Hiebermeyer led, with Jack taking up the rear. In a few minutes they had reached the bottom. They were in a gloomy beehive-shaped chamber, about eight metres high, positioned directly below the SS Generals’ Room and dug into the bedrock. Heidi pointed up to the vault with her stick. ‘There’s a swastika in the apex, directly below the Sonnenrad sun symbol in the floor above,’ she said. ‘The vault’s based on the shape of a Mycenaean Greek tomb, the so-called Treasury of Atreus at the ancient site of Mycenae. Himmler was obsessed with warrior kings of the ancient past. This vault is really a shrine to Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks who attacked Troy, the hero of another war between West and East.’ She brought down her cane and tapped on a marble slab in the centre of the floor. ‘If you look under this, you’ll see why.’
She sat down abruptly on a wooden bench beside the wall. Jack stared at the floor, but saw nothing in the closely fitted marble slabs to suggest an opening. Hiebermeyer knelt down and put his hand on the slab she had tapped. ‘How do you know anything’s here, Aunt Heidi?’
‘Because Himmler showed it to me. Ernst regarded all of Himmler’s archaeology as occult, and found a ready excuse that day to avoid the tour by volunteering to fly Nazi officials who accompanied us over the site of the castle to see Himmler’s grandiose construction scheme from the air. Himmler brought me down here alone. I never told Ernst what I saw; he would have scoffed at it. Himmler was very proud of this chamber. It was meant to be a kind of holy of holies, and a burial vault for the ashes of the greatest SS heroes. His top SS officers were meant to come and swear allegiance over the object buried below. But only a select few knew what it was.’
‘Is it still here?’
‘You can see where it rested.’ She tapped her stick against the wall behind her, then tapped it again, as if trying the find the right spot. The second tap produced a hollow sound, and where Hiebermeyer had been looking, an octagonal slab of marble about the size of a large dinner plate rose a few inches out of the floor. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m probably the only one left who knows how to do that. Even the curators of this place don’t know this is here. Go on, Maurice, pull it out.’
Hiebermeyer got down on all fours, grasping the block by two recessed handles on either side. He lifted it up and set it down beside the hole. Jack took out a Mini Maglite and knelt beside him. About six inches below was a ring of symbols, surrounding a hollow shape cut into the rock. Jack peered closely at the shape, panning his torch over it, then looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
Hiebermeyer was staring at it. ‘Incredible.’
Jack’s mind raced. A reverse swastika. It was the same as the shape in the bunker laboratory door. And it was the shape he had seen six months before in the strongbox he and Costas had retrieved from deep inside the mine in Poland, the shape of an object that Saumerre had so coveted but which had remained elusive.
‘It was for the ancient Trojan palladion,’ Heidi said. ‘At first I thought the palladion must be another fake, but I came to believe it was genuine. We all knew the swastika was an ancient shape, and had been found decorating pottery at Troy. Himmler told me that Heinrich Schliemann had discovered the palladion in the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where it had been looted from a temple at Troy. It was the most sacred Trojan object, dating back thousands of years before the fall of Troy, supposedly a gift from the sky god. It was meteoritic on one side, gold on the other. It’s gone now, though I don’t know where. But I brought you here to see the symbols around the edge of the hollow.’
Jack peered more closely. There were two circular rings of symbols, the first one close to the lip of the hole, the second inside and below the first ring, obscured in shadow. The symbols on the upper ring were similar to the ones they had seen in the hall above. ‘They’re runes,’ he murmured. ‘Eight of them altogether. Some look like the Futhark, the Scandinavian runes of the Middle Ages. But there are other symbols too, presumably Nazi additions. I can see two swastikas.’
Heidi pointed with her stick. ‘They’re the creation of Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler’s occult guru. He retained some of the original Scandinavian runes, but added some with no historical precedent as runes but based on other ancient symbols. As well as the swastikas, you can see those two symbols of a crossed ring, derived from the Phoenician symbol t th.’
Hiebermeyer looked at Heidi. ‘These SS runes have Roman letter equivalents, don’t they?’
She nodded. ‘Entirely made up by Wiligut, but applied consistently. The t th symbol means T, and the Hakenkreuz, the swastika, means A. And you can see the Sig rune for the letter S, familiar enough from the SS insignia. The other three symbols are the Heilszeichen rune for L, the Odal rune for N and the Leben rune for I.’
Jack stared again, panning his torch from symbol to symbol, then running over it again. ‘Good God,’ he said under his breath. ‘They spell out ATLANTIS.’
‘Now look at the second ring of symbols,’ she said.
Jack panned his torch deeper into the hole and stared, his heart pounding. ‘It’s incredible,’ he whispered.
‘What is it?’ Hiebermeyer said.
Jack sat back, his mind racing. ‘The symbols Costas’ ROV photographed two days ago on that cave wall in Atlantis, the ones that Katya is working on intepreting.’ He took out his iPhone, pressed a few keys and passed it to Hiebermeyer, who stared at the image on the screen and then squatted down, looking at the rock-cut symbols in the marble and then at the screen again. ‘There are twenty-six symbols on your screen. Each one of the eight symbols here in the rock is represented. They’re the same.’
‘You recognize them?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It’s the Stone Age code.’ He looked at Heidi. ‘These symbols are found on cave paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic, most extensively in the famous caves in France and Spain. What does seem incredible is that they are virtually identical across the world.’ He showed her the screen, pointing. ‘The zigzag lines, the clusters of dots, the parallel lines are all found in rock art in North and South America, Europe, South Africa, Australia. Some scholars have tried to argue that these are just common jottings that the artists could have invented independently, but that doesn’t wash with me.’
‘You think these symbols could have spread around the world from one origin?’ she murmured.
Hiebermeyer nodded emphatically. ‘We know people moved huge distances in the Ice Age: across the Bering Strait and to South America at least twenty thousand years ago, and from Asia to Australia at least thirty thousand years before that. Armchair scholars who dispute the idea look at maps and see apparently insurmountable barriers in the seas and deserts and mountain ranges, whereas those like Jack who’ve tried to retrace the routes realize that the sea especially is often an aid rather than a hindrance to long-distance travel.’
‘What’s the date range of the symbols?’ she asked.
‘Towards the end of the last Ice Age, from about twenty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. But they could have survived as relic symbols after the Ice Age, maybe in rituals.’
‘At least until 6000 BC,’ Jack said quietly, getting down on his knees and shining his Maglite at the far side of the recess. He took his iPhone back from Hiebermeyer, stared at it and then shone the torch again. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’
He straightened up and smiled broadly. Hiebermeyer pushed up his little round glasses and peered back. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’
‘I’ve just seen one I recognize above all others. It’s astonishing.’
Hiebermeyer followed his gaze. The torch lit up a symbol like a garden rake, a single slash with four lines coming off it at right angles. ‘Is this what I think it is?’
Jack scrolled down his screen. ‘It’s symbol number twenty-three in the Stone Age alphabet, what they call “pectiform”, from the Latin for comb-shaped, with short lines extending off a single line. According to Katya’s email to me summarizing the code, it’s quite rare, only occurring at five per cent of the cave sites. But it first occurs in the oldest groups, twenty-five thousand years ago.’ He tapped the screen again, and showed it to Heidi. ‘That’s why I’m so excited.’
The screen showed the cover of Jack’s monograph publication on Atlantis, based on their discovery of the site five years before. In the centre was the symbol they had first seen on the papyrus that Hiebermeyer had discovered in the Egyptian desert, the account by the ancient Greek traveller Solon of his visit to the Egyptian high priest who had told him the story of Atlantis. It was the symbol that Jack and Costas had found on the golden disc from the Bronze Age shipwreck, a disc they realized had been created in Atlantis more than five thousand years earlier, before the citadel had been drowned by the rising waters of the Black Sea. Heidi peered at it, then at Jack. ‘The symbol here is a mirror image of the Stone Age symbol. It’s as if that pectiform symbol had been flipped over.’
