Atlantis Read online

  Jack looked questioningly at Macleod, who was enjoying milking the drama for all it was worth.

  “You’re the archaeologist,” Macleod said. “What’s your estimate?”

  Jack played along. “Soon after the end of the Ice Age but long enough ago for the Mediterranean to have reached the level of the Bosporus. I’d say eighth, maybe seventh millennium BC.”

  Macleod leaned on the railing and looked intently at Jack. The others waited with bated breath.

  “Close, but not close enough. That tree was felled in 5545 BC, give or take a year.”

  Costas looked incredulous. “Impossible! That’s way too late!”

  “It’s corroborated by all the other tree-ring dates from the site. It seems we underestimated by a millennium the time it took the Mediterranean to rise to its present level.”

  “Most linguists place the Indo-Europeans between 6000 and 5000 BC,” Katya exclaimed. “It all falls into place perfectly.”

  Jack and Costas gripped the rail as Sea Venture’s gangway was secured to the quayside below them. After so many adventures together they shared the same hunches, could second-guess the other’s thoughts. Yet they could scarcely believe where they were leading, a possibility so fantastic their minds rebelled until the power of logic became overwhelming.

  “That date,” Costas said quietly. “We’ve seen it before.”

  Jack’s voice held total conviction as he leaned towards Macleod. “I can tell you about these Indo-Europeans. They had a great citadel by the sea, a storeroom of knowledge entered by great golden doors.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jack paused and then spoke quietly. “Atlantis.”

  “Jack, my friend! Good to see you.”

  The deep voice came from a figure on the quayside, his dark features offset by chinos and a white shirt bearing the IMU logo.

  Jack reached out and shook hands with Mustafa Alközen as he and Costas stepped off the gangway onto the quayside. As they looked over the modern town towards the ruined citadel it was hard to imagine this had once been the capital of the Kingdom of Trebizond, the medieval offshoot of Byzantium renowned for its splendour and decadence. From earliest times the city had flourished as a hub of trade between east and west, a tradition now darkly continued in the flood of black marketeers who had arrived since the fall of the Soviet Union and provided a haven for smugglers and agents of organized crime in the east.

  Malcolm Macleod had gone ahead to deal with the crowd of officials and journalists who had gathered as Sea Venture came in. They had agreed that his briefing on the Neolithic village discovery should be deliberately vague until they had carried out more exploration. They knew unscrupulous eyes would already be monitoring their work by satellite, and they were wary of giving away more than the minimum needed to satisfy the journalists. Fortunately the site lay eleven nautical miles offshore, just within territorial waters. Already the Turkish Navy fast attack craft moored on the opposite side of the harbour had been detailed to maintain round-the-clock vigilance until the investigations were complete and the site had been accorded special protection status by the Turkish government.

  “Mustafa, meet our new colleague. Dr. Katya Svetlanova.”

  Katya had slipped a dress over her swimsuit and was carrying a palm computer and documents case. She shook the proffered hand and smiled up at Mustafa.

  “Dr. Svetlanova. Jack told me on the radio about your formidable expertise. It is my pleasure.”

  Jack and Mustafa walked ahead of the other two as they made their way towards the IMU depot at the end of the quay. Jack talked quietly and intensely, filling Mustafa in on all the events since the discovery of the papyrus. He had decided to take advantage of Sea Venture’s revictualling stop to tap into the Turk’s unique expertise and bring him into the small fold of people who knew about the papyrus and the discs.

  Just before entering the low-set concrete building, Jack handed over a notepad which the other man passed to his secretary as they reached the door. It contained a wish list of archaeological and diving equipment from the IMU store which Jack had compiled in the final minutes before disembarking from Sea Venture.

  They were joined by Katya and Costas in front of a large steel door. After Mustafa tapped in a security code, the door swung open and he led them through a succession of laboratories and repair shops. At the far end they entered a room lined with wooden cabinets with a table in the centre.

  “The chart room,” Mustafa explained to Katya. “It doubles as our operational headquarters. Please be seated.”

  He opened a drawer and extracted a chart of the Aegean and southern Black Sea region, encompassing the Turkish coast all the way to its eastern border with the Republic of Georgia. He spread it out and clipped it to the table. From a small drawer underneath, he extracted a set of navigational dividers and cartographic rulers, placing them side by side as Katya set up her computer.

  After a few moments she looked up. “I’m ready.”

  They had agreed that Katya should give the translation of the papyrus while they tried to make sense of it on the chart.

  She read slowly from the screen. “Through the islands until the sea narrows.”

  “This clearly refers to the Aegean archipelago from the viewpoint of Egypt,” Jack said. “The Aegean has more than fifteen hundred islands in a confined area. On a clear day north of Crete you can’t sail anywhere without having at least one island in view.”

  “So the narrows must be the Dardanelles,” Costas asserted.

  “What clinches it is the next passage.” The three men looked expectantly at Katya. “Past the Cataract of Bos.”

  Jack was suddenly animated. “It should have been glaringly obvious. The Bosporus, the entrance to the Black Sea.”

  Costas turned to Katya, his voice edged with incredulity. “Could our word Bosporus be that ancient?”

  “It dates back at least two and a half thousand years, to the time of the earliest Greek geographical writings. But it’s probably thousands of years older. Bos is Indo-European for bull.”

  “Strait of the Bull,” Costas mused. “This may be a long shot, but I’m thinking of the bull symbols in that Neolithic house and from Minoan Crete. They’re quite abstract, showing the bull’s horns as a kind of saddle, a bit like a Japanese headrest. That would have been precisely the appearance of the Bosporus from the Black Sea before the flood, a great saddle gouged into a ridge high above the sea.”

  Jack looked at his friend appreciatively. “You never cease to amaze me. That’s the best idea I’ve heard for a long time.”

  Costas warmed to his theme. “To people who worshipped the bull the sight of all that water cascading through the horns must have seemed portentous, a sign from the gods.”

  Jack nodded and turned to Katya. “So we’re in the Black Sea. What next?”

  “And then twenty dromoi along the southern shore.”

  Jack leaned forward. “On the face of it we have a problem. There are some records of voyage times in the Black Sea during the Roman period. One of them starts here, at what the Romans called the Maeotic Lake.” He pointed to the Sea of Azov, the lagoon beside the Crimean Peninsula. “From there it took eleven days to get to Rhodes. Only four days were spent on the Black Sea.”

  Mustafa looked pensively at the map. “So a twenty-day voyage from the Bosporus, twenty dromoi or runs, would take us beyond the eastern littoral of the Black Sea.”

  Costas looked crestfallen. “Maybe the early boats were slower.”

  “The opposite,” said Jack. “Paddled longboats would have been faster than sailing ships, less subject to the vagaries of the winds.”

  “And the inflow during the flood would have created a strong easterly current,” Mustafa said glumly. “Enough to propel a ship to the far shore in only a few days. I’m afraid Atlantis is off the map in more ways than one.”

  A crushing sense of disappointment pervaded the room. Suddenly Atlantis seemed as far away as it had
ever been, a story consigned to the annals of myth and fable.

  “There is a solution,” Jack said slowly. “The Egyptian account is not based on their own experience. If so, they would never have described the Bosporus as a cataract, since the Mediterranean and Black Sea had equalized long before the Egyptians began to explore that far north. Instead, their source was the account handed down from the Black Sea migrants, telling of their voyage from Atlantis. The Egyptians simply reversed it.”

  “Of course!” Mustafa was excited again. “From Atlantis means against the current. In describing the route to Atlantis, the Egyptians used the same voyage times they had been told for the outward journey. They could never have guessed there would be a significant difference between the two.”

  Jack looked pointedly at Mustafa. “What we need is some way of estimating the speed of the current, of calculating the headway a Neolithic boat would have made against the flow. That should give us the distance for each day’s run and the measure from the Bosporus to a point of embarkation twenty days back.”

  Mustafa straightened up and replied confidently, “You’ve come to the right place.”

  THE SUN WAS SETTING OVER THE SHORELINE to the west as the group reassembled in the chart room. For three hours Mustafa had been hunched over a cluster of computer screens in an annexe and only ten minutes before had called to announce he was ready. They were joined by Malcolm Macleod, who had scheduled a press conference to announce the Neolithic village discovery when the Navy FAC boat was in position over the site the following morning.

  Costas was the first to pull up a chair. The others clustered round as he eagerly scanned the console.

  “What’ve you got?”

  Mustafa replied without taking his eyes off the central screen. “A few glitches in the navigation software which I had to iron out, but the whole thing comes together very nicely.”

  They had first collaborated with Mustafa when he was a lieutenant-commander in charge of the Computer-Aided Navigation Research and Development unit at the Izmir NATO base. After leaving the Turkish Navy and completing an archaeology PhD he had specialized in the application of CAN technology to scientific use. Over the past year he had worked with Costas on an innovative software package for calculating the effect of wind and current on navigation in antiquity. Regarded as one of the finest minds in the field, he was also a formidable station chief who had more than proved his worth when IMU had operated in Turkish waters before.

  He tapped the keyboard and the image of a boat appeared on the central screen. “This is what Jack and I came up with.”

  “It’s based on Neolithic timbers dug up last year at the mouth of the Danube,” Jack explained. “Ours is an open boat, about twenty-five metres long and three metres in beam. Rowing only became widespread at the end of the Bronze Age, so it’s got fifteen paddlers on either side. It could take two oxen, as we’ve depicted here, several pairs of smaller animals such as pigs and deer, about two dozen women and children and a relief crew of paddlers.”

  “You’re sure they had no sails?” Macleod asked.

  Jack nodded. “Sailing was an early Bronze Age invention on the Nile, where boats could float to the delta and then sail back upstream with the prevailing northerly wind. The Egyptians may in fact have introduced sailing to the Aegean, where paddling was actually a better way of getting round the islands.”

  “The program indicates the vessel would make six knots in dead calm,” Mustafa said. “That’s six nautical miles per hour, about seven statute miles.”

  “They would have needed daylight to beach their vessel, tend to their animals and set up camp,” Jack said. “And the reverse in the mornings.”

  “We now know the exodus took place in late spring or early summer,” Macleod revealed. “We ran our high-resolution sub-bottom profiler over an area of one square kilometre next to the Neolithic village. The silt concealed a perfectly preserved field system complete with plough furrows and irrigation ditches. The palaeoenvironmental lab has just completed their analysis of core samples we took from the ROV. They show the crop was grain. Einkorn wheat, Triticum monococcum to be precise, sown about two months prior to the inundation.”

  “Grain is usually sown in these latitudes in April or May,” Jack remarked.

  “Correct. We’re talking June or July, around two months after the Bosporus was breached.”

  “Six knots means forty-eight nautical miles over an eight-hour run,” Mustafa continued. “That assumes a relief crew as well as water and provisions and a working day of eight hours. In placid seas our boat would have made it along the southern shore in a little over eleven days.” He tapped a key eleven times, advancing the miniature representation of the boat along an isometric map of the Black Sea. “This is where the CAN program really comes into play.”

  He tapped again and the simulation subtly transformed. The sea became ruffled, and the level dropped to show the Bosporus as a waterfall.

  “Here we are in the summer of 5545 BC, about two months after the flood began.”

  He repositioned the boat near the Bosporus.

  “The first variable is wind. The prevailing summer winds are from the north. Ships sailing west might only have made serious headway once they reached Sinope, midway along the southern shore where the coast begins to trend west-south-west. Before that, coming up the coast west-north-west, they would have needed oars.”

  “How different was the climate?” Katya asked.

  “The main fluctuations today are caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation,” Mustafa replied. “In a warm phase, low atmospheric pressure over the North Pole causes strong westerlies which keep Arctic air in the north, meaning the Mediterranean and Black Sea are hot and dry. In a cold phase, Arctic air flows south, including the northerlies over the Black Sea. Basically it’s windier and wetter.”

  “And in antiquity?”

  “We think the early Holocene, the first few thousand years after the great melt, would have corresponded more closely to a cold phase. It was less arid than today with a good deal more precipitation. The southern Black Sea would have been an optimal place for the development of agriculture.”

  “And the effect on navigation?” Jack asked.

  “Stronger northerlies and westerlies by twenty to thirty per cent. I’ve fed these in and come up with a best-fit prediction for each fifty nautical mile sector of the coast two months into the flood, including the effect of wind on water movement.”

  “Your second variable must be the flood itself.”

  “We’re looking at ten cubic miles of seawater pouring in every day for eighteen months, then a gradual fall-off over the next six months until equilibrium is reached. The exodus took place during the period of maximum inflow.”

  He tapped the keyboard and a sequence of figures appeared on the right-hand screen.

  “This shows the speed of the current east from the Bosporus. It diminishes from twelve knots at the waterfall to just under two knots in the most easterly sector, more than five hundred miles away.”

  Costas joined in. “If they were only making six knots, our Neolithic farmers, they would never have reached the Bosporus.”

  Mustafa nodded. “I can even predict where they made final landfall, thirty miles east where the current became too strong. From here they would have portaged up the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus to the Dardanelles. The current through the straits would also have been very strong, so I doubt whether they would have re-embarked before reaching the Aegean.”

  “That would have been a hell of a portage,” said Macleod. “Almost two hundred nautical miles.”

  “They probably disassembled the hulls and used yoked oxen to pull the timbers on sledges,” Jack replied. “Most early planked boats were joined by sewing the timbers together with cord, allowing the hulls to be easily dismantled.”

  “Perhaps those who went east really did leave their vessels at Mount Ararat,” Katya mused. “They could have disassembled the timbers and hauled t
hem to the point where it was clear they weren’t going to need them again, unlike the western group who were probably always within sight of the sea during their portage.”

  Costas was peering at the Dardanelles. “They could even have set off from the hill of Hissarlik. Some of our farmers may have stayed on to become the first Trojans.”

  Costas’ words brought home again the enormity of their discovery, and for a moment they were overwhelmed by a sense of awe. Carefully, methodically they had been piecing together a jigsaw which had confounded scholars for generations, uncovering a framework which was no longer in the realm of speculation. They were not simply building up one corner of the puzzle but had begun to rewrite history on a grand scale. Yet the source was so embedded in fantasy it still seemed a fable, a revelation whose truth they could hardly bring themselves to acknowledge.

  Jack turned to Mustafa. “How far is twenty dromoi in these conditions?”

  Mustafa pointed to the right-hand screen. “We work backwards from the point of disembarkation near the Bosporus. In the final day they only made half a knot against the current and wind, meaning a run of no more than four miles.” He tapped a key and the boat moved slightly east.

  “Then the distances are progressively greater, until we reach the run past Sinope where they covered thirty miles.” He tapped twelve times and the boat hopped halfway back along the Black Sea coast. “Then it becomes slightly more arduous for a few days as they head north-west against the prevailing wind.”

  “That’s fifteen runs,” said Jack. “Where do the final five take us?”

  Mustafa tapped five more times and the boat ended up in the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, exactly on the predicted contour of the coast before the flood.

  “Bingo,” Jack said.

  After printing out the CAN data Mustafa led the others into a partitioned area adjacent to the chart room. He dimmed the lights and arranged several chairs around a central console the size of a kitchen table. He flipped a switch and the surface lit up.