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.
The beauty of it hit me first, the way it always does. This sea floor didn’t have the luxuriant junglelike vegetation of the reefs off Florida, but the translucence of the water gave objects a pristine, shimmery look, as if they were encased in clear plastic. Sunlight sifted down through the cool green depths and danced on the sandy bottom. It was surprisingly clean; there was almost no marine growth and no mud. Not that the bottom was level-far from it. There were patches of relatively smooth sand, black or white, the black being lava sand. But most of the surface was a jumble of rocks and stones. With a little imagination you could believe you were seeing the ruins of a city strewn across the acres of the bay. Tumbled heaps might have been fallen towers; rock ridges looked like the remains of walls, with gaping holes for doors and windows. But I knew that what I saw was not man-made. The rubble consisted of pumice and magma ejected from the volcano, mixed with fragments of broken lava flow and stones from the collapsed cliffs. Some of them, worn smooth by water, resembled worked stones to an astonishing degree. There had been reports of sunken quays in another part of the island-long strips of stone so straight it was hard to believe they had been shaped by nature. But they were beach rock, natural concrete formed by water running over limestone and the silica of lava and pumice.
There was only one way of searching the area systematically, and that was to swim a sort of grid pattern, back and forth. It would take a long time because I would have to check every suspicious-looking formation.
The sun was fully up by that time, and the eastern sky was a tapestry of blazing colors. I waved at Frederick, who was sitting hunched up on a rock looking like an irritated albatross. He gave me a limp flap of the hand, and I went down again. I struck out for the mouth of the bay, keeping fairly close to the south coastline. The water got deeper as I went on; at the mouth of the bay it was about fifty feet. I could work down there, but not for long. The rock walls came down sheer into the water, but they were uneven; I could climb out if I had to. I decided to go on out a little farther.