‘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 running through open, friendly woodland with deer drinking in the shallows. The voyage was over.
Gold. Can we accept that a high and isolated stone-age culture, practising agriculture and possessing sea-going ships, could have discovered gold before any other metal? Easily! Geology alone is enough to account for the absence of tin and copper but the presence of plentiful gold. In the Empire of the Incas that useful and malleable material had no exaggerated value. The best jugs and bowls were of gold, not of earthenware or bronze (though by then they had discovered it), and the most deadly weapons were still of stone. For how long had such a culture, there or elsewhere, been in existence? There is no evidence. But if you sailed off from such a land into the unknown, you would assume that other societies were much like your own and take with you gold for gifts and for trading.
‘We shall go back this evening and have another look at slack water,’ I told the major.
‘Useless, old boy! You said so yourself. And bloody dangerous!’
‘I’ve eaten armadillo and it was quite good.’
‘You’re in one of your dreams, come off it!’ Elsa said.
‘I am, but you started it. Glyptodont was a cousin of the armadillo.’
The major pointed out that there would be no bones left.
‘Nor of its master. Nor of his ship,’ I said. ‘Nor of Nodens nor Arthur nor the quick-witted Odysseus. But bones are not the only memorial.’
In the afternoon we had to leave earlier than I intended in order to get off the mud. The ebb was still rolling down the river in a yellow flood, and Marrin’s dinghy had not enough power to cross the tideway to the English Stones before we were carried down the Shoots. I was afraid that the first place we could put in to would be the port of Avonmouth, but managed to bear away to starboard and anchor in the shelter of Gruggy Island which formed the right-hand bank of the gorge and was partly showing. There we had to stay for two more hours in full view of the Welsh coast until slack water. A passing coaster hailed us to know if we wanted help. I understood why Marrin only went out when low water was at night and kept his rowing boat in the mouth of the pill at New Passage.
When the force of the tide died away, we crossed to the inlet in the Stones where we had been the night before and where I could change into full gear for the dive unobserved. At about seven the Shoots became as motionless as a pond and I went in carrying a small bag of stout canvas. The cave was not easy to find again, for I had been carried past it at speed and surfaced well to the north. When at last I saw it a good ten minutes of slack water had been wasted.
I swam into the mouth, keeping well clear of the bottom though it was the usual Severn mixture of mud and sand and probably safe. Ahead of me my light showed a vertical face of rock, about the height of a man, which at first I thought was the end of the cave, but it wasn’t. On the top of this little cliff was a flat ledge running back a few yards, with a slope to the right of it which ended in a nearly perpendicular funnel. It occurred to me even then that if this fissure carried on as it started it might end in a blowhole at the surface of the Stones.
The ledge had a floor of fine silt which did not appear to have been disturbed. I swept it away to reveal the bare rock beneath, but at the expense of being half blinded by the cloud I created. Below the cleft I touched something which I thought was an oddly shaped shell and pulled it out. It was encrusted with sea growths but so exactly ring-shaped that it had to be a man-made object. Time was forgotten. I was wild with excitement. I wriggled over the silt, swashing a space all round me like a cock salmon looking for eggs to fertilise in the bed of a stream. I don’t know what Marrin was after when he first entered the cave. It would not have been salmon but doubtless had something to do with life in the dark deep. He was very much in my mind, but without fear. I was conscious that I must be imitating all his movements. And then his hand had struck, as mine did, little flat pebbles which slid easily upon each other, scoured clean by the gentle wash of the silt.
I took two of them in my hand and sank down to the mouth of the cave where I was clear of the haze of silt and had a faint sheen of evening light from the surface. They were gold ingots, roughly the size and shape of a beech leaf and a quarter of an inch thick. Putting them in my bag along with the ring, I returned to the back of the ledge where I had found them and cleared three neat blocks of ingots which suggested that they had been tied together or packed in a wooden case. The outer surfaces of each block were heavily encrusted with marine growth, which had held it together.
With the thoughtless greed of gold fever I filled the bag, and of course found that the load and I could never reach the surface; so I put back a few ingots and then discarded the lead weights of my belt to the approximate equivalent of what was left in the bag. On swimming to the mouth of the cave I found that the tide had turned and was running more strongly than the day before. I was still below neutral buoyancy but able to come up then and there if I dropped either gold or lead. I chose lead rather than to lose forever several thousand pounds at the bottom of the Shoots. I came up all right but to the roof of the cave, carried by a surge running into it. Back to the ledge I went, scraping along the roof and, lacking the experience of a professional diver, confused by the weight being in my hand, not round my waist.
Obviously I needed to be heavier in order to get clear of the cave mouth, and was about to add three or four ingots to my belt – since there was no hope of finding the discarded lead weights – when another of the intermittent surges caught me and washed me into the funnel. I could see through the water that far above me there was light. I could also see that the cleft was not nearly wide enough for my body to go through. Panic-stricken scrapings with knees and elbows got me clear, and by the time the next surge arrived I was firmly anchored to the floor of the ledge, one hand in a deep crack and the other feeling for more gold to fill the bag and keep me down. I no longer cared how much of it was lost for good when I was safely out of the cave and could throw it away. Marrin’s treasure had seemed likely to do a better job than he had done.