Once again I reminded her that inside the cave he probably wouldn't need his aqualung. But I knew it didn't satisfy her. She was standing up now, leaning against the wheelhouse, the spare diving watch clumsy on her slender wrist as she stared at the sweep hand ticking off the seconds, occasionally stealing a quick glance at the rocks. "Paul. I think you should go and see what's happened. "
"He wanted me here on board."
"I know that, but he's been a long time. Too long." Her voice was urgent, the dark eyes suddenly pleading. "You've been down twice with him. You know how to do it."
"I think so." By then some of her anxiety had rubbed off on me. "I'll get the gear up anyway," I said reluctantly.
It was whilst I was below in the workshop that I felt the slight movement, Coromandel coming alive, rocking gently at her moorings. And then, when I was coming up with the spare diving equipment, Sonia's voice called to me. "There's somebody on the rocks, hailing us." I dumped the cylinder on the wheelhouse floor and seized the glasses. It was Vassilios. He was pointing towards the open sea. And then he was leaping down the rocks.
I turned, moving quickly to the port side. A dark line showed in the sticky haze, and beyond it, towards Ithaca, the sea white with broken water. My reaction was immediate, instinctive. I reached for the engine switch, turned it on, and then pressed the starter button. The big diesel thudded into life,
"No. No, Paul." Florrie was screaming at me. "You can't leave him." But then the black line reached us and the wind hit, a wild howl in the rigging. The ship heeled. A wave caught us and she lifted at the bow like a horse rearing and snubbed on the warp with a jar that nearly knocked me off my feet. I dived out of the wheelhouse, fighting the sloping deck and the \veight of the wind to throw off the bow warp. Florrie was there before me. "Mind your hands!" Released, the warp took charge, smoking as the turns whipped across the cleat, the wood charring.
White water on the shelf now and all along the shore rocks, and the boat swinging stem-on to the wind. But still too close. Much too close. The noise of the sea and the rocks, a great cacophony of sound like the roar of rapids made that clear. "I'll let go aft," I shouted at Florrie. "You take the helm. Head for the centre of the channel." I saw her eyes wide, her mouth agape, and then, thank God, she headed for the wheelhouse. Sonia was already crouched over the anchor warp when I reached the stern. "It's jammed," she shouted.
I thrust her hands away, not gently. The nylon line was stretched so taut it looked no thicker than a piece of heavy string. "Have to cut it," I shouted in her ear and ran for the diver's knife that was amongst the gear I had lugged into the wheelhouse. Just the sharp edge of it on the stretched nylon and it stranded and zinged away over the stern like a broken violin string. And Coromandel, released, went roaring up the channel with the wind. Florrie tried to bring her round, but the waves, beating back from the Meganisi shore, knocked her head off, and the wind held her. I tried myself, but it was no good. And anyway it didn't matter. Even if we could have got her round, we could never have stayed there, stemming the storm, for the whole channel was rapidly becoming a maelstrom as the waves, piling in against the narrowing rock walls, were flung back to meet in chaos in the middle. I piled on power and ran for the north end of the island, where the down-draughts blattered at us, the whole ship shivering; but here at least the sea was fiat, close under the lee of the cliffs.
By the time we were anchored in Port Vathy, Florrie was in a state of shock, moments of hysteria alternating with long periods in which she just sat, keening quietly to herself, her eyes staring into space. She was convinced Bert was dead, and having seen the millrace running through the channel, I didn't rate his chances of survival very high, particularly as the wind didn't start to ease for a good four hours. By nightfall it had gone completely, everything still and the sky clear.
But long before that I had weighed anchor and tucked the ship in under the cliffs west of Spiglia, within sight of the channel, waiting for the sea to moderate. Shortly after 17.00 hours I poked our bows round the corner. There was still a Steep sea running, but with the wind taking off it was lessening rapidly. As we came abreast of Tiglia a boat put out from the shallows behind the island-Vassilios waving to us frantically.
Florrie grabbed the glasses. "He's pointing back to the cove. It's Bert. I'm sure it's Bert." She was laughing, almost crying, as I swung the wheel to port. I caught Sonia's eye, both of us wondering how she'd take it if we found him dead there on the beach. Broadside to the waves the boat rolled wildly, and then we came under the lee of Tiglia and Vassilios was alongside, shouting excitedly, a flood of Greek lost in the din of the engine.
"Livas," Sonia said. "He keeps on repeating the word livas. I don't understand what he means."
Vassilios was scrambling on board. Florrie, crouched by the bulwarks, bulky in her scarlet oilskins, took the painter. He said something to her and then ran for'ard, barefoot on the spray-wet deck. "It's Bert," she called, her face white. "He'll guide you in and handle the anchor." And she disappeared aft to make fast the painter.
He took us close in to the island and let go the anchor in a patch of still water, the echo-sounder showing barely three feet under our keel, pale sand and the rocks of the island towering above our mast. Bert's aqualung cylinder lay on the sloping sand of the cove; his flippers, too-a lonely, tragic pile of gear,
Vassilios came aft as Florrie brought his boat alongside. He spoke to her, quickly, urgently, and her face cleared. "He's all right." She sat down suddenly on the rail capping, half laughing, half crying, relief flooding through her. "Wounded, he says. I think his arm is broken. But he's alive." And she added, "He was caught inside the cave by the livas. He swam all the way across the channel-under water with a broken arm. Isn't that wonderful!" She was a bundle of emotion, pride and excitement shining in her eyes.
Vassilios had made him as comfortable as he could in the lee of some rocks at the back of the cove. When we reached him, the excitement had gone from Florrie's eyes, in its place love and a great tenderness. She was like a mother with him then as we carried him down to the boat and ferried him across to Coromandel.
He was in considerable pain, the bone of his left forearm broken between wrist and elbow and shoAving white through the raw, bruised flesh. He'd lost a lot of blood and his face was pallid under the dark suntan. But he was conscious and whilst I got the morphine ampoule out of the medicine chest, he gritted his teeth and made an effort to tell me what had happened to him down there in that flooded cove.
He had arrived off the crevice entrance at 11.21. Depth 38 feet. The spotlight showed the crevice continuing, no block, and it seemed to widen out about five or six yards in. He described the entrance for me in detail, so that I could find it again, he said. The gap below the fallen slab was barely 2 feet high, and after scraping his cylinder and nearly ripping his air pipe on a snag, he had turned on his side. About two yards in he had been forced to turn into the normal position, and a little further in, the rock cleared from above him and he was able to use his flippers. A few more yards and the spot showed the walls receding on either side. He appeared to have entered a big cavern. The depth gauge showed 36 feet. Following a bearing of 240°, which was roughly the direction in which the entrance had run, he swam across the cave and was brought up by a solid wall of rock on the far side. The distance across he reckoned at about 20–25 yards. With no sign of any continuing tunnel, he had then circled the walls, maintaining a depth of between 35 and 40 feet.
"I thought I'd see what the height of it was then," he said, holdingr his rioht arm out so that I could roll his sleeve back to make the injection. "I hit the roof about fifteen to twenty feet up and that's Avhen I found the continuing gallery, a gaping hole slanting up quite steeply." He sucked in his breath as I jabbed the needle into his flesh none too skillfully. "Then I was out into another sort of expansion chamber, the water obscured by sediment and my gauge reading virtually nil. In fact, my head came out of the water almost immediately. It was quite a big cavern, shaped like a lozenge, with continuing galleries at each end and a hole in the roof, quite a small hole with a rope hanging down from it."