The Gods of Atlantis Page 7

  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?’

  Jack felt the sweat drip into the corners of his mouth, and then he sensed the coolness. He opened his eyes, blinking the salt out, then reached with his lips for the water tube and sucked hard, grateful that he had not tried to come out upside down and cooked the water reservoir on his back. He spat out the mouthpiece after a few gulps, then gasped hard for a few moments while Costas looked him over. ‘I don’t see any sign of leakage in your e-suit. But the heat-resistant outer shell and the Kevlar is melted from your elbows and knees. You’re not going anywhere near lava again and surviving it. Which is a good thing, because as of about a minute ago, that option closed on us anyway.’

  ‘What option?’ Jack gasped. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the option of going back the way we came. The option that would have taken us close to the lava again. Take a look.’

  Jack floated free of Costas, kicking a loop of the tether cable away, then looked down. It was a terrifying sight. The lava below them had risen at least five metres in the time since they had exited the tunnel. He suddenly realized what Costas meant. He looked over to the tunnel entrance, where the borer had broken through into the magma chamber, their entry point. A great surge of lava flowed up into it, and then another. He spun around to Costas. ‘What are the options?’

  ‘When Lanowski and I took the submersible over the volcano, we saw a number of places where gas was escaping into the sea. Mostly they were pinpricks, but there was one really big flow. I took a GPS fix on it and I’ve just been trying to relate that to all the directional data I’ve got from our dive. I think it’s one of those two caverns above us.’

  Jack looked directly up, and saw two distinct areas of blackness in the rocky ceiling of the chamber some ten metres overhead. ‘Which one?’

  ‘We’ll have to take pot luck.’

  There was a heave in the water, and Jack looked down. To his horror he saw that the entire lava lake had surged upwards, and a great bulge like a wave was rippling towards them from the far side of the chamber. ‘Up! Now!’ he shouted. He finned hard, remembering to breathe out as he did so, then stopped and flipped round, heading back down. Costas was struggling with the tether cord, which was caught around the strap of one fin. Jack reached behind his breathing pack, whipped out his knife and pulled the serrated edge as hard as he could against the cord, sawing the knife against the metallic cable inside. The cord snapped and he pulled Costas’ foot away, smearing himself with the melting rubber of Costas’ fin. He finned frantically upwards, grabbed the cord at the back of Costas’ pack and yanked it to fill the emergency flotation wings in the shoulders of the e-suit. He exhaled forcefully to avoid an embolism and prayed that Costas was doing the same. The lava surge passed only a few metres below them, and seconds later they hit
the ceiling of the chamber, jarring against the lava. Jack still had his knife in his hand, and he stabbed it into Costas’ buoyancy aid to expel the air, watching as the bubbles from the torn fabric disappeared up into the darkness above. Costas pushed off, looking down at the melted remains of his fin, and then at Jack. ‘Phew. That was close.’

  Jack felt himself close to boiling point again. He took a slurp of his water, now unpleasantly warm, and looked down. The lava was surging up all round them, rising at a horrifying speed. ‘I think what we’ve got here is a major volcanic event,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘No kidding. It’s called an eruption. And with the lava pressing up into this space, the volume of water inside the chamber is decreasing and boiling up. There’ll be a flashpoint and another phreatic explosion and everything will vaporize, including us.’

  A lava fountain licked the bottom of the divide between the two caverns. ‘See that?’ Jack said. ‘We haven’t got any choice. It’s going to have to be this cavern.’ He pushed off the wall, and they both began swimming up. Jack glanced at his gauge. They were sixty-five metres below sea level, which put them about ten metres higher than the point on the outside of the volcano where they had left the sub. He looked at Costas. ‘Does that magic program of yours tell us how far away the sub is?’

  ‘The system’s crashed in the heat. But I think we’ve come in a curve, so not as far as we’ve swum. Maybe fifty metres from here, a bit more.’ They reached the top of the chamber, a jagged ceiling of solidified lava that looked like malformed stalactites, with deep cracks and crevices between. The upper recess was about five metres wide. Costas flicked on both of his headlamp beams and swam a circuit on his back, staring up, before returning to Jack’s position. ‘There are three possibilities. How much air have you got?’

  ‘Almost on reserve. Fifty-five bar.’

  ‘Okay. You vent carbon dioxide from your rebreather into one chamber, I’ll do mine in another. You’ve got about ten bar more than me left in your breathing gas, so for the third chamber vent some air straight from your tanks.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Jack followed Costas to the first hole and pressed the button that vented the accumulated carbon dioxide from his rebreather. They watched the bubbles ascend in the beam of Costas’ headlamps, and Costas peered hard while Jack looked down at the lava surging below them. ‘I can see where the gas is pooling against the ceiling,’ Costas said. ‘Nothing’s escaping.’ They moved to the next spot and repeated the process. An arc of lava shot up in the water to within a few metres of them. Costas looked at Jack. ‘Same story.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘This is it, then.’ They looked at each other, then peered down. Jack realized that the lava was rising with greater speed now because the cavern had narrowed, forcing the molten material upwards. ‘We’ve just run out of time.’ An upwelling of gas enveloped them and they both caught hold of a lava protusion just in time to prevent themselves from falling. They finned together up the last five metres, face to face, until they hit the ceiling. Jack saw something, twisted sideways and switched off his headlamp. It was a patch of green light coming down around a hanging pillar of lava about five metres away. He pulled his way over and peered at it, then looked upwards, his heart pounding. They might make it. He had a sudden thought, and turned to Costas. ‘You got any detonator cord?’

  ‘Never leave home without it.’ Costas quickly reached down into the Kevlar pocket on the waist of his suit. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘This rock isn’t part of the ceiling, it’s a dislodged chunk of lava that must have been blown up here during the eruption five years ago. You can tell because it’s wedged upwards, not downwards. A little help and it might go.’

  Costas clipped the detonator into the two-metre section of cord he was trailing, and wrapped it into gaps around the rock. ‘You ready?’ Jack gave the okay sign and swam back five metres to the other side of the recess, followed seconds later by Costas. ‘Turn your back to it and press your visor against mine.’ Costas held Jack tight. ‘Three. Two. One. Fire in the hole.’ There was a sharp bang, and Jack felt the shock wave ripple against his back; he was thankful for the Kevlar pressure suit. They both turned just as the lava chunk fell in a tumble of smaller pieces, splashing into the molten lava below them and exploding into fiery fragments that quickly melted and sank. Jack pulled Costas over to the hole and they looked up. There was a crack about a metre by half a metre wide, and above that he saw the open ocean.

  ‘There’s no way we’re getting through that opening with all this gear,’ Costas said.

  ‘We’ll have to ditch it and swim for the sub.’

  ‘This is a one-way ticket, Jack.’

  ‘But you’ll be there waiting for me.’

  ‘No. You first.’

  ‘No way,’ Jack said. ‘I need to see that you can get though that hole. You’re wider than me.’ In a few moves he stripped off Costas’ backpack, holding it in front of him with the air hoses still attached. Costas did the same for him, and they both floated under the crack. Jack felt the heat of the water searing into his elbows and knees where the thermal layer of the suit had melted. ‘Okay?’ he said. ‘Relax, take six long, deep breaths, then hyperventilate for four. Give me the okay signal when you’re ready.’ He heard Costas breathe fast and hard and hold his breath, and then saw him put his forefinger and thumb together in the diver’s okay signal. He quickly disengaged the hoses from Costas’ helmet and heaved him upwards, watching him disappear in a welter of bubbles. He breathed in deeply, then looked down. This was not happening. A huge ball of fire was surging towards him, an explosion of lava that would rip right through the crack and erupt on the surface of the volcano. He had no time to hyperventilate. He took one huge breath and held it, then pulled out his hoses. On a second’s impulse, he held the pack down and knocked open the safety release valve on the main tank, causing gas to rip out at high pressure. He held it for as long as it took to rocket through the crack into the sea above the volcano, then he let it spiral away. He finned frantically sideways just as the lava shot up in a geyser behind him, the force of the displaced water pushing him further. Below him the magma chamber imploded, the roof dropping into the space where they had been swimming only minutes before, now a fiery mass of molten lava.

  He spun around, disorientated, seeing the plume of red fall back into a slick mass on the seabed. He could see no sign of the submersible, nor of Costas. He sensed the shadow of Seaquest II far above, but ignored it. He would never make it to the surface. Then he saw a yellow smudge down the slope of the volcano. It was the light from the submersible’s lamp array that could be activated externally. Thank God. Costas had made it.

  He forced his vision to narrow into a tunnel, to exclude all sense of his surroundings other than his destination. He began to swim hard, ignoring the tightening in his chest, the feeling at the back of his throat that was his body’s first attempt to stop him breathing in water and drowning. He was eighteen metres, maybe fifteen metres away. He could see the submersible clearly now, a yellow cylindrical form about ten metres long, raised above the seabed on retractable legs, allowing divers to enter via a hatch in the floor. He saw Costas beneath it, frantically twisting something. The hatch swung open and Costas pulled himself upwards, his head out of sight, then dropped back down into the water, facing Jack. His helmet was gone, but he was wearing the black safety mask they kept as a backup in a pocket on their legs. Jack was ten metres away now, eight, focusing on Costas’ beckoning hands, trying not to black out. He felt his diaphragm heave upwards as his body counted down the final seconds to unconsciousness. The tunnel darkened, and his limbs felt impossibly heavy. Then he was grabbed and heaved upwards in a cascade of water. Costas slammed the locking points on either side of his helmet and the visor sprang open, flooding him with air.

  Jack settled back in the water in the open hatch in the floor of the submersible, breathing in great gulps, his arms draped over Costas’ shoulde
rs, his eyes dazzled by the fluorescent glow inside. He reached his left arm up to the camera pod on the front of his helmet, detached it and lowered it in front of his face, then pressed the record button. The little LCD screen lit up and showed a video image, at first a scatter of reflected light from particles in the water and then a sharp view of the chamber in the volcano. It was all there. It had been real. He saw the skulls, the basin, the paintings on the cave wall. The image zoomed in to his final discovery, the extraordinary pillars, and then it went blank. He carefully placed the camera pod on the floor of the submersible, then shut his eyes with relief and slumped back over Costas’ frame, breathing deeply, letting the energy return to his limbs.

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The bear hug.’

  Costas’ forearms were up on the edge of the floor, entirely supporting Jack’s weight, and his head was wedged sideways against Jack’s helmet. Jack gave a half-hearted kick, then slumped back. ‘Can’t,’ he gasped. They remained still for a moment, locked together, and then they both began to laugh uncontrollably. They kicked and heaved, and Jack pulled himself up until he was sitting on the edge of the hatch. He reached out to help as Costas clawed his way up on the other side and sat down heavily. They stared at each other’s dripping forms, and then reached across the water and slapped hands. Jack closed his eyes.

  They had come here on a wing and a prayer.

  But they had done it.

  They had returned to Atlantis.