Blankenship & Dawes in: Crocopolis! Part Two.
I think you’ll find today’s installment thrilling. Polish your monocles, swirl your brandy skeptically, prepare for intrigue.
James busied himself with directing the offloading of the fragile and complex equipment: a pair of diving suits of his own invention, capable of withstanding the great pressures of the lake’s fantastic depth; a pneumatic harpoon; instruments that could analyze the level of sediment accretion on an artifact or fossil and name its date of origin within two months; even a small camera, also of Blankenship’s invention, that captured images on a rubber-celluloid compound rather than on gelatine plates, and so could operate underwater. By concentrating on the proper care of these marvelous machines, James was able to ignore that the Bellerophon, his pride and joy, was now a very expensive part of the tropical scenery.
By morning their small crew had unloaded the ship and set up camp on a patch of level ground not far from the rocky beach. Avery shot a wild pig and they had a good breakfast. Thereafter, Bellows picked up his rifle and vanished into the brush without a word to anyone. Avery watched him.
“Let him make the acquaintance of the natives or whatever he intends,” James said. “We have work to do. Fortunately the steam launch was undamaged in the attack.”
“How will we ever find this sunken city of yours, Jim?” Avery wondered. “This lake must be a hundred miles long.”
“Closer to five hundred, actually, and forty miles across at its widest point. The second largest lake in the world, after Baikal in Russia. Though the climate here is far more agreeable, I’m sure. A thorough survey has yet to be conducted. Though Sir Burton estimated its depth at a third of a mile, his techniques were rather rudimentary. Ergo, our secondary objective will be to construct a rough map of the bottom of this great lake.”
“And to bag Eustace.”
“Of course. But to our greater purpose, I have constructed – this.” James opened a crate and brushed aside the straw packing, revealing a shiny metal sphere.
“It’s brilliant, Jim. What does it do?”
“When submerged in water, it emits a tone on the frequency of six to seven hundred Hertz, and detects echoes of the same. The frequency and trajectory of these echoes, when processed through a calculating machine of astounding power and alacrity, will tell us the shape of the lake floor, and – one hopes – enable us to find the lost city.”
“And where is this calculating machine?”
James smiled and tapped his temple.
Avery laughed. “You really have no need of praise, do you?”
“I enjoy it nonetheless.”
Avery, James, and Larsen set out in the launch. The lake stretched out of sight in all directions, blue as a lapis lazuli, bright as a bowl of sunlight. Fishing craft moved sedately on the water. “Criminy, it feels like we’re back on the Med,” Avery said.
“Forgive me saying so, sir, but only a non-sailor could say such a thing,” Larsen said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“After crossing the Atlantic, to a true sailor, the Mediterranean becomes a lake; after crossing the Pacific, the Atlantic becomes a lake and the Mediterranean a placid pond. This…” He gestured at the vast water. “While grand, it’s nothing. It’s calm and still as a parkland puddle. We might as well be in a paddle boat shaped like a swan.”
Avery grinned. “You mistake me for a landlubber, Larsen. I’ve sailed around the Cape – both of them – to India and back.”
“Sailed,” Larsen said, “or merely traveled by ship?”
“Ah, you’ve got me there,” Avery said. “Still, there’s no denying that Tanganyika is quite the puddle!”
Larsen shrugged.
James lowered his sonic emitter on a boom. From the globe snaked two wires that terminated in rubber cups. He placed these over his ears, and readied a pencil and a pad of paper. He nodded to Avery, who picked up a small wooden box connected to the globe by a thick bundle of wires. From the box protruded a crank, which Avery spun furiously. James listened for a moment, then scribbled madly on his paper, producing a lengthy list of numbers. After a few minutes, he nodded, and Avery stopped cranking.
“Did it work?” he asked.
“I may have Verdi’s Anvil Chorus ringing in my ears for the next few weeks,” Jame said, “but I think I have a set of data from which to work. Let’s try again. My good Larsen, take us a quarter-mile upstream, or uplake, or whatever it is. That direction.” Larsen complied, and they took another reading. By lunchtime James’s pad was full, and they had traveled perhaps fifty miles south. They waited for an hour while James tabulated his results and sketched a rough map. Avery fished, and brought up a half-dozen brown and white cichlids. “There it is,” James said. “It’s hardly beautiful, but I’ve had to adjust my expectations. It seems that this lake has a high degree of stratification, and the bottom layers are almost entirely anoxic, which interferes somewhat with the operation of the sonic emitter. However, I’ve found that while Burton’s guess as to the mean depth of this lake are correct, he could not have imagined the distribution; I have found at least one point where the depth exceeds a mile!”
Avery whistled. Larsen grunted.
“And what of our sunken city?”
“Nothing – yet. It’s a big lake. We have time for a few more readings, though. Let’s put a good distance behind us before we take another.” They steamed for the better part of an hour before James called a halt. “We’ll try it here.” They deployed the emitter, and James listened, his pencil poised over the pad. “There’s something different in the echoes here,” he said. “The water is less stratified, though the depth is consistent. Perhaps an underground stream or spring feeds into the lake here. And the echoes are slightly broken and baffled. The surface is less regular. Which may mean – Larsen, take us a hundred yards east.” They took another reading. Delight spread on James’s face. “Heureka! I am in a state of having found it!”
“Shall we don our suits?” Avery asked.
“Don away, my good chap, don away!”
Larsen helped them into the bulky suits, which were tethered by stout cables to the launch. Larsen would have to haul them up; it would be quite impossible to swim two thousand feet upwards in the heavy suits. James thrice-checked the seals and toggled his wireless voice-telegraph. “Avery?” His own voice was fuzzy and harsh in his helmet. “Can you hear me?”
Avery’s baritone came booming back at him: “The moon on the ocean was dimmed by a ripple…”
“Yes, we all adore that song. I think the voice-telegraph operates satisfactorily. Prepare for the plunge.”
Avery picked up the pneumatic harpoon.
“Oh,” said James, “I assure you we will be quite unmolested by aquafauna at our intended depth.”
“Never into the breach unarmed,” Avery said.
James shrugged. His comrade had some eccentricities. “Into the breach, then!” he said, and, holding his breath despite the suit’s oxygenerators, he closed his eyes and stepped into the water.
#
Avery sank like a stone, the suit’s weight pulling him quickly into the darkening depths, from the bright aquamarine near the surface to the lightless void below. He fell for minutes that seemed like hours, the waterproof torch of James’s suit the only visible thing in the blackness of the lake. It came as a shock when his feet finally touched solid earth; he had forgotten their destination in the sightless, soundless freefall. James landed nearby.
He ignited his chemical torch, and light blazed from the top of his helmet, showing mounds of stones. “Not much stirring,” he said.
“No.” James’s voice crackled in his ears. “Precious little can survive at this depth, and without much oxygen, there is little incentive to venture here.”
“Not even weeds,” Avery said. “Bloody difficult to move, too.”
“That’s the weight of a half-mile of water on you. Let the suit’s motors do the work; you have merely to suggest movements. Now, the ruins!”
They lumbered toward the toppled heaps of stone. Certainly a city had stood there long ago; the stones were large, some almost colossal in scale, and even centuries or millennia of immersion had not erased the work of human hands. “This was definitely a support column of some larger structure,” James said, shining his light the length of a fallen pillar that Avery had mistaken for a bump in the lake bed. James blasted grime from the surface with his wrist-mounted waterjets. “Marble!” he said, astonished. “It’s utterly impossible, but I recognize the fine grain and near-translucence of Parian marble, from the Island of Paros – in Greece. Avery, how did the most prized stone of the classical world come to Lake Tanganyika?”
“Not by the night train, that’s for sure.”
“I agree with the gist of your remark, if not the wording. Most curious. But you see here, we have definite spiral fluting. It looks almost Athenian – but not quite. This was carved by no instrument as crude as a chisel.” James photographed the pillar and they moved on.
Their lights revealed only discrete segments of the city, but Avery was able to outline a composite in his head. No structure remained standing; whatever time-swallowed cataclysm had formed the lake had also shattered the city, and so they had the difficulty of mentally recombining the tremendous slabs of stone and the shattered columns into an image of what might have been. Avery imagined a city perhaps a mile across, very grand in its day, with broad streets radiating like spokes from a central temple or government building. There probably had been hundreds or thousands of wood or mud or brick houses outside of the city proper, but they had not stood the test of time.
James gasped over every new discovery. “I really don’t know what to think of this, Avery. The materials are from the northern Mediterranean, and some of the architecture reflects the classical, as well – namely the columns, where we see a corkscrew fluting that might be the ancestor of the Solomonic design.” His camera flashed. “But there are constant arguments to the contrary, such as these inscriptions, which appear to be, insanely, cuneiform, and the bas-reliefs resemble hieroglyphs more than… Are you listening?”
Avery was paying heed not to any physical signal, but to that instinct that had saved him from a tiger’s lunge in the jungles of India, or from a pit viper’s strike in the Australian outback – the prickling of hair at the back of his neck that told him that here was danger.
He flashed his light in all directions, but saw only the silent stones. As James had said, nothing could possibly survive at that depth. Yet for a moment he glimpsed the figure of a man, silhouetted against a white stone, and then it was gone. His eyes were playing tricks on him, no doubt, distorting the form he had expected into a bent and misshapen creature, but the vision was chilling nonetheless: a man’s limbs and torso, but a saurian snout, a thrashing tail…
“Avery! Pay attention, man! We stand in the greatest archaeological find of the century! Karnak is a paltry pile of bricks beside this! Troy is an uninteresting jumble of shacks!” Avery noted a familiar manic excitement in James’s voice. “Let’s investigate the central temple.”
It was disappointing, at least in Avery’s opinion. The nexus of the great city ought to be more than a broad dais and a few broken pillars, he felt, but they found little more. James, however, evinced no disappointment. He bent over the dais and photographed busily.
“That strange cuneiform spirals from the center. I can read most languages written in the Sumerian system – Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, and, of course, Elamite – but this appears to depict no language even remotely related.” Avery detected wonder and consternation mixed in his voice. “In fact, it’s not even pictographic – it seems phonetic, an innovation that came rather late to the Sumerian languages. But the verb structure appears almost Hellenic. Neptune’s beard, Avery, it’s Greek!”
Avery tried to whistle, but it came out as a burst of static in the voice-telegraph. “And what does that mean?”
“It means my Fellowship is secured, for one thing. The Greek alphabet surfaced in the ninth century before Christ. This is a version of proto-Greek rendered phonetically in cuneiform, which first appeared four millennia back and two thousand miles away. This suggests a common origin of the two languages!”
“But can you read it?”
“Maybe. Wait a moment.” He cleared grime with the waterjets. “A recurring ‘word’ - I use ‘word’ loosely. It’s more of a concept that only gains definition when paired with other ‘words’. The language allows for a good degree of ambiguity, as you see here.” He tapped the dais.
“Right-o.”
“I think, in this usage, the ‘word’ may be pronounced ‘Ensi-ka.’ It seems like a place name, perhaps a city or kingship.”
“The name of this city?”
“Doubtful. It distinctly uses an honorific case, implying something greater than this city. Perhaps this is a settlement or colony of Ensi-ka. Strange.” James inspected the rim of the dais. “The rest of these ruins are encrusted in centuries of grime, but it’s been disturbed here.”
“Jim, old boy, I am thinking of the better part of valor right now.”
“I assure you that we are perfectly safe at this depth. But I’ve learned to trust your primordial cunning, and I have more data than I can process right now. So long as these ancient stones promise to remain where they are, I can force myself to adjourn for the night.” He signaled Larsen through the voice-telegraph, and a moment later the clinking chains pulled them the fathoms to the surface.
#
James chatted excitedly to Larsen about their discovery the length of the ride back to camp, and Larsen responded with characteristic grunts, finally saying, “Pardon, Mr. Blankenship, sir, I just pilot the boat. This archaeo-business doesn’t interest me much.” James blinked, mouth open, having totally forgotten that he was talking to an individual rather than his own imagination.
They beached the launch alongside the wreckage of the Bellerophon. “Let’s look up Bellows,” Avery suggested, “and have a drop of summat hot.”
James shuddered. “You mean ‘partake of an aperitif.’”
“Right.”
“He ought to know of our progress and discoveries, anyway, so he can begin preparing my Fellowship recommendation to the Society.”
“My thoughts exactly!” Avery scampered up the beach to Bellows’s tent, then stopped suddenly as someone slipped out at the sound of his approach. In the twilight he recognized the Sudanese maid, in a fluttered state of half-dress. She disappeared into the brush. Well, he thought, evidently Bellows wouldn’t share a cradle with these black bastards, as he called them, but other sorts of horizontal furniture proved suitable. Fine for him, but it might look queer if word got out. Avery willfully forgot what he had seen, waited forty seconds, and called, “Bellows! Bellows, rendezvous in the mess for a toast to accomplishment and the broadening of archaeological and anthropological knowledge!” At Bellows’s muffled assent, he retired to the mess tent, where James had already cracked open a case of Armagnac brandy and was sipping delicately.
“Thank indifferent Providence our snifters survived the crash! Take yon glassware, Avery, and I’ll pour you a – tipple?”
“Careful, Jim. You’re approaching conviviality.”
“I may even collapse into flagrant amity,” James said, sharing one of his rare smiles.
The smile vanished at the interruption of Bellows’s whiskey-voice: “Then pony up a glass for me, lad, and I’ll show you how tippling’s done.”
James filled his snifter, and Bellows warmed the glass in his palms, then raised it: “To the broadening of all human knowledge, and to the two gents before me who have done so much in its service!”
“Thank you,” James said, touched despite himself, and Avery reflected that the stomach was a dead end; vanity was the way to James’s heart. They clinked glasses. Avery drank; James tasted; Bellows guzzled and refilled the glasses.
“Now, tell me what I should put in my letter to the RGS.” Bellows seemed overly cheerful to Avery; was it to cover his embarrassment at being caught with a mistress? No, Avery thought, that suspicion doesn’t do justice to such a fine fellow. He just likes to drink, that’s all.
“I wish I could tell you more,” James said. “But I must spend some time with my photographs and my books. I discovered traces of a dozen languages down there – rather, an omni-tongue, a synthesis of all languages, and I must refresh myself on my Sumerian declensions before I can begin to decipher it.”
“So you can read it?” Bellows asked over his glass.
James sniffed. “Please. Merely understanding a language is the most elementary step. I seek rather to understand the culture that the language represents, and place it in the broader context of the Western world; videlicet, to know the parents through familiarity with the child. Language can tell us much more than mere words.”
“Well, kudos, no doubt. But what culture, exactly? If it has links to Sumerian, I assume we’re dealing with an early Moslem tribe. Perhaps a settlement from Abyssinia? Mohammedans came south from Persia as early as the ninth century and established colonies in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian coast, one of which became Dar es Salaam.”
James shook his head. “Moslem architecture in east Africa favors local materials, especially mud bricks, which would not last under this lake. No. This may astound you, Mr. Bellows…”
Bellows theatrically gripped his seat.
“But I found and have photographic proof of traces of Greek architecture!”
Bellows looked from James to Avery, his eyes twinkling. “You’re putting me on.”
“No, sir,” James said gravely. “Avery can verify it.”
“I suppose,” Avery said. “I’m not up on my columns, but they were definitely twirly, and made of marble.”
“Blimey,” Bellows said quietly. “That toast was well-deserved! Let’s have another!”
They did. James told Bellows all about their discovery. The word “Ensi-ka” gave Bellows pause. “Scrawl out those symbols for me, boyo, if you remember them clearly.”
James obliged, a little sullen over the jibe at his memory. Bellows paid him no heed, and studied the cuneiform intently. “And you say it reads like Greek?”
“Yes.”
“Why not write it like Greek, then?”
“I can’t. There’s no exact analogue. You can’t just change from one alphabet to the other, this hardly being an alphabet in the first place… Results would not be verifiable.”
“Just give it a shot for old Bellows, eh?”
James rewrote the symbol in Greek. Bellows took the pencil and made a few adjustments where the vagaries of phonetic transcription allowed it. He tapped the new word. “I’m not up on my Sumerian, but I learned my Greek at Eton, and it’s still with me. What’s that word, my son?”
James reddened. “You must be joking. I present to you science, and you twist it into fairy-tale.”
“Just read the word, out loud, for the benefit of Avery here.”
“I will not. It is worse than a myth. It is a parable that teaches men to laugh in the face of ambition. A superstition that clouds the minds of men, the like against which I have sworn to fight.”
“I’ll say it, then,” Bellows said cheerfully.
His dislike for the man prompted James. “Hold your tongue, Bellows! Very well.” He pursed his lips and spat the word out: “Atlantis.”
“Described by Plato and Francis Bacon.” Bellows’s grin massed wrinkles on the sides of his face.
“And Mr. Jules Verne,” Avery interjected.
James shot him a scornful look. “Myth. What we have discovered today is fact.”
“And this word?” Bellows asked.
“An intentional mistranslation. Besides, the word doesn’t refer to our city as Atlantis; ‘Ensi-ka’ distinctly refers to another location. What we have here is a mere colony of a greater polis, which we can, for the sake of childish amusement, refer to as ‘Atlantis’ for the nonce. But our city is a stunning find in its own right.” James mused. “Which reminds me, it lacks a name.”
“Crocodopolis!” Avery shouted.
James and Bellows looked at him in surprise. “What?” Avery said. “I went to Eton, too.”
They drank to the new name, finished the bottle, and opened another one. “Of course,” Bellows said, his nose rosy, “the RGS will want physical artefacts in addition to your photographs and notes. But you look well on your way to a Fellowship, lad. Maybe one day you’ll even make Chartered Geographer, like myself.”
“Your explorations of Abyssinia are noteworthy,” James said. “What a country, back in the earlies!”
“Aye. Took a spear through the jaw and two arrows through the arm,” Bellows said. “I earned my Chartership. But it’s much harder for you boys. There are precious few dark corners left on this Earth. With your inventions, Mr. Blankenship, we’ll plumb the oceans, and then what will there be to discover?”
“I believe man will turn outward someday,” James said. “We will walk the surface of the moon and cold places beyond even that.”
“Nothing is safe,” Bellows said with a half-smile.
“What do you mean by that?” Avery asked.
Bellows turned a red-rimmed eye on him. “Nothing, boyo,” he said after a moment.
Screams interrupted their conversation. Avery was on his feet before the first cry faded, his Sharps in hand. “From the beach!”
He threw back the tent flap. Before him was a charnel scene. Crewmen, their own sailors and the hired Sudanese and Ethiopians alike, struggled with a huge reptile on the beach – Eustace. The croc had crawled from the water, and Avery could see how mammoth he really was. Avery had seen gunships smaller than Eustace. The crocodile shattered three tents with a sweep of his tail and knocked the gun-wielding men down like tenpins. Their rifles popped, flaring in the night, and sparks struck from his scales. Eustace croaked and lunged on a crewman; Avery recognized Larsen, leveling his rifle steadfastly even as the huge jaws came at him. He never fired the shot. Eustace’s jaws closed over him, clicked shut, and Larsen was gone.
“By Gad! He swallowed Larsen entire! Jim, have you any magic tricks up your sleeve? This beasty’s intent on gobbling us all!”
“I detest the word ‘magical’; it is anti-scientific and therefore anti-truth,” James grumbled. “Were we not just discussing the deleterious effects of superstition on the reasoning – ” He saw Eustace, and his eyes widened in fear. “By Herme’s perspiring buttocks! Run, Avery, that monster will devour us all!” James produced a gadget from his pocket, what looked like a fat pistol with copper wire coiled around the barrel. “Unless my magnox can check him. Prepare for positron perdition, Crocodylus niloticus ex!”
A blue bolt of electricity crawled along the coiling and sputtered out. James scowled at the useless weapon. “I am devising a theory concerning the operation of electrical equipment after prolonged submersion,” he said, quite calmly, and then Eustace was upon him.
“No!” Avery shouted, but the monstrous maw clacked shut. James was gone. “Now you’ve got a fight on your hands,” Avery growled, rolling up his sleeves. Eustace rushed at him; Avery saw a great black hole lined with white teeth, and he was in the cavernous mouth, then down the gullet, and he felt no more.
Great Jumping Jesus! Is he dead? What the hell’s going on? Come back next time to see!