Journey to Atlantis (6 page)

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “This is Seaweed. He is part of the crew. His … name … is … Sea … weed.”

“Zeeeee … vvvvid,” she said.

“Yes.”

I liked the way she said it. Seaweed couldn’t have cared less. He was wondering what there was to eat. I handed a couple of dog biscuits to Nicola and gestured for her to feed him. She bent down and carefully reached them out. Seaweed twisted his head sideways and looked at her impatiently.

“No, you have to throw them,” I said. “He won’t take them from your hand.”

“Que?”
she said.

I made the gesture for tossing. She stood up quickly and tossed a biscuit. It went wide but Seaweed caught it easily. Nicola laughed. She threw another, making it harder to catch, but Seaweed caught it. She looked for another; she was delighted.

“I don’t want to over feed him,” I said, even though I knew you couldn’t overfeed a seagull. I gave her two more biscuits. She threw them wide again and Seaweed caught them easily, but I didn’t think he was in the mood for playing. I could hear other seagulls outside. When I didn’t give her any more, Seaweed got the message and bolted up the ladder. Nicola watched him climb and burst out laughing. Her laughter was so pleasant; I was thinking how nice it would be to have more of her company. I had no idea just how eagerly she was thinking the same thing.

I SHOULD HAVE been sleeping, it was past my bedtime, but I couldn’t communicate that to my hosts who were being so kind to me. In the middle of morning Anna sent Nicola and me up the steps of the lighthouse with a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies for Arturo. My legs were beginning to get sore as I lagged behind Nicola on the way up. When we entered the room at the top, Arturo made a big fuss over us, as if he hadn’t seen us for months. He kissed Nicola on the forehead again, took me over to the window and pointed distantly towards the horizon. I strained my eyes to see, but all I could see was water and sky. I was pretty sure that’s all that was there, though he was acting as if it were something
extraordinary. On the way down the steps my legs hurt even more than going up. When we got to the bottom and entered the house, Hollie was wearing a hat!

I had grown so sleepy all I wanted to do was return to the sub, submerge and crawl into my cozy bed. Instead, I ended up spending the afternoon with Nicola. Her parents seemed delighted she had company. We played cards, worked on an enormous jigsaw puzzle of a picture of horses, and she told me the names of many things in Portuguese. And though I was too tired to concentrate, and couldn’t remember a single word, I loved sitting across from her anyway and just watching her. If there
were
mermaids, as Sheba firmly believed, I was convinced they would look like Nicola, except maybe without the piercings.

At supper, Arturo asked me where I was going next. I said I was looking for Atlantis. Had they ever heard of Atlantis being located in the Azores? Oh, yes, Arturo said. They had? Yes. Wow! That’s great! Did he have any idea where? Of course, he said. Would he show me? Of course, as soon as we finished supper.

And so, with a belly full of stew, bread and cheese, I followed Arturo up the lighthouse steps one more time, though I fell far behind. My legs were terribly sore and I was so sleepy I was dizzy. Finally, I reached the top and entered the room where Arturo was anxiously waiting to show me where Atlantis was. I caught my breath. Where? There. He pointed out the window. I looked. He was pointing out to sea. What, way out there? Yes, he said. And there! He pointed in another
direction. Really? Atlantis? Yes, he said. And there! He pointed somewhere else. “There!” he said emphatically. Then he opened his arms wide and swung around in a circle. “There!” he said. “Atlantic!” I shut my eyes. Oh. He thought I meant the ocean.

Back downstairs I thanked everyone for their wonderful hospitality. They begged me to stay but I explained that I had far to go and not much time. Anna asked: could I just leave Hollie? I said I was very sorry but Hollie was part of the crew. Nicola looked upset. She gave me a polite kiss on the cheek then disappeared. I stumbled back to the sub as it was getting dark. Hollie followed me but kept looking around, and Anna followed him across the field and even down the cliff a few steps. I was too tired to explain anything to Hollie; I just said, “Hollie! Come!” in my firmest tone. And he obeyed. But he whined and looked like somebody leaving a party just when it was becoming fun.

It wasn’t easy getting down the cliff with sore legs. It was almost dark, the time we would normally be waking. I climbed onto the sub only to discover that in my distracted state earlier I had left the hatch open. How strange! I had never done that before. Oh, well, I climbed in, shut the hatch, dove to fifty feet, shut the lights and dropped onto my bed. I fell asleep instantly.

It was early morning when I woke. Now my sleep was backwards. I surfaced and opened the hatch. Seaweed appeared immediately. He had an amazing way of keeping track of the sub submerged. I fed the crew, made a cup of tea
and headed out to sea. An hour later I heard a strange noise in the stern. Turning, I was shocked to discover we had a stowaway!

It was Nicola. She must have climbed in before me and was hiding in the stern all night long, the poor thing. She smiled with an awkward look on her face, and then said something excitedly in Portuguese. With pleading gestures she communicated that she wanted to stay. She wanted to join the crew!

I knew that wasn’t a good idea. And it should have been an easy decision to turn around and take her back home. But it wasn’t. In the first place, she was very, very persistent. Even though we didn’t speak the same language I could understand a lot of what she was saying just by the look on her face. Like me, she didn’t want to stay where she was raised and live the life that her parents were offering her. She wanted to get out into the world and explore. I could understand that. We were the same age. We would probably experience a lot of things in the same way, and that would be fun. It would be fun teaching her how to sail the submarine, and how to dive, and how to do lots of things. And she would be great company. And she was so pretty.

It was one time that I honestly didn’t want to ask myself what Ziegfried would do, because I already knew. One part of me just wanted to have fun and didn’t want to worry about what was the “right” thing to do, or what other people were going to think. It didn’t help that Arturo and Anna
probably already thought it was my idea. Or maybe they even thought that I had kidnapped her! Sheba had told me that the Trojan War was started because Paris had kidnapped Helen from Greece, and that the Greeks went to war to get her back. But, in fact, nobody really knew if Helen had actually been kidnapped or had gone of her own free will because she had fallen in love with Paris. Yikes! If I did turn around, not only would I have to deal with Nicola’s deep disappointment, but her father’s anger too. I wasn’t looking forward to either.

But I owed it to Ziegfried to try to think of what he would say. I remembered watching my grandfather’s shotgun slip out of his hands and disappear into the water. That must not have been easy for him to do, to go against my grandfather’s wishes for me, and yet he did it. He did what he believed was the right thing to do. My grandfather was being caring in the best way he knew how, too. They just showed it in different ways. Both put a lot of faith in me. Well, I couldn’t betray that faith by acting in such an irresponsible way. That decided it!

Nicola didn’t just pout when I turned the sub around, she cried all the way in, and it took a whole hour! It was the worst thing I ever had to listen to. She cried and wailed and pleaded like a little girl. At one point she even lay on the floor and kicked her arms and legs up in the air. I tried turning on the radio but she just cried louder. Well, that certainly convinced me my decision was right — if this was how she
dealt with such a setback, then she clearly wasn’t ready to leave home and go to sea.

Arturo was standing on the rock when I pulled up to moor the sub. I waved to him and tried to explain what had happened, but he didn’t seem angry with me at all. He
was
angry with Nicola. She stopped crying when she saw him. She just rolled her eyes, sighed loudly and dropped her head. I watched them climb the cliff, while he gave her an earful. Then I returned to the sub and headed out to sea. I took a deep breath and shrugged. I had heard of lonely lighthouse keepers before, but a whole family?

Arturo had advised that I avoid Sao Miguel, the biggest island with the largest population. If I were seen around there, he said, the authorities would definitely want to stamp my passport and insist that I stay around for at least a few days while they examined my submarine. I shouldn’t have too much trouble with Graciosa, though, a smaller island with just five thousand people or so. I decided not to risk it. I was not so anxious to step onto land that I’d take the chance of being delayed. But I did sail close enough to Graciosa to take a peek at the island through the binoculars.

It was completely different from Corvo. It had a mountain in the center but was low-lying on the north side and appeared to have a decent harbour. I picked up several fast vessels on radar, likely recreational boaters enjoying the warm summer afternoon. Sure enough, through the binoculars
I caught a glimpse of some water-skiers and jet-skiers. We went by about a mile out with our flags down so as not to draw attention. We were on the surface, that was all the Law of the Sea required of foreign submarines within the twelve-mile zone. It was a lovely, sleepy summer’s afternoon as we passed the beautiful island. Hollie seemed to have forgotten the lady of the lighthouse already and was enjoying the warm breeze sweeping over the portal. Everything was just about perfect, until … I started to get that premonition feeling.

“It must be my imagination, Hollie. What do you think?”

Hollie wasn’t sure. He bit his lip and looked up in the sky at Seaweed doing his kite thing. From the portal I could hear the radar beeping inside. What was it that was bugging me?

I climbed down the ladder and took a look at the screen. In one corner of the bay were three motorboats that showed up as three lights on the radar. Those were the water-skiers. They were taking turns running up a platform; I could see them with the binoculars. On the other side of the bay were two jet-skis crisscrossing the harbour like jousting knights. That looked like a lot of fun. But … the radar showed
three
vessels. I climbed the portal and gazed through the binoculars. There were definitely just two jet-skiers. Hmmm, that was strange. I went back inside. There were three beeps on the radar, though only two were moving. Those were the jet-skiers. What was sitting in the water between them?

I went back outside. It was such a gorgeous day. We were
passing them now. If any of the boaters and skiers looked out very carefully they might have seen us sailing past, but everyone was too busy having fun to stare out to sea. I scratched my head. Whatever was sitting in the water between the jet-skiers, surely they must have known what it was? But there was that feeling again. And then, I remembered what Sheba had said … “trust those feelings.” Oh boy.

“What do we do, Hollie, move on … or investigate? Hmmm?”

Actually, I knew what Hollie would think. He was an investigating kind of dog.

“Okay … we’ll move a little closer.”

So, I shut the hatch, submerged to periscope level and quietly entered the bay. I knew we were not supposed to submerge inside the twelve-mile zone but I was only planning to take a quick peek, then leave. Whatever was sitting in the water between the jet-skiers must have been made of metal because it showed up on radar. What if they didn’t know it was there and ran into it? They could get killed!

Back and forth the jet-skiers raced towards each other, crossed paths, then swung out to the far sides of their figure eight. They reached the corners of their loop at about the same time, paused to wave to each other, then raced together again. They certainly looked like knights on horseback without the long spears. I noticed the submerged object between them had shifted a little bit. It must have been drifting in with the tide. What
was
it?

Through the periscope there was no way I could tell what it was. And so, at quarter of a mile away I surfaced. I opened the hatch and quickly raised our flags. Now we were clearly visible to the boaters and anyone on shore who might care to look our way. But nobody stopped doing what they were doing; everyone was having such a good time.

Slowly, cautiously, we came closer. I stood up on top of the portal and stared hard with the binoculars. Now I could definitely see something in the water. It was floating just beneath the surface and creating a round bald space in the waves. A little closer … I thought I saw something sticking up. A little closer still … yes, there was definitely something sticking up. There were several sharp things sticking up. Closer still … they appeared to be spikes, sharp spikes sticking up from a big, black, round … oh, my gosh! I froze! It was a sea mine! It was a World War II sea mine! The jet-skiers were in terrible danger! So was everyone on the beach! So were we!