Gods of Atlantis

by David J. L. Gibbins

  ‘Major Penn.’ The voice of one of the sappers came through their intercom. ‘The inspector and Sergeant Jones have already gone into the laboratory. I couldn’t stop them.’

  Penn snorted angrily and made his way over. The door was now half open, and there were lights moving inside. Hiebermeyer saw the swastika in the roundel that Penn had described. As they came closer, one of the sappers stepped up and stopped Penn. ‘Sir, you’l see there’s a body in front of the door, mostly skeleton. We found it when we first arrived here twenty minutes ago, but he’s long dead and we didn’t see the need to disturb you. There was a smear of old blood on the door when we were cutting through. He was shot at close range in the back of the head, massive skul damage. You’l see more of the same when you go in through that door. Been a little life-and-death struggle here with no winner as far as we can see. This one’s American, by the way.’

  Penn went straight to the form on the floor and leaned over it. ‘A lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaf on the lapel,’ he murmured. ‘No division or corps insignia on the shoulders. He’s got a holstered Colt automatic, but he’s wearing a dress uniform, not a field uniform. Not a combat soldier.’ He peered at Hiebermeyer. ‘Sounds like our Monuments and Fine Arts man, Colonel Stein, wouldn’t you say?’

  Hiebermeyer nodded, staring at the body, his head swimming. There was a sudden commotion from within the laboratory, and the sound of something fal ing heavily. A voice came over the intercom.

  ‘Quick!’ They heard the French accent of the inspector. ‘Come and help! Sergeant Jones has col apsed!’

  Penn pushed into the chamber, the other two sappers fol owing and Hiebermeyer bringing up the rear. He saw two more decomposed bodies lying entangled together just inside the door, and Sergeant Jones in his white suit stretched out beside them. The nearest body was wearing tattered striped prisoner clothes, but the one beneath it, lying face-down, wore British battledress, a major’s crown clearly visible on one shoulder. Hiebermeyer stared. It could only be Major Mayne. His revolver was stil holstered, but his skeletal hand was behind his back, clutching a commando knife that poked up through the other man’s ribcage. The man in the prisoner’s uniform held a rusted pistol, a Walther, and there was a spent casing on the floor. Hiebermeyer saw a tattoo on a piece of skin that clung to the bones of the forearm. It was the SS mark. He barely had time to register it when Penn pul ed his arm.

  ‘We’ve got to get Jones out of here,’ he said urgently. He looked angrily at Auxel e. ‘How long has he been like this?’

  ‘Only moments. But he had been breathing heavily.

  Maybe it was seeing the bodies.’

  ‘That’s not like Jones. More likely a malfunction with his oxygen. If that’s the case, we’ve only got minutes.’

  He looked at the other two sappers. ‘You each take a leg, Auxel e and Hiebermeyer take the arms. I’l support his waist. Let’s move.’

  Hiebermeyer lifted Jones’ arm but had forgotten his own twisted wrist and slipped with the weight, twisting round and fal ing back against the wal , his other hand clutching a rail and slipping into something glutinous.

  He pushed himself up with his back against the wal , and as he did so he tripped the electric light switch.

  The bare overhead bulbs flickered and then came on with a sudden dazzling glare, blinding him for a moment. Then he saw wal s of a sickly pale blue, like the colour of a hospital operating room. The layer of yel ow-green was stil there, but the light rendered it opaque, a bilious colour. He saw a smal refrigerator in front of Jones’ legs, its door ajar and the interior gleaming, empty. He stared at it, transfixed, his mind blank, and then he turned to look where he had put his hand.

  What he saw was an image of unspeakable horror.

  Along the side wal of the room were five gurneys, metal trol eys with their upper surfaces formed like shal ow basins. Four contained human bodies, naked but grotesquely adiposed, as if they had been covered with a layer of white plaster. The two furthest bodies were strapped down but horribly twisted, like the plaster casts of bodies from Pompeii preserved in their death throes. His mind reeled. He forced himself to look. These people must have been strapped down alive in this laboratory, and were stil alive when they were abandoned here. The third and fourth bodies were older cadavers that had been decapitated and disembowel ed, with autopsy tools half rusted on a tray in front. The fifth gurney, the one he was holding, contained two severed heads, wax-like and hairless, staring at him blindly through sockets closed up with fatty secretion, the skul s held in the clutches of a three-armed forceps like the severed talons of some bird. They seemed to be embedded in a congealed layer, the glutinous substance he had put his hand into. He lifted it out, tendrils of congealed white and yel ow dripping from his fingers. His stomach lurched as he realized what it was. He had seen this once inside a two-hundred-year-old lead coffin he had watched being excavated from a church crypt. The archaeologists had cal ed it body liquor. He had put his hand into decomposed human fat.

  He doubled over and threw up inside his helmet, coughing and retching as the oxygen from his regulator bubbled through the vomit. He clutched Jones’ hand tight, but he felt other hands heaving him up, pushing him forward as he staggered over the two corpses on the floor. He kept his eyes shut and his mouth wide open, breathing in oxygen and vomit, coughing it out again, retching. As they staggered out of the laboratory and back towards the entrance, he fixed his mind on the refrigerator he had seen, its interior gleaming and empty. Something had been stored there, something the Nazi scientists must have extracted from those bodies, and something they had experimented with on the living. Something unimaginable. But it was gone.

  He was conscious of only one thought.

  He had to call Jack.

  9

  Costas took a last dejected look at the blank screen in front of the ROV monitor, and then swivel ed round to join Jack in front of Lanowski’s computer. The clock showed 1415 hours, less than an hour before Jack was due on the helipad to leave Seaquest II in advance of the arrival of the inspection team. A few moments before, they had felt the ship lurch as she repositioned herself, her new location visible on the digital wal map some two nautical miles north-west of the volcano and the site of Atlantis. Captain Macalister was clearly taking few chances after the images Jack and Costas had brought back with them from their dive into the caldera that morning, but he had agreed to keep the ship within range should a minor miracle happen and the ROV spring back to life. Costas pul ed his chair up until he was between the other two men and then rested his elbows on their chair backs. Jeremy had left the room to deal on the phone with an urgent problem at Troy, a statue with Egyptian hieroglyphics that had appeared just as the excavation was winding down; with Hiebermeyer preoccupied at the bunker in Germany and out of contact,

  Jeremy

  had

  wanted

  to

  speak

  to

  Hiebermeyer’s wife Aysha to see whether she could return from Alexandria to judge whether they should excavate now or rebury it for the next season. Costas nudged Lanowski. ‘Okay, Jacob. I’m itching to know where you think the new Atlantis might lie. We’re not getting anywhere waiting for Little Joey to reveal more about that inner sanctum. I think he’s left us for good.’

  Jack pointed at the screen. ‘Remember this?’

  Costas leaned forward and stared at the image, a torn brown scrap of papyrus with ancient Greek script that had been seen over the last five years by thousands of visitors who had stood in front of the original in the archaeological museum in Alexandria.

  ‘The Atlantis papyrus,’ he murmured. ‘The tail end of the account written by the Greek travel er Solon at the temple of Saïs in the Nile delta, the part of the Atlantis story that somehow never reached Plato when he used Solon’s account to write his version of the Atlantis myth in the fifth century BC.’ He pointed to a word visible at the top of the screen, letters in Greek spel ing out ATLANTIS. ‘That’
s what Hiebermeyer and Aysha saw when they pul ed this scrap from the mummy wrapping. I’ve never heard Maurice so excited by something that wasn’t actual y Egyptian. I can stil remember the look on your face when we came up from the dive on the Bronze Age shipwreck and you took his cal .’

  Lanowski tapped the keyboard, then sat back and craned his head round at Costas. ‘Gladstone. Wil iam Ewart Gladstone.’

  Costas stared back at him. ‘Huh?’

  ‘British prime minister in the late nineteenth century.

  Does that ring a bel ?’

  Costas screwed up his eyes, then peered at Lanowski cautiously. ‘The guy who was so fascinated with Heinrich Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy, who helped push Schliemann to international fame.’

  Lanowski nodded. ‘Wel , like a lot of the Victorian intel igentsia, Gladstone was also fascinated by archaeological discoveries that might il uminate the Bible, especial y with the wealth of clay tablets being found at ancient Mesopotamian sites that were seen as part of the backdrop to the Old Testament. One of the most famous discoveries was the Epic of Gilgamesh.’

  ‘It’s what we were talking about,’ Costas said.

  ‘About the tension it represents between the wild and the civilized, and how it might derive from conflict between the old shamans and the new priests in the early Neolithic.’

  Lanowski nodded enthusiastical y. ‘For the Victorians, the biggest revelation in the Epic of Gilgamesh was the story of a flood that paral eled the Biblical deluge. Gladstone attended a lecture in 1873

  at the Society for Biblical Archaeology in London, where the tablet containing the flood account was first revealed. An obsessive genius named George Smith had been sifting through thousands of tablets from Nineveh in the British Museum, and when he came across the flood tablet, he was so excited he rushed about the room and stripped naked.’

  ‘Don’t get any ideas, Jacob,’ Costas muttered.

  Lanowski’s eyes glinted. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve already had my eureka moment. What George Smith found was the flood tablet in the version of the epic written down in the early first mil ennium BC, but since the nineteenth century, fragments have been found that are a lot earlier, dating to the first period of cuneiform writing in Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC. The fact that the story of Gilgamesh seems to have been wel formed that early strongly suggests that it had been passed down oral y for a long time before then, conceivably from as far back as the early Neolithic.’

  ‘And it’s the basis for the Old Testament deluge story?’

  ‘Or a paral el tradition, deriving from the same historical backdrop. And for my money, the Gilgamesh story is a lot more intriguing, with more pointers to the early Neolithic. Uta-napishtim, the flood hero, is a more ambiguous character than Noah. For a start, he isn’t the sole survivor of the flood, and he’s actual y presented as more of an outcast. After the flood, the gods grant him immortality, but he lives on the mountain where his boat came ashore, far from the rest of humanity. It’s as if the gods’ favour comes at a price: we’l grant you immortality and give you this mountain to live on, but don’t ever come back to our shores again. As if they owe him something, even feel guilty about him, but he’s a threat to the new world of men they lord it over and they don’t want him around.

  And so Gilgamesh, half-god himself, travels a huge distance across the sea to find him, to try to discover the secret of immortality. It’s then that Uta-napishtim tel s him the story of the flood.’

  Costas looked at him shrewdly. ‘And you’re going to suggest that this flood story contains something about a survivor from Atlantis?’

  Lanowski beamed at him. ‘The character of Uta-napishtim himself could be a clue. An outcast. A shaman perhaps, the last of the old order? Gilgamesh goes a huge distance across the water to get to him.

  And Uta-napishtim lives on a twin-peaked mountain, cal ed Nisir.’

  ‘The mountain of Dû-Re was twin-peaked as wel ,’

  Jack murmured. ‘That’s where the oldest Babylonian myths locate the birthplace of the gods.’

  ‘I think Dû-Re was Atlantis,’ Lanowski enthused.

  ‘Dû-Re was somewhere to the north, where the Babylonian scribes always placed their ancestors and the home of their gods, precisely where Atlantis and those other early Neolithic sites were located in relation to the early cities of Mesopotamia. But Nisir is a kind of alter-Atlantis, Atlantis reborn, a huge distance over the sea. The question is, was the sea simply a conceptual barrier, a barrier in the mind, or was it a real ocean, and if so which one?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that made me think of Jack’s lecture at the Royal Geographical Society last December, on prehistoric voyages of discovery. About his title,

  “Voyages of the mind, voyages of the body”.’

  ‘I missed it, I’m sorry to say,’ Costas said. ‘Too wrapped up getting Little Joey finished in time for the sea trials.’

  ‘Wel , if I may,’ Lanowski said, looking questioningly at Jack. ‘The nub of his argument was this. We’ve had it al wrong. Great voyages of discovery didn’t begin after the rise of civilization, with trade and colonization. They began before that. Way before, as far back as the middle Palaeolithic, fifty thousand years ago or more, when we know people went great distances by sea to get to Australia, for example.

  Ergo, hunter-gatherers in deep prehistory had boats capable of long-distance seafaring. Hunter-gatherers ranged over huge distances on land, so why not by sea as wel ? By the end of the Palaeolithic – at the end of the Ice Age – just as many people were living off the sea as off the land. But the advent of farming actual y stifled exploration. People moved inland, settled in one place, turned in on themselves, were enslaved by agriculture as wel as by new rulers who wanted to control them, to prevent them seeing the world outside their own narrow confines, a control maybe exerted using new religious beliefs based on fear.’

  ‘So why voyages of the mind?’ Costas asked.

  Jack leaned back. ‘That title was prescient, given what we’ve been talking about here,’ he said. ‘Now I know why Jacob was in the audience looking at me as Professor Dil en used to when I stumbled my way through a passage of ancient Greek. I’d already been doing some thinking about Palaeolithic religion, about shamanism and altered consciousness. I looked at al that in relation to seafaring in two ways. First, I read about

  the

  common

  altered-consciousness

  hal ucinations of being in water, and I imagined that a real sea voyage, especial y an arduous one, would be something like that. Altered states of mind are often most easily achieved under duress, right? It might have been particularly easy when the imagery of the real-life experience and the dream world seemed so close. And I wasn’t thinking that Stone Age seafarers were floating around aimlessly in a psychedelic daze, but actual y that they were purposeful and destination-conscious. They were doing what they did in those caves, navigating their way into the spirit world, but this time marrying it with a real-life voyage using the stars and even navigational aids such as quartz sunstones. I began to think that the idea of early seafarers being terrified of the open sea might be an inheritance from the establishment of sedentary living in the Neolithic. The sea wasn’t the great unknown in deep prehistory. It became the great unknown when it suited rulers to stoke up the fear factor. Before that, sea voyages had given people with shamanic beliefs an experience that would have seemed familiar to them. I argued that they wouldn’t have sailed off into the unknown in fear for their lives, but quite the opposite. They may actual y have relished it, and looked forward with huge excitement to what they might discover in a spiritual sense as wel as in reality.’

  ‘And your second point?’

  ‘Thinking about the prehistoric colonization of Australia led me to Aboriginal songlines, the dreaming tracks that were used to cross the outback.

  If hunter-gatherers could conceptualize land routes in that way, why not at sea as wel ? Memori
zed trackways are often the most practicable routes too, and that made me think about the predictability of ocean currents and winds. I ended my lecture with a picture of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew on the Ra expedition reed boat in the mid-Atlantic in 1969, showing how it would have been difficult to avoid being swept out to sea and towards the Caribbean once you’d sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of west Africa. I argued that the sea isn’t a barrier, it’s a great complex of highways, and nowhere was that more the case than in deep prehistory. I quoted Heyerdahl’s famous last lines from his account of the Ra expedition, that his theory about prehistoric maritime contact came about because he and his crew had actual y sailed on the ocean and not on a map.’

  ‘They’d tried it out rather than sitting in an armchair theorizing,’ Costas said approvingly.

  Jack nodded. ‘And that gets us back to Atlantis. At the time of the Black Sea flood, the people of Atlantis may have been undergoing a religious revolution, but they were stil not that far away from their Palaeolithic ancestors. If we’ve got it right, there were stil shamans present in those final days before the flood, even if they were a beleaguered few. That knowledge of sea travel, that ability to sail off into the unknown, may not yet have been lost.’

  Costas nodded. ‘Makes a lot of sense.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘So what’s your big revelation?’

  ‘Plato.’ Lanowski laughed quietly to himself, pushed up his glasses, looked at Jack intently and chuckled again. ‘Plato, Plato, Plato.’

  Costas glanced anxiously at Jack, and then narrowed his eyes at Lanowski. ‘Al right, Jacob,’ he said slowly. ‘Let me guess. The Atlantis myth? Plato is the only surviving source. That is, except for the fragment of papyrus Maurice found in the desert that we’re looking at on the screen right now, the bit by Solon about where to find Atlantis that never got to Plato.’

  ‘Plato,’ Lanowski repeated to himself, shaking his head as if he were in the throes of some private rapture. He suddenly stared at Costas. ‘And Pythagoras.’