Journey to Atlantis (16 page)

SOMETIMES, WHEN YOU can’t explain what is happening around you, it feels like you are drifting through a dream. Everything you thought you knew about the world and how it works is challenged, and that can be kind of scary. But if you don’t let that fear get the best of you, it can also be pretty exciting.

We had left Penelope on her rock, wrestling with the beautiful statue in the sand. We were sailing towards Crete, only seventy-five miles south. It was a moonless night and very dark. Darkness on the sea always seems darker than on land. But the sea was calm, and Hollie and I were leaning against the hatch, watching the stars, which were sparkling more
than usual in the absence of the moon. We were cruising at sixteen knots when I thought I heard a beep. I listened for a second one. There wasn’t one.

“Did you hear that, Hollie?”

Hollie looked up at me, wanting to please.

“Did you hear the radar beep?”

He squinted and looked around in the darkness and sniffed the midnight air. I yawned.

“Oh, well, I suppose we should go in and take a peek. It’s probably nothing.”

I climbed inside, put Hollie down and went to the radar screen. The radar swept its wave around the screen but nothing lit up and nothing beeped. I stared for a few minutes, yawning, and was about to go back outside when the sonar screen caught my eye. The sea floor between Thera and Crete was deep, between six and seven thousand feet, but the sonar was showing three hundred.

“That can’t be right.”

I reached for my charts. No, there was no indication of an underwater ridge between Thera and Crete. I stared at the sonar screen, then watched wide-eyed as the sea floor rapidly fell from three hundred to six thousand feet. The numbers dropped so quickly it was like falling off a mountain. I grabbed my charts again and pored over them very carefully.

“No. No, there’s nothing there!”

I stared back at the sonar screen. The sea floor was sixty-two hundred feet below us. Five minutes later it was still the same.

“Whoa! Wait! Okay, what’s going on?”

I stopped the sub. Hollie barked and wagged his tail. He could feel my excitement.

“Let’s go back, Hollie. I want to check that depth again.”

I turned the sub around and headed back the way we had come. Watching the sonar screen the whole time, I waited to see the sea floor rise. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, fifteen, but the sea floor stayed the same. I stopped the sub, climbed out and looked around. Seaweed was sitting on the bow.

“Hi, Seaweed. Just checking our depth.”

Seaweed didn’t see any food in my hands so he didn’t care.

I went back inside, looked at the charts once more and stared at the sonar. The sea floor was well over a mile down. Was it possible the sonar had malfunctioned? Was it possible a very large submarine had passed slowly beneath us at three hundred feet? But that wouldn’t explain the mountain-like wall I had seen on the screen. I shrugged, started the engine and sat down to watch the sonar screen as we sailed over the area once again. Ten minutes later the radar beeped. Something was outside, right beside us! I raced up the portal, looked around in the darkness for a light or something, but there was nothing. The radar beeped again. I rushed back inside. The sonar indicated a depth of three hundred feet. I reached for the switch and cut the engine. We drifted slowly to a stop. Then, from the observation window came a faint blue glow. There was light underneath the sub! My mouth dropped. Something about the light was
weird. It wasn’t bright and yet it was sparkling, like stars. I didn’t rush now; I was too mystified. I went to the portal and climbed up the ladder. Part of me wanted to look, and part wanted to hit the engine switch and sail away as fast as possible.

I raised my head out of the portal and saw a shiny blue light in the water all around us. At a glance, the light had a radius of about a quarter of a mile. It was such a strange light. It didn’t seem to be coming from any one spot, but from everywhere. I had the strange sense that the light was somehow lifting us up in the air. But it wasn’t. Certainly the space occupied by the light was far too big for it to be any kind of human-made object. Besides, it wasn’t really a light as much as a glow. Suddenly, I thought maybe I knew what it was! Luminescence! I had read about strange sightings at sea of weird light phenomena that were caused by a special kind of algae. The blue glow could be coming from billions and billions of tiny algae, each emitting its own little luminescent energy.

This was a comforting theory. I started to relax. The blue glow was very beautiful to look at. It was almost a mirror of the stars. It was the most mysterious thing I had ever seen.

But a luminescence didn’t explain the sonar reading. I went back inside and looked at the screen — three hundred feet. That was impossible. I wished I had a depth cable that I could lower three hundred feet and see if it touched bottom. I started the engine and slowly sailed out of the luminescence, and as we left the glow, the sea floor dropped to
sixty-two hundred feet once more. Darkness surrounded us. Well, at least I could tell that the luminescence seemed to be causing the bizarre change in depth. But then I remembered that on our first trip over the area, the sonar read three hundred feet and there had been no glow in the water. Neither had we encountered three hundred feet on our way back. I was confused. Was it that we’d only see the luminescence when we were sailing slowly or were stopped? I turned around and went back slowly, fully expecting to see the lovely blue glow. But it was gone. The sonar revealed a sea floor sixty-two hundred feet below.

“This is crazy!”

I turned around and went over the area again. No sign of luminescence and no change in depth. Perhaps we had drifted west with the current. I crossed the area again, correcting for a small amount of lateral drift. Nope. Nothing.

By the last hour of darkness we had crossed the area a dozen times and found nothing more. I was beginning to wonder if my mind had been playing tricks on me all along. And then something happened that sent a shiver right up my spine.

There was a splash outside and a thumping on the stern, as if something heavy had come out of the water and landed on the hull. Then, it took what felt like a step, and then another one. I froze. I held my breath and listened. It was absolutely silent.

“Seaweed?” I called.

The thought that Seaweed was out there by himself made me move towards the ladder. Then something jumped from the hull, and there was another splash. I climbed the portal and stuck my head out. There was nothing on the stern. When I turned and looked at the bow, Seaweed was gone!

There was something in the water. I could sense it. It’s just a feeling you get, like something is staring at you. And then, I heard it. It came straight towards the sub, racing through the water like lightening. It jumped … and went right over my head! It came so close that I could have reached out and touched its tail. Now I knew what it was. I flicked on the sub’s floodlights and swept them across the water. Dolphins! The sea was full of them.

I smiled. Dolphins are really smart. And they like to play. I couldn’t help wondering if they thought the sub was some kind of “dummy” dolphin, with our new nose and paint. Maybe they wanted to play with us. Hollie whined at the bottom of the ladder. He wanted to come up. I went down, picked him up and carried him up the portal. His belly was already vibrating like a tiny motor and his teeth were chattering with the quietest growl imaginable. It always sounded like he wanted to growl but didn’t want anyone to know he was doing it. I doubted that a herd of dolphins was going to be afraid.

Then, Hollie surprised me. He barked. It was a brave attempt to defend his territory. He was used to barking at seals in the boathouse. Maybe he thought these were seals in the
water. The dolphins started calling back. Their calls were like soft screams. They were friendly. Hollie barked a few more times and the dolphins screamed back. Then there was a different sound, but it wasn’t a dolphin. It was also a kind of scream but it wasn’t soft or particularly friendly. It came from further away. It was a strange and frightening sound; I had never heard anything like it.

Holding Hollie tightly in one arm, I turned the floodlights toward the scream. The water was tossing with movement. Silhouettes of dolphins crisscrossed in front of the light but it was very hard to see anything else. Suddenly, a dolphin came sailing through the air and went over our heads. Splashes of water fell on us. I grabbed the floodlights and spun them back. As they cut an arc through the water they passed over something unbelievable. I mean, I saw it … but I didn’t believe it.

My eyes were playing tricks on me. I swung the lights again. Four or five dolphins were racing towards us. They were diving in and out of the water and picking up speed. I couldn’t coordinate the lights well enough to follow them but all of the dolphins went over us, and something was riding on the back of one of them. It just couldn’t be what I thought it was … It looked like a little boy.

My mind raced. I knew what Sheba would say, because she believed in mermaids. Well, I didn’t believe it could be a boy riding a dolphin, and so I tried to figure out what else it could be.

Dolphins, like fish, are always in danger of swimming into
garbage in the water — plastic rings and things like that. Sometimes they get trapped in them and drown, which is really sad. Sometimes they are able to swim away, and they carry the garbage attached to their bodies for the rest of their lives, or, sadly, until it slowly strangles them. Was that what I had seen, a piece of plastic wrapped around the body of a dolphin so that it looked like a little boy?

That was a good answer. It made sense. It made me feel better. But something was nagging me. And I knew what it was.

Darkness was fading. The water grew calm. The dolphin herd had moved on as quickly as they had appeared. I looked up in the sky for Seaweed but it was still too dark to see him. Then I saw something lying on the back of the stern, something small. Putting Hollie down inside, I strapped on the harness and climbed out onto the stern. I picked up the object. It was a small branch from an olive tree. There were three leaves on it. How strange. Then Seaweed dropped out of the sky.

“Hi, Seaweed. Did you drop this?”

He shook his beak. He probably did. He loved to pick things off the water and drop them in the sub. I looked around in the growing dawn. Inside of me a question was burning to get out, to shout to the sea all around me. And yet I couldn’t even say it out loud. I was afraid. But I could think it.

Were we in Atlantis?

THE FIRST PERSON I saw on the island of Crete stood like a giant on the pier. He had a large head of wooly hair, huge shoulders and arms and looked like he could wrestle a bull into the ground. He must have intimidated the local people just by walking through their villages. If it were ancient times they would certainly have written an epic or two about him. Of course it was Ziegfried.

I got teary-eyed when I saw him; I couldn’t help it. He looked a little different though, dressed in touristy clothes and wearing his tough look, which said, “Don’t mess with me!” No one ever would, that was for sure. But if you looked
closely, his t-shirt revealed another side of him, which I had come to know so well. On the front was a picture of a puppy and kitten, which must have been given to him by Sheba, and which he would therefore wear, no matter what. Beneath the picture were the words, “Endangered Species!” I laughed.

“Al!” he shouted, and lunged towards me and gave me one of his great bear hugs. Then he couldn’t speak for a few minutes because he was so emotional. He reached down instead and picked up Hollie, and then his tears really started to fall. He looked up into the sky with a questioning face.

“He’s around here somewhere,” I said, wiping my face. That was enough crying for a couple of men, it seemed to me.

We walked off the pier and down along the beach. Snowcapped mountains rose majestically above lush green forests, olive orchards and orange groves. It was semi-tropical.

“Where did you hide the sub?”

“Behind a rock, on the northwestern tip of the island. We swam to the main island.”

“Swam? Why didn’t you take the dinghy?”

“Ummm … that’s a long story.”

“I’m sure it is. Don’t spare me the details, I want to hear everything.”

I was nervous telling Ziegfried
everything.
Usually I’d leave out certain things, the dangerous things, such as being shot at. I was afraid that if I told him exactly how dangerous it was
sometimes, he wouldn’t want me to continue. And yet, walking on the beach together in Crete, and being treated so respectfully by him, as he had always treated me … I felt he deserved nothing less than to hear the whole story. And so I told him, and left nothing out.

We walked all the way down the beach, across a breakwater and down another long beach. Ziegfried listened carefully, only interrupting when he needed to hear something twice. When I finished, he was quiet for a long time. I waited anxiously, wondering what he was thinking, wondering what he was going to say. He surprised me.

“Your grandparents send you their love,” he said.

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Sheba does too, of course.”

“Thanks.”

He picked up a flat rock and skipped it on the water. The rock skipped about twelve times before it sank. I had no idea he could skip rocks.

“So … what do you think of my story?”

He took a deep breath and sighed.

“You live a dangerous life, Al.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s not so dangerous.”

“You’re an outlaw. That’s a dangerous life.”

“I don’t want to be an outlaw. I just want to explore. It’s just that …”

I looked over at Ziegfried. He was trying to pull a stick from Hollie’s mouth. Hollie wouldn’t give up a stick for anyone,
not even Ziegfried. He lifted Hollie into the air and still he wouldn’t let go.

“Yah, I guess I am.”

“Everything we do has consequences, Al. As long as you’re prepared to accept the consequences of your actions, and don’t hurt anybody, you can do what you want.”

“I am prepared to accept the consequences.”

“I know you are. That’s what makes you a man.”

I liked that answer. And yet I was never so uncertain about myself as I was just then, ever since the events of the other night.

“So what do you think about what I saw?”

Ziegfried turned and looked at me and he had the same slightly pained look on his face that I had — the look of not wanting to believe in something crazy, but not knowing what else to think.

“I don’t know, Al. Your theory about plastic trapped around the dolphin makes sense to me. So does the phosphorescence. Those things really happen. Maybe the phosphorescence was responsible for the variation in depth readings.”

“But what about the weird, awful screeching?”

“Maybe that same dolphin was making a different sound because of the restriction the plastic was causing.”

That seemed a pretty reasonable explanation too. And yet my skin tingled whenever I remembered the sound. Sheba had described the singing of mermaids just like that. So had
Reggie. And my efforts to convince myself that what I had seen was plastic, not a little boy, were not really successful.

“But how do I explain all of that happening at the same time, at the same place?”

“Well, you can call it coincidence, I suppose, but it strikes me that the dolphins might have been just as amazed by the phosphorescence as you were.”

“Oh. Yah. That makes sense.”

The more I talked to Ziegfried about it, the more I began to think that I had not been in the neighborhood of Atlantis at all, at least not a
living
Atlantis. And yet, I knew that if I were talking with Sheba, the conclusions would be completely different. That would come later.

But that wasn’t the end of it. We rented a car and drove to the palace of King Minos, one of the centers of the ancient Minoan civilization. It had been destroyed by earthquakes and volcanoes and had lain in a pile of rubble for thousands of years. Archaeologists had been rebuilding it for almost a hundred. The palace
itself
was a maze. Ziegfried couldn’t get his head around it because it had been built without symmetry. We walked through it for hours and he got really worked up about it.

“Al, you’ve got to understand, symmetry is like religion to architecture, especially ancient architecture. Look at the ancient temples everywhere else — they’re as evenly balanced as a two-bladed ax! There’s no symmetry here! None whatsoever! This is unbelievable!”

I had to smile. Ziegfried could explain away all the unbelievable things I had seen and yet he was stumped when it came to the way a building had been put together. But there was something else waiting for us around the corner. We turned … and there were the frescoes.

“Oh!”

They were large, colourful paintings on stone walls. The people, the ancient Minoans, were beautiful, just like the statue Penelope had found. They were a tall, elegant people, well-dressed and intelligent looking. There was something very strangely modern about them. Then we saw a fresco of a huge bull, with athletes leaping over it. And then we saw frescoes of dolphins. And there were people swimming with them. And there were people
riding
them.

We stared for a long time without saying a word. Even Hollie stared, and growled a little bit. I knew Ziegfried’s brain was busy trying to make sense of it all. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Well, … they swim with dolphins in aquariums, don’t they?”

“Yup.”

They did.