I couldn’t see the gut where Pappadimas had landed me, or the overhang. The steep slopes rising to Mount Porro were one dark mass. But I saw the end of the promontory, the open sea beyond, and with a feeling of relief I turned on to 225° and switched to automatic. I thought he was lucky in a way. Lucky to have found what he had been searching for and to die there in the certainty that he was right, his theory proved at least to his own satisfaction.
I was drinking coffee then, smoking a cigarette, my hands still trembling. He was dead, and I was still alive—his violence, his restlessness, still living in me. At dawn I should be alone, with nothing between me and the Libyan coast but 300 miles of open sea. I could turn west then, to the Messina Straits—North Africa or Spain. Or I could turn south. I thought I’d turn south, and then east along the Libyan coast—Beirut probably. If he were right—if we were going to destroy ourselves—better to be at the centre of it than die on the periphery by remote control.
I switched on the radio, but all I could get was music and the voices of men talking in languages I did not understand. The night had become very dark, no stars now and my world reduced to the dim-lit area of the wheelhouse. Shortly after midnight I picked up Guiscard light on the north end of Cephalonia. In two hours I should be clear of Greek waters—free and on my own. I felt the blood stirring in my veins, and I left the boat to steer herself while I got myself a drink.
Down below, in the saloon, the golden gleam of the goblet Kotiadis had been fondling caught my eye. I remembered a cardboard box Florrie had discarded. I got it from her cabin, a blue box with the name of a boutique—Asteris—and underneath: Souvenir of Rodos. It had contained a mug she had bought for the boat and I packed the goblet into it, bedding the priceless piece of beaten gold in cottonwool. Somewhere, some time, I would post it to them—a souvenir of the voyage. And then I sat there, smoking a cigarette and smiling to myself, amused at the thought of Bert telling somebody else what a kind, generous man Borg was.
Later, much later, the dawn broke, spilling pink across the sky. I was on deck then, tired and bleary-eyed with lack of sleep, watching as the last of Greece faded away astern, the mountains of Cephalonia a dark cloud-capped rampart low on the horizon. The sea was flat calm, no breath of wind touching the surface, and there was no ship anywhere in sight. I watched as the clouds were edged with gold and the sun rose above them, a great burning orb, and then I swung the wheel over and turned the bows to the south.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Unlike most of my novels, Levkas Man is not the result of any one particular journey. It has, in fact, been gradually taking shape in my mind over the years, and during that time a number of quite unrelated experiences have contributed to its growth. The first of these occurred more than a decade ago when F. T. Smith, then my editor at Collins, in a mood of great excitement, talked to me for over an hour about the astonishing discoveries made by a Dr Leakey in Africa. From that moment I became fascinated by the search for the origins of our species.
In 1963 my father died and the sad experience of going through his home and dealing with the relics of a lifetime was one that I felt many people must have suffered. That same year my wife and I had sailed our boat down to Malta with the object of exploring the Eastern Mediterranean. Two years later, knowing of my interest in early man and that we were planning to sail in the Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece, Alfred Knopf, my American publisher, sent me a cutting from the Christian Science Monitor about a cave-shelter discovered by a Cambridge palæontologist, E. S. Higgs, not far from the Greek-Albanian border. We visited this cave-shelter and saw his team at work on it. We also dropped our anchor in all the ports and coves of Levkas and the neighbouring islands, and in 1967 explored the volcanic area of the Central Mediterranean fault—the Lipari and Pontine islands, including Vulcano and Stromboli, and south from Sicily to that extraordinary laval heap, Pantelleria.
But I think the most dramatic of all the experiences that have contributed to the atmosphere of the book was a visit we paid in 1968–69 to the Dordogne and Vézère cave-shelters in France, and here I have to acknowledge my debt to the French authorities for permitting us to examine the cave paintings at Lascaux; the cave remains officially closed, except for scientific study. Here I was very fortunate in having Jacques Marsal as my guide. It was he who discovered the cave paintings with three young companions in 1940.
This then is the raw material out of which, over the years, Levkas Man has gradually grown. The theories upon which it is based are academic, and here I would like to acknowledge the kindly and constructive help I received from Eric S. Wood. For the purposes of my story I have taken some liberties with geology and with the placing of the various cave-shelters; none with the settings, all of which I have personally explored. The rod dunes do exist; they were shown to me by E. S. Higgs.
HAMMOND INNES
Kersey—1970
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author has quoted from the following works: Raymond Dart: Adventures with the Missing Link (Hamish Hamilton); Kenneth Oakley: Frameworks for Dating Fossil Man (Weidenfeld and Nicolson); W. J. Turner: lines from ‘The Caves of Auvergne’, which appears in Modern Poets, ed. J. C. Squire (Martin Seeker). The author is also indebted to many other source books, including of course Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hammond Innes (1913–1998) was the British author of over thirty novels, as well as children’s and travel books. Born Ralph Hammond Innes in Horsham, Sussex, he was educated at the Cranbrook School in Kent. He left in 1931 to work as a journalist at the Financial News. The Doppelganger, his first novel, was published in 1937. Innes served in the Royal Artillery in World War II, eventually rising to the rank of major. A number of his books were published during the war, including Wreckers Must Breathe (1940), The Trojan Horse (1940), and Attack Alarm (1941), which was based on his experiences as an anti-aircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain.
Following his demobilization in 1946, Innes worked full-time as a writer, achieving a number of early successes. His novels are notable for their fine attention to accurate detail in descriptions of place, such as Air Bridge (1951), which is set at RAF stations during the Berlin Airlift. Innes’s protagonists were often not heroes in the typical sense, but ordinary men suddenly thrust into extreme situations by circumstance. Often, this involved being placed in a hostile environment—for example, the Arctic, the open sea, deserts—or unwittingly becoming involved in a larger conflict or conspiracy. Innes’s protagonists are forced to rely on their own wits rather than the weapons and gadgetry commonly used by thriller writers. An experienced yachtsman, his great love and understanding of the sea was reflected in many of his novels.
Innes went on to produce books on a regular schedule of six months for travel and research followed by six months of writing. He continued to write until just before his death, his final novel being Delta Connection (1996). At his death, he left the bulk of his estate to the Association of Sea Training Organisations to enable others to experience sailing in the element he loved.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1971 by Hammond Innes
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4093-8
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
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Levkas Man Page 33