like swirling images of animals, like those prehistoric cave paintings,’ he said. ‘I wonder if Stone Age people saw something like this in pools of water above the magma chamber, bubbles that might have reflected light coming from lava.’
‘They might also have been poisoned by the gas,’ Jack said. ‘These would definitely have been malevolent spirits.’
‘Check this out.’ Costas paused beside the left-hand wall of the tunnel, and panned his light up and down a thick streak in the lava that shone a golden colour. ‘This might explain a thing or two. It’s copper sulphide. If this is common in the lava here, then we’ve just found the source of copper for the people of this place. Those brave enough to come close to the lava might even have seen it melting.’
‘Fantastic,’ Jack exclaimed, putting his hand on the copper seam. ‘That ties up another loose end. If the source of copper was within the volcano like this, then the elite could easily have controlled it. That first spearhead or sword made of copper would have been a huge milestone in prehistory. Priest-king becomes warrior-god.’
They pushed off and swam forward, Costas now in the lead. ‘We must be on the edge of the magma chamber,’ he said. ‘All I can see is reflection off the bubbles. If there’s any lava activity ahead, we should see it with our lights off.’
They switched off their headlamps in unison. For a moment, all Jack saw was blackness, and then he became aware of little flashes in front of him, the bubbles now appearing like tiny polychrome drops of oil lit through by some distant source of light. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a hazy presence somewhere beyond, a wavering red glow that suffused the background ahead of them.
‘Holy shit,’ Costas said quietly.
‘That’s lava, isn’t it?’
‘A whole lake of it,’ Costas exclaimed, swimming forward to the lip of the tunnel. Jack followed behind and stared out at one of the most extraordinary and terrifying vistas he had ever seen. It was a vast underwater cavern, at least forty metres across. In the dark recesses above them he could see the roof of the chamber, an ugly mass of solidified lava that looked as if it had been blown upwards to harden over an empty space, leaving appendages that dripped down like malformed stalactites. But it was the scene below that was so mesmerizing. The bottom of the chamber was a seething cauldron of lava, oozing up to the surface and then solidifying quickly on contact with the water, leaving pillow-shaped undulations with lobes and toes that disgorged from the cooling crust. Jack peered directly down, through a yellow-brown haze that lay in the water like a miasma above the crust. He watched a crack open and molten lava ooze into solidifying folds resembling arms and legs, like some protean being, half human, before another surge of lava swallowed it back into the cauldron. It was as if he was looking at the birthplace of the gods, at the very fount of creation itself.
Costas pressed the control panel on his wrist to activate the video camera in front of his helmet, and moved his head slowly around to take in the scene. ‘The yellow-brown stuff is suspended glass fragments from the lava. That’s the other thing that makes it lethal to be near an eruption. You don’t want to breathe any of that in or get it sucked into your equipment. Thank God for the closed-circuit rebreathers. I make it seventy-nine degrees Celsius where we are now. We’re probably looking at over a hundred degrees down there, with the gas plumes at a hundred and fifty degrees when they hit the water.’
‘At least hot water rises, so we’re not going to fall into it.’
‘It’s those gas plumes I’m worried about, the carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. Look, there’s one over there.’ Jack watched as a spectacular white mass erupted like a geyser on the far side of the chamber, followed by a glowing lava fountain that cascaded sideways and seemed to melt part of the wall of rock on the side of the chamber. ‘That’s a solid mass of bubbles, more gas than water,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve seen plumes like that over sub- sea vents in the mid-Atlantic. Some Bermuda Triangle fanatics think that’s what causes ships to disappear. If you swam over one of those plumes, you’d drop like a stone into the lava. And did you see the wall? We’re inside the caldera of a live volcano, Jack, and it’s collapsing in on itself. It’s like those holes you dig in sand by the seashore, where the water undermines the sides. That’s what the lava’s doing underneath us now, rising even in the time we’ve been watching it.’
‘How long do you think we have?’
‘I don’t even want to think. I feel like one of those mythical heroes, finally having reached the edge of the underworld and wondering whether going on from here means no turning back.’
‘We’ve got to make a decision fast.’
‘Let’s do the geology first. It’s mainly basaltic, but I can see streaks of rhyolitic lava, viscous, silica-rich stuff that’s come from deep within the magma. That’s a major warning sign, something the vulcanologists couldn’t have known without us being here. And whatever the geologists thought about the seismic activity falling off, it looks like a lull before the storm. There’s clearly a major event brewing under the North Anatolian Fault, something that could easily extend as far west as the Bosporus and Istanbul. What we’re looking at here is enough to put the whole of northern Turkey under evacuation orders.’
‘Good enough,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He fixed his mind’s eye again on the smudge of light at the entrance to the tunnel far behind them, and turned away from the hellish scene in the cauldron. But then he caught sight of something below. A plume of bubbles had risen along the wall to their left, clearing away the brown silicate material that had obscured the rock face. Suddenly he saw a rock-cut stairway leading from below the lava up the side of the chamber. He followed it with his eyes, his heart pounding, and then saw another entrance in the wall ahead of them, twenty, maybe twenty-five metres away. He grasped Costas by the arm and pointed, his voice hoarse with excitement. ‘We’ve been here before, five years ago. That’s the original rock wall from the time of Atlantis, and that’s the entranceway I remember passing. It was surmounted by the Atlantis symbol. That’s what I came here to look for, Costas, to see what’s inside. ’
Costas followed his gaze, and then turned to look at him. ‘This is the only chance you’ll have to see what’s there. We can’t go away and wait for things to cool down. That lava’s going to destroy everything here, all of the archaeology. Whatever’s inside that entranceway will be lost forever.’
‘What are the odds for a look?’
‘What’s your predicted gas supply?’
Jack glanced at his computer readout. ‘At current consumption and depth, about thirty-five minutes.’
‘Mine’s thirty. That gives us half an hour to get over there, take a look, and then return here and get back to the submersible. There’s no radio link with Seaquest II until we’re out of the tunnel. If we go out now to give them the geological rundown, we’d never get back in. Look at the rate of rise of the lava. That entrance probably won’t be there in half an hour.’
‘Will an extra half an hour make any difference to the speed of the earthquake-response team?’
Costas paused. ‘The Turkish authorities are already on Category A alert, with evacuation plans on full standby. What we’ve got to say will push them to activate, but there’ll have to be top-level government meetings in Ankara. It’s a huge decision to make. Millions of people will be disrupted.’
‘The odds for us?’
Costas swam forward and peered over the edge. ‘There’s a lot of plume activity just where we want to go. And the lava’s rising. But when have the odds ever been in our favour?’
‘What’s your call?’
‘I haven’t had a chance to test Little Joey yet. I couldn’t face Jeremy and say I hadn’t tried.’
Jack stared at the ancient entranceway, the stairs in front of it now lit up in the orange glow of the lava that was lapping the base of the rock. It was now or never. He thought about what Costas had said. Half an hour might make no difference. But that calculation depended on them escaping alive. If they never made it out and nobody knew what they had seen, that activation might never be ordered. Millions of people on standby might become millions of dead and injured and homeless. He might be about to make the most momentous decision of his career. Of his life. He stared at the ancient rock-cut entrance, his vision narrowing to a tunnel again, one that seemed to draw him forward over the burning pit in front of them.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it, and then let’s get the hell out of here.’
3
