By David Gibbins
Atlantis
Crusader Gold
The Last Gospel
The Tiger Warrior
The Mask of Troy
The Gods of Atlantis
The Gods of Atlantis
DAVID GIBBINS
Copyright © 2011 David Gibbins
The right of David Gibbins to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places and incidents are creations of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual or other fictional events, locales, organisations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The factual backdrop is discussed in the author’s note at the end.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN: 9780755374328
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Contents
By the Author
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Map of the Mediterranean region
Forward
Epigraph
Prologue
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART 2
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART 3
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Background to the novel
About the Author
David Gibbins has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA, and to my editors, Martin Fletcher in London and Caitlin Alexander in New York; to Emily Griffin for helping to get this book into production, and to Jane Selley for her skilled copy-editing of this and my previous books; to the rest of the excellent team at Headline, including Aslan Byrne, Darragh Deering and Jane Morpeth; to the Hachette representatives internationally who have done so much to promote my books; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston and Ajda Vucicevic at LBA; to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Jenny Robson and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; to Gaia Banks at Sheil Land; to my film agent John Rush; and to Harriet Evans, my former editor at Headline, whose huge enthusiasm for my first novel Atlantis led me to think of writing the sequel that has become The Gods of Atlantis.
I am grateful to my mother Ann Verrinder Gibbins for casting a critical eye over many draft chapters and manuscripts; to my brother Alan for diving with me in lava tubes off volcanoes, for his photography and video work for my website www.davidgibbins.com and for his expertise as a pilot, greatly benefiting the flying chapters in this book; and to Angie Hobbs for her unrivalled knowledge of Plato.
Among many others who have provided helpful comments on my books I am especially grateful to Professor Paul Cartledge of Cambridge University. The research behind the first part of this book owes much to former professors and colleagues at Bristol, Cambridge and Liverpool Universities, where I was fortunate to study and to teach in institutions that have been at the forefront of research into the Neolithic in Anatolia; I would especially like to thank James Macqueen, who introduced me in riveting fashion to ancient Near Eastern civilization when I was an undergraduate at Bristol, and to the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara for first enabling me to visit the site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey in 1984.
Finally, to Angie and our daughter Molly, to whom all of my books are dedicated with much love.
Map of the Mediterranean region
In 1934, Heinrich Himmler – the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany – bought Wewelsburg Castle, a medieval stronghold perched high above the valley of the River Oder in Westphalia. Himmler associated the region with the mythic origins of the German nation, and saw the castle’s triangular shape as a ‘spear of destiny’, pointing north. The castle had a sinister history: legend held that thousands of accused witches were tortured and executed there, and an inquisition room still survived in the basement. But nothing in its past could equal the plans that Himmler had for it.
He set about transforming Wewelsburg into the ‘order-castle’ of the SS, the ideological centre of the Nazi cult. Slave labourers were brought to a new concentration camp near the castle, and over a thousand of them were worked to death quarrying and transporting stone. A circular chamber was created, the ‘SS Generals’ Hall’. In the centre of the floor was a twelve-spoked sunwheel, leading out to twelve pillars and twelve window ninches. Directly below lay another chamber, a domed vault based on the tombs of the Bronze Age Mycenaeans, and a semi-mythical ruler Himmler admired – Agamemnon, the Mycenaean conqueror of Troy. At the zenith of the dome was an ancient symbol that had been found on pottery at Troy and on golden decorations at Mycenae, a symbol the Nazis expropriated for their own baleful ends – the ‘crooked cross’, the swastika.
What went on in those rooms may never be known. Wewelsburg became a focus for Nazi archaeological research, to fulfil Adolf Hitler’s desire to ‘return to the source of the blood, to root us again in the soil, to seek again for strength from sources which have been buried for 2,000 years’. Yet Hitler himself never visited the castle. It was to remain Himmler’s preserve, central to his obsession with prehistory and the occult. From there, the Ahnenerbe – the ‘Department of Cultural Heritage’ – sent expeditions to Tibet, to Peru, to Iceland, to places still unknown today, searching for Aryan origins and for the greatest prize of all, the lost civilization of Atlantis. Underlying everything lay Himmler’s racial theories, and Wewelsburg became a springboard for some of the greatest crimes against humanity ever conceived. It was there that he began to formulate the ‘Final Solution’, the mass murder of the Jews. And it was there in 1941 that he assembled his top SS generals for ideological strengthening before the invasion of Russia, the most destructive military campaign in history – one foretold to Himmler in a legend of a final battle between West and East, and fuelled by his doctrine of Aryan racial superiority over the Slavic peoples of Russia.
Yet even while these terrible events were unfolding, Himmler continued to be obsessed with the symbols and artefacts of the past. He envisaged Wewelsburg Castle within a huge semicircular complex, the ‘Centre of the New World’, its plan reminiscent of the circular prehistoric monuments that he associated with mythi
cal Aryan forebears. He planned a huge archaeological collection at Wewelsburg, to make it part of SS indoctrination. The placing of the sunwheel and the swastika in the Generals’ Hall and the vault below show how he drew power from ancient symbols, and incorporated them into the very core of Nazi ideology. And just as he saw those prehistoric monuments as evidence of a new order, of a new race arisen, so he saw his new world as one where the only gods were the gods of the Nazis, the gods they themselves had become.
Nobody knows how close Himmler may have come to realizing his dream, and what artefacts may have been brought there. Deep within the castle lay another chamber, Himmler’s private vault, but when American soldiers captured Wewelsburg in 1945 they found it empty, its contents unknown and seemingly lost forever to history.
One artefact might have been at Wewelsburg, an artefact of extraordinary power that could have unlocked the greatest obsession of all: the dream of the lost civilization of Atlantis, and of Atlantis reborn . . .
Then, as dawn first glimmered, from the horizon rose a dark cloud, and Adad the storm god was raging within it. Then Nergal, god of plague and war, wrenched out the boats’ mooring poles; Nunurta, god of the earth, made the dams overflow; and the Anunnaki, dread gods of the underworld, their torches brandished, shrivelled the land with their flames. Desolation from Adad spread over the sky, and all that had been bright was turned into darkness. Like a bull he charged the land; he shattered the land like a vessel of clay; for a day the raging winds flattened the land, and then came the flood. Like a tide of war it swept over the people. A brother could not distinguish his brother; from heaven the people were not to be seen . . . For six days and seven nights it raged, the wind, the storm, the flood; it flattened the land. On the seventh day the wind abated, the storm that had ravaged the land like a war; the sea was lulled, the gale was spent; the flood ended. I looked on the day, and all sound was stilled; all the people had turned to clay. All around me the waters were flat like the roof of a house. Then I opened a hatchway in the boat, and on my cheek streamed the sunlight. I bowed down and wept, my cheeks overflowing with tears. I gazed into the distance, to the furthest bounds of the ocean, and saw land arising. On the mountain of Nisir the boat ran aground; the mountain of Nisir held the boat fast, and would not release it . . . I brought an offering and made a sacrifice, and I pured a libation on the peak of the mountain . . . so it was that the gods took me and caused me to dwell in this place, at the ends of the earth . . .
The words of Uta-napishtim to Gilgamesh from Tablet XI of He who saw the deep, the Babylonian version of The Epic of Gilgamesh (late 2nd millennium BC Akkadian, but derived from a story first written down in Sumerian in the 3rd millennium BC and probably originating millennia earlier)
Prologue
The Voyage of Uta-napishtim
The man gripped the edge of the boat and squinted at the western horizon, trying to see past the blinding glare of the sun. Earlier he had sensed a flickering in the sky, a strange smell in the air, but he no longer knew whether it was real or a dream, after weeks of wallowing in this weed-choked sea. He tensed his hands and heaved himself up, then leaned over the side and stared into the depths. His knuckles were raw and bleeding from sunburn and salt, but he no longer felt the pain. Ever since they had been marooned in this windless sea he had taken to staring down, pulling his tattered leopardskin cape over his head to shade the water, letting it form a cover that had stiffened with the salt.
The sea was deep blue, and he could see far down, to where blue became black. He glimpsed flashes of silver, and sparkles of light. He knew that something was down there, shadowing them, a shape that lurked on the edge of the underworld. If only he could fix it with his eyes, then he would be able to draw on the power of its spirit. He had spent hours looking, days. Even his brother Enlil no longer called him by the nickname they had used as boys, Noah, but now addressed him, half mockingly, by his shaman name, Uta-napishtim, ‘he who sees the deep’. The others in his boat were too far gone to help him look, only four of them now, paralysed by thirst and hunger and fear. But he was their spirit traveller, their shaman. They might see the earthly form of the monster, but only he could touch its spirit.
He picked up his obsidian knife and ran his thumb along the blade, feeling it cut into his skin. He remembered going with Enlil and their father Ra Shamash deep into the volcano to find the sacred black stone, and watching the old man make the rippled flat of the blade by pressing off tiny flakes with a piece of antler. Noah had a cache of blades here now, in a basket under the thwarts, but this knife made by his father was the most sacred. That had been the day their father had taken them for the first time to the spirit cave and given them their shaman names, and taught them to inscribe their names into the rock using the ancient symbols, beside the paintings of bulls and leopards and vultures. But their father had gone to the spirit world years before, and now only Noah could give the others in his boat the strength to raise the paddles and seek out the shore he knew lay somewhere ahead. Three cycles of the moon ago, as the flood waters rose up the walls of their city, before he had completed the last bull sacrifice and they had taken to the boats, his dying mother Nisir had closed her eyes and seen it in a vision: a thunderbird flying towards her, then twin peaks on the edge of the western sea, lofty like those of the sacred mountain of Atlantis that had been drowning all around them. And now he was sure he had seen it too, through a crack in the horizon the day before, framed by distant breakers like those that skirted the last land they had sighted weeks ago, the great cape that jutted out from the desert shore. If they could survive this malevolent spirit that would drag them down, if he could tame the beast and ride it into the spirit world, then they might reach that shore. Atlantis might be reborn.
A man’s voice came over the water. ‘Noah Uta-napishtim, my brother.’ Noah put down the knife and shielded his eyes. He saw the raft of seaweed they had drawn in from the sea, tendrils of green and yellow filled with small crabs and fish to sustain them, until they had consumed them all. His eyes moistened in the glare, and he lifted a finger to them, wiping his eyelids and licking it, and then put his thumb on his lips, feeling the wetness of the blood that had been drawn by the knife. They had swallowed the last of the fresh water days ago. That morning his cousin Lamesh had drunk seawater and the malevolence had entered him, and they had lashed him down over the crossbeams at the front of the boat. Lamesh had consumed the lifeblood of the underworld, but before appeasing the spirits with the knife, Noah knew he must see the malevolence himself, must fix the monstrous shark that lurked below them with his own eyes.
Now he saw his brother’s boat, shimmering in silhouette, a pair of carved wooden leopards facing each other on the pointed upswept prow. Theirs were the last two boats of the flotilla that had set out from the drowning city, the ones that had carried on past the cataract that was flooding their sea and reached the safety of Troy, their outpost on the edge of the Middle Sea. For one full cycle of the moon they had paddled on, past rocky islands and great stretches of desert shore, until they had reached another narrowing of the sea and a towering rock the local people called the Pillar of Herakleos; then they had been on the western ocean. They had raised sails of deerskin, and the wind and current had taken them south along the desert shore. Before the great cape that had been their last sight of land they had alighted at Lixus, at the Garden of Hesperides, where the priestesses called the Ladies of the West had fed them with golden apples and honeyed almonds, where Noah’s brother had fallen under their spell and been tempted to stay and found their new citadel.
But just as they had done at Troy, they inscribed a pillar with their names in the ancient symbols and sailed west, over a vast open ocean with no landfall in sight. When the days were overcast, Adad the navigator had stood in the bow of his brother’s boat and held up the crystal sunstone; it too had come from the volcano, prised from the spirit cave generations before, and used many times by Adad and his forefathers to navigate the spirit line
s of their own sea. Its light had dazzled Noah’s eyes, as if it were drawing in the rays from the dawn, leading them on over the ocean. And at night Noah had traced the line of the Great Bear to the pole star, keeping it on the right, just as he had watched his father do when he had aligned the pyramid of Atlantis to the rising and setting of the sun: his father Ra Shamash, he who gave the light, sun shaman, whom they had laid to rest in the chamber inside the pyramid, surrounded by the sacred obsidian blades and ironstones from the sky that had been brought across the ice by their ancestors. But Noah need hardly have bothered to chart the heavens. It was as if they were on a river on the ocean, being swept inexorably west, a river like those of his dreams in the cave that had become the flow of his own spirit journey.
The planks in their boats had held, their sewn seams caulked with boiled animal fat. The sweet foods of the Ladies of the West had sustained them, along with the flying fish that leapt into their boats. But then they had been beset by fearsome storms and mountainous waves. Six boats had become four. And finally they had entered this flat ocean, where there was no wind to fill the sails. They had paddled on until they were exhausted. Men desperate for food had scraped and licked the animal fat from the seams, and the boats had leaked and wallowed. They had made fire with flint and boiled their deerskin sails for broth; Enlil alone had insisted on keeping his sail. They had gnawed the boars’ teeth they wore as necklaces, and scraped the marrow from the bulls’ horns that adorned the prow of Noah’s boat. That had kept them strong enough to fish, using nets made of twisted seaweed. But even that had proved too much. They had sickened, their gums swelling and bleeding and their teeth falling out, and they had become listless. Then they had begun to die.
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