He wiped his face again, recovering fast. He still had reserves of energy. ‘Last time you were here, I said I might have something to show you.’ His mood had changed, his personality too. He was smiling now and the smile transformed his face, lighting it with some inner excitement, so that he was suddenly like a child who has discovered something and cannot keep it to himself. ‘Come here.’
He had turned and was holding the lamp to the wall, moving it slowly back and forth as he had done when I stood watching him. ‘Do you see anything?’
I had moved forward and was peering over his shoulder, wondering what I was supposed to see on the pale, grey surface of the rock.
‘You don’t see it?’
‘I’m not a geologist,’ I said, thinking it was something to do with the nature of the rock.
He sighed. ‘You’ve got sharp eyes—you could always pick out a grey plover … Now look—’ And he began tracing a shape with his finger. ‘Do you see it now?’
‘What is it?’ I asked, trying to understand.
‘A rhinoceros,’ he said. ‘A woolly rhinoceros. See it? There’s the back, the head, the horn. And there’s what the French call les macaronis—the lines the cave artists drew to show the weapons entering the body, the moment of kill. The men who drew these animals were the witch doctors of their day and by picture-writing the kill, they gave their hunters confidence. Do you see it now?’
He was looking at me anxiously, expectantly, waiting to see my own excitement reinforce his own. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I see it.’ And for a moment I almost thought I did. But the rock wall was so marked by natural indentations, so scored by falls from the roof, that you could imagine almost any shape in the cracks and lines.
‘It’s not very clear,’ he said, his voice mirroring his disappointment at my lack of enthusiasm. ‘And the paint has gone. They, scratched the outline first. Then painted the beast with ochre or charcoal, using a stick brush—sometimes blowing it on in the form of a dry powder. Here the paint is all gone. The effect of the air. But when I get deeper into the cave beyond the rock fall …’ He moved the light. ‘Here’s another.’
Again he traced an outline, but it was difficult to know whether it was real or whether he was imagining it, the way, when you’re ill, you lie in bed seeing shapes in the cracks of the ceiling. ‘And here—’ He took me nearer the entrance. ‘I discovered this last year. A pigmy elephant I think, but it’s so vague and indistinct I can’t be sure about it. Do you know Malta? Ghar Dalam—a cave—there are the bones of small elephants there, and if the land-bridge existed …’ He straightened up. ‘I thought it worth investigating, and now I’m certain. If I had somebody working with me …’ He stared at me, his eyes fixed on my face, willing me, I thought, to offer to help him clear the rock fall. ‘Nobody knows why I’m here, what I’m doing—not even Sonia.’ He leaned towards me, his eyes boring into me. ‘You’re not to talk about it, you understand? You’re not to breathe a word to anybody.’
Of course not,’ I said, wondering what it was all about. Skull fragments I could understand, bones and primitive weapons, but the scratches he had shown me on the wall here … ‘I came to see you about that cable from Gilmore.’
His head jerked up. ‘Cable? What cable?’
‘Sonia says she showed it to you.’
‘I know nothing about it.’ He was on the defensive, staring at me, his face expressionless.
I couldn’t believe he had forgotten about it. But he was so locked up in himself … ‘Those skull fragments Holroyd found …’
‘It’s not my fault if he leapt to the wrong conclusions,’ he said quickly.
‘It was your dig,’ I reminded him. ‘You were working there last year.’
‘Did he say it was my dig? Did he tell Congress that I discovered it?’
‘No.’
‘Then he’s only himself to blame.’ He was suddenly laughing, that strange, jeering sound, as though sharing a joke with himself.
I couldn’t make up my mind whether he knew what had emerged at that investigation or not. But the thought was in my mind that he had known all along what would happen.
‘Sonia showed you that cable,’ I said, trying to pin him down. ‘What did Gilmore mean when he referred to Holroyd’s reputation being damaged?’
He didn’t answer, but just stood there, staring at me, smiling secretly.
‘You know he may be coming out here again.’
‘Then tell him to keep away from here.’ The big hands moved, clenched involuntarily, his hatred of the man naked and revealed. And then, his voice rising to some inner need for self-justification: ‘I’m a South African. The English—they hate the South Africans. Always have.’ He was reaching back to the Boer War and beyond, to the long rivalry of the Dutch and English, and he added, ‘You’re quarter Afrikaans yourself, whether you like it or not. I need you now.’ The tone of his voice had fallen to an urgent whisper. ‘I need your strength, Paul.’ I thought he meant my physical strength to break through that rock fall. But then he went on: ‘You’re not contaminated by the touch of the thing, and I don’t imagine you believe in ghosts. Maybe it’s just my preoccupation with the past, but when I hold it in my hand—I feel something, a power—the power of evil, or so it seems to me. Something terrible.’ He stared at me, his eyes gleaming in the dark. ‘You don’t understand? I’ll show you.’ He took me to his tent and bent down, reaching into it with his arms. ‘Here you are. Hold this.’
It was heavy, a stone about the size of a man’s head. The edge of it had been roughly shaped, the flat surface of it hollowed out in a shallow basin. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘A lamp,’ he said. ‘A stone lamp.’
Of course—the lamp he had been holding when Cassellis took those pictures. ‘Old?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Very old.’
I stood there, holding it in my hands, conscious that he was watching me intently, feeling that sense of evil again. ‘No substance in the universe—’ he was speaking very quietly—‘not even rock, is inanimate. Absorbed into the fabric of that stone is the knowledge that I seek. It’s like the walls of a house. It breathes the atmosphere of the past. Surely you’ve felt that in a house—the atmosphere left by those who have lived and died there?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘But holding that stone, you don’t feel anything, you’ve no sense of the past stirring in you?’
I didn’t dare answer him, knowing that the horror building up inside me came, as it always had done, from him.
He mistook my silence for insensibility. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘Now you understand why I need your help.’
But I didn’t understand. I was confused, uncertain how to meet his need. ‘I don’t quite see …’ But the sudden grip of his hand silenced me.
‘I need you here. I need the companionship of somebody whose mind is closed to what I think I’m going to find. You don’t comprehend the evil here. You don’t think about the world you live in, your species. You’re just a normal, healthy human animal. That’s why I need you. To keep me from thinking about my own species—the explosion of its populations, the massing in concrete jungles, the destructive assault upon the balance of nature which can only lead to nature’s retaliation—a long, slow, terrible battle of disease, famine and war.’ He let go of my arm, pushing his hand up through his hair and staring seaward as though looking beyond the dim line of the horizon into the distant past. ‘This species of ours,’ he said, speaking very slowly and clearly, ‘is Mousterian man all over again. But whereas my knowledge of the steady debasement of Mousterian stock is founded solely on the deterioration of his artefacts, the case of modern man is quite different. Here the material progress is fantastic, his “artefacts” reaching out to the planets. It is the spiritual progress that has halted, even gone into reverse.’
He paused, breathing heavily, and his eyes slowly shifted from the horizon to my face. ‘I once asked a great Swedish painter, a man who had travelled widely and who had lived, like I have, am
ongst peasant communities in many parts of the world, whether he thought we were a rogue species, and he looked at me, his blue eyes cold and full of dreadful certainty: “But of course,” he said. And yet there’s good as well as evil. I know that. The old Devil and the old God—Sade’s doctrine and Christ’s. And when I look at you I am reminded of Ruth. Your mother was artistic, cultured, the sweet goodness of mankind personified. And when I was with her my soul had no evil in it, none at all. So stay with me, Paul. For Christ’s sake stay with me.’ And he added, on a lighter note. ‘My own mother was Irish, you know. Celt and Boer—it’s like mixing the grape and the grain.’ He reached for the lamp and I gave it to him, and he stood there for a moment, holding it in his hands, then he put it back in the tent.
‘That man Barrett,’ he said, straightening up, his voice suddenly practical. ‘He’s an underwater diver. And that’s a chance I’ll never get again if you could only talk him into it.’
‘Into what?’ I asked him.
‘This cave.’ He had turned and was looking back at the dark shadow below the overhang. ‘It wasn’t tunnelled out by the flow of an underground river. It’s like Rouffignac, a sea cavern. In Rouffignac there are over a hundred gravures of mammoths. If I could get into the lower galleries here …’ He picked up his anorak and slipped it on, still talking, urgently, intently, about some theory he had that the whole great circle formed by the heights of Levkas, Meganisi, Kalomo and the mainland was the rim of a huge crater invaded by the sea after a volcanic explosion even more violent than that of Santorin. ‘I never believed in Atlantis. The continent that disappeared beyond the Pillars of Hercules is nonsense—an error due to the story having emanated from Egypt, It was the Minoan civilization—“far to the west” from the Egyptian point of view—that was destroyed when Santorin was blown to pieces, their fleet sunk, their cities and their fertile plains drowned by huge tidal waves. And if the Santorin eruption could do that, why not here, with the level of the water altered, the old cave entrance drowned? Much further back, of course—ten thousand, maybe even fifteen thousand years ago.’
And he went on to talk of the geological formation, volcanic rock overlying limestone, and the Central Mediterranean fault, running up through Pantelleria, Etna, Vulcano, Stromboli, branching off to the Ionian Isles. ‘Every year, in the hot weather, there are earth tremors here—in Levkas, Ithaca and Cephalonia in particular. Every so often there is an earthquake. Ithaca lost a thousand dead in 1953. They still talk of that earthquake on Meganisi. It did little damage there, but in Ithaca and Cephalonia whole towns and villages had to be rebuilt. When you get back to your boat, you look at the chart—you’ll see it then, the great crater circle formed by Levkas, Meganisi and the mainland mountains.’
He led me to the edge of the platform, clear of the overhang, so that we could see toe stars and the whole shadowy vista of sea and islands. ‘Suppose I’m right,’ he said, his hand gripping my arm. Then all to the south of us was dry land, all that area of sea we’re looking at now was one vast plain full of game. Pygmy elephant, lynx and ibex, hippopotamus even. And then with the last Ice Age, reindeer and the woolly rhinoceros, to be replaced as the ice receded by bison, the first cattle, small horses, a whole new breed of animals. And if this were part of a more general cataclysm, then perhaps this is the Flood—not rain, but inundation by the sea.’ He laughed, excited now, his imagination running away with him. ‘Picture it for yourself, this vast plain stretching away to what is now the Western Desert, a grazing ground for all the animals whose bones we have found in Africa. And amongst them, primitive man, standing erect, weapons in his hands—the jaw-bones of hyenas, deer-leg clubs, stones—hunting, killing, evolving all the time, and fascinated, like any child or ape today, by the holes in the rocks, the caves left by an earlier sea period. In those caves he searched for his first primitive god—a goddess, in fact—the Earth Goddess, to whom he owed his whole animate being. What more natural than that he should seek her in the bowels of the earth, offering propitiation, paying tribute to his wizard priests and in return having his next meal drawn on the rock canvas with his own weapons stuck in the beast’s guts to ensure a successful hunt.’
The stillness of the night, the calm sea running away to the blink of that distant light, and the old man’s voice conjuring a strange primeval world. Was it fantasy, the idea that this had all been land long, long ago? But listening to him, speaking, now that he had sea and land to point to, in a way that he had never done when I was a kid, vividly and with extraordinary intensity, it didn’t seem to matter. To him, at any rate, it was real. Convinced himself, he came near to convincing me.
‘Paul!’ Sonia’s voice, calling to me out of the darkness, broke the spell. ‘I thought maybe you’d lost your way,’ she said quickly, apologetically, conscious that she had broken in upon a moment of intimacy between us.
He saw us down to the boat, silent now, declining my offer of a night in comfort on board Coromandel. He was anxious to start work on that rock fall at first light, convinced he would break through at any moment to the gallery beyond. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said. ‘Ask Barrett if he’ll do an underwater survey of the area.’
I nodded, sitting on the thwart and looking up at him as he stood balanced on a rock, a dark outline against the stars. ‘That means anchoring here. What’s the holding like?’
He hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t know what the bottom was like or whether there was any current moving through the channel. ‘It depends on the weather,’ I said and started to tell him how exposed the boat would be. But at that moment Pappadimas started the outboard and the noise of it drowned my voice, beating back and forth between the rock planes that formed the sides of the channel.
Later that evening, sitting in the saloon with a drink in my hand, I found it quite impossible to convey to Bert the extraordinary sense of reality conjured by the old man’s words. For that you needed to be standing on that promontory below the cave’s overhang looking out across the flat plain of the sea, dim under the stars. But though to Bert the land-bridge theory was a lot of visionary nonsense, the cave was real enough, the prospect of discovering something of antiquity below the sea a lure, a challenge. ‘If it weren’t for those damned packages of Borg’s …’ He was torn between the urge to make an interesting dive and the desire to clear for Pantelleria and get shot of his unwelcome cargo. In the event, we did neither, the weather deciding for us. We were up in the early hours laying out a kedge, and all next morning we rode to two anchors with a gale from the north-west driving a steep scend into the inlet.
That evening, with the weather moderating, a caique came in loaded with vegetables from Corfu, and when we went ashore after dark, Zavelas told us Holroyd had arrived. He also told us that the Russian fleet was reported to be patrolling south of Rhodes, that the Israelis had launched a series of Commando raids against missile emplacements on the west side of the Suez Canal and that Egypt was appealing to the Security Council. He had a little Japanese transistor set on the table in front of him. ‘There is also a rumour that Turkey may mobilize. They are already concentrating more troops on the Anatolian coast opposite Cyprus and along the shores of the Black Sea.’ The wind was dying now, the night quiet except for the radio, a woman’s voice singing a Greek song.
Vassilios was bringing his boat into the quay. I waited, sipping my ouzo and watching for Holroyd. And when he came I got up and walked to meet him on the quay.
He stopped when he saw me, his head lowered like a bull on the defensive. He looked older, less cocky, a hunch to his shoulders. ‘Well, young man?’ He stood with his legs braced as though still feeling the movement of the sea, his head thrust forward. ‘What do you want?’
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘To your dig at Tiglia?’
‘Where else?’
‘I thought you might be going out to see my father.’
‘Later. That’ll come later.’ And he added, his eyes narrowing so that the creases running back from the co
rners were very pronounced, ‘You were in on it, were you? You knew what he was up to—wasting public money, making a fool of me. And with what object? Can you tell me that?’ The anger was building up in him. ‘Thought he’d get rid of me. Is that it? A clear field whilst he worked on the cave that really mattered. Well? Well, haven’t you got anything to say?’
‘I know nothing about it.’
‘Well, if you won’t talk I’ll have to have it out with Van der Voort.’
‘You leave him alone,’ I said. I could see the old man now, his big hands opening and clenching. There’d be murder if Holroyd tried to interfere with him. ‘Stick to Tiglia or go off and find some dig of your own. But don’t cross the channel to where my father is working.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’ll kill you if you do.’
I saw his eyes widen and he stood there, staring at me for a moment. And then without another word he went past me to the boat and Vassilios helped him in. The outboard roared and they slid away from the quay, out into the calm waters of the inlet, the light fading, everything still. I stood there, watching until they were out of sight, wondering what was going to happen. And then I turned to find Sonia standing a few yards away.
‘He mustn’t worry Dr Van der Voort,’ she said in a small, tense voice. ‘Did you tell him that?’
‘Of course I did.’ I was angry at her for stating the obvious, angry with myself for yielding to a compulsion I did not understand. And as I stood there, facing her, I was remembering the sense of something altogether evil I had felt up there alone with him the previous night.
She took my arm suddenly, her fingers gripping tight. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’re trembling.’
But I couldn’t tell her what it was, for I didn’t know myself. ‘Do you remember those photographs Dr Gilmore brought with him to Amsterdam? The second one—he was holding something in his hand. A stone lamp, Gilmore said. D’you remember? What did they use a stone lamp for?’
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