power of the place was all the more awesome because so much of it was invisible, convulsions of energy that pulsed unseen through the depths each time a slab of ice fell into the sea, a steady unleashing of force seen like this nowhere else on earth. For Jack it was a new measure of human frailty in the face of nature, an envelope he seemed to be stretching farther and farther with each new project.
Macleod nodded at the crewman, who pulled the starter cord and fired up the engine. The Zodiac turned back in the direction of the open sea and then accelerated towards the shore, its wake rocking the brash that extended out from the fjord in long tendrils of white. The crewman found a patch of clear water and opened the throttle wide, planing the Zodiac in a wide arc towards the rocky promontory that marked the northern edge of the fjord. Jack held on to the safety line and leaned back from the pontoon where he was sitting near the front of the boat, letting the freezing spray lash his face and relishing the tang of salt in his mouth. It had been several months since he had dived and he had missed the taste of the sea. He saw Maria smile at him as she clung on beside him, and he watched as Macleod and Costas ducked down and held their hoods against the spray. He remembered his last dive with Costas, deep in the bowels of the volcano six months before, a dive that had reawakened his worst trauma. The dive they planned now was even more confining, and would be one of the most extraordinary they had ever undertaken. The fears were still there, but under control, and all he felt now was a sense of overwhelming elation. The Golden Horn project had reignited his passion for archaeology, but it had been directed from the bridge of a ship, one crucial step removed from revealing history with his own hands. He was itching to get underwater again, to be the first to see and touch fabulous treasures lost for centuries in the ocean depths.
As the engine powered down, the roar of the outboard was replaced by an eerie chorus of howling and yipping, and they realised that the valley ahead was dotted with dogs chained to posts, some of them baying with hunger and others gorging on hunks of meat left for them in their muddy pens.
“The Greenlanders still use dog sleds in winter,” Macleod said, his hood now pushed back. “Much of the terrain’s too rugged for snowmobiles, and the ice cap’s a long way from fuel. They keep the dogs chained up all summer long and shoot them when they get too old to work. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then they’re not pets.”
“I seem to recall that when they excavated the last abandoned settlements of the Norse Greenlanders, they found dog bones with cut marks on them, their final meal,” Jack said. “Ancestors of these dogs.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re howling,” Costas said.
Maria stared apprehensively at the dogs after the others had scrambled over the bow on to the pebbly beach, and it took Jack proffering his hand to persuade her to join them. Macleod quickly led them to higher ground, above the danger zone from berg displacement, then responded to a call on his two-way radio and handed it to Maria. She stopped and spoke briefly into it, then passed it back to Macleod and resumed her place beside Jack.
“That was Jeremy,” she said. “He stayed on board to finish analysing the Mappa Mundi inscription. He thinks he’s got something else. It could be really exciting, but he needs a bit more time.”
“Should be just ready for us when we finish our dive,” Jack said. “We’ll need to sit down and work out where we go from here.”
“I still can’t believe you’re doing it,” she said, gazing at him with concern. “Sometimes I think you have a death wish.”
“This is your first time with IMU in the field.” Jack grinned. “As James said, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Despite the warmth of the summer sun, they kept their survival suits zipped up against the insects, and followed Macleod from the beach escarpment up an eroded path towards a low saddle in the valley. No vegetation stood more than a few feet high, but the bleak rock of the surrounding ridges was offset by lush beds of moss and grass that carpeted the valley floor.
“The ruins ahead are ancient Sermermiut,” Macleod said. “A sacred place for the local Inuit. People have lived here for at least four thousand years, since the first Greenlanders made their way across the frozen sea from the Canadian Arctic. The town of Ilulissat is over the ridge to the north, but it was only founded in 1741 with the modern Danish occupation of Greenland. The Danes called it Jacobshavn, but the Greenlandic name is a little more appropriate.”
“What does Ilulissat mean?” Costas asked.
“Icebergs.”
Costas grunted, and they trudged off the path over a marshy depression towards the ancient site, waving away the clouds of midges that seemed to rise from the bog like mist. “What about the Vikings?”
“To the Norse this whole stretch of coast up to the polar ice cap was Nordrseta, the northern hunting grounds, a forbidding place where hardly any Viking remains have ever been found.” Macleod stopped, waiting for Costas to catch up. “The Norse only settled permanently where they could have some hope of a traditional Scandinavian way of life, stock-raising and basic agriculture. In Greenland that meant the fertile fjord valleys near the southern tip, where Eirik the Red arrived with his family in the early eleventh century. Most of the colonists came from Norway and Iceland. Eventually there were hundreds of homesteads, a population that peaked at several thousand, and they even built crude stone churches after they converted to Christianity.”
“What happened to them?” Costas asked.
