The Last Gospel (10 page)

‘I think it’s about to get better. A whole lot better.’ Costas had been wafting sediment off the amphora below the word
Loukas
, and a third scratching appeared. The letters were as clear as day. They both stared speechless.

Paulos
.

Paul of Tarsus, St Paul the Evangelist, the man who had scratched his name and those of his companions on this pot almost two thousand years before, below the symbol of the one they already revered as the Anointed, the Son of God.

Jack and Costas pushed off and rose together, towards the opaque shimmer of light where the sun shone on the surface almost one hundred metres above. Jack seemed to be in a trance, looking at Costas but not seeing him, his mind’s eye on the foredeck of a great grain ship plying the Mediterranean two thousand years before, in the age of the Caesars, taking its passengers inexorably into the annals of history.

‘I take it,’ Costas said bemusedly, ‘we’re in business?’

J
ack lifted his helmet briefly to ease the ache in his neck, his senses suddenly overwhelmed by the roar of the Rolls-Royce turbine just behind him, then pulled the helmet back into place and pressed in the ear protectors until the noise was dampened and the microphone repositioned. He was physically exhausted but too excited to rest, elated by their discovery of the shipwreck the day before, itching to get back, but now full of anticipation for a new prize that lay ahead. Hiebermeyer had been able to say little, but it had been enough for Jack to know that this was real. He checked his watch again. They had been flying due north in the Lynx helicopter for just over an hour from the position where they had left
Seaquest II
before dawn, in the Strait of Messina off Sicily, and Jack had set the autopilot to keep them low over the waves. Monitoring the altimeter was critical, and it was keeping him awake. It had been less than twelve hours since they had surfaced from their dive, and their bloodstreams were still saturated with excess nitrogen which could expand dangerously if they gained any more altitude.

He checked again, then switched off the autopilot and engaged the hand controls and pedals of the helicopter, bringing the Lynx round thirty degrees to the north-east so that it was angled towards the coastline. He reactivated the autopilot, then settled back and looked again at the image he had been contemplating on the computer screen between the seats. It was an image he had grown up with, a centrepiece of the Howard Gallery, the art collection Jack’s grandfather had accumulated and which was now housed in a building on the IMU campus in Cornwall. It was a miniature watercolour by Goethe, painted during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1787. In the background was a flat grey sky, and in the foreground a luminous yellow sea. In the centre was the dark mass of the volcano, the shoreline beneath it fronted by flat-roofed buildings similar to the ancient Roman towns below Vesuvius then being unearthed for the first time. The image seemed whimsical, almost abstract, yet the streaks of red and yellow above the volcano betrayed the violent reality of the event that Goethe had witnessed. Jack gazed out of the cockpit windscreen towards the bay ahead of them. It was as if he were seeing a version of the watercolour, pastel shades drifting across the horizon in the sunrise, the details melded and obscured by the layer of smog in the atmosphere just below their altitude.

In the co-pilot’s seat Costas had been dozing fitfully, but he shifted forward when Jack adjusted the course. He woke with a start as his sunglasses slipped off his helmet and wedged on his nose.

‘Enjoying off-gassing?’ Jack said through the intercom.

‘Just keep us below fifteen hundred feet,’ Costas replied blearily. ‘I want to keep those nitrogen bubbles nice and small.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll be on the ground soon enough.’

Costas stretched, then sighed. ‘Fresh air, wide-open spaces. That’s what I like.’

‘Then you should choose your friends more carefully.’ Jack grinned, then nosed the helicopter down a few hundred feet. They broke through the layer of haze, and the mirage became a reality. Below them the dramatic shoreline of the islands and the mainland coast was sharply delineated, expanses of sun-scorched rock surrounded by azure sea. To the east was the great expanse of the city, and beyond that a smudge on the horizon where the bay ended, the haze just concealing a looming presence below a burst of orange where the sun was rising above the mountains beyond.

‘The Bay of Naples,’ Jack said. ‘Crucible of civilization.’

‘Civilization.’ Costas yawned extravagantly, then paused. ‘Let me see. That would be corruption on a seismic scale, drug crime, the Mafia?’

‘Forget all that and look at the past,’ Jack said. ‘We’re here for the archaeology, not to get embroiled in the present.’

Costas snorted. ‘That’d be a first.’

Jack looked out at the extraordinary scene in front of them, and was infused by the sense of history he had experienced at other cities in the Mediterranean: Istanbul, Jerusalem, where the superimposed layers of civilization were still visible, different cultures which had left their distinctive mark yet were bound together by the possibilities that settlement and resources at the place had to offer. The Bay of Naples was one of the great staging posts for the spread of ideas into Europe, where the Greeks had first settled in the ninth and eighth centuries BC when they came west, trading with the Etruscans for iron at a time when Rome was just a few huts above a swamp. Cumae, where the alphabet was first brought west, Neapolis, Pompeii, all these places became centres of the new Greece, Magna Graecia, fuelled by trade and by the hinterland of Campania with its rich agriculture. Jack stared at the slopes of Vesuvius, then had a sudden flashback to their underwater discovery the day before. He turned to Costas. ‘Remember those wine amphoras on the shipwreck? They were from here.’

‘Rich volcanic soil, perfect for vineyards.’

‘And a lot of Greek influence,’ Jack said. ‘Even after the Romans took over in the fourth and third centuries BC, making this place a kind of Costa del Sol for the wealthy, Greek culture stayed strong. People think of Pompeii and Herculaneum as the quintessential Roman towns, but actually they existed for centuries before the Romans arrived. They were still highly cosmopolitan in AD 79, with people speaking Greek and local dialects as well as Latin. And the Bay of Naples continued to be the first port of call for all things from the east, not just Greece but also the Near East and Egypt and beyond, exotic trade goods, new art styles, foreign emissaries, new ideas in philosophy and religion.’

‘Now fill me in on the volcano,’ Costas said.

Jack tapped the computer keyboard and the Goethe watercolour was replaced by a black-and-white photograph showing a distant view of a volcano erupting, a great plume of rolling black cloud hanging like a malign genie over the city. ‘March 1944, during the Second World War,’ Jack said. ‘Fastforward nine months from the Allied landings in Sicily, where we’ve just been diving. A few months after the liberation of Naples, while the Allies were still slogging towards Rome. The most recent major eruption of Vesuvius.’

Costas whistled. ‘Looks like the gods of war unleashed hell.’

‘That’s what people thought at the time, but fortunately it was just an immense venting of gas and ash and then the fissure closed up. Since then there’s been nothing as dramatic, though there was a bad earthquake in 1980 that killed several thousand people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. There’s a lot of concern about the recent seismic disturbances.’

‘Three weeks ago.’

‘That’s why we’re here.’

‘And in ancient times?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, the eruption of AD 79?’

Jack tapped again, and another painting appeared. ‘This is the only known Roman image of Vesuvius, found on a wall painting in Pompeii. It’s fanciful, with the god of wine laden with grapes to the left, but you can see the mountain’s rich with vegetation and vineyards growing up the slopes. Vesuvius had been completely dormant since the Bronze Age, and the Romans only knew of it as an incredibly bountiful place, with rich soils that produced some of the best wines anywhere. The eruption in AD 79 was a massive shock, psychological as well as physical. Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, the villas around the volcano, were all gone for ever, though eventually life reasserted itself in Campania. The psychological effects were probably more damaging, reverberating down the centuries. It’s hard to make a modern analogy, but imagine if the San Andreas fault split open destroying Hollywood and devastating Los Angeles. Many would see it as the coming apocalypse.’

‘So they really had no clue about what was going to happen?’

‘The clues were there, where we’re headed now, but they had no reason to link them with the mountain.’

Jack pulled the helicopter in a wide arc to the north, and Costas peered down at a barren landscape. ‘What’s that place?’

‘That’s what I wanted you to see. We’re over the north-west shore of the Bay of Naples, about twenty-five kilometres west of Vesuvius. This was the one area of extensive volcanic activity in the Roman period, though even Pliny never made the connection with Vesuvius. The Phlegraean Fields, the fields of fire. Listen to this. It’s from the
Aeneid
by Virgil, Rome’s national poet. I’ve got the text on screen. “There was a deep rugged cave, stupendous and yawning wide, protected by a lake of black water and the glooming forest. Over this lake no birds could wing a straight course without harm, so poisonous the breath which streamed up from those black jaws and rose to the vault of sky.” Now look outside. That’s Lake Avernus, which means birdless. Over there you can see the most active crater today, Sulfaterra. That’s what Virgil was on about. And by the coast you can just make out the overgrown acropolis of ancient Cumae, one of the first places the Greeks settled.’

‘Where the Sibyl hung out.’

‘Literally. According to some accounts, she was suspended in a cage in the back of her cave, never fully visible and always wreathed in smoke.’

‘High in more ways than one.’

Jack grinned. ‘In the Roman period, the Phlegraean Fields was a big tourist attraction, much more so than it is now. The entrance to the underworld, a place that reeked of fire and brimstone. People came here to see the tomb of Virgil, buried beside the road from Naples. And the Sibyl was still here too, at least before the eruption. Augustus consulted her, and other emperors too. Claudius went to the Sibyl,’ he added.

‘So the Greek colonists brought the first Sibyl with them?’

‘Yes and no.’

Costas groaned. ‘Facts, Jack. Facts.’

‘Supposedly there were thirteen Sibyls across the Greek world, though the earliest references suggest they derived from the idea of a single all-seeing prophetess. The site of Cumae is one of the few places where archaeology adds to the picture. In the 1930s, an extraordinary underground grotto came to light, exactly as the Romans described the cave of the Sibyl. It’s a trapezoidal corridor almost fifty metres long, lit by side galleries and ending in a rectangular chamber, all hewn out of the rock. In Virgil’s
Aeneid
, this was where the Trojan hero Aeneas consulted the Sibyl, to ask whether his colony in Italy would one day become the Roman Empire. And this was where she took him down into the underworld, to see his father Anchises.’

Costas pointed to the steaming crater below them. ‘You mean the fields of fire, the Phlegraean Fields?’

‘There were probably open volcanic vents here in antiquity. It must have been a vision of Dante’s inferno if there ever was one,’ Jack said. ‘People are always drawn to these places, creation and destruction together in one terrifying cauldron. It was the perfect location for the Sibyl, who must have seemed like an apparition from the underworld itself. Supplicants were probably led through the fumaroles and boiling mud, so would have been shaking with fear even before they stood in front of her cave.’

‘If my memory serves me, Aeneas was a Trojan prince escaping from the Trojan War, at the end of the Bronze Age,’ Costas said thoughtfully. ‘That means Virgil thought the Sibyl was here already, way before the Greeks or the Romans arrived.’

‘All of the mythology we know today associated with the Cumaean Sibyl was Greek, especially her relationship with the god Apollo. But this may have been what the Greeks brought with them, and layered on to a goddess or prophetess who already existed in prehistoric Italy. The Greeks and the Romans often fused their gods with similar native gods, even as far away as Britain.’

‘So there may have been a much older female deity here.’

‘Our friend Katya has a theory about that. Her team at the Palaeographic Institute in Moscow are almost ready to publish the Atlantis symbols. You remember the Neolithic mother goddess of Atlantis?’

‘Could hardly forget her. I’ve still got the bruises.’

‘Well, we already knew that corpulent female figurines were being worshipped across Europe at the end of the Ice Age, at least to the time of the first farmers. For years archaeologists have speculated about a prehistoric cult of the mother goddess, a cult that crossed boundaries between tribes and peoples. Well, Katya thinks the survival of that cult owes everything to a powerful priesthood, the men and women who led the first farmers west, whose descendants preserved the cult through the Bronze Age and to the classical period. She even thinks the druids of north-west Europe were connected.’