The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘But Solon finds a way,’ murmured Costas.

  ‘And maybe the high priest still doesn’t trust him, and it was the priest who arranged for Solon to be robbed and knocked on the head after leaving the temple that final night.’

  Costas shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it. We know from what’s openly in the text that the priest told Solon a phenomenal story, something passed down over almost seven thousand years. There’s incredible detail in the descriptions of Atlantis. What else could he reveal that might suddenly seem beyond the pale, too secret to tell Solon?’

  Lanowski got up and paced in front of them, gesticulating. ‘Let’s imagine he told Solon where the Atlanteans went, something Solon wrote down at the end of the text in the corner of the papyrus that’s been ripped off. We can pretty well guess what it would have said. Troy, Greece, Crete, the coast of the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, where all the early civilizations subsequently developed. But then let’s imagine there was another story. Something dark, a story of exile, of banishment. Something hinted at in later myth, but a truth that should not be told. Then I thought of the Epic of Gilgamesh.’

  ‘I think I’ve got you,’ Jack said. ‘The idea of Uta-napishtim cast away, a pariah. To a place where nobody is supposed to follow.’

  ‘And a place whose horror might have been exaggerated by the new priesthood of the early Neolithic, a priesthood who had already made people fear the unknown, the open ocean,’ Costas said. ‘Try to go there, and the ancient demons of the spirit world will arise again and haunt you.’

  ‘And carry out appalling acts half remembered, take away the children and sacrifice them to satisfy their blood lust,’ Lanowski said.

  ‘So you think Solon heard what he should not have heard, agreed not to write it down but did so, in some kind of code?’

  ‘I think the fear of that place and of the one who lurked there, a kind of nightmare shaman, may have still been felt by those priests of Egypt who were the last in the line to carry the actual story of what happened, a story that survived elsewhere only in the garbled accounts of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament. Seven thousand years on, that last shaman and what he represented still struck terror into the hearts of Egyptian priests whose gods were supposedly all-powerful, yet who could not suppress that ancient fear of the old spiritualist religion and the threat it posed to the new world of the gods.’

  ‘And?’ Jack said. ‘The code?’

  Lanowski scratched his head. ‘It’s not quite there yet. I’ve narrowed it down to three possibles. It’s what you say, Jack. A hunch. A gut feeling that I’m on to something.’

  Jack stared at him for a moment, then nodded. ‘Okay, Jacob. Email it to me when you’ve got a result.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Lanowski gave him a crooked smile, his face red with excitement, then sat back down in front of the screen and began mumbling lists of letters to himself, apparently oblivious to anyone else in the room. Jack drummed his fingers on the desk, feeling frustrated. Suddenly they were on the cusp of something big, and it was going to have to be put on hold. He tried to keep his mind on prehistoric exploration for a moment longer. The possibility of ancient voyages across the Atlantic had been a fascination of his during his student years, something he had married with Maurice Hiebermeyer’s obsession with retracing the Nazi Ahnenerbe expeditions to see whether they were ever on to anything real. It had come to fruition years later when they had crossed the North Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland, following Viking explorers. But the other main route across the Atlantic, south from the Mediterranean and across from Africa, continued to be unexplored territory for him. The African route south had been taken by the Phoenicians, but there was no certainty that they had ever intentionally struck off west. And Jack had already begun to think much earlier than that, to early prehistory, the basis for his Royal Geographical Society lecture. Only he had never associated it with an exodus from Atlantis, until now. He could only hope that the trail that was beginning to form in front of them would set up some waymarkers soon.

  ‘One final thing.’ Lanowski turned and looked at him. ‘If you want to work out where the Atlanteans went, get into the cave, Jack. And I don’t just mean metaphorically. If we’re looking for the last of the shamans, if we’re looking for Noah Uta-Napishtim, we need to be looking for somewhere he can do his thing again, somewhere like that holy sanctum in Atlantis.’

  ‘Just as long as it doesn’t take us on a psychedelic trip into a cave of the mind,’ Costas said. ‘That transatlantic current dumps you in the Caribbean, right? Sounds good to me. I want a tropical island.’

  Lanowski peered at him. ‘My girlfriend says every man needs his cave.’

  ‘And she wants to get into yours?’ Costas asked.

  ‘It’s no different from the cave you disappear into every night in the basement of the engineering department at IMU, hatching mini-ROVs.’

  ‘Don’t. Little Joey. It’s still too raw.’

  Jeremy came back into the room, stopped before reaching them and pointed. ‘Hey, Costas. Have you seen that?’

  Costas glanced back at the ROV monitor. ‘My God,’ he said hoarsely. While they had been talking, the screen had come to life. He quickly got up, pushed aside the chairs and sat down at the monitoring station, his eyes glued to the screen. Lanowski came up quickly behind him and leaned over the control panel.

  ‘There may be some electrical impulse still left that could knock the camera askew. Until we’re sure this image is recorded, let’s keep hands off the control stick.’ He tapped the keyboard, downloading the video stream, and Jack stared in astonishment at the underwater image on the monitor. He could see tendrils like monofilaments in the water, the glassy discharge from phreatic explosions. He imagined a horrifying scene directly behind the ROV, a billowing wall of lava completely sealing the entrance to the inner sanctum where he had peered in only a few hours ago. Even at this remove the view seemed confining, claustrophobic. He concentrated on the stone wall visible in the background. Like the other parts of the cave wall, it had been smoothed down, but he could just make out the ghosts of older carvings, similar to the ones that stood out starkly in front of them.

  ‘They’re symbols,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Symbols carved on the wall. And look,’ he said in hushed tones. ‘The video’s live. You can see tiny bubbles rising in the water, gas from the lava.’

  Jack stared at the symbols. They seemed to have been crudely chiselled, as if done in a hurry. There were two separate clusters, each surrounded by a circle. Altogether he counted sixteen symbols: little spirals, stick-figure hands, triangles, zigzags, open angles, half-circles, groups of dots. Some appeared in both clusters, others in one only. At the centre of one cluster was a cross like an X, and in the other a slash with lines going out from it like a garden rake, repeated twice. The symbols presented an extraordinary image, like nothing else they had seen in Atlantis, evidently carved in the dying moments of the citadel, yet almost immeasurably old to those last Atlanteans, originating far back in the Ice Age.

  ‘I recognize these,’ he said. ‘They’re found in Palaeolithic cave art. Some archaeologists have dubbed them the Stone Age code, but nobody really knows what they mean.’

  ‘Look at that one,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s like a precursor to the Atlantis symbol.’ Jack saw where Costas was pointing. Instead of the fully formed Atlantis symbol – the one that they had interpreted as the form of a spirit bird, an eagle or a vulture – this looked like one wing of a bird, a straight line with four parallel lines extending from it. The symbol appeared three times at the same sloping angle with the parallel lines going off to the left, and once the other way round with the lines going right.

  ‘Isn’t this up Katya’s street?’ Jeremy said. ‘Prehistoric symbology?’

  ‘In fact, isn’t this whole thing up her street?’ Costas said, looking quizzically at Jack. ‘She was pretty well in at the outset five years ago, our expert palaeographer, then there was al
l the involvement of her father the warlord in trying to get those nukes off the Russian sub that sank beside Atlantis.’

  Jack gave Costas a wry look. ‘That’s precisely why she’s not involved. Her father met his end here, remember? But I’ve always left the door open for her. I called her yesterday evening before I flew here from Troy, and told her that if we found any more ancient symbols at Atlantis I’d let her know.’

  ‘But you’re involved, aren’t you, Jack?’ Lanowski said, pushing his glasses up his nose and peering at Jack like a doctor. ‘It’s common knowledge at IMU. That is, when you’re not involved with Maria. Costas explained it to me.’

  Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas, and then looked back at Lanowski. ‘I’m glad to see that even the most unimportant things don’t get past your radar now, Jacob.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lanowski exclaimed, shaking his head, peering furtively at the flashing email inbox message on his computer screen. ‘Oh, but they are important, Jack. Very important. I find you just can’t get away from them.’

  Costas grinned. ‘Back to prehistoric symbology, guys.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ Lanowski said with a smile, pulling a memory stick out of his pocket and plugging it into the console. ‘I can email a still from this video to her.’

  ‘I caught her in a taxi on the way from the Institute of Palaeography in Moscow to the airport, where she was flying to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan,’ Jack replied. ‘She should be at the petroglyph site at Cholpon-Ata beside Lake Issyk-Gul by now. They’re four hours ahead of us, so it’ll be near the end of their working day.’

  ‘She’s still digging up those petroglyphs?’ Costas said, shaking his head. ‘It’s been almost two years since we were out there.’

  ‘That’s archaeology for you,’ Jack said ruefully, reaching for his tablet computer as Lanowski saved the image. ‘There are thousands of boulder carvings beside the lake and many square kilometres still to be explored. Since finding the Roman legionary inscription that took us there two years ago, she’s worked backwards in time searching for the oldest petroglyphs, back to the Neolithic and even earlier. The place wasn’t just a Silk Road site, it was a major prehistoric migration point between East and West. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if one day she found evidence of a group of early Neolithic refugees from Atlantis heading towards China.’

  He took the memory stick from Lanowski, plugged it into his computer and took out his cell phone as he emailed the image. He found a saved number and then put it up to his ear, waiting. ‘During the summers, she’s out there with an international team, really well resourced after our board of directors agreed to fund the project,’ he said. ‘But out of season like now, it’s usually just her and Altamaty, like it was at the beginning.’ He suddenly looked away, putting his free hand over his other ear. ‘Hello? Altamaty? It’s Jack. I can barely hear you. It must be windy. I’ve got something for Katya.’ He strained to listen, and then took down the phone. ‘He’s digging out their laptop and getting the webcam up, and then he’ll go and find her.’

  Jack activated the webcam on his own computer and propped it behind the main console keyboard so they could all see. The webcam came on line, showing a shaky image and a pair of hands, evidently propping a laptop on a rock; then the image stabilized to reveal a bleak landscape of scrub and boulders with clouds racing overhead. A face appeared, a ruggedly handsome man with Mongolian features wearing a mountaineering jacket and a Kyrgyz woollen hat. After he had adjusted the position of the laptop again, they saw him lope off beside a tractor and wave, pointing back at the computer. A few moments later a woman appeared and walked towards them, taking off a pair of gloves. She was wearing hiking boots and jeans and a down jacket, and her long black hair was tied back behind her head. She came in front of the webcam, put down a trowel and brush, took a camera from around her neck, and then adjusted the screen. She had strong eastern features too, mixed with European, and dark eyes. ‘Hello, Jack. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon. It’s cold and windy here, so let’s be quick.’ She had a deep voice and spoke with a slight American accent. She wiped her nose and rubbed her hands together, then smiled again at him. ‘I can see you’re on Seaquest II, in the operations room. Have you done the dive? I miss you.’

  ‘I’m here with Costas and Jeremy and Jacob Lanowski, all watching you just off screen,’ Jack replied. ‘We’ve done the dive, and we’ve just had an image from the ROV taken inside a cave we didn’t see five years ago. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Take a look at the attachment we’ve just sent you.’

  She looked down to the side of the screen, evidently opening another window. Her eyes lit up and she stared for a few moments, then took out a notebook and flipped through it, holding the pages down in the wind. She stared again, and then looked back at the webcam. ‘You probably recognize these symbols from the cave at Lascaux in France,’ she said, angling her face away from the wind. ‘I know you and Maurice went there as students, because he talked to me about it. The symbols date across the entire range of Palaeolithic rock art, from about thirty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. Finding these symbols in Atlantis is completely consistent with the animal cave paintings there. The symbols appear in various numbers and combinations in caves across Europe and in rock art elsewhere, as far away as Australia and South America. Some of my colleagues believe that outside the main area in southern Europe, the similarity of the relatively small number of symbols found is just coincidence, that they were mostly simple enough for people to have invented them independently. But I don’t buy that. People moved around a lot in the Palaeolithic, and their shamans may have moved the most. If humans reached Australia by fifty thousand years ago, then they could have got anywhere else by sea, literally anywhere. To the Americas, for example, from Europe.’

  ‘We’ve just been discussing that,’ Jack replied. ‘So what about the Atlantis symbol? It’s fascinating. It looks as if that rake-shaped symbol is some kind of precursor.’

  ‘It makes perfect sense that the Atlantis symbol should have derived from a Stone Age one. Interesting that someone seems to have been trying to erase them.’

  ‘The big question,’ Jack said. ‘Are we looking at some kind of script? A code?’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing here now, at Cholpon-Ata,’ Katya replied. ‘Looking for rock inscriptions that might go that far back in prehistory. If the Stone Age symbols are a form of script, then it takes the history of writing back tens of thousands of years. I do think they have symbolic meaning, that they’re ideograms that may somehow represent the rituals carried out in those caves. The big breakthrough would be to find clear patterns of association, repeated clusters of symbols in the same order. That’s when this image from Atlantis could get really exciting.’

  ‘What about the clustering?’ Jack persisted. ‘Words, names?’

  ‘Possibly, but more as general ideograms or even mnemonics,’ she said. ‘There’s an old shaman in Altamaty’s Kyrgyz tribe who scratches simple signs like this into the sand or on a rock before he goes into a trance. The symbols by themselves don’t mean a sound or a word, but in clusters they represent the name of an ancestor, the spirit the shaman is trying to reach. They tend to be descriptive of what that ancestor had done in life, and are regarded as spirit names: “She who held the torch”, “He who would be a great hunter”. They can become generic, so that one particular ancestor becomes representative of many, and the shaman only scratches out a few of these formulae before he sets to work. What’s the context of your symbols? You said they’re in a cave.’

  Jack nodded. ‘We saw animal paintings too, just out of sight. Mostly late Ice Age – leopards, bulls – rather than megafauna such as woolly mammoths, so my guess is a late-Palaeolithic origin, about twelve thousand years ago. It seems to have been some kind of open-air sanctuary with a cave backdrop.’

  ‘You might expect to find more of these symbols, more clusters, if it was a place for shamanistic rituals.’

  ‘On the sc
reen here from the ROV we can see where other symbols, more deeply incised and clearly older, have been chiselled out and smoothed away on the surrounding rock. We think there was a religious transition going on, from shamanism to gods. It looks as if these two clusters of symbols you’re looking at were done hastily, scratched rather than carefully chiselled.’

  ‘Maybe as the flood waters rose,’ Katya suggested. ‘Some kind of desperate measure to evoke ancestors, perhaps. Shamans could have had those spirit names I was talking about while they were still alive, the names they were to be known by in death as their spirits were evoked. One can imagine the last shamans of Atlantis stuck in that place with the water rising and certain death ahead, knowing there would be no future shaman to call up their spirits and so scratching the symbols on that wall.’

  Costas coughed. ‘What about “Noah was here”?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Katya demanded.

  He craned his head close to Jack so the webcam caught him. ‘Noah was here. It’s just a name we’ve been bandying about. Noah and his Ark, thinking of the people who escaped from Atlantis.’