“I see. In that case we will have to get in a few hours before we go to the dig. The sun rises before six-”
I groaned. Frederick ignored me.
“And all day Sunday,” he went on. “Perhaps in a few days you will feel more competent and can continue alone.”
There was no point in arguing with him. I shrugged.
“Okay. You’ll have to wake me up; I don’t get up before dawn willingly. Now suppose you tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”
“Anything that is not a natural formation.”
“That’s a lot of help. Jars, I suppose. What about anchors?”
“The question of anchors is interesting.” Frederick ’s face brightened. “It has been claimed that before the seventh century B.C. ships did not carry anchors. That seems to be extremely poor reasoning. There must have been some method of stopping a ship, and the pierced stone, tied to a cable or rope, would seem an obvious solution that would occur to the most primitive mind. A triangular stone, with a hole in the center, has been identified by one authority as a Minoan anchor. Certainly metal anchors were not used until-”
I sighed ostentatiously and interrupted.
“Pierced stones. They are not going to be very conspicuous. How about masts?”
“They used them, of course. Whether they would survive-”
“These amphorae you talked about. Would they be the same shape as the ones we found on the dig?”
“Yes. Long, two-handled, with a narrow neck and a pointed base.”
“What else?”
“There could be,” said Frederick, “anything down there.”
“Well, I guess that gives me something to go on with. Suppose I do find something. How do I mark the spot so I can find it the next time I dive?”
“I have given that matter some thought. An inflatable globule of some sort is the obvious answer; yet I am reluctant to leave a marker that might alert others. The process of triangulation…”
He went on talking, but I stopped listening. The conversation had become pointless and rather pathetic. We were like a couple of kids making solemn plans to build a rocket ship. Neither of us knew the first thing about what we were doing.
“We’ll start tomorrow, then,” I said, collecting the dishes. There was no use being Women’s Lib about the housework; if I had been a man, Frederick would still have expected me to do it.
I had my back turned when he said unexpectedly, “You don’t believe you will find anything, do you?”
“Huh?” I turned. “I didn’t say-”
“Your conviction is implicit in every word you have said.” His eyes narrowed. “Nor can I blame you. You seem to have the rudiments of a logical mind; a pity it hasn’t been trained. I suppose I must show you this. It was found in the bay.”
He held out his hand.
The light wasn’t good. For a second I had the horrible impression that his palm had turned hard and shiny. Midas? Then I saw that he was holding something, a flat, irregular object that covered his palm from the wrist to the base of his fingers. It shone with the glint of gold-the one substance that does not corrode, in soil or seawater.
I snatched at it. He snarled a warning, but there was no need, it wasn’t as fragile as it looked. The underlying metal was badly corroded; it showed green and rotten around the ragged edges, but the flat top surface was covered with a hard, shiny substance like black plastic. Into this black surface tiny golden figures of animals and flowers and men had been set. There was a cat, with a bird in its mouth; two lotus blossoms; and a man, a hunter, with a long spear and one of the man-tall, figure-eight Minoan shields. The tiny figures were done with such delicacy and vigor that you could sense the agonized struggle of the bird and the lithe ferocity of the cat.
Frederick didn’t have to tell me what it was. I had seen the daggers from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae in the Athens Museum. This was part of the blade of another such inlaid dagger. The daggers in Athens had been found on the mainland, but they were believed to be of Cretan workmanship. They had been found only in royal graves-rare imports, so highly prized that they were buried with their dead owners.
“Okay,” I said, with a long breath. “I don’t know whether I believe in your ships. But you’ve convinced me; there’s something down there.”
Chapter 6
I
BY FOLLOWING A PATH ACROSS THE HEADLAND WE were able to reach the bay of the villa and save swimming time. I was thinking about Frederick when I proposed the land route, but I was also remembering Jim’s warning. I could at least minimize the time I spent in the water under Frederick ’s unreliable supervision.
As we walked along the path, the roof of the villa came into sight on our left.
“I wonder if we’re trespassing,” I said. “Maybe that’s their private bay down there.”
“The sea is open to all,” said Frederick vaguely.
“Well, we can but try. If we get warned off, or shot at, it’s your problem.”
Frederick didn’t answer; the question didn’t seem to concern him. We turned toward the cliff, which was lower here than it was on our section of the coast, and climbed down to the water.
I hadn’t slept too well the night before. I had lain awake for a long time, thinking about what Frederick had told me. In spite of my doubts and reservations, the lure of hidden treasure had infected me. The description of the ships, tumbled and scattered across the ocean floor like bones in a marine graveyard, was so fantastic it sounded like a scene out of Jules Verne. Yet Frederick ’s theories made sense. The southern coast of Thera, the nearest part of the island to the motherland of Crete, would be the logical place for a major port. Some archaeologists believed that the capital city must have been in the center of the island, which had collapsed into the caldera. But this assumption seemed to be based on the Atlantis legend, as recorded by Plato; and with all due respect to Plato, the details of his story were highly questionable. It simply didn’t make sense to have a big city in the middle of an island when the sea was the main highroad of communication. In Crete the cities were on the coast or within easy reach of the coastline. I didn’t believe Plato’s account of a man-made channel three hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep that allowed ships to reach a central harbor.
The central part of the island wasn’t the only part that had subsided. There was another caldera on the south coast, according to maps I had seen. That’s where the main harbors must have been, on the lee side of the island, the part nearest to Crete.
So when I slid into the water I wouldn’t have been surprised to see submerged towers and mammoth walls, with fish swimming in and out of the empty window frames. I knew better-but I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I was using a snorkel but no air tanks, because I didn’t have them or any means of filling them. I couldn’t bring my own tanks; they were too bulky to carry and they would have been useless anyway, without a compressor to refill them.
Frederick had done nothing about supplying these necessary items, and his vagueness on the subject was a point against his claims. It was almost as if he were afraid to give me the equipment that would prove or disprove his story. I could see the difficulty; as soon as he started making inquiries about scuba gear, the port authorities in Phira would learn about it. Frederick claimed “they” were suspicious and antagonistic already. He might be exaggerating, but I had read about divers in Greece and Turkey having trouble with government officials. And there was no use telling him he should have thought about these things before he planned the project.
However, my preliminary survey had convinced me that I could do a lot of exploring without scuba gear. The water was fairly shallow and warm. In fact it felt warmer than the cool morning air, and it closed around me like welcoming arms.