David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Jeremy nodded. ‘The ancestor theory fits in with what our bones lady thinks. The plastered skulls are all disarticulated, right? There are no neck bones attached. There’s no evidence of trauma injury. These skulls were taken from bodies that were already skeletonized.’

Jack reached for his tablet computer, dragged his fingers over the screen and showed it to Jeremy. ‘There’s a lot of vulture imagery from Atlantis and the other Neolithic sites. Look at this one: a painting of a vulture pecking at a headless corpse from Catalhoyuk. And here’s a vulture from Atlantis, from one of those stone pillars above the skulls, another image taken by my helmet camera. You can see a carving of a great bird of prey with a human arm clutched in its talons. It looks like a Mayan thunderbird, a spirit bird, but is probably meant to be a real bird of prey. I’m convinced we’re looking at evidence for sky burial – for excarnation – with bodies being exposed to be consumed by vultures like Zoroastrian sky burial today in India. That sanctum at Atlantis was originally partly open to the air beside a platform on the flank of the volcano, and I believe that sky burial was one of the functions of these temple sites before the pillars were erected. The birds may have been seen as spirit birds, and by consuming human flesh they may have been able to transport the spirits of the departed to the other world. Seeing this now, I think the Atlantis symbol may not have been an eagle as we supposed, but instead a vulture, a spirit bird.’

Jeremy nodded. ‘Now for that X-ray vision I was talking about. Prepare to be amazed.’ He zoomed in, tapped a key and sat back, and they watched while the screen repixellated. ‘This is a composite CGI of what you just saw, using the GPR data.’ The screen transformed into an image showing far more than was visible with the naked eye, shapes and artefacts that were buried beneath the lime encrustation. Costas whistled, and Jeremy pointed at the skull in the centre of the image, one that had been visible only in vague outline before. ‘This is one of the unplastered skulls, a child about nine or ten years old. Look closely and you can see that four of the neck vertebrae are still attached. You wouldn’t get that if you’d taken the skull from a properly skeletonized body, with all the ligaments gone. And then look over there, beneath the lime accretion on the floor.’

‘Holy cow,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘It’s a complete skeleton.’

‘Nearly complete,’ Jeremy corrected. ‘And that wasn’t just dumped there. Look, you can see dark rings where the wrists were lashed together, probably copper wire. There’s a little reed flute in one of the hands. This was a fully articulated fresh corpse, with musculature and sinews intact when the waters rose and it was encased in lime. I said nearly complete. The head’s missing. And it isn’t another body. It’s the same body. The number of missing neck vertebrae match those on the child’s skull.’

Costas looked at Jeremy aghast. ‘Do you think this child was killed by being beheaded?’

‘That’s what I thought at first. But then I emailed this image to our bones lady. She zoomed in on the skull, and pointed this out. You see? It’s been bashed in on one side. And look at the shapes of the objects buried in the lime just below it. There’s some kind of mace, a stone-topped wooden hammer. And that leaf-shaped thing in the foreground is a chipped stone knife, ripple-flaked, almost certainly obsidian. You see what I’m getting at? What Costas said about the Aztecs might not be that far off the mark.’

‘That child was sacrificed,’ Costas whispered.

Jeremy zoomed out from the skull to reveal a panorama of the chamber, showing the circle of pillars and the stone basins rising up between the skulls. ‘Look at the relationship between the skeleton and the skull and that stone basin. It makes sense of the basin, don’t you think? It was an altar. A sacrificial altar.’

Jack wondered whether the basins were windows into the depths, into the underworld, some kind of visionary device. He remembered the dark red stain on his glove when he put his hand into the basin. ‘We know they sacrificed bulls, because we found the remains of one five years ago spread over a large stone table at an entrance chamber into the volcano. But this is a revelation. It’s horrifying. Human sacrifice.’

Jeremy leaned back. ‘I think that child was killed by being bludgeoned with the mace. Then it was bled from the neck into the basin, and the knife was used to behead it. Separate the head from the body, and maybe you dispatch the soul to the spirit world. Maybe the blood in the basin was a conduit, a river, fitting in with those altered-consciousness visions we were talking about. Maybe the sacrificer also travelled that river, a portal to the spirit world opened up by the act of sacrifice.’

‘With implements specifically designed for the purpose,’ Jack murmured. ‘Obsidian blades like that one have been found in caches in houses at Catalhoyuk, and have long been suspected to have symbolic significance. And those stone basins look much older than the pillars, carved out of the living rock. They were part of the ancient function of this chamber way before the flood.’

‘Wasn’t there a tradition of child sacrifice in the Near East?’ Costas said. ‘I mean the Old Testament account of Abraham and his son Isaac. And the Phoenicians, and their successors in the west Mediterranean, at Carthage. When we’ve been at the IMU museum at Carthage I’ve often walked around the tophet, where the children were supposedly sacrificed.’

‘But we know child sacrifice may have been exaggerated by the Romans,’ Jack said, staring pensively at the image. ‘It may only have been in times of extreme duress, in the case of the Carthaginians when they were faced with annihilation by the Romans.’

‘But isn’t that what we’re seeing at Atlantis?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, extreme duress? The flood waters rising, and no way out?’

That was it. And no way out. Jack remembered the walled-over chamber, the pillars freshly carved and the old paintings erased. Had this been a newly refurbished temple, on the verge of being revealed as the flood waters came, but instead used as a dungeon for the last remaining shamans, their death chamber? He stared at the skeleton. Had those people been driven in desperation to take human life, when the blood of bulls had no longer been sufficient?

‘It wasn’t just children,’ Jeremy said. ‘The osteologist reckons there are at least twelve other trussed-up bodies in there, all of them articulated skeletons and all of them decapitated. They seem to be of widely varying ages, adults and younger, probably male and female. Visionary ability is often perceived to be passed down in a family, isn’t it, from parent to child? That’s what I think we’ve got here. I think we’ve got entire families being locked in this chamber. It’s a really chilling image, like those Jewish families trapped at Masada by the Romans. It’s as Costas says: people driven to it by extreme duress.’

‘You mean driven to sacrifice?’ Costas said.

‘Call it sacrifice. Or call it assisted mass suicide.’

They were all silent for a moment, staring at the image. Costas coughed, and then spoke quietly. ‘So let me get this right. In this Garden of Eden, at the dawn of civilization, you’ve got vultures picking away at dismembered corpses. You’ve got a new order of priests that make the Jesuits of the Inquisition look like angels, forcing people to hack out limestone pillars and drag them up the volcano to make this temple, a temple to themselves, the new gods. And you’ve got an old order of shamans, off their heads on some kind of psychedelic trip, trapped in this death chamber and performing human sacrifice. And all of that while the flood waters are rising, and their world is being annihilated.’