The Lost Labyrinth

TWENTY-FIVE
I

It proved to be a gorgeous Cretan evening, the skies clear, the air lightly scented with lavender and honeysuckle. Iain and Gaille sat amid the debris of their noodles and tomato sauce and gazed up at the extraordinary canopy of stars, while grey-green geckoes made sudden short darts over the pale walls, and crickets chirped in the surrounding fields. 'Nights like these,' murmured Gaille.

'They bring the past closer, don't they?' agreed Iain. 'One of our archaeologists went to live up in the Lasithi Plateau after he retired. I heard rumours he was a bit poorly over the new year, so I headed up there to make sure he was okay. He was fine, thank goodness. But then a snowstorm hit like you wouldn't believe. It comes down fast there. Anyway, I was snowed in for the best part of a week. Fantastic stroke of luck. He tells the most extraordinary stories. More to the point, he has a telescope on his roof. We caught this amazing meteorite shower. Can you imagine what that would have been like for the Minoans? Or imagine if a meteorite actually struck! I mean, this place here, it looks almost like a vast impact crater, right?'

'I hadn't thought about it. But yes.'

'I don't suppose it was, but you never know. Of course, if Petitier has found something here, that might be the reason. The Minoans considered iron sacred because back then it pretty much only came from meteorites.' He stretched out his leg; his foot brushed Gaille's ankle. She pulled away, not sure whether it had been deliberate. 'There was this dig in Anemospilia,' he continued. 'They found the body of a young man sacrificed to appease the gods; though it can't have done much good, because the roof collapsed mid-ceremony and killed the priest too, as well as a couple of other attendants. He was wearing an iron ring. The priest, I mean, not the poor bastard he sacrificed.' He shook his head in amusement. 'Everyone thinks the Minoans were so civilised because they worshipped goddesses and decorated their palaces with charming frescoes of birds and lilies. Not so much. We've found a pit of children's bones at Knossos, and it's pretty clear from the knife-marks that they'd been butchered in just the way you'd butcher livestock for your pot.'

'Yuck.'

'They were no worse than anyone else, mind. Everyone was at it. They're a lot more like the surrounding cultures than we tend to think. That's actually the main premise of my book.'

'You mean The Pelasgian and Minoan Aegean: A New Paradigm?'

'That's the baby,' laughed Iain. He found a couple of stones lying loose on the roof, began to juggle them in his right hand. 'You see, we've got all these overlapping accounts of the people who lived in the pre-Mycenaean Aegean. The Greeks called them Pelasgians. Sir Arthur Evans called them Minoans. Were they the same or different? And do they have any connection with the Philistines, or the Sea People, or the Hyksos, and so on? And, more broadly, was the Mediterranean a series of isolated cultures with minimal links between them, or was it-as I believe and argue-far more fluid and homogeneous than most academics now allow.'

'Despite the archaeological record?'

'On the contrary. Because of it. There's a ton of evidence to support my view. And where there are differences, they're only the ones you might expect. Take Crete and Egypt, for example. Superficially, their religions and cultures look very different. Superficially, one couldn't have derived from, or even taken much from, the other. But we forget how much our religions are defined by our environments. I mean, imagine you live on the…' He dropped one of his juggling stones, muttered a soft curse, picked it up again. 'Imagine you live on the side of an active volcano. Don't you think you'd worship different gods from someone who lives in the flood-plain of a river like the Nile that inundates once a year?'

'Of course,' said Gaille.

'Egyptian priests put an awful lot of effort into calculating the annual rising of Sirius, because Sirius predicted the inundation, the natural start of the Egyptian year. But there was no reason for the Minoans to start their year with Sirius, or even to treat it as a particularly significant star. Yet they did. And Sirius didn't just make it to Crete: it became an integral part of Greek religion via the Eleusinian Mysteries.'

'What are you getting at?'

'I'm just saying, what if some enterprising Egyptians had come here, to set up a trading post, say? Crete is the hub of the Mediterranean, after all. They'd surely have brought their religion and mythology with them, because that's what people do; but how long would it have taken them to trade their river and sun gods for earthquake gods and volcano gods?' Two bats appeared as dark shadows above the roof, swirling and swooping in pursuit of flies, before vanishing as quickly as they'd come. 'Mount Thera was active long before its final blast,' continued Iain. 'The experts agree that it had regular minor eruptions. It surely had to be a major factor in Minoan cosmology. So how about this for an idea: when Persephone was abducted by Hades in the Eleusinian Mysteries, there was a blinding light and a noise like the earth being split open. Does that remind you of anything at all?'

Gaille sat up a little straighter, intrigued by the idea. 'You're not suggesting that Eleusis is a celebration of Thera erupting?'

'Why not? According to the myth, after Persephone was abducted, her mother Demeter cursed the earth and made it infertile. And this wasn't some unusually long winter: it was a famine that clearly lasted years. But when Persephone was finally restored to Demeter, she made the earth richer than ever.' He dropped one of his stones again, couldn't find it this time, so tossed the other irritably away. 'Volcanic ash is incredibly rich with nitrates. That's why people live near volcanoes, even though they're so dangerous. Visit Bali some time, if you don't believe me. You'll never have seen such greens. So each time Thera had one of its minor eruptions, it would have covered the surrounding islands with ash, devastating at least one year's crops, maybe even two or three. But when the fields finally started producing again, the harvests would have been magnificent. Just like in the Eleusinian myth. Until the big one, at least.'

'Can you imagine what that would have been like?' smiled Gaille, leaning her head back against the stone parapet, its edge pressing like stress against her nape. 'To have been in Crete when it went off?'

'A front-row seat on the most spectacular event in human history,' nodded Iain. 'An explosion that would literally have shaken the world. One hundred cubic kilometres of rock raining down over the next few days. Tsunamis destroying your fleets and coasts. The sun blacked out for months. The seas thick with ash. And the survivors knowing that even if they won their personal battle against starvation, their empire was doomed. It took years for the Mycenaeans to take over, but surely that was only because they'd been ravaged by Thera as well.'

'And traumatised. Think how much courage it would have taken to go back into the water after that.'

'Exactly. The whole of eastern Mediterranean civilisation smashed apart by a single catastrophic event. And though we've managed to find a great number of the jigsaw pieces it left behind, we're still not sure that they all belong to the same puzzle, or how to fit them together, basically because the picture on our box is wrong, because it's been drawn by Greek specialists, and by Egyptian specialists, and by Asia Minor specialists, not by Mediterranean specialists. But throw that box away, start out with a new picture of Crete and Santorini at the hub of a great and sophisticated empire, then everything suddenly fits. And thanks to Plato, we already have a wonderful idea of how this new picture should look.'

'The Atlantis Connection,' suggested caille.

'The Atlantis Connection,' smiled Iain.