The Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  The light almost burned through his eyeballs, and a hot breath singed his face. He splashed back in terror as the flames licked up in front of him and water droplets sizzled into steam. He shut his burning eyes, then cracked them open a fraction. He had come up in a pool in another small chamber, but instead of a rock face, this one was barred by a wall of fire. He gaped, amazed. The flames seemed to lick out of the rock itself, and the walls round it were black with soot, softly moulded like melted wax.

  Treading water, Grant extended a toe until he found the bottom. It wasn’t too deep. Still marvelling at the fire, he let himself stand—and almost immediately collapsed as a tug on his leg pulled his feet out from under him. Marina. He splashed wildly, scrabbling against the walls for a grip. Marina was strong—she was pulling hard, almost desperately. It was all he could do to hold on, fighting to keep himself from being dragged back into the tunnel. It felt as though his leg would be ripped off. He tried to kick off the noose but it was too tight, and there was no way he could reach it with his hands without losing his grip. All he could do was hold on and pray.

  The rope went still. Grant gave it two deliberate tugs with his leg, waited a few seconds, then gave two more. A moment later he felt two tugs in reply. The rope went taut again, then started to twitch like a plucked guitar string as Marina hauled herself along it, hand over hand. Grant braced himself against the chamber to anchor her. Ever closer—then a hand wrapped itself round his calf, let go and she broached the surface like a dolphin. He put out an arm to hold her back from the flame at the far end.

  She shook the water from her head and pushed back the hair that was slicked to her face.

  “Careful,” Grant warned. “Open your eyes slowly.”

  She gasped. The sound sighed round the chamber. “What is it?”

  “A gas vent.” Now that he’d had time to think, Grant could remember an evening by a campfire near the Zambezi, yarning and bragging with the diamond company geologists. “Methane gas escapes through holes in the rock and spontaneously ignites. No one quite knows how it works. Apparently . . .” He unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it off, rolling it into a loose bundle. With a quick movement, he breasted his way through the water and pressed the shirt into the flames. With a hiss of steam, the cave was plunged in darkness.

  Grant whipped the shirt away and stepped back—straight into Marina. She cried out and grabbed him, wrapping her arms round his bare chest for balance. Her nipples pressed against his back, her sodden blouse leaving little barrier between their skins. Just at that moment he had no time to appreciate it. The flames had leaped up again, as steady and constant as a gas fire in a suburban sitting room.

  Just as they had said. “It always relights itself,” he marvelled.

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “You don’t want to cover it too long in case the gas builds up.” That prompted another thought. “But if it burns, it’s getting air from somewhere. The water seals the way we came. There must be something behind it.”

  With a hint of reluctance, he pulled away from Marina’s embrace, stepped forward and smothered the flame again. There was a splashing in the darkness behind him, then a spark. A new light filled the cave as Marina held her lighter aloft. By its glow, they could see a dark tunnel continuing on the far side of the gas vent.

  Grant slipped the rope off his ankle and handed the end to Marina. “Wait here.”

  She shook her head. “You’re not going down there alone.”

  There was no time. The smell of gas was already beginning to seep into the cave and if it caught the lighter flame they would—literally—be toast. “You have to. We can’t leave the vent shut, and I’ll need someone to put it out again if I come back. When I come back,” he corrected himself.

  Grant hauled himself out of the water, taking great care not to dislodge the shirt, and pushed forward. A second later he felt the heat on the soles of his feet as Marina whipped the shirt away. He could see the passage now. It was still as low and tight as before, but this time the air was fresher. There was the unmistakable billow of a breeze on his face. He carried on, faster, crawling over the shadow cast by the fire behind him.

  The tunnel ended in another rock wall—and this time there was no pool of water at its base. He twisted his head round. The light from the gas vent barely penetrated this far down the passage, but there was still a faint glow in the air. As his eyes balanced with the gloom, he thought he could make out a dim circle of light, a halo hovering over him in the tunnel roof. He reached up a hand and felt nothing except the cool rush of air.

  He felt around the rim of the hole above his head. The black basalt had been ground smooth, polished to a sheen that had not faded in thirty centuries of darkness. It was almost perfectly round, but it seemed terribly narrow. Narrower even than the slot he had squeezed through to enter the tunnel.

  “Nowhere else to go,” he told himself. He unbuckled his belt and slid off his trousers—if he was going to get through, there wouldn’t be a fraction of an inch to spare. He sucked in his stomach and pulled himself up so that he was squatting directly under the hole. He raised his arms over his head and pressed them together, like a diver preparing to take the plunge. Then he stood.

  The stone was tight as a noose. He writhed and squirmed against it, squeezing himself through inch by agonizing inch. The rock was not quite as perfectly smooth as he’d thought: against his body, each tiny ridge became a razor, scraping his bare skin raw. He gritted his teeth against the pain—at least the blood lubricated the edge of the hole a little. His shoulders were through; then his ribs, though it felt as if the breath had been squashed out of them. Now he could use his hands as well as his feet—and just as well: he needed all his strength to lever his hips through. If they could actually make it. Perhaps he would end up trapped, unable to move up or down, until the flesh rotted from his bones and the noose finally released his skeleton.

  Something gave—not within him, thank God, but around him. He was through. With a final heave, he hauled himself out and emerged—naked, bloodied and wet—into the most extraordinary room he had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 12

  After being squeezed in the tunnel so long, the space was vast and dizzying. He was lying on the floor of what looked like an enormous beehive: a round stone chamber whose sides slowly curved in until they met in a point high above him. Directly below it, a few yards away from where he lay, a round hole was sunk in the floor like a well. But there was no water in the bottom: this was a well of fire. Flames licked round the edges, a giant gas ring that illuminated the whole chamber with a murky orange glow. On one side, just in front of the opening Grant had crawled through, a pair of stone horns stood atop a monolithic stone altar.

  Grant moved round the walls. The decoration was almost unimaginably intricate, bands of concentric friezes bordered with a menagerie of birds and animals all carved into the stone. They were caked with soot, but the underlying images were still clear enough. On one level Grant could make out the gnomic figures of the Kabyri, bulbous and ludicrously well-hung as they danced and revelled in the firelight. On the level above, armies marched to war and peasants gathered crops in the fields, a lost civilization immaculately preserved in stone.

  “Grant?”

  The voice echoed round the domed chamber, quickly overtaken by a gasp of amazement. Marina’s head had popped through the hole in the floor and she was staring at her surroundings with wide eyes—that widened still further as her gaze fell on Grant. She gave a short, embarrassed laugh and looked away, blushing in the firelight. Grant realized that he was still stark naked.

  “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and not really succeeding.

  “I was waiting for the unspeakable rites to start.”

  “I think you’re too late.” She reached his bundled trousers out of the hole and tossed them across the room. “Ela. Cover yourself before the Kabyri get jealous.”

  Grant pulled them on. �
��I thought I told you to wait by the gas vent.”

  “I didn’t want you disturbing the site before a proper archaeological investigation.”

  “It’s quite a sight.” He reached down to pull her through the hole, then hesitated. “Can you get back down the tunnel?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Then you’d better fetch the others. They won’t want to miss this.”

  To Grant’s disappointment, Marina was able to squeeze through the entrance hole without having to undress. As for Reed, he almost leaped through it like a jack-in-the-box. Far from traumatising him, the ordeal of getting through the tunnel seemed to have filled him with energy. He bounded around the chamber like a boy in a toyshop, examining everything and murmuring awed exclamations under his breath. In one corner he found a pair of three-legged iron pots, their legs bent over like stalks.

  There lame Hephaestus the goddess found,

  Obscure in smoke, his forges flaming round,

  While bathed in sweat from fire to fire he flew;

  And puffing loud, the roaring billows blew.

  That day no common task his labor claim’d:

  Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed.

  “Just as Homer described it. This must have been the first cult center, before it moved to the coast.” He shook his head in wonder. “We’ve just been inducted into a club that hasn’t had a new member in two thousand years.”

  “Lucky there was no one here to blackball us.” Muir’s head poked through the hole. Grant and Marina hauled him up.

  “Obviously there were certain ritual elements missing . . .” Reed drifted away to peer at a frieze. “The tunnel we took would certainly have been the path of initiation into the cult. First of all the symbolic death in water . . .”

  “It almost wasn’t symbolic at all,” said Grant, remembering the total emptiness in the black pool. “But I thought water was just supposed to purify you.”

  “To the ancients, death and purification were intimately linked. The water that cleanses your body or your soul can also wipe clean your memory. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, was what you crossed to get into Hades. As far as the Greeks were concerned, if you forgot who you were you might as well be dead. Even today, if you think of Christian baptism, the water doesn’t just cleanse you. When you’re dipped in it you die to sin. Then the fire kindles new life, you squeeze through the birth canal and pop out here, naked as a baby. Pratolaos, reborn into the sacred mysteries of Hephaestus and his sons, the Kabyri.”

  “Fascinating,” said Muir. “Now see if you can solve the mystery of that fucking meteorite.”

  They spread out to search the sanctuary. Grant and Marina moved around the edges, poking into every niche and shadow; Muir went the other way. Reed seemed curiously detached from the work. He had managed to bring a flashlight through the tunnel and contented himself with staring at the friezes, picking out the frozen stone figures in the beam.

  “Over here.”

  Grant joined Muir on the far side of the room, behind the horned altar. What he had taken to be another niche was in fact a door which led on to a small side chamber. This was square and much plainer than the main dome, with only a single band of relief carved round the wall. A flat-topped boulder—a hard, blue-tinted stone—rose knee high in the middle of the room; at the back a bowl-shaped impression about a foot wide had been bored out of the floor. Curved fragments of pottery lay all around it.

  “What’s this?” asked Grant. “Another shrine?”

  “I think it’s a primitive furnace.” Marina squeezed past them and knelt beside the impression in the ground and reached in. Her hand came out black.

  “I think I can guess where the meteorite went.”

  “Where?” Muir spun round, his eyes raking the room. But there had been no triumph in Marina’s voice—only weary resignation. Grant’s gaze followed hers down, to the dark jaws of the furnace that opened at her feet.

  “You said that apart from the Element 61, the tests showed the meteorite was mostly iron.”

  A horrible thought began to grow in Grant’s mind. “You said this was the Bronze Age,” he objected. “I thought the Iron Age came later.”

  “It did.” Reed had entered the room and was standing in the doorway. A distracted thought creased his brow. “It’s interesting—the idea of an Iron Age originally comes from the poet Hesiod. A near-contemporary of Homer. For him it had nothing to do with technology, but with the lustre of a civilization. He thought it went the other way: from the gilded accomplishments of a golden age, down through silver and bronze, to the lumpen ugliness of iron. It’s only in our scientifically minded times that we’ve come to see iron as progress. Harder, sharper, cheaper—much better for hammering into guns and engines and barbed wire.”

  “I’m sure that’s fascinating, Professor.” Impatience strained Muir’s voice. “But could the Mycenaeans work iron?”

  Reed looked surprised by the question. “Of course.”

  “But you said it was the Bronze Age.”

  “A new age doesn’t begin at the stroke of midnight. Iron Age, Bronze Age, Stone Age—they’re labels of convenience. The transitions between them would have been gradual and sporadic: a process of decades, perhaps centuries. And then there are the practicalities. It’s my understanding that working iron isn’t terribly difficult, just a matter of bringing it to the right temperature. Extracting iron from ore, that seems to have been the dicey part.”

  “The earliest pieces of ironworking are all meteoritic,” Marina confirmed. “Axe blades, arrowheads, knives . . . In fact, the ancient Egyptian word for iron literally translates as ‘metal of heaven.’ They didn’t know any other source.”

  Exhaustion overtook Grant. Outside, in the world where time had not stood still for three millennia, it must be almost midnight. He flopped down on the flat-topped boulder and stared at the ground. “So the Mycenaeans found this juicy lump of iron—mixed with Element 61—at the shrine on Crete and brought it here . . .”

  “. . . to melt it down.” Marina’s words rang in the stone chamber.

  “Well of course. They’d have had to. You’re probably sitting on the anvil where they hammered it out.”

  They all stared at Reed, thrown into confusion by his cheerful, almost excited manner.

  He in turn looked utterly baffled by their gloom. “Didn’t I tell you? Come and have a look.”

  Back in the main chamber, Reed’s torch played over the stone frieze that ringed the room at about head height. The yellow beam only deepened the shadows round the carved figures, so that they seemed to leap out from their stone frames and come alive in the air.

  “Each bold figure seemed to live or die. Do you remember the lines from the Iliad in Pemberton’s notebook?”

  “You said it came from a bit describing Hephaestus’s workshop.”

  “Did I?” Reed sounded surprised. “Well, yes. After a fashion. It would have been more accurate to say it describes a piece of metalwork Hephaestus makes in his forge. Are you familiar with the ecphrasis?”

  “No.”

  “An ecphrasis is where the poet breaks his narrative to give a long, minutely detailed description of some precious artifact, usually weapons or armor.”

  “Going off on a tangent, in other words,” said Muir.

  “Tangential to the story, perhaps, but integral to the poetry. Some of the most dramatic passages in all Homer are these ecphrases. And the longest, most magnificent of them all takes place here on Lemnos, in the workshop of Hephaestus. He forges a shield, inlaid with the most intricate decoration imaginable. A microcosm of the world—scenes of daily life and scenes of war. A cross between a Brueghel painting and the Bayeux tapestry. In the cities, men and women dance and revel, while lawyers and politicians argue in the forum. In the fields, the seasons turn: crops are sown and harvested, grapes pressed to wine. Shepherds drive their sheep to pasture. Armies invade, wars are fought. All depicted on the shield.”

  As Reed spok
e, Grant had the extraordinary feeling of floating free of reality. The torch beam darted around the room, flashing across the frieze from panel to panel, so that for a split second each one was illuminated. The pictures ran together in his mind like the frames of a film, a panorama of the world. There they were: youths and supple maidens dancing, so lifelike they seemed to sway in the trembling torchlight. Oxen pulled plows over fields and the furrows sprouted wheat that the drovers, now armed with sickles, harvested and tied in bundles. A ribbon of men wound its way over distant hills to a great city, where two armies vied beneath the walls. Under a leafy oak tree a placid bull sat hobbled on the ground, while women plaited ribbons through his horns and men sharpened their knives.

  The torch beam stopped its whirling dance and came to rest as Reed finished his description. The film was over, the cave was still again.

  “I thought it was a fairy tale,” Grant said at last.

  “So did I. But this . . .” Reed spoke tentatively, testing each word as if he couldn’t believe it would hold the weight of its implications. “This is what Homer describes. This is where he describes it.”

  “On a shield?”

  “The shield of Achilles.” He spoke the name in wonder. “I suppose it makes sense. In the Bronze Age, iron was the rarest metal there was—forty times more valuable than silver. Finding a piece as big as that meteorite would have been like finding the Koh-i-Noor diamond. They wouldn’t have melted it down for pocket knives and axe heads. They would have turned it into something extraordinary—something legendary. Something the poets would sing about for generations, that even three thousand years couldn’t obliterate.”

  Reed leaned against the altar. The stone horns that decorated it curved round him like wings.

  “So where do we find it?” asked Grant.