J ack lifted his helmet briefly to ease the ache in his neck, his senses suddenly overwhelmed by the roar of the Rolls-Royce turbine just behind him, then pulled the helmet back into place and pressed in the ear protectors until the noise was dampened and the microphone repositioned. He was physically exhausted but too excited to rest, elated by their discovery of the shipwreck the day before, itching to get back, but now full of anticipation for a new prize that lay ahead. Hiebermeyer had been able to say little, but it had been enough for Jack to know that this was real. He checked his watch again. They had been flying due north in the Lynx helicopter for just over an hour from the position where they had left Seaquest II before dawn, in the Strait of Messina off Sicily, and Jack had set the autopilot to keep them low over the waves. Monitoring the altimeter was critical, and it was keeping him awake. It had been less than twelve hours since they had surfaced from their dive, and their bloodstreams were still saturated with excess nitrogen which could expand dangerously if they gained any more altitude.
He checked again, then switched off the autopilot and engaged the hand controls and pedals of the helicopter, bringing the Lynx round thirty degrees to the north-east so that it was angled towards the coastline. He reactivated the autopilot, then settled back and looked again at the image he had been contemplating on the computer screen between the seats. It was an image he had grown up with, a centrepiece of the Howard Gallery, the art collection Jack’s grandfather had accumulated and which was now housed in a building on the IMU campus in Cornwall. It was a miniature watercolour by Goethe, painted during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1787. In the background was a flat grey sky, and in the foreground a luminous yellow sea. In the centre was the dark mass of the volcano, the shoreline beneath it fronted by flat-roofed buildings similar to the ancient Roman towns below Vesuvius then being unearthed for the first time. The image seemed whimsical, almost abstract, yet the streaks of red and yellow above the volcano betrayed the violent reality of the event that Goethe had witnessed. Jack gazed out of the cockpit windscreen towards the bay ahead of them. It was as if he were seeing a version of the watercolour, pastel shades drifting across the horizon in the sunrise, the details melded and obscured by the layer of smog in the atmosphere just below their altitude.
In the co-pilot’s seat Costas had been dozing fitfully, but he shifted forward when Jack adjusted the course. He woke with a start as his sunglasses slipped off his helmet and wedged on his nose.
‘Enjoying off-gassing?’ Jack said through the intercom.
‘Just keep us below fifteen hundred feet,’ Costas replied blearily. ‘I want to keep those nitrogen bubbles nice and small.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll be on the ground soon enough.’
Costas stretched, then sighed. ‘Fresh air, wide-open spaces. That’s what I like.’
‘Then you should choose your friends more carefully.’ Jack grinned, then nosed the helicopter down a few hundred feet. They broke through the layer of haze, and the mirage became a reality. Below them the dramatic shoreline of the islands and the mainland coast was sharply delineated, expanses of sun-scorched rock surrounded by azure sea. To the east was the great expanse of the city, and beyond that a smudge on the horizon where the bay ended, the haze just concealing a looming presence below a burst of orange where the sun was rising above the mountains beyond.
‘The Bay of Naples,’ Jack said. ‘Crucible of civilization.’
‘Civilization.’ Costas yawned extravagantly, then paused. ‘Let me see. That would be corruption on a seismic scale, drug crime, the Mafia?’
‘Forget all that and look at the past,’ Jack said. ‘We’re here for the archaeology, not to get embroiled in the present.’
Costas snorted. ‘That’d be a first.’
Jack looked out at the extraordinary scene in front of them, and was infused by the sense of history he had experienced at other cities in the Mediterranean: Istanbul, Jerusalem, where the superimposed layers of civilization were still visible, different cultures which had left their distinctive mark yet were bound together by the possibilities that settlement and resources at the place had to offer. The Bay of Naples was one of the great staging posts for the spread of ideas into Europe, where the Greeks had first settled in the ninth and eighth centuries BC when they came west, trading with the Etruscans for iron at a time when Rome was just a few huts above a swamp. Cumae, where the alphabet was first brought west, Neapolis, Pompeii, all these places became centres of the new Greece, Magna Graecia, fuelled by trade and by the hinterland of Campania with its rich agriculture. Jack stared at the slopes of Vesuvius, then had a sudden flashback to their underwater discovery the day before. He turned to Costas. ‘Remember those wine amphoras on the shipwreck? They were from here.’
‘Rich volcanic soil, perfect for vineyards.’
‘And a lot of Greek influence,’ Jack said. ‘Even after the Romans took over in the fourth and third centuries BC, making this place a kind of Costa del Sol for the wealthy, Greek culture stayed strong. People think of Pompeii and Herculaneum as the quintessential Roman towns, but actually they existed for centuries before the Romans arrived. They were still highly cosmopolitan in AD 79, with people speaking Greek and local dialects as well as Latin. And the Bay of Naples continued to be the first port of call for all things from the east, not just Greece but also the Near East and Egypt and beyond, exotic trade goods, new art styles, foreign emissaries, new ideas in philosophy and religion.’
‘Now fill me in on the volcano,’ Costas said.
Jack tapped the computer keyboard and the Goethe watercolour was replaced by a black-and-white photograph showing a distant view of a volcano erupting, a great plume of rolling black cloud hanging like a malign genie over the city. ‘March 1944, during the Second World War,’ Jack said. ‘Fastforward nine months from the Allied landings in Sicily, where we’ve just been diving. A few months after the liberation of Naples, while the Allies were still slogging towards Rome. The most recent major eruption of Vesuvius.’
Costas whistled. ‘Looks like the gods of war unleashed hell.’
‘That’s what people thought at the time, but fortunately it was just an immense venting of gas and ash and then the fissure closed up. Since then there’s been nothing as dramatic, though there was a bad earthquake in 1980 that killed several thousand people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. There’s a lot of concern about the recent seismic disturbances.’
‘Three weeks ago.’
‘That’s why we’re here.’
‘And in ancient times?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, the eruption of AD