‘That child was sacrificed,’ Costas whispered.
Jeremy zoomed out from the skull to reveal a panorama of the chamber, showing the circle of pillars and the stone basins rising up between the skulls. ‘Look at the relationship between the skeleton and the skull and that stone basin. It makes sense of the basin, don’t you think? It was an altar. A sacrificial altar.’
Jack wondered whether the basins were windows into the depths, into the underworld, some kind of visionary device. He remembered the dark red stain on his glove when he put his hand into the basin. ‘We know they sacrificed bulls, because we found the remains of one five years ago spread over a large stone table at an entrance chamber into the volcano. But this is a revelation. It’s horrifying. Human sacrifice.’
Jeremy leaned back. ‘I think that child was killed by being bludgeoned with the mace. Then it was bled from the neck into the basin, and the knife was used to behead it. Separate the head from the body, and maybe you dispatch the soul to the spirit world. Maybe the blood in the basin was a conduit, a river, fitting in with those altered-consciousness visions we were talking about. Maybe the sacrificer also travelled that river, a portal to the spirit world opened up by the act of sacrifice.’
‘With implements specifically designed for the purpose,’ Jack murmured. ‘Obsidian blades like that one have been found in caches in houses at Catalhoyuk, and have long been suspected to have symbolic significance. And those stone basins look much older than the pillars, carved out of the living rock. They were part of the ancient function of this chamber way before the flood.’
‘Wasn’t there a tradition of child sacrifice in the Near East?’ Costas said. ‘I mean the Old Testament account of Abraham and his son Isaac. And the Phoenicians, and their successors in the west Mediterranean, at Carthage. When we’ve been at the IMU museum at Carthage I’ve often walked around the tophet, where the children were supposedly sacrificed.’
‘But we know child sacrifice may have been exaggerated by the Romans,’ Jack said, staring pensively at the image. ‘It may only have been in times of extreme duress, in the case of the Carthaginians when they were faced with annihilation by the Romans.’
‘But isn’t that what we’re seeing at Atlantis?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, extreme duress? The flood waters rising, and no way out?’
That was it. And no way out. Jack remembered the walled-over chamber, the pillars freshly carved and the old paintings erased. Had this been a newly refurbished temple, on the verge of being revealed as the flood waters came, but instead used as a dungeon for the last remaining shamans, their death chamber? He stared at the skeleton. Had those people been driven in desperation to take human life, when the blood of bulls had no longer been sufficient?
‘It wasn’t just children,’ Jeremy said. ‘The osteologist reckons there are at least twelve other trussed-up bodies in there, all of them articulated skeletons and all of them decapitated. They seem to be of widely varying ages, adults and younger, probably male and female. Visionary ability is often perceived to be passed down in a family, isn’t it, from parent to child? That’s what I think we’ve got here. I think we’ve got entire families being locked in this chamber. It’s a really chilling image, like those Jewish families trapped at Masada by the Romans. It’s as Costas says: people driven to it by extreme duress.’
‘You mean driven to sacrifice?’ Costas said.
‘Call it sacrifice. Or call it assisted mass suicide.’
They were all silent for a moment, staring at the image. Costas coughed, and then spoke quietly. ‘So let me get this right. In this Garden of Eden, at the dawn of civilization, you’ve got vultures picking away at dismembered corpses. You’ve got a new order of priests that make the Jesuits of the Inquisition look like angels, forcing people to hack out limestone pillars and drag them up the volcano to make this temple, a temple to themselves, the new gods. And you’ve got an old order of shamans, off their heads on some kind of psychedelic trip, trapped in this death chamber and performing human sacrifice. And all of that while the flood waters are rising, and their world is being annihilated.’
‘The old order swept away, the new world about to dawn,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘If you look at the Old Testament account and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is represented as an act of God, an act of divine punishment. Maybe that idea was created by the new priests and became the myth. And maybe the flood was actually propitious timing for the new priests, the new gods, who were ready for the diaspora to leave and found new cities and civilizations around the ancient world.’
‘In which case,’ Costas said, ‘who was Noah? A shaman survivor?’
Jeremy paused. ‘In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Uta-napishtim is cast up on a mountain far across the waters, cut off from the world of men and their gods.’
Jack stared at Costas, his mind racing. ‘It’s possible. Maybe one of them did survive. Maybe the annihilation wasn’t complete.’
‘Maybe he was a vacillator,’ Jeremy said. ‘Maybe he had been unsure whether to stay with the old order or go with the new.’
‘Maybe he was guardian of the animals, of the bulls the shamans corralled for sacrifice, and the new priests needed him to tend those they were taking with them.’
Jack stared at the image on the screen. ‘If I could get into that chamber this morning, then someone could have got out. That hole in the wall had been made deliberately, by pulling the stones from the outside. Maybe someone dragged him out, at the last moment.’
Jack cast his mind back again to his image of those final hours. Had the shamans been sealed in, blamed perhaps for the flood, told to use all their powers to stem the waters? Or had that been a lie, and it had truly been a death chamber of the new priests’ devising? In the absence of bulls to sacrifice, sealed in that chamber and realizing they were facing certain death, had they crossed the boundary and committed the ultimate act of sacrifice? Had the new gods forced them to unspeakable horror?
Lanowski came bounding up to them, rubbing his hands. ‘Okay. I’m ready.’
Costas stared back at the wall. ‘But the ROV monitor’s still blank.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean what I’ve been working on at the computer.’ Lanowski peered at the image on the screen. ‘Oh. I nearly forgot.’ He reached into his pocket and handed Jack a crumpled slip of paper. ‘The lab technician gave this to me as I was coming in. The test results on that red stuff on your glove.’
Jack smoothed open the paper and read the report. It was exactly as he had thought. It was human blood. It had been on his glove, in the cracks and crevices, clouding the water as he rubbed it off, the seven-thousand-year- old blood of that child, perhaps, of its family, blood that had fed the pool in that basin that someone was using desperately in an effort to get into the spirit world, to escape the horror of drowning as the flood waters began to lap the chamber. For a moment Jack wished he had pulled himself further inside, up over the basin, so that he could peer into it, to glimpse what the one with the bloodied mace and the dripping knife had tried to see. But then he knew he would only have witnessed a reflection of that circle of pillars looming over the basin, radiating in the circular shape of the bowl like the spokes of the Sonnenrad in Lanowski’s drawing, flickering in whatever firelight they had left in the chamber, a fiery image of the new gods leering through the spent blood of the old order.
He glanced again at the three circular shapes Lanowski had chalked on the blackboard, from spiral to Sonnenrad to swastika. He suddenly remembered the palladion, the symbol of ancient Troy they knew had taken the swastika shape: a sacred meteorite forged and hammered into the crooked cross and melded with gold, stolen by the Greek king Agamemnon from Troy and then found by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae and secretly taken by the Nazis to Germany. He stared at the image of the swastika. ‘The star of heaven,’ he murmured. ‘ Of course.’
‘Come again?’ Lanoswki said.
‘The star of heaven,’ Jack repeated, his heart pounding with excitement. ‘It’s been staring us in the face all along. It’s in the Epic of Gilgamesh.’ He picked up his tablet computer and called up the text of the Babylonian epic. ‘It’s on the first tablet, “The Coming of Enkidu”. Gilgamesh has a dream, and tells his mother, the goddess Ninsun. Listen to this: “I walked through the night under the stars of the firmament, and one, a meteor of the stuff of Anu, fell down from heaven. I tried to lift it but it proved too heavy. All the people of Uruk came round to see it, the common people jostling and the nobles thronging to kiss its feet; and to me its attraction was like the love of a woman. They helped me, I braced my forehead and I raised it with thongs and brought it to you.”’
Jack put the tablet down. ‘It’s incredible. I’m convinced that’s the same story as the Trojan foundation myth, which recounts the origin of the palladion as a meteorite. I think both stories hark back to Atlantis: the Epic of Gilgamesh from the perspective of northern Mesopotamia, the Trojan myth from the viewpoint of those who fled Atlantis to the Dardanelles and actually took the palladion with them. The “star of heaven” was the palladion after
