‘Plato.’ Lanowski laughed quietly to himself, pushed up his glasses, looked at Jack intently and chuckled again. ‘Plato, Plato, Plato.’
Costas glanced anxiously at Jack, and then narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘All right, Jacob,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me guess. The Atlantis myth? Plato is the only surviving source. That is, except for the fragment of papyrus Maurice found in the desert that we’re looking at on the screen right now, the bit by Solon about where to find Atlantis that never got to Plato.’
‘Plato,’ Lanowski repeated to himself, shaking his head as if he were in the throes of some private rapture. He suddenly stared at Costas. ‘And Pythagoras.’
Costas held his gaze. ‘Pythagoras. Let me see. Pythagoras is about geometry, right? Triangles, pyramids? Pyramids, early civilizations, Atlantis?’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve lost me.’
Lanowski beamed at him. ‘We know from Aristotle that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras. What that means is that Plato believed there was a mathematical and even a musical structure behind everything. But instead of taking an interesting idea into hard science, the Greeks made it esoteric, using it in a mystical way and seeing Pythagorean logic in weird places. They also used it to create hidden messages of meaning. Some scholars have come to believe that Plato embedded codes in his writing to reveal his beliefs to other Pythagoreans. We’re not talking about hidden messages as we might understand a code, but about arrangements of letters and words that had a mathematical logic or – in the case of letters – could be related to the musical scale. Other Pythagoreans might recognize them, like a symbol on a ring or a secret handshake.’
Costas looked puzzled, and jerked his finger at the screen. ‘But if it’s this papyrus you’re on about, Solon wrote it about 580 BC. Isn’t that a couple of decades before Pythagoras was even born?’
‘Often the names we associate with a theory are not those who invented it, and there’s good reason for thinking that ideas we call Pythagorean had their origins much earlier in Greece. If they were floating around already in Solon’s time, then a clever polymath like him would have lapped them up.’
Jack stared at Lanowski. ‘So you think Solon may have put some kind of code in his text?’
Lanowski pointed at the screen, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Thanks to my friend Maurice Hiebermeyer, we’ve got a scan of the very papyrus in front of us. Usually what I’m talking about can only be revealed by stichometric analysis, taking the medieval texts that are our only surviving copies of ancient works and trying to reconstruct how they would have looked on the original papyrus, based on the regular length of lines ancient scribes used. But we’ve actually got an original papyrus, with the lines exactly as Solon composed them. Almost immediately I matched his layout to the twelve-note musical scale. Look, you can see where I’ve highlighted the text, the letters alpha to lamda for the musical notes in the first letters of a line of words running diagonally through that last paragraph. That was my eureka moment. I realized that Solon had been doing what Plato later did, that there was more to this papyrus than meets the eye. So now I’ve been looking at the letters along the right and left margins, and then at criss-cross patterns, and all the other obvious geometric possibilities, and then I’ve been applying basic cryptographic analysis using letter codes. I’m convinced there are words embedded in the text.’
‘You know ancient Greek?’ Costas asked.
‘Yeah. Easy. Did it at school.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve tried about five hundred different letter codes.’
‘In your head.’
Lanowski looked nonplussed. ‘Of course. Computers can’t actually think, you know.’
Costas leaned back. ‘But surely all you’re going to find is more patterns, more word games. Where does that get us?’
‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I remembered how easy it was for me to find that musical scale. Way too easy for an intellectual like Solon. I think he wanted some successor like Plato to see it and then look for what else was hidden, something we know Plato never had the chance to do because this fragment of papyrus was lost in the desert before Solon left Egypt, and he never replicated it. I love the idea that Solon might have been robbed of the gold he was going to use to pay the priest and that he suffered some kind of permanent amnesia, losing this part of his papyrus during the scuffle as well. But I think I’m taking up where Plato should have been, as someone who immediately recognizes that there must be something else hidden in the text.’
‘That still doesn’t explain how a hidden code could be anything other than wordplay, mathematical games.’
Lanowski looked at Costas. ‘The technique could also have been used to conceal actual words, as a code in the way we might expect.’
‘It makes sense,’ Jack added. ‘Why on earth would Solon bother to embed a word game in a script he’s writing in the flickering torchlight at the foot of an old priest, telling him one of the most extraordinary tales he’s ever heard? There must have been a particular purpose for concealment, and Solon wasn’t a mystic like some of those later Pythagoreans.’
‘There’s geometry in that page,’ Lanowski said, pointing at the screen. ‘Not in the section at the top of the papyrus, where I think he was hastily copying down a dictation from the high priest, but in that final crucial paragraph. It’s much more carefully written. Remember, Solon was translating from Egyptian into Greek as he was listening. So he was already thinking hard about language, about words. He was good at composing fast. I’ve really got to like the guy and I can see where he was coming from. He enjoyed making clever geometry out of his writing. It’s really no different from the way a creative writer today uses metaphor and simile, alliteration and assonance. Only here I think the artistry had a special reason. Imagine this: the high priest is speaking slowly, carefully, giving Solon time to transcribe what he’s saying. This was really important stuff, about the end of Atlantis, coveted information normally only passed from priest to priest. The high priest is taking a bit of a gamble telling him, perhaps induced by the promise of gold. But then he oversteps the boundary and tells Solon something really coveted, something sacred. Maybe he then regrets it and instructs Solon not to write it down.’
‘But Solon finds a way,’ murmured Costas.
‘And maybe the high priest still doesn’t trust him, and it was the priest who arranged for Solon to be robbed and knocked on the head after leaving the temple that final night.’
Costas shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. We know from what’s openly in the text that the priest told Solon a phenomenal story, something passed down over almost seven thousand years. There’s incredible detail in the descriptions of Atlantis. What else could he reveal that might suddenly seem beyond the pale, too secret to tell Solon?’
Lanowski got up and paced in front of them, gesticulating. ‘Let’s imagine he told Solon where the Atlanteans went, something Solon wrote down at the end of the text in the corner of the papyrus that’s been ripped off. We can pretty well guess what it would have said. Troy, Greece, Crete, the coast of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, where all the early civilizations subsequently developed. But then let’s imagine there was another story. Something dark, a story of exile, of banishment. Something hinted at in later myth, but a truth that should not be told. Then I thought of the Epic of Gilgamesh.’
‘I think I’ve got you,’ Jack said. ‘The idea of Uta-napishtim cast away, a pariah. To a place where nobody is supposed to follow.’
‘And a place whose horror might have been exaggerated by the new priesthood of the early Neolithic, a priesthood who had already made people fear the unknown, the open ocean,’ Costas said. ‘Try to go there, and the ancient demons of the spirit world will arise again and haunt you.’
‘And carry out appalling acts half remembered, take away the children and sacrifice them to satisfy their blood lust,’ Lanowski said.
‘So you think Solon heard what he should not have heard, agreed not to write it down but did so, in some kind of code?’
‘I think the fear of that place and of the one who lurked there, a kind of nightmare shaman, may have still been felt by those priests of Egypt who were the last in the line to carry the actual story of what happened, a story that survived elsewhere only in the garbled accounts of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament. Seven thousand years on, that last shaman and what he represented still struck terror into the hearts of Egyptian priests whose gods were supposedly all-powerful, yet who could not suppress that ancient fear of the old spiritualist religion and the threat it posed to the new world of the gods.’
‘And?’ Jack said. ‘The code?’
Lanowski scratched his head. ‘It’s not quite there yet. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibles. It’s what you
