Pitt gave him a steel-edged stare but did not reply. He made a 'thumbs up' sign and slipped through the narrow hole into the forbidding water.
He slowly settled past the encircling white walls. He felt as if he were diving down a well. Once clear, he was dazzled by the glistening kaleidoscope of color from the sun's rays that penetrated the ice. The underside of the sheet was jagged and uneven and specked with small hanging stalactites formed by brine from the rapidly freezing fresh water carried into the fjord by glaciers.
Underwater visibility was almost eighty meters on a horizontal range. He glanced down and saw a small kelp community grasping the rocky mass carpeting the bottom. Thousands of small shrimplike crustaceans suspended in the still water swirled past his sight.
A huge, three-meter bearded seal eyed him curiously at a distance, tufts of coarse bristles sprouting from its muzzle. Pitt waved his arms, and the big seal shot him a wary look and swam away.
Pitt touched the bottom and paused to equalize his ears. There was a danger in diving with a buoyancy- compensatortype life-jacket under ice and he did not wear one. He was slightly heavy, so he adjusted by removing and dropping a lead weight from his belt. The air that flowed from the compressor through a filter and then an accumulator into his mask tasted bland but pure.
He gazed upward and oriented himself from the eerie glow of the ice hole and checked his compass. He hadn't bothered to carry a depth gauge. He wouldn't be working in water over four meters deep.
'Talk to me,' the voice of Al Giordino came through the mask's earphones.
'I'm on the bottom,' replied Pitt. 'All systems up to par.'
Pitt spun and stared through the green void. 'She lies about ten meters north of me. I'm going to move toward her. Give me some slack in the lines.'
He swain slowly, taking care his lines didn't foul on the rock outcroppings. The intense cold of the frigid water began to seep into his body. He was thankful Giordino had had the foresight to see that his air supply was warm and dry The stern of the wreck slowly unveiled before his eyes. The sides were covered with a mat of algae. He brushed away a small area with his gloved hand, stirn'ng up a green cloud. He waited a minute for the cloud to dissipate and then peered at the result.
'Inform Lily and Doc I'm looking at a wooden hull without a stern rudder, but no sign of steering oars.'
'Acknowledged,' said Giordino.
Pitt pulled a knife from a sheath strapped to one leg and pried at the underside of the hull near the keel. The point revealed soft metal.
'We have a lead-sheathed bottom,' he announced.
'Looking good,' replied Giordino. 'Doc Gronquist wants to know if there is any sign of carving on the sternpost.'
'Hold on.'
Pitt carefully wiped off the growth over a flat section of the sternpost just before it disappeared upward into the ice, waiting patiently for the resulting algae cloud to drift away.
'There's some kind of a hardwood plaque imbedded into the sternpost. I can make out lettering and a face.'
'A face?'
'With a curly head of hair and heavy beard.'
'What does it read?'
'Sorry, I can't translate Greek.'
'Not Latin?' Giordino asked skeptically.
The raised carving was indistinct in the shimmering light that filtered through the ice. Pitt moved in until his face mask nearly touched the wooden plaque.
'Greek,' Pitt stated firmly.
'Certain?'
'I used to go with a girl who was an Alpha Delta Pi.'
'Hold on. You've thrown the bone pickers into spasms.'
After nearly two minutes, Giordino's voice returned over the earphones.
'Gronquist thinks you're hallucinating, but Mike Graham says he studied classical Greek in college and asks if you can describe the lettering.'
'First letter resembles an S shaped like a lightning strike. Then an A with the right leg missing. Next a P followed by another handicapped A and what looks like an inverted L or a gallows. Then an 1. Last letter is another lightning strike S.
That's the best I can do.'
Listening over the speaker inside the shelter, Graham copied Pitts meager description on the page of a notebook.
He scrutinized what appeared to be a word for several moments.
Something was out of place. He struggled to jog his memory, and then he had it. The letters were Classical but Eastern Greek.
His thoughtful expression slowly turned incredulous. He furiously wrote a short word, tore out the page and held it up-in modern capitals it read, S A R A PI S
Lily stared at Graham questioningly- 'Does it mean anything?'
Gronquist said, 'I think it's the name of a Greek-Egyptian god. '
'A popular deity throughout the Mediterranean,' agreed Hoskins. 'Modern spelling is usually 'Serapis. ''
'So our ship is the Serapes,' murmured Lily pensively, Knight grunted.
'So we might have either a Roman, Grecian or Egyptian shipwreck. Which is it?'
