Levkas Man (28 page)

‘Three quarters at least,' she said. ‘It's at the south end of the Meganisi Channel.'

It would be getting dark by then. ‘See if you can fix it with Pappadimas,' I said and went back to the kaféneion to tell the Barretts where I was going. We left at quarter to seven, and by the time we were in the Meganisi Channel the island of Tiglia was a dark bulk between shadowed walls of rock with the mess tent a blue glow reflected in the shallows. Above us, the mountains of Levkas black against the last of the sunset glow.

South of Tiglia, Pappadimas edged the boat close to the west side of the channel. The rocks were getting difficult to see, darkness closing in and the first stars showing above the dim outline of Meganisi. ‘It's not far now,' Sonia said. Her voice sounded nervous. ‘You won't find him very communicative. He lives in a world of his own. I'm afraid …' She hesitated, her voice barely audible above the noise of the outboard. ‘It may be all in his imagination, you see. And yet he's convinced that if he could only get through the rock fall …' She was leaning so close to me that I could feel the breath of her sigh on my cheek. ‘I don't know what to think. But I'm glad you're here. Perhaps he'll talk to you. So long as you're patient with him. He's very secretive about it. Hans came with me once, but he wouldn't speak to him, wouldn't show him anything. Said he was Professor Holroyd's stooge, accused him of coming to spy and practically threw him out. It was all very unpleasant and Hans had brought some stores, things he desperately needed.' The engine died as the bows nuzzled the rocks. ‘Anyway, you'll see for yourself.'

We were in a narrow gut and Pappadimas came for'ard, hauling the boat along, both hands on the rock, until it grounded on a shelf of gritty sand. The water was very still, no sound at all. We got out and she took my hand, leading the way. There was a path of sorts, winding up between the rocks. It led to a steep slope and there was a musty smell of broom in the air. ‘It's about another hundred feet up.' She let go of my hand. ‘You'll find him camped under the overhang. I'll wait for you here.'

I hesitated, staring up at the dim outline of what appeared to be an enormous cavity scooped out of the cliff above. Then I went on alone, and where the overhang jutted black against the stars, the slope levelled off abruptly, and I stopped. The line of the cliff, the pale glimmer of open sea beyond. It struck a chord. The light was different, of course, but standing there, noting the configuration of sea and land, I had no doubt. This was where Cassellis had taken the pictures. I called to him then, stumbling among fallen rocks, but there was no answer and his tent when I found it was empty. It was a very small tent, the sort you have to crawl into on your hands and knees, and I stood there, wondering at his toughness, alone up here, living little better than the primitive men whose movements he was trying to trace.

The site was a good one, the sort of position that the ancient Greeks, with their eye for country, might have chosen for one of their temples. It looked down into the channel, and to the south I could just make out the flat expanse of the sea running out to Arkudi and the island of Ithaca. A solitary light, flashing red every 3 seconds, signposted the route to the Gulf of Patras. It was like standing on the bridge of a ship, for this natural platform was almost at the tip of a promontory formed by a spur of Mount Porro. There was no breath of air, no sound, everything very still. And then suddenly, from behind me, the clink of metal on rock, the clatter of stones.

I turned then, feeling my way deeper into the shadow of the overhang. Past a great rock fallen from the roof I saw the glimmer of a light. It came from beyond a mound of rubble, and when I had climbed to the top of it, I found myself looking down into a steeply sloped cavern. I could see him then, a dark figure in silhouette. The light came from an old acetylene lamp and the single small jet of flame showed the cavern blocked by a fall. He was bending down, levering at the face of the fall with a crowbar, and he was so intent on what hawks doing that he didn't hear the scattering of rubble as I scrambled down to the floor of the cave.

I was about ten yards from him then and I paused, curious at the care with which he was prising loose a lump of rock wedged against the cavern wall. He put the crowbar down and began tapping at it with a sharp-pointed hammer. It broke and then he was using the crowbar again, and when the rock finally fell away in pieces, he pulled a rag from his pocket, dusting the wall carefully. Then he put on his steel-rimmed half spectacles, picked up the lamp and peered at it closely, moving the lamp this way and that like a miner searching for traces of some precious metal in the face of the rock.

I was so fascinated I stood rooted to the spot, not moving, not saying anything. A strange guttural sound came from his throat, an exclamation of excitement, of satisfaction. And then some sixth sense seemed to warn him of my presence, for he turned suddenly, straightening up and facing me, the lamp held high. ‘Who's that?' He reached for the crowbar, and I thought he was going to come at me with it, but instead he backed against the wall as though to conceal something.

‘It's Paul,' I said, and I heard his breath escape in a long sigh. He took his glasses off then, leaning slightly forward, peering at me.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?' His voice was thick, a whisper I barely recognized. The beetling brows, the blue eyes lit by the lamp, wide and staring. Remembering that photograph, the hair prickled on my scalp, my nerves taut as I recalled what Gilmore had said: Loneliness, identification with the subject that had engrossed him for so many years.

I began talking to him then, explaining my presence, the words too fast. With an effort I forced myself to speak quietly, gently, the way you would talk to an animal defending its territory, and gradually he relaxed, became himself again.

‘I thought for a moment …' He put the crowbar down and wiped the sweat from his face with the rag he had used to dust the wall behind him. Silence then, a silence that dragged, his breathing heavy, the only sound in the stillness of the cave. He was leaning against the wall, his lungs gasping air—an old man near the point of exhaustion.

He wiped his face again, recovering fast. He still had reserves of energy. ‘Last time you were here, I said I might have something to show you.' His mood had changed, his personality too. He was smiling now and the smile transformed his face, lighting it with some inner excitement, so that he was suddenly like a child who has discovered something and cannot keep it to himself. ‘Come here.'

He had turned and was holding the lamp to the wall, moving it slowly back and forth as he had done when I stood watching him. ‘Do you see anything?'

I had moved forward and was peering over his shoulder, wondering what I was supposed to see on the pale, grey surface of the rock.

‘You don't see it?'

‘I'm not a geologist,' I said, thinking it was something to do with the nature of the rock.

He sighed. ‘You've got sharp eyes—you could always pick out a grey plover … Now look—' And he began tracing a shape with his finger. ‘Do you see it now?'

‘What is it?' I asked, trying to understand.

‘A rhinoceros,' he said. ‘A woolly rhinoceros. See it? There's the back, the head, the horn. And there's what the French call
les macaronis
—the lines the cave artists drew to show the weapons entering the body, the moment of kill. The men who drew these animals were the witch doctors of their day and by picture-writing the kill, they gave their hunters confidence. Do you see it now?'

He was looking at me anxiously, expectantly, waiting to see my own excitement reinforce his own. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, I see it.' And for a moment I almost thought I did. But the rock wall was so marked by natural indentations, so scored by falls from the roof, that you could imagine almost any shape in the cracks and lines.

‘It's not very clear,' he said, his voice mirroring his disappointment at my lack of enthusiasm. ‘And the paint has gone. They, scratched the outline first. Then painted the beast with ochre or charcoal, using a stick brush—sometimes blowing it on in the form of a dry powder. Here the paint is all gone. The effect of the air. But when I get deeper into the cave beyond the rock fall …' He moved the light. ‘Here's another.'

Again he traced an outline, but it was difficult to know whether it was real or whether he was imagining it, the way, when you're ill, you lie in bed seeing shapes in the cracks of the ceiling. ‘And here—' He took me nearer the entrance. ‘I discovered this last year. A pigmy elephant I think, but it's so vague and indistinct I can't be sure about it. Do you know Malta? Ghar Dalam—a cave—there are the bones of small elephants there, and if the land-bridge existed …' He straightened up. ‘I thought it worth investigating, and now I'm certain. If I had somebody working with me …' He stared at me, his eyes fixed on my face, willing me, I thought, to offer to help him clear the rock fall. ‘Nobody knows why I'm here, what I'm doing—not even Sonia.' He leaned towards me, his eyes boring into me. ‘You're not to talk about it, you understand? You're not to breathe a word to anybody.'

Of course not,' I said, wondering what it was all about. Skull fragments I could understand, bones and primitive weapons, but the scratches he had shown me on the wall here … ‘I came to see you about that cable from Gilmore.'

His head jerked up. ‘Cable? What cable?'

‘Sonia says she showed it to you.'

‘I know nothing about it.' He was on the defensive, staring at me, his face expressionless.

I couldn't believe he had forgotten about it. But he was so locked up in himself … ‘Those skull fragments Holroyd found …'

‘It's not my fault if he leapt to the wrong conclusions,' he said quickly.

‘It was your dig,' I reminded him. ‘You were working there last year.'

‘Did he say it was my dig? Did he tell Congress that I discovered it?'

‘No.'

‘Then he's only himself to blame.' He was suddenly laughing, that strange, jeering sound, as though sharing a joke with himself.

I couldn't make up my mind whether he knew what had emerged at that investigation or not. But the thought was in my mind that he had known all along what would happen.

‘Sonia showed you that cable,' I said, trying to pin him down. ‘What did Gilmore mean when he referred to Holroyd's reputation being damaged?'

He didn't answer, but just stood there, staring at me, smiling secretly.

‘You know he may be coming out here again.'

‘Then tell him to keep away from here.' The big hands moved, clenched involuntarily, his hatred of the man naked and revealed. And then, his voice rising to some inner need for self-justification: ‘I'm a South African. The English—they hate the South Africans. Always have.' He was reaching back to the Boer War and beyond, to the long rivalry of the Dutch and English, and he added, ‘You're quarter Afrikaans yourself, whether you like it or not. I need you now.' The tone of his voice had fallen to an urgent whisper. ‘I need your strength, Paul.' I thought he meant my physical strength to break through that rock fall. But then he went on: ‘You're not contaminated by the touch of the thing, and I don't imagine you believe in ghosts. Maybe it's just my preoccupation with the past, but when I hold it in my hand—I feel something, a power—the power of evil, or so it seems to me. Something terrible.' He stared at me, his eyes gleaming in the dark. ‘You don't understand? I'll show you.' He took me to his tent and bent down, reaching into it with his arms. ‘Here you are. Hold this.'

It was heavy, a stone about the size of a man's head. The edge of it had been roughly shaped, the flat surface of it hollowed out in a shallow basin. ‘What is it?' I asked.

‘A lamp,' he said. ‘A stone lamp.'

Of course—the lamp he had been holding when Cassellis took those pictures. ‘Old?' I asked.

He nodded. ‘Very old.'

I stood there, holding it in my hands, conscious that he was watching me intently, feeling that sense of evil again. ‘No substance in the universe—' he was speaking very quietly—‘not even rock, is inanimate. Absorbed into the fabric of that stone is the knowledge that I seek. It's like the walls of a house. It breathes the atmosphere of the past. Surely you've felt that in a house—the atmosphere left by those who have lived and died there?' And when I nodded, he said, ‘But holding that stone, you don't feel anything, you've no sense of the past stirring in you?'

I didn't dare answer him, knowing that the horror building up inside me came, as it always had done, from him.

He mistook my silence for insensibility. ‘Good!' he said. ‘Now you understand why I need your help.'

But I didn't understand. I was confused, uncertain how to meet his need. ‘I don't quite see …' But the sudden grip of his hand silenced me.

‘I need you here. I need the companionship of somebody whose mind is closed to what I think I'm going to find. You don't comprehend the evil here. You don't think about the world you live in, your species. You're just a normal, healthy human animal. That's why I need you. To keep me from thinking about my own species—the explosion of its populations, the massing in concrete jungles, the destructive assault upon the balance of nature which can only lead to nature's retaliation—a long, slow, terrible battle of disease, famine and war.' He let go of my arm, pushing his hand up through his hair and staring seaward as though looking beyond the dim line of the horizon into the distant past. ‘This species of ours,' he said, speaking very slowly and clearly, ‘is Mousterian man all over again. But whereas my knowledge of the steady debasement of Mousterian stock is founded solely on the deterioration of his artefacts, the case of modern man is quite different. Here the material progress is fantastic, his “artefacts” reaching out to the planets. It is the spiritual progress that has halted, even gone into reverse.'