The Gods of Atlantis (46 page)

Schoenberg waved his hand. ‘More nonsense. More fantasy.’

‘The type of fantasy that helped to tip Himmler towards the Final Solution.’

Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas. ‘
Atlantis
. Carry on, Professor.’

Schoenberg paused. ‘Atlantis was another of the schemes. Himmler was under the spell of a man named Karl Maria Wiligut, who claimed to be the last in a line of ancient sages who told of lost cities and vanished civilizations.’

Costas glanced at the notebook he had taken from his pocket. ‘
Wiligut
. That rings a bell. Hard name to forget. Here we are. Karl Maria Wiligut also taught that the ancestral enemies of the German people were the Jews. Founder of an anti-Semitic league. Head of the Department for
Pre- and Early History within the Race and Settlement Office. Funny name for a scholarly institution, don’t you think?’

Schoenberg opened his arms and sat back. ‘Is this to be an interrogation?’ he said, looking at Jack.

Costas stared at him, then closed his notebook and put it in his pocket. ‘Do carry on, please.’

Schoenberg paused, then leaned forward again. ‘In the mind of Himmler, Atlantis was the ancient foundation civilization, the original Aryan homeland. It existed in the Age of Ice, and evidence for it was to be found in Iceland, in Greenland, under Antarctica, high in the glaciers of the Alps and the Andes and the Himalayas, where people might live who were genetically untainted descendants of the original Atlanteans. But those of us who were genuine scholars knew better. When your IMU team discovered the Neolithic citadel in the Black Sea, I felt an extraordinary vindication. If Plato’s Atlantis was based on reality, we knew it could not have been in some remote location but must have been a vanished civilization of the Old World, right in the heartland of the first civilizations. The revelations of the Bronze Age, of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, of Troy, showed how much had been lost to history, and we assumed that Atlantis would be another civilization like that, waiting to be rediscovered by some latter-day Schliemann. But I also believed that a precocious early civilization would have spread its wings. My private quest was not to find Atlantis, but to find Atlantis reborn. We guessed that the most famous Bronze Age civilizations, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the Minoans, might owe their extraordinary achievements to some precursor civilization, to refugees from Atlantis. But where else might the Atlanteans have gone?’

Jack leaned forward. ‘Did you find clues in the Heidelberg Codex?’ Schoenberg’s eyes lit up with fervour. ‘When the order came from Himmler to scour the ancient sources in the search for Atlantis, Heidelberg was the first place I went. I’d been just about to start research for my doctorate at the university when I was fingered for the Ahnenerbe. My subject had been another periplus, the ancient
Periplus
of Hanno
, one of the other texts bound up in
Codex Palatinus Graecus
398 with the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
.’

Costas looked at Jack ‘Were these original texts?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Tenth-century
AD
copies. Until Hiebermeyer’s discovery of those pottery fragments with the Erythraean Sea text, the Heidelberg Codex represented the earliest surviving versions of the geographical works it contains. The monk who transcribed them may well have copied from exemplars dating from antiquity, though probably even those were not the originals.’

‘That’s the key to what I’m about to tell you,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Even the most careful monks could lose concentration and introduce errors, and of course they copied any existing errors in the versions they were transcribing. Sometimes if they recognized errors they tried to rectify them, yet they often failed to grasp the original meaning and in so doing made it worse. The biggest problems are with texts that have also gone through translations. With those, the more knowledgeable monks sometimes added their own comments in the margins, where they felt they might fix a questionable translation or clarify a passage. Where they include reference to other ancient sources to make their point, this can reveal the existence of other works now lost.’

‘So what’s your point?’ Jack asked.

‘Do you remember which text comes next in the Heidelberg Codex after the
Periplus Maris Erythraei
?’

Jack cast his mind back to the day he had spent with Maria and Jeremy at Heidelberg. ‘It’s your speciality, the
Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian
, the extraordinary account of Hanno’s voyage in the sixth century
BC
down the west coast of Africa. Folio pages 55v to 58v, if I remember correctly. I can vividly recall the excellent seminar you gave on it at Cambridge when we first met. The
Periplus of Hanno
really illustrates your point about transcription problems. It was originally inscribed on bronze tablets on a pillar in Carthage, and then was translated into Greek. We glanced at it when we were examining the codex but didn’t have time to study it in detail.’

‘Nor did I, to begin with,’ Schoenberg said, beaming. ‘My study of
the codex for my doctoral research was interrupted when I was recruited into the Ahnenerbe. It was only when they sent me back to the library to look for clues to Atlantis that I had the chance. And even if you
had
read it, you wouldn’t have seen what I saw.’

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

Schoenberg picked up the leather document case in front of him and opened it, taking out a brown envelope. He held it for a moment, then looked at Jack. ‘You must understand me. I’ve kept the contents of this envelope secret since the war. In April 1945, when the Russians were closing in, I was forced into the
Volkssturm
militia for the defence of Berlin. My unit defended the western part of the Tiergarten below the Zoo flak tower. I was one of the lucky few who were captured. I say lucky now, but we didn’t think so at the time. We were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. Most of my comrades who weren’t summarily executed or worked to death died of disease or starvation. When I was finally released in 1954, I went to Germany to retrieve this case from where I had hidden it and then took advantage of the lifting of immigration restrictions on former Nazis by the Canadian government to emigrate. They needed manual labour, and for several years I worked as a lumberjack. Then I was able to resume my studies, to complete my doctorate and embark on an academic career. I married, had children and now have great-grandchildren. The past was behind me. I had no wish to reveal anything while my children were still growing up that might expose what I had been and what I had done.’

‘Why now?’ Jack asked.

‘Because I am old, and sitting here looking over the ocean, imagining ancient explorers and seafarers, I dwell often in the past in Heidelberg, when I was so excited to be in that library. I took out this document a few days ago and smelt the old vellum of the codex. It brought it all back to me. That’s when I called my old friend James Dillen. I could not die without revealing this to someone. And there is a specific reason why I wanted it to be you.’

‘Let’s see it,’ Costas said, leaning forward on his elbows. Schoenberg took a deep breath, then reached in and pulled out two
sheets from the envelope, placing them on top of the table. The upper sheet was an A4-sized black-and-white photograph of an old manuscript. ‘This is an image of folio 23v of
Codex Palatinus Graecus
398,’ he said. ‘You can see that the monk wrote the main text in minuscules – that is, lower-case letters – but put marginal headings in uncials, upper-case letters. That’s how we can date it: Byzantine scribes only started writing Greek in minuscules around the ninth century
AD
, and this codex is one of the earliest examples. I’m showing you this page as an example because you can see where he has put comments and corrections in the left-hand column. Now look at this.’ He lifted the photograph, revealing an old sheet of vellum, yellowed around the edges and crinkled at the bottom. ‘This is an actual page from the codex, an insert before the first page containing the text of the
Periplus of Hanno
. The earlier translators of the codex in the nineteenth century failed to mention it. It’s pretty obvious why.’

‘Because it’s blank,’ Costas said.

‘So it seems. It was inserted as a blotter, to prevent poorer-quality ink from spreading on the back of the preceding sheet. When I first saw this in 1942, I remembered similar blank pages inserted for that purpose in other codices. On a whim I raised the page and shone a torch through the vellum. I could see a faint imprint in reverse of the main text on the following page, and a clearer imprint from the monk’s marginal notes where that part of the page had been compressed close to the binding when the book was closed. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but with the light you can make out most of the text. It matched exactly the text on the following page, a mirror image, except in one place. Some time after the blank page had been inserted, one of the marginal notes on the following page had been erased: scraped away or painted over with a solution that dissolved the ink. The note only survived in ghostly reverse on the back of the blank sheet.’

‘What was the subject of the text of the
Periplus of Hanno
beside the note?’ Jack asked.

‘It was the first sentences of the
Periplus
, where the text describes Hanno sailing past the Pillars of Hercules with fifty large ships and
thirty thousand settlers. The erased note is opposite the line where Hanno talks about cities of the “Libyo-Phoenicians”. He lists city names that occur nowhere else and can’t be precisely identified, though several of them probably correspond to the known Phoenician outposts of Lixus and Mogador on the Moroccan coast facing the Atlantic. There’s a clue in that note to which one of those cities he’s referring to.’

‘I’ve been there,’ Jack murmured. ‘My undergraduate study tour, examining evidence for Phoenician exploration along the coast of west Africa. The archaeology of the very early period is pretty elusive, difficult to pin down. Go on.’

Schoenberg picked up a Mini Maglite, held the vellum vertically and shone the light through it. Jack gasped as saw the faint imprint of letters. Schoenberg moved the torch and shone it on one side at the bottom. Jack could clearly see letters in Greek, lower-case letters with the words separated, like modern cursive script. ‘I’ve transcribed it,’ Schoenberg murmured, ‘but you should he able to make out the original Greek. It’s quite clear.’

Jack stared into the halo of light coming through the vellum, then reached out and held a corner to keep it still. He realized that he was looking at the obverse side, seeing the text the correct way round, rather than the mirror imprint on the reverse. He counted twenty-one words in the note, in three lines. Costas took out his notepad and pencil, and stared. ‘Holy cow,’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you see what I see?’

Schoenberg peered at Costas. ‘Of course. Your name, Kazantzakis. You read Greek too.’

Jack stared at the writing.
That word
. His heart was pounding, but he tried to stay focused. Costas wrote it down, keeping the lower-case script of the Greek minuscules:
. He held the notepaper up so Jack could see it.
Atlantis
. Jack’s mind flashed back to five years before, to the fragment of papyrus that Maurice Hiebermeyer had found in the mummy necropolis in Egypt, the words that had set in motion their quest for the lost city. That papyrus had been an original text of the early sixth century
BC
, written by the Greek traveller Solon
after his visit to the high priest in the Egyptian temple at Saïs, the account that led Plato almost two centuries later to write about the legend of Atlantis in the book that became the basis for all modern speculation. Jack stared at the word, trying to remain analytical. This was a marginal note written by an unknown monk in the tenth century
AD
. Many monks in the Byzantine world would have known of Plato, and could have read the Atlantis story in his
Critias
and
Timaeus
. He thought of other ways the monk could have known that word. ‘The Greek word Atlantis, that exact spelling, first appears in the
Histories
of Herodotus in the fifth century
BC
. But for him it meant Atlas, and was his name for the Western Ocean, Atlantis Thalassa, the Sea of Atlas. That’s the first time in history that the ocean is called the Atlantic, and the monk could simply have been using the word Atlantis in that sense.’

‘That’s what I thought at first,’ Schoenberg said. ‘But despite its appearance so early in Herodotus, the more common Greek and Roman name for the Atlantic was simply Ocean. Pliny the Elder in his
Natural History
in the first century
AD
calls it that, Oceanus. The ancients of course knew about the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, the Maris Erythraei of the other periplus, but to them there was only one Ocean, the huge expanse to the west beyond the Pillars of Hercules.’