How I hated him! I always had-his twisted mind, his bitterness. He saw the hate in my eyes and smiled. "You haven't changed."
"No," I said angrily. "I haven't changed. And nor have you." I got to my feet. "I'll go now."
I left him then, climbing the dune side hurriedly, back to where I'd left the rucksack. There was still some food left, but when I called down to him that I'd leave it there for him, I saw him staggering up the slope towards me. By the time he reached me I'd taken off my sweater and slipped it, with the remains of the food, into the rucksack. "Here you are," I said, handing it to him. "The rucksack's yours, anyway."
He had collapsed on the sand at my feet, breathing heavily. "We shouldn't-part-like this," he gasped. "You and I-the same blood-and those nine years. We had nine years together."
"You were away most of the time." My voice sounded hard and brutal.
"Yes. So much to do-always seeking-a new location, some find reported. There was always something, beckoning me on. That's what drove me. I'm sorry." There were tears in his eyes again. And then he was staring up at me. "I need your help."
"No," I said. "No, I'm leaving."
"Paul." He was gasping for breath. "I've no time left. I'm old and ill and I need you."
Gilmore's words almost, and our roles reversed. It was incredible. "I'm going now." If I didn't go now, I'd get involved. And I didn't want to get involved. "I can't help you."
"Yes, you can. That boat." He was tense and urgent, his eyes over-bright. "You said you had a boat, and it's not more than a day's run from Preveza." He was pleading.
"You want to go to Levkas, is that it?"
"If I had the use of that boat-just for one day."
The urgency, the absolute driving urgency, his eyes burning with excitement, his whole face lit by a desperate desire. I
hated to kill it. But there was Kotiadis, and when I told him what had happened after we had landed at Pylos, the light died in his eyes, a dead look, and his hands clenched slowly. They were big hands, big in proportion to his body. "So they've checked with the Russians now. Everything I do. ." His body seemed to droop. "Ever since I was a student. Do you wonder that I'm here, hounded, alone-my ideas, my whole life wasted. Nobody believes in me-nobody except myself."
"There's Dr. Gilmore," I reminded him.
"Yes, but Adrian's old. It's men like Holroyd rule the academic world now. And in Russia-they only helped me so long as it suited them." And then he returned to the subject of the boat, what sort of boat and asking about the Barretts. "The dig at Despotiko would take too long. But on Levkas- a week, a month at most, and I'd have the answer-know for certain. And the summer ahead of me-warmth. I've friends there." Then he leaned forward, gripping hold of my hand and pulling me down on to the sand beside him. "Listen, Paul. You're a seaman. Have you been through the Malta Channel?"
"Once," I said.
"Then you'll know the depth there."
"I know it's shallow."
"And further west, between Sicily and Tunisia-the islands?"
"I've seen Marettimo, once in the dawn."
"No, not Marettimo, though there is a cave further inshore on Levanzo. But south of Sicily-Linosa and Pantelleria, both volcanic, and another island, Lampedusa, much older." His gaze had fastened on me, his voice urgent with the effort to communicate, to engage my interest. "Geologists have for some time believed that the Mediterranean was a himdred to two hundred feet lower during the Ice Age. Here you see the evidence of it." He waved his hand at the dunes around us. "This sand belongs to two distinct periods-the lighter colour has an iron ore content, the darker and later is manganese. Nobody has checked it, as far as I know. I don't know of anybody who even knows about it, and if I could get one really authoritative geologist. ." He picked up a handful of sand and ran it through his fingers, watching it intently like a man watching an hourglass. "But why should I help them? They don't like being taught their business any more than anthropologists. They'd take the credit for themselves. ." He flung the remains of the sand away in a gesture of disgust. "They don't know the water level of the Mediterranean twenty thousand years ago. They're just guessing. It's an enclosed sea and they're not even sure that the Straits of Gibraltar existed then. Suppose the level was four or five hundred feet lower. Then all the sea between Sicily and Africa would have been one vast plain, with Lampedusa a small mountain range. Have you ever seen Pantelleria?"
I shook my head, and he went on, barely pausing for breath, "It's like a volcanic slag heap, the north of it all black lava, probably dating from the period when Knossos, the old capital of the Minoan civilization of Crete, was destroyed. There's a Greek volcanologist who believes that the destruction of Santorin was the basis of the legend of Atlantis. But the rest of Pantelleria is the product of older eruptions. I spent a month there some years back. If I could have stayed longer. . there are some underwater caves there, but you'd need divers-aqualung equipment. In Homer's day there was a story about Odysseus descending into Hades, meeting the shades of the great men of Greek history. Why did he write that into the Odyssey? Everything he wrote was based on stories handed down by word of mouth, and if Atlantis was Santorin, remembered to this day, why not a cave some sailor had stumbled on?" He looked at me then. "You've never seen the Vezere-those beetling limestone cliffs with caves marked by the engraved drawings of mammoths going back sixty thousand years. I was brought up in the Vezere, you remember. It's a long time ago now, but I've never forgotten. It's been my dream-that somewhere, some time before I die, I'll find others-painted caves that will prove beyond doubt the pattern of Cro-Magnon migration."
His voice faltered and his body sagged again with weariness. "It's just a dream," he murmured. "But if I had a boat, a few months. . there was nothing in Asia Minor or Russia, nothing that proved anything-definitely. What I wrote then. ." He was leaning forward, intent, his words coming slowly, as though by speaking his thoughts aloud he could clarify his mind. "Theories-nothing more. And I was guilty, like the rest of them, of twisting facts to prove what I believed to be true. But there comes a point when you know the facts don't fit. Then you can only sit back and re-think your theories. I did that one whole winter in Amsterdam, arguing it out on paper. A new thesis-negative, rather than positive. If Homo sapiens, as represented by Lartet's Cro-Magnon type, did not come from the east, via Russia, or up through Mesopotamia, then either he evolved on the spot-there is a theory that each Ice Age produced its own natural development of our species-or else he must have come north from Africa." "Is that the book you sent to a British publisher?" "Yes. I knew the Russians wouldn't print it. ." He looked at me, suddenly puzzled. "You know about it? How? I never told Adrian. I never told anybody." And then he became very excited as I told him about Holroyd's visit and how the book had come to be rejected. "I knew it. I knew he must be involved." His eyes were blazing, his body literally trembling. "Holroyd used it in a book of his own-published quite recently-my theories, my own words. And no acknowledgment. None." Those hands of his, those big hands, were clenching and unclenching, as though he were going through the motions of throttling the man. He smiled to himself, his teeth bared, and his face had changed. It was wolfish and there was something in his eyes. A crafty look. The trembling had stopped and there was a stillness about him now. I was conscious suddenly of evil. I can't explain it-the dunes maybe, the heat; but something had invaded us. And yet his words were ordinary enough, his manner practicaclass="underline"
"You're going back-to Despotiko? You'll see Holroyd?" I nodded, not saying anything, appalled by that unreasoning sense of evil. A cold shiver ran down my spine, for the evil stemmed from him. I was certain of that. It wasn't the dunes or the heat-it was there, deep inside him, and it scared me.