Levkas Man

PART TWO

It was dark when I arrived in Malta, the air soft and smelling of the sea. The airport taxi took me to the Phoenicia Hotel and from there I got a bus to the yacht marina at Ta' Xbiex. The waterfront was crowded with boats, a forest of spars standing against the night sky, and it took me some time to locate Coromandel. She was lying on the Manoel Island side between a chromium-plated gin palace and a big Italian ocean-racer. She appeared to be a conversion from some sort of fishing boat, and sandwiched between those two gleaming monsters, stern-on to the quay like all the rest, she looked her age. A light showed in the wheelhouse for'ard and my hail was answered immediately by a short, ruddy-faced man with greying hair. He was dressed in blue jeans and an old blue jersey and he came aft wiping his hands on a piece of cotton waste. "Mr. Van der Voort?" A wooden board served as a gangplank and he put his foot on it to hold it steady as I went on board. "Sorry not to meet you." He took my case. "Is this all your gear?" He seemed pleased when I said it was.

The decks were badly worn, the bulwarks shabby, and there was paint flaking from the lockers aft. But the deckhouse itself gleamed with new varnish. "We slapped a second coat on this afternoon, so mind out." And he added, "Sorry the old girl's in a bit of a mess, but as soon as I got Mr. Borg's cable I had her slipped for a scrub and a coat of anti-fouling. We only got her back this morning."

I followed him into the wheelhouse, where the floorboards were up and most of the steering gear dismantled. He was installing an automatic pilot, purchased as scrap from a yacht that had been towed in badly damaged. "Most of the equipment on this ship is my own work, as you might say," he said. Aft of the wheelhouse was a short companionway leading down into a cubby-hole with a work bench. The light was on, illuminating a chaos of paint pots, brushes, tools and bits of machinery. But the chaos was only superficial, the after bulkhead lined with a neat array of boxes for screws and bolts, the area above the work bench fitted out for tools, and clamped to the starboard wall were pyrotechnics, log, foghorn, fire extinguishers. Below these, in special racks, were three aqualungs and a couple of outboard motors.

On the far side of the wheelhouse a second companionway led for'ard, down into a saloon which had probably once been the fish hold. The contrast was very marked. Here was order and comfort, chintz coverings to the settee berths, chintz curtains over the portholes, the brasswork gleaming and the fine Honduras mahogany polished to a rich gloss. He showed me to my cabin, which was aft, a two-berthed stateroom with a different patterned chintz. And when I complimented him on the condition of his ship below, he said, "Ah, that's the wife. She's very particular." And he added, "She's gone to a movie with the people from Fanny Two. Had enough for one day. It's always bad after you've been on the slip-the dirt, you see."

He showed me where the "heads" were and then left me to sort myself out. In the lights below he had looked younger than he had seemed at first, around forty, I thought. A good solid type, not very bright, but reliable. I wondered what his wife would be like. Borg hadn't said anything about a wife.

When I returned to the saloon, he was waiting for me there, the drink locker open beside him and two glasses on the table. "What'll you have, Mr. Van der Voort-a Scotch?" He had cleaned the oil from his hands and face and was wearing a bright check shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

I said a Scotch would be fine and told him my name was Paul.

He smiled, showing me an even line of what looked like false teeth. "Good. First names are best on a small ship. Mine's Bert and my wife's is Florence, though she answers to Flor-rie." He gave a quick, cackling laugh. And as he poured the drinks he said, "It's lucky you didn't ask for gin. They only let us have one bottle a week out of the bonded locker, and the gin's just about had it." It was malt whisky and he gave it to me neat.

"Does your wife go with you on all your trips?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. The ship's our home, you see, and Florrie's a good sailor. Better than I am in some ways."

I asked him when we could leave and he said he thought by the week-end. "We've tanked up with fuel and water, and the stores are ordered for tomorrow. It's more a case of getting the ship ready. Mr. Borg's cable caught us on the hop like and the Aegean is quite a long haul."

"We'll be going to the west coast of Greece first," I said.

"Oh? Mr. Borg said Crete." But he took the change of plan in his stride. In fact, he seemed relieved. "Pylos is a good port of entry. We've done that before. It's three hundred sixty-six miles and the course is nearer the South Italian ports. Whereas Crete-it's a lonely run, you see." And he added, "As long as we don't get a gregale-a. nor'-easter wouldn't be comfortable heading for Pylos. But with luck we'll have a westerly this early in the season. Not that it matters, mind you. Corie's a sturdy little ship. Built as a fishing boat up on the Clyde way back at the turn of the century-nineteen six to be exact-and

sound as a bell. And she's got a brand new engine." He said it with pride. "Come and have a look."

He took me up into the wheelhouse and down the com-panionway on the port side. Aft of the workbench he lifted a hatch. "I spent all winter installing this myself." He switched on the light to reveal a big Perkins diesel. There was a generator, too, and a range of Nife batteries, also a compressor, and the whole engine compartment reflected the loving care of a dedicated engineer, copper and brasswork gleaming and not a smear of oil anywhere on the bright paintwork. "She's been test run for about six hours with extra warps out aft, and going round to Manoel Island shipyard and back she ticked over sweet as a bird. Can't wait to get to sea and give her a proper try-out."

"What speed will it give you?"

"About eight knots I reckon." He was staring down, his eyes bright with anticipation. "Did Mr. Borg tell you what he'd done?"

"How do you mean?" I asked, wondering what Borg had got to do with it.

"No, of course not. A nice fellow like that wouldn't go advertising the fact that he'd helped somebody." He leaned his thick hairy arms on the edge of the hatch, feasting his eyes on that gleaming lump of machinery. "When I bought Coro-mandel she had an old Kelvin in her. One of the very early ones. I sweated blood on that bugger-everything gummed up and rusty as hell. The miracle is that it got us out here."

And he told me how for two seasons he had kept it going, making his own replacements when anything broke. Then in August last year Borg had chartered the boat for a few days.

"I think he got a bit tired of the Hilton and wanted a breath of sea air. Then, when we got out to Gozo, he said what about making a quick passage to Pantelleria. He'd been looking at the charts, you see, and he suddenly had this urge to make a passage. He didn't seem to understand about Customs clearance, but as it was a quick trip there and back I thought I'd take a chance on it. Halfway across that clapped-out old engine started playing up. It was a broken valve and it took

me a whole day to machine and fit a replacement. We couldn't even sail. There wasn't a breath of wind."

"Did you get to Pantelleria?"

"In the end, yes. By then I had explained to him about Customs and entry formalities-Pantelleria is Italian, you see — so we didn't go into the port of Pantelleria, just motored round the island, close in, so that he could see the extraordinary lava formation. We spent the night in a little cove, gave him a quick run ashore and then back to Malta. Well, to cut a long story short, on the way back he said he happened to know a scrap merchant in Holland who had a modern diesel engine for disposal. It had been salvaged from a small trawler sunk off the Hook. He'd enjoyed himself so much, he said, that he'd like to make me a present of it. And that's it," he added, pointing with pride. "Mind you, it was a bit rusty, but it was bloody generous of him all the same-must have cost a damn sight more than the charter. I waived that, of course. And all he got out of it was four days at sea, a few hours ashore on Pantelleria and some wine."

"Where did you pick up the wine?" I asked.

"At Pantelleria. He was very fond of wine and some people in the cove we anchored in for the night let him have four cases."

"What about the Customs when you got back to Malta?"

"Oh, we didn't clear Customs-couldn't very well after slipping out like that. Not that they worry about wine. Anyway," he added, "when we put into Emerald Bay-that's on Little Comino in the straits between Malta and Gozo-some friends of Mr. Borg's were there in a motor boat, so we were on our own when we got back to the marina." He straightened himself up, still staring at the engine. "Looks nice, doesn't it?" He switched off the light and closed the hatch with obvious reluctance. "Mr. Borg's a friend of yours, I take it," he said as he led the way back to the saloon. "Well, you tell him how grateful I am. That engine, and now a charter we didn't expect. It's not often you meet a rich man like that who'll do a good turn for somebody less fortunate."

Unworldly was the way Borg had described him. But it

was difficult to believe that anybody could be quite so naive. It was only when I got him talking about himself that I began to understand. He was an East Londoner, who had spent most of his life as a fitter in the R.A.F. He had married in Cyprus and had then left the Air Force and settled at Great Yarmouth, where he had built up a small engineering business turning out specialized items for the North Sea rigs.

"But the Government changed, inflation hit us and we lost business to Dutch and Danish firms. If I'd held out until they devalued maybe I'd have been all right-at least I'd have got a better price. As it was, I sold out at about the bottom." His broad shoulders moved, a self-deprecating shrug. "I'm not much of a business man, but at least the boat was cheap."

He had converted her himself in the fish port at Great Yarmouth, and then they had sold their house and sailed south into the Channel. "It was marvellous-just ourselves- and the sea and foreign ports. Nothing to worry about, only the weather."

He was on to his second drink then and he began telling me the story of the voyage out, how they had run into a force lo gale in the Bay of Biscay. "Can you navigate?" he asked suddenly. "By the stars, I mean. Mr. Borg said you were an experienced sailor." When I said I could, he nodded. "I studied it a bit-we've got a sextant on board. Reeds Almanac and all the tables. But I haven't the patience for that sort of thing. Anyway, we didn't see the sun for three days …"

He paused, his head on one side, listening. There was the sound of voices and then footsteps on deck. A moment later a small, bright-eyed woman in orange slacks appeared in the companion way. She stopped when she saw me. "Oh, you've arrived." She came forward quickly and shook my hand. "I'm sorry I wasn't here." She glanced at the glasses and her nose wrinkled. "I don't suppose Bert thought of offering you anything to eat?"

"I had a meal on the plane," I told her.

"Sure? I could knock you up an omelette very quickly."

"Quite sure."

She hesitated, her eyes taking me in. She was a good deal younger than her husband, a small, sturdy woman with dark eyes and a very clear olive-brown skin. Her black hair and the oval shape of her face gave her a madonna-like quality. But that was only in repose. She had a volatile personality, and this I learned later stemmed from her mixed parentage-her father had been English, her mother Cypriot. "Well, I'll make some coffee anyway." And she disappeared into the galley, which was aft of the saloon on the port side.

It was over the coffee that she asked me a question I should have been expecting. She wanted to know why I was going to Greece so early in the season. "Hardly anybody leaves the marina before May, most of them not until June." She was frowning slightly and there were little lines at the corners of her eyes as she stared at me, waiting for an answer.

Her husband sensed my reluctance. "When he goes is his own business, Florrie. He's the charterer, after all."

"I know that, Bert. But still … it is our boat. I think we should know." Her voice was subdued, but quite determined.

I don't think she suspected anything. It was just that the hasty fixing of the charter made her uneasy. And rather than attempt to invent a reason, I told them about my father's expedition.

She relaxed at once. "Oh, that explains it."

"Is it caves he's exploring?" Bert asked. "Or just a dig?"

"I've no idea," I said.

He asked me where the camp was, and when I told him he went up into the wheelhouse and returned with a chart of the west coast of Greece. "If it's caves I might be of some use," he said, spreading it out on the table. "As a kid I belonged to a spelaeological group-pot-holing, you know. We went to Spain one year-had a look at Altamira. That's the cave that's full of prehistoric paintings, on the north coast near Santander." His stubby finger indicated Jannina. "It looks as though Preveza would be the best port-Jannina is about sixty miles away and a good road by the look of it. We can make our entry at Pylos and then go straight up the coast, through the

narrows between Meganisi and Levkas. Do you know the Levkas Canal?"

I shook my head.

"A queer place-for Greece, that is. More like Holland really. Very flat, and a bloody great fort at either end. Preveza is only about eight miles beyond the north end of the canal."

We studied the chart for a bit, and then I said I was tired and went to bed.

I saw very little of Malta during the next two days, only Manoel Island and a few of the narrow balconied streets of Sliema. Whilst Bert finished the installation of the automatic steering gear and Florrie dealt with the stores, I completed the varnishing of the brightwork and started on repainting the bulwarks. "Not often I get a charterer who'll work as hard as you," Bert said. But I didn't mind. There was something very satisfying about getting that old boat ready for sea, and the work kept my mind off my own problems.

Saturday morning we took on bonded stores, cleared Customs, and after a meal ashore, we slipped and headed out towards the entrance of Sliema Creek under engine. It was blowing hard from the south-west and we turned under the battlements of St. Elmo and winched the gaff mainsail up and then the mizzen. The sun was shining on the piled-up mass of Valetta's honey-stoned buildings, and as we cleared Dragut Point a machine-gun rattle of firecrackers burst from the roof of one of the churches, little puffs of smoke against a cloudless sky to celebrate some saint's day.

Outside the entrance the sea was rough and it was cold, so that I was glad of the oilskins I had purchased. We were hoisting the jib then in flurries of spray, and when we had got it properly set at the end of the short bowsprit, Bert switched off the engine, and in the sudden quiet we sailed close under the stern of an American carrier of the 6th Fleet and set course for Greece on a bearing just north of east.

Visibility was good and it was not until almost 1700 hours that we lost the low line of Malta below the horizon. An hour later we broke the seal on the bonded stores locker and had

our first drink at sea, the boat sailing easily at about six knots with the wind on our starboard quarter. We had an early meal, and then, as darkness fell, we went into watches, Bert and I sharing the night turns, with Florrie relieving us for the dawn watch.

When I called her, at the end of the last night watch, the wind had strengthened to nearly force 7 and the helm was heavy with the ship showing a tendency to yaw. I think she was already awake, for her eyes were open when I switched on the light in their cabin. "Do you want to shorten sail?" she asked as she slipped quickly out of her bunk, her black hair tousled and her face still flushed with sleep. "I'll wake Bert, if you like." He was snoring gently in the other bunk.

"Better see what you think first," I said, and I went back to the wheelhouse. We had swung about a point off course and I brought her head back. The light of the compass was fading with the dawn. I could see the waves more clearly now. They were steep and breaking, the sea flecked with white to the horizon, the sky ahead a pale translucent green just starting to flush with the sun's hidden rays.

She didn't take long to dress, and when she entered the wheelhouse, she stood there a moment, looking at the sea and at the sails with eyes slightly narrowed, a cool, almost professional appraisal. Then she took the wheel from me and held it, getting the feel of the boat. "No, I think she's all right," she said. "It always sounds worse below." She gave a quick little laugh. "I'm inclined to get panicky when there's a lot of noise."

She was wearing a thick black polo-necked sweater and red oilskins. "It's hard on Bert," she said. "He did want to run that new engine of his. But I like it like this-just the noise of the sea." She was fully awake now and her eyes sparkled with the exhilaration of the speed and the movement. "Doesn't it excite you-the sea, when it's like this?" But then she laughed. "No, of course-you must have experienced plenty of really big seas."

"In the North Atlantic, yes. But with a large vessel it's much more remote."

She checked the wheel as a breaking wave rolled under us, biting her lip with concentration, and the jib emptied and filled with a bang to the roll. The green had gone from the sky ahead. Ragged wisps of cloud showed an edge of flame and right on the horizon an island of molten lava seemed to blaze up out of the sea.

"How old is your father?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Sixty-ish, I suppose."

She glanced at me then, "You're worried about him, aren't you?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Then why didn't you fly out?"

I had no answer to that, but fortunately she took my silence as a rebuke. "I'm sorry, I ask too many questions, don't I?" She gave a little laugh, low and strangely musical, and then she was looking up at me, her lips slightly parted, her dark eyes gentle.

We were alone, the two of us in a wild dawn, and I put my hand on her shoulder and the next moment she was in my arms, her mouth soft, her body clumsy in her heavy weather clothing. She stayed like that for a moment, and then the ship yawed and she pushed away from me and took the wheel again. She was smiling, a quiet, secret smile. "You're lonely, aren't you?"

"And you?" I asked.

"I'm not lonely. It's just the sea. It excites me." And she added, "Now go to bed. You've been up half the night."

"I'm not tired." I hesitated, conscious of a need, but no way of satisfying it.

"Of course not. You're too tensed-up to feel the tiredness."

"Perhaps."

She was looking at me, those large, dark eyes of hers suddenly offering sympathy. "Those two days in Malta-nothing but work, and you hardly left the ship. Even Bert noticed it. And now-at sea, ." She shook her head. "I don't know what

the trouble is, and I'm not asking, but bottling it all up inside you-that's not good." She checked the wheel, staring ahead. "Try to relax, why don't you?"

"Was that why you kissed me?"

She smiled. "It helps-sometimes."

I nodded, and we stood in silence, watching as the sun's upper rim lipped blood-red over the horizon. Then I checked the log reading and entered up the course and mileage covered during my watch. When I turned again she was a squat, almost square figure, in silhouette against the sudden flare of light that had turned the steel grey heaving surface of the sea to a shimmer of orange. She was braced against the wheel, hands holding the ship, her whole being concentrated on the lift and swoop of the movement. The sun rose clear of the horizon, a flaming ball, and the whole empty world of sea and sky was lit by blinding light, the cloud wisps swept away like a veil and the sky a brazen blue.

My limbs felt slack and I was suddenly tired as I turned without a word and went below to my cabin. But sleep came slowly. There was something of the peasant about her and I was deeply stirred, furious that my vulnerability had been so obvious.

She called me for breakfast at nine-thirty. Bert was at the wheel and we were alone. But she was cool and distant, efficiently feminine in blue slacks and white shirt. The movement was less, and by midday the wind had died away and we were under engine. We had drinks in the wheelhouse and the three of us lunched together with the automatic pilot doing the work. It was like that for the rest of the voyage, and the third day out, at dawn, Florrie and I watched the outline of Sapienza Island emerge as a dark silhouette against the sunrise straight over the bows.

"Your navigation is very exact." The way she said it, I thought there was envy as well as admiration, for by then I had discovered that there was a basis of fear in the excitement she felt for the sea. Bert was easy-going, almost slapdash, in everything not connected with machinery. "Last year our first

sight of Greece was Cape Matapan. Bert was navigating on dead reckoning and he was miles out-we had to make our entry at Kalamata instead of Pylos." She was laughing, her teeth white against the dark of her skin, which was already tanned by the sun and salt air. "You don't speak Greek, do you?"

"No."

"Well, don't forget-if you want to telephone about your father, I can do it for you."

I stayed with her in the wheelhouse until we had closed the coast and I had identified the gap in the cliffs that marked the entrance to Navarino Bay. Then I called Bert and went into the galley to make some coffee. When I got back to the wheelhouse, we were close in, our bows headed towards a jagged stack with a hole in the middle. Just beyond it, the sea swell died and the water was glass-calm, the great expanse of the bay shimmering like a mirror in the warm sunlight. Ashore the hills were green and bright with flowers. It was suddenly spring.

"This was where Admiral Codrington caught and destroyed the Turkish fleet," Bert said. "There are eighty-three vessels lying sunk under the waters here." He was grinning, an eager glint in his eyes. Bronze and copper are worth a lot of money and he had never dived in Navarino Bay. "All I've ever found in the Aegean, apart from amphorae and sherds and bits of Roman glass, is one-just one-bronze figurine, rather battered. Plenty of marble, of course, column drums and carved seats and a couple of massive statues. But nothing that was worth the trouble of bringing up,"

I asked him what had happened to the figurine, thinking he might have sold it to Borg. But he said it was ashore with friends in Malta. "Daren't have it on board. The Greeks are very hot on underwater looting."

We were opening up the port now and a massive Turkish castle slung a great rampart wall over the protecting peninsula. Behind us, on hills that stood like a crater rim along the seaward side of the bay, the ruined remains of another castle perched precariously.

We dropped anchor off the end of the quay and hauled ourselves in, stem-on to the blue and yellow diagonals that marked the area reserved for visiting boats. The Port Captain came on board almost immediately, a young, very alert, very charming man, who spoke reasonably good English. Customs and police followed, also the doctor. We took them down to the saloon, offered them Scotch, which they accepted out of politeness, but barely touched, and after half an hour they left, taking our passports for stamping and the ship's certificate of registration from which the Port Captain's office would prepare the transit log. "You may go ashore now," the Port Captain said. And when Bert offered to collect the papers, he gave a little shrug. "It is not necessary. We will find you." And he added, laughing, "Pylos is not too big a place."

Ten minutes later we were having our first retsina in the little tree-shaded square, where Codrington's statue stood guarded by bronze cannon. All around the square small dark men in dark clothes sat over their coffee, whilst women in black went about their shopping. And over the shops the names unreadable in the Greek alphabet.

We had just finished our first bottle of the dry resined Achaian wine, and I had ordered another, when the Port Captain came hurrying towards us, accompanied by a tough-looking Greek in light khaki uniform. "This is Kapetan Kondylakes of the Police." He smiled disarmingly, his manner as charming and friendly as when he had visited us on the boat. The police officer also smiled, a flash of gold teeth in a pockmarked face.

My muscles were suddenly tense. This wasn't part of the routine passport check. This man looked like the senior police officer in Pylos.

"May we sit down with you, please?" the Port Captain asked. "For one minute when we make some questions?"

They pulled up two chairs and Bert offered them a drink. More smiles and a sharp clap of the hands to summon the waiter. Extra glasses were brought, the wine poured, and I sat there, watching them and wondering what the hell I was do-

ing here, risking my neck, when I could have been safe aboard Johannessen's boat en route for New Zealand.

"Kapetan Kondylakes is not speaking English, so I speak for him. Okay?" And then the Port Captain turned to me as I had feared he would. "Your name is Van der Voort."

I nodded, dumbly.

The police officer produced my passport from the side pocket of his tunic, opening it at the page with my photograph and pushing it across the table to his companion. They talked together for a moment, both of them staring down at the passport. "Van der Voort," the Port Captain said and he looked across at me. "That is a Dutch name?"

"Yes." My hands were trembling now and I kept them out of sight below the table, cursing myself for not realizing that Interpol operated in Greece.

"But you have an English passport. Why, please?"

"Both my parents were English. After their death I was adopted by Dr. Van der Voort and took his name." This took some time to explain and when I had finished he said: "And this Dr. Van der Voort of Amsterdam-what is his full name?"

I told him and he repeated it to the police officer, who nodded emphatically. "And when do you last see him?"

"About eight years ago."

"So long?"

And when I had explained, he said, "Then why do you come to Greece, if you do not like this man?"

I had no ready answer to that. But at least I could relax now. It wasn't me they were interested in, but the old man. "What's the trouble?" I asked him. "Why all these questions?"

He conferred briefly with the police officer and then said, "Dr. Van der Voort entered Greece on March 9 with an Englishman and a Dutch student. They say they are a scientific expedition looking for prehistoric settlements. Now Dr. Van der Voort is not anywhere to be found. Do you know that?"

"I knew there'd been some trouble between him and another member of the expedition."

"And so you come to Greece. You charter a yacht and sail

to Pylos because there is trouble between Dr. Van der Voort and this Englishman, Cartwright." The police officer stabbed his finger at my passport. The Port Captain nodded. "But it says here that you are a ship's officer." He pushed the passport across to me, indicating the entry against Occupation. "Ship's officers do not have money to charter yachts."

"I'm in tankers," I said, and they nodded. Pylos was a tanker port and they knew what the pay was like.

"And you do not know where Dr. Van der Voort is?"

"No."

"Where do you expect to find him?"

"At Despotiko, a village north of Jannina."

He conferred again with the police officer. "Kapetan Kon-dylakes insists that you explain why you come to Greece."

I did my best to satisfy him, but it was difficult to explain when I didn't really know myself. The Port Captain passed it all on to his companion, and when he had finished I again asked him what all the fuss was about, why the police were so interested. But I met with a blank wall. All he said was, "Dr. Van der Voort has disappeared. Naturally the police have to find him."

But that did not explain why, in a little place like Pylos in the south of Greece, the local police captain had been informed about a man who was missing in quite another part of the country. And when I tried to insist on an explanation, the Port Captain rose to his feet saying that Kapetan Kon-dylakes would have to report back to Athens. They left us then, with many apologies for inconveniencing us and a request that we did not attempt to leave until permission had been granted,

"Well, this is a fine old mess," Bert said.

"It's something political, I think." Florrie was staring thoughtfully at her empty glass. "Kapetan Kondylakes referred at one point to security arrangements. But don't worry," she added. "In Greece everything is twisted into a political issue. You have to have patience."

We drank another bottle, the retsina ice-cold and pungent.

the sunlight warm. Later we had lunch in the taverna opposite, picking out the things we wanted from the bubbling pots on the kitchen range-a fish soup and shish-kebab with stuffed tomatoes. The bare concrete room echoed to the rapid sound of Greek. We didn't talk much ourselves. And then, just as we were finishing, the Port Captain and Kondylakes came in, accompanied by a civilian in a light grey suit. He was taller than the other two. "Which is Van der Voort?" he asked as he reached our table.

I got to my feet and he said, "Kotiadis my name. Deme-trios Kotiadis."

We shook hands and he sat down, motioning the other two to pull up chairs. He had a long, rather sallow face, with a big beak of a nose and heavy-lidded eyes. He was smoking a Greek cigarette and this stayed firmly in his mouth. "Do you speak French?"

I shook my head.

"Then excuse my English, please." He clapped his hands for the waiter and ordered coffee for all of us. "You are arriving here in Greece to see Dr. Van der Voort."

I nodded, wondering what was coming.

"We also wish to see him. So we co-operate, eh?" He smiled at me thinly.

I didn't say anything. I wanted a cigarette, but my hands were trembling again.

"You know he has disappeared?"

"Yes."

"He has been missing for two weeks now. Do you know why?"

I shook my head.

"And you don't know where he is?"

"No."

"Then why you come? Have you some message for him, some instructions?"

"How do you mean?" And because I didn't understand what he was driving at I started to explain again why I had come to Greece. The coffee arrived, poured out of individual

copper pots, and he sat staring at me through the smoke of his cigarette. "Do you know this man Cartwright who is with him?"

"No."

"Or the Dutch boy, Winters?"

I shook my head.

"But you know there has been trouble?"

"I know that-yes."

He hesitated. "There was a question of some money taken. But that has been settled now; it is a young Greek boy who breaks open the tool locker of the Land-Rover. So it is not for that reason he disappear." He stared at me, waiting. Finally he gave a little shrug. "If you wish I can take you to this village where they camp."

I muttered something about not wishing to trouble him, but he brushed it aside. "No trouble. I like to help you. Also we can talk-privately, eh?" And he added, to make it absolutely clear that I had no alternative, "It is fortunate for you that I am at Methoni today, otherwise Kondylakes here must take you to Athens for interrogation. If we leave after our coffee we can be at Despotiko tomorrow morning and then you can talk with this man Cartwright. Maybe you discover what I have failed to discover-where Dr. Van der Voort is." He smiled at me and left it at that.

I lit a cigarette and sat there watching him, thinking of the journey ahead and the two of us alone. He was a man in his late forties, or early fifties, well educated and with a strong energetic personality. It was difficult to place him. When I asked him about his official position, all he replied was that he was with a Ministry in Athens and was here to help Kape-tan Kondylakes in his enquiries. He could have been security police, of course. But there was a peculiar mixture of toughness and charm in his manner; also a certain air of secrecy. I thought he was probably Intelligence.

The coffee was strong and sweet and very hot, and as we sat there drinking it, the three Greeks talking amongst themselves, I felt a strong sense of isolation. Florrie touched my hand. "It will be all right, Paul. I'm sure it will." And she added, "We can meet you in Preveza."

Bert agreed. "We can be there in two, possibly three days-dependent on the weather. We'll wait for you there."

When we had finished our coffee, Kondylakes returned our passports and the Port Captain handed Bert the ship's papers. They were free to sail when they wished. Back at the boat, I threw some clothes into my suitcase and by the time I was ready to leave, Kotiadis was waiting for me on the quay, his battered Renault backed up to the gangplank.

It was shortly after two when we drove out of Pylos, following the coast road that took a wide sweep round Navarino Bay, and then up into the hills, with Kotiadis talking all the time about his country's ancient history. He was a compulsive, explosive talker, his English interspersed with French and Greek words, and his enthusiasm for Greek antiquities was genuine. All the way up through the Peloponnese he was talking and driving fast, using his horn on the bends.

We crossed to the mainland of Greece by the ferry that plies the narrows separating the two gulfs of Patras and Corinth. By then the sun had set and we stopped the night at the ancient port of Navpaktos. It was here, after our meal, that I faced the questions I had been expecting. We were sitting under the plane trees in the square and Kotiadis was talking about his early life on the island of Crete where he had been born.

His family had owned a small vineyard, growing grapes for the raisin trade, but when the Germans invaded in 1941, he had left to join the guerrillas in the mountains. The air in the square was soft, and below us lay the medieval harbour, a circle of still, dark water surrounded by massive stone walls that had been built at the same time as the castle piled on the hill above us. Beyond the black curve of the harbour wall, the Gulf of Corinth lay serene and pale under the moon. The serenity of the scene was almost unreal in contrast to the story of hatred, violence and sudden death revealed by Kotiadis in staccato English.

The tide of liberation had swept him across to Athens and the picture he drcAv of a young man flung into a political maelstrom made my own background seem humdrum by comparison. In Athens he had been involved in yet more killing, this time his own people. "The Communist organization ELAS," he said. "I hate Communists." We had been drinking coffee and ouzo and the tone of his voice was suddenly quite violent. "You are lucky. You do not experience civil war. To kill Germans because they invade your country-that is good, that is natural. But war between men of the same race, that is terrible." He sighed and tossed back the remains of his ouzo. "We are a very political peoples-very excitable. It is the climate, the chaleur. In summer we play with our beads, we try to soothe our nerves, and then we explode like the storm cloud. That is why politics are so dangerous in Greece." He leaned towards me. "Have you seen a father kill his own son, deliberately and in cold blood?" He nodded, his eyes staring, bloodshot with cigarette smoke. "I have. The boy was a Communist. And when it was done the father threw himself down on the boy's body, kissing his cheek and weeping. That is la guerre civile. I don't like. That is why you are here with me now. For us a man like Dr. Van der Voort can be dangerous. He is a Communist and if we do not find him-"

"That's not true," I protested. "He hasn't been a Communist-"

"Ah, so you admit he was a Communist?"

"Yes. As a student. But not after nineteen forty."

"Chi, ohi." He made a negative movement with his fingers. "Apres la guerre-long after, he is travelling in Russia, accepting money from the Soviet government, writing books for publication in Moscow and information for their scientific journals. Why does he do that if he is not a Communist?"

"That was years ago," I said. "Since about nineteen fifty-nine he's been working entirely on his own."

"How do you know? You tell Kondylakes you do not see him for eight years."

I repeated what Gilmore had said, but it made no difference. "Once a man is a Communist, he does not change because of a little brutality in Hungary. Communism is the creed of the proletariat, and the proletariat represents man at his most brutal."

"He wouldn't have seen it that way," I said. "For him Hungary would have come as a terrible shock. Anyway," I added, "I'm certain he isn't a Communist now."

"That is not my information." He summoned the boy from the kafeneion across the road and ordered more ouzo. "Not only have the Russians financed his expeditions in the Soviet Union, but also in Turkey. You know we have been invaded by Turkey since six centuries. We do not like the Turks, and he was in Cyprus when the troubles begin." And after that he sat, silent and morose, until the boy came running with a tray loaded with bottles and glasses. He drank half a tumbler of water and then said, "Now, tell me about yourself. Particularly about your relations with Dr. Van der Voort. I wish to understand please."

The interrogation seemed to last endlessly, with him probing and probing as though I were trying to conceal from him some obvious truth. But in the end he gave it up, or else he just became bored. It was already past eleven, and shortly afterwards we left the square and walked back to the hotel. It had been an exhausting two hours, and even when I was in bed, his belligerent, staccato English continued drumming in my head.

Next morning I was called at six-thirty and we left early, driving back the way we had come to rejoin the main road, which ran west to the swamps of Missolonghi. "Do you read your poet Byron in England now?" Kotiadis asked.

"No," I said.

"Not at school?" He shook his head at me sadly. "Here in Missolonghi he has his headquarters for the struggle to liberate Greece from the Turks. Here he dies. He never saw the liberation. But in Greece we remember Byron. Why do you not remember him?"

I had no answer to that, and Missolonghi looked a miser-

able place. The road swung north to Agrinion and then down to the shores of the great inland sea that I remembered from the chart-the Gulf of Amvrakikos. And all the time, slices of history mingled with questions, and the sun getting hotter. As we swung away from the gulf we came to a road junction signposted Preveza to the left, Arta and Jannina to the right. We turned right, climbing again, and there were peasants on the road and in the fields.

"Beyond Jannina we shall be very near the frontier with Albania." He said it with strong emphasis on the second "a" as though he hated the place. "Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria-all the north of our country is a border with Communist territory and it is from these Communist territories Dr. Van der Voort comes with his expedition. You know the Red Army is holding manoeuvres in Bulgaria, all the Warsaw Pact forces? And their fleet is in our waters, in the Aegean." He was staring at me, his cigarette dangling from his lips. "Don't you think it strange that he should come into our country from Macedonia at this exact moment?"

"I doubt whether he gave it a thought."

"You think he does not know there is trouble coming again between the Arabs and the Jews?"

"Another Israeli-Egyptian war?"

"You do not read the papers-listen to the radio?"

"I don't speak Greek," I reminded him.

"But Dr. Van der Voort does."

"He wouldn't be interested."

"No?"

"A mind like his," I said, "dedicated to the work that has been his whole life-"

"Phui! He is trained by the Russians and he has been in Greece before."

We were still climbing, the road snaking through bare hills with a great deal of rock. With every mile we were driving deeper and deeper into the heart of Greece, and further away from Preveza and the sea.

"When is he in Greece before, do you know?"

"I've no idea."

He nodded. "Of course, you do not see him for eight years. So how can you know he was here last year. He arrived on fourth April, in Kerkira-what you call Corfu." He sounded his horn and thrust past a truck loaded with reeds, a blind bend just ahead. "Last year he is alone, and for three months he is wandering by himself in the Ionian islands, particularly Levkas, and he is on Meganisi, where he lives for some days at the village of Vatahori. He has a tent with him and a rucksack, and then for almost two weeks there is no trace of him. Next I find him at limani Levkas-the port, you understand- and afterwards he walks from Preveza towards Jannina, along the way we are driving now, talking to people, climbing to the tops of the hills, wandering down dry riverbeds as though he is looking for gold, and all the time he is making notes and drawing little plans. Why, if he is not an agent?"

"He's a palaeontologist," I said wearily. "He was looking for bones."

"Bones?" He stared at me, his eyebrows lifted, and I found myself in the difficult position of trying to explain my father's work. If I had said old Greek coins, or bronze statuettes, he would probably have understood, but searching for bones and worked flints, for traces of early man, was beyond his comprehension. "The only proper study in my country is the great civilization of Ancient Greece. Nothing else is important." And he went on to say that he had traced Dr. Van der Voort to a village called Ayios Giorgios. "There we lose track of him again, nothing for a whole month."

"You seem to have followed his movements very closely."

"Of course. That is why I am at Methoni when you arrive. At Methoni he take a caique north along the coast. But it all happened a year ago, so it is difficult to follow him with exact dates. About the middle of August he take the caique-to Levkas again." He muttered something to himself in Greek. "Why does he go back to Levkas? And he is on that island more than a month. Why?" he demanded excitedly.

"I don't know."

"Levkas, Kerkira, Cephalonia, all those Ionian islands-seven of them-are under a British Protectorate for fifty years. Turkey and France held them for a short time. For centuries before they are Venetian. Is that why he goes back to Levkas — because they are more vulnerable politically?"

"He wasn't interested in politics."

"No? Then why does he return to the islands? He is there all last September. What is his particular interest in Levkas?" He was staring at me again, ignoring the road, so that we touched the verge.

"I tell you, I don't know."

"You know nothing about him." He hit the steering wheel angrily. "But all the time you say he is not any more a Communist."

"Yes."

"How can you be sure? He is like a stranger to you." By then his patience was wearing thin. "Why did he attack this Cartwright?"

"I don't know."

"And to draw attention to himself by disappearing-he is either a very stupid man. . What do you think?" And when I didn't say anything, he turned his head, staring at me angrily. "You are not being co-operative."

"I can only tell you what I know. I was never interested in his expeditions."

"But you come to Greece. Why? Why you come now?"

He had put this question to me before. He seemed to sense that this was the weak point, and it worried me. "I tell you, to find out what's happened to him." I closed my eyes wearily. It was hot in the car, the smell of his Greek cigarettes strong and acrid.

The road swung away from Arta, and a few kilometres further on we came to a reservoir with the arched remains of an old aqueduct at the far end. He slowed the car where a dirt track turned off to the right. "That is the road to Ayios Giorgios-what you call St. George. See the hole in the hill up there?" He pointed to a natural bridge spanning a rock out-

crop high on the hillside. Blue sky showed through the gap. "Here is one of many places in the Eastern Mediterranean where St. George is supposed to slay the dragon; that is the hole his lance makes." And as we gathered speed again, he said, "Now, if last year he comes to Ayios Giorgios to examine the Roman ruins of that aqueduct I would understand, for it is a part of history. At the entrance to the Gulf of Amvrakikos, at Aktion, close by Preveza, is where Caesar Augustus defeated Anthony and Cleopatra. To celebrate his victory he built the city of Nikopolis and to provide water for Nikopolis he builds that aqueduct. It is a very long aqueduct, nearly fifty kilometres."

We were into the valley now, a river flowing fast below us and high rocky slopes enclosing us. The valley was cool and green, trees growing by the water, and the grass of the hills not yet seared by the sun's heat. There was peace and a timeless quality, and for a moment I forgot about Kotiadis and the future.

"Do you know when Dr. Van der Voort first come to Greece?"

"Last year you said."

"Ohi ohi." He shook his head violently. "When he first come is what I ask."

I tried to remember whether Gilmore had said anything about previous visits, but my mind was a blank.

"You do not know?"

"No."

He seemed resigned to my inability to help him, for he gave a little shrug. "My information is that he is here in nineteen sixty-five-you think that is possible?"

I remembered then that Holroyd had said something about a visit in 1965. "Since his new theories involved the Central Mediterranean it's highly likely," I said. "But I was at sea then and we were out of touch."

"You never write letters to your father?"

"No."

He sighed and offered me one of his evil-smelling ciga-

rettes. "Perhaps when you have talked with Cartwright. ." He flicked his lighter and after that he filled me in on what had happened after the old man had gone off in the Land-Rover, talking and driving with the cigarette in his mouth and his eyes half-closed against the smoke.

Cartwright had gone into Jannina the following morning on the village bus accompanied by Hans Winters, and in searching for a doctor, they had stumbled on the Land-Rover. As soon as he had had his wrist strapped up, Cartwright had airmailed a report to Holroyd, and they had then driven round the town, questioning bus drivers, garages, hotels and tavernas without success. The next day they had stayed in camp and it was not until the morning of March 17 that they had informed the police in Jannina. They were then very short of petrol and by the time London had cabled them additional funds, the security police had taken over. "That is when I go to Despotiko to interrogate them. Maybe it is true that they don't know where Van der Voort is. But I don't want any more archaeologists disappearing, so I confine them to the area of their camp with a guard to see that they stay there."

"You got nothing out of Cartwright?"

"No. Nothing that interested me." And after that he drove in silence as we passed through Jannina, still heading north. And now that we were nearing the end of our journey, I wondered whether I would do any better, whether Cartwright would give me some sort of explanation.

About twenty minutes later we turned right onto a dirt road that was signposted Despotiko. The village was on the shoulder of a hill, a huddle of nondescript buildings round a central square with the tiled roofs of older houses sloping into the valley below. We stopped beside an army truck parked outside the taverna and Kotiadis got out to have a word with two young soldiers sitting on a bench in the sun drinking Coca-Cola.

"Cartwright and Winters have gone up to the cave," he said as he got back into the driving seat. "It is about one kilometre beyond the camp." And he added, "His sister has arrived here."

"Whose sister?" I asked, but I could guess the answer.

"The Dutch boy's," he said and started the engine.

We took a cobbled alleyway that ran out into bare rock as the houses thinned, the Renault in low gear and lurching on the steep slope, scattering hens from its path. The track led down to a stream and finished at a communal wash-house where women were busy slapping and kneading clothes on flat rocks at the water's edge. Two donkeys stood with dripping wooden water casks strapped to their backs, while a boy filled the last cask from a natural fountain gushing from a rock. There was a Land-Rover parked where the track narrowed to a path, and as we drew up beside it, two pigs, long and russet-coloured like wild boars, eyed us from the edge of the stream where they lay wallowing in the sun.

The chatter of the women died as we got out of the car. Kotiadis said something to them in Greek and the music of their laughter mingled with the tinkling noise of water running over stones. "Now we walk." And he led the way along the path, which followed the stream. Old olive trees twined gnarled branches over our heads, their trunks dark against the green of close-cropped grass, the white of cyclamens. In the distance, goat bells tinkled, and in a clearing ahead, a glint of orange marked the camp.

There were three small sleeping tents, all orange, and one blue mess tent. Some clothes hung on a line and smoke drifted up from a stone fireplace with a blackened iron pot on it. It was such a beautiful, peaceful place, with the sun dappling the grass through the grey leaves of the olives and the cool sound of the water, that it was difficult to imagine two men coming to blows here. I thought I saw a movement in the mess tent, a figure standing in the shadows. But Kotiadis went straight past the camp and I followed him, wondering why she was here, what her brother would have told her.

The olive trees ceased and we could see the valley then with the hills on either side running back to a blue vista of

distant peaks. We were walking on a carpet of thyme, oleanders by the water and the slope above us patched with a bright pattern of early spring flowers. The air was full of an unbelievable scent.

Kotiadis pointed to a gaping brown wound in the hillside ahead. "That is where they dig." He halted suddenly. I thought it was to get his breath, but then he said, "Why does a man attack his assistant when they are already together almost one whole month? Have you thought of that? Why not the day before, or the week before?" He was staring up at the brown gash. "I tell you why." He turned and faced me. "Because that night Cartwright is telephoning to Athens from the taverna,"

"What about?"

He shrugged. "That is for you to discover. Some friend of his, an archaeologist. That is what he says. Myself, I think it is then he discovered that Dr. Van der Voort is a Communist."

If his long face hadn't looked so serious I would have thought he was joking. "You've got Communism on the brain," I said angrily. I was thinking of all he had told me, how the old man had walked this area of Greece alone, going out to the island of Levkas again and again. And before that in the Sicilian islands, in Pantelleria and North Africa. For four years, since 1965, he had been searching, desperately searching, using up every penny he possessed, and all Kotiadis could think of was Communism. "If he were a Communist, why the hell do you think he'd want to bury himself up here in this lonely valley?"

He turned on me then. "What sort of a world are you living in?" He caught hold of my arm and swung me round. "Re-gardez! There is Albania." He flung out his arm in a broad gesture. "That one is Mao-Communist. And there is Yugoslavia." He pointed to the north. "Tito-Communist. A third frontier is with the Bulgars-Russian puppets." He almost spat. "We are ringed with Communist enemies. Their armies are on our north-eastern frontier, their fleet among our islands, and beyond the Aegean we are face-en-face with Turkey. The smell of war is in the air and you wonder we are sensitive?"

And when I reminded him again that this was just an anthropological dig, he said, "That is good cover for a man who wishes to travel the villages of my country."

It was no good arguing with him, and we walked on, climbing the final slope to the cave. A young corporal in olive-green uniform came to meet us and Kotiadis talked with him for a moment. Then we had reached the dig, where Cart-wright waited for us, stripped to the waist and wearing a pair of over-long khaki shorts. Behind him, Hans Winters was standing in the trench they had dug. He reminded me of Sonia, the same features, but rounder and heavier. He, too, was stripped to the waist, and his long fair hair, bleached almost white by the sun, hung over his eyes, limp with sweat.

They already knew Kotiadis. It was I who was the stranger, and their eyes fastened on me, waiting to know who I was- and Kotiadis let them wait, watching them both, a cigarette in his mouth, his sleepy-lidded eyes half closed.

My gaze had fastened on Cartwright. He was about my own age, tall and thin, his ribs showing through the tight-stretched skin of his torso, his stomach fiat and hard with muscle. But the shoulders were sloped, the head small. He had a little sandy moustache and high colouring; and the round steel spectacles he wore gave him a studious, rather than an athletic appearance. His left arm was in a sling.

He blinked when I told him who I was. "I didn't expect you'd. ." He hesitated. "He never m-mentioned you." He was on the defensive, his nervousness showing in a slight stutter. His eyes shifted to Kotiadis, owl-like behind the thick lenses. "Any news of Dr. Van der Voort?"

"Ohi." Kotiadis shook his head.

He was glad. I sensed it immediately; it probably gave him a glow of importance to have the dig to himself. "I suppose you're in charge here now?"

"Yes."

I looked beyond him, along the line of the trench into the

shadowed interior of the cave. It wasn't really a cave at all, more of a scooped-out hollow in the hillside, as though a great piece of it had been prised out and let fall into the valley below. And it was large. Even where we stood the overhang protruded above our heads. The height of it must have been a good 50 feet, and the cave itself about 80 feet wide and 40 feet deep. Stones had been piled on the far side, and at the back, where they had erected a little blue terylene shelter on an aluminium frame, the curve of the rock wall was black, and so smooth it might have been glazed. "How old is this cave?" I asked him. He hadn't expected that, and I was thinking of the letter from Gilmore lying on the desk in the house in Amsterdam. "Does it go back thirty-five thousand years?"

"I've no idea."

"But it's important?" It had to be important, otherwise there was no sense in the old man's behaviour.

"It's a cave-shelter," he said. "But how long it's been a cave-shelter. ." He gave a shrug. "That we'll only know when we've dug down through the layers."

"But you must have some idea what you're going to find. You're not digging here just for the fun of it."

"It's worth a try. That's all one can say at the moment."

"But what did my father think?"

"Dr. Van der Voort?"

"Yes, what did he say about it?"

He hesitated. "You've got to remember we'd been walking steadily, mostly in bitter cold, all the way down through Macedonia and a bit of Montenegro-about two hundred miles of territory we'd covered-and apart from a few artefacts, all quite recent, we'd found nothing." And he added, "Everything's relative on an expedition like this. In the end, you've got to justify it somehow. Our finances limit us to three months' work."

"In other words, it's a shot in the dark?"

"If you like."

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that the old man would have gone out in winter with such desperate urgency

to work on something he didn't believe in. "You hadn't much confidence in him, had you?"

"I didn't disagree with him, if that's what you mean."

"That's not what I meant at all," I answered. "It's just that I want to know how this fits in to the pattern of his discoveries."

"The pattern?" He seemed puzzled.

"You must have realized that he was working to some sort of an overall pattern-a framework if you like. You know very well he was out here last year, that he covered the whole area from here to the coast and out to the islands. Didn't he tell you? Didn't anybody tell you what he was aiming at?"

His manner, his whole attitude to the dig, annoyed me. I had expected enthusiasm, a sense of excitement, something that would enable me to understand what it was my father was searching for. Instead, he was making it all seem dull and ordinary, like those students you read about digging around in the foundations of old hill forts in Britain. "You haven't been in charge of a dig before, have you?"

"Not in charge. But I've been on digs before."

"Where?"

"In Suffolk-Clactonian Man. In Germany and France. Why?" He was frowning. "Why are you so interested in this cave? You're not an anthropologist."

"No. I'm a ship's officer." I stared at him, trying to see into his mind, trying to understand. "You came out here with a man who's regarded as a brilliant palaeontologist and you don't seem to know what his theory is, what he's working towards. Didn't Holroyd brief you?"

"Of course. And I knew Dr. Van der Voort's reputation."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's common knowledge. Planting that skull in a dig in Africa. Trying to fool people, and then working for Moscow and twisting his theories to suit the Russians. He may be brilliant. I know some people think so. But it's a damn tricky sort of brilliance."

"What was he trying to prove here in Greece? Or don't you know?"

"Yes, of course I do."

"Well?"

"The Cro-Magnon-Mousterian gap. That's something anthropologists have been puzzling over for years. He had a theory about that. But his main interest was to prove that Homo sapiens sapiens-modern man-came up from Africa across a mythical land-bridge. It was a complete reversal of all that he had written previously."

"You don't agree with him then?"

He hesitated. "Well, if you want to know, I think a man should be consistent; he shouldn't switch his ideas to suit his convenience the way Dr. Van der Voort did."

"And you didn't believe in it?" I insisted.

The question seemed to worry him. "No," he said finally, "No, I didn't." He said it reluctantly, as though I had forced the admission out of him.

"Then what's the point of this expedition?"

"To check. There's always a chance, you know."

"An outside chance, as far as you're concerned?"

"Well, yes, if you like. It's a theory, nothing more. And a pretty wild one. If you knew anything about anthropology you'd realize that."

I turned to Hans Winters. "Is that what you think?"

He stared at me, not saying anything, a stubborn, mulish look on his face.

"What puzzles me," I said, turning back to Cartwright, "is why Holroyd got him a grant, why he sent you out to spy on him, if there's no basis for his theory."

"I w-wasn't spying. I was here to help." Two angry spots of colour showed in his cheeks.

"If you'd done that, he wouldn't have disappeared."

He stared at me, his face flushed. "You don't seem to understand what sort of a man Dr. Van der Voort is."

"I think I do."

"He's mad." He said it almost viciously.

"He's difficult, I agree. But I've no reason to believe that he's mad."

"Then why did he attack me? Suddenly like that, and for no reason."

"That's what I came to find out."

"He was like a maniac."

"I think you'd better explain." I was keeping a tight rein on my temper. "Suppose you tell me exactly what happened?"

He hesitated, staring at me owlishly as though I'd dug a pit for him. "There's nothing to tell you," he said. "Nothing you don't know, I imagine. He called me out of my tent. He'd been for his usual walk and I came out and saw him standing there in the moonlight. And then he went for me. No warning-nothing. He just seemed to go berserk. And he had that stick with him, the one he always carries." He moved his left arm slightly. "It broke my wrist."

"You wrote to Holroyd that there was an argument."

"Did I?" He seemed surprised. "I don't remember." And he added, "In fact, I don't remember much about it. I was pretty badly knocked up."

"What time was it?"

"I've told all this to Mr. Kotiadis."

I moved a few steps nearer, staring him in the face, getting a sense of pleasure almost as I saw him shrink back. "Well, you're telling it to me now," I said. "Go on. What time did it happen?"

"Sh-shortly after eleven o'clock."

"And there was no argument, no altercation?"

"No."

"Do you mean to say he attacked you without a word?"

"I tell you, I don't remember."

I couldn't decide whether that was the truth, or whether there was more to it. In the end I left it at that. If there had been a reason for the attack, then he wasn't admitting it-not yet. And with Kotiadis standing there, I felt this wasn't the moment to question him about his telephone call to Athens. I turned to Hans Winters. "Where were you when this happened?"

"In my tent."

"And you didn't hear anything?"

"The first I knew about it was when Alec woke me with blood on his face and in pain from his broken wrist." And he added, "I sleep very heavily." His manner was surly, and though his English was good, the accent was more pronounced than his sister's.

"And what did you do then?"

"I went out to look for Dr. Van der Voort."

"And by then he'd gone?"

"Ja. He'd gone. The Land-Rover, too."

A small wind had sprung up and it was suddenly quite cool. Cartwright was already putting on his shirt, moving away from me. Somewhere on the hillside above us bells were tinkling. "Goats?" I asked.

Hans Winters nodded. "Ja. Goats."

The breeze was from the north, carrying the sound with it, but the wide mouth of the cave, with its beetling overhang, blocked all sight of the hillside above. I moved further into the cave, staring about me. The floor was packed hard, dry powdery earth flattened by long ages of occupation, and embedded in it were great slabs of rock fallen from the arch of the overhang. They had cut their trench a little left of centre, from the back right out to the beginning of the drop down into the valley. It was about 3 feet wide and 4 feet deep at the outer edge. The parapet of it came up to Hans Winters's chest. "So this is what you call a cave-shelter?"

He nodded.

"Does that mean occupied by men?"

"We think so."

"How do you know?" He smiled. "We don't yet. In recent years it's been a winter shelter for sheep and goats. The first thing we had to do was to remove the stock fence." He indicated the stones piled at the side. "That was a dry-stone wall-right across the whole mouth of it, three or four feet high."

I glanced back at Cartwright, but he was now talking to Kotiadis. Down in the valley sheep were moving along the

grass at the river's edge. It was like being on a natural balcony, the valley spread out below and a glimpse of purpled mountains across the tops of the hills opposite. "Very different sort of country to Holland." I wanted to get him talking.

"Ja." And for the first time I caught a gleam of warmth in his eyes. "Is good. I like these hills, the valley. It's very beautiful. But I miss the sea."

"The sea's not all that far away," I said, smiling. He couldn't be more than nineteen and he was homesick. "Did my father talk about the islands at all?"

"Ja, ja. Often. He thought our species of man came up through the islands-the Ionian islands. Across from Africa and through Sicily." He glanced quickly towards Cartwright, and seeing that he was out of earshot, he added, "Alec doesn't see it that way. He's a flat earth man." He grinned. It was a grin that lightened the heaviness of his Dutch face, so that for a moment I glimpsed the elfin look his sister had. "He's very practical, likes everything straightforward and simple. Dr. Van der Voort was a man of ideas, of vision."

"Did you like him?"

He stared at me, the warmth fading, the surliness returning. "I thought him very interesting, very intelligent. That's why I came on this expedition. I like his ideas."

"But you don't like him personally."

"No." He glanced at his watch. "Time for lunch," he said and he put his hands on the edge of the trench and heaved himself out. It was the easy, fluid movement of a man whose muscles are in perfect tune. "You coming?" The others were moving off down the slope. He picked up his sweater and started to follow them, tying the sleeves round his neck.

"Just a moment," I said. "Was it my father who insisted that this cave-shelter was occupied by early man?"

He nodded, pausing. "He said it might not prove anything beyond doubt, but for him it was confirmation."

"Why?"

"The situation." He was standing in silhouette against the sunlight, a thick-set powerful figure, staring down into the

valley. "The river right at their door," he said. "And it faces south with a good view. That's important-to watch for game and to avoid being surprised by human enemies. And the sun-those early hunters went practically naked. They needed the sun. And they needed water, for themselves and to attract the animals that provided them with food, weapons, tools, fat for their lamps, skins to lie on."

I had moved to his side, and standing there on that high platform of beaten earth, looking down upon that flock of sheep moving slowly beside the river, I could almost imagine myself, with a skin over my shoulders and a flint axe in my hand, preparing to go down and cut the next meal out.

"It's a textbook situation, you know." He turned, smiling at me. "I'm still a student. I'd never seen a cave-shelter before. But as soon as I saw this place. . it's a natural."

"You think it's important then?"

He hesitated, his gaze switching to the two figures of Cart-wright and Kotiadis moving slowly down the slope towards the river and the olives. "I'll tell you, I'm only a student. But ja-ja, I do. So little work has been done in the Balkans-almost nothing in Greece. And Dr. Van der Voort. . maybe his theory is wild, as Alec says, but he had a most extraordinary eye for country. All down through Macedonia, in the mountains of Montenegro, and then after we crossed the border into Greece-I watched him, trying to learn, to understand. He seemed to know-instinctively. About the country, I mean. Sometimes he drove the Land-Rover. More often he was walking himself, a queer slouching walk, his head bent, his eyes on the ground or on the lie of the land. It was almost. ." He hesitated. "I don't know … as though he saw it all with the eyes of prehistoric man. He had that sort of rapport with the subject. Identification-ja, that's the word. He was involved, identified, and so completely dedicated, so entirely absorbed. ." He grinned as though to cover his unwilling admiration. "Maybe it's just because I'd never worked with a real expert before."

"Cartwright said you didn't find anything very much."

"Oh yes, we found traces here and there-quite a few things, chert flakes mainly. But nothing Dr. Van der Voort thought worth-while. Not until we came here. And it wasn't only the situation that excited him. Come and look at this." He took me to the back of the cave, to the blackened curve of the rock. "Alec is not convinced. He thinks it may be water seepage. But Dr. Van der Voort insisted that the discolouration was carbon deposit from the smoke of open hearths." He put his hand on the rock face. "Feel that. Feel how smooth it is. That's calcium. A thick layer of it overlying the fire marks and acting as a protective coating. It's caused by water seeping down from the limestone overhead, and if we knew when it had happened, how fast it had built up, we'd know how old the fire marks are. Dr. Van der Voort thought ten thousand years at least."

"Did he give any reason?"

He shook his head. "No, he didn't say. But you can see here where he chipped a bit out with the small geological hammer he always had with him." The calcium coating was almost an inch thick, opaque like cathedral glass. "What he was, hoping for, of course, was a hearth burial. They used to leave their dead beside their hearths and move on. At least, that's what the books say. And then wind-blown earth gradually covered the body-a natural burial. But there's a lot of work to do before we get anywhere near that level."

We were standing on the lip of the trench and at the back here it was less than two feet deep with rock showing at the bottom.

"We're in trouble already, you see. Big slabs fallen from the roof. They'll take a lot of shifting. And out near the edge of the platform, where the earth is softer, we are already having to widen the trench to prevent it from collapsing." He glanced at his watch again. "Well, let's go and eat. I don't know about you, but I'm hungry." He picked up his shirt and we started down the slope. The breeze was stronger now and quite cool, but he didn't seem to notice it.

"I gather your sister has joined you."

"Ja. She is come four days ago."

"Why?"

He looked at me, his pale eyes suddenly hostile. "Sonia can be very obstinate at times. And she has money of her own."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Well, you ask her yourself." And he muttered, "That old devil had a sort of fascination for her."

"You mean my father?"

"Dr. Van der Voort-ja. It's not healthy for her. He may be a very clever palaeontologist, but he's a damned strange old man." And when I asked him what he meant by that, he rounded on me. "You should know. You're his son and you haven't been near him for years."

He closed up after that, and a few minutes later we arrived at the camp. She was standing by the stone hearth, looking more like a boy than ever in a pale shirt and very short shorts, and all she said was "Hullo!", as though we had parted only that morning. And then she turned back to her cooking, reaching for a wooden spoon, and in doing so dislodged a packet of biscuits. She bent down to retrieve it, the curve of her buttocks stretching the flimsy shorts. I saw Cartwright staring, a sly look that was somehow unexpected in an academic. He glanced round, caught my eye-a satyr with glasses and a schoolboy flush. My feeling of dislike intensified.

"A word with you please." It was Kotiadis, and he took me aside, along the path through the olive trees that led back to the village. "I have sent the corporal for your valitsa. Also I have told him you are free to come and go as you please."

"You're leaving?"

"Yes. I do not wish to eat here. I prefer Greek food."

"And I'm to stay?"

"It's what you want, eh?"

"Yes. Yes, of course."

He nodded, smiling and holding out his hand. "I will be back in two, perhaps three days."

"And I can go where I like?"

"Of course. You can go to Preveza, meet your friends, leave

Greece-if that is what you want. You are free and you have your passport."

I shook his hand and he walked off through the olive grove, still smiling quietly to himself. Shortly afterwards the corporal arrived with my suitcase.

It was hot that afternoon and I was alone. The three of them had gone up to the dig. Lunch had been a hurried meal, eaten largely in silence. No doubt I was responsible for that, but I got the impression that the midday meal was always hurried. The hours of daylight were precious and Cartwright seemed driven, as though he had a deadline to meet. "If you want to sleep here," he said, "then you'd better use Dr. Van der Voort's tent. Everything's still there, including his sleeping bag. We'll be back at dusk." I had expected Sonia to stay in the camp, but she went with them.

I sat for a while on the gnarled trunk of a fallen olive tree, listening to the strident sound of the cicadas, the distant tinkling of sheep bells. The breeze had died and it was very still, very peaceful. An idyllic spot, except for the picture in my mind-moonlight and the old man going for Cartwright without any reason. It didn't make sense-and yet … I wondered why Hans hadn't liked him when his sister so obviously did.

In the end I got up and prowled around the camp site. Something-something had happened that night to drive the old man to violence. He'd been for a walk, Cartwright had said. But you don't go berserk walking on your own. Unless it had been building up inside him for a long time. .

My gaze switched to the tents. His was next to the mess tent. I went across to it and pulled back the flap. His things had all been neatly stacked-a rucksack, a battered suitcase, bed roll and sleeping bag. No camp bed, everything very spartan, and the whole interior suffused with a weird orange light, the sun shining through the gaily-coloured terylene.

I went in and opened up the suitcase. But all it contained was clothes-no notes, not even any books. Whatever he had learned on the way down through Macedonia was locked away in his head.

I went down to the river then and lay for a while in the warm sun, listening to the sound of the water. It was a relief to be on my own in the quiet of the Greek countryside instead of cooped up in that car with the smell of Kotiadis's cigarettes and his explosive talk. I took my clothes off and waded into the water. It was almost knee-deep, running fast over flat, worn stones, and at the deepest part I plunged myself into it, clinging to the bottom and letting it wash over me. It was clear, sparkling water, very cold, and I came out refreshed to lie on the grass again and dry out in the sun. The bathe had relaxed me and my mind felt clearer. If I had known enough about anthropology to understand what was in the old man's mind, what this cave-shelter meant to him … I closed my eyes, soaking up the warmth of the sun, thinking of Cartwright and Hans. There was the girl, too. She had been here four days, and she knew the old man better than any of us. In four days she must have discovered something. Kotiadis was probably right. If I stayed here a day or two, living with them in the camp, perhaps working with them on the dig, sooner or later I would discover what had really happened.

After a while I put on my clothes again and went back to the camp. I would have gone up to the dig then, but I needed

a sweater and the corporal had put my case outside the mess tent. The flap of the tent was open and in the blue interior of it was a folding table with two canvas chairs. There was a pressure lamp on the table, and amongst a litter of books and papers, I saw a pocket mirror, comb, hairbrush and powder compact. Sonia had been using it as a dressing table and her sleeping bag was laid out on the grass at the back.

I ducked my head and went in. The papers were notes-notes on the books she had been reading. Two of them were open-a little British Museum booklet called Man the Tool-Maker and a much bigger volume, Hiindert Jahre Neander-thaler. The other books, four of them, were also anthropological. One in particular caught my eye: Adventures with the Missing Link by Raymond Dart. There was also a typewritten article by E. S. Higgs dealing with A Middle Palaeolithic Industry in Greece. I skimmed this through, and then, intrigued by the title, I took Adventures with the Missing Link and one of the canvas chairs out into the sunshine and began to read.

It was just curiosity, no more-an excuse to sit in the sun and do nothing except enjoy the stillness and the emptiness of the olive grove. It never occurred to me that I should enjoy it, that I should become so engrossed in a book on anthropology that I should lose all sense of time. But this told of the first discoveries that proved man had originated in Africa. It was a fascinating story, written in a language I could understand, and though the setting was much further south than Kenya, it brought back something of my own childhood.

In 1924 Raymond Dart had been shown the fossilized skull of a baboon. He was an Australian who had recently taken the chair of Anatomy at the little-known University of Witwaters-rand. The skull, brought to him by a young girl student, had come from limeworks at a village called Buxton on the edge of the Kalahari desert, and it was the first of a whole series of discoveries that led him ultimately to the conclusion that the evolution of man from primate ancestors had begun, not in Asia, as was then generally thought, but in Africa. This first

discovery was followed almost immediately by a consignment of fossil-laden rocks, two of which were complementary. From these two Dart pieced together the skull of a six-year-old primate with a small ape-sized brain and a facial appearance that was almost human. This became known as the Taung skull, after the railway station nearest to the point where it had been blasted out of the limestone.

The man-ape child had lived in the early Pleistocene period, about a million years ago, and the form of the skull made it clear that it was a true biped and had walked upright. Moreover, the teeth, which were like human teeth, proved beyond doubt, to Dart at any rate, that it had been a carnivore. In other words, about a million years ago, in Africa, environment had developed a breed of killer apes that had branched off from their arboreal ancestors; they had taken to the ground, standing erect, and had used bone weapons instead of teeth for hunting,

A slip of paper had been inserted as a marker at chapter two and somebody, presumably Sonia, had underlined the opening paragraph: For many years after the news of my find was presented to the worlds I was to be accused of being too hasty in arriving at the definite conclusions I had formed after studying the skull, teeth and endocranial cast for a matter of only four months.

The major part of the book concerned Dart's work on limestone breccia from the Makapansgat Valley in Northern Transvaal. In fourteen years 95 tons of bone-bearing breccia were recovered from thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone dumped by the quarries, and each of those 95 tons had yielded an average of 5,000 fossil bones. From these he had reconstructed, not only the appearance, but the whole way of life of the early man-ape, proving that his development had been associated throughout with the use of weapons.

It read like a detective story, the bones, so carefully chipped from their limestone matrix, acting as the clues, for these man-apes accumulated only those remains of their prey that were useful to them as weapons or tools. They had even

inserted teeth or sharp slivers of bone into the larger bones they used as clubs to give an edge to them, and they were already essentially right-handed.

The sun had dropped below the hills and it was getting chilly when I reached the chapter entitled-T/i(? Antiquity of Murder. It showed the man-ape as a killer and an eater of his own, as well as other, species, and I was just considering this in relation to what Gilmore had told me about the old man's Journal when I became conscious that somebody was standing behind me. I turned. It was Sonia.

"That's mine," she said possessively.

"I thought it probably was."

"It never occurred to me. ."

"What?"

"That you read-books, I mean."

"Only the lighter ones." I closed the book and held it up so that she could see the title. "This man Dart-he's like a sort of anthropological private eye."

"Raymond Dart," she said coldly, "is probably the most outstanding anthropologist since Darwin."

"Well anyway, he makes it interesting."

"Really-to you?" She smiled. "That's probably because it was written in collaboration."

"Then it's a pity more anthropologists don't collaborate with somebody. Here he is, rattling his old fossil-bones, making deductions nobody believes in-"

"I suppose you mean the Taung skull-Australopithecus africanus."

I stared at her and then burst out laughing. "Is that meant to encourage me? Why the hell can't you call it a man-ape child like he does? Then we know what we're talking about." I opened the book at the marker paper, pointing to the first paragraph of chapter two. "Did you underline that?"

"No." She was leaning down over my shoulder. "It was like that when he gave it to me."

"Who-the old man?"

"Dr. Gilmore."

"He'd marked it, had he?"

"I suppose so."

"Why did he give it to you?"

She hesitated, frowning. "I don't quite know. He bought it for me especially at a bookshop in Amsterdam. I knew all about Dart, of course. But I hadn't read this book. He said it might interest me. That was all. I don't know why."

"You've read it, have you?"

"Yes, of course. I read it straight away. And then again in the plane coming over."

"And you still don't know why?"

"No."

"This chapter on the antiquity of murder," I said. "I was just reading it when you arrived. How far back do our instincts go? I mean how deep are they?"

She didn't answer that, and when I looked up at her, she seemed to have stiffened as though she were holding her breath.

"What this man seems to be saying is that as soon as the man-ape came down from the trees he was a killer. In fact, that that was the reason he was able to leave the trees. When he found he could stand upright, then he could see above the tall grass and had his hands free to use weapons to assist him in killing much larger animals than himself. He became a flesh-eater. Why does Dart use the word murder?"

"To emphasize his point-that's all."

"About man being a killer?"

"Yes."

"And that's a million years ago-a long time."

I think she knew very well what I was driving at. "There isn't much known about man's deep-buried, instinctive urges. They've only just started a proper study of the brain."

"And the instincts may not be in the brain. They may be in our nerves, our tissues, our blood cells. Is that what my father was after in his Journal?"

"I haven't read it," she said quickly.

"No, but Dr. Gilmore has. Didn't he say anything to you about it?"

"A little. Not much." She turned away. "I can't stay talking. The others will be here soon and there's a meal to be got ready." She went over to the stone fireplace, leaning down and blowing on the embers. Then she put on some more wood. "Will you get some water, please? I'll need water for the tea." She gave me a blackened iron kettle and I took it down to the river. I was feeling disturbed, confused. Dart's categorical statement, my own satisfaction at seeing that man fall back over the edge of the oil terminal pier, the old man's attack on Cartwright-it all seemed to add up, and it worried me.

Dusk was falling fast, and by the time I got back she had lit a pressure lamp and flames were leaping between the stones of the fireplace. "I should have come down earlier," she said. "I had to use paraffin. But it's exciting up there. Sifting each shovelful of soil, wondering what you're going to turn up, I've never been on a dig before." She went to get something from the mess tent and then Cartwright and her brother came into camp. Hans went down to the river immediately, stripped to the waist, his towel over his shoulder. Cartwright busied himself lighting the second pressure lamp.

The meal did not take long to prepare-tinned stew, followed by tinned pears. Only the bread and a rather acid sheep cheese was local. We washed it down with a lot of dark, sweet tea. Hans had found a coin that afternoon. It was of no value, an Augustan bronze coin, but it proved that the cave-shelter had been occupied, or at least visited, by somebody in the first century a.d.- a shepherd, probably, who had taken his sheep to the market in Mikopolis. They were speculating as to why he had dropped it there, and I sat listening, not asking any questions. I thought if I let them get used to my presence in the camp. . "Care to see it?" Hans asked. He dredged in the pocket of his shorts and flipped the coin across to me. "I was widening the trench and that was just over a metre down — one hundred twelve centimetres to be exact. So that's the amount of dirt and turd dropping that have accumulated there during two thousand years."

It was the only thing they had found that could be given an exact dating. The rest had been animal bones and broken pieces of pottery-sherds of simple country work. At the lowest point they had reached Cartwright reckoned they were only back to the Homeric period. "We've a lot of digging to do before we get down to a depth that's of any interest to us. And it's all so slow-the soil to be sifted, everything catalogued so that we have a complete picture of man's occupation century by century." He spoke slowly, staring at me all the time, the firelight reflected in his glasses, as though he were explaining something to a child. But he sounded depressed all the same, and when I asked why they didn't drive a pilot trench straight down to the depth that did interest them, he answered me quite sharply: "That's not the way we do things. We might miss something vital. And anyway, without a steady build-up of the picture, we can't be sure what depth we are interested in. We need a complete stratified picture, all the layers of occupation. It wouldn't make sense otherwise."

We had finished supper by then, and as soon as we had washed up, Cartwright went off to his tent to write up his notes and Hans took the other pressure lamp. "I have some books I must study." Sonia had disappeared with a torch and a towel to the river. I got my suitcase and moved into the old man's tent, setting my things out by the light of a candle. And then I picked up Dart's book again and re-read that chapter on the age-old instinct of man to kill, lying stretched out on the bed roll, the candle in its bottle on the ground beside me.

I had just started on the next chapter when Sonia pulled back the entrance flap. "I feel like a drink," she said.

I put the book down and sat up. She meant the taverna up in the village, for she had put on a skirt and was wearing an anorak against the growing chill of the evening. "What about your brother?"

"He's working. He works most evenings. And Alec doesn't drink."

She had a torch and as we left I saw Cartwright sitting on his camp bed, the interior of his tent bright with the light of the pressure lamp. He looked up as we passed the dying embers of the fire, staring at us, the papers on his knee momen-

Man the Seeker loi

tarily forgotten. He half rose as though to say something, or perhaps to join us, but then he seemed to change his mind and a moment later we were alone together in the darkness of the olive trees. The moon had not yet risen. The only light was the stars and the pencil gleam of her torch.

She seemed to be waiting on me, for she didn't say anything and we walked for a time in silence, the only sound the growing murmur of water ahead. And then she stopped. "Well, now that you've come, what do you intend to do?" She was facing me, suddenly very tense, the way she had been when we had first met.

"Stick around for a day or two, I suppose." I wasn't sure myself.

"Is that all?"

"What else? You've been here four days-you tell me what I ought to be doing."

She stared at me, biting her lip. "Why did you come here?"

I laughed. "If I knew that, I'd know a lot more about myself than I do at the moment."

"But you came here with that man Kotiadis. I don't understand."

I told her how it had happened and she said, "Oh, that explains it. I wondered." She seemed relieved and I realized that this was why she had been avoiding me.

As we walked on, she said, "You know about this Congress, don't you? There's a Pan-European Prehistoric Congress being held at Cambridge at the end of May. That's why Alec is in such a hurry to get this dig opened up." And when I asked her what that had to do with it, she said, "I don't know whether Professor Holroyd initiated it, but he's certainly been closely involved in organizing it. All the leading academics of Western Europe will be there, possibly some from Russia and Eastern Europe as well. And he has the chance of reading one of the papers. That's why Dr. Van der Voort was given a grant."

"Who told you that? Cartwright?"

"No. Hans. Alec, as you've probably guessed, is Holroyd's

protege." We had reached the water point and she paused, the stream close beside us, the gleam of it like steel in the starlight. "You remember that book Holroyd read for an English publisher? It was all there, all Dr. Van der Voort's thinking on the origin of our own species. In outline, that is. Nothing confirmed. Just theory. But then he sent those bones to Dr. Gil-more for dating." She seized hold of my arm, her voice suddenly raised against the sound of the water. "Please-try to understand. If Holroyd can get supporting evidence, then he'll go to this Congress, read his paper. Dr. Van der Voort's theories are unpublished. He'll present them as his own."

"And what am I supposed to do about that?"

"Find him, you fool," she answered stridently. "Find him and bring him back, so that he can take credit for anything that's discovered here."

"That's all very well," I said. "But Cartwright has already searched the area. Your brother was with him. And Kotiadis has been searching too-not just this area, but half the country. You realize he's a Greek Intelligence Officer?"

She nodded. "I wasn't sure. He said he was from the Ministry of Antiquities in Athens-the General Direction of Antiquities and Restoration, he called it."

"He's Intelligence," I repeated. "And he thinks the old man is a Communist agent. Not only that," I added, "but he's leapt to the conclusion that Cartwright knew this and that's why my father attacked him."

"But that's ridiculous."

"Maybe, but what's the alternative? Why did he attack him? D'you know?"

"No. I can only guess."

"Well?"

"Can't you see it-from his point of view? Knowing Holroyd was using him. Alec, too. It must have worked on his mind-a feeling of frustration, depression. ."

"He was in a manic-depressive state you mean?"

"I don't know-yes, probably."

"But why-suddenly like that?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. He's so complicated. I don't pretend to understand him."

"Nor do I," I said. "I never did." I took hold of her arm. "Come on. Let's go and have that drink."

She nodded, and as we walked on I told her about Kotiadis and the questions he had asked as we drove up through Greece. "So you see," I said finally, "there's no question of my father being allowed to continue his work here."

"Yes, I see. And that's why we have a guard on the camp." She was silent as we turned into the steep alleyway that led up to the centre of the village. At length she murmured, "I can't bear the thought of Holroyd getting the credit for it all, for all his years of work."

"Not much chance of that," I said, trying to cheer her up. "Cartwright didn't seem at all optimistic about this dig when I questioned him this morning."

"Of course not. His instructions were to locate the dig from which those dated bones had come. The cave-shelter has a virgin floor, quite undisturbed. He knows this isn't it, but since Dr. Van der Voort disappeared. . Well, he's in charge now. He may not believe in your father's theories, but it's a great opportunity for him, and there's always a chance."

We had reached the square by then. There were lights on in the taverna and the radio was blaring Greek music as] pushed open the door. The interior was not designed for comfort, bare wood tables, some forms and the walls cracked and peeling. At one of the tables four men in open-neck shirts were playing dominoes, two others were talking, and an old man with drooping moustaches and baggy Turkish trousers occupied the only chair. All eyes were turned upon us as we entered. The owner appeared behind the counter that did service as a bar. He was a short bull of a man with black eyebrows and features that suggested he had just suffered some terrible loss. Sonia smiled at him. "Kalispera, Andreas."

"Speras," he replied, his eyes on me, watchful like all the rest.

"What would you like?" I asked her.

"Coffee," she said. "Just coffee. All we have at the camp is tea and I'm not used to it. We drink coffee at home."

I nodded, remembering how it had been in Holland-coffee at all hours of the day. "Bad for the liver," I said, and she smiled. "We're plain eaters and we don't suffer from le foie."

I ordered coffee and ouzo for both of us, but she shook her head and said something to Andreas. "I'm sorry, I don't like ouzo. Just coffee, please."

We sat at the one vacant table, watching Andreas make the coffee on a paraffin burner. She had a few words of Greek, but though the occupants of the tavema were polite, it was not a congenial atmosphere. I talked to her about the Barretts and the voyage from Malta, but it scarcely seemed to register. She had withdrawn into herself, her small face devoid of any expression, her eyes fixed on one of the faded posters that decorated the walls, seeing nothing, only what was in her mind.

The coffee came, black and sweet in tiny cups, each with its glass of water and my ouzo smelling of aniseed. "Tile-ghrafima," Andreas said and handed Sonia a cable.

"It's for Alec," she said, glancing at it, and then she seemed to freeze, sitting very still, staring down at it. Finally she looked at me. "Professor Holroyd is taking the night flight. He will be in Athens tomorrow morning."

"Does he say why he's coming out here?"

"No." She folded the cable sheet and slipped it into the pocket of her anorak. "No, he doesn't say why. But it's obvious, isn't it?" She called to Andreas, and then she said to me, "I'm so sorry. I don't like the stuff, but I've ordered one all the same." And when it came she picked it up and drank half of it at a gulp as though it were geneva. "They're like vultures," she breathed. "That's what he always called them-the desk-bound academics-vultures." She looked at me suddenly, her face pale and tense. "Can I have a cigarette please?"

I produced one of the duty-free packets I had brought

from the boat, and as I lit her cigarette, she said, "Suppose I told you where he was-what would you do?"

I stared at her. "You know where he is?"

She shook her head. "No-not for certain. But I think I can guess."

"How?"

"The book-I told you I was typing his new book."

I had forgotten that. I lit my own cigarette, watching her, waiting for her to tell me, conscious that I was nearing the end of my journey now.

"What would you do?" she repeated.

I sipped my ouzo and drank some water. The water was very good, soft as milk and yet like crystal; spring water from the mountains, uncontaminated by chemicals. I hadn't expected this and I couldn't think of an answer. I looked at her and our eyes met, and after that my hands began to tremble, for I was certain she knew, and the prospect of meeting him, wild and alone in some secret place, brought back my boyhood fears.

"Well?" she asked in a level, controlled voice.

"Why didn't you go yourself if you knew where he was?"

"I wasn't sure-" She hesitated. "I thought perhaps he needed to be alone. But now-"

"Well, where is he?" I asked. "Where has he holed up?"

"First answer my question."

"All right," I said. "I'll go."

"Of course you'll go," she answered quickly. "But what happens then?"

"That's up to him," I told her, not relishing the prospect. "I can only offer to help in any way I can." It was what I had come for after all.

I don't know whether that satisfied her or not. She drank her coffee and finished her ouzo. "Let's go," she said. "I can't talk here." I paid and we said goodnight, but it wasn't until we were clear of the village that she told me where he was-or rather, where she thought he was. "On the main road, before you got to Jannina, did you see the remains of an aqueduct?"

It came back to me then, the hillside sloping green with that gaping hole high up in the rock, and Kotiadis saying my father had been in that village the previous year. "Ayios Giorgios?"

"No, not Ayios Giorgios." We had reached the water now and she stopped, her voice only just audible above the sound of it. "On the other side of the valley. I've never been there, of course, but he describes it in great detail-two whole pages. And it was so important to him that, typing it, I could see the whole thing. The road cuts the line of the aqueduct; on one side the water was carried on great arches, on the other the Roman engineers drove a tunnel through the mountain. The entrance to that tunnel is right beside the road. The tunnel itself is blocked by a fall, but above it, on the tops of the hills, there is an area of red desert sand. It's a hang-over from some-thing that happened twenty thousand years ago."

"And you think he's there?"

"I don't know. . it's just a feeling." She was no more than a shadow in the starlight, standing staring towards the steel ribbon of the water. "That place was terribly important to him. He writes very factually, you know, not at all interestingly, except to experts. But this passage was different. It had a compelling sense of excitement." She hesitated, and then said, "You'd have to read it, I think, to understand. I can only give the facts-the geophysical facts and they're quite extraordinary. What he says is that during the last and most severe stage of the Wiirm glaciation the sea level of the Mediterranean was up to four hundred feet lower than it is at present. Violent winds from the south picked up the sand from the exposed North African coast and carried it to the Balkan peninsula. Greece was buried under that sand to a depth of two or three hundred feet. It's all gone now. You can see traces of red here and there in the soil, but twenty thousand years of erosion have washed the great blanket of sand away-except in this one place."

She looked at me and her hand touched my arm, holding it. "Will you go there-tomorrow? Will you see if he's there?"

And without waiting for me to reply, she went on, her words comina: in a rush: "If he is there … it scares me to think of it. Alone in that place all this time. It made such a deep impression on him-the atmosphere of it. It seemed to fascinate him. You see, ever since those great dust storms, there's been life there, human life-Bronze Age, Neolithic, the old Stone Age, risht back to Mousterian Man. There's chert in the area and they knapped it like flint-chipped sharp slivers off to make their implements. . knives, arrowheads, all their weapons, and the chippings aren't buried as they are in a cave-dwelling. Because of erosion, the evidence is lying there on the surface, so that he didn't have to dig-he could just read the w^hole story as he wandered about. He said it was a dead place, a sort of cemetery of continual human occupation." And she added with sudden intensity, "It's not healthy for him to be there alone." Her fingers tightened on my arm. "Will you go-please? Not in the Land-Rover. It's too conspicuous. There's a bus leaves the village about seven and you could hitch-hike (m from Jannina."

That was how I came to find myself wandering alone next day in the lunar landscape of the red dunes near Ayios Giorgios. Sonia had produced food for me, which she had stowed in his old rucksack, and by ten that morning I was in the cab of a cattle truck driving south out of Jannina. We called at two villages on the way, and it was a little after eleven-thirty that we came to the valley, the road snaking down between the hills, and that hole in the rock showing like a watchful eye above us. The aqueduct came into view, its ancient arches spanning the river, and beyond it the reservoir gleamed like a mirror in the sunshine. "Endaksi-Ayios Giorgios." The truck slowed to a stop where the road to the village turned off to the left. I thanked the driver and climbed out. "Herete." I waved him goodbye and he drove off, leaving me standing alone in the dust on the verge, the sun warm on my face. As soon as the truck was out of sight, I started down the

road which had been blasted out of the hillside above the reservoir. There was no breeze and already it was hot, an early spring heat-wave. Patches of red earth showed on the far side, and high in the sky a bird wheeled and hovered. At the far end of the reservoir the sloping face of the dam was white with the water pouring down it. And on the other side of the road, the aqueduct tunnel was a shadowed slit in the naked rock. There was no difficulty in reaching it. You could even walk in it without stooping, for it was built to the height of a man, tapered at the top like the entrance to a catacomb. It was so narrow that my body blocked the light and I probed ahead with her torch only to find that she had been right-the cleft was blocked by a rock fall about 25 or 30 yards from the entrance.

I switched the torch off and stood in the semi-darkness, thinking for a moment of those Romans hacking their way into the mountainside nearly 2,000 years ago. It must have been quite an engineering feat in those days. I wondered what the old man had been thinking when he had stood where I stood now. Had the rock walls told him what he would find on the top of the hill inside which he stood? It seemed unlikely. I had no idea what chert looked like then, but the walls were smooth, except for the marks of Roman tools. It appeared to be a fairly soft rock, volcanic probably, and no doubt an earthquake had caused the rock fall.

I walked slowly back towards the slit of brightness that marked the entrance, and when I reached it and stood again in the sunshine, I found my mind had moved far enough back into the past for the road itself to seem an intrusion. I followed the road, moving almost automatically, and where it curved round the shoulder of a hill, I found a goat track leading steeply up. It was not a very long climb, but the track zigzagged to a bluff, so that I had no view of what lay ahead of me until I topped the last rise and it burst upon me with all its strange unearthly beauty. Here, suddenly stretched out before me, was a world that was out of time, completely apart from the landscape in which it lay. Instead of grass and rock and the Greek flowers of mountains in springtime, here was nothing but desert-red, desiccated dunes, so bare of anything that a withered, stunted bush was like the prospect of an oasis.

I hesitated, shocked by the transformation. And when I finally started forward again, that red world, with its extraordinary timeless atmosphere, seemed to swallow me completely. The colour of the sand absorbed the sun's heat. The place was like an oven, and so deathly still that it seemed all life had ceased here long, long ago. I felt my nerves tingle and the hair of my neck stiffen. I glanced quickly up at the blue vault of the sky. Nothing stirred, no sign of that eagle, or whatever it had been, hovering; the sky was empty, as empty as the red dune world into which I was slowly advancing. And when I looked back, there was no sign of any other world behind me, only the scuff of my feet in the loose sand to show the way I had come.

It was a confusing place, for the dunes were a series of humps and hollows without any regular pattern. The sun was little help, for it was almost overhead, but as I topped a rise, I came upon something I could use as a guideline. At first I did not understand what it was. I was looking across a steep ravine of sand, and on the far side, the smooth red surface of the next dune was broken by a spill of stones. These stones built up like a cone to a point on the dune-top where they stood proud by at least the height of a man, as though a great cairn had been erected there. What puzzled me was where the stones had come from.

Standing there, looking around me, I saw that there were other points where stone showed through the sand. But these were all quite different, for there was no spill of stone and nothing had collapsed; here the rains and strong winds had eroded the sand overlay to expose the rock below. And since in every case the rock had been shattered as by a giant hammer, it was clear that this could only have been caused by ice. I realized then that the rock I was seeing exposed in the twentieth century a.d. was rock that had not seen the light of day since its shattering by the deadly cold of the last Ice Age.

But that did not explain the spill of stones on the far dune. I slithered down into the ravine. The floor was packed hard, but the soft sides made it difficult to claw my way up. When I finally reached the top, I found that the pile of stones had the form of a collapsed circle. There was a distinct hollow in the middle. It was like the shaft of an old well exposed by erosion of the surrounding soil until it stood like a column above the ground, finally falling in upon itself and spilling down the slope.

I was standing fairly high at this point and had a good view over the whole dune area. It was all of it red in colour, but two shades of red, as though formed by two different types of sand, and the dune formation was uneven-steeply humped in the ravines, but thin on the slopes with the underlying rock exposed in places. And then, as I turned to view the whole area, ^vhich looked as though it covered about four, possibly six square miles, I saw that there was another spill of stones several hundred yards away, and I thought I could see yet another beyond that. These spills were not so pronounced, the "well-heads" standing less proud of the surrounding sand, but what struck me immediately was that they were more or less in a straight line running in a south-westerly direction.

I understood what they were then. These were the remains of vertic al shafts connecting Avith the line of the aqueduct tunnel deep in the hill below me. They were either ventilation shafts, or else the Romans had used them for hauling out the rock cut from the tunnel, and where the rock ceased and they were into the red sand, they had had to line the shafts as well-diggers have to line a well in soft ground. A geologist could probably have gauged from the amount of stone debris exposed just how much erosion had occurred in the two thousand years since those shafts had been built. My guess was that it was 20 feet, and if the rate of erosion had been constant for the whole twenty thousand years since the last Ice Age, then that would give an original depth of 200 feet for the sand overlay. This more or less confirmed the depths Sonia had given me, since obviously the rate of erosion over such a long period would not have been constant.

I have gone into this in some detail, because the sense of being in a world lost to everything but geological time was very strong, and it affected my mood. It is true that I had seen goat, possibly sheep droppings in the dune bottoms, but this evidence that animals crossed the area in search of the next grazing land did not detract in any way from the feeling that this was a world apart; rather the reverse, in fact, for it made me conscious of the struggle life must have been when all of Greece had looked like this red throwback to a long dead age. And there were the flakes of chert. At least, I presumed they were chert-between brown and ochre in colour, quite small and sharply edged, so that I was certain they had been chipped from larger stones. I had seen them everywhere, lying on the surface as Sonia had said. One, which I had put in my pocket, looked like an arrow-head.

I think I must have stood there for quite a time, my mind lost in the past, my eyes searching and searching the whole hot expanse of shimmering sand. There was a small wind blowing from the north and it gradually chilled the sweat on my body. Search as I might, I could see no sign of life. There were no birds, no cicadas even, the whole area so utterly still and lifeless it mig^ht indeed have been the moon. And when I called out in the hope of an answer, my shouts seemed deadened by the dunes, the sand acting like a damper.

It was almost two and I stopped to eat on the top of a dune where the breeze touched my damp skin. Below me the sands pulsed with the heat, and on a ridge away to my left the third of those strange shafts spilled stones into a hollow. It had the shape of an old worn-down molar, and near the crown of it a shadow cast by the sun showed black like an unstopped cavity. It was a possibility-about the only one left in this desolate stretch of country. But by then I had opened up the rucksack. Sonia had made up a package for me of bread and cheese and tinned ham. I put on my sweater and began to eat. I was facing south-west at the time, my back to the breeze and the way I had come. I don't know what made me turn-some instinct, some sixth sense. The second of those stone shafts stood like a cairn, sharp against the blue sky, and beyond it, a long way

away, the purpling shape of a distant range stood humped on the horizon. And then my gaze fell to the red sand valley below and I saw something move, a shambling figure wandering with head bent intent upon the ground.

The sight of him so shocked me that for a moment I did not move. I just sat there unable to believe what my eyes recorded, for he looked so frail, so insubstantial. Partly it was the khaki shirt and trousers. They seemed to have taken on the colour of the dunes so that they merged into the sand. But the long white hair, the way he walked, head bent, searching the ground. . those nights in Amsterdam so long ago came back to me and the certainty that it was him was overwhelming.

I got to my feet, tried to call out to him, but though I opened my mouth no sound came and I was trembling. He was moving slowly nearer all the time, coming up the floor of the valley, and he looked small, a ghost of a figure in the red immensity of that dune landscape, walking with slow uncertain steps, searching, but not stopping, not picking anything up.

I started down the dune slope then, loose sand under my feet, and even when I reached the hard-packed sand of the valley floor, he still did not hear me. It wasn't until I was within a few yards of him that he stopped suddenly, his head lifted, his body quite still, alerted to the fact that he was not alone. I had stopped, too, waiting for him to turn. And when he did so, slowly, there was no recognition in his eyes, only a secret, hunted look.

"Who are you?" he asked, the words coming falteringly as though speech were strange to him. "What do you want?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't-I was too appalled. I had expected him to look older, of course, and those two photographs should have warned me, the observations Gilmore had made. But I was not prepared for such fragility. He seemed smaller, a shadow of his former self, withered and stooped, and so thin he looked half starved, the khaki trousers hanging loose, the rib cage staring through the torn shirt. But it was his

face that really shocked me, the hunted, burning look in his eyes.

It had always been a remarkable face, the leathery features like a piece of deep-chiselled, fine-carved wood. Now there was the grey stubble of a beard, and beneath the stubble the lines had deepened. The flesh seemed to have fallen away, exposing the bone formation of the skull, accentuating the jut of the jaw and the beetling brows. It was a haggard, tortured face, and the eyes, which had always been deep-sunk, seemed to have retreated deeper into their sockets.

They were staring at me now, seeing me only as a stranger who had invaded his secret world. I said my name, and for a moment it didn't seem to register. And then suddenly there was recognition and his eyes blazed. "Who sent you?" There was hostility, no sign of affection-I might have been an enemy out to destroy him. "What are you doing here?" The words came in a whisper and he was trembling. "I was worried about you," I said.

A rasping sound came from his throat, a jeering laugh of disbelief. "After eight years?" And then, leaning forward, he repeated his first question-"Who sent you?"

"Nobody sent me. I came of my own accord."

"But you knew where to look."

"Sonia thought I might find you here."

"Sonia Winters?" His face softened, the eyes becoming less hostile.

"She's at Despotiko," I said.

"And you came-to look for me?"

I nodded, wondering how to break through to the man I had once known.

He was silent for a long time. Finally he seemed to gather himself together. "That was good of you." He said it slowly as though making an effort, and then suddenly there were tears in his eyes and I stood there, staring at him stupidly, uncertain what to do or what to say. He'd been here-how long? A fortnight, nearly three weeks. The red dunes all around

him, and nobody with him, nobody at all. "What have you found to live on?"

But his gaze had wandered, searching the ground. "You haven't seen the sole of my boot, have you? I lost it last night, and I've been searching."

He was wearing an old pair of desert boots, tough camel skin, and the right foot had the crepe rubber missing. "It's no good to you," I said. "You couldn't repair it here."

"Somebody may find it. ." His eyes were roving again, his voice irritable. He seemed obsessed by his loss and I realized he was afraid it might betray his presence here. "Are you sure nobody sent you?" He was looking at me again, his eyes shifting and uneasy.

I did my best to reassure him, but it was only when I told him how I had come to Greece that his attention seemed to focus. "A boat? You chartered a boat?"

I nodded.

"Where is it-at Pylos you say?"

"No, Preveza. They should have arrived at Preveza by now."

"Preveza?" His eyes gleamed, a strange suppressed excitement. "If they'd let me come on my own-that's what I wanted. I could have been there a month-more now. But they gave me a Land-Rover and an assistant." His body sagged, dejected. And then, suddenly, he sank to the ground as though he couldn't support himself any more. "I'm tired," he murmured. "Very tired. I haven't the strength I had once."

I offered to get him some food, but he shook his head. "It's only the sudden heat. And walking … I thought if I searched for it now, in the middle of the day, nobody would see me."

"But you must eat," I said.

He shook his head again. "I'm beyond that. And the last time it made me sick."

He told me then how he'd killed a sheep, had beaten it to death with a stone and taken it to his lair up there on the dune ridge where that third shaft showed a cavity in the circle of fallen stones. He'd cooked it inside his burrow, gorging him-

self sick and sucking the marrow from the bones. He told it with his eyes closed, dwelling on all the revolting details as though to saturate himself with disgust. "Have you ever gone for a long period without food?"

I shook my head.

"I did it once before-lost my way in the Kyzyl Kum desert. The mind floats free. Everything very clear. But it was different then. It wasn't of my own choice and I had no water."

He had no water here either, but every night he told me he went down to the reservoir. That was how he had come to lose the sole of his boot. "And what happens when you're too weak?" I asked. "You can't live without water."

"No, I'd die then." The dusty lips behind the stubble cracked in a smile. "That would be the easy way." The smile had lit his face with some inner calm. "But I shan't die. I mustn't die-not yet." His brows dragged down, his eyes suddenly glaring at me. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? It was always the same with you-like talking to somebody who's never learned-who'll never bother to learn-one's own language. We're strangers, you and I."

There was nothing I could say and I stood there, silent. The stillness of the place, the sense of being alone with somebody who was not quite real … I didn't understand him. I never had. And the way he was staring at me from under those shaggy brows. . "What do you want?" he asked abruptly. "Eight years, isn't it?"

I nodded.

"Then why are you here?" His eyes drew mine, holding them, the stare so penetrating that I had the feeling I had always had that he could read my thoughts. "You're in trouble again. Is that it?"

I couldn't help it. I laughed, an awkward, jarring sound in the stillness. Looking down at him squatting there, weak with hunger and half out of his mind, and thinking I'd come to him for help. Yet perhaps he was right. In the end I had always come back to him. Perhaps it really was the reason.

"Yes," I said. He might as well know. It might help him even — to know that he wasn't the only one who was on the run. "I think I've killed a man. In fact, I'm certain I have."

I saw the shock of that register, his eyes appalled, a look almost of horror on his face. "You?" He bowed his head. "You were always violent-always that same streak of violence." And then after a while he said, "Sit down, Paul. Sit down here and tell me about it. How did it happen?"

"It was at the end of the voyage," I said. "We'd come into Fawley with oil from Kuwait-the long way round the Cape." I had seated myself cross-legged on the sand, the two of us facing each other like a couple of Arabs. "I was first officer and we had a Czech on board, a man called Mark Janovic-a good deckhand, cheerful, hardworking. The papers said he was a Pole, but I'm damned sure he was a Czech, and they were waiting for him-two toughs from the Polish embassy. The turn-round is quick, but I'd given several of the hands shore leave and I was on the pipeline terminal when they came off the ship. Janovic was the last to leave, and as he did so these two thugs closed in on him. They had a car waiting. There was an argument and I went over to see what it was all about. It was something to do with his family. I could see Janovic was scared, and then he suddenly made a break for it. One of the bastards grabbed him and I just reacted instinctively. I smashed his face in. He was right on the edge of the pier. He went straight over into the water. It was dark and the tide was running. There wasn't a chance of anybody fishing him out alive. And then the other man started to come at me." I felt like a child again, telling him my troubles. "I didn't stop to think. I just hit him in the stomach, grabbed the car and drove off."

He didn't ask me why I'd been such a fool, why I hadn't stayed to justify my actions. He just sat there, silent, lost in his own thoughts. Finally he said, "I've been afraid of this-always." The words seemed dragged out of him. "Both you and I, we've the same temperament, the same predeliction to violence …" He was staring at me as though looking at a ghost.

"It's an odd place to tell you-but you're old enough now, a man … I loved your mother once. A long time ago now." He seemed to gather himself together, his eyes looking straight at me, very direct. "You're my son. My own son."

"Yes," I said. "I know that now."

"You know?" It seemed to worry him, the brows dragged down, the eyes staring, bloodshot. "How do you know? When?" And he added slowly, almost painfully, "I tried to keep it from you. After what had happened. . the shock of their death … I felt I had to. How did you find out?"

"The letters-that note pinned to my birth certificate." And I told him how I had gone back to the house in Amsterdam, "But I didn't come here to burden you with my own troubles."

"You went to Amsterdam?"

"I needed money, somewhere to hide out till the heat was off."

"Is that all?" He sighed. "I've never refused to help you. Surely you know-"

"How the hell could you help me?"

I saw him wince. "No, of course. You're right. And there was no money in the house." He was peering at me, his eyes probing my face. "Then why are you here?"

"To tell you that Professor Holroyd left London by air last night. He should be in Athens by now. Sonia thought you ought to know."

He didn't seem surprised. "He's in a hurry, of course. And she told you where to find me?"

"Yes."

"But that doesn't explain why you came to Greece,"

I told him about Gilmore then, his concern after reading his Journal. But all he said was, "It was good of Adrian to bother." He was following quite a different train of thought. "Now tell me the truth." He leaned forward, his voice urgent. "Why did you come-after eight years? And not a word from you in all that time. You're not interested in me or my work."

I didn't know how to answer him. "I just felt I had to,"

"Because you discovered I was your natural father?" That rasping sound again, that jeering laugh.

How I hated him! I always had-his twisted mind, his bitterness. He saw the hate in my eyes and smiled. "You haven't changed."

"No," I said angrily. "I haven't changed. And nor have you." I got to my feet. "I'll go now."

I left him then, climbing the dune side hurriedly, back to where I'd left the rucksack. There was still some food left, but when I called down to him that I'd leave it there for him, I saw him staggering up the slope towards me. By the time he reached me I'd taken off my sweater and slipped it, with the remains of the food, into the rucksack. "Here you are," I said, handing it to him. "The rucksack's yours, anyway."

He had collapsed on the sand at my feet, breathing heavily. "We shouldn't-part-like this," he gasped. "You and I-the same blood-and those nine years. We had nine years together."

"You were away most of the time." My voice sounded hard and brutal.

"Yes. So much to do-always seeking-a new location, some find reported. There was always something, beckoning me on. That's what drove me. I'm sorry." There were tears in his eyes again. And then he was staring up at me. "I need your help."

"No," I said. "No, I'm leaving."

"Paul." He was gasping for breath. "I've no time left. I'm old and ill and I need you."

Gilmore's words almost, and our roles reversed. It was incredible. "I'm going now." If I didn't go now, I'd get involved. And I didn't want to get involved. "I can't help you."

"Yes, you can. That boat." He was tense and urgent, his eyes over-bright. "You said you had a boat, and it's not more than a day's run from Preveza." He was pleading.

"You want to go to Levkas, is that it?"

"If I had the use of that boat-just for one day."

The urgency, the absolute driving urgency, his eyes burning with excitement, his whole face lit by a desperate desire. I

hated to kill it. But there was Kotiadis, and when I told him what had happened after we had landed at Pylos, the light died in his eyes, a dead look, and his hands clenched slowly. They were big hands, big in proportion to his body. "So they've checked with the Russians now. Everything I do. ." His body seemed to droop. "Ever since I was a student. Do you wonder that I'm here, hounded, alone-my ideas, my whole life wasted. Nobody believes in me-nobody except myself."

"There's Dr. Gilmore," I reminded him.

"Yes, but Adrian's old. It's men like Holroyd rule the academic world now. And in Russia-they only helped me so long as it suited them." And then he returned to the subject of the boat, what sort of boat and asking about the Barretts. "The dig at Despotiko would take too long. But on Levkas- a week, a month at most, and I'd have the answer-know for certain. And the summer ahead of me-warmth. I've friends there." Then he leaned forward, gripping hold of my hand and pulling me down on to the sand beside him. "Listen, Paul. You're a seaman. Have you been through the Malta Channel?"

"Once," I said.

"Then you'll know the depth there."

"I know it's shallow."

"And further west, between Sicily and Tunisia-the islands?"

"I've seen Marettimo, once in the dawn."

"No, not Marettimo, though there is a cave further inshore on Levanzo. But south of Sicily-Linosa and Pantelleria, both volcanic, and another island, Lampedusa, much older." His gaze had fastened on me, his voice urgent with the effort to communicate, to engage my interest. "Geologists have for some time believed that the Mediterranean was a himdred to two hundred feet lower during the Ice Age. Here you see the evidence of it." He waved his hand at the dunes around us. "This sand belongs to two distinct periods-the lighter colour has an iron ore content, the darker and later is manganese. Nobody has checked it, as far as I know. I don't know of anybody who even knows about it, and if I could get one really authoritative geologist. ." He picked up a handful of sand and ran it through his fingers, watching it intently like a man watching an hourglass. "But why should I help them? They don't like being taught their business any more than anthropologists. They'd take the credit for themselves. ." He flung the remains of the sand away in a gesture of disgust. "They don't know the water level of the Mediterranean twenty thousand years ago. They're just guessing. It's an enclosed sea and they're not even sure that the Straits of Gibraltar existed then. Suppose the level was four or five hundred feet lower. Then all the sea between Sicily and Africa would have been one vast plain, with Lampedusa a small mountain range. Have you ever seen Pantelleria?"

I shook my head, and he went on, barely pausing for breath, "It's like a volcanic slag heap, the north of it all black lava, probably dating from the period when Knossos, the old capital of the Minoan civilization of Crete, was destroyed. There's a Greek volcanologist who believes that the destruction of Santorin was the basis of the legend of Atlantis. But the rest of Pantelleria is the product of older eruptions. I spent a month there some years back. If I could have stayed longer. . there are some underwater caves there, but you'd need divers-aqualung equipment. In Homer's day there was a story about Odysseus descending into Hades, meeting the shades of the great men of Greek history. Why did he write that into the Odyssey? Everything he wrote was based on stories handed down by word of mouth, and if Atlantis was Santorin, remembered to this day, why not a cave some sailor had stumbled on?" He looked at me then. "You've never seen the Vezere-those beetling limestone cliffs with caves marked by the engraved drawings of mammoths going back sixty thousand years. I was brought up in the Vezere, you remember. It's a long time ago now, but I've never forgotten. It's been my dream-that somewhere, some time before I die, I'll find others-painted caves that will prove beyond doubt the pattern of Cro-Magnon migration."

His voice faltered and his body sagged again with weariness. "It's just a dream," he murmured. "But if I had a boat, a few months. . there was nothing in Asia Minor or Russia, nothing that proved anything-definitely. What I wrote then. ." He was leaning forward, intent, his words coming slowly, as though by speaking his thoughts aloud he could clarify his mind. "Theories-nothing more. And I was guilty, like the rest of them, of twisting facts to prove what I believed to be true. But there comes a point when you know the facts don't fit. Then you can only sit back and re-think your theories. I did that one whole winter in Amsterdam, arguing it out on paper. A new thesis-negative, rather than positive. If Homo sapiens, as represented by Lartet's Cro-Magnon type, did not come from the east, via Russia, or up through Mesopotamia, then either he evolved on the spot-there is a theory that each Ice Age produced its own natural development of our species-or else he must have come north from Africa." "Is that the book you sent to a British publisher?" "Yes. I knew the Russians wouldn't print it. ." He looked at me, suddenly puzzled. "You know about it? How? I never told Adrian. I never told anybody." And then he became very excited as I told him about Holroyd's visit and how the book had come to be rejected. "I knew it. I knew he must be involved." His eyes were blazing, his body literally trembling. "Holroyd used it in a book of his own-published quite recently-my theories, my own words. And no acknowledgment. None." Those hands of his, those big hands, were clenching and unclenching, as though he were going through the motions of throttling the man. He smiled to himself, his teeth bared, and his face had changed. It was wolfish and there was something in his eyes. A crafty look. The trembling had stopped and there was a stillness about him now. I was conscious suddenly of evil. I can't explain it-the dunes maybe, the heat; but something had invaded us. And yet his words were ordinary enough, his manner practical:

"You're going back-to Despotiko? You'll see Holroyd?" I nodded, not saying anything, appalled by that unreasoning sense of evil. A cold shiver ran down my spine, for the evil stemmed from him. I was certain of that. It wasn't the dunes or the heat-it was there, deep inside him, and it scared me.

"Last year …" his voice was tense, the words beating into my brain with the glare of the heat refracted from sand and stone. "I discovered something in a cave-dwelling on Meganisi. By an island called Tiglia in the channel between Meganisi and Levkas. Some bones. I sent them to Adrian. I asked him to get them dated. Human bones-pieces of a skull-cap, part of a jaw, some teeth. Also fragments of animal bone, part of a woolly rhinoceros."

"There's a letter from him on your desk."

"Does he give the dating?"

"About thirty-five thousand b.p."

He nodded as though it confirmed what he already knew.

"He also made the point that you had no right to keep the location of such an important find to yourself."

"Good!" He seemed pleased. He was smiling. "When something like that is sent in for dating. ." The smile had bared his teeth again, the eyes cunning, that wolfish look. "They talk. They pass it on. Soon everybody knows, and then the vultures gather." He laughed, but only as an emphasis to bitterness. "You're staying at the camp, are you? You'll be there when Holroyd arrives?"

I nodded, wondering what was in his mind. His face had smoothed out again, an expression of innocence. "Perhaps Adrian is right. The individual in the field is unimportant. What is important is the corporate knowledge of the scientific world as a whole. That's what they say, isn't it? That's their excuse." His hands clenched again. "But what happens if the scientific world doesn't believe you? How do you make them understand if they reject, not the truth, but the man himself?" He was speaking in a whisper, his eyes lowered as though communing with his feet. "Then you must use other methods. I've been thinking about that, all the time I've been alone. And now you come here, young, thoughtless, full of energy and vitality. ." He stopped suddenly, his head cocked on one side, listening. I heard it then, the faint sound of a bell. "Sheep," he said. "Every few days that bell-wether leads the flock across the dunes to grazing on the far side. There's a shepherd with them." His head had turned towards the shaft of stones that was his refuge and he began to get to his feet. The bell was jangling now and he paused, his hands still on the ground, his body crouched, and that hunted look back in his eyes. "Something has disturbed them. They're running."

Faint on the wind I heard the distant sound of a human voice, a man shouting. It came from the far side of the dune, from the way I had come, and I thought I heard a dog bark. I was on my feet then, running along the dune top, and where it fell into the ravine of which I had climbed to have my lunch, I saw the sheep in a huddle, facing away from me, their eyes on the dog. It was an Alsatian, and the soldier who held it on its leash was arguing with the shepherd. Beyond them was Kotiadis, in his shirt sleeves, his jacket over his arm and his tie hanging loose.

I turned and ran back, out of sight below the crest of the dune, the sound of the shepherd's voice raised in anger fading behind me. The old man was on his feet when I reached him and I grabbed the rucksack and thrust it into his hand. "Quick!" I said. "Down there." And I pointed to an area of rock exposed by erosion. There was just a chance. "It's Kotiadis with a tracker dog. But he's following my tracks, not yours. Lie flat and keep your head down."

I didn't wait to see whether he understood. There wasn't time. I back-tracked along the ridge, and where the dune ended, I saw the dog again pulling the soldier along on a tight leash, Kotiadis close behind them. They were circling the flock now and for a moment I was in full view of them as I slid down the side of the dune. But they were so intent on the trail, and on keeping their footing in the loose sand, that I got away into a hollow in the dunes without being seen. I was in the floor of the ravine then, the dune between me and the parallel ravine, the old shaft-head out of sight.

I kept to the floor of the ravine, following a line of old sheep droppings. It led me to the end of the dune country, and as I climbed the last slope of sand, I heard the sheep bell again, far away and sounding quietly. The dog was silent. By then I had put the better part of a mile between myself and the place where I had left him. There was no point in going on, and where the sand ended, giving way to rock and a sort of maquis scrub interspersed with patches of poor grass, I sat down to recover my breath.

About five minutes later they came into view, the dog with his nose down, still following my trail. The soldier saw me first, standing and pointing excitedly, the dog straining at the leash. "Are you alone?" Kotiadis called up to me. He could see I was alone and he said something to the soldier, and then came panting up the slope. "Where is Dr. Van der Voort?"

"I didn't know you were following me," I said.

"Of course, I follow you. What do you expect?" He was hot and angry at finding me alone. "Where is Dr. Van der Voort?" he repeated. "He is somewhere here. I am sure of it." He was out of breath and a whiff of garlic came to me on the hot air. "Why else do you come here?"

I began to tell him about the geological significance of the dunes. But he hadn't come here with a soldier and a tracker dog to be lectured on the last Ice Age. "Where is your rucksack? You have a rucksack when you get on to the bus."

"Have you been following me since seven o'clock this morning?"

"But of course."

I was annoyed with myself for not realizing the trap he had set for me.

"Where is your rucksack?" he repeated.

"Somewhere around," I said. "I put it down when I had lunch, but these dunes are confusing."

He sat down beside me. "Now you answer my questions please. Why do you come here?"

Patiently I started in again on the strange nature of the dunes. But he refused to be side-tracked. He was still hot and angry, impatient for something to justify the time and energy he had expended. The interrogation was not a success. Finally he said, "Okay, we look for your rucksack now."

But of course we didn't find it. He'd given the dog the wrong briefing and only once did the animal take us anywhere near the shaft with its shadowed cavity. Finally I suggested the shepherd might have picked it up and that took us a good mile from the dune country and wasted almost an hour. In the end he gave it up and we went down to the road where the soldier had parked his army truck.

The sun had set and it was almost dark by the time we got back to Despotiko. They were just settling down to their evening meal. "You will stay in the camp now," Kotiadis said. "You are not permitted to leave it-any of you."

It was dark under the trees and their faces, as they listened to him, were lit by the glow of the fire. "What about the cave?" Cartwright asked. "I take it you're not stopping us from continuing our work?" And as Kotiadis hesitated, he added quickly, "I think I should tell you that Professor Hol-royd of London University is in Athens. I had a cable from him last night. He'll be at the General Direction of Antiquities today. That's under the Prime Minister's Office. And then he'll be coming on here to examine the cave-dwelling himself."

"You are not permitted to leave the camp. That is all I have said." Kotiadis moved towards Cartwright. "And now a word with you please."

Cartwright put his plate down and got to his feet. They went off together and Sonia said to me, "You must be hungry. Would you like some stew?" I think she expected me to be leaving with Kotiadis, for her eyes beckoned me to the fire, and as she handed me a plate, she whispered, "Did you find him?"

"Yes," I said. "He's all right-for the moment."

"Thank God!" she breathed.

I started to tell her what had happened, but she shook her head. "Not now."

Cartwright was leading Kotiadis to the old man's tent. She

followed them with her eyes, the ladle poised over the stew-pot. The old man's things were in there and I bent down, my head close to hers. "They've got a tracker dog." Her hair touched my cheek as she nodded. "Better eat this quickly," she said, pouring the contents of the ladle onto my plate.

But she was wrong in thinking Kotiadis would take me with him. He came out of the tent with a bundle under his arm wrapped in newspaper, and after talking a moment with Cartwright, walked over to where I sat stuffing the food hurriedly into my mouth. "Mr. Cartwright has promised that he and his companions will not leave the camp. You will give the same promise please."

I looked up at him. "Why should I? You've got soldiers here."

"You are not being co-operative."

"Of course not." The plate was shaking in my hand, anger sweeping through me. Why the hell couldn't they leave him alone? "Do you think I don't know what you've got under your arm?"

The firelight glimmered in the pupils of his eyes. "Perhaps if we have some of Dr. Van der Voort's clothes today. ." He gave his habitual little shrug. "But it does not matter. You have indicated where we must search and tomorrow we try again." He was so sure of himself he was actually smiling. "And now I will do as you suggest. I will order the soldiers to watch you. So please do not try to leave the camp. They have guns and they will shoot."

He left then, and shortly afterwards the soldiers arrived with their tent. The corporal sited it on the path leading to the village, and after it was erected and a guard posted, he and the rest sat around watching us. Under surveillance like that, the atmosphere in the camp was strained and there was little conversation until the meal was over. Whilst the others were washing up, Cartwright moved over to where I was sitting. "Mind if I join you?"

I didn't say anything. It was his camp and he could sit where he liked. He pulled out a pipe and sat down, chewing

at the curved stem of it. Finally he said, "I don't know how long you will have to stay here. But since we're forced into each other's company like this, I think I should tell you that I'm not responsible for what Kotiadis is doing. I knew, of course, that Dr. Van der Voort had been in Russia, that he had had books published there and that he spoke the language. By inference, I suppose, you could say that I knew he was a Communist. But I did not inform the authorities."

It was a categorical statement and I did not doubt for a moment that it was true. "Then why did he attack you?"

He hesitated, his owl-like eyes staring straight at me. "That evening-" He began to fumble for his tobacco pouch. "I had to telephone Athens-an archaeological friend, Leo Demotakis. I made the call from the taverna and was in bed shortly after nine. Dr. Van der Voort had gone off on his own — he often walked alone at night. But he was in the taverna around ten o'clock and by then somebody from the Public Order Ministry had phoned Andreas to check on the expedition and the identity of its leader. He's the village headman. The enquiry was political and he admits that he warned Dr. Van der Voort." He began to fill his pipe. "It's not easy to explain. Dr. Van der Voort and I-" He hesitated. "You know Professor Holroyd sponsored this expedition. I'm his assistant and Dr. Van der Voort hated Bill Holroyd-a quite unreasoned, pathological hatred. I found that out very early on, when we were still in Macedonia. Anyway, when Andreas told him I had phoned Athens earlier, I suppose he leapt to the c-c-concl-clusion. ." He turned to me suddenly. "I wasn't given a chance to explain. He seemed driven by a f-fury of rage, words pouring out of him-" Hans called to us that tea was ready and he got quickly to his feet as though glad of the opportunity to escape. "I thought you ought to know. That's all." And he added, "I can tell you, it was a most unpleasant experience."

He went over to the fire then, and I sat there trying to understand my father's behaviour, the violence of his reaction. Cartwright's explanation of what had happened had been quite direct. I didn't like the man, but I was certain that what he had told me was the truth.

"Here's your tea."

Sonia stood there, holding an enamel mug out to me. It steamed in the cool night air. I took it and she hesitated, as though about to say something. I wanted to have a talk with her, but alone, not in front of the others. Our eyes met for a moment, then she turned abruptly and went back to them. The fire had died to embers, the glow of it on their faces, and behind them, and all around, the olive grove was dark in shadow. Somewhere a bird, or perhaps it was a frog, repeated and repeated its single fluting note, regular as a metronome, while I continued to sit there, withdrawn and alone, thinking of that tired old man preparing to make his nightly journey to the reservoir for water. And tomorrow Kotiadis would pick him up and that would be the end of all his dreams, all the years of wandering and searching. It would finish him. I felt that very strongly, and when eventually I went to the tent and crawled into his sleeping bag, it was with a feeling of resentment, almost a physical sickening, at the way the pattern of both our lives was being drawn inexorably closer.

So far my involvement in my father's affairs fiad been largely accidental, and in writing about what happened during that hot summer in the Mediterranean, I find it difficult to decide exactly when and how I stopped fighting against the inevitable and decided to let myself become engaged emotionally in his affairs. Certainly Holroyd's arrival in the camp at Despotiko was a decisive factor. It personalized the old man's struggle for recognition and made me realize for the first time the powerful forces he had to contend with.

Holroyd was a member of the academic Establishment. It was typical of him that, instead of coming straight out to the scene of operations, he had spent a whole day in Athens first. And when he did arrive, it was in an official car and accompanied by one of the directors of the General Direction of Antiquities. They had stopped the night somewhere on their way up from Athens and Holroyd had taken the trouble to telephone ahead to say he would be arriving at eleven o'clock.

As a result, nobody went up to the dig that morning and Cart-wright fussed around the camp, making certain that everything was in order. The folding table and the two canvas chairs were brought out from the mess tent, mugs laid ready, a bottle of ouzo, glasses. They had even purchased some mocha coffee from the taverna. Hans dug a new latrine and then appeared, transformed in blue trousers and pale shirt, with his fair hair slicked down with water. Sonia put on a short white dress and Cartwright a tie to go with his grey flannels and elbow-patched sports jacket.

It was a little before eleven that Holroyd came into the camp. He had his pipe in his mouth and he was smiling, his round, babyish face looking pink and newly scrubbed. Cart-wright went forward to meet him, holding himself very erect in an effort to conceal that slouching, gangling walk of his. I almost expected him to salute. It was all very old-fashioned and English, the two of them in grey flannels and sports jackets formally shaking hands against the exotic background of the olive grove, and the Greek official standing beside them, neat in a dark blue suit and dark glasses.

I now knew a little more about Holroyd's background, for the night before Sonia had settled down on the grass outside my tent and we had talked for nearly an hour. He was the son of a Bradford spinning mill operator and all through the early 'thirties, when he had been growing up, his father had been unemployed. He had been newspaper boy, errand boy, and then his father had got part-time work at another mill and they had moved out to Cleckheaton. Through voluntary work at a local library he had managed to bring himself to the notice of one of the founders, a rich mill owner, who had supplemented his scholarships and seen him through grammar school and then university. Anthropology was not a very popular subject at the time, and with the war just over, he had got himself appointed to a department of the Allied Military Government in Germany that was dealing with papers and documents of scientific interest.

"It is not too large a step," she had said, "from the appropriation of the discoveries of a conquered country to picking the brains of your own scientists." He had stayed close to government, always with some official position that gave him a certain amount of power. "If the plagiarism is not too blatant, there are few people who will openly oppose a man who has the ear of senior officials and can influence academic appointments." She had got all this from Gilmore and I was remembering her words now as I saw Holroyd glance quickly across to where I was standing slightly apart from the others and then turn to question Cartwright. "He's politically astute and quite ruthless. He's also a publicist." By this she had meant he could write for a wider public than the purely academic. "You'll see, he'll have the Greeks eating out of his hand. He's a born schemer."

Holroyd was moving towards the table now. He shook hands with Hans, said something to Sonia which was received in stony silence, and then, after accepting a glass of ouzo, he came across to me. "Well, young man-so you changed your mind, eh?" A smile was creasing the corners of his eyes, but the eyes themselves were without warmth. "Dr. Gilmore told me he had failed to persuade you to come out to Greece."

"I changed my mind, as you say."

He nodded. "Now, come and have a drink-I want to talk to you in a moment about your father. I hope to persuade him to behave more sensibly in future. I shall expect your help." The aroma of coffee filled the air. Cartwright brought a tray of artefacts from his tent and placed it on the table, also his notebooks. The soldiers were dismantling their tent. "I have brought Mr. Leonodipoulos with me," Holroyd nodded towards the Greek official who was talking to the corporal. "I'll explain why later."

Coffee was served, and whilst we drank it the talk was entirely scientific as Cartwright explained the artefacts they had picked up in their trek down through Macedonia, mostly chippings of chert and obsidian, and all neatly labelled. Now and then he referred to his notes. Holroyd listened, smoking his pipe and only occasionally asking a question. At the end

of it, he said, "Well, at least you've got something to show for your efforts. But the earliest of these chert flakes is probably not more than seventeen thousand." He leaned forward, stabbing with the stem of his pipe at the contents of the tray. "There's nothing here, nothing that could remotely be associated with a carbon-fourteen dating of thirty-five thousand B.P."

"No, sir, I agree."

"But that was the whole purpose of the expedition."

Cartwright nodded, his face flushed. "I understand, sir. But, as I wrote you, I have high hopes of the present location. When we've dug down-"

"That's a full season's work. You admit it yourself." And Holroyd added with harsh emphasis, "This expedition was not undertaken with a major dig in mind. You know that very well. If we had envisaged that, it would have meant a much bigger grant and a dozen or so students."

"With all due respect I think the two of us can manage to get a pilot trench cut to the Solutrean level at least."

"Solutrean, or Aurignacian-what does it matter? You don't know what's there. Whereas this expedition was based on quite positive information-a carbon-dating of bones that had already been unearthed."

"I think when you see the site itself-"

"In a moment, Alec. In a moment." Holroyd smiled, his manner suddenly more conciliatory. "What I'm trying to establish for you is the real intention of this expedition. It is purely a reconnaissance, an initial probe to test the validity of Dr. Van der Voort's theories." He turned to Sonia. "You were right about his Journal. I had a talk with Dr. Gilmore and I must accept his word for it that it is personal and deals with behaviourism. What I do not accept is that there is no record of his discoveries out here. He made three expeditions in the Central Mediterranean area, two of them entirely on his own. Last year he brought back bones for dating that would appear to be highly significant. You, as his secretary, must know-"

"I'm not his secretary," she said quickly. "I merely did some typing for him."

"You also nursed him through an illness. You lived for a time in his house." He was staring at her intently and I began to understand why he had decided to discuss the expedition publicly like this, instead of having a private talk with Cart-wright. "You could assist us greatly, and Dr. Van der Voort, if you would tell us where he was last year, also perhaps the year before-the exact locations."

She was staring back at him, very pale, very intense. "Surely it is for Dr. Van der Voort to tell you himself," she said in a tight, controlled voice.

"That is precisely my difficulty. Miss Winters. If Dr. Van der Voort were available-"

She went for him then, all the feelings that had been bottled up inside her during the days she had been in Greece bursting out of her in a torrent of words: "You of all people-to come here and complain that Dr. Van der Voort is not available. You know what is happening today-this very minute. A man called Kotiadis-Intelligence agent. Security Police-I don't know what he is-but he is hunting him down with a police dog like a-criminal. And you're responsible."

"What do you mean by that?" Holroyd's voice was sharp.

"Don't pretend you don't know." Her voice was wild and unrestrained. "Do you think I'm a fool? Who set them on to him? Who tipped off the authorities that he was a Communist? You hound him. You drive him half out of his mind. And then you have the effrontery to come here asking me- me-to tell you where he was working these last two years. That's something you'll never-"

"Calm yourself." He was leaning forward, his hand gripping her arm. "I assure you I did not inform the authorities of his political background. Why should I?" he added. "It is of no advantage to me that he has disappeared. Quite the reverse, I assure you." He turned to Cartwright. "Is that what he thinks-that I informed the authorities?"

Cartwright shook his head. "No. He thought it was me."

"And that's why he attacked you?"

"Yes."

"I know all that," Sonia snapped. "He went for the wrong man."

"You mean he should have attacked me?"

She shook her head, biting her lip. "He shouldn't have attacked anybody, of course. But imagine how he felt-how you would have felt? He was engrossed with his work, and then suddenly this old bogey of Communism-"

But Holroyd was looking across at the Greek official. "Tell her, will you," he said. And then, turning back to Sonia, "I knew this would have to be explained-if not to Van der Voort himself, certainly to you, and his son since he's here. It was one of the reasons I asked Mr. Leonodipoulos to accompany me." He nodded to the Greek, who said:

"On March thirteenth the Intelligence branch of the Public Order Ministry learned that a Communist agent had entered Greece under cover of leading a scientific expedition and was operating from a camp near this village. The information came from a Yugoslav source that has generally proved reliable." He was speaking in impeccable English, smoothly and with scarcely a trace of accent. "They checked first with our Immigration people, then with my Ministry. It was not difficult to confirm that this Dr. Van der Voort had been associated with the Soviets and had published books in the Communist countries. The Security Police were informed and that evening they phoned the local headman here, Andreas Dikeli. Discreet enquiries were then made through the Russian embassy in Athens. It all seemed to confirm the information our people had been given. However, since the expedition was British-sponsored, they sent Demetrios Kotiadis, one of their most senior men, up to interview Dr. Van der Voort. When he discovered this man is disappeared in somewhat unusual circumstances-" He left it at that with a little expressive shrug.

"But-and this is the point I want to make clear to you, young lady." Holroyd had lit his pipe and was puffing at it happily. "Whilst I was in Athens I was able to convince both the Ministry and the Security Police that Dr. Van der Voort has broken with the Russians and that his presence here in Greece is entirely innocent."

I don't think Sonia believed him even then. "But why-" she said. "Why should you do that?"

"Well, it's the truth, isn't it?"

"Yes, but-"

"You have to have a reason, do you?" He was smiling at her, perfectly relaxed now. "Try looking at it from my point of view. Without Dr. Van der Voort this expedition will achieve nothing. And I had great hopes of a break-through, something new. I've been asked to read a paper at the Pan-European Prehistoric Congress in May and this would be an ideal platform from which to launch Dr. Van der Voort's new theory. And Mr. Leonodipoulos here is keen, very keen, that his country should be involved in any scientific advance in our evolutionary knowledge."

The Greek official nodded. "That is quite correct. Despite Dr. Van der Voort's political background, my Ministry is now satisfied that it is important for Greece that he continues his work here."

Holroyd smiled and got to his feet. "You think about that," he told her, "while we go up and look at this cave-dwelling. And remember, the Congress meets in less than two months. There's not much time."

"You mean-when he's found-he's free to go on with his work?"

"You heard what Mr. Leonodipoulos said."

"But then you don't need information from me. You will be able to talk to him personally."

"Perhaps. I hope so." He patted her arm in a fatherly way. "Well, we'll see, eh?" He turned to Cartwright, gave a peremptory jerk of his head, and as the party began to move oflF through the olive grove, he began explaining the cave to Leonodipoulos. "I'm afraid this may not appear to you very impressive, accustomed as you are to tholos tombs and the glories of Ancient Greece. But Greek civilization stemmed

from successive waves of primitive people coming down from the Black Sea coasts and the Caucasus. What Alec Cartwright hopes to unearth here, and perhaps elsewhere, is the original souce of your civilization. This may be the first of a whole series of exciting discoveries-"

His voice faded and I looked round for Sonia. She was walking slowly down to the stream. Her long bare legs, her fair hair, the white tunic of her dress-in that setting she looked like one of the early Greeks. I started to go after her, but Hans stopped me. "We go up to the dig now," he said. "She wants to be alone." That surprised me, that he should be so considerate. "She is concerned about Van der Voort."

I nodded. "She behaves as though …" I didn't know quite how to put it to him. "How did they come to meet in the first place?" I asked. "I suppose she was also studying anthropology?"

"No. Biology."

"It was through you then?"

"Partly."

I continued to question him as we started up the track to the dig, but he was not very communicative. And yet her concern had been so deeply emotional. . "Tell me about your own father," I said finally.

"My father is dead. A car accident. It happened three years ago." The tone of his voice discouraged further questions and we walked on in silence.

When we reached the cave Holroyd was standing back, sucking at his pipe and looking up at the overhang, his eyes narrowed against the glare. Cartwright was watching him anxiously. "I think you're going to have trouble here." Holroyd turned to Leonodipoulos. "What we are concerned with is the fate of Neanderthal man when the oceanic climate changed to a continental one. The Neanderthalers went into a sort of decline and a new race of man-the Cro-Magnon or Aurignacian type-began to take over."

"I do not understand." Leonodipoulos was frowning. "Why does this new type, this Cro-Magnon, take over?"

"Aye, well, there you've put your finger on it." Holroyd nodded. "That's the question we've all been asking ourselves. Mousterian man-the Neanderthalers-had been in existence a long time, sixty thousand years at least. We've found traces of him all over Europe, in Russia, in the Near East, in Africa, and with the passage of time you would expect his artefacts, his chippings of flint and chert and obsidian for use as weapons, to show a gradual improvement. And yet the reverse is the case, particularly after the emergence of Cro-Magnon man."

"You have told me," Leonodipoulos said, "that this Cro-Magnon is our own species."

"Yes. Homo sapiens sapiens. He's named after the Cro-Magnon cave-shelter at Les Eyzies in the Dordogne. That was where the first skeletons were unearthed, in 1868. But where he came from, that too is a mystery. The general view is that he came from Asia. Dr. Van der Voort thinks from Africa." He put a match to his pipe. "So there you have it-two mysteries. Where did he come from? Why did Mousterian man disappear? Did this taller, more intelligent type of man-a man with a bigger brain capacity, with a head like ours, no ape-like brow ridges and a square jaw-destroy the Neanderthalers, or did Mousterian man just fade away naturally, a sort of death wish, like an African under the spell of a witch doctor?" His pipe was drawing again, his round babyish face smiling. "Fascinating, isn't it? But whether this cave-shelter will throw any light on it-" He took his pipe out of his mouth, shaking his head, still smiling. "Difficult to say. But perhaps Van der Voort will be able to tell us."

His inspection of the dig took about half an hour and most of his comments were directed to Leonodipoulos. He seemed very anxious to establish the importance of the research they were doing into the prehistory of man in Greece. Several times he referred to the tourist attraction of the caves in the Dordogne region of France. But what interested me, as I stood there listening to him, was the way he managed to convey how primitive man, and the animals he hunted, could be associated, through the juxtaposition of bone remains, with definite climatic conditions and the period of their existence established in geological time by relating each new find to others of the same period. It was, in fact, a short lecture on how early man had developed along similar lines in different parts of the world, and the way he put it, in his slow, matter-of-fact North Country voice, even I could understand and appreciate why, once all the correlated parts of a discovery-human bones, animal bones, artefacts and the soil in which they had been found-had been established and the date determined, then the name given to that discovery was used to describe others of a similar type.

Finally, standing once again on the slope below the cave, he pointed the stem of his pipe at the overhang and said, "There's been a lot of water coming down this hillside. The evidence is there at the back of the cave." He turned to Cartwright. "I'm afraid, when you get down a little deeper, you'll find that whole layers of occupation have been washed down the slope or are interspersed with detritus from above. It looks as though Van der Voort has put you to work on a dig of extreme complexity."

We went back to the camp then. It was pleasant under the trees and Sonia had prepared a cold lunch. Holroyd seated himself next to me. "Now about your father. . you will appreciate from what I've been saying that the whole success of this expedition depends on him." His eyes were fixed on me. "You saw him yesterday?"

I nodded. In view of what he had said earlier there seemed no point in denying it.

"Where?" And when I told him, he said, "Good. Then they'll pick him up today. Did he talk to you about the future at all? Did he say whether he planned to concentrate on this cave site or move on to another area?"

"We were interrupted."

"I see. Well, it doesn't matter. He'll be able to tell us that himself, I hope." He concentrated for a moment on his food. He was a very purposeful eater, the sort of man who regards

food solely as fuel for his energy, and he talked and ate at the same time. "How did you know where to find him, eh?" He seized a glass of water and drank deeply, his little eyes watching me. "Alec didn't know. Nor did that Greek fellow-he had to follow you. Well?"

I hadn't expected the question and I hesitated.

"You turn up here out of the blue, after the police have been searching the countryside for him without success for nearly three weeks, and the very next day you go straight to the place where he's been hiding out." He jabbed at my arm with his forefinger. "You found something in his house- his notes-locations where he worked last year?"

I didn't say anything, and he smiled as though my silence was sufficient answer. "Now, how long did you have together before you were interrupted?"

"I don't know. About fifteen or twenty minutes, I suppose."

"And what did you talk about?"

I hesitated. "The dunes mainly," I said, and I began to explain to him the significance of that odd stretch of country. But he wasn't interested in that. He wanted to know whether I had been shown any excavations, any prehistoric bones or artefacts. He brushed aside my description of the ventilation shafts. "Modern-Roman," he said impatiently. "I'm talking about things that are thirty-five thousand years old. Surely you realize that by now."

The others had fallen suddenly silent and I looked up to find Kotiadis coming into the clearing. He was alone and he came straight to where I was sitting, walking fast and with purpose. "Here's your rucksack," he said and dumped it on the table in front of me. "You know where I find it?"

"Where is he?" I demanded.

"That is what I come to ask you." He was hot and tired and extremely angry. "He has been hiding out in the top of that old shaft for a long time. The evidence is everywhere."

I was staring at him, barely listening to what he was saying.

"He must be there," I said.

"Not now."

There was finality in the way he said it, and the memory of his violent anti-Communism scared me for a moment, "Have you searched the dunes?"

"Of course I searched the dunes-the whole area. He is not there."

The intensity of his frustration convinced me and I relaxed. The old man must have realized they would come back. He had seen the trap and escaped. But where to? Weak as he was, where could he possibly have gone? Sonia caught my eye, the same question in her mind. I shook my head. I didn't know.

I put the rucksack on the ground beside me. Kotiadis had switched his attention to Leonodipoulos now, and as the changed situation was explained to him, he became very heated. Holroyd gripped my arm. "If you know where he is, laddie, you'd better tell me. It's for his own good. This Congress is a great opportunity. Where's he gone to ground now?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know."

"You must have some idea, surely?" And when I shook my head his grip on my arm tightened. "What else did you discover in his house? You knew he would be somewhere on those dunes. What was the next location?"

"I don't know."

"You're lying."

Sonia intervened then, leaning across the table. "He's telling you the truth. He'd never have found Dr.' Van der Voort if I hadn't told him about the dunes near Ayios Giorgios."

"You?" He let go of my arm and stared at her. "He was there last year, was he?"

The corners of her lips turned up in a little secret smile. "It was just something I typed for him, a description of the dunes. He was very interested in the geological aspect of his discovery. It confirmed, you see, the climatic conditions. ."

"Yes, but what else? Was there something near-a cave-dwelling? What was the next passage you typed for him?"

"Nothing else."

"Nothing? But these were his notes. He was out here two seasons-"

"I'm afraid that's all I can tell you."

He hesitated, staring at her hard. Then he got abruptly to his feet, pulling his pipe out of his pocket, and went over to where the two Greeks were still arguing. Cartwright got up, too, nervous, ill-at-ease, fumbling with his pipe. Hans followed him.

I turned to Sonia then. "Have you any idea where he is?"

She shook her head. "He may have gone up to the village of Ayios Giorgios. He lived there for a time last year."

"Kotiadis will have searched there."

"Probably. But he could be in the hills, hiding. From what you've told me he's too weak to have gone very far." And she added angrily, "All Professor Holroyd cares about is where those bones came from-the ones I sent to Dr. Gilmore for dating. If it wasn't for that he'd be glad to see your father dead." Her voice shook with the intensity of her feeling.

I leaned across the table. "And where did the bones come from?" I saw the muscles of her face tighten, her eyes go blank. "Was it Levkas?" I asked, lowering my voice to a whisper. But Levkas was an island. "He couldn't possibly have got there."

"You don't realize how desperate he is." There were tears in her eyes. "This is his last chance. You mustn't-please you mustn't tell Holroyd about Levkas."

But Holroyd was talking to Kotiadis now. They were standing together on the edge of the clearing, away from the others, and Kotiadis already knew about Levkas. He knew all the locations.

"I think they'll decide to move camp to Ayios Giorgios now."

"Will Holroyd stay out here?" I asked.

She nodded. "I think so. He feels he's on to something now and he won't leave it to Alec. The time's too short if he's to read that paper. Yes," she said with finality. "He'll stay." And she added with a little jerk of her head to where Cartwright

and her brother were standing alone and silent, "They're resigned to it already, both of them. Alec is ambitious, and Hans is a dreamer. They thought this dig here-" She gave a little brittle laugh. "The academic world is full of conceit, you know."

Cartwright's dejection I could understand. I had seen the way he had flushed like a girl up there at the dig when Hol-royd had condemned it as a site of great complexity. But Hans Winters was still a student. "I should have thought your brother would be glad to work under a man like Holroyd."

She gave a little shrug. "You can't dream dreams with a man like Professor Holroyd in chajge, and Hans is my father all over again."

"Your father's dead, I believe."

"Yes, he's dead. Did Hans tell you?"

I nodded.

"Did he tell you how?" She was looking at me very directly. "He committed suicide."

"I'm sorry," I murmured.

"No need to be," she said harshly. "He wasn't cut out for this world. He was a Christian. A real Christian. And he thought everybody was like him. He was too bloody good to be true. And so unworldly … he drove his car straight off the road into the Amstel."

"You obviously don't take after him."

"No. I take after my mother's side of the family, thank God. But-" Her face suddenly softened. "On the surface, that is; deep down-I'm not so sure."

"You're older than your brother."

"Yes. Two years."

"He says you studied biology."

"Foreign languages. Biology was only a sideline." The habitual tenseness of her face was lit fleetingly by that quick elfin smile of hers. "You're wondering how I came to be associated with Dr. Van der Voort."

"I presumed it was through your brother."

"Yes. Indirectly. Dr. Van der Voort's books have never been published in Holland, but Hans got hold of the East German editions, and German being one of my languages-" She gave a little shrug. "I just became fascinated, that's all. Not the writing. He writes very technically. But the ideas, the way he correlates man and his environment-the effects of the Wiirm glaciation in particular-the extraordinary changes produced by the interstadials-hippopotamus, rhinoceros, reindeer, bison, mammoths, tropical animals interchanging with an almost arctic fauna, and man himself evolving all the time. And then, when I realized he was in Amsterdam, actually lived just across the canal from us-"

I had never asked her what her feelings for him were, and now, when I felt she was just about to explain of her own accord, Holroyd interrupted us. "I've had a talk with Deme-trios Kotiadis," he said to me. He was looking pleased with himself, standing over me, puffing contentedly at his pipe. "He's done a very thorough job tracing your father's movements last year and during his earlier visit in 1965. He's going to check up now on all the likely places, and when he finds him, he'll keep him under surveillance. But that's all. Leonodipoulos was very emphatic. I don't think he convinced him, but Kotiadis has his orders and Dr. Van der Voort will be free to rejoin the expedition, if that's what he wants." He patted my shoulder. "So you've no cause to worry about him any more."

I looked across at Kotiadis. He was still arguing with Leonodipoulos, the staccato sound of his voice ringing in the quiet of the glade as they walked towards the path that led to the village. "What are you planning to do?" I asked Holroyd.

"First thing tomorrow morning we'll move camp-to Ayios Giorgios first, and if that doesn't produce what I'm hoping for, then we'll be going to one of the islands. Levkas. Van der Voort seems to have been particularly interested in Levkas last year."

Kotiadis was shaking hands with Leonodipoulos. I watched him turn and hurry away up the path. "So you've found out all you need."

Holroyd nodded. "Enough I think to ensure that our time isn't wasted."

There was a smugness in the way he said it that had me simmering with anger. "You've no further use for him now?"

He was quick to understand my mood. "No man is indispensable, you know," he said mildly. "And from what Kotia-dis told me, he's not fit to be in charge of an expedition on his own. Would you agree with that?" And when I didn't say anything, he said, "Be honest now. He's not a fit man, is he?"

"He's been without food for some time. He's very weak, that's all."

It seemed to satisfy him. "In that case, he won't have gone far. He'll probably turn up at Ayios Giorgios. Kotiadis enquired there, of course, but-" He patted my shoulder in that aggravating way of his. "Any^vay, don't you worry. When he does turn up, I'm sure Miss Winters will see to it that he's properly looked after." He wanted to know my plans then. "Kotiadis told me you had a boat waiting for you at Preveza. Leonodipoulos will be leaving shortly for Athens. I'm quite certain he'd give you a lift-as far as Arta, at any rate."

I looked across at Sonia, but she was already on her feet and moving away. I had a feeling then, a sudden urgent feeling, that I must visit Levkas-now, before Holroyd got there. "Yes," I said. "I'd be glad of a lift." Levkas was on our route to the Aegean, whether we took the Corinth Canal or went south round the bottom of Greece.

Holroyd nodded as though the matter had never been in doubt. "Good. To be plain with you, I don't like people on a dig who are not a part of it. They get in the way. And as for your father, most of his life has been spent in strange countries. He's well able to look after himself."

"I expect you're right," I said.

"No doubt about it. And you've got your own life to live, eh-your own problems?" And he went off to fix it with Leonodipoulos.

That night I slept in a private house in the old Roman town of Arta. Leonodipoulos arranged it at a taverna where he was known. They were kindly people who spoke a few words of English and sent me to bed full of a strong local wine after showing me endless photographs of their son, who was about my own age and serving in a tank regiment somewhere up by the Bulgarian border. They had given me their best room, all Victorian style furniture and lace-lace curtains and the sheets and pillow cases of the big double bed edged with lace and smelling of lavender. A ewer and basin in blue china stood on a marble-topped wash-stand and there was even a chamber pot. Probably the room was typical of countless others belonging to the petit bourgeoisie in the country towns of Greece, so spotlessly clean, so lovingly cared for, that to me it was almost a museum piece. A single naked light bulb hanging from its flex in the middle of the ceiling was the only indication that the world had progressed in the last fifty years.

Lying there in the faded splendour of that brass-trimmed bedstead, the camp at Despotiko already seemed remote, part of another world to which I did not belong. When we had left they had already started packing up for the move to Ayios Giorgios. In the morning the tents would be gone, the olive grove empty except for the goats. The involvement which I had begun to feel was a very tenuous one. I was on my own again now and even my concern for the old man faded as my mind began to grapple with the problems of the voyage ahead. Leonodipoulos has given me a lot of information about sea conditions in the Aegean. He had sailed there regularly in a friend's yacht out of Vouliagmeni. He not only knew Samos, but he knew the actual port I should be using and warned me against the severe down-draughts to be expected off Pythago-rion whenever the meltemi was blowing.

This common interest in the sea had made the drive pleasant for both of us, and it amused me that Holroyd, in his haste to be rid of me, had made me a present of such a useful contact in the Greek Establishment. In fact, during our meal together in the taverna, Leonodipoulos had assured me that he would see to it that my father was all right; Kotiadis had orders to report to him as soon as he had located him.

I was woken in the morning by the daughter-in-law bringing my breakfast in on a tray. She had put in a brief appear-

ance the night before, leaving with a giggle and flash of dark eyes. I watched her now as she stretched up to pull the curtains. Like most of the girls I had seen in Greece she was too broad in the beam, too thick in the calves-a dumpy, unattractive figure. And yet somehow she managed to imbue her movements with a sensuous sexuality. And when she leaned over to put the tray on the bed I forgot about her figure; all I was conscious of was her eyes, big and shining and black like newly-washed grapes.

"Kafe," she said firmly and almost filled the cup with hot milk before adding a little of the very strong black coffee. Her skin had the sheen of olives. She smiled at me, and the smile lit up her eyes, and then she gave that embarrassed little giggle and was gone in a swirl of skirt and fat little buttocks.

I drank my coffee, wondering when the boy in those photographs would get home again. Six months they had said since he last had leave. She was too ripe a plum to be left on her own that long. She reminded me a little of Florrie. Florrie had that same southern sensuality-and there'd be another dawn, or perhaps a night watch. .

Somewhere above me a baby cried, and then I heard the murmur of the mother's soothing voice. Sex, procreation, birth, death-it all seemed much closer, more natural down here in the Mediterranean, an inevitable part of living. And the old people worrying. That had seemed inevitable, too. Worrying about their son, about themselves, about the future — that strange mixture of fear and human warmth and happiness that seems to be a characteristic of hot countries.

I was stripped to the waist, shaving, when she returned for the tray, and she stood there, her body thrust out to take the edge of it as she tried a few words of conversation-"You- Preveza-Simera?

She meant today, of course, and I nodded.

"Autobus-ten half hours."

She giggled, her eyes bright and liquid with the excitement of this contact with a stranger from another country. But then the baby started crying again, and as she listened the excitement in her eyes changed to something softer. "Stefan," she said, smiling gently, and she was gone-no swirl of skirt, but a mother to her young, quickly and with purpose.

They saw me to the bus, the whole family, including the baby; made sure I got a seat and waved me goodbye as though I were the son of the house. It was a leisurely journey, for we stopped at every village, and the waits were sometimes long. It was afternoon before we saw the Gulf of Amvrakikos. The great expanse of water was a silken blue, arrowed by the wake of a few fishing boats, and the hills beyond were puffed up to twice their size by the clouds that hung over them.

All the way down I had been seeing traces of that same aqueduct whose ventilation shafts marked the erosion in the red dunes. Now at last I was catching glimpses of the great city it had served, the ruins overgrown with creepers, half-buried in vegetation, but still gigantic in size. The outer wall ran like a stone rampart into green grass country where sheep and goats gazed. Beyond Nikopolis, the grass gave way to agriculture, and where there was irrigation, the land was intensively cultivated. And then at last we were in Preveza itself, swinging through an area of new building centred around a petrol storage depot and out on to the waterfront, a broad promenade built on the scale of a major seaside resort with the town behind it a low huddle of nondescript buildings.

The water was absolutely still, a sheet of glass mirroring the blue of the sky. I pressed my face to the dirty window. But there were no boats. The whole length of that waterfront was absolutely empty. The emptiness of it came as a shock to me. I had been so certain the Barretts would be waiting for me there, the boat anchored stern-on. The weather had been perfect. There had been no gales. The bus came to a stop and I got out with the rest of the passengers, standing there, irresolute in the sunshine, my suitcase in my hand. A group of gypsies passed with a mule-drawn cart, two dogs slinking in the shade below the axle, the women following, free-striding and upright, their skirts and shawls bright with colour. The little band was a gay contrast to the drab black of the Greeks

sitting over their coffee at the kafeneion, which was also the bus terminal, and out beyond the smooth strip of water that was the entrance to the Gulf of Amvrakikos, the further shore showed as a fringe of low-lying land. It was all flat country, the hills a long way away, and seaward I could see the buoys that marked the dredged channel. No vessels were coming in and the only thing that moved on the flfat molten surface of the water was a small open fishing boat powered by an outboard.

For a moment I was at a complete loss. Coromandel should have arrived two days ago. Standing there, conspicuous and somewhat forlorn, I realized how urgent had been my desire to get to Levkas, how committed I was to the idea of searching for a cave-shelter there similar to the one at Despotiko.

"Say, fellow-you American?"

I turned. A broad, grizzled man was staring at me with bright dark eyes from one of the tables. "No, English," I said.

"Englezos, Americanos-same thing, eh? I sail many ports." He reeled off the English ports he had been in, most of them barely recognizable the way he pronounced them. "I was stoker, see. In the old Mauritania one time. Jeez! That was work. You like a kaffee, sump'n to drink? What you like?"

He was a battered, garrulous old man who had knocked around the world in all sorts of ships. "Ain't many coal burners left now. They want greasers, not stokers. Anyways, I'm too old. An' I got dollars. Anybody got dollars in Greece, they can sit in the kafeneion an' do nothin'-jus' talk. That's a good life, eh?" He gave a toothless chuckle. "Not bad for an old man who's bin a stoker all his life. You in the war? No, too young, I guess. Torpedoed twice. Second time was on one of those P.Qs. Jeez, that was cold. We was in the goddam ice three days …"

I sat and drank my coffee and listened to that Ancient Mariner going on and on about the disaster that had hit a convoy to Murmansk. It was an incredible story, but difficult to follow. Finally he ran out of steam and I asked him if he had seen an English boat in Preveza during the last two days.

"An old fishing boat with a bowsprit? Yeah. She come in

Thursday evening, but she don't stay. She was lyin' right there." He indicated a position almost opposite us with a hand that had two fingers missing. "Woman spoke Greek. Very bad Greek. Said they gonna wait here for a friend. Guess that was you, eh? Well, they was gone next morning. Yesterday morning."

"Where did they go to?" I asked.

He shook his head. "They jus' vamoose." He smiled. I think he was pleased at remembering that word. And then he thrust his mutilated hand in front of my face. "See that? That was the first time I get the torpedo. Lucky I don't lose my fuckin arm." He was in mid-Atlantic then and it was ten minutes before I could extricate myself and visit the Port Captain's office. It was about a hundred yards further along the waterfront and there I was able to confirm Coromandel's movements. The Port Captain himself showed me the entry in his book. She had arrived at 18.30 hours on Thursday evening direct from Pylos and she had left the following morning at 08.30 bound for Port Vathy on the island of Meganisi. He did not speak English so that I was unable to question him, but just as I was leaving he indicated a poste restante box on the wall. There was a note in it addressed to me, just a line from Bert to say they would be back by Saturday evening, or at the latest Sunday morning.

There was a local chart pinned to the wall beside the Port Captain's desk. "Meganisi?" I asked him and he pointed to an island shaped like some extraordinary crayfish with a thick, pronged body and a whiplash tail. It was about ten miles south of the Levkas Canal and separated from the island of Levkas by the narrow Meganisi Channel.

There was a restaurant nearby and I left my suitcase there and walked out to a wooded promontory that looked across to the ruined fortress of Actium. By then a small breeze had come in and the sea glinted between the red boles of the pines. I sat at a table near a logwood kiosk that served coffee and soft drinks, watching the dredged channel. But though I stayed there until the last of the boys who had been running in and out of the water had gone home and the sun was slanting towards the sea, I saw only two ships come in, and both of them were caiques.

It was almost dark by the time I got back to the restaurant and there I had the best meal I had had in weeks-huge meaty prawns, fresh-caught that morning from the sands off Preveza. I was sitting over my coffee, wondering whether I would have to find myself a room for the night, when I saw the green and red of navigation lights close off the quay, heard the rattle of an anchor chain running out. By the time I was out of the restaurant the boat had turned stern-on and was coming in fast. It was Coromandel, and I reached the edge of the quay just as Bert heaved the first warp for the waiting harbour boy to slip over a bollard. He saw me, gave a cheerful wave, and the next moment the bight of chain that carried the second warp crashed at my feet. As soon as he had made fast and the gangplank had been rigged, I went on board. Bert's hand gripped mine. "Are you alone?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Where's Kotiadis?"

I began to explain, but then the glimpse of a white sweater showed for'ard and Florrie was spotlighted green as she came quickly down the starboard side. "Paul!" I suddenly found myself embraced, enveloped almost in the warmth of her emotional personality. "You're alone?"

"Yes, of course I'm alone." But when I started to explain what had happened so that they would understand why I wanted to visit Levkas, Bert stopped me. "Something we've got to tell you, something important. When we arrived here- the morning after, that is-"

"Not now." Florrie indicated the shadowy figures crowding the quay to look at the boat. "Wait till we're down below."

We made the warps fast, hauled in on the chain for'ard and then went down to the saloon. "It's your father, y'see," Bert said as he opened up the drink locker. "There's a village called Vatahori out there on Meganisi-"

"For heaven's sake," Florrie cut in. "Begin at the beginning."

"That's what I was trying to do." He shrugged. "Oh, well, you tell him yourself then."

She turned eagerly towards me. "You know we got in the evening before last? Well, yesterday morning it was-about five-thirty. There were footsteps on the deck. I'm a very light sleeper. I thought perhaps it was you. A voice called from the wheelhouse and I woke Bert and we went up to find this man sitting there slumped in the chart table seat. He looked like a scarecrow almost, his face drawn, his clothes hanging on him like rags. I thought for a moment he was some sort of beggar. And then he staggered to his feet, mumbled his name and said he was your father. . and all in the same breath he asked if we'd take him out to Meganisi."

"He said you'd sent him." Bert handed Florrie the brandy he had just poured for her. "You did send him, didn't you?"

"I told him about your boat, how I'd got to Greece. But that's all."

"Well, it doesn't matter," she said, sipping her drink. "There he was, and he was so ill-looking and weak-we brought him down here, and when he told me he hadn't eaten for a long time, I made him an omelette and some coffee. He had the sense to eat it slowly, but he was dreadfully tired. And he wouldn't go to bed-not until we'd promised to take him to Meganisi."

"You're sure it was Meganisi, not Levkas, he wanted?" I asked.

"Of course. The village of Vatahori on Meganisi, that's where he wanted to go-and without anyone knowing."

"Did he tell you why?"

She shook her head. "Not really. He kept talking about a cave, something he had to do. He wasn't very coherent."

"He never mentioned Levkas," Bert handed me the bottle of Scotch and a glass. "And he was quite straight with us- about the risk, I mean. But he seemed so desperately urgent-"

"We couldn't just leave him here to be picked up by the police or that man Kotiadis. Even if he was a Communist agent. Which I don't believe."

"He told you about that, did he?" I asked.

"Oh yes-everything. But it was all very confused. The words just poured out of him. I don't think we understood half of it, did we, Bert? He just went on talking and talking, as though he couldn't stop. And then, when Bert said we'd take him, he just collapsed. We put him to bed in your bunk, and then Bert went ashore to clear with the Port Captain's office."

"Where is he now?" I asked.

"I told you, at Vatahori," Bert said. "And that made it a little more risky. They haven't got a harbour official at Vatahori so I had to tell the Port Captain here we were going to Port Vathy."

"Does he know you had a passenger on board?"

He shook his head. "They didn't ask me about that, and where officials are concerned, I always say what the eye doesn't see. ." He laughed. "But then it was dark when he'd come on board, and the truck that had brought him down to Preveza had gone straight on to a farm further along the coast. There was no way they could know we'd got an extra bod on board." He took a quick gulp at his whisky. "I suppose it was about eight-thirty when we cleared. A nice westerly breeze, motor-sailing all the way, right through the Levkas Canal. And no trouble at Vatahori-nobody there, just a long inlet marked on the chart as Port Atheni. You anchor in the middle and the village of Vatahori is about a mile from the end of it."

"And you put him ashore there?"

"Yes, after breakfast this morning." And he added, "He wouldn't let us go with him up to the village. Said he'd be all right-he had friends there."

"He didn't need help, anyway," Florrie said. "He'd slept most of the time we were sailing. And afterwards, when we'd anchored, he had the most enormous meal-bacon and eggs, the lot." She smiled. "I thought he'd never stop eating. And

though he looked so ill, he had enough energy to walk up the hill."

Bert nodded. "He's tougher than he looks, that's certain."

"He was like a kid really. I just poured food into him, and you could see him converting it into energy. And talking all the time. To himself, mostly-for his own benefit. All technical stuff. I couldn't understand half of it." And she added, "I can see him now, walking away with a brief wave of his hand, up the stony track that led to the village, a bent old man, his shoulders stooped, his eyes on the ground, and still wearing those ragged clothes. It didn't seem right-to let him go like that, all alone."

"It's what he wanted," Bert said.

After that they had sailed round to Port Vathy, the next bay to the west, and made their number to the Customs man and then steamed straight back to Preveza. "Dead easy." He hesitated, looking at me a little uncertainly. "I hope we did right-taking him out to that island and leaving him there?"

"Yes," I said. "Of course. It was very good of you. And you say he had friends at Vatahori?"

Bert nodded. "That's what he said." And Florrie added, "We wouldn't have left him otherwise-not like that. He didn't look at all well. Very drawn and his skin a bad colour."

"Did he say why it was so urgent?" Only a narrow strip of water separated Meganisi from Levkas and if he had friends at Vatahori they could presumably take him across there. "He must have given you a reason."

"Oh, yes." Florrie nodded. "But as I say, it was all very confused-something he had to do-some bones. He kept talking about bones."

"That's right," Bert agreed. "A collection of bones and artefacts they were keeping for him-his friends, I think. What was their name, Florrie? Pappa-something. They were Greeks."

"Pappadimas."

"Yes, that's right. I remember now. A collection he'd brought out with him. The previous year. But, as Florrie says.

Levkas Man

it was all a bit confused like. He kept talking about a cave. And a professor came into it. He had to get to them before this professor."

"Professor Holroyd?"

"Yes, I think that was the name. Like I say, he seemed to have something he had to do very urgently before this professor bloke beat him to it. He kept on about time. He hadn't much time, he said. I remember that because he gave me the creeps for a moment, staring at us, his eyes shining under his shaggy brows. I thought he was. . well, you'll excuse my saying this about your father, but I thought he was a bit off his rocker."

"He was very tired, that's all," Florrie said. "Tired and ill."

"Okay." Bert shrugged. "Tired and ill and a bit delirious. But it comes to the same thing. A bloke in that sort of state, you have to humour him, so we took him to Meganisi."

I nodded. I knew what he meant. I had felt the same up there in the red dunes. "I'll have to go there," I said. "When can we leave?"

"For Meganisi?"

"Yes."

He thought about ten in the morning. Florrie needed to get some fresh stores from the market and he'd have to clear again with the Port Captain's office. "They'll think I've got a ruddy girl friend there, or something."

Florrie laughed. "Not with me on board, they won't."

It was late by the time I had retrieved my suitcase and told them what had happened at Despotiko. But even so, I found it difficult to sleep. Partly it was the stuffiness of the cabin after camping out in the open air. But chiefly it was the old man. It was extraordinary the effect he had on people. When I had asked the Barretts why they had taken the risk of running him out to Meganisi-and it was a big risk, knowing that he was in trouble with the Security Police-all Florrie had said was, "You weren't here, Paul. If you had been, you'd understand." And Bert added, "If he'd been pleading for us to ship him out

of the country, I wouldn't have done it. But he wasn't trying to escape. He had something urgent and positive he wanted to do. I may not understand about anthropology, but a man who's dedicated to his work and his beliefs-" He had turned then and poured himself another whisky. "You may not like him. You don't have to like him. But you respect him, even if there is something very strange about him. I felt-" His open, honest features had reflected his own puzzlement as he searched for words to express his feelings. "He sort of made me feel I was in the presence of an enormously powerful mind. Y'see, when a man is ranging over thousands of years-it's like the stars at night when you're sailing-you feel so small and insignificant. It just didn't seem important that we were taking a risk in helping him to get where he wanted."

When I went on deck next morning it was cloudy, a grey day with the wind from the west. It looked as though we would have a good sail and after breakfast I went with Bert to the Port Captain's office. I think they knew all about me. Anyway, we had no difficulty in clearing again for Meganisi. Then, back on board, we heard the sound of women's voices in the saloon and I went below to find Sonia there. She was on the settee berth, facing Florrie across the table, and she jumped up as I came in. "Paul." Her voice was urgent. "They're packing up. They're not staying at Ayios Giorgios."

Holroyd had spent an afternoon in the red dunes, had found nothing of real interest and had made the decision to move after supper the previous night. She had left the camp at four in the morning, walked down to the main road where she had waited over an hour before getting a lift. "I was afraid I'd miss you."

"She wants to come with us." Florrie's tone was controlled — not openly hostile, but it was clear she didn't want another woman on her own boat.

"Only to Meganisi," Sonia said quickly. "You see-last night-Kotiadis came up to the camp-" She was facing me, her voice, her whole manner, distraught. "The Chief of Police at Levkas had been making enquiries for him and that eve-

ning he had phoned him at his hotel in Jannina. I've just been trying to explain to Mrs. Barrett. They know where Dr. Van der Voort is now. Kotiadis can't do anything-not at the moment. But he's passed all the information on to Professor Holroyd-where your father's staying, the locations he was working on last year, everything. And I'm scared. I'm scared of what will happen when Professor Holroyd gets there. Please-" she was leaning forward, a note of desperation in her voice. "Mrs. Barrett doesn't realize. . please try and convince them of the urgency. They shouldn't meet-your father and Professor Holroyd-not before I've seen him, not without warning."

So it was all coming to a head on this island of Meganisi. I sat down. "You say Holroyd knows the location of his digs?"

She nodded. "Kotiadis told him. That's why they're moving camp this morning."

"And the digs are on Meganisi, not Levkas?"

"One on Meganisi-by an island called Tiglia. That's in the channel between Meganisi and Levkas. The other is across the channel, on the Levkas side-a bay. I can't remember the name now. I typed it. But it's gone for the moment."

"What are you suggesting then?" I asked. "That he'll go for Holroyd the way he went for Cartwright?"

She shook her head. "No, not that. But something. I don't know. I must get there first. Otherwise-" She hesitated. "Oh, it's all so stupid. And to try and explain what I feel. Can't you see? Working on his own all last year, and now … If it isn't all to be wasted, he's got to fight this man. Not physically, I don't mean that. Not with violence. But he mustn't become another Marais. He mustn't lose out to an academic publicist, have all his work filched by a man who's never done any real basic research in his life. It's wrong, wrong-all wrong. He's got to fight back-somehow."

She was looking anxiously at the three of us. "Please-please take me. I don't like the thought of him there alone. Anything could happen. But if he had support, people there who believed in him …" She reached for her handbag.

"Something else I have to tell you. Dr. Gilmore is arriving by plane this afternoon, at Corfu." She handed me a cable. "I got that just before we left Despotiko." It gave Gilmore's flight number and ETA and instructed her to contact him at the Kerkira Hotel. "I kept him informed, everything, by letter. He asked me to. And then, when I knew Professor Holroyd was coming out, I cabled him. I think Dr. Gilmore is the only man who can help your father now."

"And you want us to pick him up at Corfu?" She nodded, her silence more pleading than words.

The white limestone cliffs of Paxos were on our starboard bow, Corfu dropping astern, when Bert relieved me at the helm. "Are you going outside Levkas or through the canal?" I asked him. "The wind's north-westerly, increasing." It was the prevailing wind of this coast and I thought it would be force 6 by the late afternoon.

"Oh, I think the canal," he said, without even glancing at the chart.

"It's a dead run and a lee shore when we make the entrance."

He nodded. "But once inside we'll be in quiet water." He was thinking of our passenger. He had looked tired, almost frail when we had met him at the airport the previous day, and though we had had an early meal, he had insisted on staying up until he had all the facts of the situation clear in his mind. I had given him my cabin and he had not stirred from his bunk all morning.

"It's running it a bit fine- it'll be almost dark when we get there." I handed over the wheel and took another look at Chart 1609. It was divided into two sections-the canal itself and the north and south entrances, including the whole of the island of Levkas. The northern entrance was a bight formed by the island and the mainland; it had a sand spit backed by shallows running away to the north-east, and the entrance itself was a 90° turn to starboard, close in to the shallows and flanked by sandbanks. It looked singularly unattractive for a boat running under sail before a strong north-westerly breeze. "Well, you know what it's like."

"Yes, I know it."

He had altered course to port, and though the jib was still full, the staysail was beginning to slat under the lee of the main. The boat was steady, but pitching slightly now that the sea was getting up. He asked me to boom the staysail out and up for'ard I was more conscious of the surge of the bows, could feel the weight of the wind. The sky was blue, but veiled with cirrus, the sea white with the break of wave-caps. When I'd rigged the boom and clipped it to the clew of the staysail I went aft and eased out the mainsheet. From the stern I could still see the Pindus Mountains, a white glint of snow at the far end of the Corfu Channel where the Albanian coast began.

Down in the saloon Florrie and Sonia had finished their lunch. "Dr. Gilmore all right?" I asked.

Sonia nodded. "He's had a cup of Marmite and now he's propped up in his bunk reading some abstruse paper in the American Journal of Anthropology. He said he had no idea that a small boat could be so comfortable." She smiled. "He's really remarkably chirpy. Oh, and he asked me to give you this. He thought it might help you to understand your father." She reached to the shelf behind her head and handed me a wadge of typewritten sheets. "It's an article written by one of his students." It was headed- T/j^ Tragic Life of Eugene Marais.

"You mentioned that name yesterday morning."

She nodded. "Marais was also a South African. That's why it came to my mind. And because it's a very sad, very well-known case. A brilliant man who had his work filched by somebody else."

"And he killed himself?" It was there in the first paragraph-Lflrf};er^ journalist, poet and naturalist, patriot and drug addict, and in the end-suicide; but for all that a man so in advance of his time. ." "Is that what you're afraid of?" I asked. "That he'll commit suicide?"

"No. No, I don't think so. I hadn't really thought. But you read it. You'll see then why Dr. Gilmore thought it relevant."

Florrie came in from the galley with my lunch and I put the typescript on top of the drink locker. I was hungry. Also I was more concerned at the moment about the entrance to the Levkas Canal. I was remembering what Florrie had said about her husband's navigation, and it would be dark by the time we got there.

However, there is no point in anticipating a moment of crisis, and since I had nothing else to occupy my mind when I had finished my meal, I took the typescript up on deck and settled myself for'ard of the wheelhouse. I was sheltered from the wind there and the sun was warm. I'm not a great reader, not of biographies anyway, and I don't think the piece was particularly well written. Nevertheless, it was such an extraordinary story that I forgot for a moment about the difficult entrance we would have to make, barely noticed the increase in the wind's strength.

It was certainly a tragic story, and as I read it, I found myself comparing it all the time with my father's life. Communism had been at the root of his loneliness. In the case of Marais, it was patriotism. He came of an old Afrikaaner family and the outbreak of the Boer War had caught him in London still studying for the bar, having abandoned medicine after four years. He was interned, but by the end of the war he was in Rhodesia, smuggling arms across the border to the Boers. All this I could understand; it was the sort of thing I would have done myself. But then he had cut himself off from

the human race and in an isolated part of the Transvaal, the Waterberg, had lived with a troop of baboons.

In a sense it was not unlike my father's disappearance into the red dunes, except that while Marais had had the company of living creatures, my father had been cut off from all life, with only the dead past of human occupation for company. But only for three weeks, not three years.

In carrying out this intensive study in the field Marais was half a century ahead of any other scientist. Nobody, until after the Second World War, had apparently considered it important to observe the behaviour of primates in their natural state, rather than in captivity. And since the violence of his patriotic fervour dictated that the only account of his observations should be published in an Afrikaans newspaper, his work went unrecognized. The articles were not translated into English until 1939, and by then he was dead. And it was the same with his later study of termite society.

Six years after Marais's articles on the white ant appeared in Afrikaans, a Belgian named Maeterlinck had published in a popular scientific series a little book called La Vie des Termites. Marais had sued him, but Maeterlinck was not only a man of letters who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but his books on scientific subjects were widely read. The truth was confused with sour grapes. In any case, barrister though Marais was, an international legal action of this kind against an established public figure was beyond his resources. Most of his money had gone long ago in compensation to farmers for the depredations of his baboons during those three years spent alone in the Waterberg. It was not until after his death, when his articles were translated into English and published under the title The Soul of the White Ant, that the basis for Maeterlinck's book became apparent to the scientific world and Marais recognized for the genius he was.

But for Marais himself, the comfort of morphine and ultimate suicide had replaced justice. He remained unrecognized throughout his life. A man who voluntarily cuts himself off from society cannot complain if that same society ignores him. This sentence, on the last page of the typescript, had been underlined and in the margin Gilmore had written-Pieter Van der Voort has done just this as far as the Western world is concerned and anything he may discover will be accorded an even more hostile reception than would Marais' observations. The reasons for this I will explain later.

That was it-the strange life of another South African with a chip on his shoulder. And though my father hadn't confined his writings to Afrikaans, it had amounted to almost the same thing as far as the Western world was concerned- his two books published only in Communist countries. I sat there for a long time after I had finished reading, not feeling the sun on my face, not hearing the roar of the bow wave as we ran downwind, only thinking of my father, comparing his story with Marais's. Would my father also have to wait half a century for recognition-presuming that he too was a genius? And I couldn't help thinking that if some dedicated student had written an article about him, setting out his whole life story like this, and I had read it, then perhaps I would have seen him for the sort of man he was and have understood him.

I looked down again at that last page, at the passage Gil-more had underlined and the comment he had written in the margin. / will explain later. What more was there to explain? I was thinking of the old man alone there in the red dunes, that strange feeling I had had of something terrible and evil, and then Bert called to me from the wheelhouse. He wanted the jib lowered.

We were closing the land fast now, the wind force 7 in the gusts, and the sun slanting into cloud. By the time I had got the fores'l down single-handed, dusk was closing in. By six we were in the shallows and the sea a white mass of broken water with the high north-west of Levkas looming large on our starb'd side. To the east of it, the land dropped away to sea-level, and in the fading light, it was quite impossible to make out the entrance to the canal against the background of Levkas town.

The four of us were in the wheelhouse then, watching tensely as the boat drove towards the shallows. Florrie was at the wheel. It was at this moment that Dr. Gilmore emerged from the companionway, still in his pyjamas and wearing an old fawn dressing gown. He stood for a moment looking at the land. "Levkas?" he asked.

I nodded. I thought I could see the lighthouse on the western arm now, a small white tower, and behind it the ruined bulk of the citadel. Bert must have seen it, too, for he ordered a change of course to starb'd and started the engine. We began to roll then, spray spattering the windshield, and Gilmore grabbed my arm for support. "You read that little paper on Marais, did you?"

"Yes." I was preoccupied, going over in my mind the handling of main and mizzen sails which would be necessary when we made the turn inside the canal. At least there was some daylight left.

"Tragic. Very tragic. A genius, and unknown, disregarded for years. But an intellectual, of course." He looked at me. "Don't confuse him with your father. The fact that they are both South Africans is only incidental."

"Then why did you ask me to read it?"

"I thought it might help you to understand the ruthless-ness of the scientific world, the loneliness of pure research." He had found his balance now and let go my arm. "But don't worry. Your father is a fighter. He is more like Dart, for instance, than Marais." He looked at me, smiling. "Sonia tells me you've been reading Dart's book. I gave it to her because I think Pieter. ." He hesitated. "Well, maybe not as great as Dart or Broom, but when a man conceives a theory, spends all his resources-money, time and energy-to prove it, then there's always a chance. ." He had turned and was leaning forward, peering at the land ahead. For a time he seemed lost in his own thoughts. "But then Dart had the advantage of large areas of limestone, his specimens preserved by fossiliza-tion. Here there's no surface limestone. We're into volcanic country now, a continuation of the middle Mediterranean fault." And he added, "An interesting formation this, a promontory of the mainland rather than an island. I wonder if there is anything left of the old Roman canal. There was an earlier one, too, built by the Corinthians."

"Bits of the Roman canal are still visible," Bert said. "You'll see them in the morning." He had taken over the wheel now and was leaning slightly forward, his eyes narrowed. He seemed quite confident, and shortly afterwards he asked me to go aft and stand by the sheets. "Harden the main right in as we turn the sandbank. The mizzen, too."

Outside the wheelhouse the noise of the sea and the boat's movement was much louder. The lighthouse at the end of the protecting wall seemed to rush towards us out of the darkening line of the land. Bert gave it a wide berth, steering perilously close to the further shore. The piled-up yellow of a naked sandbank slid by close to starboard. The bows swung as we made the turn, the sea smoothed out under the lee, and suddenly all was quiet except for the flapping of the sails. We were inside, motoring in calm water, the boat heeling as I winched in the sheets.

The port of Levkas is no more than a bulge in the canal, three-quarters of a mile south-south-west of the entrance. We berthed alongside the quay, handed our transit-log to the harbour official, and having stowed the sails, went below for a drink. For an old man who had never been to sea in a small boat before Dr. Gilmore seemed in remarkably good heart. "It's only when I'm ill that I get a chance to spend the whole day in bed-and that's not often." He was smiling, sitting there very bright and alert in his dressing gown and drinking whisky.

It may have been the drink, or perhaps it was the excitement of the voyage, but he became very talkative. He had never been to Africa, had never met Dart or Broom, only Leakey, yet he could talk about all three of them as though they were old friends. "They are the three giants of modern anthropology-Broom particularly. He was almost as old as I am when he turned from zoology to Dart's collection of fos-

sils, taking up the process of man's evolution from small mammalian ancestors, rather like Smith did with that living sea creature of his, the ceolocanth, which he called 'Old Four-legs.' " There was a glint of laughter in his eyes. "We're back fifty million years now." And he added, "It has always been my dream that a student of mine would become one of the greats. There was a moment, a long time ago now-in nineteen thirty-five I think-when I thought that Pieter might. ." He shook his head. "A pity. A great pity. There he was, in Africa, within a stone's throw-you might call it that in relation to the size of the continent-within a stone's throw of the world's greatest anthropological site. ." Again that sad shake of the head. "Just a youngster with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He was in too much of a hurry, too impatient. And there it was, waiting for him-the Olduvai Gorge. A stone's throw away, that's all. The chance of a lifetime. ."

His mention of the Olduvai Gorge reminded me of that album. I asked him where the gorge was, and he said, "Tanganyika. I believe they call it Tanzania now." He shook his head. "So much has changed. When I was a young man we owned half Africa. All gone now."

He sat looking at nothing for a moment. I thought his mind was wandering back down the long vista of the years-incredible as it might seem, he would have been alive at the time of the Boer War. I told him about the album with its faded pictures of a collection of bones at the bottom of a dry dusty pit, the words that had been written beside it. He smiled and nodded, "Yes, yes. That's it. Only a hundred miles from Olduvai-he wrote that, did he? A stone's throw, just as I said."

"What was it all about?" I asked. He had closed his eyes again and I was afraid his mind would wander off on to something else. "You wrote him a letter, in nineteen thirty-five. He kept all your letters, in a bundle in the bureau."

Gilmore nodded, smiling vaguely. "He was always writing to me, always asking my advice or for information. So he thought them worth keeping. I'm glad."

"They were type^vritten," I said. "All except the one written in nineteen thirty-five-in it you said you couldn't condone his behaviour, that it placed him beyond the pale and that thereafter everything he discovered would be suspect."

"You saw that letter, did you?" He leaned back, his eyes half-closed. "I see. And you don't understand it? You don't know what it's about?" ^

"No."

"He never told you?" And then he nodded. "No, no, of course not. No man likes his son to know he was caught cheating." He sipped his drink, staring at me. "You've read that paper on Marais. You know how a genius can be treated. And now. . this is what I said I'd explain later." He leaned forward quickly. "Whether he likes it or not, you've a right to know, for it will be remembered against him. However sound his theory, they won't believe him. And all because of something that happened a long time ago." He paused and took a cigarette from the box above the drink locker. Bert lit it for him and he leaned back, puffing at it eagerly, his eyes half closed again as though collecting his thoughts. "He was just a kid at the time. It was after he had got his degree and had returned to South Africa. He was in an angry mood and it took him alone into the bush in search of the 'dawn man.' He had a theory, you see." He hesitated. "The theory won't interest you, of course, and since you obviously know nothing about his world it will be difficult to make you realize the enormity of what he tried to do." His hand suddenly banged at the side of the settee berth. "And he was right. That was the tragedv of it. Everything that has been discovered since- a great deal during the last decade or so-has proved him right." He sighed, leaning forward so that the bulkhead light sharpened the brittle bone formation of his face, glinted on his pale grey eyes. "But he tried to cut corners; he manufactured evidence. And that was unforgiveable."

"You mean the picture I saw in the album?"

He nodded.

"And the evidence he manufactured-it was the skull, I suppose; the one displayed in the glass top of the bureau in his study?"

Gilmore nodded again, vigorously. "That's it. You remember I recognized it at once, as soon as I came into the study. I had never seen it before. Photographs, yes; but he never let it out of his hands. Wouldn't trust anybody to handle it." He paused for a moment, his eyes a little wide and staring as though he were still appalled at what my father had done. And then suddenly he gave a small chuckle. "Does the Piltdown Man mean anything to you?" He seemed to assume my ignorance for his eyes searched the faces of the others, all listening intently, as though gathering his audience together. And then he went on, barely pausing for breath, "It was a hoax, the most fantastic, barefaced hoax in the history of anthropology." Again that sudden, amused chuckle. "Students love it, of course. It makes all the experts look such fools."

He paused there, and in the silence I could hear the wind ruffling the water against the hull. 'Pieter was always fascinated by the Piltdown story. He argued that it fitted too neatly the post-Darwinian belief that Homo sapiens was God-created, even though he did evolve from the apes." He leaned back, drawing reflectively at his cigarette, blowing the smoke in a long streamer from his pursed lips, his eyes bright with the thought of what he was telling me. "You have to remember that the Darwinian theory of evolution was a great shock to the religious beliefs of the period. Even now, we are still very reluctant to face up to the realities of man's evolution- we tend to describe him as a tool-maker, when, in fact, his development is based mainly on his ability to produce weapons. When Darwin died in 1882 his theory of evolution was established beyond question, but most scientists clung doggedly to the idea of man created in the image of God. The Piltdown skull fitted this theory perfectly. The bits and pieces included part of a skull that indicated a brain almost as large as modern man's, and associated with it were the bones of animal remains dating back about a million years. The size of the brain case, in association with the known date of the animal remains, indicated that man had developed through God's gift of a large brain, not that his present large brain and capacity for thought had been part of the normal processes of evolution. Some of the more progressive scientists had reservations about the 'dawn-man' as they called it, chiefly because there was half a jaw that clearly belonged to the chimpanzee family and the skull fragments could be reconstructed in various ways to give different sizes of brain."

He went on to describe its discovery by some workmen in the gravels of the Sussex Ouse in 1912, how it had been accepted as genuine for forty years, and then he was explaining the way in which the whole thing had been bust wide open by a backroom anthropologist in the basement of the British Museum. His voice, his whole manner of telling it, had a sort of boyish enthusiasm that was infectious. Like Dart on the Taung skull, he made the Piltdown mystery sound like a detective story. First, the chemical test that had shown three times as much fluorine in the skull as in the jaw bone, proving beyond doubt that the two were quite unconnected. Then Geiger counter tests, with all the animal remains recording a count of between 10 and 25, except three elephant teeth, which gave counts of 175, 203 and 355. Finally, a world-wide search that tore the whole thing to shreds by indicating Tunisia as the only source of fossil remains of elephants giving such high beta ray counts.

He lit another cigarette. "That was in 1953," he said. 'Torty-one years after-too long a gap for the man who perpetrated the hoax to be identified." The thin parchment skin of his face was crinkled in a smile. "Extraordinary, isn't it? Picture him yourself, stealing off to Sussex one week-end with a pocketful of bones filched from some travelled family's private collection, then creeping out in the moonlight to bury them in a gravel pit where he knew workmen would discover them. And all those years, watching and saying nothing-just laughing to himself at such utter nonsense being taken seriously by the leading anthropologists and palaeontologists of the day."

The picture was so vivid, so detailed I couldn't help it: "You would have been a student yourself when the bones were originally discovered."

He looked at me with his head on one side like a bird. "Yes, that's so." He chuckled quietly to himself, then reached for his drink as though to drown his amusement. "But what Pieter did wasn't done for a joke. He'd no sense of humour. None whatever." He was frowning, his face suddenly serious. "He was in deadly earnest. But unfortunately for him he was in Africa, out in the bush, not in a gravel pit in Sussex. There were no quarry men digging around in the cave-shelter where he buried his bones, so he had to dig them up himself. A youngster like that, rushing his fences. ." He shook his head, no ghost of a smile. "However well disposed you were, you couldn't help smelling a rat. And then, when he wouldn't let the evidence out of his hands, only photographs-well, they tore him to pieces, those that bothered. And now, of course, those books published in the Communist countries." He sighed and gave a little shrug. "A carbon-fourteen dating of thirty-five thousand b.p. -that's something no anthropologist will readily accept for Cro-Magnon man. And from him of all people. . they're not going to like it, not at all."

"But they're scientists," I said. "Surely, if the evidence is overwhelming. ."

"Where did those bones come from-did he tell you?"

"No. But he seemed pleased when I told him you felt he'd no right to keep the location to himself. He said they'd talk, they'd pass it on and soon everybody would know. Isn't that how things become established-the gradual accumulation of evidence?" And I began telling him again about the red dunes, how this had established in the old man's mind the low level of the Mediterranean during the Ice Age.

But he refused to accept that the dunes formed a vital link in the chain of evidence. "I think you are confusing two things here. In my view, the essence of Pieter's genius is that he is willing to carry on an ethological-to use an American term-an ethological study, whilst at the same time developing in the field a new theory covering what to us has always

been an evolutionary gap. If you had read his Journal. . but then you probably wouldn't have understood it." He sipped at his drink and turned to Sonia. "I have spent most of today reading and thinking about a report of some very interesting psychological experiments carried out on rhesus monkeys-controlled experiments in captivity set against careful and protracted studies of these nearest-to-human primates in the wild. And I have been comparing the conclusions this Harvard scientist arrives at with those reached by Pieter Van der Voort, not as a result of experimenting with monkeys, but achieved by taking a hard, detached look at himself. It's a fascinating study, starting with his childhood. His conclusion, basically, is that 'normality' is only achieved within a social framework, that the loner represents the extremes, producing at one end of the spectrum the most debased of creatures, at the other end the most brilliant-the genius, the prophet, the great leader." He chuckled quietly. "The trouble is that Pieter cannot make up his mind into which category he falls."

Sonia shook her head. "I don't understand," she said.

Nor did I. "He went there to escape. It was the only place he knew where he could hide up and at the same time still be in contact with the evidence that supported his theory."

But Gilmore shook his head. "An experiment I would call it. These days we are so dazzled by our material progress-supersonic flight, nuclear physics, the moon landings, quasars, lasers, etc., etc.-we are apt to forget that our ancestors were quite remarkably advanced in other ways. You say that he was escaping into solitude. But remember, he had given way to his natural aggressive instincts-to the devil that is in all of us. And what if Christ were right-what if forty days and forty nights of lonely fasting and praying is the medically exact formula for inducing a state of self-hypnosis where environmental, even perhaps hereditary, instincts can be overcome? This I think was what he was trying to prove. Not an experiment with poor little captive monkeys, but an experiment with his own flesh, himself under the microscope, and then to have it interrupted. ." He hesitated, frowning. "Lying in my bunk today I tried to put myself in his place, imagine how I would react when faced with a man like Holroyd seeking to take advantage of something I had discovered." He shook his head. "Not easy." He turned to Sonia again. "You know he half killed a man in Russia-at a dig of his near Tashkent?"

She nodded. "Yes. He told me. It was when he was ill, his mind rambling, and I wasn't sure."

"Oh, it was real all right. He goes into it in great detail in his Journal. A Bulgarian. He tried to throttle him with his bare hands, a blind fury of rage after the fellow had stolen some artefacts from his tent. Fortunately his assistant was near at hand, otherwise he'd have killed the poor devil. A fit of uncontrollable violence like that. ." He looked across at me. "Now perhaps you understand why he was so disturbed, so mortified at his blind, instinctive attack on Cartwright."

That night I dreamed I faced my father, both of us hellbent on murder. Maybe it was the prawns we'd had for dinner. I was berthed in a pipe cot up for'ard amongst the sails and I woke in a muck sweat thinking I'd killed him. After that I dozed fitfully, feeling we were both of us doomed. Then suddenly it was four o'clock and Bert woke me with a cup of tea.

We were away at first light, motoring south in the wake of a big trading caique, the old canal banks straight lines of stone in a vast area of shallows. The flat marsh country, the grey dawn, depressed me and my mood was sombre. Ahead, on its hill, rose the massive bulk of Fort St. George, and beyond it, the bare bleak island hills stood like early prints, rimming the open roadstead of Port Drepano.

The sun rose as we left the canal, keeping between the three pairs of buoys that marked the dredged channel, and the towering heights of Levkas were touched with gold. The sea was glass, not a breath of wind. By seven-thirty we were abreast of Skropio, a steep little wooded island owned by a Greek millionaire, and half an hour later we entered Port Vathy, the houses sleeping in the morning sun and donkeys browsing at the water's edge. There was a small fishing boat selling the night's catch and near it a caique loaded with bright-coloured Turkish rugs. The Customs Officer greeted us in his own home, dressed in vest and trousers, not yet shaved, and when Bert had obtained permission to visit the inlets of Meganisi provided he finally cleared from Vathy, Florrie began to make enquiries about Holroyd.

"Holerod. Ne, ne." The Greek official nodded vigorously and told her that the whole party had arrived the day before in a caique from limani Levkas. They had enquired about a man who had been digging the year before in a cave beyond Spartokori and he had taken them to see Zavelas. Would we like to talk to Zavelas who spoke English and knew everything that went on in Meganisi?

We found him on the waterfront, sitting at a table in the shade with the Pappas. He was a big, powerful man with a hooked nose and iron grey hair. The Greek Orthodox priest was younger, a very striking figure in his black habit, tall black hat, his dark beard combed and silky and his long hair drawn back to a little bun above the nape of the neck. I think it was the presence of the priest that made Florrie excuse herself and return to join Sonia on the boat.

Zavelas was a very different man to my garrulous friend at Preveza, quieter, more reserved. And very much tougher. He had gone to sea as a kid, tramps first, then whaling and sealing out of Gloucester, Mass. He had served in the U.S. navy during World War II, had been a lumberjack out west in the Rockies and had finished up as a cop in San Francisco. 'Tish-erman's Wharf-you know it?"

"Yes," I said. "I did one voyage through the Panama Canal and up to S.F."

He nodded, pleased. "A good place. But plenty tough. I guess Port Vathy is quieter, eh?" He was smiling, his blue eyes staring at me very directly. Either he came of pure Greek stock or there was a touch of the Viking in his ancestry.

He was not the official headman, but his American background, particularly his police experience, set him apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the small island community. The police chief at Levkas was a personal friend of his-he mentioned this quite early on in the conversation, thus establishing his unique position. I got the impression that he and the Pappas virtually ran the place. Certainly the Customs official treated them both with deference.

Nobody had ordered coffee, but it came and I think it was on the house. I offered him a cigarette. "English, eh? I guess we don't see many English cigarettes here in Port Vathy." He took one. So did the priest and I left the packet on the table. "Now, what's on your mind, fella?" He was suddenly a San Franciscan cop again, watching me closely as he lit his cigarette and began sipping noisily at his coffee. "This guy-" he indicated the Customs Officer-"says your name's Van der Voort and you're in'erested in a man named Holerod who arrived yesterday."

Holroyd had come in by caique at four-thirty in the afternoon, had left the other two members of his party to set up camp on the waste ground at the head of the inlet and had walked alone to Vatahori. He had got back to Port Vathy a little after nine and had then arranged with Vassilios, a local fisherman, to take them round to the west side of the island in the morning. "Now, you tell me something." His gaze fastened on Bert. "Two days ago you slip a man ashore at Port Atheni without informing the Customs Officer. Why?"

Bert was too astonished to say anything and Zavelas smiled, his eyes cold. "You think we don't know what goes on in our own island?"

"I didn't think it mattered," Bert said. "He'd been here before-"

"Okay. No need to explain. We know all about Dr. Van der Voort." He turned to me. "And you're his son. That right?"

"Yes," I said. "How did you know?"

"I have told you, Kapetan Constantinidi is an old buddy of mine. He is Chief of Police in Levkas." And he added, "You know Demetrios Kotiadis? Then I do not need to explain. We have been expecting you." His blue eyes were star-

ing at me. "You wanna talk to the Doctor first or this Professor Holerod?"

"Holroyd," I said.

He nodded, smiling. "Like some more cawfee? No? Okay then, we go." And he got to his feet.

Five minutes later we were chugging out of the inlet in the little boat he kept for fishing. "The cave is in the Mega-nisi Channel facing Levkas. The Doctor took me there once, but there ain't nothing to see-just rocks and a big square hole in the ground he dug himself." He was leaning forward, his head close to mine so that he could talk above the noise of the engine. "He was camped there all on his own for about a month last year. Pappadimas took supplies out to him from Vatahori."

"Why not from Vathy?" I asked. "Or Port Spiglia? That's even nearer." Vatahori was at the north-east corner of the island.

"I guess because the Doctor and Pappadimas are old friends. When he first came to the island-that was before I got back from the States-he made Vatahori his base and hired Pappadimas and his boat to explore the whole of Meganisi, also some of the little islands like Kithro and Arkudi, parts of Levkas, too. I figured he must have been some sort of geologist. But then last winter Pappadimas showed me the collection of flints and bone fossils he'd left with him. Brought out a whole box full last year, and when he got cheesed off with digging around in that cave, he'd stay a few days with Pappadimas and his family, sitting for hours over that box of relics, making notes." We had turned the corner of the inlet now and he was steering close in to the rocks. "If he didn't have Doctor in front of his name, reckon I'd say he was a nutcase. But then I ain't had any sort of an education and all the long words he used-it was Greek to me." And he laughed.

We were already opening up the entrance to Port Spiglia. It was a wild little inlet with the village of Spartokori perched high above a sheer rock cliff. The first cat's-paws of the day breeze were just beginning to mark the flat surface of the

water as we turned south into the Meganisi Channel. It was a narrow gut with a ridge of the Levkas mountains towering above us to starboard and a small island dead ahead, close in to the Meganisi side. "That's Tiglia," Zavelas said. "The cave is just back of the shallows. And over there-" He pointed to the Levkas shore. "You see that bay? It's called Dessimo. The Doctor was over there for a time last year."

Inside of Tiglia Island the sea was a bright emerald green — shallows and a sand bottom. And as we opened the cove, we could see a boat drawn up close in to the rocks, the expedition's mess tent a bright splash of blue. Zavelas leaned towards me again. "First thing the Doctor did when your friend landed him at Vatahori was to get Pappadimas to bring him out here."

"Did he leave him here?"

"No. They went back to the village that night."

"And yesterday?"

"Yesterday the Doctor is at Pappadimas's house. He is in Vatahori all day. But that don't mean he's still there today."

He steered the boat into the shallows where the water was like crystal, the sand bottom very clear, and then he cut the engine. A short dark man wearing an old pair of khaki shorts, tufts of black hair showing above a dirty vest, waded out and caught our bows, drawing us in beside the other boat. "This guy is Vassilios." The fisherman nodded and smiled, a flash of even white teeth in a brown stubbled face. They talked for a moment and then Zavelas said, "It's okay. The Doctor's not here. You wanna go up to the cave?"

The little beach was littered with gear, no sign of Holroyd and the others, and only the one tent pitched. "Where is it?" I asked.

"Up there." He pointed to a pinnacle of rock away to the right. "Vassilios will show you."

Bert stayed in the boat with Zavelas and I went up alone, following the fisherman. There was a faint track, and behind the pinnacle of rock, we came out on to a sloping platform looking south down the channel. There was an overhang

here, and in the recess below it, a pit had been dug about two feet down at the outer end, but much deeper at the back. All three of them were there on their hands and knees scrabbling at the earth where rain had collapsed the edges of the dig, sifting the dry soil through their fingers. "Here's another one," Cartwright said. And the others peered over his shoulder as he rubbed the dirt from a shaped piece of stone. "That's Solutrean surely?" He passed it to Holroyd who nodded. "Definitely. Look at that willow-leaf point."

They were so engrossed they didn't realize I was standing there, watching them. "It's a pity we don't know the exact level from which it came," Cartwright said.

Holroyd laid the piece of stone carefully down with several others on the edge of the pit. They were all sharp slivers of a very dark colour, almost black. "The levels are probably disturbed anyway. We'll know more when we start to dig at the back. But it definitely has possibilities." His tone was eager. "Look at this arrow-head." He had picked up one of the smaller slivers. "Obsidian. And very advanced work-typical late palaeolithic." He held it in his hands, peering at it, fondling it almost, "Beautiful! Beautiful work."

Vassilios moved, dislodging a stone, and Holroyd looked up, saw me and scrambled to his feet. "How did you get here?"

"Boat," I said.

He nodded, waiting, Cartwright and Hans Winters, still on their hands and knees, staring up at me. "Has Dr. Van der Voort given you permission to examine his dig?" I asked him.

He stepped out of the pit and stood facing me. "To begin with, young man, I don't need his permission. I have authority from the General Direction of Antiquities to examine any cave-shelter in Greece." He reached into his pocket and got out his pipe, a conscious effort to control himself. "When did you arrive?"

"A few hours ago."

"And you came straight here?"

I nodded.

"Then you haven't seen him yet?"

"No."

"I saw him yesterday. He's in a cottage at Vatahori and I suggest you go and see him before you start asking me whether I have a right to examine this cave-shelter."

"You mean he gave you permission?"

"He's in no fit state to lead an expedition and he knows it. Yes, he agreed that I take over."

"I find it very difficult to believe that."

His little eyes narrowed. "He had no alternative."

"And if this dig is important, who gets the credit?" I asked.

But he wouldn't give me a straight answer to that. "If we did discover something important-" He was filling his pipe, frowning, his movements almost unconscious. "Dr. Van der Voort couldn't put it across." His head thrust forward, suddenly belligerent. "If you'd ever interested yourself in your father's affairs you'd know that. They wouldn't accept it from him. Nobody would."

"But they will from you?"

"Yes, they will from me." He lit his pipe, taking his time and looking at me over the flame. "Anything else?" He tossed the match clear of the pit, waiting. And then he said, "Well, there it is. Nothing for you to worry about-except perhaps your own affairs." This last was said very pointedly, and then he turned back to the dig, leaving me to wonder whether he had seen that piece in the paper. Or perhaps Kotiadis had been checking up on me.

I wandered around for a moment, looking for the place where the old man had sat, crouching with that stone lamp in his hand. But the pictures Cassellis had taken showed open water. There was no vista of blue sea here, only the dark enclosed gut of the Meganisi Channel. This was a different site, and I went back to the boat, strangely disturbed by the knowledge that there was still another place Holroyd didn't know about.

That afternoon I went with Sonia to Vatahori. We didn't talk much, both of us wrapped in our own thoughts. It was about a two-mile walk from Port Vathy and it did us good, for it was a bright day with just enough breeze to keep us cool, and the island was very beautiful, full of wild flowers and a great sense of peace pervading.

"They say certain animals have a sense of beauty-places they constantly return to." Sonia had stopped and was staring out across a green slope with olive trees and a glimpse of the sea beyond. "Do you think our early ancestors appreciated beauty? This is so lovely." Her voice was subdued as though the sheer perfection of land, sea and sky was a physical ache. "I thought that olive grove was beautiful. But this. ."

We stood for a moment, the sun warm on our backs. It was all so peaceful, only the murmur of the cicadas, the bleat of goats far off. I was very conscious of her then, the desire to touch her almost overwhelming, and the grass of the slope, the shade of the olives inviting. She turned abruptly and we went on, following the road until it turned the shoulder of the hill to give a view of Vatahori. The church and the school looked new, but beyond the cemetery and a dusty open space where the road ended, the old village sprawled over a hilltop like a dark stone rampart. The cottages were small and very old, the passages between no more than tracks of rubble or naked rock. Pappadimas owned one of the few two-storied modern houses, a little way out of the village on the stone track leading down to Port Atheni. His wife, with two brown-eyed children clinging to her skirt, took us round to the back where the old man sat at a table writing with a glass of dark red wine beside him and the half-glasses he used for reading perched on the high beak of his nose. He did not hear us come, sitting hunched forward, totally absorbed, a dark, brooding look on his face.

"Dr. Van der Voort!" Sonia ran forward, eager as a child, and as he saw her the brooding look was wiped away, his face lit up and there was a softness in his eyes I had never seen before. She kissed him, and when she straightened up, I saw that he was smiling. It was a quiet, gentle smile that transformed his whole expression so that suddenly he looked like the man I remembered.

Mrs. Pappadimas brought two more glasses and a lemonade bottle full of wine. "Krasi," she said proudly. "Kala."

"Efharisto." He was still smiling as he thanked her. "It will probably send you to sleep," he said, filling our glasses. "They make it themselves."

We were with him for about an hour, and most of that time he seemed imusually relaxed. No doubt this was partly due to Sonia's presence. His fondness for her was obvious. Also, he seemed to have come to terms with himself as though he no longer cared what happened. Yes, he had seen Holroyd. They had had a talk the previous evening. "Of course, I don't want him to take over. But I can't stop him." He seemed resigned. "I'm tired, and anyway, I've other work to do. A lot of writing."

I didn't understand it, all the fight gone out of him. Even when I told him about my visit to the cave-shelter, how Holroyd was already finding worked pieces of obsidian, it didn't seem to worry him. "Did he comment at all?" And when I said they had agreed it was Solutrean, he nodded, smiling, as though he were actually pleased that they had got it right.

"There was an arrow-head," I said, "which Holroyd regarded as particularly beautiful work."

"Was he able to date it?"

"He said it was very advanced work-late palaeolithic."

"He didn't use the word Cro-Magnon?"

"No."

"Ah well, perhaps when they start to dig. . They hadn't started, had they?"

"No. They'd only just arrived. They found it in some loose soil that had fallen from the side of the pit."

"But they're going to dig?"

"Yes, at the back where Holroyd thought the layers would be undisturbed."

"You should be there," Sonia said.

But he shook his head.

"Just occasionally," she said coaxingly. "If you don't. Professor Holroyd will make use of it the way he made use of your book."

"No," he said. "It's much better that the discovery should be announced by him. He can refer to it in the paper he's

reading to the Pan-European Prehistoric Congress next month. They'll take it from him, whereas if it came from me …" Holroyd's words almost, and the note of resignation back in his voice. I had a sudden uneasy feeling that this was an act put on for our benefit. To hide his bitterness perhaps. And then Sonia mentioned that we had Dr. Gilmore on board and he froze, a tense stillness as though the news came as a shock, instead of a pleasant surprise. "You remember Dr. Gil-more," she said. "You often spoke of him."

He seemed to have difficulty finding his voice. "What's Adrian doing here?"

"I cabled him," she said.

"Why?" His voice was harsh. "Why did you do that?"

"You were in trouble with the authorities, and then Professor Holroyd coming out … I thought Dr. Gilmore-"

"How could he help?" He seemed strangely upset, as though shaken by some inner conflict. "You shouldn't have involved him."

"Well, he's here on the boat and he'd like to see you."

"No." For some extraordinary reason he seemed to shy away from the idea. "I don't want to see him. I don't want to see anybody."

She tried coaxing him, but it was no good. It was as though by opting out, by abandoning his work to Holroyd, he had withdrawn inside himself. Nothing would induce him to go down to Port Vathy. I offered to bring the boat round to Port Atheni, but it didn't make any difference. He seemed determined now to cut himself off completely from his own world. And to close the subject he asked me about my own plans.

I told him briefly, not explaining the purpose of my visit to Samos, and he said, "Anatolia I know, all that Turkish coast. But the islands off … I don't think early man ever got to the Dodecanese." And then he was questioning me about Bert again, asking about the boat and the diving equipment on board. The diving equipment seemed to fascinate him. "A spelaeologist, you say?" He was leaning back, his eyes half closed. "And he's been exploring underwater cities."

"Only two," I said. "One off the island of Andros, and a Roman port on the African coast. He's really more interested in old wrecks."

"Have you done any diving yourself?"

"No."

"A pity. I was thinking. ." But then he seemed to lose track of what was in his mind, for he began talking about the Aegean and the successive waves of invasion from the east by primitive people worshipping the Earth Goddess. And then suddenly he was back to Bert again. "He's a friend of yours?"

"I've chartered his boat, that's all."

"He thinks a lot of you."

I stared at him, wondering what he was after. "Bert's a good fellow," I said. "And he took quite a risk bringing you here."

He nodded. "Yes. I appreciate that." But I could see his mind was on something else.

"Why were you in such a hurry to come here?"

He stared at me, his eyes suddenly blank.

"You talked to the Barretts about having to get here before Holroyd, something urgent you had to do, and about some bones-bones you'd left here the previous year."

"Did I?" His tone was vague-deliberately vague. And his face had a shut look. "Oh yes," he said. "But that's all settled. I'm working on something else now." And he added, "When you come back. . You know where to find me now. Come and see me."

"From Samos," I said, "I'll be sailing direct to Pantel-leria."

But he didn't seem to take that in. "Maybe I'll have something to show you then."

"What?" I asked. And when he didn't reply, I said, "Are you referring to that lamp?" I don't know why I said that. It just seemed to come into my head.

"Lamp! What lamp?"

It was extraordinary. His whole face had changed, the brows drawn down and the lines back. A carved head on some great cathedral's gutter.

"The stone lamp you were holding," I murmured, and his breath came in a hiss.

Sonia spoke then-quickly as though soothing a child. "Paul saw it in a picture-some shots taken by that student of Dr. Gilmore's, Cassellis."

He leaned back, rubbing his hand over his face. "Yes, of course. I remember now."

"Where was it?" I asked. I would have pressed him for an answer, but Sonia reached out and gripped my hand, holding it tight with an urgent shake of her head. And instead of answering me, he said, "So you're going to Pantelleria. I was there once. In nineteen sixty-four. No, 'sixty-five. I can't remember."

He passed his hand up over his brow. "All lava. Black. A dreadful, volcanic place. And under the lava. ." He was concentrating, almost struggling, it seemed, to keep his mind focussed on what he was saying. "Old places-middens. . places where ancient man had lived before the island erupted." He was speaking faster now, getting into his stride as he told how all vestige of man had been buried beneath an avalanche of molten rock. And then suddenly he was pressing me urgently to come back through the Corinth Canal and pick him up. "By then perhaps I'll have broken through-I'll know the truth, I hope." He looked at me, suddenly pleading. "Come back for me. And if I'm here, then we'll go on to Pantelleria together."

I didn't say anything, not relishing the thought of bringing the contents of looted Turkish graves out through Greece, and unaccountably my hands were trembling. His assumption that I would fit in with his plans. .

"Paul." He was staring at me urgently. "I want you to promise. Come back. I may need you."

But all I said was, "I'll think about it." He was sick. Sick in his mind, and it scared me. I finished my wine and got to my feet. "I have to go now."

He nodded, his eyes, deep-sunk in their sockets, watching me. "You're like your mother," he said. "Ruth was like that.

Physical courage, yes. But she couldn't face the turmoil that springs from the great well of man's loneliness." He leaned a little forward. "Do you believe in God?" The question took me by surprise. It made me feel uneasy. "Well, do you?"

"I–I don't really know."

"Do you never think about death and what happens afterwards?" He was smiling now, a little sadly. "Well, never mind. Go back to your boat and the nice uncomplicated life of the sea. But remember that half of you is me, and with that half you inherit the other side of man-Man the Seeker." He chuckled to himself, but there was no mirth in the sound. "Pray God it never leads you where it has led me." He closed his eyes and leaned back. The brooding look had returned to his face and his mind was far away.

We left then, for he seemed suddenly exhausted. Or perhaps it was just that he wanted to be alone. Whatever it was, we were conscious of a mood of withdrawal. It didn't worry me, but Sonia felt it deeply, so that she was very quiet as we walked back through the village and down past the church. Above the slope of the hill with its olives she stopped suddenly, gazing out to the vista of sea beyond. "You'll be sailing to Samos now, I suppose."

"Yes," I said.

"And from there you'll go straight to Pantelleria? You won't be coming back here?"

"No."

She stood there, silent, looking lost and sad. I could feel her loneliness, and for the first time I understood her need, the desperate, driven search for the father she had never really known. Now she felt shut out. It was this realization, and perhaps the wine I had drunk, that made me say, "Would you like to come with us?" The words were out before I'd given a thought to what I might be letting her in for.

"On a smuggling run?" Her pale eyebrows lifted and she smiled. "That's nice of you, Paul. But no." She shook her head. "I must stay." Her eyes were screwed up. I thought at first it was the sun, but then I saw the glint of tears as she turned quickly away. I caught her then, my arm round her, and suddenly she was leaning against me, sobbing her heart out.

"I'm sorry," she breathed. "And it's all so beautiful." She didn't say what was beautiful. She was shaking uncontrollably. "It's so bloody pointless, but I feel I must. He's all alone, and no money, nobody to make him feel he's wanted." She had got her handkerchief out. "I'll be all right in a moment." And then she pushed away from me and stood very straight and stiff, facing me and not bothering to hide her tears. "You did mean that, didn't you?"

"Yes."

She stared at me a moment and then she smiled. It was like sunshine after rain, a smile that seemed to light up her whole face, so that for a moment she looked quite radiant. And then the sunshine vanished and she turned away, blowing her nose and searching in her bag for her compact. "It wouldn't have worked anyway." She was in control of herself again now. "Florrie wouldn't have liked it, and it's her boat."

But when we got back on board Florrie was much too concerned over the fact that Dr. Gilmore wanted to stay with the ship to have worried about Sonia. "He seems to think the whole voyage will be a downhill run like we had from Corfu. Bert's tried to explain to him what it's like when conditions are bad, but he doesn't seem to understand. Says he's too old to mind what happens to him now and he's enjoying himself. You must talk to him, Paul."

Dr. Gilmore was in the saloon, small, bird-like and very determined. "My dear fellow, you must understand that I've never had a real holiday in my life. And you're going into the Aegean, something I've always dreamed of." And he added, "You needn't worry that I'll be a nuisance."

"Florrie's afraid you'll be seasick and die on her."

"That's very thoughtful of her." His eyes glinted with laughter.

"Just practical," I said, and tried to make him realize what it was like to be really seasick, how violent the movement could be when beating. "You could be thrown out of your bunk, break your arm or your ribs." But it was no use. He had made up his mind. What is more he had offered to pay Bert over and above the charter.

"I told you, I think, that I had had a piece of luck-financially. It was the football pools. Quite a long time ago now. I used to do them for fun, a change from teaching youngsters how man evolved from the Pliocene into the Pleistocene. It's rather funny really-a Reader in Anthropology landing a shared win in a football pool. I handed it all over to one of my least successful students who had gone into merchant banking and now it's quite a respectable sum. My pension, you see, doesn't really run to Mediterranean cruises, but I always promised myself that when I did retire I'd use this money to do the travelling I had always wanted to do."

It was hopeless to argue with him, and when I broke it to him that my father had withdrawn into himself and didn't want to see anybody, he accepted it without any sign of surprise. "Well, that settles it," he said finally. "You'll have to take me with you."

Florrie grumbled, of course. "This is a sailing ship, not a boarding house." But since we couldn't dump him ashore on Meganisi against his will, she had to accept the situation.

We sailed at first light the following morning, motoring round the north-west corner of the island and south through the Meganisi Channel to give Dr. Gilmore a sight of the dig behind Tiglia Island. The three small orange sleeping tents had blossomed on the beach beside the blue mess tent. But there was no sign of life in the camp and the cave itself was obscured by the rock pinnacle, only the outer edge of the platform visible. Gilmore, still in his dressing gown, stood propped against the wheelhouse door, looking at it through the big ex-German U-boat binoculars until we were out of the channel and had altered course for Atoko Island and the entrance to the Gulf of Patras. "I don't understand it," he said almost petulantly as he finally lowered the glasses. "It's not like Pieter to give up so easily."

"What else could he do?" I asked.

"He could fight."

We should have kno^vn. We should have known, both of us, that that was just what he was doing. But now that I was at sea again I thought this was the end of my involvement with his affairs. My mind was on other things and it never occurred to me that the voyage would be no more than an interlude.