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I scrambled out to the west end of the English Stones, and there below me was the last of the ebb sliding as smoothly as a conveyor belt and a lot faster down the deep cha
I had told Elsa that I should not be more than twenty minutes underwater and would give her a wave when I was about to dive. When she waved back I plunged in. The silt, no longer carried by the current, was sinking with me like a sparse flurry of yellow snow. Visibility was very poor, but better over the clean rock bottom close under the cliff. I passed a sloping ledge halfway down, which could have been a beach, and a much wider one nearer the bottom worn by the ice. The face of the rock was cut by vertical fissures and crevices much like the many inlets on the surface of the stones. I worked southwards until I came across a promising cave, which might well have been inhabited in the Stone Age, and explored it at length, my interest now being purely and enthusiastically archaeological without a thought of Marrin and his gold.
I found nothing. When I shot out into the cha
On that last sweep past the face of the Stones I had spotted two points of genuine interest. One was just such a shelter as I had described to Marrin. There was a wide stone ledge with the cliff above it deeply undercut, marking the bank of the river as it would have been – at a guess – two or three thousand years after the ice had retreated towards Scotland and before the river had become a tidal estuary. To one side of the shelter was a darkness which looked as if it might be a cave. The second interesting discovery was a little deep-water harbour where a boat could lie safely, given a heavy stone or a pi
The combination exactly suited Marrin’s requirements, but what in God’s name he had been diving for I could not imagine. A treasure of gold was no more likely than the nest of a sea serpent preying on mariners. The skills of the riverside family, if there was one, behind their curtain of hides at the entrance to that cave would have been limited to bone fish hooks and tridents with points of flint. Elsa suggested that a Spanish galleon might have gone aground on the Stones, but there would be some record of such a spectacular wreck supplying enterprising Gloucestershire fishermen with cash and timber for years to come. My whole hypothesis was ridiculous and archaeologically impossible.
We crossed the river and put up for the night at Beachley, almost under the Severn Bridge, intending to return to Bullo, or as near as we could get, on the next day’s tide. Elsa telephoned Broom Lodge to let the major know where we were. Some minutes passed before she could get hold of him. Meanwhile the person on the other end, who she thought was Raeburn, far from treating her as holy told her that she must return, almost adding ‘or else’. Denzil too was short and, without mentioning me or our address, said that he would drive over in the morning. It sounded as if he might be having trouble with the pagans.
He turned up after breakfast. It appeared that the six druidicals were spending their nights in the forest and their days in sleep. They did not work and they did not attend the gentle periods of meditation, separating themselves completely from their once-happy companions who were worried about them rather than resentful.
The bag of Marrin’s little masterpieces had been found, but the i
‘We’ll have no peace until the bowl is back,’ he said.
‘Better tell them that it’s a modern fake and get a certificate from the museum.’
‘It is not a fake, Piers.’
‘Still the Grail?’
‘It can be the Grail recoverable in spirit but not in fact.’
‘Like Arthur’s cavalry?’
‘At last you have understood, Piers. Indeed like Arthur’s cavalry.’
I let it go at that. The major’s abstruse heresies were endurable after di
He knew nothing of our expedition to the Shoots and I told him the whole futile story.
‘It didn’t fit your bright water and shadow, but long ago it might have done.’
‘Just daydreams, old boy. Get ’em while I’m shaving sometimes. Mustn’t take them too seriously.’
‘You weren’t shaving when you told me the glyptodont was a pet. You had been taking pictures of it for me.’
‘Pet? Did I say pet? What sort of pet?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, now. Like a rabbit.’
‘The glyptodont wasn’t a bit like a rabbit.’
‘But edible.’
‘One doesn’t usually eat pets.’
‘Like a rabbit,’ he repeated. ‘Buy it to eat and then become too fond of it.’
‘My Spanish galleon!’ Elsa exclaimed. ‘Perhaps the ship took on board a live glyptodont in America for the captain’s table and by the end of a long voyage he was feeding it from his golden plate.’
I said that glyptodonts were extinct long before Columbus, but her phrase ‘the end of a long voyage’ was working in me. Did the glyptodont come from the English Stones? If it did, it must have been brought there by ship.
Long voyage. America too far. Where was that sunken land to the west in which the Welsh bards believed? Atlantis? Well, I’ve always been damned sure that Atlantis wasn’t Santorini. When a colossal eruption overwhelmed it, Mycenaean and Egyptian civilisations were going strong. Yet there is not a word or the vaguest reference to so great a tragedy in Homer or the myths or the hieroglyphs.
Plato’s Atlantis is far older. We can date it – so far as one can date a myth – to 8/9000 B.C. A thousand years earlier, as the ice retreated, temperatures had begun to go up and thereafter sea levels were steadily rising about three feet every century, putting the fear of the gods into every settlement by the shore. Geologists can’t place the lost low-lying land, yet there must have been a dozen such along the Atlantic coasts which were happy isles until overwhelmed, like the green meadows on the English Stones. At least one of them could have preceded Egypt in its civilisation, its temples and its harbours.
By God, I can see the fugitives pulling up the long river, too narrow perhaps to use the square lugsail which had brought them in from the ocean, and entering the gorge against the powerful current from the last glaciers on the Welsh mountains, too strong for broken oars and weary arms; but here was a beach for the keel, a platform of rock on which to unload the cargo and stretch their limbs and a cave for shelter. Upstream beyond the gorge they could see the blue river ru