"The Sea King’s Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Michaels Barbara)

I

BY FOLLOWING A PATH ACROSS THE HEADLAND WE were able to reach the bay of the villa and save swimming time. I was thinking about Frederick when I proposed the land route, but I was also remembering Jim’s warning. I could at least minimize the time I spent in the water under Frederick ’s unreliable supervision.

As we walked along the path, the roof of the villa came into sight on our left.

“I wonder if we’re trespassing,” I said. “Maybe that’s their private bay down there.”

“The sea is open to all,” said Frederick vaguely.

“Well, we can but try. If we get warned off, or shot at, it’s your problem.”

Frederick didn’t answer; the question didn’t seem to concern him. We turned toward the cliff, which was lower here than it was on our section of the coast, and climbed down to the water.

I hadn’t slept too well the night before. I had lain awake for a long time, thinking about what Frederick had told me. In spite of my doubts and reservations, the lure of hidden treasure had infected me. The description of the ships, tumbled and scattered across the ocean floor like bones in a marine graveyard, was so fantastic it sounded like a scene out of Jules Verne. Yet Frederick ’s theories made sense. The southern coast of Thera, the nearest part of the island to the motherland of Crete, would be the logical place for a major port. Some archaeologists believed that the capital city must have been in the center of the island, which had collapsed into the caldera. But this assumption seemed to be based on the Atlantis legend, as recorded by Plato; and with all due respect to Plato, the details of his story were highly questionable. It simply didn’t make sense to have a big city in the middle of an island when the sea was the main highroad of communication. In Crete the cities were on the coast or within easy reach of the coastline. I didn’t believe Plato’s account of a man-made channel three hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep that allowed ships to reach a central harbor.

The central part of the island wasn’t the only part that had subsided. There was another caldera on the south coast, according to maps I had seen. That’s where the main harbors must have been, on the lee side of the island, the part nearest to Crete.

So when I slid into the water I wouldn’t have been surprised to see submerged towers and mammoth walls, with fish swimming in and out of the empty window frames. I knew better-but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I was using a snorkel but no air tanks, because I didn’t have them or any means of filling them. I couldn’t bring my own tanks; they were too bulky to carry and they would have been useless anyway, without a compressor to refill them.

Frederick had done nothing about supplying these necessary items, and his vagueness on the subject was a point against his claims. It was almost as if he were afraid to give me the equipment that would prove or disprove his story. I could see the difficulty; as soon as he started making inquiries about scuba gear, the port authorities in Phira would learn about it. Frederick claimed “they” were suspicious and antagonistic already. He might be exaggerating, but I had read about divers in Greece and Turkey having trouble with government officials. And there was no use telling him he should have thought about these things before he planned the project.

However, my preliminary survey had convinced me that I could do a lot of exploring without scuba gear. The water was fairly shallow and warm. In fact it felt warmer than the cool morning air, and it closed around me like welcoming arms.

The beauty of it hit me first, the way it always does. This sea floor didn’t have the luxuriant junglelike vegetation of the reefs off Florida, but the translucence of the water gave objects a pristine, shimmery look, as if they were encased in clear plastic. Sunlight sifted down through the cool green depths and danced on the sandy bottom. It was surprisingly clean; there was almost no marine growth and no mud. Not that the bottom was level-far from it. There were patches of relatively smooth sand, black or white, the black being lava sand. But most of the surface was a jumble of rocks and stones. With a little imagination you could believe you were seeing the ruins of a city strewn across the acres of the bay. Tumbled heaps might have been fallen towers; rock ridges looked like the remains of walls, with gaping holes for doors and windows. But I knew that what I saw was not man-made. The rubble consisted of pumice and magma ejected from the volcano, mixed with fragments of broken lava flow and stones from the collapsed cliffs. Some of them, worn smooth by water, resembled worked stones to an astonishing degree. There had been reports of sunken quays in another part of the island-long strips of stone so straight it was hard to believe they had been shaped by nature. But they were beach rock, natural concrete formed by water running over limestone and the silica of lava and pumice.

There was only one way of searching the area systematically, and that was to swim a sort of grid pattern, back and forth. It would take a long time because I would have to check every suspicious-looking formation.

The sun was fully up by that time, and the eastern sky was a tapestry of blazing colors. I waved at Frederick, who was sitting hunched up on a rock looking like an irritated albatross. He gave me a limp flap of the hand, and I went down again. I struck out for the mouth of the bay, keeping fairly close to the south coastline. The water got deeper as I went on; at the mouth of the bay it was about fifty feet. I could work down there, but not for long. The rock walls came down sheer into the water, but they were uneven; I could climb out if I had to. I decided to go on out a little farther.

I was swimming with my face in the water watching the scene below. There was considerable activity, fish of all sizes scuttling around. The visibility was excellent.

All of a sudden there was nothing down there. A few fish, yes. But no bottom, only a gaping black gulf. The edge was as sharp as the rim of the Grand Canyon, and I had a feeling the bottom was almost as far down.

There aren’t too many things in the water that scare me, but that did. I went flapping back from the edge like a kitten on a glass-topped table. When I could see bottom under me I floated for a minute or two, getting my breath back.

Then I went back to the chasm and dived.

Not down into it, of course, but near the rim. I had to do it to compensate for that attack of nerves. I’m not ashamed of being afraid; caution is a sign of good sense. But this wasn’t a rational fear. It was fear of the lightless depths, fear of the dark; peering down into the abyss I half expected to see some monstrous bulk heave itself out of the water, trailing tentacles and staring with big evil eyes full of a cruel intelligence… It was ridiculous. I could drown just as fast in five feet of water as in five hundred; and the Kraken is an imaginary monster.

There was no way I was ever going to get down into those depths. This was part of the outer caldera, and if it was anything like the central bay, it was hundreds of feet deep. Nothing less than a specially designed submarine would ever penetrate the abyss.

I’d had enough. I wasn’t nervous anymore, but I’d had enough for one day. I went back to the place where Frederick was waiting, and rose up out of the water at his feet, spitting out my mouthpiece and pushing my mask up.

“Well?” he demanded. “What did you find?”

Nothing.” I pulled myself up onto the rocks and reached for a towel. “If you mean ruins or wrecks. But there sure is a hell of a big hole out there.”

“Ah, yes, the outer caldera. Nothing would have survived down there. The pressure must be enormous.”

I stood up.

“Let’s go. I’m cold and hungry.”

As we crossed the plateau back toward the house, I was surprised to find my eyes pricking, almost as if I wanted to cry. I decided it must be fatigue. I had come to terms with my father a long time before, there was no excuse for feeling hurt because he thought of his antiquities first and me second. No, that was a misstatement. He didn’t think of me at all.