by Philip Roy
But that wasn’t the end of it. We rented a car and drove to the palace of King Minos, one of the centers of the ancient Minoan civilization. It had been destroyed by earthquakes and volcanoes and had lain in a pile of rubble for thousands of years. Archaeologists had been rebuilding it for almost a hundred. The palace itself was a maze. Ziegfried couldn’t get his head around it because it had been built without symmetry. We walked through it for hours and he got really worked up about it.
“Al, you’ve got to understand, symmetry is like religion to architecture, especially ancient architecture. Look at the ancient temples everywhere else — they’re as evenly balanced as a two-bladed ax! There’s no symmetry here! None whatsoever! This is unbelievable!”
I had to smile. Ziegfried could explain away all the unbelievable things I had seen and yet he was stumped when it came to the way a building had been put together. But there was something else waiting for us around the corner. We turned … and there were the frescoes.
“Oh!”
They were large, colourful paintings on stone walls. The people, the ancient Minoans, were beautiful, just like the statue Penelope had found. They were a tall, elegant people, well-dressed and intelligent looking. There was something very strangely modern about them. Then we saw a fresco of a huge bull, with athletes leaping over it. And then we saw frescoes of dolphins. And there were people swimming with them. And there were people riding them.
We stared for a long time without saying a word. Even Hollie stared, and growled a little bit. I knew Ziegfried’s brain was busy trying to make sense of it all. Finally, he broke the silence.
“Well, … they swim with dolphins in aquariums, don’t they?”
“Yup.”
They did.
Epilogue
IF ATLANTIS WAS part of the Minoan civilization, which I believed it probably was, I had a better idea now why people were still talking about it. It was such an amazing civilization to begin with. They were so advanced they even had hot and cold running water and flushing toilets — four thousand years ago! They had a unique and unusual way of looking at the world. For instance, they never built walls to protect their cities from invaders. Why was that? Did they have a secret weapon? Did they know something their enemies didn’t? Some people have suggested the people of Atlantis knew terrible catastrophes were coming their way and prepared for them by developing a way of living under water, beneath a giant bubble, or even developing gills! I laughed when I read that, then was shocked that Ziegfried didn’t. It wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded, he said. Gills and lungs function basically the same way — they isolate oxygen molecules and pump them into the blood. Lungs take oxygen from air; gills take it from water. It was even conceivable to breathe under water with lungs, he said, if you could find a way to fill the water with enough oxygen. That sounded pretty crazy to me, but so did landing on the moon, probably, until it was done. We have artificial lungs today, Ziegfried said, and organ transplants, test-tube babies, cloning and all kinds of weird things. What would our scientists and inventors come up with today if they had to prepare for a giant meteor crashing into the earth? Yikes!
But did that mean I had to believe in mermaids now and children riding around on dolphins at sea? No way. Not yet. But I did understand Reggie’s words a little better, that the longer he was at sea, the more he felt he was not alone. Still, Atlantis had been lost for thousands of years; I was only fifteen. I was just getting started.
We spent a couple of weeks exploring Crete. We visited temples, monasteries, museums, caves, markets, villages and junkyards. We went hiking in the mountains and swimming in the sea. On our last day we restocked the sub with food and fuel and bought more rope and a new dinghy. We said goodbye in the twilight on an isolated rock, and Ziegfried went to catch the night ferry back to Athens. I picked up Hollie and we climbed into the sub. We submerged to periscope depth, waited for the ferry and followed it out. A few miles from shore we surfaced behind the ship. I didn’t care if anyone saw us but I knew Ziegfried would be watching. I climbed the portal and waved. Ziegfried waved back and saluted. We would meet again in just a few months at Sheba’s, but for now my journey would continue. As I stood up on the portal and saluted back, I noticed a young girl standing next to Ziegfried. She waved too. She had seen us. Then Seaweed sailed out of the sky, tapped his beak on the hatch and dropped inside. I wondered how that must have looked to the little girl. Would it change the way she looked at the world?
The radar beeped. I climbed inside. Two vessels were coming our way from shore.
“Time to go, guys!” I said to the crew.
I shut the hatch, submerged to two hundred feet … and we disappeared.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip Roy hails from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and has a deep affection for the sea, having grown up beside it and lived by it on different shores. His university studies included music and history but he has always wanted to write novels. Submarine Outlaw, his first book, grew out of a lifelong fascination with submarines. Journey to Atlantis is the product of another dream — to work with myths and legends from the world’s great literature. “These are the stories we grow up with and live with all our lives,” says Philip. He is already busy on the next book in the Submarine Outlaw series.