“Jack! Look at me. Everything’s all right. It’s gone.”
Costas stared into Jack’s wide-open eyes and gripped him by the shoulders. As the noise of the water jet subsided and he began to hear his exhaust again, Jack heaved a shuddering breath and began to relax.
It was Costas. He was still in the chamber.
“It must have been one of the bodies Kuznetsov ejected from the torpedo tube. Got lodged in the rock niche and was then blown out by the water jet. Not a pretty sight.” Costas gestured towards the white-flecked form now wafting in the water towards the submarine’s casing, its torso obscenely mangled where Costas had punched it aside, causing the adipose tissue that still clung to the skeleton to disintegrate.
Instead of revulsion Jack felt an enormous elation, the exhilaration of the survivor who has faced oblivion and beaten it. The rush of adrenaline would propel him through whatever lay ahead of them.
Katya had been blown back by the force of the water against the membrane and had been oblivious to his panic. Jack looked up at her and spoke hoarsely through the intercom, his breath still coming in ragged bursts.
“My turn for a shock, that’s all.”
She could never know the demons that had haunted him, the force that had beckoned him on and nearly spelled the end for him.
The swirling maelstrom ended and the water attained a limpid clarity soon after the turbulence had ceased. Costas’ eyes remained locked on Jack’s until he could see he had fully relaxed. After a moment Costas reached down and undid the Velcro straps that held Jack’s fins to his legs, pulling the silicon blades over his feet and snapping them in place.
Jack rolled over and watched the bubbles from his exhaust coalesce into little pools of translucence that wobbled and shimmered into each other on the ceiling of the membrane. He felt his cylinder pack scrape along the bottom and quickly injected a blast of air into his suit to achieve neutral buoyancy.
Costas swam from the casing towards the rock face. As he reached it an incomprehensible high-pitched noise filled their earphones. Jack found himself shaking uncontrollably, the terror of the last few minutes having transformed into delirious relief.
“Hey, Mickey Mouse,” he said. “I think you should activate your voice modulator.”
The combination of extreme pressure and helium distorted the voice to a comical degree, and IMU had developed a compensating device to avoid precisely the response Jack was finding so difficult to control.
“My apologies. I’ll try again.” Costas turned a dial on the side of his visor. He found a best-fit frequency and switched to automatic, ensuring the modulator would respond to changes in pressure and gas make-up as their depth altered.
“Andy has relaxed the magnetization to make the membrane semi-flexible, allowing the ambient pressure of the sea to pass through into this space and match the pressure of the water behind that door. It’s 9.8 bar, almost 100 metres. At this depth the trimix only gives us half an hour.”
With their headlamps reduced to half-beam to limit the reflection, they could make out more features of the entranceway. On each panel was the magnificent bull’s horn symbol which had been visible in the hologram, life-size forms, beaten in gold, which stood out in low relief.
Costas extracted another contraption from his tool belt.
“Something I knocked up in the geophysics lab at IMU,” he said. “Ground penetrating radar, generating broadband electromagnetic waves to reveal subsurface images. We call them acoustic flashlights. The GPR signal only goes five metres but should tell us whether there’s solid obstruction on the other side.”
He extended the transducer antenna and swam to and fro along the base of the entraceway, eventually coming to rest beside the crack between the doors.
“It’s clear,” he announced. “No resistance after half a metre, which must be the thickness of the doors. I looked closely along the lower jamb and there’s nothing that should cause us trouble.”
“Metallic corrosion?” Katya enquired.
“Gold doesn’t corrode perceptibly in seawater.”
Costas replaced the unit in his belt and arched his fingers over the sill below the doors. He pulled his body back and forth a few times, then rested.
“Here goes,” he said.
In a sudden frenzy of finning he rocketed himself forward, bringing the full force of his body to bear on the door. He continued heaving for a few moments before settling down exhausted. The doors seemed like solid rock, the two-metre-high outline mere etchings on the cliff face.
“Nothing doing,” he gasped bleakly.
“Wait. Look at this.”
Jack had been hovering a metre above and had been enveloped in a sheen of bubbles from Costas’ exhaust. His eye had been caught by a curious feature refracted through the turbulence, an anomaly too small to have been picked up by the hologram laser.
It looked like a shallow, saucer-sized depression centred between the two sets of bull’s horns. The crack between the doors was concealed beneath it, making it seem like a seal stamped into the metal after they had been shut for the last time.
Katya moved up beside him and reached out to touch it.
“It feels crystalline,” she said. “It’s complex, lots of right angles and flat planes.”
The crystal was immaculate, so nearly flawless it was almost invisible. The movement of Katya’s hand as she traced the shape looked like the gesticulations of a mime artist. It was only when they dimmed their headlamps that a form began to emerge, the light refracting like a prism to reveal lines and angles.
When Jack moved, the lines suddenly coalesced into a familiar shape.
“My God,” he breathed. “The Atlantis symbol!”
For a moment they stared in amazement, the trials of the last few hours suddenly fallen away as they were sucked back into the extraordinary excitement of discovery.
“In the Aquapods we saw the symbol carved into a roundel in front of the pyramids,” Jack said. “It would seem consistent to have it here as well.”
“Yes,” said Katya. “A sort of talisman to proclaim the sanctity of the place.”
Costas pressed his visor against the crystal. “The carving’s incredible,” he murmured. “Most silica compounds wouldn’t last this long in seawater with such high sulphur content without forming a reaction patina.”
Jack’s mind was racing as he stared at the door. Suddenly he grunted and pulled out an oblong package which he had wedged in beside the Beretta.
“I brought along a little talisman of my own.”
He unwrapped the copy of the gold disc from the Minoan wreck. As he turned it over to reveal the symbol, the light from his headlamp danced off the surface.
“Behold the key to Atlantis,” he said jubilantly.
Costas erupted with excitement. “Of course!” He took the disc from Jack and held it up. “The convex shape exactly matches the concavity on the door. The symbol on the disc is in reverse, pressed into the metal, whereas the crystal is a mirror image in obverse. The disc should fit like a key into a lock.”
“I had a hunch it might prove useful,” Jack said.
“That door isn’t going to budge an inch,” Costas said. “This could be our only chance.”
Jack finned upwards a few strokes until he was directly in front of the symbol on the door, Katya immediately to his left.
“Only one way to find out,” he said.
AS JACK ALIGNED THE DISC WITH THE DOOR the crystal seemed to be pulling him in, as if some primeval force were drawing together two halves of a whole which destiny had kept apart for too long. And sure enough, the disc mated with the crystal and slid smoothly inwards until it was flush with the doors.
“Bingo,” he said quietly.
He placed his palm on the disc and kicked hard with his fins to bring pressure to bear. Abruptly the disc sank inwards and spun rapidly clockwise, the motion causing the water to corkscrew like the wake from a propeller. As it stopped turning there was a low grinding noise, the disc disengaged and the doors swung ajar.
There was little resistance as Jack pushed the doors wide. Their view was momentarily obscured by the sheen of turbulence where ice-cold water inside mingled with the seawater around them. Jack sucked in his breath to conceal a spasm of pain, a stabbing sensation where the tear in his suit had exposed his chest to the freezing water. The other two saw his agony but knew he would rebuff their sympathy.
Costas had floated over the sill and was examining the mechanism revealed in the edge of the door.
“Fascinating,” he murmured. “The door was held by a granite beam like a crossbar, in two lengths scarfed together. The upper surface has been carved into ridges and furrows like a cog. The crystal was embedded in a stone cylinder with matching ridges. When Jack pressed the disc, the cogs engaged.”
Costas prised the disc from the crystal and passed it to Jack for safekeeping.
“How did it spin on its own?” Katya asked.
“The ends of the beam are weighted, probably inside cavities adjacent to the jambs. When the cog was engaged, the weights pulled the two lengths apart, spinning the cylinder.”
“To onlookers the automation would have seemed miraculous, the work of the gods,” Jack said.
“An impressive piece of engineering.”
“Simplicity of purpose, economy of design, durability of materials.” Costas grinned at them through his visor. “It would have won first prize hands down in the student competition at MIT when I was there.”
They turned their headlamps on full beam. The water ahead was crystal clear, free from contaminants in the thousands of years since it first seeped through the cracks in the doorway.
The light sparkled off the rock walls as their beams traversed from side to side. They were looking into a rectangular chamber the size of the torpedo room in the submarine. Immediately in front was a massive pedestal hewn from the living rock.
“It’s an altar!” Jack exclaimed. “You can see the channels where the blood spilled down the stairs outside.”
“Human sacrifice?” Costas queried.
“It has a long history among the Semitic peoples of the Near East,” Katya said. “Think of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament.”
“But never on a mass scale,” Jack countered. “The story of Abraham and Isaac is powerful precisely because it’s exceptional. The Minoans also sacrificed humans, but the only evidence is a peak sanctuary near Knossos where an earthquake toppled the temple in mid-ritual and preserved the skeleton. It was probably only ever performed in relation to catastrophes like the eruption of Thera.”
They were finning towards the pedestal in the centre of the chamber, their beams converging on the edge of the sacrificial platform. As the top came into view they were confronted by an image almost too fantastic to comprehend, a spectre that vanished like a genie as soon as they came close to it.
“Did you see what I saw?” Katya breathed.
“Extraordinary,” Costas murmured. “The bones must have disintegrated thousands of years ago, but in the stillness the calcium salts remained where they fell. The slightest disturbance and it disappeared like a puff of smoke.”
For a split second they had seen a recumbent bull, its giant shape reduced to an imprint of white streaks like a faded photographic negative. In the corners of the table they could make out holes where its limbs had been tied down before the sacrifice, the rope long since disappeared as the seawater rose and took the carcass in its icy embrace.
Jack picked up a dagger lying on one side of the table. The stone handle was incised with a fearsome beast, half bull, half eagle.
“There’s your answer,” he said softly. “The courtyard with the colossal statue by the shoreline was the world’s first bullfighting arena. The doomed animals were led up the processional way between the pyramids and then driven up the stairs to this slab. It would have been a spectacular site, overlooking the entire city on the plain below, the sacrifice perhaps timed to coincide with the first flash of sunlight overhead through the twin peaks of the volcano to the horns of the bull-sphinx in the courtyard far below. The whole city must have come to a standstill.”
He paused and looked at the other two solemnly through his visor. “We’ve just borne witness to the final sacrifice, the last desperate attempt by the priests to repel the rising seas before the doors to this chamber were locked shut for all time.”
They finned over the altar and headed towards a yawning black hole in the rear of the chamber. The shimmer grew more intense as they swam forward, the light from their headlamps sparkling off the walls as if they were billowing curtains of crystal and gold.
“Golden-walled Atlantis,” Jack said quietly.
Just before they reached the portal, Costas veered off to the right, his beam reduced to a narrow orb as he closed in on the wall.
“It’s iron pyrites, fool’s gold.” His voice was hushed in awe. “The crystals are so large and close-set they look like gold plate until you get close up.”
“But the island’s volcanic, made of igneous rock,” Katya said.
“Mainly basalt,” Costas agreed. “Molten magma that cooled too quickly for mineral crystals to form. The basalt between the cliff and the ancient shoreline was low in silica so cooled slowly as it flowed out over the limestone substrate. Further up it formed from acidic lava rich in silica that solidified as soon as it hit the surface. In the Aquapods we saw fissures of obsidian, the black volcanic glass that forms when rhyolitic lava is quickly chilled.”
“Obsidian blades were the sharpest known until the development of high-carbon steel in the Middle Ages,” Jack said. “That dagger was obsidian.”
Costas came towards them along the back wall. “Incredible,” he mused. “Obsidian for tools, tufa for masonry, volcanic dust for mortar, salt for food preservation. Not to mention the richest farmland anywhere and a sea teeming with fish. These people had it all.”
“What about the granite in the doors?” Katya persisted.
“Also igneous,” Costas replied. “But it’s not the result of volcanic eruption. It’s an intrusive rock that forms deep in the earth’s crust as the magma slowly cools, producing crystalline structures dominated by feldspar and quartz. It’s called plutonic after the Greek god of the underworld. It was thrust upwards by plate tectonics.”
“That explains another resource,” Jack interjected. “The pressure also metamorphosed seabed limestone into marble, providing fine-grained stone for those sculptures outside. There must be outcrops lower down these slopes and on that ridge to the west.”
“We’re inside a composite volcano,” Costas continued. “A combination cinder cone and shield volcano, the lava interlayered with pyroclastic ash and rock. Think Mount Saint Helens, Vesuvius, Thera. Instead of building up behind a plug and erupting explosively the magma wells up through a folded outcrop of plutonic rock and solidifies as a basaltic shield, an event repeated every time the pressure builds up. My guess is that the deeper reaches of this rock are a seething cauldron of gas and lava that force their way through fissures to leave a honeycomb of passageways and caverns. Deep down this volcano is literally riddled with rivers of fire.”
“And the fool’s gold?” Katya asked.
“An unusually dense node of iron forced up with the granite. Slow cooling deep in the earth’s crust formed huge crystals. They’re fabulous, a unique discovery.”
They turned back for one last look at the world they were leaving. In their headlamps the water was suffused with colour, the light sparkling off the rock in a shimmer of gold.
“This chamber is a geologist’s dream,” Costas murmured reverentially. “Polish it up and you’ve got a spectacle that would dazzle any onlooker. To the priests it must have seemed a godsend. An awesome complement to the pyrotechnics of the volcano itself.”
Beyond the silhouette of the altar they could just make out the casing of the submarine at the end of the tunnel. It was a reminder of the sinister enemy that barred their way back to the world above, that their only hope of rescue for Ben and Andy lay in the pitch-blackness ahead.
Before confronting the forbidding darkness of the portal, Costas finned back to the centre of the chamber. He extracted an item from his tool belt and swam round the altar before returning, an orange tape reeling out of a spool on his backpack.
“It’s something I thought of when you were telling us of legends that hark back to conflict between the Mycenaeans and Minoans in the Bronze Age,” he explained. “When Theseus arrived at Knossos to kill the Minotaur he was given a ball of thread by Ariadne to guide him through the labyrinth. Under this rock we have no access to GPS and can only navigate by dead-reckoning with compass and depth gauge. Ariadne’s thread may be the only safety line we’ve got.”