The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  Jack grinned through his visor. ‘I wish it were that easy. At this date we don’t even know whether the cross was a Christian sign. If it’s the shipwreck of St Paul, we’re talking twenty, maybe twenty-five years after the crucifixion. Most of the familiar Christian symbols, the cross, the fish, the anchor, the dove, the Greek letters chi-rho, only start appearing in the following century, and even then were only used secretly. The archaeology of early Christianity is incredibly elusive. And remember, Paul was supposed to be a prisoner, under Roman guard. He’s hardly going to have relics with him.’

  Jack looked at his depth gauge. Seventy-seven metres. He could feel the compensator continuously bleeding air into his suit as he descended, counteracting the water pressure. He felt elated, preternaturally aware, at a depth where he would have been one step from death twenty years before. He remembered too well the numbing effect of nitrogen narcosis, the thick, syrupy taste of compressed air below fifty metres, into the danger zone. Breathing mixed gas was like drinking wine without alcohol, all expectation but no buzz. He realized that he missed the narcosis, that his mind was overcompensating. It was euphoria of a different kind to descend to these depths clear headed. He felt acutely alive, focused, his lucidity sharpened by the threshold of danger just ahead, revelling in the moment as if he were a novice diver again.

  ‘They must have been narked out of their minds,’ Costas said.

  ‘Cousteau’s boys?’

  ‘I can’t believe they got this deep.’

  ‘I can,’ Jack replied. ‘I dived with the last of that generation, the survivors. Tough French ex-navy types. They took a slug of wine before diving to dilate the blood vessels, and the last breath they took before the regulator was a lungful of Gauloise. Going deep was like a drinking competition. Real men could take it.’

  ‘Take it and die.’

  Then out of the gloom Jack saw them. First one, then another. The unmistakable shapes of pottery amphoras, half buried and shrouded in sediment. The trail of amphoras led back to the cliff face, the way he and Costas had come, in the right direction, but the forms were too encrusted to identify. They could be Greek, they could be Roman. Jack needed more. He looked at his depth gauge. Eighty metres. He swam over the last shape, Costas behind him. Suddenly they were at another cliff, only this time there was no sandy shelf below, only inky blackness. They had reached the edge of the unknown, a place as forbidding as outer space, the beginning of a slope that dropped through vast canyons and mountain ranges to the deepest abyss of the Mediterranean, more than five thousand metres below. It was the end of the road. Jack let the momentum carry him a few metres over the edge, his mind blank in the face of the immensity before them.

  ‘Don’t do it, Jack.’ Costas spoke quietly, his voice now sounding distorted as the helium level increased. ‘We can come back with the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod, check out the next hundred metres or so. Do it safely.’

  ‘We haven’t found enough to justify it.’ Jack’s voice sounded distant, emotionless, too overwhelmed to register his feelings, masking his disappointment. ‘Cousteau’s divers, the account in that diary, they must have meant that scatter of amphoras on the shelf. There’s no way they could have gone deeper, down that slope. We’re well into the death zone for compressed air.’ He turned slowly, then on a whim switched on his helmet headlamp. There was nothing to lose now. The glare was blinding, and showed how dark it was around them. He played the beam down the rock face, revealing occasional patches of red and orange marine growth which had been invisible in the natural light. Very little lived at this depth. He swept the beam back up from the limit of visibility below, then swept it back down again.

  Bingo.

  A narrow ledge, concealed from above by the cornice of the cliff. A mound of forms, twenty, maybe thirty of them, identical to the ones they had just seen. Amphoras.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ Jack said excitedly. ‘About ten metres below us.’

  Costas swam alongside, switched on his headlamp and peered down. ‘Looks like a wreck mound to me,’ he murmured. ‘A sandy gully. Could be good for preservation.’

  ‘It must be the stern,’ Jack said fervently. ‘The bow strikes the cliff, the stern floats back, dropping amphoras as it goes, then sinks here. It’s where the best artefacts should be, ship’s stores, personal possessions, stuff to identify it.’

  ‘Can you see the amphora type?’

  ‘No way. I need to get down there.’

  ‘Jack, we can do it, but I’d have to reconfigure the dive profile. It’s exactly what I didn’t want. It puts us into an extended decompression schedule, before Seaquest II arrives and without any backup. Even the safety diver’s no use. And we’d only get an extra ten minutes.’

  ‘Every dive’s a risk,’ Jack murmured. ‘But if you can calculate the risk, you can do it safely. That’s what you always tell me and you’ve just calculated it.’

  ‘Remember what you said about all the new diving technology, about missing the edge? Well, you’re on it now.’

  ‘I trust your equipment, you trust my intuition. This could be the best wreck we’ve ever discovered.’

  ‘We could wait. Surely we’ve found enough now to come back.’

  ‘We could.’

  ‘I’ll cover your back, you cover mine.’

  ‘That’s always the deal.’

  ‘Let’s do it.’

  They dropped over the cliff together, Costas reprogramming his wrist computer as Jack panned his light over the mound of amphoras below. Just before they reached the ledge he let out a whoop of excitement. ‘Graeco-Italic,’ he exclaimed. ‘Dressel 2 to 4. Look, you can see the high handles, the angular shoulder. First century AD, Italian type, from Campania around Mount Vesuvius. That’s it. We’ve found what we need. We’ve got a mid first century AD wreck.’

  ‘We’ve got another nine minutes,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve programmed it in, and we may as well use the time.’ They both dropped down and knelt on the sea bed beside the amphoras, and began sweeping the site with their headlamps, the light revealing the red colour of the amphoras and reflecting off a sheen of silt suspended in the water. Jack saw other shapes protruding from the sediment under the amphoras, bar shapes about a metre long. He sank down further and wafted away sediment with his hand, then unsheathed his knife and scraped cautiously. ‘Just as I thought,’ he murmured excitedly. ‘Lead ingots.’

  ‘This one has lettering on it.’

  Jack sheathed his knife and swam over to Costas, then fanned the sediment away for a clearer view. TI.CL.NARC. BR.LVT.EX.ARG. For a moment there was silence. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he murmured. ‘Tiberius Claudius Narcissus.’

  ‘You know this guy?’

  ‘A slave of the emperor Claudius. When he was freed he adopted the emperor’s first two names, Tiberius Claudius. He was Claudius’ secretary and became one of his chief ministers, but was murdered by Claudius’ wife Agrippina after she had her husband poisoned.’

  ‘How does this help us?’

  ‘Freed slaves were the nouveau riche of the time. They weren’t restricted by aristocratic snobbery about investing in trade and industry. It was just like the nineteenth century. We already know that Narcissus had his fingers in a number of pies in Rome, some of them pretty muddy. This ingot shows what a crafty character he was.’

  ‘BR means Britain?’

  ‘Yes. LVT was Lutudarum, in Derbyshire, one of the main lead-mining centres in Britain. EX ARG means ex argentariis, from the lead-silver works. I guessed it when I scraped that other ingot.’

  ‘High-quality lead,’ Costas said. ‘Produced from galena, lead sulphide, a by-product of silver production. Fewer impurities, less stuff to oxidize, brighter. Am I right?’

  ‘Correct. We know that British lead was exported to the Mediterranean, from the analysis of lead pipes at Pompeii. It’s just what you’d expect a wealthy shipowner to have on board his vessel, to repair lead sheathing on the hull. Our sounding lead was pretty pure, not blackened with
corrosion, and my guess is it was cast from this metal somewhere along the way.’

  ‘Fascinating, but I still don’t see where this gets us.’

  ‘Britain was invaded by the Romans in AD 43, the lead mines were in operation by AD 50. Wily old Narcissus gets straight in on the act and snaps up a lucrative contract, just like a modern mining speculator. These ingots must date to the early fifties. That gets us closer, a whole lot closer, to the magic date for St Paul’s shipwreck.’

  ‘Got you.’

  There was a crackling on the intercom, and then a staccato beep indicating a relay message from Seaquest II: ‘You take it,’ Jack said. ‘I need to concentrate.’ He toned down the external receiver on his helmet and rose a few metres above the wreck site, while Costas sank down beside an amphora as he listened to the message. Jack swept his headlamp over the tumbled rows of amphoras, knowing he and Costas only had a few minutes left. They had found more than he had expected, much more, and with a huge sense of elation he realized that the excavation would now go ahead. Suddenly everything here was sacrosanct, no longer a frontier of discovery but a forensic scene, an interlocking matrix of evidence where every feature, every relationship could contain precious clues. He began to drop down again to pull Costas off the site, just as the three-minute warning flashed inside his helmet.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Costas said. ‘It’s your old buddy Maurice Hiebermeyer. Just when you thought he was up to his neck in mummies in Egypt, he pops out of a hole in the ground in Italy.’

  ‘Maurice?’ Jack said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘He says it’s urgent. He won’t go away.’

  ‘He’s been working with Maria at the Roman ruins of Herculaneum,’ Jack said. ‘There was an earthquake, and it’s a kind of rescue excavation. They’ve been having problems with the authorities who control their part of the site, so maybe there’s been some kind of lull. He’s been badgering me for months about a papyrus, something to do with Alexander the Great. Last time he collared me was when we were raising that cannon from the great siege of Constantinople. He really chooses his moments. Tell the radio officer I’ll talk to him while we decompress.’

  There was an insistent beeping sound, and Costas looked at his computer. ‘We’re on amber, Jack. Two minutes, max.’

  ‘Roger that. I’m good to go.’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘This amphora in front of me. It’s got some kind of inscription on it.’

  Jack was directly above Costas now, and could clearly see the letters painted on the shoulder of the amphora. EGTERRE. ‘It’s a Latin infinitive, means “to go”. Fairly standard export marking.’

  ‘No. Not that. Below it. Scratched markings.’ Costas wafted his hand gently at the side of the amphora as Jack sank down beside him. ‘It looks like a big asterisk, a star maybe.’

  ‘Pretty common too,’ Jack murmured. ‘Bored sailors, passengers whiling away their time doodling on the pottery, playing games. If it was a long-haul voyage, we’ll find plenty of that. But I’ll get the remote-operated vehicle guys to photo this on their first run over the site.’

  ‘Aristarchos,’ Costas said slowly. ‘Greek letters. I can read it.’

  ‘Probably a sailor,’ Jack said distractedly, his tone now urgent as he looked at his computer. ‘Plenty of Greek sailors then. Probably an ancestor of yours.’ He suddenly caught his breath. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Aristarchos. Look for yourself.’

  Jack sank down and peered at the pottery. A common name. The letters were confident, bold, not the crude scratches of a sailor. Yet could it be? He hardly dared think it. Aristarchos of Thessaloniki?

  ‘There’s another,’ Costas said, excited. ‘The same hand, by the looks of it. Loukas, I think. Jack, I’m remembering the Acts of the Apostles. Paul’s two companions.’

  Jack’s mind reeled. Loukas. Luke. He looked back at the symbol scratched above the names, the star shape. ‘I was wrong,’ he said hoarsely. ‘We were all wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That symbol. It’s not a star. Look, the vertical line has a little loop at the top. It’s the Greek letter R, and the X is the Greek letter Ch. It’s the chi-rho symbol. So they did use it in the first century.’ Jack could hardly believe what he was saying. ‘The first two letters of the word Christos, the Greek for Messiah,’ he whispered.

  ‘I think it’s about to get better. A whole lot better.’ Costas had been wafting sediment off the amphora below the word Loukas, and a third scratching appeared. The letters were as clear as day. They both stared speechless.

  Paulos.

  Paul of Tarsus, St Paul the Evangelist, the man who had scratched his name and those of his companions on this pot almost two thousand years before, below the symbol of the one they already revered as the Anointed, the Son of God.

  Jack and Costas pushed off and rose together, towards the opaque shimmer of light where the sun shone on the surface almost one hundred metres above. Jack seemed to be in a trance, looking at Costas but not seeing him, his mind’s eye on the foredeck of a great grain ship plying the Mediterranean two thousand years before, in the age of the Caesars, taking its passengers inexorably into the annals of history.

  ‘I take it,’ Costas said bemusedly, ‘we’re in business?’

  5

  Jack lifted his helmet briefly to ease the ache in his neck, his senses suddenly overwhelmed by the roar of the Rolls-Royce turbine just behind him, then pulled the helmet back into place and pressed in the ear protectors until the noise was dampened and the microphone repositioned. He was physically exhausted but too excited to rest, elated by their discovery of the shipwreck the day before, itching to get back, but now full of anticipation for a new prize that lay ahead. Hiebermeyer had been able to say little, but it had been enough for Jack to know that this was real. He checked his watch again. They had been flying due north in the Lynx helicopter for just over an hour from the position where they had left Seaquest II before dawn, in the Strait of Messina off Sicily, and Jack had set the autopilot to keep them low over the waves. Monitoring the altimeter was critical, and it was keeping him awake. It had been less than twelve hours since they had surfaced from their dive, and their bloodstreams were still saturated with excess nitrogen which could expand dangerously if they gained any more altitude.

  He checked again, then switched off the autopilot and engaged the hand controls and pedals of the helicopter, bringing the Lynx round thirty degrees to the north-east so that it was angled towards the coastline. He reactivated the autopilot, then settled back and looked again at the image he had been contemplating on the computer screen between the seats. It was an image he had grown up with, a centrepiece of the Howard Gallery, the art collection Jack’s grandfather had accumulated and which was now housed in a building on the IMU campus in Cornwall. It was a miniature watercolour by Goethe, painted during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1787. In the background was a flat grey sky, and in the foreground a luminous yellow sea. In the centre was the dark mass of the volcano, the shoreline beneath it fronted by flat-roofed buildings similar to the ancient Roman towns below Vesuvius then being unearthed for the first time. The image seemed whimsical, almost abstract, yet the streaks of red and yellow above the volcano betrayed the violent reality of the event that Goethe had witnessed. Jack gazed out of the cockpit windscreen towards the bay ahead of them. It was as if he were seeing a version of the watercolour, pastel shades drifting across the horizon in the sunrise, the details melded and obscured by the layer of smog in the atmosphere just below their altitude.

  In the co-pilot’s seat Costas had been dozing fitfully, but he shifted forward when Jack adjusted the course. He woke with a start as his sunglasses slipped off his helmet and wedged on his nose.

  ‘Enjoying off-gassing?’ Jack said through the intercom.

  ‘Just keep us below fifteen hundred feet,’ Costas replied blearily. ‘I want to keep those nitrogen bubbles nice and small.’

 
; ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be on the ground soon enough.’

  Costas stretched, then sighed. ‘Fresh air, wide-open spaces. That’s what I like.’

  ‘Then you should choose your friends more carefully.’ Jack grinned, then nosed the helicopter down a few hundred feet. They broke through the layer of haze, and the mirage became a reality. Below them the dramatic shoreline of the islands and the mainland coast was sharply delineated, expanses of sun-scorched rock surrounded by azure sea. To the east was the great expanse of the city, and beyond that a smudge on the horizon where the bay ended, the haze just concealing a looming presence below a burst of orange where the sun was rising above the mountains beyond.

  ‘The Bay of Naples,’ Jack said. ‘Crucible of civilization.’

  ‘Civilization.’ Costas yawned extravagantly, then paused. ‘Let me see. That would be corruption on a seismic scale, drug crime, the Mafia?’

  ‘Forget all that and look at the past,’ Jack said. ‘We’re here for the archaeology, not to get embroiled in the present.’

  Costas snorted. ‘That’d be a first.’

  Jack looked out at the extraordinary scene in front of them, and was infused by the sense of history he had experienced at other cities in the Mediterranean: Istanbul, Jerusalem, where the superimposed layers of civilization were still visible, different cultures which had left their distinctive mark yet were bound together by the possibilities that settlement and resources at the place had to offer. The Bay of Naples was one of the great staging posts for the spread of ideas into Europe, where the Greeks had first settled in the ninth and eighth centuries BC when they came west, trading with the Etruscans for iron at a time when Rome was just a few huts above a swamp. Cumae, where the alphabet was first brought west, Neapolis, Pompeii, all these places became centres of the new Greece, Magna Graecia, fuelled by trade and by the hinterland of Campania with its rich agriculture. Jack stared at the slopes of Vesuvius, then had a sudden flashback to their underwater discovery the day before. He turned to Costas. ‘Remember those wine amphoras on the shipwreck? They were from here.’