They had passed the Sea of Marmara and were flying over the Bosporus. The clear air of the Aegean had transformed into a haze of smog from the sprawl of Istanbul. They could just distinguish the Golden Horn, the inlet where Greek colonists founded Byzantium in the seventh century BC. Beside it a forest of minarets poked up out of the morning mist. On the promontory they could make out the palace of Topkapi, once the very symbol of oriental decadence but now one of the finest archaeological museums in the world. Near the seafront were the great walls of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which kept Rome alive in the east until the city fell to the Turks in 1453.
“It’s one of my favourite cities,” Jack said. “Once you find your way around, it’s got the richest history you can imagine.”
“When this is over I’d like you to take me there,” Katya said.
Ahead lay the Black Sea, the broad sweep of coast on either side of the Bosporus seemingly extending to infinity. The GPS showed the final leg of their journey due east to a position some ten nautical miles north of the Turkish port of Trabzon. Jack opened the IMU channel on the VHF relayer and engaged the scrambler, punching in a routine position fix for the crew of Sea Venture.
Moments later a blue light flashed on the lower right-hand corner of the screen above the central console.
“Incoming email,” Costas said.
Jack double-clicked the mouse and waited while the address appeared.
“It’s from Professor Dillen. Let’s hope it’s his translation of the Phaistos disc.”
Katya leaned forward from the back seat and they waited in hushed anticipation. Soon all the words were visible on the screen.
My dear Jack,
Since our teleconference last night I have worked flat out to complete the translation. Much has depended on the co-operation of colleagues around the world. The Linear A archive found at Knossos last year was parcelled out to many different scholars for study, and you know how protective academics can be of their unpublished data—remember the trouble we had accessing the Dead Sea Scrolls when we began our search for Sodom and Gomorrah. Fortunately most scholars of Minoan epigraphy are former students of mine.
Only the obverse of the second disc was meaningful. The attempt to conceal the true text was even more extensive than we thought.
Our mysterious symbol occurs twice and I have simply translated it as Atlantis.
Here it is:
Beneath the sign of the bull lies the outstretched eagle god. (At) his tail (here is) golden-walled Atlantis, the great golden door of the (citadel?). (His) wingtips touch the rising and the setting of the sun. (At the) rising of the sun (here is) the mountain of fire and metal. (Here is) the hall of the high priests [Throne room? Audience chamber?]. Above (here is) Atlantis. (Here is) the mother goddess. (Here is) the place (of) the gods (and) the storeroom (of ) knowledge.
I do not yet know what to make of this. Is it a riddle? Maurice and I are eager to know what you think.
Yours ever,
James Dillen
They read the translation several times in silence. Costas was the first to speak, his mind as ever seeking practicality where others saw only mystery.
“This is no riddle. It’s a treasure map.”
JACK! WELCOME ABOARD!”
The voice was raised above the din of the Rolls-Royce Gem turboshafts as they powered down. Jack had just stepped out onto the inflatable skid landing gear, a modification of the usual fixed-wheel naval configuration that allowed the IMU helicopters to land on water. He hurried over to shake Malcolm Macleod’s outstretched hand, his tall frame stooped low as the rotor shuddered to a halt. Costas and Katya followed close behind. As they made their way below, several of the crew scurried round the Lynx, securing it to the deck, and began offloading gearbags from the cargo bay.
Sea Venture differed from Seaquest only in the range of equipment suited to her role as IMU’s chief deep-sea research vessel. She had recently conducted the first manned submersible survey of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. Her present role in the Black Sea had begun as a routine sedimentological analysis but had now taken on a startling new dimension.
“Follow me to the bridge console.”
Malcolm Macleod led them below the same dome-shaped screen they had viewed on Seaquest. Macleod was Jack’s counterpart in the department of oceanography, a man whose expertise Jack had come greatly to respect through their many collaborative projects around the world.
The burly, red-haired Scotsman sat down in the operator’s chair beside the console.
“Welcome to Sea Venture. I trust your inspection can wait until I show you what we’ve found.”
Jack nodded. “Go on.”
“Do you know about the Messinian salinity crisis?”
Jack and Costas nodded but Katya looked perplexed.
“OK. For the benefit of our new colleague.” Macleod smiled at Katya. “Named after deposits found near the Strait of Messina in Sicily. In the early 1970s the deep-sea drilling ship Glomar Challenger took core samples across the Mediterranean. Beneath the sea floor they found a huge layer of compacted evaporates, in places three kilometres thick. It formed during the late Miocene, the most recent geological era before our own, around five and a half million years ago.”
“Evaporates?” Katya asked.
“Mainly halite, common rock salt, the stuff left when seawater evaporates. Above and below it are marls, normal marine sediments of clay and calcium carbonate. The salt layer formed at the same time across the Mediterranean.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means the Mediterranean evaporated.”
Katya looked incredulous. “The Mediterranean evaporated? All of it?”
Macleod nodded. “The trigger was a huge drop in atmospheric temperature, a far colder spell than our recent Ice Age. The polar ice trapped a vast amount of the world’s oceans, causing the sea level to fall as much as five hundred metres. The Mediterranean was sealed off and began to dry up, eventually leaving only brackish mire in the deepest basins.”
“Like the Dead Sea,” Katya suggested.
“Even more saline, in fact barely liquid at all. Too salty for most life, hence the paucity of fossils. Large areas became desert.”
“When did it fill up again?”
“About two hundred thousand years later. It would have been a dramatic process, a result of massive melt at the Poles. The first trickles from the Atlantic would have become a torrent, the biggest waterfall ever, a hundred times bigger than Niagara, carving the Strait of Gibraltar down to its present depth.”
“How is this relevant to the Black Sea?” Katya asked.
“The Messinian salinity crisis is an established scientific fact.” Macleod looked across keenly at Jack. “It will help you believe the unbelievable, which is what I’m going to tell you next.”
They gathered behind Sea Venture’s remote operated vehicle station on the far side of the console. Macleod invited Katya to sit behind the screen and showed her how to use the joystick.
“Think of it as a flight simulator. Use the joystick to fly it any way you want, up or down, sideways or backwards. Speed control is the dial on the left-hand side.”
Macleod put his hand on Katya’s and executed a full clockwise circle, pulling it round at maximum depression. The wide-format video screen remained pitch-black but the direction indicator spun through 360 degrees. The depth gauge read 135 metres, and a set of GPS coordinates showed the ROV’s position with an accuracy deviation of less than half a metre.
Macleod pulled the stick back to its default alignment.
“A freefall spin followed by a perfect recovery.” He grinned at Jack, who well remembered their ROV dogfights when they had trained together at the IMU deep-sea equipment facility off Bermuda.
“ROVs have been used extensively by scientific teams for a couple of decades now,” Macleod explained. “But over the last few years the technology has become increasingly refined. For exploratory survey we use AUVs, autonomous operated vehicles, which have multitask sensor packages including video and side-scan sonar. Once a target is identified we deploy direct-control ROVs. The IMU Mark 7 we’re operating here is not much larger than a briefcase, small enough to penetrate a sub-sea vent.”
“You can turn one of these babies on a dime,” Costas added. “And the Doppler radio-pulse control means it can go fifteen nautical miles horizontally or straight down to the deepest abyss.”
“Nearly there,” Macleod interrupted. “Activating floodlights.”
He depressed the joystick, flipping several switches on the console panel as he did so. Suddenly the screen came to life, the inky blackness replaced by a brilliant shimmer of speckles.
“Silt,” Macleod explained. “Our lights reflecting off particles disturbed in the water.”
They began to make out something more substantial, a shadowy background which gradually came into clearer view. It was the sea floor, a bleak, featureless expanse of grey. Macleod switched on the ROV’s terrain-contour radar which showed the seabed sloping down on a 30-degree gradient from the south.
“Depth 148 metres.”
A strange tower-like structure suddenly hove into view and Macleod halted the ROV a few metres away.
“Another of Costas’ ingenious contraptions. A remote-operated excavator, capable of drilling cores a hundred metres below the seabed or airlifting huge volumes of sediment.” With his free hand Macleod reached into a box beside his seat. “And this is what we found just below the sea floor.”
He passed Katya a shiny black object the size of his fist. She weighed it in her hand and cast a quizzical look.
“A beach pebble?”
“Worn smooth on the seashore. All along this gradient we’ve found evidence of an ancient coastline, one hundred and fifty metres deep and ten nautical miles from shore. Even more astonishing is its date. It’s one of the most remarkable discoveries we’ve ever made.”
Macleod punched in a set of GPS co-ordinates and the image on the screen began to move, the floodlit sea floor showing little change as the ROV kept to the same depth contour.
“I’ve put it on autopilot. Fifteen minutes to target.”
Katya handed back the blackened beach pebble. “Could this be associated with the Messinian salinity crisis?”
“We certainly would have put it before the arrival of humans—or rather, hominids—in this region two million years ago.”
“But?”
“But we would have been wrong. Wildly wrong. Submerged shorelines are hardly unusual in our line of work but this one’s big news. Follow me and I’ll show you.”
Macleod downloaded a computer-generated isometric map of the Black Sea and the Bosporus.
“The relationship between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea is a kind of microcosm of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,” he explained. “The Bosporus is only about one hundred metres deep. Any lowering of the Mediterranean below that depth and it becomes a land bridge, cutting off the Black Sea. These were the conditions that allowed the first hominids in Europe to cross over from Asia.” He moved the cursor to highlight three river systems leading into the sea.
“When the Bosporus was a land bridge, evaporation caused the Black Sea to lower, just like the Mediterranean in the salinity crisis. But the Black Sea was replenished by river inflow, from the Danube, the Dnieper and the Don. A median was reached where the rate of evaporation equalled the rate of inflow, and from then on the change was in salinity, with the Black Sea eventually becoming a vast freshwater lake.”
He punched a key and the computer began to simulate the events he had been describing, showing the Bosporus becoming dry and the Black Sea lowering to a point about 150 metres below present sea level and 50 metres below the floor of the Bosporus, where its level was maintained by inflow from the rivers.
He swivelled round and looked at the others.
“Now for the surprise. This is not an image from the early Pleistocene, from the depths of the Ice Age. What you’re looking at is the Black Sea less than ten thousand years ago.”
Katya looked dumbfounded. “You mean after the Ice Age?”
Macleod nodded vigorously. “The most recent glaciation peaked about twenty thousand years ago. We believe the Black Sea was cut off some time before that and had already dropped to the hundred and fifty metre contour. Our beach was the seashore for the next twelve thousand years.”
“Then what happened?”
“It recapitulates the Messinian salinity crisis. The glaciers melt, the Mediterranean rises, water cascades over the Bosporus. The immediate cause may have been a retreat phase some seven thousand years ago in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We believe it took only a year for the Black Sea to reach its present level. At full flow almost twenty cubic kilometres poured in daily, resulting in a rise of up to forty centimetres a day or two to three metres a week.”
Jack pointed at the lower part of the map. “Could you give us a close-up of this?”
“Certainly.” Macleod tapped a sequence and the screen zoomed in on the coast of northern Turkey. The isometric terrain mapper continued to depict the topography of the land before the inundation.
Jack edged forward as he spoke. “We’re currently eleven nautical miles off the north coast of Turkey, say eighteen kilometres, and the depth of the sea below us is about one hundred and fifty metres. A constant gradient to the present seashore would mean a rise of about ten metres for every kilometre and a half inland, say a ratio of one to one hundred and fifty. That’s a pretty shallow slope, hardly noticeable. If the sea rose as quickly as you indicate, then we’re looking at three or four hundred metres being flooded inland every week, say fifty metres a day.”
“Or even more,” Macleod said. “Before the inundation, much of what lies beneath us was only a few metres above sea level, with a sharper gradient close to the present shoreline as you begin to ascend the Anatolian Plateau. Within weeks huge areas would have been swamped.”
Jack looked at the map in silence for a few moments. “We’re talking about the early Neolithic, the first period of farming,” he mused. “What would conditions have been like here?”
Macleod beamed. “I’ve had our palaeoclimatologists working overtime on that one. They’ve run a series of simulations with all possible variables to reconstruct the environment between the end of the Pleistocene and the inundation.”
“And?”
“They believe this was the most fertile region in the entire Near East.”
Katya let out a low whistle. “It could be an entirely new tapestry of human history. A strip of coast twenty kilometres wide, hundreds of kilometres long, in one of the key areas for the development of civilization. And never before explored by archaeologists.”
Macleod was twitching with excitement. “And now the reason you’re here. It’s time to return to the ROV monitor.”
The seabed was now more undulating, with occasional rocky outcrops and furrowed depressions where there had once been ravines and river valleys. The depth gauge showed the ROV was over the submerged land surface, some fifteen metres shallower and a kilometre inland from the ancient shoreline. The GPS co-ordinates were beginning to converge with the target figures programmed in by Macleod.
“The Black Sea should be an archaeologists’ paradise,” Jack said. “The upper hundred metres are low in salt, a relic of the freshwater lake and a result of river inflow. Marine borers such as the shipworm Teredo navalis require a more saline environment, so ancient timbers can survive here in pristine condition. It’s always been a dream of mine to find a trireme, an ancient oared warship.”
“But it’s a biologist’s nightmare,” Macleod countered. “Below a hundred metres it’s poisoned with hydrogen sulphide, a result of the chemical alteration of seawater as bacteria use it to digest the huge quantities of organic matter that come in with the rivers. And the abyssal depths are even worse. When the high-saline waters of the Mediterranean cascaded over the Bosporus they sank almost two thousand metres to the deepest part of the sea. It’s still there, a stagnant layer two hundred metres thick, unable to support any life. One of the world’s most noxious environments.”
“At the Izmir NATO base I interrogated a submariner who had defected from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet,” Costas murmured. “An engineer who had worked on their top-secret deep-sea probes. He claimed to have seen shipwrecks standing proud of the seabed with their rigging intact. He showed me a picture where you could even make out human corpses, a jumble of spectral forms encased in brine. It’s one of the spookiest things I’ve ever seen.”
“Almost as remarkable as this.”
A red light flashed in the lower right corner of the screen as the GPS fix converged. Almost simultaneously the seabed transformed into a scene so extraordinary it took their breath away. Directly in front of the ROV the floodlight reflected off a complex of low-set buildings, their flat roofs merging into each other like an Indian pueblo. Ladders connected lower and upper rooms. Everything was shrouded in a ghostly layer of silt like the ash from a volcanic eruption. It was a haunting and desolate image, yet one which made their hearts race with excitement.
“Fantastic,” Jack exclaimed. “Can we take a closer look?”
“I’ll put us where we were when I called you yesterday.”
Macleod switched to manual and jetted the ROV towards an entrance in one of the rooftops. By gingerly feathering the joystick he moved inside, slowly panning the camera round the walls. They were decorated with moulded designs just visible in the gloom, long-necked ungulates, ibexes perhaps, as well as lions and tigers bounding along with outstretched limbs.
“Hydraulic mortar,” Costas murmured.
“What?” Jack asked distractedly.
“It’s the only way those walls can have survived underwater. The mixture must include a hydraulic binding agent. They had access to volcanic dust.”
At the far end of the submerged room was a form instantly recognizable to any student of prehistory. It was the U-shape of a bull’s horns, a larger than life carving embedded in a wide plinth like an altar.
“It’s early Neolithic. No question about it.” Jack was ebullient, his attention completely focused on the extraordinary images in front of them. “This is a household shrine, exactly like one excavated more than thirty years ago at ?atal Hüyük.”
“Where?” Costas enquired.
“Central Turkey, on the Konya Plain about four hundred kilometres south of here. Possibly the earliest town in the world, a farming community established ten thousand years ago at the dawn of agriculture. A tightly packed conglomeration of mud-brick buildings with timber frames just like these.”
“A unique site,” Katya said.
“Until now. This changes everything.”
“There’s more,” said Macleod. “Much more. The sonar shows anomalies like this along the ancient coast as far as we’ve surveyed, about thirty kilometres either way. They occur every couple of kilometres and each one is undoubtedly another village or homestead.”
“Amazing.” Jack’s mind was racing. “This land must have been incredibly productive, supporting a population far larger than the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and the Levant.” He looked at Macleod, a wide grin on his face. “For an expert on deep-sea hydrothermal vents you’ve done a pretty good day’s work.”