Temple of the Gods - Andy McDermott [117]
The wait was almost intolerable. Nina moved forward again, not even another nudge from Matt sufficient to move her back. She stared intently into the darkness outside. Then . . .
‘There!’ she cried. ‘There it is!’
Her first true sight of the ruins of Atlantis hazed into view through the murk. It didn’t appear particularly impressive, just the collapsed remains of a building – but to her it was utterly breathtaking. A civilisation lost for eleven thousand years, discovered through the work and dedication of first her parents and then herself . . . and now she was finally seeing it first-hand. ‘Oh, my God. That is incredible . . .’ She felt as though she were about to cry.
Eddie punctured her bubble. ‘Great. We’ve come to the bottom of the Atlantic to look at a building site.’
‘Shut. Up!’
They approached what was left of the Temple of the Gods. Compared to some of the other majestic structures the expedition had unearthed it was not particularly big, an oval perhaps seventy feet across at its longest. Large sections of its walls had toppled outwards, giving the impression that it had exploded from within.
‘So that’s where they kept this sky stone?’ Eddie asked.
‘That’s right,’ said Nina. ‘It’s quite an unusual place, actually. Atlantean temples are usually devoted to a single god, but this was dedicated to . . . well, dozens of them, as far as we can tell. Although now that we know about the sky stone from the rest of the Kallikrates text, there might be an explanation. Nantalas said that it contained the power of the gods – plural. So the Atlanteans made sure to honour them all.’
‘If they knew there was something special about the meteor, enough for ’em to build a temple to put it in, why didn’t they use its power right away?’
Nina looked out at the broken building as they glided past. ‘There could be any number of reasons. They might have been afraid of it; the text said that some of the royal court were opposed to using its power. Or maybe they didn’t originally have all three statues – or anyone who could use them. It was obviously a big thing for Nantalas to be able to channel earth energy, so it could have been as rare an ability then as it is now, even amongst Atlanteans.’
‘Maybe you’re her great-great-great-great-et cetera grand-daughter,’ Eddie suggested.
Nina treated the jokey comment with more seriousness. ‘Maybe. I’m descended from someone from Atlantis, so who knows?’
The collapsed temple disappeared from view. Beyond it, something far larger came into sight.
The Temple of Poseidon.
Even after the destruction wrought upon it by the impact of the sunken Evenor, it was still an imposing structure. The submersible was approaching its northern end, where Eddie had first entered the temple five years earlier. An enormous wall of dark stone rose out of the sediment, stepped in tiers like a ziggurat near its base before curving smoothly inwards to form a great arched roof.
Nina noticed a sudden tension in her husband at the sight. ‘Hugo?’ she asked quietly. Eddie gave her a silent nod; one of his closest friends had died here. Matt also became uncharacteristically sombre for a moment. Eddie had not been the only one to suffer a loss at Atlantis.
The submersible drew closer. ‘That’s the tunnel,’ said Eddie, pointing at a small hole in the wall. The shaft had been constructed by the Atlanteans as a secret passage leading directly to the altar room.
‘You don’t need to crawl through a little hole to get inside now,’ said Matt as he guided the Sharkdozer towards the roof. The wreck of the Evenor came into sight, a long white axe that had sliced the four-hundred-foot-long temple in two. Something bright flickered in the gloom atop the rubble. ‘There’s the altar room.’
He brought the sub into a hover near the object, a