The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘And you think Schoenberg may be one of those.’

  ‘I don’t know. He may just be a retired scholar with a past that was beyond his control. But if I’m right and Saumerre has got to him, then we have to be doubly cautious, because he could be playing us too.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We’re looking for the site of Atlantis reborn, right? The place where the survivors of the exodus inscribed those symbols we know from Atlantis in the Black Sea, symbols that Himmler’s Ahnenerbe archaeologists who discovered the new Atlantis copied in that secret chamber in Wewelsburg that Frau Hoffman showed us. We know from her that the new Atlantis was where Himmler decided to build his secret hideaway, the destination for the U-boat dispatched with Hoffman and his deadly cargo in the final days of the war. We know that he shrouded the place with the mystique of Atlantis, which had for so long been the obsession of the Ahnenerbe, a mystique that may continue to motivate a man like Schoenberg. We’re on this trail now with such urgency because of the deadly virus that may have been successfully delivered by the U-boat to this new Atlantis, a virus Saumerre desperately wants to get his hands on. A man like Schoenberg could be caught in between, ignorant of the deadly biological weapon and Himmler’s true purpose, but passionately believing in the association of the place with the dream of revealing the Aryan roots of civilization that he now wants to see fulfilled before he dies.’

  ‘So you think Saumerre could have made a deal with him.’

  ‘I think Saumerre may have told him to give us all the information he has. Remember, Saumerre wants us to find this place. He has his contracted thugs, the Chinese gangsters of Shang Yong, but he doesn’t have the resources or the expertise to follow the archaeological trail we’re now on. He’s watching and waiting for us to get there. As soon as he knows enough to allow him to organize the logistics needed to get his men in place with the right equipment, he’s going to have a go again at kidnapping Rebecca so that he can blackmail me into revealing the location. It’s why I asked Mikhail to get Rebecca out of school to his place in the Adirondacks. I’m not going to let that happen again.’

  ‘You’d give away the location if it came to it?’

  Jack gave him a steely look. ‘I have a plan.’

  ‘Okay. Just keep me in the loop.’ Costas looked out, shading his eyes, and pointed ahead. ‘That must be it now.’

  Jack saw a narrow strip of beach on the shoreline to the right, and the eaves of a low wooden house in the forest behind. He turned the boat towards the beach, throttled down and stood up, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the painter line to steady himself. He steered into a small cove beside a spine of rock jutting into the bay, and then brought the boat against a small floating dock. He sat down, flipped the gear lever to neutral and threw the painter line to Costas, who leapt out and secured it to a wooden post. After switching off the engine, Jack climbed out, and together they made their way along a rickety boardwalk towards the beach.

  He clicked on his cell phone and paused to read two urgent text messages, one from Lanowski and one from Katya. He called Costas back. ‘Incredible stuff. It really takes us forward. You remember Lanoswki’s Plato code, the idea that Plato and Solon before him embedded Pythagorean messages in their texts? Well, take a look at this. He’s found a code in Solon’s text, the Atlantis papyrus that Maurice and Aysha discovered in the desert five years ago.’

  Costas peered at the message. ‘He says it’s a simple geometric code, easy enough to understand if you play chess in three dimensions. Typical Lanowski. For easy, read impossible. Sounds like he’s found a soulmate in Solon.’

  Jack scrolled down. ‘Lanowski translates the ancient Greek as The priestess prophesied that the new Atlantis would be founded over the western ocean, where the palladion becomes heavy again and where the two mountains form a saddle and two peaks like the horns of a bull.’

  ‘That’s what Lanowski thinks Solon was told by the high priest at Saïs, but that he instructed Solon not to write it down because it was sacred.’

  Jack nodded. ‘It’s fantastic. Remember the weight of meteoritic iron along the North Anatolian Fault, at Atlantis, and the shape of the volcano? It may simply be saying that the new Atlantis will be founded at a site very similar to the old, but if that’s what the fleeing Atlanteans were looking out for, so should we.’

  ‘You’ve got something from Katya too? Not personal?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Read it. She’s worked on those Stone Age symbols on the cave wall at Atlantis. She’s convinced they’re syllabic, and two proper names. It seems incredible, but the nearest equivalents among known early names she can come up with are Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh.’

  ‘Not really so incredible though, is it, Jack? They’ve been staring at us from the Epic of Gilgamesh all along.’

  ‘And now we know they’re embedded in the reality of the Neolithic, in Atlantis,’ Jack said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Maybe that’s who we should be trying to see, real men, not mythical demigods, when we imagine a voyage west to that place where the palladion was heavier and the mountain had twin peaks.’

  Costas jerked his head up to the treeline. ‘We’d better get moving if we’re going to use our time well.’

  Above the berm of seaweed at the high-tide mark were huge bleached logs that had been washed in by winter storms, jumbled on the beach like a line of natural sculpture. They clambered over them and made their way up a wooden stairway towards the house. They could see an old man with a stick waiting for them, wearing a bandanna neck scarf and a straw hat. Jack raised his arm, and the man waved back, then beckoned for them to follow him as he turned towards the open screen door of the veranda.

  18

  Ten minutes later, Jack and Costas were sitting in wicker chairs around a low glass-topped table piled high with books and papers, with steaming mugs of coffee in front of them. Schoenberg had taken his hat off to reveal a full head of white hair, neatly swept back. He was a tall man, lean-limbed, with fine features, and moved with an easy confidence. It was hard to reconcile the genial image with the world the man had grown up in and his role in it, and for a fleeting moment Jack thought that maybe he had been wrong, that the man should be judged for what he had become and what he had made of his life. He looked at the brown leather document case that Schoenberg had placed on the table between them. They had exchanged niceties and news of Dillen’s latest work, but Jack had remembered that Schoenberg was not one for small talk.

  ‘I’ve been hoping for this moment for many years, to share what I know with the right person,’ Schoenberg said, his German accent still marked despite more than half a lifetime in Canada.

  ‘James Dillen said it was most important that I come to visit you now. I’m fascinated to hear what you have for us.’

  ‘You are, I know, very familiar with the Periplus Maris Erythraei.’

  Jack stared at him, then nodded. ‘The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, written in Greek in Egypt. One of the most extraordinary ancient texts on seafaring and maritime exploration to survive. Two years ago, we discovered a Roman shipwreck in the Red Sea with a huge trove of gold bullion destined for India, the best corroboration yet of the ancient trade across the Indian Ocean described in the Periplus.’

  ‘I followed the excavation on your website. It was a marvellous discovery. Then you know something of the Heidelberg Codex?’

  ‘Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, containing the Periplus? A compilation of copied ancient texts on geography and exploration put together in about the tenth century, probably in a monastery in the Byzantine East. My colleagues Maria de Montijo and Jeremy Haverstock travelled with me to Heidelberg University to examine it. They’ve done a complete palaeographic analysis of the text of the Periplus, and Dillen has been working on a new translation.’

  ‘Ah. He didn’t say. We’ve been out of touch since my retirement.’

  ‘I expect he wanted to tell
you first about the new passages of Homer, The Fall of Troy. They came from the ancient library we discovered three years ago in Herculaneum. That’s been the huge excitement of the last year, in conjunction with the excavation at Troy, which has even produced a wall painting of a bard called Homeros.’

  Schoenberg nodded, his eyes rapt. ‘A remarkable find. Remarkable. Your work is so much what I envisaged all those years ago, when there were those of us in the Ahnenerbe, the genuine scholars, not the charlatans and the frauds, who saw our future had we won the war just as you must have first envisaged your own institute.’

  Costas narrowed his eyes, and Jack said nothing for a moment, watching Schoenberg, then took a sip of coffee. ‘Back to the Periplus. While Costas and I were excavating the shipwreck, Maurice Hiebermeyer and his team dug up a Roman merchant’s house at the Red Sea port site of Myos Hormos. They found fragments of inscribed potsherds that seemed to be a first draft of the Periplus, containing digressions that were excised from the final version, the one copied by the monk who compiled the Codex Palatinus Graecus. One of the digressions mentioned Roman legionaries who escaped from Parthian imprisonment and went east through the mountains of central Asia towards China. Following that lead put us on the trail of a group of Romans who thought they’d found their own El Dorado, who had heard about the fabled riches of the First Emperor Shihuangdi’s tomb in China. They never made it that far, but settled on the distant reaches of the Silk Road, where their descendants still live today.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Blond-haired, blue-eyed? We heard these rumours in the 1930s. Himmler wanted to find descendants of the Aryan master race who might still exist in pockets of racial purity in isolated places around the world, as well as in Germany.’

  ‘The trail got us in a little bit of trouble, as usual,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Marxist guerrillas in the Indian jungle, then the cross hairs of a sniper in Afghanistan. We came up against some pretty sinister modern-day opponents.’

  Jack glanced at Costas, then looked back at Schoenberg. ‘They were a Chinese secret society. For more than two thousand years they had been on the trail of a fabulous jewel they thought had been stolen by one of the custodians of the First Emperor’s tomb. The search for the jewel became enshrined in their mythology, the basis for a warrior cult. The society today is a fully modern criminal cartel steeped in the drugs and arms trades, with its headquarters somewhere in the Taklamakan Desert. But finding the jewel remained their paramount obsession. They thought one of the Romans had taken it from the fleeing tomb custodian two thousand years ago, and that we knew where it was. They’re called the Brotherhood of the Tiger, and the one who undertakes the quest to find the jewel is the Tiger Warrior. Have you heard of them?’

  Schoenberg looked taken aback, then pointedly shook his head. ‘I’m just a scholar.’ He smiled, then curled his lip. ‘But you have nothing to fear. When I was still an undergraduate at Heidelberg in 1938, I was specially selected above dozens of others to join an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. We of course encountered many Mongoloids there, including agents of Chairman Mao sent to keep an eye on us. You were in no danger. They are an inherently weak race.’

  Jack sat back. ‘All I know is that I personally shot the latter-day Tiger Warrior in a remote valley in Afghanistan. As far as I know his bones still lie there along with the dream of the jewel. Our information led to the Brotherhood’s activities outside China being shut down, and all they are now is a gang of guns for hire. Their leader Shang Yong would like to see me dead, but any threat he poses will evaporate in about a week’s time, when Chinese internal security finally takes out his headquarters in the Taklamakan. Any promise Shang Yong might make to his clients now is as hollow as the place in his fantasy world for that jewel. One thing, though, that his men are very good at is assassination. Once he realizes he is under threat, I have no doubt he will send out his remaining thugs to kill his clients to cover his tracks.’

  Schoenberg looked uncertain for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively as if ignoring what Jack had just said. ‘You two, James Dillen, your palaeographers, your divers. A team effort. That’s what I love about your projects. They remind me of the best of our research in the 1930s, bringing together the clues that led us on fabulous expeditions to Tibet, to the Andes, to Iceland. It was an exciting time.’

  ‘All in the cause of Nazism,’ Costas murmured. ‘Searching for evidence of racial superiority.’

  Schoenberg gave him a cold look. ‘Not all of us were ardent Nazis. And we had no choice. Either we worked for the Ahnenerbe, or Himmler put us on the blacklist of dissidents who ended up in Dachau. I personally found the anthropological research distasteful, but measuring skulls and photographing racial types seemed harmless. It was only later that we realized how much this was fortifying Himmler’s views. None of us had any idea then where it would lead. And for us as young men, searching for a lost Aryan civilization, for Atlantis, was a huge adventure. Surely we were not the only nation to use archaeology to search for our roots.’

  ‘You were the only one to use archaeology to help justify the extermination of an entire people.’

  Jack gave Costas a warning look, seeing Schoenberg watching him. ‘Atlantis. That’s what we’re here to talk about, isn’t it?’

  Schoenberg nodded, his lips pursed, then turned to Jack. ‘I am not an apologist for Nazi extremism, but I want to tell you how it was. We were not all madmen and psychopaths.’

  Jack looked at him impassively. ‘James Dillen holds your classical scholarship in high regard.’

  ‘I was a sane man trapped in a lunatic asylum. Wewelsburg Castle was the asylum, and I did all I could to avoid spending time there. The expeditions were my escape, and we always found new reasons to go, to justify ever more fantastic projects. The moment I stepped away from the castle, I could look forward to the fresh air of the mountains, the sea, the ice, the thrill of new horizons to explore.’

  ‘Atlantis was one of those projects?’ Jack asked.

  Schoenberg paused. ‘There were many schemes. You have heard of “world ice theory”, Welteislehre, yes? We were supposed to believe that our Nordic ancestors grew strong in a world of ice and snow; ice is the cosmological heritage of Nordic man. For a time, I had to teach this nonsense at the SS ideology school at Wewelsburg.’

  Costas cleared his throat. ‘Did you teach them that world ice theory was promoted by the Nazis as the antithesis of the theory of relativity, which was seen as abhorrent because Einstein was Jewish?’

  Schoenberg waved his hand. ‘More nonsense. More fantasy.’

  ‘The type of fantasy that helped to tip Himmler towards the Final Solution.’

  Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas. ‘Atlantis. Carry on, Professor.’

  Schoenberg paused. ‘Atlantis was another of the schemes. Himmler was under the spell of a man named Karl Maria Wiligut, who claimed to be the last in a line of ancient sages who told of lost cities and vanished civilizations.’

  Costas glanced at the notebook he had taken from his pocket. ‘Wiligut. That rings a bell. Hard name to forget. Here we are. Karl Maria Wiligut also taught that the ancestral enemies of the German people were the Jews. Founder of an anti-Semitic league. Head of the Department for Pre- and Early History within the Race and Settlement Office. Funny name for a scholarly institution, don’t you think?’

  Schoenberg opened his arms and sat back. ‘Is this to be an interrogation?’ he said, looking at Jack.

  Costas stared at him, then closed his notebook and put it in his pocket. ‘Do carry on, please.’

  Schoenberg paused, then leaned forward again. ‘In the mind of Himmler, Atlantis was the ancient foundation civilization, the original Aryan homeland. It existed in the Age of Ice, and evidence for it was to be found in Iceland, in Greenland, under Antarctica, high in the glaciers of the Alps and the Andes and the Himalayas, where people might live who were genetically untainted descendants of the original Atlanteans. But those of us who were genuine scho
lars knew better. When your IMU team discovered the Neolithic citadel in the Black Sea, I felt an extraordinary vindication. If Plato’s Atlantis was based on reality, we knew it could not have been in some remote location but must have been a vanished civilization of the Old World, right in the heartland of the first civilizations. The revelations of the Bronze Age, of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, of Troy, showed how much had been lost to history, and we assumed that Atlantis would be another civilization like that, waiting to be rediscovered by some latter-day Schliemann. But I also believed that a precocious early civilization would have spread its wings. My private quest was not to find Atlantis, but to find Atlantis reborn. We guessed that the most famous Bronze Age civilizations, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Minoans, might owe their extraordinary achievements to some precursor civilization, to refugees from Atlantis. But where else might the Atlanteans have gone?’

  Jack leaned forward. ‘Did you find clues in the Heidelberg Codex?’ Schoenberg’s eyes lit up with fervour. ‘When the order came from Himmler to scour the ancient sources in the search for Atlantis, Heidelberg was the first place I went. I’d been just about to start research for my doctorate at the university when I was fingered for the Ahnenerbe. My subject had been another periplus, the ancient Periplus of Hanno, one of the other texts bound up in Codex Palatinus Graecus 398 with the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.’