Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis

“Then we need to keep moving,” said Kari. She took out the sextant arm. “Find where this needs to go.”

“Maybe we could just leave it here and pretend we put it back,” Nina said, not entirely joking.

“I think they might check,” replied Chase sarcastically.

“Well, it was a thought… Oh.”

They had reached the end of the passage.

Chase lifted the flashlight. Even its bright beam was almost lost in the huge room beyond.

“The Temple of Poseidon,” Nina whispered.

Chase stared in awe. “Bloody hell.”

By Nina’s estimate, the great chamber was two hundred feet long, half the length of the entire building, and nearly as wide. The vaulted stone ceiling, wreathed with gold and silver, rose like a cathedral roof, supported along its length by buttresses at the sides of the vast room. In each alcovelike space between the buttresses was a statue, glinting with the unmistakable color of gold. There were dozens of them, ranks of unimaginable riches.

But they were nothing compared to what had seized the attention of the three explorers. At the far end of the chamber, stretching to the very highest point of the ceiling nearly sixty feet above, was another statue.

Poseidon.

“My God,” said Nina as she walked towards it, any concerns about traps completely banished from her mind. “It’s just as Plato described it…”

“There was the god himself standing in a chariot, the charioteer of six winged horses, and of such a size that he touched the roof of the building with his head,’” recited Kari alongside her.

“You’d get a few quid for that on eBay,” Chase remarked.

“Those must be the hundred Nereids,” said Kari, ignoring him and pointing at a circle of much smaller statues around Poseidon’s chariot.

“Doesn’t look like a hundred to me,” Chase said as they headed for the giant statue.

“I bet there’s sixty-four of them,” said Nina. “In base eight, that would be the number as important as a hundred in base ten. Plato was using a word translated from a different numerical system, but the actual number it represented was different-”

“I count seventy-three,” interrupted Kari.

“What? Seventy-three?” Nina snapped incredulously. “What the hell kind of system would use seventy-three as an important number?”

“Nina? Seriously? We don’t care,” said Chase. “We’re here-now let’s do what we’ve got to do before we all get killed, okay?”

“Okay,” Nina pouted. “But it still doesn’t make any sense…”

Behind the massive statue was an opening leading to a flight of stairs. They ascended to find another chamber, smaller than the main temple, but even more elaborate-and extravagant. Although it was lower, the ceiling was vaulted to match the temple outside. But where that had been made from stone, this was something else.

“Ivory,” said Kari as Chase directed the torch upwards. She frowned. “According to Plato, the roof of the entire temple was meant to be lined with ivory…”

“This isn’t the Temple of Poseidon,” said Nina. “It’s a replica , a copy. The Atlanteans tried to re-create the citadel of Atlantis in their new home. I guess ivory was harder to come by here, so they made do with what they had… Whoa.” She came to an abrupt stop. “Eddie, give me the flashlight.” She snatched it from his hand. “We’ve found what we came for.”

She aimed the beam at the chamber’s rear wall. A warm reflected glow filled the room. Orichalcum.

The entire wall was coated with the metal, thin sheets inscribed with line upon line of ancient text. Nina quickly saw that it was another variation on the language, older, but no less advanced.

But that wasn’t what transfixed her attention. She played the torch over the large illustration dominating the wall, following the distorted but very familiar lines…

“Is that a map ?” Chase said in disbelief.

“It’s the Atlantic,” Nina whispered. “And beyond.”

Although inaccurate in detail, the shapes of the continents were impossible to mistake. The eastern coasts of North and South America on the left, Europe and Africa on the right. And past Africa, the map continued around into the Indian Ocean, tracing the shape of India itself and even parts of Asia. Lighter lines connected various points, apparently charting courses between ports and marking routes to settlements inland.

Most of the lines converged on something in the eastern Atlantic, the shape of an island found on no modern map…

“Jesus.” For a moment, Nina felt as though her heart had stopped. “We’ve found it. Atlantis. Right where I said it was.”

“My God,” said Kari, stepping forward for a closer look. “You found it! Nina, you found it!”

“We found it,” Nina replied, sharing her delight. “We did it, we found Atlantis!” For a moment she almost whooped with glee-until the reality of the situation returned to her. “Eddie, how long have we got left to get back?”

“Fourteen minutes. The only bit that’ll be tricky will be getting back through those poles with the spikes-we can do it in eight, if we shift.” Chase moved away from the map, spotting something in the rear corner of the chamber.

“So we’ve only got six minutes left to explore? Shit. Shit!” Nina banged her clenched fists against her thighs in utter frustration. “I need more time!”

Kari held out the orichalcum artifact. “Let’s find where this goes. If we can get back to the village in time, we might be able to convince them to let us back into the temple if we promise we won’t take anything. All we need are photographs…”

“It’s not enough,” Nina moaned, feeling everything she’d worked for slipping away. She knew there was no chance of the Indians allowing them inside the temple again-assuming they weren’t killed just to keep its mere existence secret.

“Hey.” At first Chase thought he’d found another exit, a chute leading downwards from the chamber. But a quick glance told him it was blocked, clogged by rough chunks of rock. That the debris was far from the exacting standards of the rest of the temple didn’t escape him, but then he saw something more interesting nearby. “Over here.”

Nina and Kari hurried over to find an altar, a high slab of polished black stone. On it rested several objects, all made of orichalcum.

“That must be the other part of the sextant,” said Kari, pointing at a flat pie-slice-shaped piece inscribed with Atlantean numerals. Nina quickly took off her pendant and held it against the bottom of the sextant. The curvature was an exact match.

“God, I had part of one like it all along,” she said, putting the pendant back around her neck. “Give me the arm.”

“How come the Nazis got away with that piece, but not the rest of them?” Chase asked.

“Maybe the men carrying the others were the ones we saw on the river.” Nina quickly placed the nub on the arm’s underside into the corresponding hole at the top of the triangle, swinging it around so the arrowhead scribed into its surface lined up with the mark above each number. “It works,” she said, with a mixture of vindication, and sadness that she wouldn’t be able to show anyone else her discovery. “Whatever they used as mirrors are missing, but you can see the slots where they’d fit. God, they really could calculate their latitude, over ten thousand years ago…”

“Okay, the thing’s home, let’s go,” said Chase.

Nina waved her hands. “Wait, wait!”

“Nina, they’re going to kill Hugo and the others, and us too if we don’t move our arses!”