The two silver coins described in Chapter 15—and one of them in the Prologue—
truly exist, and can be seen along with other images from this book at www.davidgibbins.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Canada, at the age of fifteen David Gibbins dived on his first shipwreck in the Great Lakes. He has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University, he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.
For centuries, people have speculated about the fabled lost libraries of antiquity.
If one were found, what marvels would it contain? Now, a fearless team of adventurers is about to unearth that long-hidden secret, and it will lead them to the most astonishing discovery ever made…
THE LAST
GOSPEL
by
David Gibbins
Coming from Dell in February 2008
READ ON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEEK!
THE LAST GOSPEL
On sale in February 2008
1
Jack Howard eased himself down on the floor of the inflatable boat, his back resting on one pontoon and his legs leaning against the outboard engine. It was hot, almost too hot to move, and the sweat had begun to trickle down his face.
The sun had burned through the morning haze and was bearing down relentlessly, reflecting blindingly off the cliff face in front of him, the limestone scarred and worn like the tombs and temples on the rocky headland beyond.
Jack felt as if he were in a painting by Seurat, as if the air had fragmented into a myriad of pixels that immobilized all thought and action, that caught him in the moment. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, took in the utter stillness, the smell of wetsuits, the outboard engine, the taste of salt. It was everything he loved, distilled to its essence. It felt good.
He opened his eyes and peered over the side, checking the orange buoy he had released a few minutes before. The sea was glassy smooth, with only a slight swell rippling the edge where it lapped against the rock face. He reached out and put his hand on the surface, letting it float for a moment until the swell enveloped it. The water below was limpid, as clear as a swimming pool, and he could see far down the anchor line into the depths, to the shimmer of exhaust bubbles rising from the divers below. It was hard to believe this had once been a place of unimaginable fury, of nature at her cruelest, of untold human tragedy.
The most famous shipwreck in history. Jack hardly dared think of it. For twenty years he had wanted to come back to this place, an itch which had nagged at him and become a gnawing obsession, ever since his first doubt, since he had first begun to reassemble the pieces. It was an intuition that had rarely failed him, tried and tested over years of exploration and discovery around the world.
Intuition based on hard science, on an accumulation of facts that had begun to point unswervingly in one direction.
He had been sitting here, off Capo Murro di Porco in the heart of the Mediterranean, when he had first dreamed up the International Maritime University. Twenty years ago he had been on a shoestring budget, leading a group of students driven by their passion for diving and archaeology, with equipment cobbled together and jerry-built on the spot. Now he had a multi-million-dollar budget, a sprawling campus on his family estate in southern England, museums around the world, state-of-the-art research vessels, an extraordinary team at IMU who took the logistics out of his hands. But in some ways little had changed. No end of money could buy the clues that led to the greatest discoveries, the extraordinary treasures that made it all worthwhile.
Twenty years ago they had been following a tantalizing account left by Captain Cousteau’s divers, intrepid explorers at the dawn of shipwreck archaeology, and here he was again, floating above the same site with the same battered old diary in his hands. The key ingredients were still the same, the hunches, the gut feeling, the thrill of discovery, that moment when all the elements suddenly came together, the adrenaline rush like no other.
Jack shifted, pushing his diving suit farther down around his waist, and checked his watch. He was itching to get wet. There was a slight commotion as the divers pulled the buoy underwater, and he could see it refracted five metres below, deep enough to avoid the props of passing boats but shallow enough for a free diver to retrieve a weighted line that hung from it as a mooring point. Jack had already dared to look ahead, had begun to eye the site like a field commander planning an assault. Seaquest could anchor in a sheltered bay around the cape to the west. On the headland itself the rocky seashore dropped in a series of stepped shelves, good for a shore camp. He rehearsed all the ingredients of a successful underwater excavation, knowing that each site produced its fresh crop of challenges. Any finds they made would have to go to the archaeological museum in Syracuse, but he was sure the Sicilian authorities would make a good show of it. IMU would establish a permanent liaison with their own museum at Carthage, perhaps even an air shuttle as a package trip for tourists. They could hardly go wrong.
Jack peered down, checked his watch again, then noted the time in the logbook.
The two divers were at the decompression stop. Twenty minutes to go. He leaned back, made himself relax and take in the perfect tranquility of the scene for a moment longer. Only three weeks earlier he had stood by the edge of an underwater cavern in the Yucatan, drained but exhilarated at the end of another extraordinary trail of discovery. There had been losses, grievous losses, and Jack had spent much of the voyage home ruminating on those who had paid the ultimate price. His boyhood friend Peter Howe, missing in the Black Sea. And now Father O’Connor, an ally for all too brief a time, whose appalling death had brought home the reality of what they were ranged against. Always it was the bigger stake that provided the solace, the innumerable lives that could have been lost had they not relentlessly pursued their goal. Jack had become used to the greatest archaeological prizes coming at a cost, gifts from the past that unleashed forces in the present that few could imagine existed. But here, he felt sure of it, here it was different. Here it was archaeology pure and simple, a revelation that could only thrill and beguile any who came to know of it.
He peered into the glassy stillness of the sea, saw the rocky cliff face underwater disappear into the shimmering blue. His mind was racing, his heart pounding with excitement. Could this be it? Could this be the most famous shipwreck of all antiquity? The shipwreck of St. Paul?
“You there?”
Jack raised his foot and gently prodded the other form in the boat. It wobbled, then grunted. Costas Kazantzakis was about a foot shorter than Jack but built like an ox, a legacy of generations of Greek sailors and sponge-fishermen. Like Jack he was stripped to the waist, and his barrel chest was glistening with sweat. He seemed to have become part of the boat, his legs extended on the pontoon in front of Jack and his head nestled in a mess of towels at the bow. His mouth was slightly open and he was wearing a pair of wraparound fluorescent sunglasses, a hilarious fashion accessory on such an unkempt figure. One hand was dangling in the water, holding the hoses that led down to the regulators at the decompression stop, and the other hand was draped over the valve of the oxygen cylinder that lay down the center of the boat. Jack grinned affectionately at his friend. Costas was always there to lend a hand, even when he was dead to the world. Jack kicked him again. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. I can see them at the safety stop.”
Costas grunted again, and Jack passed over a water bottle. “Drink as much as you can. We don’t want to get the bends.”
“Good on you, mate.” Costas had learned a few comically misplaced catchphrases in his years based at the IMU headquarters in England, but the delivery was still resolutely New York. He reached over and took the water, and proceeded to down half the bottle noisily.
“Cool shades, by the way,” Jack said.
“Jeremy gave them to me,” Costas gasped. “A parting present when we got back from the Yucatan. I was moved.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m not sure if he was. Anyway, they work.” Costas pulled them down again, passed back the bottle then slumped back. “Been touching base with your past?”
“Only the good bits.”
“Any decent engineers? I mean, on your team back then?”
“We’re talking Cambridge University, remember. One guy took a portable blackboard with him everywhere he went, would patiently explain the Wankel rotary engine to any passing Sicilian. A real eccentric. But that was before you came along.”
“With a dose of good-old American know-how. At least at MIT they taught us about the real world.” Costas leaned over, grabbed the bottle again and took another swig of water. “Anyway, this shipwreck of yours. The one you excavated here twenty years ago. Any good finds?”
“A typical Roman merchantman,” Jack replied. ‘About two hundred cylindrical pottery amphoras filled with olive oil and fish sauce laden on the edge of the African desert, due south of us. A fascinating selection of ceramics from the ship’s galley, which we were able to date to about A.D. 200. And we did make one incredible find.”
There was a silence, broken by a stentorian snore. Jack kicked again, and Costas reached out to stop himself from rolling overboard. He pushed his shades up his forehead and peered blearily at Jack. “Uh huh?”
“Sorry. I know you need your beauty sleep. But it’s almost time.”
Costas grunted again, then raised himself painfully on one elbow and rubbed his hand across his stubble. “I don’t think beauty’s an option.” He heaved himself upright, then took off the sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Jack peered with concern at his friend. “You look wasted. You need to take some time off. You’ve been working flat out since we returned from the Yucatan last month.”
“You should stop buying me toys.”
“What I bought you,” Jack gently admonished him, “was an agreement from the Board of Directors for an increase in engineering personnel. Hire some more staff. Delegate.”
“You should talk,” Costas grumbled. “Name me one archaeological project run by IMU over the last decade where you haven’t jumped onboard.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Costas stretched, and gave a tired grin. “Okay, a week by my uncle’s pool in Greece wouldn’t go amiss. Anyway, was I dreaming? You mentioned an incredible find?”
“Buried in a gully directly beneath us now, where Ben and Andy should have anchored the shot-line. The remains of an ancient wooden crate, filled with sealed tin boxes. Inside the boxes we found more than a hundred small wooden phials, filled with unguents and powders including cinnamon, cumin and vanilla.
That was amazing enough, but then we found a large slab of dark resinous material, about two kilogrammes in weight. At first we thought it was ship’s stores, spare resin for waterproofing timbers. But the lab analysis came up with an astonishing result.”
“Go on.”
“What the ancients called lacrymae papaveris, tears of the poppy, papaver somniferum. The sticky milky stuff that comes from the calyx of the black poppy.
What we call opium.”
“No kidding.”
“Pliny the Elder writes about it, in his Natural History.”
“The guy who died in the eruption of Vesuvius?”
“Right. When Pliny wasn’t writing he was in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum, the big naval base on the Bay of Naples. He knew all about the products of the east from his sailors, and from Egyptian and Syrian merchants who put in there. They knew the best opium came from the distant land of Bactria, high in the mountains beyond the eastern fringe of the empire, beyond Persia. That’s present-day Afghanistan.”
“You’re kidding me.” Costas was fully alert now, and looked incredulous. “Opium.
From Afghanistan. Did I hear you right? We’re talking the first century A.D. here, not the twenty-first century, right?”
“You’ve got it.”
“An ancient drug runner?”
Jack laughed. “Opium wasn’t illegal back then. Some ancient authorities condemned it for making users go blind, but they hadn’t refined it into heroin yet. It was probably mixed with alcohol to make a drink, similar to laudanum, the fashion drug of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seed was also pounded into tablets. Pliny tells us it could induce sleep, cure headaches, so they knew all about the painkilling properties of morphine. It was also used for euthanasia. Pliny gives us what may be the first-ever account of a deliberate Class A drug overdose: a guy called Publius Licinius Caecina who was unbearably ill and died of opium poisoning.”
“So what you found was a medicine chest,” Costas said.
“That’s what we thought at the time. But a really odd find in the chest was a small bronze statue of Apollo. When you find medical equipment it’s more commonly with a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. A few years later I visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, on the edge of the active volcanic zone a few miles north of Misenum, within sight of Vesuvius. Apollo was the god of oracles. Sulphur and herbs were used to ward off evil spirits and maybe opium was added to it. I began to wonder whether all those mystical rites were chemically assisted.”
“It could have been smoked,” Costas murmured. “Burned like incense. The fumes would have been quicker than a draught.”
“People went to those places seeking cures,” Jack said. “All we hear about is the message of the oracle, obscure verses written on leaves or issued as prophetic pronouncements, all sound and fury and signifying God knows what. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe some people really did find a cure of sorts, a palliative.”
“And a highly addictive one. It would have kept the Sibyl in business. Cash offerings from grateful clients would have kept the supply rolling.”