Rocks, The by Peter Nichols Page B

Mediterranean. At one point, we were anchored on Skerki Bank west of Sicily. This is a remote reef between Sicily and Tunisia that rises from the sea floor to only a foot or so beneath the surface. Four thousand years of shipping has navigated, successfully and otherwise, around this unmarked reef. It was hot and, along with some of the crew, I went swimming. There was no land in sight, but we discovered that we could wade calf-deep in the water. We had no swimming masks as everyone has today, but we could see that the reef was littered with ancient amphorae, the two-handled pots in which Greeks like King Agamemnon and his armies that fought the Trojan War carried wine, olive oil, almonds, dates, honey, and, of course, gold and valuables, aboard their ships. We had no breathing apparatus either, of course, yet simply by shallow diving, we brought eight or ten of these barnacle-encrusted amphorae to the surface—archaeological looting it would probably be called today. Some of the amphorae were almost intact after who knew how many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years they’d spent underwater. What, we wondered, was inside them?”
    Gerald’s audience had become as still as the surrounding ancient Greeks. Kate looked enthralled, as if she hadn’t yet read what he was going to say and couldn’t wait to hear it.
    Gerald smiled. “Thick, ageless sludge. No gold. No honey or almonds either, to augment His Majesty’s naval rations.”
    Titters, happy smiles.
    “But seeing these old jars coming up out of the sea, breaking the surface into the light of present day—breaking through the membrane of history, as it were—gripped me quite powerfully. During that one afternoon on Skerki Bank, all the tales of ancient Greece became real for me. Here was proof.”
    Aegina stared at her father. Before her eyes, he had transformed into an instinctual storyteller—or, he was living it all again: he was back there now, on that reef.
    Gerald went on. “Throughout the war, and afterward, during the years I spent cruising the Mediterranean in an old, twenty-four-foot gaff cutter, I read again and again passages in my old green, tattered, salt-stained edition of A. T. Murray’s prose translation of
The
Odyssey
. Two volumes, published by the Loeb Classical Library. I also read many volumes of British Admiralty sailing directions for the Mediterranean Sea. These were not literature, usually written in very dry prose, but occasionally the men who penned the descriptions of harbors and coastlines—not scholars, but one could detect a certain level of education in their idiom and references—managed to get past their editors”—more, knowing laughs—“the suggestion that many of the islands, harbors, headlands I was seeing might well stand as the factual locations of various episodes from
The
Odyssey
. Some of this was obvious. If there
were
a factual geography to
The
Odyssey
, the whirlpool of Charybdis could hardly have been anywhere but the Strait of Messina, which, at the wrong state of the tide, could spin a corvette in circles. The cliffs where Odysseus was ambushed by the boulder-throwing Laestrygonians might well have been—I can’t think of any other location—the entrance to the Corsican harbor of Bonifacio. And there is a cave . . .” Gerald’s attention, and then his voice, momentarily faltered “. . . where I believe Odysseus found the cunning to outwit Polyphemus, the Cyclops. . . .” He fell silent, gazing at the marble frieze on the opposite wall.
    Aegina had never seen her father in such a state. He was transported.
    At the moment when his pause became conspicuous, Gerald collected himself and started up again. “Well, why shouldn’t
The
Odyssey
be a real story? I thought. We know that Troy was real, that a great battle was fought there, and that Schliemann and others, only a hundred or so years ago, armed with a copy of
The
Iliad
, went to a mound of rock and grass in Asia Minor and found the city,