“My God.”
“It’s…” Jack faltered.
“It’s a paw,” Costas whispered.
“A lion’s paw.” Jack quickly regained his composure. “This must be a gigantic statue, at least a hundred metres long and thirty metres high.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“A sphinx.”
For a moment the two men stared at each other through their domes in stupefied silence. Eventually Costas’ voice crackled over the intercom.
“Seems incredible but anything’s possible in this place. Whatever’s up there is a long way off our entry route and we wouldn’t have seen it. I’m going to check it out.”
Jack remained stationary while Costas floated upwards, gradually receding until all that was left was a diminishing halo of light. Just as that too seemed about to disappear, it came to an abrupt halt some thirty metres above the sea floor.
Jack waited anxiously for Costas to report. After more than a minute he could restrain himself no longer.
“What can you see?”
The voice that came through seemed strangely suppressed.
“Remind me. A sphinx has a lion’s body and a human head. Right?”
“Right.”
“Try this for a variant.”
Costas flicked his floodlights to full beam. The image that appeared high above was awesome and terrifying, the stuff of nightmares. It was as if a flash of lightning on a stormy night had revealed a huge beast towering over them, its features silhouetted in a spectral sheen that burst forth between rolling banks of clouds.
Jack stared up transfixed, scarcely able to register an image for which all their experience, all their years of exploration and extraordinary discovery, could provide no preparation.
It was an immense bull’s head, its huge horns sweeping up into the darkness beyond the arc of light, its snout half open as if it were about to lower its head and paw the ground before the onslaught.
After what seemed an eternity, Costas angled his Aquapod forward and panned the light down the neck of the beast, showing where it became a lion’s body.
“It’s carved from the living rock, basalt by the look of it,” he said. “The horns extend at least ten metres above the buildings. This must once have been a jutting ridge of lava that flowed down to the sea.”
He was descending more rapidly now and soon reached Jack.
“It’s facing the volcano,” he continued. “That explains the strange alignment of the courtyard. It respects the orientation of the twin peaks rather than the line of the coast, which would have been a more practical benchmark for the street layout.”
Jack quickly latched onto the significance of Costas’ words.
“And the rising sun would have shone directly between the horns and the two peaks,” he said. “It must have been a sight even the ancients could scarcely have imagined in their wildest fantasies about the lost world of Atlantis.”
The two Aquapods rose slowly together over the parapet, their water jets kicking up a storm of silt as they powered away from the floor of the courtyard. The rearing form of the giant bull-sphinx was swallowed in the darkness behind them, but the image of the colossal head with its curved horns high above remained etched in their minds.
The south-eastern perimeter was higher than the rest, rising at least ten metres vertically.
“It’s a stairway,” said Jack. “A grand entrance into the courtyard.”
The two Aquapods veered off to either side, Jack to the left and Costas to the right. Soon each appeared to the other as no more than a distant smudge of yellow in the gloom. At the top was a wide roadway, which their water jets revealed had a lustrous white surface.
“It looks like marble pavement.”
“I had no idea people quarried stone this early.” Costas was already amazed by the scale of stone extraction in the courtyard, and now here was evidence for masonry. “I thought quarrying didn’t begin until the Egyptians.”
“Stone Age hunters dug for flint to make tools, but this is the earliest evidence for precision-cut building stone. It predates the first Egyptian quarries by at least two thousand years.”
They continued silently onwards, neither able to comprehend the enormity of their find. Churned up phosphorescence billowed behind them like vapour trails. The road followed the same orientation as the courtyard, leading from the ferocious gaze of the bull-sphinx directly towards the foot of the volcano.
“I can see structures to my right,” Costas announced. “Pedestals, pillars, columns. I’m just passing one that’s square-sided, about two metres across. It towers way up out of sight. It looks like an obelisk.”
“I’m getting the same,” Jack said. “They’re laid out symmetrically, just like the Egyptian temple precincts at Luxor and Karnak.”
The floodlights revealed a succession of ghostly forms on either side of the processional way, the shapes looming into view and then disappearing like phantasms glimpsed in a swirling sandstorm. They saw altars and plinths, animal-headed statues and the carved limbs of creatures too bizarre to make out. Both men began to feel unnerved, as if they were being lured by these beckoning sentinels into a world beyond their experience.
“It’s like the entrance to Hades,” Costas murmured.
They ran the gauntlet between the eerie lines of statues, a lurking, brooding presence that seemed to reproach them for trespassing in a domain that had been theirs alone for millennia.
Moments later the pall lifted as the roadway abruptly terminated at two large structures divided by a central passageway. It was about ten metres wide, less than half the width of the roadway, and had shallow steps like those which led up from the courtyard.
“I can see squared blocks, each four or five metres long and maybe two metres high.” Costas was suddenly elated. “This is where all the quarried stone went!” He stopped just inside the passageway and used his water jet to blow silt from the base of the wall. He angled his light so it shone up the structure.
Jack was about ten metres from Costas and could see his face in the dome as he looked across.
“My turn for a recce.”
Jack vented water and began to rise, but rather than receding gradually upwards, he abruptly vanished over a rim not far above.
Several long minutes later his voice crackled over the intercom.
“Costas. Do you read me? This is incredible.”
“What is it?”
There was a pause. “Think of the most outstanding monuments of ancient Egypt.” Jack’s Aquapod reappeared as he descended back into the passageway.
“Not a pyramid.”
“You’ve got it.”
“But pyramids have sloping sides. These are vertical.”
“What you’re looking at is the base of a massive terrace,” Jack explained. “About ten metres above us it turns into a platform ten metres wide. Above that there’s another terrace with the same dimensions, then another, and so on. I went along the entire length of this side and could see the terrace continuing on the south-east side. It’s the same basic design as the first Egyptian pyramids, the stepped pyramids of the early third millennium BC.”
“How big is it?”
“That’s the difference. This is huge, more like the Great Pyramid at Giza. I’d estimate one hundred and fifty metres across the base and eighty metres high, more than halfway to sea level. It’s incredible. This must rank as the oldest and largest masonry edifice in the world.”
“And on my side?”
“Identical. A pair of giant pyramids marking the end of the processional way. Beyond this I’d expect some form of temple or a mortuary complex, maybe cut into the side of the volcano.”
Costas activated the navigational monitor which rose like a fighter pilot’s gunsight in front of him. Jack looked down as the radio-pulse modem flashed the same image to his screen.