"Unless what?" I asked, for he was staring out through the windshield, his mind apparently on something else.
"He's a very clever talker, very convincing. A political rather than an academic animal, and not to be underrated on that account. If he were to come up now with something spectacular-" He looked at me quickly, a darting glance. "Last night-that ex-policeman-he said there was a rhinoceros drawn on the wall of this cave and that Holroyd was very excited about it."
"There's a reindeer, too," Sonia said. "And what looks like an elephant-just scratch marks, very faint."
"And these gravures were discovered by Pieter Van der Voort, not by Holroyd?"
"Yes," I said. And I told him how I had found my father working on the rock fall that night, his desperate urgency to break through into the cave beyond.
He nodded. "It's what I suspected, that he was on to something of real importance. That's why I hurried out here, as soon as I knew Holroyd had left for Greece. I was afraid. ." He hesitated, staring at me, strangely agitated. "However, this is an accident. An earth tremor, they tell me." He shook his head. "Something nobody could have foreseen. Nevertheless, if Pieter is dead, then Holroyd can reasonably claim. ." He gave a little shrug. "Well, we'll just have to hope for the best."
We were past Tiglia then, the rock gut opening up and a boat lying there, the scar of the overhang just visible. I pointed it out to him and he shaded his eyes against the glare, staring at it, his interest quickening: 'A perfect site, very typical-provided, of course. ." He moved to the wheelhouse door, looking back over the port quarter at the site on Meganisi below the rock pinnacle. "Two of them, and both natural observation posts. Tell me, did your father say anything about the sea level here-what it would have been like twenty
thousand years ago?" And when I explained that all to the south of us, as far as the African shore, he believed to have been one vast plain, with Meganisi the western flank of a volcano, he nodded his head vigorously.
"You think that's possible?" I asked.
He smiled. "Anything is possible. But proof-that's another matter. We know so little." He was staring at the Meganisi shore. "A volcano, you say." His eyes gleamed, bird-like in the sun.
"He thought it might have erupted-a bigger eruption than Santorin."
He nodded, gazing ahead to the distant shape of Ithaca. "Fantastic! And the skull fragments, those bones he sent for dating-thirty thousand years ago at least." And then, speaking quietly, as though to himself: "Even as far back as that man knew how to knap or flake the hardest substances to produce sharp-cutting instruments-flint, for instance, and chert. And in volcanic regions, the brittle, black, glass-like substance we call obsidian. It's the oldest and most basic of all industries and a very good case has been made out recently for these primitive industrial centres-these city communities, you might call them, founded on the presence of a workable raw material-being the precursor of husbandry. It has put the whole conception of city centres much further back in time." He had apparently a theory of his own that the cave artists were a product of these first city communities, a means of encouraging the hunters on whom they depended for bartering their products, and that it was the superior organisation developed by Cro-Magnon man that had destroyed the Neanderthals.
"A little far-fetched perhaps," he murmured. "But something I would like to have discussed with Pieter, particularly if he has discovered the work of cave artists so close to an area that could have been rich in obsidian." He shook his head, smiling to himself. "All of scientific research into prehistory is a sort of jig-saw puzzle. Fitting facts to theories until the sum of all the facts establishes without doubt a complete and irrefutable picture."
A small boat was moving out of the gut, coming towards us now. It was Vassilios, and Hans was in the bow, his blond hair immediately recognizable. He came aboard, whilst Vassilios took the bow warp out.
We off-loaded the timber by throwing it into the water, where Vassilios secured it with a rope for towing ashore. And while he helped me get it overboard, Hans told me what had happened inside the cave the previous day. With the borrowed rope tied around his waist, he had descended the blow hole until he had reached the point where it entered the cavern in which Bert had surfaced. He confirmed that this cave was lozenge-shaped and that galleries entered it from either end; also that it seemed to be influenced by tidal variations or surge, since the walls and slopes of exposed rock were damp-looking and black with slime. After calling repeatedly without receiving any reply, he had untied the rope from about his waist and climbed back up the blow hole to report to Holroyd.
I asked him whether he had left the end of the rope hanging down into the water and he said he had. Cartwright had wanted to go down then, but Holroyd had ruled that there was no point imtil they had some means by which they could be certain of climbing out of the cave after they had lowered themselves into it. Finally, it was decided to construct some sort of rope ladder, and he and Cartwright had climbed back through the gap opened in the rock fall to do this. Holroyd had stayed on inside the cave to examine the walls for gravures and make rough drawings.
"Presumably he had a torch with him?"
"Yes. And the Greek stayed there to hold it for him."
"What about the rope? Was the upper end secured to anything?"
"The crowbar. We had it wedged across the upper end of the blow hole."
I then asked him if he could remember the exact time of the roof collapse.
"Yes." he said. "As soon as I was told what had happened,
I looked at my watch. I thought the time might be important. The fall occurred just before eleven-thirty."
"And how long since you had left Holroyd?"
"Oh, about a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes-something like that."
Which meant that if Holroyd's urge to examine the cave was so great that he Avas willing to go down the rope on his own, he could have been into the lower galleries about the time Bert was starting to work his way into the underwater entrance.
Vassilios was waiting and Hans climbed down into the boat, Sonia calling to him to be careful. He grinned, mouthing a reply against the scream of the labouring outboard. Slowly the raft of timbers drew away from the side. There was nothing now to hold me back and I was suddenly trembling as I stood there by the bulwarks, staring at the beauty of that sun-bright scene, the mountains falling to the narrow channel, the shallows by Tiglia bright emerald against the sea's deep blue, and white clouds hanging like puffs of smoke over the mainland heights. A fish broke the surface, a gleam of silver gone in a flash, and up by Spiglia a lone cottage poked a white face round a brown shoulder of rock. And above me the sun god riding high. All that beauty, and my mind six fathoms deep in the dark bowels of a sea-filled cave.
"Does that mean Holroyd has access to the gallery Pieter is in?" I turned to find Gilmore close behind me, peering at me with an intent bird-like expression. "Is that what he meant?"
I thrust my hands behind me, forcing my mind to concentrate. "He has access to where I think my father is. But that doesn't mean he's availed himself of it. Anyway, my father may be dead."
Gilmore nodded. "And that, of course, we won't know until they've cleared this roof fall and got Holroyd out. Unless, of course …" He hesitated, watching me speculatively, and I knew he was thinking of the underwater entrance. "How long will they take, do you think, to get through the fall?"
"Zavelas said maybe tomorrow."
Sonia was staring at me, her eyes wide, indignant with disbelief. "You're not going to wait till then, surely. He's been down there three days already."
"No, of course not. Only. ." But I stopped there. I couldn't tell her about the body, and Bert could have imagined it. "Give me a hand with the gear," I said, but she had already turned into the wheelhouse to get it.