“Nothing doing,” he gasped bleakly.
“Wait. Look at this.”
Jack had been hovering a metre above and had been enveloped in a sheen of bubbles from Costas’ exhaust. His eye had been caught by a curious feature refracted through the turbulence, an anomaly too small to have been picked up by the hologram laser.
It looked like a shallow, saucer-sized depression centred between the two sets of bull’s horns. The crack between the doors was concealed beneath it, making it seem like a seal stamped into the metal after they had been shut for the last time.
Katya moved up beside him and reached out to touch it.
“It feels crystalline,” she said. “It’s complex, lots of right angles and flat planes.”
The crystal was immaculate, so nearly flawless it was almost invisible. The movement of Katya’s hand as she traced the shape looked like the gesticulations of a mime artist. It was only when they dimmed their headlamps that a form began to emerge, the light refracting like a prism to reveal lines and angles.
When Jack moved, the lines suddenly coalesced into a familiar shape.
“My God,” he breathed. “The Atlantis symbol!”
For a moment they stared in amazement, the trials of the last few hours suddenly fallen away as they were sucked back into the extraordinary excitement of discovery.
“In the Aquapods we saw the symbol carved into a roundel in front of the pyramids,” Jack said. “It would seem consistent to have it here as well.”
“Yes,” said Katya. “A sort of talisman to proclaim the sanctity of the place.”
Costas pressed his visor against the crystal. “The carving’s incredible,” he murmured. “Most silica compounds wouldn’t last this long in seawater with such high sulphur content without forming a reaction patina.”
Jack’s mind was racing as he stared at the door. Suddenly he grunted and pulled out an oblong package which he had wedged in beside the Beretta.
“I brought along a little talisman of my own.”
He unwrapped the copy of the gold disc from the Minoan wreck. As he turned it over to reveal the symbol, the light from his headlamp danced off the surface.
“Behold the key to Atlantis,” he said jubilantly.
Costas erupted with excitement. “Of course!” He took the disc from Jack and held it up. “The convex shape exactly matches the concavity on the door. The symbol on the disc is in reverse, pressed into the metal, whereas the crystal is a mirror image in obverse. The disc should fit like a key into a lock.”
“I had a hunch it might prove useful,” Jack said.
“That door isn’t going to budge an inch,” Costas said. “This could be our only chance.”
Jack finned upwards a few strokes until he was directly in front of the symbol on the door, Katya immediately to his left.
“Only one way to find out,” he said.
CHAPTER 18
As Jack aligned the disc with the door the crystal seemed to be pulling him in, as if some primeval force were drawing together two halves of a whole which destiny had kept apart for too long. And sure enough, the disc mated with the crystal and slid smoothly inwards until it was flush with the doors.
“Bingo,” he said quietly.
He placed his palm on the disc and kicked hard with his fins to bring pressure to bear. Abruptly the disc sank inwards and spun rapidly clockwise, the motion causing the water to corkscrew like the wake from a propeller. As it stopped turning there was a low grinding noise, the disc disengaged and the doors swung ajar.
There was little resistance as Jack pushed the doors wide. Their view was momentarily obscured by the sheen of turbulence where ice-cold water inside mingled with the seawater around them. Jack sucked in his breath to conceal a spasm of pain, a stabbing sensation where the tear in his suit had exposed his chest to the freezing water. The other two saw his agony but knew he would rebuff their sympathy.
Costas had floated over the sill and was examining the mechanism revealed in the edge of the door.
“Fascinating,” he murmured. “The door was held by a granite beam like a crossbar, in two lengths scarfed together. The upper surface has been carved into ridges and furrows like a cog. The crystal was embedded in a stone cylinder with matching ridges. When Jack pressed the disc, the cogs engaged.”
Costas prised the disc from the crystal and passed it to Jack for safekeeping.
“How did it spin on its own?” Katya asked.
“The ends of the beam are weighted, probably inside cavities adjacent to the jambs. When the cog was engaged, the weights pulled the two lengths apart, spinning the cylinder.”
“To onlookers the automation would have seemed miraculous, the work of the gods,” Jack said.
“An impressive piece of engineering.”
“Simplicity of purpose, economy of design, durability of materials.” Costas grinned at them through his visor. “It would have won first prize hands down in the student competition at MIT when I was there.”
They turned their headlamps on full beam. The water ahead was crystal clear, free from contaminants in the thousands of years since it first seeped through the cracks in the doorway.
The light sparkled off the rock walls as their beams traversed from side to side. They were looking into a rectangular chamber the size of the torpedo room in the submarine. Immediately in front was a massive pedestal hewn from the living rock.
“It’s an altar!” Jack exclaimed. “You can see the channels where the blood spilled down the stairs outside.”
“Human sacrifice?” Costas queried.
“It has a long history among the Semitic peoples of the Near East,” Katya said. “Think of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament.”
“But never on a mass scale,” Jack countered. “The story of Abraham and Isaac is powerful precisely because it’s exceptional. The Minoans also sacrificed humans, but the only evidence is a peak sanctuary near Knossos where an earthquake toppled the temple in mid-ritual and preserved the skeleton. It was probably only ever performed in relation to catastrophes like the eruption of Thera.”
They were finning towards the pedestal in the centre of the chamber, their beams converging on the edge of the sacrificial platform. As the top came into view they were confronted by an image almost too fantastic to comprehend, a spectre that vanished like a genie as soon as they came close to it.
“Did you see what I saw?” Katya breathed.
“Extraordinary,” Costas murmured. “The bones must have disintegrated thousands of years ago, but in the stillness the calcium salts remained where they fell. The slightest disturbance and it disappeared like a puff of smoke.”
For a split second they had seen a recumbent bull, its giant shape reduced to an imprint of white streaks like a faded photographic negative. In the corners of the table they could make out holes where its limbs had been tied down before the sacrifice, the rope long since disappeared as the seawater rose and took the carcass in its icy embrace.
Jack picked up a dagger lying on one side of the table. The stone handle was incised with a fearsome beast, half bull, half eagle.
“There’s your answer,” he said softly. “The courtyard with the colossal statue by the shoreline was the world’s first bullfighting arena. The doomed animals were led up the processional way between the pyramids and then driven up the stairs to this slab. It would have been a spectacular site, overlooking the entire city on the plain below, the sacrifice perhaps timed to coincide with the first flash of sunlight overhead through the twin peaks of the volcano to the horns of the bull-sphinx in the courtyard far below. The whole city must have come to a standstill.”
He paused and looked at the other two solemnly through his visor. “We’ve just borne witness to the final sacrifice, the last desperate attempt by the priests to repel the rising seas before the doors to this chamber were locked shut for all time.”