Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 15

The friend of wisdom is also a friend of the myth.

—ARISTOTLE

HORRIBLE IDEA.

“Had we known what was to come,” Xan complained, brushing by the fact that he’d been warned exactly what was to come, “we would never have started out immediately after two consecutive days with little rest or food.” Still, maybe Monty could have been more specific about the weather. Xan and Delaney hadn’t gotten far from Akendria when it started to rain, building to a downpour that continued all night. Finally, after hours of stumbling in the dark on wet stones and pulling his boots out of gluey mud, Xan gave up. If he was caught, so be it.

“Even the threat of capture and its inevitable outcome, the firing squad, were not sufficient to induce us to keep walking,” he’d recall. “I found myself longing for the sudden appearance of a German patrol to put an end to our increasingly unbearable muscular fatigue and sleeplessness.”

That did it for Costa, too. As Xan’s guide, he’d done his best to live up to xenía, the Cretan code of hospitality. Xenía speaks to the heart of Greek identity, because every Greek at some point has been a stranger; in ancient Greek, “stranger” and “guest” are even the same word. In a nation of seafarers and shepherds and traveling scholars, of earthquakes and warfare and overseas trade, relying on an occasional unexpected handout is necessary and inevitable. “All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by kindness so unfeigned,” one British traveler still marveled after many trips to Greece, “that it invests even the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.”

Xenía isn’t even a virtue, really; it’s a law enforced by thunder-god Zeus himself. Much the way Christianity adopted a pay-it-forward policy as its “Greatest Commandment” and reveres a homeless savior who got by on handouts, the Olympian myths are all about the immortals quality-controlling xenía by wandering about in human form and seeing how they’re treated when they show up in disguise. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two Greek pillars of Western literature, are xenía written in blood—a pair of epic thrillers that explore what happens when you (a) abuse hospitality by monkeying with your host’s wife and (b) depend on it during a twenty-year road trip to hell and back. A Cretan is measured by her xenía, and the three rules are very clear:

You offer food.

You offer a bath.

You ask no questions.

Not, at least, until the traveler has been refreshed. That way, he’ll at least get a bite and a breather in case you discover you can’t stand him. You can think of xenía as compassion, but only if you get rid of the notion that compassion is based on sweetness, or charity, or even trading favors. Compassion is a battle instinct, a jungle-law alert system that lets you know when someone, or something, is closing in on you for the kill. We like to pretty it up with a halo and call it angelic, but compassion really springs from our raw animal need to figure out what is going on around us and the smartest way to respond. It’s your social spiderweb, a protective netting of highly sensitive strands that connects you to your kinfolk and alerts you the instant one of them runs into the kind of trouble that can find its way back to you. Compassion requires you to be a wonderful listener, much like psychiatrists and FBI profilers and for essentially the same reason. The goal is to get inside someone else’s head, and in that regard Rule #3 of xenía was way ahead of both crime detection and psychoanalysis; peppering someone with questions, as any police interrogator will tell you, isn’t nearly as effective as letting him relax until the words flow on their own. And when they do—when you get access to someone else’s feelings—you can put aside your own and see the world through a new set of eyes. That kind of insight is crucial to what combat soldiers call “situational awareness”—a constant mental scan of your environment so you’re always up to the second on the best and worst way out of any situation. That’s really the unvarnished essence of xenía, and it’s the reason Darwin and Andrew Carnegie could never quite grasp what heroes are all about. They thought it was crazy to risk yourself for a stranger. But to someone truly tuned into situational awareness—into xenía—treating a stranger like a brother can be the only sane response.

Many years after the war, Americans rushed to their televisions to watch xenía in action when Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the icy Potomac River on January 13, 1982. To horrified viewers, it seemed impossible that anyone could be alive inside the mangled steel carcass slowly vanishing into the water. But one by one, six survivors gasped to the surface and grabbed at the tail of the plane. Freezing rain and winds were so brutal, it took twenty minutes before a rescue chopper finally arrived. It dropped a life ring into the hands of one survivor and plucked him from the water. Then something peculiar happened.

The next person to receive the ring handed it over to someone else. The chopper lofted her to safety, then wheeled back.

The man gave away the ring again.

And again.

He even gave it away when he knew it was his last chance to live. He must have known, because when the chopper thundered back seconds later, he was gone. The man in the water had vanished beneath the ice. He was later identified as Arland “Chub” Williams Jr., a forty-six-year-old federal bank examiner who hated water and spent his life, until the day he lost it, playing it safe.

“Arland never called a lot of attention to himself,” says Peggy Fuesting, his high school sweetheart from Illinois, whom he’d begun dating again shortly before the crash. “He’d had that fear of water his whole life.” Arland was trusted by bankers and borrowers alike, his boss would say, because he was careful and discreet and never took risks. But there was another side of Arland, one that was formed nearly a quarter-century earlier when he was a cadet at one of the country’s most demanding military colleges: the Citadel. “They make a man out of you,” I was told by Benjamin Franklin Webster, Arland’s Citadel roommate. “The job of the upperclassmen is to remake you from a boy to a man in one year. They push you, physically and mentally. We lost thirty cadets before we even started classes.”

When Webster heard about the crash, he was perhaps the only person who wasn’t surprised that a risk-averse accountant would suddenly emerge as the Hero of Flight 90. The Citadel has one iron law: “Always take care of your people first,” Webster says. “That’s an unbreakable code. You go last. Your people go first.” Some of the survivors said Arland seemed to be trapped by the wreckage and unable to free himself. But instead of clinging desperately to the life ring or clawing out for help, he assessed the situation and realized there was only one best decision. To Arland, the survivors around him in the water weren’t competitors in a battle for survival. They were family.

Of course they were, agrees Lee Dugatkin, Ph.D., a professor of biology at the University of Louisville who specializes in altruistic behavior. After all, xenía is the military’s specialty. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors moved in such tight family circles that the only people they’d ever see were members of their own hunter-gatherer clan. “If you saved someone’s life under those conditions, you were very likely saving a blood relative,” he says. But now our relatives are scattered all over the place, so the military has made a science out of reviving that lost feeling of fellowship.

“The armed forces always use the language of kinship to condition soldiers to think of one another as family,” Dugatkin points out. “They’re not ‘strangers’; they’re a ‘band of brothers.’” Consider what happens when a bus full of strangers of all races and backgrounds pulls into Fort Benning for boot camp. As soon as you arrive, your head is shaved, your clothes are replaced with a uniform, you’re taught to walk and talk and eat and make your bed exactly the same way as everyone around you. Because the more alike you look, the Army understands, the more likely you’ll look out for one another.

Lawrence of Arabia underwent the same transformation during his first trip abroad as a young archeologist. He arrived in Egypt as a fussy Brit and made one crucial decision that would change his life: instead of spending his nights in the English compound, he began camping at the dig site with the Arab workers. He shared their meals of sour goat’s milk and warm hearth bread. He traded his khakis for a tunic and a Kurdish belt and joined the singing and storytelling around the fire. Mostly he listened, absorbing “the intricacies of their tribal and family jealousies, rivalries and taboos, their loves and hates, and their strengths and weaknesses,” as one biographer would put it. When the Arab Revolt began, Lawrence’s xenía knew exactly where he had to be. He saw himself in them, and them in him.

So when Xan and Delaney began lagging, Costa remained true to the xenía code. For as long as he could. He slowed his pace and carried their supplies, and he even bit his tongue when Xan weirdly insisted on bolting out of Akendria the same day they got there. But take a bullet for them? Forget it. Xenía says you have to be hospitable; it doesn’t say you have to be an idiot. When the young Brit and the aging Aussie sergeant sank down and refused to get up, Costa tore into them.

“Delaney and I would have willingly succumbed but for Costa’s example and exhortation,” Xan would admit. The relentless Costa dragged his two charges to their feet and got them moving again. By dawn he’d harried them as far as the southern foothills of Mount Ida. There, at last, they could hole up in a little village and get some rest before pushing on that night.

Except … something didn’t feel right. Something about the valley was making Costa uneasy. It just seemed … wrong. He hunted up a local and discovered his suspicions were correct: Germans were ransacking the villages in search of a local guerrilla. Costa had to get Xan and Delaney out of sight before the sun came up, so he led them into the cliffs and found a snug spot between some brush-covered rocks. They burrowed in while Costa slipped off for provisions, soon returning with goatskins of wine, a pot of cold beans, and some friends in the Resistance. By the time he got back, Xan was already out cold. While the other men ate and whispered, Xan slept through the day on the cold, wet stone, too exhausted to eat.

Turning himself into John Pendlebury was turning out to be a lot tougher than Xan had expected. Of course, Pendlebury had an advantage: he’d been practicing the art of becoming John Pendlebury his entire life.

When Pendlebury was two years old, his parents left him one evening in the care of friends. When they returned, one of his eyeballs was punctured. Maybe the boy poked himself with a pen, maybe he was scratched by a thorn—no one saw it happen or could ever figure it out, not even his father, a surgical professor and house surgeon at St. George’s Hospital. Pendlebury didn’t seem to mind at all; he liked to dress up the glass replacement with a monocle, or pluck it out when going on a hike and leave it behind on his desk as a way of saying he’d be gone awhile.

His taste for masquerade followed him to Cambridge, where he became an excellent high jumper, despite poncing around between jumps in a white cloak. Although he was the university’s preeminent archeology student, Pendlebury liked to “play the buffoon,” according to a friend’s recollection. He’d scrawl endless doodles of knights in armor in his notebooks, and he founded a drinking club he called Ye Joyouse Companie of Seynt Pol, a sort of boozing fantasy league for make-believe Merry Men. He and Lawrence of Arabia loved the same favorite book, which is an even odder coincidence because it’s so awful. The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay is the story of Richard the Lionheart, except told with more stabbings, straining bosoms, and wild-eyed killers than a Mexican telenovela. Lawrence read it nine times before he graduated Oxford, while Pendlebury was always raving about it to his friends. When a classmate dropped by before returning to Australia, Pendlebury “pounced on his Richard Yea and Nay, by Maurice Hewlett, which he gave me with instructions to think of him when I read it. This was a much bigger gesture than it appeared, for this grubby little book was, to John, a symbol of heroism and romance.”

Wrong! That’s what his friends didn’t get. To Pendlebury, those mace-and-maiden tales weren’t symbols; they were real voices from the past with important lessons to teach. Chivalry and the art of the hero were the fading lights of a train he’d just missed, and Pendlebury was obsessed with finding a way to catch up. Yea-and-Nay was his inspiration, and soon after he graduated Cambridge, he found his path.

Pendlebury spent his twenty-fourth birthday as a visiting student at the British School in Athens, and it was there that a strange book with a blue-and-gold cover came into his hands: The Palace of Minos. Inside, he found a thrilling proposition: was he willing to believe that all those myths he’d loved as a boy—King Minos and the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne, the Iliad and the Odyssey—were based on real people, real places, real events? Could he accept that they weren’t just make-believe, but a snarled thread of history that, once untangled, led back to a time when heroes roamed the earth? Because if he could, fantastic new discoveries awaited him.

And they began on the island of Crete.

Pendlebury was so electrified, he left Athens within days of reading The Palace of Minos and went in search of its author, Arthur Evans, the eccentric adventurer and antiquities collector. Evans claimed he’d found hard proof that the legend of King Minos—son of Zeus, stepfather of the monstrous half man, half bull who ate fourteen of Athens’s best-looking teenagers every year—was based on a true story. Evans said he’d located not only Minos’s lost kingdom and the Minotaur’s fabled Labyrinth but also the remains of a fabulous Minoan culture that dominated the Mediterranean two thousand years before the pyramids were built.

Was it a hoax? If so, Evans was going all out. To believe his story, you had to believe he’d found the birthplace of, well, everything. This lost world he described was so old, it was already dying by the time the Egyptians began making words out of dog and bird drawings. Science, literature, politics, advanced math, philosophy, sports, theater—according to Evans, it all sprang from Crete, that craggy little cinder in the sea. It also meant that this nearsighted amateur, a fiery, squinting little man who strode about London smacking carriages with a hiking staff he called “Prodger” and set entire teams of diggers to work because he’d caught a whiff of fennel, had stumbled across a new chapter of human history nearly as long as the span from the birth of Julius Caesar to the death of Steve Jobs.

Pendlebury’s excitement grew as he got off the boat in Crete. Just walking along the waterfront was like seeing Evans’s book come to life. In the frescoes Evans described, Minoan women were curiously graceful and attractive, “gaily dressed in the height of fashion, with elegantly coiffured hair, engaged apparently in gay chit-chat,” as Evans put it, while Minoan men had the sinewy physiques of aerial acrobats. “They were quite unlike the classical Greeks, unlike the Egyptians, unlike the Babylonians, unlike any ancient people whose painted or sculpted representations had survived from the ancient past,” archeological researcher Leonard Cottrell would note. There’s something very right, Evans reflected, about a culture that portrays itself with such sass and strength.

And here they were, alive and well and strolling the streets. “I know of no sight finer than a well-dressed Cretan peasant, and with the dress goes a swing and a lightness of foot which always sets me thinking of the slim athletes of Minoan days,” Pendlebury would write. From the port of Heraklion, Pendlebury made his way three miles south to Knossos, Evans’s spectacular six-acre restoration of an ancient Minoan city. Inside the great palace, Evans had found marvels of sophisticated design: a plumbing system, chess games, four-story architecture, locking doors, a trademark registry, a system of weights and measures, and an astronomical calendar. But deep belowground were hints of darker arts: sinister catacombs with mysterious piles of children’s bones.

Pendlebury got lucky; he found Evans on the porch of the Villa Ariadne, the stone compound that served as his home and a kind of youth hostel and teaching hospital for wandering archeologists. Students from all over the world were constantly bustling through, enjoying Evans’s excellent food and wine before setting off into the mountains or creeping through the thousand interlocking crypts and throne rooms of Knossos. Unlike most scientists, Evans was rich; between his family’s paper mill and his late wife’s estate, he had the cash to entertain scholars and bankroll an army of architects, artists, builders, and diggers in pursuit of his hunches.

And his wildest notion was this: maybe Homer’s and Virgil’s tales about Trojan Horses and man-eating Cyclopes weren’t fairy tales, but historical fiction: fiction, sure, but still historical. Evans knew he was risking a firestorm of ridicule, but at least he was following in a cock-sure set of footsteps. Back when he was getting his start in archeology, Evans had been spellbound by Heinrich Schliemann, another rich rebel who sought more than proof that heroes existed; he wanted to visit their homes. Schliemann had been fixated by the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey, despite their magic and monsters, were far too realistic to be just make-believe stories about superhuman warriors and bewitched boat rides. His critics smirked, but that’s because, unlike Schliemann, they’d never amassed a fortune after being broke, homeless, and shipwrecked in a foreign country; they weren’t living proof, in other words, that average people are capable of epic feats.

As a teenager in Germany in the 1830s, Schliemann had hoped to improve his weak lungs by working as a shiphand on a voyage to South America. The boat went down off the Dutch coast, and Schliemann barely made it to shore. Sick and penniless, he slept in an unheated warehouse while running messages by day for a Dutch merchant. By night, he studied so feverishly that by age twenty-two he’d mastered bookkeeping and seven languages. By thirty-three he was boss of his own company and spoke fifteen languages. He became such a financial dynamo that during a short trip to San Francisco to recover the body of his dead brother, Schliemann learned about gold prospecting; quickly set up a frontier savings and loan; and pocketed another pile of cash before heading home.

But Schliemann’s true love was antiquity, and there was something about the Greek classics that always nagged at him. Was Homer really such a creative wizard, or had his stories lasted so long because they gave off a whiff of the real? Take Agamemnon, King of Men. He sounds too operatic to be true, the way he butts heads with Achilles, blood-sacrifices his own daughter, leads an army of warriors in battle for Helen of Troy, and then comes home victorious, only to be murdered by his wife. But if it’s all fantasy, why did Homer crowd his narrative with so many directional details that it reads like a pirate’s map to a treasure chest?

So Schliemann treated it like a map, and treasure is what he found. After decades of puzzling over Homer’s description of, for instance, a stone wall just past a windswept fig tree and not far from an icy-cold spring next to a steaming thermal pool, Schliemann finally sleuthed his way not only to the lost city of Troy but to the ruined palace and hidden jewels of Priam, its king. Triumphantly, he crowned his wife with “Helen of Troy’s tiara,” a stunning headdress of cascading gold he’d uncovered that was certainly worthy of the fabled beauty, if not owned by her.

And Schliemann wasn’t finished; he followed his success at Troy by hunting down palaces that matched to an uncanny extent Homer’s descriptions of the homes of Agamemnon and Odysseus. “Here begins an entirely new science,” one converted scientist admitted. All this time, a written road map had been right there, right in two of literature’s best-read texts. No longer would archeologists have to search for the stones and then figure out what happened; they could now read what happened and go in search of the stones.

Schliemann was sixty-four and wearying of a lifetime of underdog battles when he met young Arthur Evans, so he was inclined to pass along a tip: no one had ever solved the mysteries of Crete. Homer told of “a great city called Knossos, and there, for nine years, King Minos ruled and enjoyed the friendship of almighty Zeus.” Thucydides backed up the story, describing Minos as a world shaker whose fleets dominated the mainland and controlled the seas. So Evans followed Schliemann’s lead; relying on myths as his guide and his detective’s eye for landscape clues (Evans knew, for instance, that fennel has long roots and often sprouts where the ground had been deeply disturbed), it wasn’t long before he zeroed in on a pair of dirt mounds not far from the coastal city of Heraklion.

Evans was soon burrowing into a kingdom older and wilder than anything he’d imagined. The Minoans were so remarkable, Evans began wondering if all those awful legends about King Minos weren’t just sour grapes and gossip. “The fabulous accounts of the Minotaur and his victims are themselves expressive of a childish wonder at the mighty creations of a civilization beyond the ken of the new-comers,” Evans would write. “The ogre’s den turns out to be a peaceful abode of priest-kings, in some respects more modern in its equipments than anything produced by classical Greece.” Of course, King Minos didn’t help his public image any by conducting a weird basement ritual that had teenagers somersaulting over the horns of charging bulls. “It may even be that captive children of both sexes were trained to take part in the dangerous circus sports portrayed on the Palace walls,” Evans had to admit.

By the time Pendlebury arrived at the Villa Ariadne, it was Evans’s turn to withdraw from the hunt. He was seventy-seven years old and secretly in some serious hot water. He’d been arrested in London’s Hyde Park for public indecency with a seventeen-year-old boy, and only eased his way out of the scandal by turning over ownership of Knossos and the Villa Ariadne to the British School on the day he appeared in court. John Pendlebury’s timing couldn’t have been better. He arrived at the Villa Ariadne in 1928 as an unknown student and a year later was hired to run the entire operation.

Pendlebury knew right where he wanted to start: with the Minotaur, which he suspected was a lot more sinister than Evans realized.