'Perhaps; but I'm not looking forward to the way in which I shall have to get it.'
'No decent man would. Still, it will be your one big chance to save yourself and, if that is not enough inducement, you must think of the much greater things that are at stake. Do you know, I heard a rumour at my hotel this morning that the conference in Delhi has broken down.'
'Yes, I heard the same thing, while I was being shaved at a barber's. It's said that last night the Russians walked out. I suppose something has come through on the wireless. All the same, neither side can be quite so crazy as to go to war. If they did they would blow one another to pieces, and they know it.'
While the car ran on past the back lots and dusty buildings in the suburbs, they fell silent. Soon they reached more open country and, some twenty minutes' drive from the city, ran down a hill to the valley in which Knossos is situated. The palace occupied the whole of a low, extensive hill in the valley. There was no fine view in any direction and it was some distance from the sea; although it was believed that, at one time, the sea had come up to it and its site had been chosen for that reason. However, the contours of the country had since been radically changed by violent earthquakes.
A first palace had been in existence there in two thousand b.c., as the centre of a brilliant civilization which had lasted two or three hundred years. It had then been destroyed by an earthquake. From the sixteenth century b.c., a second great civilization had arisen, and Crete, under the Minoan Kings, had become a sea power of the first rank, trading with distant lands and drawing tribute from many coast towns in the Eastern Mediterranean. But again, towards fourteen hundred, another terrible earthquake had destroyed Knossos and the other principal buildings throughout the island. The Minoans had never recovered from this second, devastating blow.
It was believed that the palace originally had five stories; but the ruins of only the two lower ones remained, and these had lain undiscovered until the colossal labours undertaken by Sir Arthur Evans in the early nineteen hundreds. No photographs could give an adequate impression of the vastness of the ruin, because there were no lines of tall pillars or lofty archways. It was simply a huge, man-made mound, riddled with passages, staircases and chambers. Owing to the prevalence of earth tremors the rooms were small, but there were said to have been no fewer than one thousand three hundred of them.
Sir Arthur Evans had done far more than simply excavate the ruins. He had spent a large part of his great fortune in restoring many of the most interesting chambers. The original frescoes had been moved for preservation to the Museum in Heraklion; but artists had painted exact copies of them on the walls where they had formerly been, and they consisted of colourful representations of birds, beasts, fish and flowers, rendered with a technique far more modern in conception than the art of any other people of the ancient world.
That the Minoan nobility had lived in a state of luxury comparable to modern standards was also evident. Some of the frescoes showed women who had lived nearly four thousand years ago, yet their elaborate coiffeurs, jewels and the richness of their brocade dresses could have rivalled those of twentieth-century Parisians. The Queen's private bathroom could still be seen and had been better equipped than that of Marie Antoinette at Versailles. By a skilfully devised system of pipes for sewage and steam, the inmates of the palace had enjoyed both modern sanitation and central heating.
For the better part of two hours, Robbie and Stephanie wandered about the endless succession of rooms and staircases; then they lunched at the Tourist Pavilion. Afterwards, they walked right round the ruin to see the theatre and the long, solidly-built sunken road which connected the great palace to a smaller one a quarter of a mile off, on the far side of the highway. By then the sun was blazing down, so they found a shady place in which to sit and Stephanie said:
'I suppose the famous Labyrinth, in which young men and maidens were sacrificed to the Minotaur each year, lies somewhere below the ruins of the palace. But the Minotaur couldn't really have been half man, half bull, could it?'
Tt is impossible to say,' Robbie replied. 'Modern opinion is that these young captives were just trained as bull-fighters and put into a bull-ring to amuse the Minoans. But there are well-authenticated accounts of some pretty queer creatures that women have given birth to in quite recent times. According to the ancient chronicles, King Minos angered Poseidon, so the god inflicted Minos's Queen, Pasiphae, with a monstrous passion for a bull. In order to gratify it, she had the great inventor, Daedalus, make for her an imitation cow that she could get inside, and the result of his efforts was so lifelike that the bull took it for a real cow and acted accordingly. The result was that she gave birth to the Minotaur.'
'It must have been joHy uncomfortable for her,' Stephanie remarked; then she added hastily: 'Anyhow, one must give Daedalus full marks for having made a cow good enough to deceive the bull.'
'Oh, he was a genius. When he got into trouble with Minos and was imprisoned here, he is said to have invented wings by which he and his son, Icarus, escaped. Unfortunately, Icarus flew too high; so the sun melted the wax by which the wings were attached to his shoulders, and he fell in the sea and was drowned. But Daedalus got away safely and later invented all sorts of wonderful things for a new patron, King Cocalus, who reigned over a large part of Sicily. It was through the Minotaur that Daedalus got on the wrong side of King Minos; because it was he who had the bright idea of providing Theseus with the ball of thread that enabled him to find his way out of the Labyrinth after he had killed the monster.'
They were silent for a moment, then Stephanie said: 'Tell me about Theseus, Robbie.'
'Oh, I don't know.' He gave a shrug. 'Somehow, I find it difficult to think about that sort of thing any more.'
'But you should,' she urged him. 'You mustn't let yourself brood about the trouble you are in, and awful things in the future which may never happen.'
He smiled at her and, after a moment, admitted: 'I suppose you're right. Very well, then. Theseus was one of the greatest of the Heroes and came of the royal line of Athens. They were a pretty tough lot and, to start from the beginning, the city was founded by a chap called Cecrops. His grandson, Pandion, had two daughters, Procne and Philomela. In those early days, the Athenians still had great difficulty in preventing barbarian invaders from ravaging their country; so Pandion called in a fierce King of Thrace, called Tereus, to give him a hand. When Tereus's tribesmen had done their stuff, Pandion said he could have whichever he liked of his daughters as a reward.
'Tereus chose the elder, Procne, married her and took her off to Thrace, where she had a son by him called Itys. But, as the years passed, Procne grew lonely; so she asked her lord and master to let her go on a visit to her old home. He wouldn't hear of it but, after a while, he agreed to go down to Athens himself and bring back Philomela, so that the sisters could have a few weeks' get-together.
'When he collected Philomela he found that, since he had last seen her, she had blossomed out quite a bit. That gave him wicked ideas. In the ship on the way back, he did his best to make a good impression on her by fetching her cushions to sit on, admiring her hair-dos and feeding her lots of Turkish delight. Naturally, she took all this simply as proof of what a charming brother-in-law she had. But, once they got ashore, as the story books say "the villain revealed himself".
* "Be mine," he said, "and I will make you my Queen in your sister's place." "No, no!" she cried. " 'Twould be a crime in the eyes of gods and men." "I care not a fig for either," he stormed.