“You’re constructing a fountain?” the Frenchman asked.
“I’m making a dragon. I need to find some oil on Thira.”
Cuvier, when not recording expenses and compass readings in his journal, proudly showed his new pistols to Hamidou Dragut. The pair had a fine time with mock duels, pacing the length of the xebec before turning and firing with clicks of hammers, like boys.
“These pistols are as pretty as a houri!” our captain exclaimed. “This is good, because death should be elegant. I would be kissed by weapons like these, or the American’s pretty sword, and bleed happily. You are gentlemen of taste and refinement.”
The truth was that we felt cheerful. There’s thrill in cheating danger. We were swashbucklers, out for scientific fame. Bonaparte’s required journey was a diversion to a Mediterranean where all colors are brighter, all meals slower, all evenings more languid, all women more mysterious, and all cities more ancient. The wind was warm, and the limoncello liqueur we bought was ambrosia from the islands, sweet and sharp as honeyed ice.
For me, the conversation with Napoleon about his Little Red Man had ignited a hundred memories and unanswered questions. I remembered Bonaparte’s bold stay alone in the granite sarcophagus of the Great Pyramid, lying like a dead man and emerging from its dark chamber with hallucinatory visions. I’d been embroiled in a deepening puzzle ever since—first the medallion and the pyramid, and then the Book of Thoth in the tunnels of Jerusalem and the City of Ghosts. Magnus Bloodhammer had dragged Norse myth and North America into the tangle, and all this musty legend pointed to some ancient beginnings forged by strange god-men with powerful knowledge, long forgotten and only half rediscovered. There were secrets that had been anxiously sought by conquerors from Alexander to the Crusaders, and a weird, dark history that interwove with our more conventional one. Each time I thought the mystery had finally slammed shut, another door would open. Each time I thought the Egyptian Rite was out of my life, it would unexpectedly reappear. Each time I thought I’d fought or tunneled my way to some final conclusion, yet another quest became necessary. It was dangerous as the devil, and I grieved for the friends I’d lost along the way, but it was also as intoxicating as a temptress or a chest of gold. I was becoming the master, I realized, not of electricity as my mentor Franklin might have hoped, nor commerce as my father desired, nor even war as Napoleon might instruct, but of a story with snakelike twists that hinted where we’d come from. It led back into the fog when time began. While Smith and Cuvier looked to rocks for the answer, I was the scientist of myth, the investigator of the improbable. Fate had woven me a career out of fable.
Dragut was curious, of course, why four European scholars (I benefitted from their company by being lumped with them) would want to coast round the Peloponnese of Greece and fetch up at a rocky island on the rim of the Aegean. Thira had no city, no commerce, and no ancient ruins of any note. “They are poor and pious, on an island the devil made,” he said. “It is one of those places in the Mediterranean where nothing is.”
“We study the history of the earth,” Smith told him. “Thira is dramatic.”
He shrugged. “I allow it is steep. But what need of history?”
“Men learn from the past.”
“Men are slaves to the past, always trying to correct old errors. Trust in Allah, my friend.”
“I trust you to sail this ship safely to where we want to go.”
“Yes! Put your faith in Hamidou, too! I will surprise you!”
We caught a northwesterly maestro wind off the continent and surfed down the windy Adriatic, quickly passing the Austrian possessions of Dalmatia and then, as the breeze fell, coasting by Croatia, tiny Montenegro, and the western coast of Greece that was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The wind gradually gentled, the sea a saucer of sparkle. Castles crowned rocky headlands, pastel villages lined aquamarine bays, and bulbous church steeples served as navigation marks between reefs and islets. The blue of sea and sky deepened as we sailed south, clouds sweet as cream.
The seven Greek islands of the new Septinsular Republic, created when the Russians and Turks ejected French troops three years before, slid by like high green jewels: Corfu, Kefalonia, Ithaca. It was one of the leaders of this tiny experiment, charismatic Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, whom we were to secretly meet on Thira. There was cloud at the summit of Kefalonia’s Mount Ainos as we breezed by, and I could smell the pine from its shore. It beckoned like a green paradise, but we had no time to tarry. We were going to a place dry and largely treeless, and more like Creation when the world began.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thira, that Greek island that the Venetians call Santorini, rises sheer from the blue Aegean like a wall of jagged chocolate, its volcanic cliffs topped by whitewashed villages that cling to the crest like frosting. Thira is actually an archipelago of half a dozen islands, the broken remnants of an ancient crater. We sailed into its caldera drunk from wind and the dazzling sunlight of the Aegean, all colors brighter, all edges sharper, the babble of our sailors foreign, our mission misty, and my scientific companions as anticipatory as if they were on holiday. We were in legendary Greece, cradle of democracy, edge of the Ottoman Empire, in a place that looked as if it was created yesterday and could be remade by an explosion tomorrow. Our destination island was a crescent that enclosed a seemingly bottomless bay four miles wide by six long. Across this bay was the smaller island of Thirassia that represented, Smith told me, the opposite side of the old crater wall. In the harbor’s center was a small, low, rumpled island as pocked as the moon. It was smoking.
“This is what the world looked like when it began,” Cuvier said. “Rock and water.”
“Look at the strata of those cliffs, Georges!” Smith exclaimed. “Eruptions laid down like rows of bricks! We can read them like a book!”
“What shelter this would be for a navy,” Fulton added. “Cliffs you could cuddle under.”
“Or the worst lee shore,” Dragut said. “There are days when the meltemi blows that you do not want to be in here, my friend. It can be an evil place.”
“Evil? I can see the blue domes of half a dozen churches from here.”
“Christian churches are no shield against the devil when Satan awakes.”
“And mosques no shelter from an earthquake. Bad things happen to all of the pious, Dragut. The solution would be to use science to warn of disaster.”
“No, worse things happen to nonbelievers, like savants and French revolutionaries. And no one can warn about the will of God. I put my faith in Allah.”
“Cuvier,” I interrupted, “you described this as one of the oldest places in the world, but I’m not sure what you meant by that,” I said.
“Oldest and newest,” the scientist said. “Old in that it’s like our planet’s beginning, raw and mostly treeless. New in that when that isle in the center belches, hot new rock comes out. The island destroys and remakes itself.”
“It seems an odd place to hide anything you want to keep.”
“And a forbidding place if you want to keep treasure hunters away.”
We made for a small harbor at the base of the island’s cliff, the little port cast in shadow this morning by an escarpment hundreds of meters high. Fishing boats bright as toys bobbed by the rubble quay, their gay colors a contrast to the grim rust, brown, and gray striations towering above. The shoreline was so steep that Dragut could bring his xebec right to the short jetty. We hired donkeys for a slow, sure-footed trek up a switchback trail etched into the face of the somber cliff, the animals bristly, ears twitching, and their clop steady as we swayed. The route had no railings and was slick with manure, the donkeys blinking against the flies. Smith kept making us stop so he could peer at different clumps of ugly rock, as if willing the soil to speak. The cliff looked mute to me, and the view out to the other side of the vast bay was across an unnerving gulf of air. I was anxious to get off the precipitous trail.