The Atlantis Codex Page 21

  Ethan knew enough about the famous mathematician to be aware that he was able to think far ahead of his time, but building a working computer seemed beyond even that man’s prodigious intellect.

  ‘They couldn’t have done that, could they?’ he asked as they entered the interior of the ancient city, sheltered beneath its elaborate enclosure. ‘I thought that people back then believed the earth to be flat and at the center of the universe.’

  The voice that replied was heavily accented Greek.

  ‘A common myth.’ Ethan turned to see a slim, bespectacled man watching them, his shirt bearing an official identification patch. ‘The Greeks knew well that the earth was a sphere and that the other planets orbited the sun, and nobody but a handful of cranks has ever thought otherwise in the past three thousand or more years.’

  Ethan shook the man’s hand and saw that his ID badge bore the name Andres Gabris.

  ‘Do we know you?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘No,’ Andres replied, ‘but I was told that you would come here sooner or later and that I should keep an eye open for you.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Ethan asked, glancing warily around for any sign of Petrov’s murderous thugs.

  ‘Lucy Morgan told me,’ Andres replied. ‘She said that you would be following her and that you would need my help.’

  ***

  XXXI

  ‘Lucy was here? When?’

  Andres beckoned them to follow him into the interior of the city as he replied, the whole of Akrotiri concealed beneath a vast roofed enclosure. Ethan could see ranks of semi–excavated buildings stretching into the distance, tourists milling and pointing at the ancient structures.

  ‘She was here less than a week ago, and she came straight to me. I’m the researcher in charge of a section of the excavation called the West House. Lucy asked me if she could examine one particular part of the area in great detail.’

  Andres led them through the ancient remains of the city, and despite the fact that the buildings were now effectively indoors due to the protective canopies erected over the entire settlement Ethan was stunned at how easy it was to visualize how life might have been for the people who had lived here so many thousands of years before.

  The walls were incredibly smooth and the windows inside them were fitted with thick frames, no doubt to strengthen them against the earthquakes that would have frequented the volcanic island. Many of the buildings were still half buried in the ancient ash that had fallen on the site during the eruption, but Andres gestured to the floor as they walked.

  ‘What befell ancient Akrotiri is very similar to what happened to the Romans at Pompeii, with one major difference: the leaders of Akrotiri managed to evacuate their people before the city was consumed. That suggests they had plenty of warning that life was about to become impossible here.’

  ‘Solon’s description of Atlantis being beneath a plume of smoke and flame,’ Amber said softly as they walked. ‘The island might have been under the threat of an eruption for years, decades perhaps, enough time for the word of its appearance to get around to other cities and civilizations.’

  To Ethan’s surprise, Andres overheard Amber’s hushed words.

  ‘The Egyptians spoke of a land far away where the people lived with great technology but also under the threat of great danger,’ he said without looking around at them. ‘The descriptions matched closely some of the lesser known beliefs about Atlantis.’

  ‘Lucy mentioned that she was searching for the city?’ Lopez asked the Greek.

  ‘Of course,’ Andres replied. ‘It was one of the interests that we shared in our work. People think that we Greeks frown upon the legend, and it’s true given that we have such a rich history that represents the birth of democracy in the ancient world: we have much to be proud of without relying on an ancient legend. But that does not mean we wouldn’t like to find the remains of perhaps an even greater Greek society somewhere out here.’ Andreas grinned back at them. ‘As my colleagues like to say, the Greeks were civilized when much of the rest of humanity were still living in caves.’

  Before any of them could reply, Andreas gestured for them to follow him into one of the buildings, the entrance to which was cordoned off to the public. Andreas lifted the cordon and Ethan ducked beneath it and then through the low door frame and inside the building.

  To their surprise, in contrast to the bare external walls the interior of the building was alive with stunningly colourful and well preserved frescoes on every wall that detailed life in the city before its violent demise. Ethan turned as Andres joined them and beckoned for them to follow them into another room, which had a single long image emblazoned across a strip around the walls.

  ‘This is the Flotilla Fresco,’ Andreas said.

  The artwork was only about a foot and a half high but it wrapped around three walls of the room in which they stood and was about forty feet long. Ethan could see ships sailing between islands, people hunting in the hills and dolphins in the seas in a panoramic view of life from millennia before.

  ‘This is what Lucy was interested in?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘This is all she was interested in,’ Andres replied, ‘and she spent several hours in here before she suddenly took off with a real excitement about her. I think that she learned something but she never said anything about what it was.’

  Ethan walked up to the fresco, examining it closely as Lopez and Amber likewise began searching for clues within the elaborate artwork. There was no way that they could spend hours here, the Russians would not be far behind them, so whatever Lucy had managed to work out in hours they would have to achieve within minutes.

  ‘Did Lucy say anything about why this fresco interested her?’ Ethan asked Andres. ‘Was there anything specific about it that you noticed?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ Andreas said, ‘she just told me that she was following a lead that an old mariner had passed on to her.’

  Ethan and Lopez exchanged a glance. ‘Pytheas?’

  ‘She didn’t mention a name,’ Andres said, and then he recognized it. ‘You think that she meant the Greek mariner Pytheas?’

  Ethan looked again at the fresco stretched around the walls. Pytheas had made one of the most extraordinary voyages of the ancient world, travelling as far north as the Norwegian fjords, close enough to the Arctic Circle to witness pack ice and the Aurora Borealis. As Ethan looked at the fresco he could see sailing ships leaving Akrotiri, visiting islands and voyaging long distances, sometimes amid flames and smoke before finally reaching a grand looking city with towering spires atop flights of steps. Ethan noticed that the depictions of dolphins in the seas stopped about half way along the fresco.

  ‘Pytheas sailed north around Europe and the British Isles,’ he said out loud as his eyes traced the line of the fresco. ‘If he left something of his journey behind in this fresco, part of his legend if you like, then maybe Lucy recognized something in the artwork that denoted a location, a place where she needed to travel to next.’

  Lopez squinted as she scanned the fresco from one side to the other. ‘The locations could be anywhere, there’s nothing that makes them stand out enough that we could match them to a current location.’

  Amber hurried along the bottom of the fresco, leaning in close and searching for any sign of text or markings that might betray even a hint of latitude or longitude, but even after a thorough examination she stood back from the wall and sighed.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ he insisted.

  ‘There must be,’ Ethan replied. ‘Lucy found it and we need to as well before Petrov and his men find us’.

  ‘Petrov?’ Andres echoed as he looked quizzically at them. ‘There are others searching for Lucy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lopez replied, ‘and they’re not real friendly.’

  ‘If they show up, tell them everything,’ Ethan said to Andres. ‘Don’t try to conceal anything about us or what we’re looking for.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’ Andres asked.

&
nbsp; ‘You don’t want to know.’

  *

  Konstantin Petrov climbed off the deck of the yacht that had sailed into the harbor at Athinios, just a couple of miles north of ancient Akrotiri. He watched as his men handled their paperwork at the port office, the Kremlin ensuring that diplomatic immunity protected both himself and his entourage from any unwanted attention.

  The sun beating down on the island was unfamiliar to him, as had been the cloying heat of India and Indonesia. He preferred the cooler air of Moscow in summer, much of his life having been spent to the east of the city where the forests and the winter snows painted a different canvas than the brilliant blue sky and bright sand and rock of these remote volcanic islands.

  ‘Have they been seen?’ he asked one of his men as they returned from the port office.

  ‘Neither Warner nor Lopez have been through here yet and the yacht they were on in Indonesia is not here.’

  Petrov nodded to himself thoughtfully. It had taken the experts back in Moscow a while to figure out what the images on Hellerman’s phone meant, and a while longer to find a suitable match, but it was possible that they had made an error. The thousands of years that had intervened between the creation of the relief map at Gunung Padang and one gigantic eruption event meant that they could be in the wrong place. Conversely, Warner and Lopez were unlikely to be travelling legally from country to country and could even now be wandering the streets of ancient Akrotiri in search of Atlantis.

  ‘Maintain a watch on all radio frequencies,’ he ordered his men, ‘boats, planes, everything. I don’t want anything leaving this island without our knowledge until we either find Warner and Lopez or we find Atlantis itself, is that understood?!’

  His men rumbled a muffled affirmation and hurried to their duties as Petrov turned to look south, where he knew the remains of ancient Akrotiri perched on the clifftops.

  ‘I want that place surrounded,’ he growled. ‘Let’s go!’

  ***

  XXXII

  Ethan swept his gaze across the fresco as he searched desperately for something that would indicate what had sent Lucy almost running from the site. Andres too began walking up and down the fresco, examining it as he sought an explanation for Lucy’s excitement.

  ‘Perhaps she made a connection between more than one thing in the artwork,’ he said. ‘We might not be looking for a single piece of evidence at all.’

  ‘Thanks Doc, that makes our lives much easier,’ Lopez said with a grin. ‘Let’s face it, we don’t know enough about this to figure out what Lucy knew. She’s a scientist, an expert in this sort of thing.’

  ‘She’s not an archaeologist,’ Andres replied, ‘her degree was in palaeontology. But she is widely read and apparently became obsessed with the search for out–of–place artefacts a few years ago.’

  ‘Yeah, we know about that,’ Ethan replied. ‘Lucy has a real knack for standing back and looking at the bigger picture when it comes to finding things that should’t be there…’

  Ethan broke off as he heard his own words. He thought of how Lucy had been able to consider the impossible in her career despite the strictures of science, and in doing so been able to make discoveries that other scientists would never have had a chance of locating. Suddenly, he stopped looking closely at the walls and stood back. He paced away from them until his back touched the opposite wall of the room, and then he just stared at the fresco.

  ‘What?’ Amber asked. ‘You see something?’

  Ethan didn’t reply as he stared at the fresco in its entirety and began to see things that he hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘Why is the fresco only on three walls?’

  ‘There were windows on the west wall, looking out over the Aegean Sea,’ Andres said. ‘You can see where it was, looking out to the north west.’

  Ethan noted the position of the window and then orientated himself to it as he looked up again at the fresco. The image began on his left with the ships sailing from a recognizable Akrotiri, as it was before the volcano erupted and blasted half the island into the history books. He realized that the three peaks matched well with the relief map in the chamber at Gunung Padang. As he swept his gaze to the right he saw the ships sailing through the Mediterranean Sea and then, strangely, a series of small islands that looked out of place amid the rest of the scene, right below the large smudged area. To the right he saw another island, this one surrounded by four suns that shone with different intensities as though describing the passage of the four seasons. Then there was the burning ship, and finally the vessels arriving at the palacial city that they assumed represented Atlantis.

  And then he saw it.

  ‘The Eyes of the North.’

  The others looked at him, mystified, as Ethan pointed to the strange smudge about half way along the fresco.

  ‘That’s not a smudge,’ he said finally. ‘This fresco tells the story of Pytheas’ journey into the north, and the Phaistos Disc speaks of a face that looks to the north; The sun in azimuth, the dawn star aloft, the eyes of the north shall gaze ever toward their goddess, where a land of fire bleeds toward the underworld.”

  ‘The quote from the disc,’ Lopez said, recognizing the verse. ‘There must be another icon somewhere out there where Pytheas sailed, that of a face.’

  Lopez looked at the smudge and frowned.

  ‘She’s looking north, out of the windows.’

  Andres stared in amazement at the image. ‘The West House is set at an unusual angle compared to the rest of the buildings in Akrotiri. If you’re right, it is possible that the building was constructed purposefully to be directed in a certain way for that fresco to be pointed at something far away.’

  Ethan pulled out his cell phone and within moments he had a map of the world on the screen with their location marked with GPS precision in the center. He turned until he was orientated north and then looked along a line to the north west as he got a handle on where the face might be looking.

  The line on the map crossed Europe in its entirety and extended up through the British Isles and on toward Iceland and Greenland.

  ‘That gives us a line,’ Lopez said, ‘but again there’s no distance.’

  Ethan looked up at the fresco again.

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  Ethan realized that the islands marked on the fresco beneath the image of the face were not islands at all, but one island as mapped by the cartographer during Pytheas’ voyage as they circled the British Isles. The channels separating the islands were the great rivers and estuaries, and in an instant he knew that their location on the fresco and the appearance of a single island to the north of the British Isles gave him the approximate location of the face.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘If we align the markers we found at Gunung Padang with this line and if we can find the Face of the North, we can pinpoint the location of Atlantis.’

  Ethan could now see the map of the northern hemisphere as it was known to Pytheas after his voyage stretched across the fresco around the room, and at one end not the image of a glorious homecoming but a veiled message: the location of Atlantis as recorded by the only person who might have actually figured out where it was.

  ‘Is it possible that Pytheas could have sailed east as extensively as he sailed west and north?’ he asked Andreas.

  The Greek shrugged and nodded. ‘There would be nothing stopping such a man but time, tide and the land crossing from the Nile River to the Gulf of Suez. From there, Pytheas could have reached Arabia and from there, India and beyond. There is no record of him doing so, but that of course does not mean it didn’t happen.’

  ‘You think that Pytheas could have followed the same route that Lucy is?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Defintely,’ Ethan replied. ‘Lucy’s following Pytheas, using the same ancient references that he had access to in order to track Atlantis down. Now we have what we need, it’s time to leave.’

  Ethan turned and marched from the West House with Lopez and Amber right behind him
, and as they walked out of the building so Ethan came to an abrupt halt and Lopez almost plowed into him.

  Ethan looked south down the line of buildings and saw men walking into the enclosure, and even from this distance he could tell by their movement and their posture that they were not tourists come to marvel at the ancient wonders around them. Then he saw a squat, stocky man with a small black beard stride into the enclosure.

  ‘Petrov. Get back inside.’

  They backed up into the West House and out of sight as Ethan turned to Andres.

  ‘Is there any other way out of here?’

  ‘There are three exits to the east and one to the south that uses a subway to the main road,’ the Greek replied.

  ‘Petrov would have covered the main exits,’ Lopez warned.

  ‘His men will be outside,’ Ethan confirmed.

  Andres gestured for them to follow him. ‘Then if you cannot go out, you will have to go under.’

  Ethan followed the archaeologist without hesitation as they filed out of the West House and hurried toward the eastern side of the enclosure. Andres walked normally as Ethan, Lopez and Amber variously hugged the walls and crouched low, ignoring the bemused stares of the handful of tourists milling around the exhibits.

  Andres turned into a building near the eastern entrance and Ethan followed him inside with Lopez and Amber close behind. They walked through the excavated ruins, the walls helping to conceal their passage as Andres led them to a craggy opening in the ground near one of the walls and gestured to it.

  ‘This tunnel is an old sewer that ran beneath the city. It connects to more excavations on the hillside between the excavation and the car park. Follow it to the end and it joins a staircase that comes up on top of the hill. There’s only a chain link fence to cross to reach the road and the car park. Hurry.’