What they had revealed was astounding, the greatest revelation from an ancient text in the history of archaeology. One word had stood out, a word that had bedevilled archaeologists since time immemorial, a word spelled out in the syllabic script of the Minoans and represented by the symbol in front of Jack now: Atlantis. That had been remarkable enough, but then his colleague Maurice Hiebermeyer had made another discovery deep in the Egyptian desert, a fragment of papyrus showing that the story of Atlantis told by the Greek philosopher Plato had not been a myth but was based on hard reality, on an account given to a Greek traveller by an Egyptian priest who had inherited secret knowledge stretching back thousands of years before the first pharaohs. Together the papyrus and the disc contained clues that had brought Jack and his team to the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, searching a shoreline submerged when the Mediterranean had cascaded over a land bridge at the present-day Bosporus and filled the Black Sea basin, the last and most catastrophic event in the sea-level rise caused by the great melt at the end of the Ice Age twelve thousand years ago. For Jack, it had been the perfect archaeological quest, a marriage of textual clues, hard science and intuition, and it had brought together all the skills of his team. They had revealed nothing short of the most dramatic archaeological site ever discovered, surrounding the twin peaks of a partly submerged volcano. It had been a spectacular vision of human ingenuity and achievement at the beginning of the Neolithic, when people had built monuments that equalled those of the Egyptians and the Sumerians and the Mesoamericans thousands of years later.
Jack traced his glove over the symbol on the disc, up the central axis to where two symmetrical patterns extended outwards like garden rakes, each terminating in a series of parallel lines. The text on the Phaistos disc had instructed them to follow the shape of the eagle with outstretched wings, and they had realized that the symbol was also a map, a plan of the submerged tunnels and chambers they had discovered under the peak of the volcano. Five years ago they had passed through extraordinary wonders: a huge chamber full of ancient cave paintings of the Ice Age, then a tunnel with carvings showing latter-day priests of Atlantis with conical hats, and then the holy of holies, the place where the tunnel ahead of them now might be leading. Yet that chamber with its huge statue of a mother goddess had been freshly carved shortly before the flood, and Jack was convinced that somewhere inside the tunnels and chambers lay other secrets, something that would link the holy of holies and the priests with those ancestral images from the Ice Age: perhaps an inner sanctum that would reveal how the belief system of the Ice Age hunter-gatherers had transformed into a religion of priests and gods and worship. The most likely location, the complex of tunnels ahead of them, was a place they had only just begun to explore five years ago when the North Anatolian Fault had shuddered and the volcano surged to life again, forcing them away from the site seemingly forever.
Jack pressed his hand against the surface of the disc, wishing he could remove his glove and feel it against his skin. He had found gold before: gleaming coins of the Roman emperors, dazzling cups and jewellery on the Bronze Age wreck, gold fit for a king. But this disc was extraordinarily old, at least as old as the flooding of Atlantis more than seven thousand years ago. That was three thousand years before the earliest site elsewhere to produce worked gold, at Varna in Bulgaria. The gold in the disc could have come here with the first hunter-gatherers who had sought shelter in the caves on the slopes of the volcano during the Ice Age, who had painted the rock with images of mammoths and fearsome lions and leopards: a band of humans of precocious intellect and vision who had travelled south from the retreating glaciers with their most precious belongings. Their talent with metals was clear from the finds five years ago, their ability to collect and work copper and then to make an alloy to produce bronze, thousands of years before bronze technology re-emerged and became widespread in the ancient world. They could have brought the gold with them from the nearest rich source, the gold-bearing streams of the Caucasus Mountains to the east, laying woolly mammoth skins in the water and collecting the precious flecks just as the Greek myths had Jason and the Argonauts do with the Golden Fleece. And they could have smelted and fashioned the gold into a disc bearing their sacred symbol, perhaps at the time they were transforming their world – moving beyond the natural caves in the volcano to cutting their own passageways and chambers in the rock, then fashioning mud-brick and lime and volcanic ash into the walls of houses, creating the world’s first civilization.
To Jack, the golden disc represented everything that was fascinating about this place: the symbol of a people on the cusp of the greatest revolution in human history, a symbol that allowed them to look forward to a new world and yet also back to the time of their ancestors. He wanted to feel what they had felt, to see the world as they had seen it, to look far back in prehistory to the time before the memory of the deep past had become clouded by the foundation myths that followed the first cities and the first dynasties; and he wanted to look forward to where these people were going, to understand what motivated them as they poured all their energy into creating this place and then fleeing the oncoming flood. If he could see those things, then he would have found the greatest treasure of this place. He wanted to discover their past. Above all, he wanted to find out about their beliefs, how these people saw their existence at the dawn of modern religion. He wanted to find the gods of Atlantis.
Costas tapped Jack’s helmet. ‘You happy?’
Jack drew his eyes away from the symbol and looked at Costas, his form now visible as the sediment cleared. Beneath a tattered boiler suit filled with tools, Costas was completely encased in white, like an astronaut. His helmet bore the anchor logo of the International Maritime University, partly obscured by a laser range-finding device that he had spirited up in the engineering department, one of numerous gadgets that always festooned him when he went diving. Underneath the white outer layer they were both wearing e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced drysuits with integrated buoyancy systems, back-mounted oxygen rebreathers and dive computers with readouts visible inside their helmets. But the famed environmental resilience of the e-suit did not extend to diving in near-boiling water inside an active volcano, so they were entirely encased in thermal protection developed at IMU from the latest NASA and Russian spacesuit technology. Jack had to remind himself that they were not inside some lunar simulator, but under the Black Sea off Turkey, more than thirty metres below a solidified lava flow and heading for a place that made outer space seem distinctly congenial by comparison.
He tapped the intercom on the side of his helmet. ‘Happier now I know we’re on target. Lucky that pillar wasn’t crunched by the borer.’
‘I was driving it, remember? Rule number one. Never trash the archaeology.’
‘You mean you got lucky.’
‘We used the 3-D terrain map of the site from five years ago, and put the borer dead on the entrance to the chamber leading to the holy of holies.’
‘I’ve lost all sense of direction. My compass has gone haywire.’
‘Did Lanowski mention the magnetic anomaly?’ Costas said. ‘We noticed it yesterday when we did a magnetometer run over the site. The readouts showed some pretty spectacular spikes, centring over the likely location of the magma chamber. The Turkish geological survey guy with us said he’d recorded a similar anomaly at several other places along the North Anatolian Fault, though nowhere as spectacular as here. You get anomalies like this at a few other places in the world where an upsurge in magma has a localized effect on the earth’s magnetic field – along the Puerto Rico Fault in the north Caribbean, for instance. The guy said there’s a lot of variation in how magnetic materials react to these field changes, but they’d noticed that meteoritic iron is the most dramatic. Several samples they had from one meteorite impact site in Siberia felt twice as heavy as normal at one place along the North Anatolian Fault where they tried them, and he reckoned it might even be more marked here.’