He paused, breathing heavily, and his eyes slowly shifted from the horizon to my face. "I once asked a great Swedish painter, a man who had travelled widely and who had lived, like I have, amongst peasant communities in many parts of the world, whether he thought we were a rogue species, and he looked at me, his blue eyes cold and full of dreadful certainty: 'But of course,' he said. And yet there's good as well as evil. I know that. The old Devil and the old God-Sade's doctrine and Christ's. And when I look at you I am reminded of Ruth. Your mother was artistic, cultured, the sweet goodness of mankind personified. And when I was with her my soul had
no evil in it, none at all. So stay with me, Paul. For Christ's sake stay with me." And he added, on a lighter note, "My own mother was Irish, you know, Celt and Boer-it's like mixing the grape and the grain." He reached for the lamp and I gave it to him, and he stood there for a moment, holding it in his hands, then he put it back in the tent.
"That man Barrett," he said, straightening up, his voice suddenly practical. "He's an underwater diver. And that's a chance I'll never get again if you could only talk him into it."
"Into what?" I asked him.
"This cave." He had turned and was looking back at the dark shadow below the overhang. "It wasn't tunneled out by the flow of an underground river. It's like Rouffignac, a sea cavern. In Rouffignac there are over a hundred gravures of mammoths. If I could get into the lower galleries here. ." He picked up his anorak and slipped it on, still talking, urgently, intently, about some theory he had that the whole great circle formed by the heights of Levkas, Meganisi, Ka-lomo and the mainland was the rim of a huge crater invaded by the sea after a volcanic explosion even more violent than that of Santorin. "I never believed in Atlantis. The continent that disappeared beyond the Pillars of Hercules is nonsense- an error due to the story having emanated from Egypt. It was the Minoan civilization-'far to the west' from the Egyptian point of view-that was destroyed when Santorin was blown to pieces, their fleet sunk, their cities and their fertile plains drowned by huge tidal waves. And if the Santorin eruption could do that, why not here, with the level of the water altered, the old cave entrance drowned? Much further back, of course-ten thousand, maybe even fifteen thousand years ago."
And he went on to talk of the geological formation, volcanic rock overlying limestone, and the Central Mediterranean fault, running up through Pantelleria, Etna, Vulcano, Stromboli, branching off to the Ionian isles. "Every year, in the hot weather, there are earth tremors here-in Levkas, Ithaca and Cephalonia in particular. Every so often there is an earthquake. Ithaca lost a thousand dead in nineteen fifty- three. They still talk of that earthquake on Meganisi. It did little damage there, but in Ithaca and Cephalonia whole towns and villages had to be rebuilt. When you get back to your boat, you look at the chart-you'll see it then, the great crater circle formed by Levkas, Meganisi and the mainland mountains."
He led me to the edge of the platform, clear of the overhang, so that we could see the stars and the whole shadowy vista of sea and islands. "Suppose I'm right," he said, his hand gripping my arm. "Then all to the south of us was dry land, all that area of sea we're looking at now was one vast plain full of game. Pygmy elephant, lynx and ibex, hippopotamus even. And then with the last Ice Age, reindeer and the woolly rhinoceros, to be replaced as the ice receded by bison, the first cattle, small horses, a whole new breed of animals. And if this were part of a more general cataclysm, then perhaps this is the Flood-not rain, but inundation by the sea." He laughed, excited now, his imagination running away with him. "Picture it for yourself, this vast plain stretching away to what is now the Western Desert, a grazing ground for all the animals whose bones we have found in Africa. And amongst them, primitive man, standing erect, weapons in his hands-the jaw-bones of hyenas, deer-leg clubs, stones-hunting, killing, evolving all the time, and fascinated, like any child or ape today, by the holes in the rocks, the caves left by an earlier sea period. In those caves he searched for his first primitive god-a goddess, in fact-the Earth Goddess, to whom he owed his whole animate being. What more natural than that he should seek her in the bowels of the earth, offering propitiation, paying tribute to his wizard priests and in return having his next meal drawn on the rock canvas with his own weapons stuck in the beast's guts to ensure a successful hunt."
The stillness of the night, the calm sea running away to the blink of that distant light, and the old man's voice conjuring a strange primeval world. Was it fantasy, the idea that this had all been land long, long ago? But listening to him, speaking, now that he had sea and land to point to, m a way
that he had never done when I was a kid, vividly and with extraordinary intensity, it didn't seem to matter. To him, at any rate, it was real. Convinced himself, he came near to convincing me.
"Paul!" Sonia's voice, calling to me out of the darkness, broke the spell. "I thought maybe you'd lost your way," she said quickly, apologetically, conscious that she had broken in upon a moment of intimacy between us.
He saw us down to the boat, silent now, declining my offer of a night in comfort on board C or o man del. He was anxious to start work on that rock fall at first light, convinced he would break through at any moment to the gallery beyond. "Don't forget," he said. "Ask Barrett if he'll do an underwater survey of the area."
I nodded, sitting on the thwart and looking up at him as he stood balanced on a rock, a dark outline against the stars. "That means anchoring here. What's the holding like?"
He hadn't thought of that. He didn't know what the bottom was like or whether there was any current moving through the channel. "It depends on the weather," I said, and started to tell him how exposed the boat would be. But at that moment Pappadimas started the outboard and the noise of it drowned my voice, beating back and forth between the rock planes that formed the sides of the channel.
Later that evening, sitting in the saloon with a drink in my hand, I found it quite impossible to convey to Bert the extraordinary sense of reality conjured by the old man's words. For that you needed to be standing on that promontory below the cave's overhang looking out across the flat plain of the sea, dim under the stars. But though to Bert the land-bridge theory was a lot of visionary nonsense, the cave was real enough, the prospect of discovering something of antiquity below the sea a lure, a challenge. "If it weren't for those damned packages of Borg's. ." He was torn between the urge to make an interesting dive and the desire to clear for Pantel-leria and get shot of his unwelcome cargo. In the event, we did neither, the weather deciding for us. We were up in the
early hours laying out a kedge, and all next morning we rode to two anchors with a gale from the north-west driving a steep scend into the inlet.
That evening, with the weather moderating, a caique came in loaded with vegetables from Corfu, and when we went ashore after dark, Zavelas told us Holroyd had arrived. He also told us that the Russian fleet was reported to be patrolling south of Rhodes, that the Israelis had launched a series of Commando raids against missile emplacements on the west side of the Suez Canal and that Egypt was appealing to the Security Council. He had a little Japanese transistor set on the table in front of him. "There is also a rumour that Turkey may mobilize. They are already concentrating more troops on the Anatolian coast opposite Cyprus and along the shores of the Black Sea." The wind was dying now, the night quiet except for the radio, a woman's voice singing a Greek song.
Vassilios was bringing his boat into the quay. I waited, sipping my ouzo and watching for Holroyd. And when he came I got up and walked to meet him on the quay.