The Priestess

by Amethyst Gray

  He was talking about out of place artefacts in archaeology and items that hinted of Atlantis.

  In one slide, he had a picture of a bird that looked like a modern-day glider that had been found in an ancient Egyptian tomb. He remarked that it could have been a ‘Vimana’ that was mentioned in the ancient Hindu text known as the Mahabharata. He added that a replica was made from the original and it flew perfectly, thus proving that Egyptians knew aerodynamics and presumably flight. He also had a slide of temple hieroglyphs that appeared to show submarines and other technology.

  When she was finished with her daydream, she started packing up her things ready for leaving the ship the following day. As she did so, her phone rang. It was from the director’s office. She held her breath as she answered. “Yes”.

  “Diana, good to speak to you again. Fine work on the paper and artefacts. We want to hold a press conference next week to announce your Phoenician discoveries at the dig site. We will hold it in the University Grand Hall. Stan and the rest of your team can be there too. We’ll have a party afterwards to thank you all for your efforts. I hope we can rely upon your, um, discretion?”

  “Of course.” Diana sighed.

  “Fantastic. Thursday next week, around lunchtime. We’ll confirm it all when you are all back stateside. The crates are all secured and screened by the Bahamian authorities?”

  “Yes, they are Director. Two sets, as agreed.”

  “Thank you again, Diana. I’ll be speaking to you soon then. Goodbye.”

  “Bye.” She put her phone down and turned it off. She was about to cry when Stan put his head through the door.

  “How are you doing my darling? And how’s little Janey?”.

  “Oh, she’s fine. I suspect she is a girl as I’ve not been very sick with her and I think with boys it's often a problem to be carrying two sets of hormones.” She replied.

  “We’re going to break out some drinks for an end of dig party aboard. You look like you could do with one, but of course, we’ve got a whole host of mocktails for you and the other non-drinkers aboard. I would show solidarity with you by not drinking, but somebody has sent over a crate of Budweiser Budvar from Czechia. It would be rude not to drink it.”

  “Yes, rude not to. I’ll let you this one time you git. This is all your fault, you know.” She pointed to her tummy.

  “Oh, yes. It takes two to tango my darling. I didn’t hear you complaining.”

  Diana flushed.

  “I just want to be getting home now. All the fun’s gone out of this situation.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. But we’ll bounce back. We’ve still pushed back boundaries here. Just not all the ones we hoped for.”

  “Agreed.”

  XXV – Press

  The morning of the press conference, Diana got up from bed in her Miami hotel room, leaving Stan sleeping.

  She had a shower and carefully washed around the site of her wound where the stitches had now been removed. Dabbing the towel gently so as not to knock her scar, Diana dried herself off then went to her wardrobe to select an outfit. She giggled as she chose her horizontal striped black and white dress. It did look like a prison uniform in some respects. A non-verbal protest at the constraints she was now under in keeping the secrets of Atlantis under wraps for at least a little longer.

  Stan smiled at her as she returned to the dressing table to do her makeup. He headed to the bathroom, humming as he went. Diana was not in nearly such a good mood. She was less than happy with what she had to say at the press conference. But lives were potentially at stake. She would play her part but would give clues to her real views. She would wear the Templar brooch with the equilateral cross motif and her dolphin earrings. Both symbols linked in her mind to Atlantis. Her Egyptian ankh would complete the set, however, mismatched it might appear.

  Stan had put on his blazer with the white trim. He looked like Number Five from the classic TV series ‘The Prisoner’. He had the same idea, though they hadn’t discussed it. Perhaps their costumes and body language would spark conspiracy theories in years to come, much like Neil Armstrong’s curious use of words during the Moon landings. ‘That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Was it nerves that made him omit the ‘a' from ‘for a man’s or was it a clue that it wasn’t such a giant leap after all? Would we ever know now he had passed away? Diana finished her makeup with her slightly curious purple toned lipstick and matching eye shadow.

  After a brief breakfast where Stan packed in a full stack of American pancakes with maple syrup and Diana managed a croissant with a robust Americano, it was time to head around the corner for the news conference in the Grand Hall of Miami's Atlantic University.

  The hall was a mixture of contemporary technology and faded Art Deco architecture. The stage was being prepared for the press conference with banners made up for the occasion. There were images of the Phoenician artefacts that had been discovered during the dig—none of the older stuff.

  The seats were starting to fill up in the auditorium. Interestingly near to Tallulah was a man who had more than a passing resemblance to Edward Dusk. So perhaps he was the mysterious benefactor after all.

  She would be watching him closely.

  Some thickset slavic men were also sitting prominently. They looked quite familiar. They appeared to be the same two men who had admired the spire of Salisbury cathedral during the spy poisoning scandal in England a few years previously. That must have been a deliberate attempt to say that the FSB is watching you. No heroics. Diana swallowed.

  Stan tapped her on the shoulder and whispered in her ear. She looked around and could see Professor Heinz Schmidt in the audience. He hadn’t told them he would be in town. It was nice to see a friendly face in the crowd. The rest was made up of the press, archaeologists and a few conspiracy people. Al James was there too. “Oh, great.” Diana heard herself saying as she saw him.

  With the audience in place, the conference was preparing to start. From its makeup, Diana knew what line of questioning was likely. She would evade any awkward lines of discussion and stick to the key points that were consistent with the Phoenician findings. She didn’t relish the prospect of a horrible radioactive death if the cathedral groupies didn’t like her answers.

  The University Chancellor had arrived on the stage and walked straight up to the podium to give his speech.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, colleagues, academics and members of the world’s press. Very few times in my career have I been present at pivotal moments in history. But today is one such time. Columbus Day may never be quite the same again. Today we change the history of the Americas and plant a middle eastern flag on our continent. The irony of this is not entirely lost on me. My esteemed colleague, the Director of Archaeology Professor Chuck Morris, will give you the full details. I am sure you will agree it is all quite remarkable. “

  The Chancellor left the podium and sat back next to his wife. Her red dress and grey hair contrasted greatly with his formal black suit and wispy black hair.

  Chuck Morris wandered up to the lectern. His hair was unusually tidy, and his shirt and tie made him look much more serious than his regular comfortable corduroy trousers and polo shirts. He turned back and smiled at Diana before addressing the audience.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen. Others. Welcome. Rarely in my long career have I been given the opportunity to make an announcement that pushed our understanding of history to another level. But today is one such occasion. We have conclusive proof and confirmed dating evidence that a Phoenician port was established in South Bimini in the Bahamas.”

  The audience gasped. The editor of ‘The Modern Archaeologist’ magazine, Clarence de Pinks, shook his head in disbelief.

  “Not only that, but the earliest piece of evidence that we have found is 4,500 years old, so corresponds to the very start of those sea-faring people from around modern-day Lebanon. We can only speculate as to why they were here, of course. But as we know, there were many resources in Nor
th America and Central America in antiquity as well as in the Bahamas themselves that might have been traded for goods from the Middle East. It might even go on to explain why some mummies in Egypt have been found to contain traces of tobacco that were not native to their region but are native to ours. Though that might be too controversial to speculate on at this point.”

  De Pinks nodded his head vigorously as he was frantically jotting down notes. Al James was smiling. The Professor continued speaking.

  “But enough speculation. The fact is that the Phoenicians were here in the Americas long before Columbus, Cabot or even the Vikings. We have artefacts, we have marble columns, and we have statues attributable to the ancient seafarers from around Tyre.”

  Chuck gestured to Diana to come up and join him.

  “Here is the dig Director who discovered these items in the sand and shallow waters of the Bahamas. All the way from England and seconded to us from Bath Sulis University. Please give a big hand to Doctor Diana Garry.”

  The audience clapped and cheered. Mostly. Both Clarence de Pinks and Al James seemed somewhat subdued compared with the others.

  Diana took to the podium as Chuck patted her on the back and headed back to his seat.

  The lights dimmed, and a large screen descended behind her. An elegant pillar of marble filled the screen.

  “Hello. I can see that many of you may be sceptical about our finds and our conclusions. But let me be clear. The dating evidence ranges from 4,500 years ago to 3,000 years ago—the classic Phoenician period. The pillar behind me appears Greek in style, yet it predates the Greeks by at least 500 years. Thermoluminescence dating of a sample dated this to between 1000 and 1100 BCE.”

  The picture changed to that of the small orichalcum statue behind her.

  “And this statue, in reality just a few centimetres tall, was covered in a biological deposit that has been carbon-dated by three independent laboratories to 4500 BCE. And we have other items of pottery – generally shards of amphora (bottles) – that demonstrate continuous habitation of the site between the two dates. Two broken stone anchors of likely Middle Eastern origin were found out to sea from our dig site and not far from the so-called Bimini Road. Lending credibility to the prior conjecture that the Bimini Road may have been a quay complex at a time when sea levels were lower than today.”

  Diana paused from speaking as a picture of one of the stone anchors faded from view as the lights were turned up and the screen disappeared from behind her.

  “I can say it has been an honour to work on this dig alongside my colleagues from the Atlantic University and my husband, Doctor Stanislav Harvel.”

  A few claps and cheers broke out from amongst the audience.

  “I am sure you all have many questions.” Diana paused then gulped as a sea of hands raised. Thankfully each delegate was holding a cardboard number issued to them at the desk on entry.

  “Number 25.”

  Clarence de Pinks stood up to ask his question. “Doctor Garry. Congratulations on this impressive gallery of artefacts. Can you be sure this wasn’t carried here in more modern times for onward sale to the faker Father Crespi?”

  Diana smiled and looked the man straight in the eyes.

  “We can be quite sure that these artefacts have lain undisturbed for many hundreds of years under deposit layers consistent with their surroundings and confirmed by large scale LIDAR traces of the dig site and beyond. Only the faint edges of the items were initially visible in many cases, and they had to be excavated carefully by diggers or divers from the sediment. We are releasing a peer-reviewed scientific paper of our findings to be published in the next issue of the ‘Journal of Scientific Archaeology and Antiquities’. We will provide copies for you as you leave.”

  Mr de Pinks seemed dumbstruck and just nodded.

  “Number 66.” Diana picked Al James’ hand.

  “Hi. Al James. I applaud your discoveries here and your little cover story. But I have it on excellent authority that you discovered remnants of Atlantis off of the coast of Cuba while you were aboard a charter vessel. So please, spare me any more of this charade and confess the truth. Your team have proof of the ‘mythical’ Island if Atlantis but you don’t have the guts to tell us. Deny it why don’t you!”

  Diana had flushed red at this. One of the crew must have sold their story.

  “That’s an interesting interpretation of recent events. However, we were using geological mapping tools to trace the edge of the tectonic plates between the Bahamas and Cuba to establish the rate of tectonic plate subduction between our survey and a prior survey done some twenty years ago. Factoring in the so-called ice age rebound the results are consistent with our site being a waterside settlement for the period up to just before 1000 BCE. We can probably rustle up those results for you.”

  Al James appeared even angrier than usual. He shouted “Cover-up. Atlantis was real. These liars know it. They have been paid off. It’s all a charade!” With that, he turned away and stormed out of the press conference. He had made his point.

  Diana continued almost unphased. Her stomach was sick at being called out by James, but the cover story sounded plausible and had been war-gamed by her and Professor Morris the previous day while Tallulah looked on impassively at the pair of them.

  The press conference concluded a few minutes later, and the delegates were free to mingle together over a light buffet with some champagne. Diana noticeably relaxed as Stan came over to greet her along with Heinz.

  “Congratulations, my dear. I am very proud of you. You have another major achievement against your name without the blight of controversy. Ignore men like Al James. He was out if order with his accusations, I am sure. Even if you had in reality discovered Atlantis, you would not be announcing it today. As I did not back in the 1980s with my team. Some things are better to remain unsaid.”

  Diana’s jaw dropped at Heinz’s revelation. She had no idea.

  XXVI – Life

  Back in England in her parents’ study overlooking Corfe Castle, the cuckoo clock ticking and the late summer sun falling on her notebook she cast her mind back to the press conference in Miami where she announced the Phoenician link to the world. She was dazed by it all, yet had to bite her tongue not to reveal the real facts. The attendance by the Russians who looked like assassins reminded her that Atlantis was still off-limits. For now. The offer of a chair at The Atlantic University of Miami was tempting, but America was no place to bring up kids. So, she declined and returned to the UK to continue to study the artefacts from her Bahamian dig.

  As she put her pen down, she got a jarring sensation in her abdomen. There was a sensation of water dripping down her leg. Another round of contractions had started. And now her waters had broken.

  “Stan, Mother! I think it’s time for me to be going. My waters have broken, and my contractions are less than five minutes. Are my things in the boot?”

  “Coming dear. Let’s help you down to the car. You can sit on this towel. Stan – here are my keys, you can have the honour of driving your wife to the hospital. I will sit in the back quietly.” Replied her mother.

  Both Stan and Diana laughed at her mother’s comments. She was never quiet. And with her first grandchild imminent it seemed even less likely.

  The drive to Poole hospital maternity unit had been well-practised, but with the holiday traffic, it still took nearly thirty minutes. By the time they arrived, Diana was panting and in discomfort as her contractions neared four minutes apart.

  The midwife on duty on the maternity department desk had a quick look at Diana and summoned a porter to take her straight upstairs to the labour suite.

  On the maternity ward, another midwife took Diana into one of the rooms to examine her. She had to strip below the waist for the exam. “Oh, yes, nicely dilated. Not long now, dear. You better clamber up on this bed and make yourself comfortable. Not that it really will be.” She said. Looking at Stan she added “Nice to have the support of your man, but he’ll b
e comfortable enough. He gets the easy part.”

  The midwife was, of course, quite right. Diana went into full-blown labour a few minutes later. Feeling like her body was being torn apart as she attempted to squeeze something the size of a melon out of an aperture the size of a grape, the gruelling ordeal seemed to go on forever. She refused pain killers so as not to risk her baby, so she felt it all. Her lower abdomen ached and burned like never before. The waves of contractions intensified, and she pushed when the midwife or Stan shouted “Push!”, but the youngster was showing all the stubbornness of its mother, grandmother and father all put together. Diana’s mother was calmly knitting some little green booties while sat on a seat at the bottom of the bed. She was occasionally looking up. “You took 12 hours, Tara 11 and Aphrodite 10. I can’t see you’ll be less than 8.” She helpfully remarked some 5 hours into Diana’s labour.

  “Oh God, shoot me, Ow, ow, ow, ow!” Diana called out soon after.

  “Stick with it, my darling,” Stan replied.

  “That’s effing easy for you to say. Do you think I’m even able to stop now? Owwww!” She snapped.

  The cycle repeated several times before Diana repositioned herself, legs splayed even further, she screamed: “Out you come!”. Panting and pushing with mighty breaths and mighty pushes, she timed her exertions perfectly with the latest round of contractions to manage to push the baby’s head out of her. With some coaxing by the midwife and more pushes its shoulders, body and feet came out too.

  Stan stared in awe at what looked like a purple-red fish deposited at the bottom of the bed. The midwife wiped its mouth, and the baby let out an enormous cry to start up its lungs. The midwife clamped the umbilical cord once it had stopped pulsing, injected Diana with syntometrine to help her uterus contract and coaxed her to give birth to her placenta. With the placenta on the nearby trolley, she snipped the cord and handed the baby to its mother, Diana.