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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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Hackett caught the chunk of crystal in mid-toss and set it down on the table. “When you were a kid, which was better: Betamax or VHS?”
“Betamax,” Scott answered instantly.
“What're they all talking about?” November asked, concerned.
“Video-tape formats,” Pearce explained, equally puzzled.
“What's video-tape?”
Pearce gave her a double take, then let it slide. After all, he was still mourning the loss of DVD recorders and they were light-years ahead of video-tape.
“Okay,” Hackett said. “Why was it better?”
“Superior picture, clearer sound—”
“So which VCR did you have at home?”
“VHS,” Scott admitted darkly, aware he'd been led into a trap.
“Why?”
“Because it was cheaper.”
“So which format dominated the market?”
“VHS.”
“That,” Hackett said with a smirk, “is
precisely
the point I wanted to make. Better does not necessarily mean evolutionary certainty.”
“Those are VCRs,” Pearce growled. “What the hell has that got to do with language?”
“Because they both exhibit the very essence of what is a complex adaptive system.”
“So how we wound up with VHS is complicated? Fine.”
“No, no, no!” Hackett insisted. “Not complicated. There is a difference between something being complicated and something being complex and adaptive. The key is adaptivity. How does a component react in a given situation? Betamax versus VHS is a question of economics. Society adapted to the price.”
Hackett shifted gear. “Okay,” he said. “Another example is, why did the petrol-driven car succeed at a time when petrol was expensive and dirty and when steam-power had been driving trains for fifty years and worked just as well in cars? It's not gonna be price now, is it? Answer: Foot and Mouth Disease. Steam cars could only fill up at water troughs, but because Foot and Mouth Disease was plaguing the horse population, to prevent the spread of the problem the water troughs were removed from all the towns. No troughs, no water. No water, no steam cars—or horses. So the idea of a car is popular and all anyone is left with is the petrol-powered car. So society adapted and chose gasoline.” He shifted gear again. “A snowflake in and of itself is complicated. Beautiful, but complicated. It's when it interacts with other snowflakes that it's complex. How do you predict avalanches? What route will it take down the mountain?”
“You can predict that?”
“Not a chance. Then you're in the realms of chaos. What I predict is the order that arises out of chaos, Bob. For there has to be order out of chaos or none of us would be here. Out of that primordial soup two amino acids had to have decided to get together. When you heat up soup or water, at the exact moment of its boiling point there will always be a hexagonal pattern of six spots within the liquid that rises and falls. We call it simmering. But it's complexity in action. Order from chaos.”
Hackett sat up. “Bob,” he said sternly, “it's a hundred
thousand years ago and you've developed the perfect language. You want November here to use it. And you've decided that,” he looked about quickly for something to use as an example, “chair. You've decided that chair—should be called ‘chair.' But November doesn't call it a chair. She calls it an ‘Ug' … Why?”
“Coz she's stupid?”
“Excuse me?” November retaliated in mock anger.
“No, she's not stupid. She's in love.”
“I am?”
“But not with you.”
“She's not?”
“November's in love with some great big ape,” Hackett explained. “Not a weedy smartass. He's strong. He's handsome. The ape's more likely to be able to provide for her and the family—and did you see those cute buns? So she procreates with him. Wants to communicate with
him.
And he calls a chair an ‘Ug.' Coz basically …
he's
the stupid one.”
“Oh, great.”
“Oh, it gets better. So now they're both calling it an ‘Ug.' That's two to one. And pretty soon they're starting a family. Their kids call it an ‘Ug,' and after a while, everybody's calling it an ‘Ug,' which is just so dumb because anyone with half a brain knows, the perfect word for that thing—is a chair.”
Scott finished sketching out his notes on the wipeboard. Gave Pearce a sympathetic look.
“And you call that progress?” Hackett queried.
“Well done, Professor,” Scott said warmly.
“Thank you,” Hackett murmured without the least hint of humility. “Complexity,” he ran his fingers through his hair. “It's the key—to everything.” He cast an eye over the jumbled-up stones on the table. “Order from chaos,” he beamed.
 
Order from chaos was what Sir William Jones, a British judge living in Calcutta in 1786, had managed to achieve when he studied languages and noticed Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, Gothic and Old Irish all possessed similar words and grammar. Grouped together they became known as the Indo-European family of languages.
Since then linguistic anthropologists had charted the development of language all over the world, calling on a diverse array of sciences.
By 1991, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford had compared the world family tree of molecular genetic data with the world family tree of linguistic data and discovered an incredible similarity in the pattern spread. Now gene frequencies and population dispersal helped to chart language evolution.
In some ways, yes, maybe Hackett was right. Maybe Scott was exploring complexity. And maybe it was the key.
“Language evolved due to four prime factors,” Scott went on. “Firstly the initial migration of the human population out of Africa to the rest of the world prior to 12,000 B.C.E.
“Secondly there's the dispersal of language due to farming. Y'know, Farmer Bob has a farm and his family. In time he's successful. His farm gets bigger. So does his family. About two hundred years later it's a village and gets too big to support itself so half the population moves on and eventually they lose contact with Grandpa. It's also called Demic fusion. The Bantu languages of Africa started this way. They belong to the Niger-Kordofanian language family. Nomadism and horseback-riding made the spread bigger in places like Turkey and the Turkic languages. Kurdistan and so on.
“Thirdly you've got languages that developed due to the late climatic change around 8000 B.C.E. and the after-effects of the last Ice Age. They're the Uralic-Yukaghir family, the Chukchi-Kamchatkan and the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene of the Americas. But I don't think any of those concern us here because they're restricted to regions affected by glacial melt water in the Arctic. They're northern dispersal languages …” He was thinking on his feet. Stood back from his board. Put a thick black line through that set of languages. “Okay,” he said, his mind made up. “Then you just got the Elite Dominance languages like the Altaic in medieval central Asia. Languages that become dominant due to conquest. Like English is in the States, or Chinese is in China. Chinese was only adopted in historical times through military expansion. It was the same for Latin in Europe. Whereas, before convicts settled in Australia, the Pama-Nyungan
language family of the Aborigines came about due to migration and farming divergence.”
“So languages developed at different times for different reasons,” November reiterated.
“Yeah, but what I've been given here is a language on a set of stones that comes from Antarctica. A place where nobody lives. Nobody migrated to. A place where—satellite images aside—we thought nobody had built anything. So physically, I have to work out what languages it might be related to. And that's the problem.
“The first source for the story of Atlantis comes from Plato, in Greece. In the Mediterranean—which is nowhere near Antarctica. So what's the link, as far as language is concerned?
Is
there even a link?”
Pearce nodded with anticipation. “So what's your theory?”
“I don't have a theory,” Scott admitted darkly. “I have an idea on how to get to a theory.”
 
“Okay, so we've discounted Chukchi-Kamchatkan as a language family. And the arctic languages. So that's Uralic-Yukaghir gone and Finnish and Hungarian along with it. And we can also discount Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene. That discounts all the language families that evolved as a result of the late climate-related dispersal after 8000 B.C.E.—”
“After the last Ice Age and the Flood?” Pearce asked, double-checking with the notes that he'd started to scrawl.
“Right. Now we're agreed that Atlantis is a pre-flood, Ice Age kinda civilization. Right?”
November was excited. “So we can lose the conquest languages—Latin and stuff.”
“Right,” Scott confirmed, nodding and drawing a line through the box containing such names as Genghis Khan and William the Conqueror. Then he said: “Now we hit a gray area.”
He drew a line sharply under the last two groups. The languages from the initial human migration pre-12,000 B.C.E. And the farming dispersal languages.
“The oldest languages that we can determine are in bits around the globe,” he revealed. “They don't fit easily into
the migratory patterns of the last ten thousand years. As a consequence they stick out like a sore thumb to linguists. The Khosian and the northern and southern Caucasian languages. The Australian languages. The languages of New Guinea known as Indo-Pacific, where each individual language in and of itself doesn't appear to be related to any of its neighbors—that's how come they got grouped together. Then there's Amerind, and also the Nilo-Saharan languages which include Basque—”
“Isn't that a region in Spain with all those terrorists?” November was quick to chip in.
Scott nodded his agreement, not wanting to be sidetracked further and drew their attention to the farming-dispersal languages.
“Indo-European covers classical Greek, which covers Plato. So I guess that should stay. Sino-Tibetan … Well, that's nowhere near Greece or Antarctica so that can go. Niger-Kordofanian, central African states, uh …” He shrugged, not sure. “If I don't start cutting out more families I'm going to have a list of comparison languages to study as long as my arm.”
“So cut it.” Hackett's voice was harsh but logical. “You can always go back to it.” Scott reluctantly agreed. “That leaves Austronesian—”
“But the societies who used those languages weren't noted for building megalithic structures. Or any real structures at all,” Scott said. “And besides, their flood myths are also the most vague.”
“You want to base the choices on an engineering comparison as well?”
“Makes sense. There's an entire city under the ice out there. And something under the Sphinx.” Hackett nodded. “Now, Elamo-Dravidian covers Asia Minor. It may have a link but I don't think so. And finally we have good old Afro-Asiatic. Covers the semitic languages predominantly. Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian. That can stay.” Scott slashed lines through more groupings he didn't want to include. “So we got, one, two … nine different language families to work from.”
“That's not so bad,” November said.
“That means about thirty or forty actual languages to trawl through,” Scott calculated.
Hackett stood up, tucking his shirt in. “It's a start,” he said. “But from the pre-12,000 B.C.E. languages I'd be inclined to lose the Indo-Pacific languages. Basically because, as you say, they didn't build squat. And on that basis you can lose all the Australian, the Khosian and the northern and southern Caucasian as well.”
“That leaves me with just Nilo-Saharan and Amerind.”
“I don't think there's time to be more systematic.”
“So we're down to four language families in total. Nilo-Saharan, Amerind, Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.” Scott stepped back to look at his board. “Yeah—it's a start.”
 
They were just getting into the next phase of analysis when one of the chemists, Morgan, approached. “Dr. Hackett?”
“Yes?”
“They need you upstairs. They want to transfer you over to the Solar Observatory Network. They just received the latest solar data … it doesn't look good.”
He was late. Well, that was no surprise. Thorne was always late.
Sarah didn't shower in the end, back at her room at the Nile Hilton. She took a bath instead. She kicked back into the foam. Relaxed. Washed the sand out of every pore. Shaved her legs and did all those things she had told herself she wouldn't do. Sarah made herself ready for Rip Thorne, and she hated herself for it. As she sipped lemonade at the table next to the window nearest the bar, cooling herself under the ever-present ceiling fans, she wondered if he was still married. Lemonade? Damn fundamentalists. What she wouldn't do for a real drink.
There was a guy in a cream jacket across the room who kept smiling and trying to catch her eye, but Sarah just wasn't in the mood. It was all she could do just to psyche herself up for this little encounter. How long had it been? Five, six years? Maybe longer. Considering they both worked for the same company it was an achievement to have been apart this long.
“Miss Kelsey?” The voice was gentle. Calming.
When Sarah looked up she instantly recognized the woman from earlier, outside the main gates to the Giza encampment. The demonstration. The armed soldiers. This woman with long gray hair, and those deep penetrating eyes. “It
is
Sarah Kelsey, isn't it?”
Sarah was suddenly aware that there was a live piano playing somewhere in the background. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind. “Uh, yes,” she replied. “Yes, I'm Sarah.” And then after a moment. “I'm sorry, I—” She got up and shook the woman's hand. They exchanged an awkward laugh.
“Ellen,” she announced. “Ellen Paris. No,
I'm
sorry,” she insisted. “I'm not disturbing you, am I?”
Sarah eyed the empty seat across the table. “Well, uh …”
“Oh,” Ellen Paris sighed. “I hope you haven't been stood up.”
Sarah didn't quite know how to take that. Had she been stood up? It was just possible this Ellen was right. She inclined her head and narrowed her eyes. “Would you care for something to drink? Don't worry, nothing alcoholic. I don't fancy the Mullahs coming to chop off a hand.” Ellen looked pensive. Sarah gave her a comforting smile. “Company tab.”
Ellen relaxed. “I'll have a lemonade.”
Sarah ordered two more lemonades as they took their seats. “That was quite a little demonstration today, Ellen.” The other woman still had her modest black purse tucked under her arm. She set it down on the table and shrugged simply. “Why'd you do it?” Sarah asked curiously. “And a foreign woman too. That's some risk.”
“One should always fight for what one believes in.” Ellen folded her hands in her lap. “You don't seem surprised to see me.”
“You said something earlier today,” Sarah said by way of
an explanation, “and it's stuck with me. You said, ‘Cayce was right.' What were you talking about? Who is Cayce? I don't understand. Is he part of your group who doesn't want us digging around the monuments?”
“He is the reason I'm here,” Ellen admitted.
“Did he send you?”
“Hardly.” Ellen paused. “He's dead.”
Sarah sat back with a start. “I'm sorry,” she said.
“It's okay. He's been dead since 1945.”
The lemonades arrived. Sarah took hers quickly and had an unceremonious gulp. She fished the slice of sour lemon out and bit down on it. “So you
were
being prophetic. I wasn't imagining it.”
“Cayce was the prophetic one,” Ellen explained.
“Did you ever meet him?”
“I'm not that old,” Ellen chided gruffly, but with good humor. “I'm here because I think you need to know what you're getting yourself into.”
Sarah sipped her lemonade. “Tell me about Cayce,” she said.
 
He was born on a Kentucky farm in 1877, the blue-eyed Edgar Cayce. Said to go to bed with his head on a book, then wake up knowing its contents. Tales of osmosis aside, he left a curious legacy of prediction and prophetdom That inspired a foundation in his name and a headache for serious academics.
Like Nostradamus before him, Cayce was in the business of predicting the future. He predicted that the Nile once flowed west. And that it once flowed into Lake Chad. In the 1990s this was confirmed when archeologists used satellite Ground Penetrating Radar and peeked beneath the desert sands. They soon discovered the dried-up riverbed.
Cayce also predicted that a group of early Christian activists called Essenes lived near the Dead Sea. He predicted that two U.S. Presidents would die in office soon. In 1945 Cayce was dead, alongside Roosevelt. Months later the Essenes' Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered by an Arab shepherd boy, and it wasn't long before Kennedy had been killed as well.
Edgar Cayce predicted many things. And many times, he got those things right.
“He also got a lot wrong,” Ellen continued. “He was only human. But before you go and get all skeptical, don't forget the CIA mounted Operation Deep See for over twenty years.”
“What was that? I've never heard of it.”
“The CIA employed psychics to penetrate secret enemy strongholds using nothing more than the power of the mind. They penetrated these strongholds and mapped them using a technique called Remote Viewing. They could see who operated in these places, and what was there. All of the information was verified by spies on the ground. They shut it down in the early 1990s. Then started it back up again about five years ago.”
“Are you serious?”
Ellen didn't seem to feel the need to answer that. Instead she continued: “The important point for you about Cayce's predictions is that he foresaw that around the turn of the millennium, a hidden chamber would be discovered beneath the Sphinx. He called it ‘The Hall of Records,' a place where mankind's lost history had been gathered together alongside instruments of power. He also predicted that the people of ancient Atlantis possessed some kind of crystal stone that trapped the rays of the sun.”
Sarah sipped more lemonade cautiously. She didn't want to give anything away, but she had a feeling it was probably already too late. “I see,” was all she would consciously commit herself to.
“There's been a long precedence of finding a hidden chamber,” Ellen added. “The Westcar Papyrus from the fourth dynasty speaks of Djedi, a magician of the court of Khufu, or Cheops as he's sometimes called. Djedi claimed to know details about the secret chambers containing
The Books of Thoth.
He said that the keys to those chambers were hidden in the city of Ani. Ani has another name—He—liopolis, which literally means ‘City of the Sun.'”
“Heliopolis today is a modern suburb with an airport,” Sarah said.
“Yes, and much of ancient Heliopolis is still hidden beneath it. Including the house of Septi, where the fifth Pharaoh of the first dynasty who reigned around 3000 B.C.,
Pharaoh Septi, is said to have kept the ipwt-seals or keys to the hidden place in a box of flint or whetstone.”
“Do you think the keys really exist?”
“Possibly. Do you think you'll need keys?” Sarah remained tightlipped. “If you're feeling particularly awkward about the company you're keeping on this subject,” Ellen offered gently, “you can always remind yourself that the secrets of the pyramids have been investigated by some of the world's greatest minds—Sir Isaac Newton, for example. He dedicated a huge portion of his life to decoding the mystery. And Thomas Young, he not only did some of the most pioneering work on translating Egyptian hieroglyphics, but he was also a physicist. He discovered the wave theory of light. And if I'm not much mistaken, that's still a cornerstone of modern physics.”
“You said I needed to know what I was getting myself into,” Sarah said sharply. “Is this it? Something I'm not even trained for?”
Ellen smiled, almost to the point of stopping herself from laughing. “This? Oh, it's much bigger than this. The investigation your company's involved in strikes at the very heart of organized religion and in turn the western world's power base.”
 
“I don't understand.”
“You will. In time, you will understand. But be aware of these facts. Why is it that as we speak, Rola Corp. has a team of scientists investigating certain crystals in Switzerland? Why is it that it has a team involved in similar work here—and had a team in China
before
the stand-off in Antarctica? That's right, Rola Corp. was in China. Why has another team gone off to the jungles of South America? Why is NASA suddenly so interested in mineral deposits on earth and not deep space? And why has the Vatican called an earth geological symposium for next week?
“Do you think that the pyramids are the only manmade structure to mirror a pattern in the stars? Or that the ancient Egyptians were the only people to believe their River Nile to be a mirror of a river of stars in the sky—the Milky Way? In China, the first Emperor, Chin, or Qin Xen Xuan Di, had the
Xian Yang and Erpang Palaces modeled on the stars, with the Chungnan Shan mountain peak as the gateway to heaven and the River Wei as the mirror to the Milky Way. Just like here in Cairo. Even today, Taoist priests do the star dance to the constellation of the Great Bear.
“They believe in Chi or Qi—the lifeforce energy, similar to the Egyptian concept of the Ka. But the real clincher is that Emperor Qin also knew of a sacred underground place upon which he had built his square-based pyramid burial tomb. Though his pyramid was constructed from earth, it's more massive than anything in Egypt. To this day, inside are fully loaded crossbows poised to fire at trespassers, and lakes of poisonous mercury to reflect the light. Pearls and jade are set in the ceiling. But the Chinese won't open the tomb, which is precisely the one thing that Rola Corp. wanted.”
Ellen drank before continuing. “The Chinese believe ancestor spirits are malignant. If you disturb them, they'll disturb you. Qin was a tyrant who killed millions. If they disturbed him, he might return to destroy China, a country after all, which is still named after him. This is the ruler who had blast furnaces fifteen hundred years before Europe. Who was able to manipulate carbon and lower its content in iron, making it malleable, so that his armies could plate their weapons with potassium dichromate to prevent corrosion, something which baffles archeologists even today. He had the Great Wall of China built and eight thousand terracotta soldiers buried with him as an army to command in the afterlife. Ironically he gave them real weapons which the peasants used to defeat his son later.”
Ellen took another sip of lemonade. She had sounded excited, but hardly fanatical. Which was the disturbing factor for Sarah.
“But the focal point for Chinese culture is also a precious stone. Jade. It's supposed to aid immortality. Burial suits were made of the stuff. Taoists literally ground it up into a powder and ate it. And two weeks ago NASA said, among other things, that they had found indications of jade in Antarctica. The press release simply said ‘mineral deposits,' but if you look at the official report, there's jade.”
Ellen's drink was finished. She set the glass down and declined
another. “And all of this because of what they started doing in the Takla Makan desert.”
“I've heard of the desert,” Sarah said, “but I don't know the significance of it.”
“Rola Corp. originally went out to look for oil in the Takla Makan desert in western China. But their search took them closer and closer to ancient sites, like Wupu.”
Sarah was none the wiser.
“The Tokarians were the original indigenous people of the Takla Makan region, responsible for building the Great Silk Road that constituted the first trade road linking east and west. They died out about two and a half thousand years ago. Just before First Emperor Qin came to power.
“They built whole cities. Structures, some of which were megalithic. They wore woolen tartans woven in identical techniques to the Celts. They brought agriculture to the region—and nobody knows to this day where they came from. They turned up on the historical map at the same time as the Sumerians, and no one knows where
they
came from either.
“Their language was also most closely connected to Italo-Celtic and Germanic, not the nearer Indo-Iranian languages. And unlike everyone else in China they were tall, blond and red-headed. In appearance, they were foreigners, but they pre-date China. We think Rola Corp. came across certain information that led them to Qin's pyramid and Antarctica.”
Ellen handed Sarah a manila envelope and stood.
“What's this?”
“It's a little report on what we think is going on,” she said.
She had her purse tucked under her arm again. “The point I'm trying to get across to you, Sarah, is that nothing is as it seems. Be very careful. You're at the forefront of a lot of this and you don't even know it. And be wary of China,” she said. “They may not be the enemy they've been painted to be.”

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