Alex Archer - The Lost Scrolls

A young woman sat perched on a stool by the photographic table, at the other end from the bulky camera itself, which was mounted on a heavy mobile stand. Now she pushed off and came sauntering over. She was strikingly pretty, with pale blond hair done in pigtails that made her round-cheeked face look even younger than it probably was. Her eyes were big and blue, if currently half-lidded as if with contemptuous disinterest. She wore a tight black-and-red top that showed off her healthy figure and an extremely short skirt with horizontal stripes in red and black. For all the horizontal stripes and harsh colors she was stunning looking; Annja fought down an inclination to hate her.

As she approached the flat-screen monitor Annja felt uneasy. China-doll perfect the young woman’s appearance may have been, but she gave a strong impression of negativity.

Excited as they were, the other team members moved back from the screen as she approached. The young woman leaned in, jaw working on a wad of gum.

“Not too close, Jadzia,” the man at the keyboard said. “You are the anticomputer geek.”

She gave him a baleful squint and snapped her gum at him. She stuck a finger toward the screen. The guy at the keyboard seemed to wind up tighter and tighter the closer her fingertip, the nail painted black, got. She read in a bored voice:

“—had in their possession most marvelous stones, like unto gemstones, such as rubies or emeralds, but the size of goose’s eggs, wherein they stored a force as potent as the lightnings. Perhaps this blasphemy, this stealing of the very thunder of mighty Zeus, evoked his wrath and caused him to cast down that which belonged by right to Poseidon.”

She shrugged, popped her gum, straightened up with a little headflip. “That’s it for this page. The break was a physical one. Nothing to translate.”

Everybody cheered and hugged each other and exchanged high fives. Annja noticed nobody tried to embrace the pigtailed blond girl.

“Can she really just read it like that?” Annja asked the air.

She didn’t expect to be answered in the hubbub. But beside her boomed the ever-cheerful voice of Dr. Pilitowski. “Ah, yes, she can. This is the noted Jadzia Arkadczyk. She holds degrees in cryptology and linguistics. She has a remarkable gift for languages. She is, quite simply, beyond genius.”

Annja studied the young woman, who seemed content to stand looking offhandedly at the screen, soaking up the arm’s-length adulation of her comrades. Annja had her own gift for languages. It had formed a key part of her love for travel and adventure.

“I’m impressed,” she said.

Maria was speaking to the girl and nodding at Annja. Jadzia turned and looked at the visitor for the first time. Her blue eyes flew wide.

“I know you!” she exclaimed. “I have seen you on Chasing History’s Monsters .”

“Well, yes, I appear on the show from time to time,” Annja said with authentic modesty. She did not want to be known primarily for her association with the program. Especially among peers as distinguished as these.

“You are the woman they bring on when they wish to cover something up,” the girl went on, voice rising accusatorily, “and undo all the good work done by poor Kristie Chatham!”

“They despised everything but virtue,” Annja read, the bubbly water, still hot, gurgling to the slight motions of her body as she kept the book braced open against her drawn-up knees.

Photographic specialist Rahim al-Haj had lent her a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, well grimed and dog-eared by the team, as she took her leave of the recovery site late that afternoon. Unwinding in her hotel room after dinner in one of her favorite fashions, she was reading what Plato had written about Atlantis.

The legend claimed there had been an island outside the Pillars of Heracles, “larger than Libya and Asia put together.” Whatever Plato meant by Asia. A big island, to be sure.

The Atlanteans, the story said, made war on Europe. The Athenians, eventually standing alone, had defeated them. Then violent earthquakes had occurred, followed by floods. In a single day and night the island of Atlantis and all its people disappeared in the depths of the sea. That sounded pretty final to Annja. It did intrigue her that the Athenians apparently suffered greatly from the same catastrophe.

“You never hear that part of the myth when people talk about Atlantis,” she said aloud.

There was a lot of discussion about the founding of Athens. It intrigued Annja to read of what seemed to her to be an equality of men and women in ancient Athens, including in warfare. She was also struck by the claim that Greece had once been a wonderfully green and fertile peninsula that had suffered sorely from millennia of soil erosion. She wondered if there might be something to that part, anyway.

At last the narrative wandered around to Atlantis. It had been built by the sea god Poseidon to impress his human love, Cleito. It was a land of fertile fields, concentric circles of canals, elephants, that sort of thing. She made note of several details to take up with her hosts in the morning.

What made the biggest impression on her was the interval of nine thousand years since the supposed fall of Atlantis. She put her book up on the rim of the sink and closed her eyes and tried to wrap her mind around it.

As someone who had studied geology, and a bit of paleontology, as part of her formal education, she had little trouble coping with nine millennia. In geologic terms it was a fraction of a second.

But for a coherent account of events to survive for nine thousand years—for any kind of knowledge to be transmitted over such a yawning gulf of time—that just made her jaw sag in disbelief.

She was well aware that archeology, especially the relatively new but fruitful practice of applying modern forensic techniques to archeological evidence, was showing that as often as not the written histories bore only a passing resemblance to what could be physically demonstrated to have really happened. History was perhaps not bunk—not altogether. But to say it was inexact was like saying it snows at the North Pole.

Could any meaningful, let alone accurate, information be transmitted over nine thousand years? She doubted it.

And yet…the legend of Atlantis had persisted all that time. It had exercised a fascination on the human imagination continuously since Plato had recorded it. Does that count for something?

She shook her head. Weariness was getting the better of her. She’d been going pretty hard of late, to say the least. She stood up with a slog of water and a cascade of soapy foam down her long smooth body and legs, and drew the curtain around the tub to shower off before heading to bed.

IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT. Annja had spent the day down in the excavation itself, painstakingly helping to extract burned scrolls from the rubble of the burned cabinets. She was exhausted and felt sticky from sweat, although here in the main lab inside the old warehouse it was quite cool. Apparently the Supreme Council on Antiquities was willing to spring for air-conditioning. Or maybe the television network was springing for it—she was grateful to whomever.

She noticed Jadzia lurking off to one side. The girl was fanning herself with a sheaf of fanfolded paper and trying to chat up a handsome young Egyptian technician working on a computer near her. Either he was shy or deliberately ignoring her. She caught Annja’s attention, glared and looked away.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annja said, propping her rump on a table. “Wasn’t the Minoan civilization destroyed by a great big volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C.?”

“Yes,” Pilitowski said. “The catastrophic eruption of Thera. It is now estimated to have been at least ten times as powerful as Krakatau in 1883.”