Free The Last Gospel by David Gibbins Page B

Jack. Ten minutes max, unless we really want to stretch the envelope.’
    ‘Roger that.’
    ‘I take it we’re not looking for a giant cross sticking out of the sea bed.’
    Jack grinned through his visor. ‘I wish it were that easy. At this date we don’t even know whether the cross was a Christian sign. If it’s the shipwreck of St Paul, we’re talking twenty, maybe twenty-five years after the crucifixion. Most of the familiar Christian symbols, the cross, the fish, the anchor, the dove, the Greek letters chi-rho, only start appearing in the following century, and even then were only used secretly. The archaeology of early Christianity is incredibly elusive. And remember, Paul was supposed to be a prisoner, under Roman guard. He’s hardly going to have relics with him.’
    Jack looked at his depth gauge. Seventy-seven metres. He could feel the compensator continuously bleeding air into his suit as he descended, counteracting the water pressure. He felt elated, preternaturally aware, at a depth where he would have been one step from death twenty years before. He remembered too well the numbing effect of nitrogen narcosis, the thick, syrupy taste of compressed air below fifty metres, into the danger zone. Breathing mixed gas was like drinking wine without alcohol, all expectation but no buzz. He realized that he missed the narcosis, that his mind was overcompensating. It was euphoria of a different kind to descend to these depths clear headed. He felt acutely alive, focused, his lucidity sharpened by the threshold of danger just ahead, revelling in the moment as if he were a novice diver again.
    ‘They must have been narked out of their minds,’ Costas said.
    ‘Cousteau’s boys?’
    ‘I can’t believe they got this deep.’
    ‘I can,’ Jack replied. ‘I dived with the last of that generation, the survivors. Tough French ex-navy types. They took a slug of wine before diving to dilate the blood vessels, and the last breath they took before the regulator was a lungful of Gauloise. Going deep was like a drinking competition. Real men could take it.’
    ‘Take it and die.’
    Then out of the gloom Jack saw them. First one, then another. The unmistakable shapes of pottery amphoras, half buried and shrouded in sediment. The trail of amphoras led back to the cliff face, the way he and Costas had come, in the right direction, but the forms were too encrusted to identify. They could be Greek, they could be Roman. Jack needed more. He looked at his depth gauge. Eighty metres. He swam over the last shape, Costas behind him. Suddenly they were at another cliff, only this time there was no sandy shelf below, only inky blackness. They had reached the edge of the unknown, a place as forbidding as outer space, the beginning of a slope that dropped through vast canyons and mountain ranges to the deepest abyss of the Mediterranean, more than five thousand metres below. It was the end of the road. Jack let the momentum carry him a few metres over the edge, his mind blank in the face of the immensity before them.
    ‘Don’t do it, Jack.’ Costas spoke quietly, his voice now sounding distorted as the helium level increased. ‘We can come back with the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod, check out the next hundred metres or so. Do it safely.’
    ‘We haven’t found enough to justify it.’ Jack’s voice sounded distant, emotionless, too overwhelmed to register his feelings, masking his disappointment. ‘Cousteau’s divers, the account in that diary, they must have meant that scatter of amphoras on the shelf. There’s no way they could have gone deeper, down that slope. We’re well into the death zone for compressed air.’ He turned slowly, then on a whim switched on his helmet headlamp. There was nothing to lose now. The glare was blinding, and showed how dark it was around them. He played the beam down the rock face, revealing occasional patches of red and orange marine growth which had been invisible in the natural light.