Testament

by David Gibbins

  “He doesn’t like flatfish, I do. I leave him the rest. It’s called working with nature.”

  “That something you learned on the mean streets of the Bronx?” Jeremy said.

  Costas took another bite. “Spearfishing with my uncles as a boy when we went back home to Greece on vacation.”

  “When you weren’t sipping gin and tonic by the pool on the deck of your father’s two-hundred-foot yacht?”

  “That was a different kind of learning. Learning how to enjoy myself. Speaking of which, barbecue on the beach tonight?”

  “Depends how we get on here,” Jack said. “Might have to head off this afternoon.”

  Costas grunted, pushed the final part of the sandwich into his mouth and wiped his hands on his shorts, staring at Jeremy’s laptop showing the transcript of Hanno’s Periplus. He read it while he finished munching, and nearly choked. He stared again, swallowing hard. “Check this out,” he said, and read out a passage.

  “‘In this gulf was an island, resembling the first, with a lagoon, within which was another island, full of savages. Most of them were women with hairy bodies, whom our interpreters called “gorillas.” Although we chased them, we could not catch any males; they all escaped, being good climbers who defended themselves with stones. However, we caught three women, who refused to follow those who carried them off, biting and clawing them. So we killed and flayed them and brought their skins back to Carthage. For we did not sail any further, because our provisions were running short.’”

  He looked up, his expression deadpan. “Hairy women who bit and scratched? How long had these guys been at sea? They must have been desperate.”

  “That was probably in the region of Senegal, so maybe several months after leaving the Strait of Gibraltar, longer if they’d stopped to trade and establish outposts as the text implies,” Jack said. “This is the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian, sailing down the west coast of Africa.”

  “Gorillas? Really?”

  “That’s the actual word, in Greek,” Jeremy said. “In fact it’s one of the reasons for believing in the authenticity of this document. What we have here is a Greek translation of the original Phoenician inscription set up in Carthage by Hanno after his return, in the early sixth century BC. The Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC knew of Hanno’s Periplus, as he describes a method of bartering along the West African coast that closely mimics an earlier passage in the Periplus and for which he could have had no other source, as there had been no further exploration along that coast after Hanno. Perhaps a Greek traveler who had been in Carthage made a copy and showed him. The word ‘gorilla’ would have been otherwise unknown to the Greeks and must have been copied from the original Punic inscription. It’s a rendering of the Kikongo word ngo diida, meaning a powerful animal that beats itself violently, so Hanno must have got the word from the Africans he met.”

  “Not so nice of him to kill and flay them,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s fascinating, because it’s actually the first recorded instance we have of a natural history specimen being brought back from a voyage of discovery,” Jack said. “Men like Joseph Banks on HMS Endeavor and Charles Darwin on the Beagle would have approved. Pliny tells us that the gorilla hides were still on display in Carthage when the Romans sacked the city in 146 BC.”

  Costas dug a can of Coke out of his shorts pocket and popped it noisily, taking a deep drink. “Okay, the gorilla story may be real, but I don’t believe that final sentence, about turning back.”

  “We were just talking about that,” Jeremy said. “It doesn’t fit the narrative.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Costas said. “But when I was in the US Navy we deployed along that coast, and I do know about wind and currents. The Phoenicians were supposed to be great navigators, right? Trying to battle back against the Canary current and the prevailing northwesterlies would have made no sense at all. Hanno would have carried on, rounded the Cape and gone up the east coast of Africa.”

  “That’s what Pliny said he did, reaching the coast of Arabia,” Rebecca said.

  “Speaking of circumnavigating Africa, take a look at this.” Costas typed something into the laptop, and swung it round so Jack could see. “Our favorite salvage ship Deep Explorer has left her position off Sierra Leone, and is now heading past the Cape of Good Hope. Lanowski forwarded this image.”

  “Lanowski? From Carthage?”

  “He’s a one-man mobile command and control center. Never goes anywhere without his Landsat link.”

  “Anything more?”

  “About an hour ago she turned north-northeast, making fifteen knots at twenty-five degrees, and she’s maintained that course some thirty nautical miles off the coast.”

  “That means she’s heading to the northern Indian Ocean.”

  “The Horn of Africa. Any idea why? That’s a pretty hot place, and I don’t just mean temperature. Pirates and Iranian missiles. Not sure I’d want to be there now.”

  “I had a few moments alone in the chart room on Deep Explorer just before our dive,” Jack said. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, as all eyes were on Clan Macpherson and we assumed Deep Explorer would be there for weeks attempting a salvage operation. But judging by the charts that were lying around, that figures as their next destination.”

  “Another Second World War wreck? That seems to be their speciality.”

  “They’ve got an excellent researcher in London, Collingwood, the guy who put them on to Clan Macpherson. He was at the same college as me at Cambridge, doing a doctorate on Allied convoy operations in the war. He always struck me as a little weak and naïve and he never managed to secure an academic post, so he makes his money where he can. In fact I met him at the National Archives yesterday, when we were ordering the same box of declassified Admiralty files, and we had a guarded conversation in the café afterward. I was certain he was there yesterday as a result of the Clan Macpherson project going bust following our dive. I invited him to contribute any additional documentary evidence he had for my report to the government on the wreck, and then I plugged him with some innocent-seeming questions. It turned out that he’d just returned from the Deutsches U-Boot archive that morning, and he was quite excited about some kind of all-expenses-paid holiday to the Indian Ocean in a few days’ time. Seeing this Landsat image, I wouldn’t be surprised if that meant a trip out to Deep Explorer. I got the impression that he’d been mandated to find evidence of any lost cargo of value, especially U-boats.”

  “They’re going to be desperate after the failure to recoup from Clan Macpherson,” Costas said. “A ship like Deep Explorer costs thousands to operate per day, and there are going to be some pretty noisy investors out there. He’s probably going to be looking for anything marketable, not just gold.”

  “Landor’s always operated on a knife edge,” Jack said. “But if he’s heading up to the Horn of Africa, he might just have got himself in too deep this time.”

  “Landor?” Rebecca said. “You mean the guy you and Maurice were at school with? I thought he was in prison somewhere in South America.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it before we were called out,” Jack replied. “He’s operations director for Deep Explorer Inc., his latest incarnation. He keeps bouncing back.”

  “No wonder you had to grit your teeth to go out there and do that dive. He had a bend, didn’t he?”

  “A bad one, in his spine,” Jack said. “It was on a First World War wreck off Scotland two years ago, hunting for a consignment of silver bars. He pushed the envelope too far, dropped too deep and took a gamble with his air.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Rebecca said wryly.

  “The hyperbaric specialist who dealt with him told me about it. He had the choice either of running out of air underwater and dying, or of surfacing too quickly, knowing he was going to take a hit. He was diving alone from a Zodiac without a support vessel, and by the time the boat driver got him to the recompression chamber a
t Oban, the damage was done. He can’t even do a ten-minute dive to ten meters without risking a fatal hit, and hasn’t dived since.”

  “If his passion for diving was anything like yours, I can imagine what that might do to him.”

  “It’s hardened him, made him bitter. I don’t recognize him any more.” Jack paused, thinking for a moment. “He and I were inseparable for about a year, both obsessed with diving. I did my first ever open-water dives with him, and I can still remember the excitement. But then Maurice arrived at the school and I found someone I could share my archaeology interests with too, and Landor and I drifted apart. He was charismatic but rebellious, always with a dark edge, self-destructive. He dropped out of school and drifted off to Africa, worked for an aid agency at first but then as some kind of mercenary, and then he got into treasure hunting. For a long time I felt bad about him, guilty that I’d let him down by turning away from him at school.

  “He came to see me once when I was a student and I agreed to dive with him again, on a galleon he’d found off Colombia. Then the Gulf War intervened and I was called up from the naval reserve, and the next I knew he was languishing in a prison in Bogotá. But he’s always been good at pulling in credulous investors. He’s made fortunes, lost them, made them and lost them again. I’m godfather to his son, who lived with his mother after Landor left her; father and son have never spoken since. I kept my distance from him on Deep Explorer, but what I saw I didn’t like. Maybe agreeing to go out on Deep Explorer was part of my old guilt trip with him, and he knew it. But once I was out there, seeing him standing at the ship’s rail doing nothing while Costas and I battled to get into the Zodiac, I realized I didn’t owe him anything.”

  “Did the researcher give you any more hints about what they might be after?” Costas said.

  Jack took a deep breath, and shook his head. “Very secretive. But if we’re right and they are heading toward the Somali coast, we could do a bit of ferreting about and work out if there were any Allied vessels or U-boats in the vicinity with valuable cargos. And I might just have a word with a friend from navy days who’s currently commanding officer of Combined Task Force 150, the anti-piracy flotilla operating out of Bahrain. I can at least warn him about Landor and what might be going on.”

  “I’ve got some spare time after diving while I wait for deliveries to the engineering lab,” Costas said. “I can do a search online.”

  “Meanwhile, keep Lanowski on to it. I’d like to be updated on Deep Explorer’s progress. Get him to stream it through to my account as well.”

  “He could probably hack into the CIA and order in a drone strike if you like.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Jack said. “So where are we, Jeremy?”

  Jeremy picked up an A4-sized envelope and looked at him. “I think it’s time to tell you about the bronze plaque from Clan Macpherson.”

  Costas finished his Coke, exhaling noisily and crushing the can under his foot. “And you haven’t seen my sherd with its inscription yet. I found the bucket before coming in here, and the conservator will bring it in as soon as I call her.”

  Jack leaned forward, tense with anticipation. “All right. Show us what you’ve got. The plaque first.”

  Jeremy slid the envelope toward him. “That contains a sharpened still from your helmet video inside Clan Macpherson, along with my translation. Remember what we were saying about Hanno the Carthaginian, whether or not he circumnavigated Africa? Prepare to be amazed.”

  10

  Jack stared in astonishment at the photograph that Jeremy had put in front of him, showing the bronze plaque from Clan Macpherson in the upper part and Jeremy’s translation below. “Are you certain about this?” he asked, rereading the text, hardly daring to believe what was before his eyes.

  “Absolutely,” Jeremy replied. “It’s the early Punic alphabet, pretty well identical to Phoenician from the Levant, the text reading from right to left. You can see the early form of the Punic letter A, toppled over on one side. There’s no chance of this being some kind of forgery, because there are distinctive features of the letters bet, tet, and mem, the equivalent of the Greek beta, theta, and mu, that are only found elsewhere on the potsherd inscriptions from our Phoenician wreck, and we know from the Lydian coins and the datable Greek painted pottery in the cargo that our wreck sherds date to the early sixth century BC. We’ve run a thorough paleographic comparison between the early alphabetic letters on the plaque and those on the wreck inscriptions, and have concluded beyond doubt that they are contemporaneous. Both the plaque and the wreck date to the most likely time period of Hanno and Himilco’s voyages, about the 590s or 580s BC.”

  Jack slowly read out Jeremy’s translation: “‘Hanno the Carthaginian affixed this at the southernmost point of the Libyan regions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, having commanded fifty ships and now only having one, before setting off up the far shore with his cargo to the appointed place at the mountain called the Chariot of Fire. To Ba’al Hammon he dedicates this plaque.’”

  Jeremy leaned over and pointed at the photo. “And then there’s that symbol crudely stamped at the end, looking like an Egyptian hieroglyph of two stick-figure men carrying a box on poles between them. It’s a pictogram, certainly. I haven’t yet asked Maurice if he’s seen one like it in Egypt, but will do so now that his excavation at Carthage is coming to a close and he’ll have more time to check for comparisons.”

  “That’s exactly what I found on my potsherd,” Costas said. “I think Jenny from the conservation tent has just left it outside.” He got up, hurried out of the tent and came back moments later carrying a bucket full of water. He reached in and pulled out an amphora sherd, carefully patting it on his shirt and placing it on the table between them. “You can see that the letters are scratched, not painted, so that’s one difference from the other amphora inscriptions. But if you look carefully, you can just make out that pictogram among the scratchings. You see?”

  Jeremy pushed up his glasses, leaned forward and peered at it. He looked up, staring into the middle distance, and then looked down again. “My God,” he said quietly.

  “Let’s deal with the plaque first,” Jack said, still focused on the photograph. “Have you got the text of the Periplus of Hanno to hand?”

  Jeremy cleared his throat, still gazing at the sherd. “Yes, of course.” He turned to his laptop, tapped the screen and swiveled it toward Jack. “The Heidelberg manuscript.”

  “It mentions a mountain called Chariot of the Gods, toward the end.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Here it is: ‘And we sailed along with all speed, being stricken by fear. After a journey of four days, we saw the land at night covered with flames. And in the midst there was one lofty fire, greater than the rest, which seemed to touch the stars. By day this was seen to be a very high mountain, called Chariot of the Gods.’”

  Jack looked at him. “Could Chariot of the Gods and Chariot of Fire be the same thing?”

  “I’m certain of it. Remember, the Heidelberg text is a copy made more than fifteen hundred years after the event of a Greek translation that may itself have been copied from earlier translations, each time offering the possibility of mistakes and corruption. ‘Chariot of the Lord’ or ‘Chariot of God’ is most familiar as the translation from Hebrew into Greek of the conveyance in which the Israelite God appears in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. It’s possible that the monks in the scriptorium, steeped in the Bible, would have seen the Greek word for ‘chariot’ and inserted the familiar biblical phrase, restricting reference to fire to the other fiery images in that passage. But with the evidence of the plaque, in Phoenician and dating to the time of Hanno, we can be certain that the original phrase was the one that I translate as ‘Chariot of Fire.’”

  “There is a geographical problem, though,” Jack said, thinking hard. “In the Heidelberg text, the chariot appears on the west coast of Africa, just before the land of the gorillas. The image of rivers of fire is usually equated with an active volcano t
hat Hanno must have seen in the region of modern Senegal. And yet the text in the plaque indicates that it was set up hundreds of miles to the south, at the Cape of Good Hope, and that the chariot lay ahead of them, somewhere up the east coast of Africa.”

  “That’s why the plaque is a game-changer,” Jeremy said, talking intently. “It suggests that the fiery passage in the Heidelberg text is a conflation, combining the Senegal volcano with something awesome to come, something that Hanno chose not to present accurately when he returned to Carthage and composed his Periplus.”

  Jack nodded slowly. “And yet something he could use to embellish his description of the volcanic region, making it seem even more terrifying, even more as if anyone traveling there would be transgressing in the realm of the gods.”

  “Exactly.” Jeremy turned to Rebecca. “Earlier you mentioned the idea of trade secrets, of the explorers extolling their achievements but being careful not to give away too much, to make sure they were not providing a route map for their rivals. Well, here I think we have evidence that the Heidelberg Periplus is a truncated version of the truth, one that Hanno himself connived in, making a decision not to tell the full story when he came to present it to the world on his return to Carthage.”

  “How then do you account for Pliny’s assertion that he did reach Arabia?” Rebecca said.

  Jeremy shrugged. “Perhaps several of his sailors survive with him, and they can’t keep their mouths shut. Perhaps Hanno himself lives to old age, when he no longer has anything to lose, and it becomes important for him to tell the truth of his achievement, to keep the names of Hanno and Himilco high in the annals of exploration. The tablets of the Periplus remain unaltered, sacrosanct in the temple of Ba’al Hammon, but rumor spreads, soon becoming a fixed truth among Carthaginian mariners, men who would have revered the memory of Hanno, just as later ones did Vasco da Gama or Captain Cook. When the Romans sack Carthage, the story is still there, surviving with enough authority for Pliny to present it as fact in his Natural History.”