Keller laughed harshly. “The past is never dead. You and this girl think you are free of it? You are wrong. The past shapes the present, and our lives are circumscribed by the acts of others long dead. We are all of us trapped in the labyrinth of time.”
The speech might have sounded contrived and theatrical if it had not been for the fact that the man was in deadly earnest. And what had prompted him to select the metaphor of the labyrinth? I shivered. Jim put his arm around me.
“No,” he said. “I’m not trapped, and neither is Sandy. At the moment we’re inconvenienced, not by your past actions but by your present behavior. Damn it, if you have something to say, why don’t you say it? I’m tired of vague hints and wild-eyed warnings.”
“I cannot,” Keller whispered.
He covered his face with his hands. To me he seemed a very pathetic figure, but Jim was unmoved.
“You said last night there was something you ought to tell me,” he insisted. “I’m not stupid, Keller. It’s no accident that your old adversaries came to Thera this summer. Why did they come? What secret do you all share?”
Keller lowered his hands, but he did not speak. After a moment Jim went on.
“I’ll start the ball rolling, then. When Sandy was hurt the other day, it was no accident. The amphora she found had been planted, with a booby trap attached. I knew when she described it to me that it couldn’t have been underwater for three thousand years. Not only was it free of marine incrustations but it was entire, unbroken. Wave action will shatter a pot that’s only twenty-five or thirty feet deep. The amphora had to be a good one, so that Sandy would be moved to dig it out, but it isn’t impossible to find vessels of that caliber. The museum at Phira has some, and I would guarantee to rob that place any night of the year, it’s so poorly guarded. Or if a man lived here for years, excavating in an amateur fashion, he might discover unbroken amphorae. Why do you want Sandy to stop diving, Keller? What’s out there in the bay?”
“Ships,” said Keller. “The fleet of the sea king.”
His surrender was so complete, so unexpected, that Jim was taken aback.
“What?” he gasped.
“Yes.” Keller let out a long, shuddering sigh. “It is yours by right. It was his. I am only the guardian.”
Jim’s arm tightened around my shoulders.
“He’s right,” I said. “ Frederick knows about it too. That’s why he brought me here.”
“Wait a minute,” Jim said dazedly. “I can’t take it in, it’s too much. A fleet? One Bronze Age ship was found in Turkey. A trading vessel, fantastically well preserved, but not carrying a rich cargo. Are you trying to tell me that an entire Minoan fleet sank in that bay, and that it survived? No. I don’t believe it.”
“He saw it,” said Keller. As always, he avoided the name, but neither of us wondered who the pronoun “he” referred to. “Two years before the war, when he was on Thera for a few days. To hear him describe it, was an experience one could never forget. The sea bottom for many acres strewn with rotting ships and cargo-anchors, masts, amphorae, even the ropes of the rigging.”
The words came pouring out of him. The sheer relief of being able to speak, after years of silence… Or was it more than that? Words aregiven to us to conceal our thoughts; people sometimes talk about one subject in order to avoid another that is more dangerous. The suspicion flashed through my mind and then was gone, in the fascination of Keller’s story.
“It was a summer of bad weather. Storms and winds and earthquakes. He had come, after a season’s work in Crete, to pursue a personal theory. He had read the reports of the early excavators- you know, of course, that Fouque discovered Minoan houses here in the 1870’s. Nothing was done to follow up those discoveries, and since Fouque’s time the excavations on Crete had opened up an entire new civilization. So he came, dreaming, as young men do, of making great discoveries.
“Do you believe in accident? If so, you will say that by pure accident he arrived between two storms, one of which swept the bottom of this bay clear of the sand that had covered the fleet for thousands of years. He had hired one of the fishermen to take him on a trip around the island. The man was reluctant to go because he feared more bad weather, but at last he was persuaded.
“They anchored briefly in this bay, so that he might search the base of the cliffs for ruins. Diving, he struck his hand on an anchor that protruded out of the ocean floor. Accident, you say? Cling to that thought. It is not pleasant to think we are the toys of vast forces indifferent to man…
“You were thunderstruck to hear of his discovery. Imagine his sensations, seeing it spread out before his very eyes. But he was trained, he knew these islands and their people. He knew that if the ship’s captain learned what he had found, there would be looting, hasty and destructive. He dared not remove any object large enough to be noticed by the crew. He took only one thing-”
“The dagger,” I interrupted. “Like the inlaid daggers from Mycenae, Jim. Frederick has it now. How did he get it?”
Keller’s mouth tightened. “If he told any other of his find, I was not informed. He told me, because he could not bear that it should be lost, and because he knew I felt as he did about archaeology.”
Jim had been frozen throughout the long speech. Now he said, in a croaking voice, “But why didn’t he come back? Why didn’t he tell someone-other archaeologists, the Greek government-”
“He did come back,” Keller said. “Three days later, after the second storm. He came on foot, overland, and swam, recklessly, alone. He found nothing. Another convulsion-accident, my young friends?-had reburied the ships. He had not the opportunity to do more. You must remember that this was before the war, before the development of the self-contained breathing apparatus for diving. His find was deep, deeper than you”-he nodded at me-“have yet gone. Fifty feet, perhaps more. Oh, certainly, divers could work at greater depths, even without the clumsy suits that were the only equipment available then. The sponge divers of the Aegean have been doing it for centuries. But this was an entirely new field. None of the techniques of underwater archaeology had been dreamed of, much less worked out. He was dazzled by the immensity of the problem; and he had also a touch of the hoarding instinct all scholars have. The find was his, his alone, and no one else should see it until he was in a position to handle it as it deserved. Also, I think, he was something of a mystic. It was as if someone had opened the sea to him with one sweep of a giant hand and said, ‘Here. It is for you. I have kept it for you for three thousand years.’ What had waited so long could wait a little longer. The warclouds were gathering, and the Greek government was not concerned with protecting antiquities. At any moment the waters might be closed to him and his people; to speak out would disclose the secret to those who would exploit it for themselves or neglect it in the more urgent demands of survival. You shake your head; you cannot understand. But I can. Even now, I think I would have acted as he did under those circumstances.”
“Oh, I can understand,” Jim muttered. “Certainly I can understand his desire to keep it for himself. But it’s like a-like a fantastic dream. Even if he wasn’t hallucinating, the ships can’t be there now.”
“I think they are gone,” Keller said calmly. “I, too, have searched. When I was younger and stronger, I swam often in the bay. Never did I find a scrap. For ten years now I have done nothing. When Frederick came here, I suspected that he also knew. How he found out I do not know. I never spoke to anyone, not even to Kore.”