David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Costas put a hand on the ROV’s neck. ‘Little Joey will be following you. He can send back remote signals, but I’m keeping him on the tether in this place. If you see anything, hold him like I am and put him on to it. Remember, I’m seeing what he sees on the screen inside my visor. Just point and I’ll drive him forward. Then you come out, pronto.’

Jack stared at the ROV, its single camera eye encased in a sphere of glass. It angled its head around and looked at him, the black lens cap half-down like an eyelid. He realized that he was cocking his own head in the same way, as if they were querying each other. He shook his head in disbelief at what he had just done and looked away. The ROV was not alive. ‘Roger that.’

‘Remember what Macalister said. No disappearing down holes.’ Costas’ voice crackled. ‘That electromagnetic interference is increasing again. There must be a lot of ferrous material in the lava here. I may be out of contact with you.’

Jack surged forward, passing through the entrance and finning down the rock-cut tunnel. After about ten metres the tunnel became a T-junction. Jack stopped and checked his remaining time. Four and a half minutes. It had to be one or the other. The ROV came up alongside him and angled to the right, illuminating the passage. Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Jack, give me a confirmation on what you see. I think I’m looking at another entranceway.’

‘That’s an affirmation. But there’s one on the opposite side too.’

‘Little Joey’s pointing the way. Left would take you to the surface of the volcano, now under tons of lava. Right would take you towards the location of that open-air platform we saw five years ago, a more likely place for some kind of sanctuary.’

Jack heard crackling as Costas tried to say more, and then a low hum. Whatever it was that was causing the interference, this place was the epicentre. He had no time to weigh up the options. He swerved right and followed the ROV into the passageway, kicking hard to get beyond it. He swam about ten metres further, then followed the passageway as it veered left. Ahead of him the tunnel was partly blocked with rough-hewn squared stones that looked as if they had been hastily assembled. Whatever it was that had been beyond there on the eve of the flood seven thousand years ago, somebody had wanted it cut off. An aperture still remained, big enough for someone unencumbered to crawl through, but not big enough for a diver with gear. Jack rolled sideways to fit the hole and shoved his head through, his headlamp angled upwards. It was a chamber, maybe eight metres across. He could see jagged protrusions of lava from the eruption five years ago, visible beyond another wall of crude masonry that blocked what must have been the open front of the chamber, clearly a cave in the face of the volcano. He twisted to the left, lying on his back, and saw that the opposite side was natural rock, a wide opening that extended inwards. Big multifaceted crystals of quartz were visible in the wall just to his right. He flicked on his helmet video camera, moving his head from side to side to ensure maximum coverage, then struggled to twist around until he was lying on his front. He strained to raise his head up, angling the lamp as high as he could, then he froze with horror.

He was staring at a human face. It was a skull, embedded in the floor of the chamber. The bone had been plastered over and was partly covered with a rough calcite accretion that must have formed underwater after the flood. One eye socket was open, and the other was filled with plaster and a cowrie shell, as if the skull were staring at him through the slit. Jack instinctively recoiled, his breathing coming in short rasps, and then he forced himself to raise his head higher and look beyond. It wasn’t just one skull. There were dozens of them, all embedded in the floor and facing him, all of them plastered over in the same fashion. The accretion as well as the anoxic conditions of the water must have preserved them. Then he saw another skull lying on its side, unplastered, with the jawbone hanging away, and shapes on the floor covered with accretion. Beside the skull nearest to him was a stone basin about half a metre high on a plinth. He reached out his left arm and put his hand inside, scraping the interior, then pulled his hand away and stared at his glove. It was smeared in a thick, viscous substance that seemed to have lined the bottom of the bowl, some kind of residue. He brought his hand under his headlamp beam and stared at it, his heart pounding. The substance was a deep maroon colour.

He was not only looking at the people of Atlantis. He was touching their blood.

He propped himself up on his elbows, straining his neck up as far as he could. His beam flashed on the interior wall of the cavern. To his astonishment, he saw the shadowy outline of paintings on the rock, ibex, leopards, great horned bulls, faded and ancient. In one part he thought he saw where they had been erased, the rock scrubbed clean. He strained up further, and then he froze again.

Towering above the floor were giant pillars, twenty or more of them, their tops extending outwards in a T-shape. They looked freshly cut, with sharp edges; and had not been hewn out of the living rock but hauled here from somewhere else. The arms were carved with outstretched hands, and other relief carving adorned their sides: swirling abstract forms, parts of human bodies, leopards and bull’s horns, scorpions, a vulture. One swirling circular shape might have been a human face, but he could not be sure. As he looked around, he realized that the outer pillars formed a circle about eight metres across, with pairs of pillars within the circle. His mind reeled. A stone circle. The pillars confronted him like the skulls, ghostly sentinels from the past. Jack felt a shiver down his spine. Were these pillars statues of men, or were they gods?

In a flash, he remembered what he had come here to see.

The birth of the new religion.

The death of the old.

The threshold of a new world order, seven thousand years ago, at the dawn of civilization.

His time had run out.

He struggled backwards, grabbed the ROV and shoved it into the hole, leaving it sitting on its hind legs with the camera aimed inwards. He ripped a small tube out of his sleeve pocket and quickly took a scrape sample from the floor of the chamber. Little Joey’s head turned and eyed him, cocked sideways, and then swivelled back to look into the chamber. Jack disentangled his fins from the tethering line and crouched into a ball, rolling round and extending his legs so that he could fin back along the passage. He pulled hard with his hands at first, anxious not to dislodge the ROV, and then he powered ahead towards the T-junction. As he did so, the low hum and crackle in his intercom suddenly became shouted words. ‘Jack! Get out of there now!’

He surged forward and veered into the main tunnel facing the entrance to the magma chamber, where Costas should have been visible. What he saw instead was an image from hell. A surge of lava was lapping towards him, five metres or more into the tunnel. All his instincts told him to go back, to seek some other way out, but he knew he had to go forward and swim over the lava to where he could now see Costas’ beam shining at him no more than ten metres away.

He finned frantically, following the tethering line for the ROV. After five kicks he was over the lava, almost within touching distance. He was being pushed against the roof of the tunnel, and realized to his horror that the boiling water above the lava was rising and forcing him upwards. He remembered his failing coolant system. He was beginning to overheat. The sweat dripped off his face on to the interior of his visor, and he could see the outside of his suit crinkling and turning brown. He was being cooked alive. Suddenly there was a yank on the tether line and he held on, feeling himself being pulled. He turned upside down and clawed his way along the ceiling, but then remembered his cylinder and air pack. He might survive the Kevlar on the front of his suit being scorched, but not his breathing gear. He turned over again, drew himself up into an upside-down crab crouch and pushed his feet and elbows against the rock, hopping forward a metre or so each time, trying to keep his helmet away from the lava. The sweat in the inside of his visor began to boil like spatters of water on an oven hot ring. He pushed one last time and was free, rocketing up into Costas in a tangle with the tethering line. He was dimly aware of Costas unhooking the line and fumbling with his wrist control panel, and he saw that the thermostat had been turned down to its lowest setting, ten degrees Celsius. Costas spun him round and stared him in the face. ‘There may be enough juice in that thing to give you a burst of cool air before it packs up. Can you feel it?’