The Last Gospel (22 page)

‘A secret chamber,’ Costas mused. ‘So if Augustus was planning this new shrine as a replica of the old, he would have had a chamber built into this one too?’

‘My thinking exactly.’

‘But if the sacred items remained in the forum shrine, this new one would have been empty.’

‘Or not quite empty.’

‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

Jack opened his bag and pulled out a clipboard with a blown-up photograph of a Roman coin on the front. ‘This is the only known depiction of the new shrine, the Palatine Shrine of Vesta. It’s from a coin of the emperor Tiberius, of AD 22 or 23. You can see a circular colonnaded building very similar to the old shrine in the forum, clearly emulating it. The circular shape was meant to copy the hut form of the earliest Roman dwelling, the so-called House of Romulus, which was carefully preserved as a sacred antiquity on the other side of the House of Augustus. You can still see the postholes in the rock. What else can you see on that coin?’

Costas took the clipboard. ‘Well, the letters S and C above the shrine.
Senatus Consultum
. Even I know that. And the shrine’s got a column on either side, a plinth with a statue on it. They’re animals, possibly horses.’ He paused, then spoke excitedly. ‘I’ve got you. Not horses.
Bulls
.’

‘That’s what clinches it,’ Jack said excitedly. ‘We know from the ancient sources that two statues stood in front of the Palatine Shrine of Vesta. Statues of sacrificial animals, sacred to the rites of the Vestals. Both statues were originally Greek, by the famous sculptor Myron of the fifth century BC. Statues of cows.’

‘Of course.’

‘Remember our clue,’ Jack enthused. ‘
Subduo sacra bos
. Beneath the sacred cows. These two statues were a unique pair. There was nothing else like them in Rome. This can only be what Pliny meant. He hid the scroll here, in the empty chamber under the Palatine Shrine of Vesta.’

‘Where exactly?’ Costas had taken out a GPS receiver and was looking round, eyeing the featureless ground and dusty walls dubiously.

‘My best guess is where we are now, give or take ten metres either way,’ Jack said. ‘All trace of the shrine is gone, but it seems clear that it would have been on this side of the temple portico, right beside Augustus’ house.’

‘Ground-penetrating radar?’

‘Too much else going on here. The place is honeycombed, building built on building. Even the bedrock’s full of cracks and fissures.’

‘So what do we do now? Get a shovel?’

‘We’ll never find it that way. At least not without a lot of money, a lot of bureaucracy, and about a year for the permit to come through. No, we’re not going to dig down.’

‘So what can we do?’

‘We might be able to go up.’

‘Huh?’

Jack took back the clipboard, closed his bag and jumped to his feet. He checked his watch. ‘I’ll explain on the way. Come on.’

 

Twenty minutes later they stood on a terrace on the north side of the Roman Forum archaeological precinct, with a magnificent view of the heart of ancient Rome stretching out in front of them and the vast bulk of the Colosseum in the background. ‘This is the best place to get a sense of the topography, ’ Jack said. ‘At its height this was a huge conglomeration of buildings, temples, law courts, monuments, all crowding in on each other. Strip all that away and you can see how the forum was built in a valley, with the Palatine Hill on the west side. Now look to our right, below the north slope of the Palatine, and see how the valley sweeps round towards the river Tiber. Where we’re standing now is the Capitoline Hill, the apex of ancient Rome, the place where the triumphal processions reached their climax. Just to the right of us is the Tarpeian Rock, where criminals were flung to their deaths over a precipice.’

‘The miscreant Vestals?’

‘Traditionally their place of execution is thought to have been outside the city walls, but Pliny the Younger only mentions an underground chamber. It could have been close by.’

‘So tell me about underground Rome,’ Costas said. ‘Not that I want to go there. Three thousand years of accumulated sludge.’

Jack grinned, opened his bag and pulled out the clipboard again, folding back the sheet with the image of the coin to reveal a copy of an old engraving, the word
ROMA
in large letters at the top. The centre of the map showed topographical features, valleys, hills and watercourses, and around the edge were building plans. ‘This is my favourite map of Rome,’ he said. ‘Drawn by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the eighteenth century, about the same time that the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum was first being explored. The fragmentary plans of buildings around the edge are drawings of chunks of the famous Marble Plan, a huge mural originally displayed in Vespasian’s Temple of Peace. Only about ten per cent of the Marble Plan survives, in fragments like this.’ To Jack, Piranesi’s map was like a metaphor for knowledge of ancient Rome, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle with some areas known in great detail, others hardly at all, even building layouts recorded exactly but their actual location lost to history.

‘It shows the topography very clearly,’ Costas said.

‘That’s why I love it,’ Jack replied. ‘Piranesi kept the pieces of the jigsaw to the edges, swept aside the buildings, and focused on the hills and valleys. That’s what I wanted you to see.’ He angled the map so it had the same orientation as the view in front of them, and traced his finger over the centre. ‘In prehistoric times, when Aeneas supposedly arrived here, the forum area was a marshy valley on the edge of a flood plain. As the first settlements spread down the slopes of the hills into the wetland, the stream was canalized and eventually covered over. It became the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Drain, extending beyond where you can see the Colosseum now, then right under the forum, then sweeping round in front of us and flowing into the Tiber. There were tributaries, streams running into it, as well as artificial underground constructions, the channels of aqueducts. It’s all still there, a vast underground labyrinth, and only a fraction of it has ever been explored.’

‘Where’s the nearest access point?’

‘We’re heading towards it now. Follow me.’ Jack led Costas off the terrace and down into Via di San Teodoro, the ruins on the Palatine rearing up to the left and the buildings of the medieval city to the right. They veered right again into a narrow street which opened out into a V-shaped courtyard, with traffic thundering beyond. In the foreground was a massive squat ruin, a four-way arch with thick piers at each corner. ‘The Arch of Janus,’ Jack said. ‘Not the most glorious of Rome’s ruins, pretty well denuded of anything interesting. But it stands astride the Cloaca Maxima. The place where the drain disgorges into the river is only about two hundred metres away, beyond the main road.’ They went through an opening in the iron railing surrounding the arch and walked under the bleached stone. On the forecourt on the other side a van was drawn up and two clusters of diving equipment were laid out on the cobbles, with two IMU technicians running checks on one of the closed-circuit rebreathers.

‘This looks like a setup,’ Costas grumbled.

‘I thought I’d spring this on you now after giving you a sense of purpose. It’s fantastically exciting, the chance to explore completely unknown sites in the heart of ancient Rome.’

‘Jack, don’t tell me we’re going diving in a sewer.’

A man came towards them from where he had been squatting beside the arch. He had a wiry physique and fine Italian features, though he seemed unusually pale for a Roman. ‘Massimo!’ Jack said. ‘
Va bene?
’

‘
Va bene
.’ The voice sounded shaky, and close up the man looked slightly grey. ‘You remember Costas?’ Jack said. The two men nodded, and shook hands. ‘It seems only yesterday that we met at that conference in London.’

‘It was my greatest pleasure,’ Massimo said in perfect English, only slightly accented. ‘We work here under the auspices of the archaeological superintendency, but we’re all amateurs. It was a privilege to spend time with professionals.’

‘This time, the tables are turned,’ Jack said, smiling. ‘This will be my first venture into urban underwater archaeology.’

‘It’s the archaeology of the future, Jack,’ Massimo said with passion. ‘We come on ancient sites from below, leaving the surface intact. It’s perfect in a place like Rome. It beats hanging on the shirttails of developers, waiting for a fleeting chance to find something in a building site before the bulldozers destroy it.’

‘You’re beginning to talk like a professional, Massimo.’

‘It’s a pleasure to help. We’ve been desperate to explore where you’re planning to go. We’ve been waiting for the right diving equipment.’

‘What do you call yourselves?’ Costas said.

‘Urban speleologists.’

‘Tunnel rats,’ Jack grinned.

‘Be careful of that word, Jack,’ Massimo said. ‘Where you’re about to go, it might come back to haunt you.’

‘Ah. Point taken.’ Jack gave a wry grin. ‘You have a map?’

‘It’s inside the arch. Your people will bring over the equipment. Follow me.’ Jack and Costas waved at the two IMU technicians, and went towards a door in one of the stone piers. ‘This leads up to a complex of small chambers and corridors inside the arch, used when it was converted into a medieval fortress,’ Massimo said. ‘What nobody knew was that the stairway extends below as well, into the Cloaca Maxima. We assumed there must have been an access point somewhere under the arch, and came looking for it a few months ago. The superintendency allowed us to remove the stones.’ He pointed to a new-looking manhole cover about a metre and a half round on the floor just inside the door. ‘But first, some orientation. The map.’ He reached behind the door and pulled out a long cardboard tube, then extracted a rolled-up sheet and held it open against the side of the pier. ‘This is a plan of everything we know about what’s underground in this part of Rome, from the entrance into the Cloaca Maxima under the Colosseum to the river Tiber just beyond us here.’

‘This is what I’m really interested in,’ Jack said, using both hands to point to branches leading off the main line of the Cloaca Maxima, then drawing his hands together into the blank space in between.

‘Absolutely. That’s one of our most exciting finds,’ Massimo said. ‘We think those branches are either end of an artificial tunnel running right under the Palatine. We think it was built by the emperor Claudius.’

‘Claudius?’ Jack said, startled.

‘He’s our hero. A posthumous honorary tunnel rat. His biggest projects were underground, underwater. Digging the tunnel to drain the Fucine Lake. Building the great harbour at Ostia. His aqueduct into Rome, the
Aqua Claudia
. We think a drainage tunnel under the Palatine would have been right up his street. And he was an historian, would have been fascinated by anything they came across, any vestiges of the earliest Romans, his ancestors. He might even have gone down there himself. One of us.’

‘Small world,’ Costas murmured.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ he began, then Jack shot him a warning look. ‘Well, Jack was just telling me about Claudius, the harbour, when we were flying into Fiumicino. Fascinating guy.’

‘I think we can leave Claudius aside until we actually find something that identifies his involvement,’ Jack said sternly. ‘Remember, what we’re after dates hundreds of years before Claudius’ time. What we talked about on the phone, Massimo. The Lupercale cave.’

‘The Lupercale,’ Massimo repeated reverently, then looked furtively around. ‘If you can find a way into that from underground, then we’ve made history.’

Costas peered enquiringly at Jack, who turned to him stony faced. ‘My apologies, Costas. I was waiting till now to fill you in on what we’re really after. I didn’t want anyone overhearing, any word leaking out,’ he said forcibly, looking at Massimo. ‘It’s an amazing find. Archaeologists drilling into the ground below the House of Augustus on the Palatine broke through into an underground chamber, a cavity at least fifteen metres deep. They sent in a probe, and saw walls encrusted with mosaics and seashells, like a grotto. It could be the Lupercale, the sacred cave of Rome’s ancestors, where the she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus. A place revered in antiquity but lost to history. It could be one of the most sensational finds ever made in Roman archaeology. We’re here to see if we can find an underground entrance. Massimo’s even kept the superintendency in the dark. His team are worried about looters getting in, and want to explore the place fully before going public.’

‘The Palatine’s riddled with caves and fissures,’ Massimo enthused. ‘God only knows what else lies under there. The Lupercale cave could just be the tip.’

‘You’re sure this is the best entrance, here under the arch?’ Jack asked.

‘On the other side of the Palatine, the tunnel runs from the Cloaca Maxima somewhere near the
Atrium Vestae
, the House of the Vestal Virgins,’ Massimo replied. ‘We haven’t got any further than that. This side is definitely your best bet. The branch going from here into the Palatine is on the line of the Velabrum, an ancient stream that was once part of another marshy area, canalized and arched over about 200 BC. We’ve explored as far as the edge of the Palatine, but then the tunnel drops down and becomes completely submerged. We’re not cave divers, not yet. From our farthest point we think it’s only about two hundred metres to the site of the Lupercale, and about thirty metres up.’

‘What’s the geology?’ Costas said.

‘Tufa, volcanic stone. Easily worked but strong, a good load-bearer. And you sometimes see calcite formations as well, even stalactites and stalagmites, where calcium-rich groundwater has dripped into the Roman conduits.’

‘Can we take a peek down that hole?’ Jack said, jerking his head towards the open doorway in the arch. ‘I want some idea of what we’re dealing with.’