Текст книги "Trojan Odyssey"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

31

After communications with Pitt ended, Sandecker waited patiently while Gunn arranged for a helicopter to pick up his special projects director at the phony lighthouse. Then they exited the admiral's office and dropped down a floor to the conference room, where Sandecker had arranged a meeting to discuss the Celtic discoveries on Navidad Bank.

Sitting around a huge oval table built of teak and resembling the deck of a ship was Hiram Yaeger, Dirk and Summer Pitt and St. Julien Perlmutter. Seated next to Summer was historian Dr. John Wesley Chisholm, professor of ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. Everything about Chisholm's appearance was average. The height and weight were average. The hair a medium average brown that matched the eyes. But there was nothing average about his personality. He smiled constantly and was extremely warm and courteous. His mind went far above the level of ordinary.

Everyone was paying rapt attention to Dr. Elsworth Boyd, who stood in front of a large monitor displaying a montage of photos and lectured on the artifacts and images of the stone carvings recovered and recorded at Navidad Bank. The story that was coming together was so startling, so fabulous, that everyone seated around the spacious table sat in awed silence as Boyd described the artifacts, their approximate dates and original source. All this before shifting to the stone carvings.

Boyd, a limber man with the body of an acrobat, sinewy and nimble in the full vigor of his early forties, stood erect, occasionally brushing back a forelock of yellow-red hair, and gazed at his rapt audience through eyes as gray as a pigeon wing. A professor emeritus of classics at Trinity College, Dublin, he devoted his energies to researching the early history of the Celts. He had published numerous books on every aspect of the complex Celtic society. When invited by Admiral Sandecker to fly to Washington and study the artifacts under conservation, he was on the next plane from Dublin. When he saw the relics firsthand and a photo montage of the wall sculptures, he came within an inch of going into complete shock.

At first, Boyd refused to believe what he was seeing were not forgeries from an elaborate hoax, but after twenty hours straight of examining the artifacts, he became convinced of their authenticity.

Summer experienced a tingling of excitement as she took in every word of Boyd's lecture, transcribing it with a lightning display of the lost art of shorthand on a legal-sized tablet.

"Unlike the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans," explained Boyd, "the Celts have been sidetracked by most historians, despite the fact that they were the keystone of Western civilization. Much of our heritage – religious, political, social and literary traditions – was born within Celtic culture. Industry too, since they were the first to produce bronze and then iron."

"So why aren't we more aware of Celtic influence?" asked Sandecker.

Boyd laughed. "There lies the rub. Three thousand years ago, the Celts transmitted all their information, gossip and knowledge orally. Their rituals, customs and ethics were passed down through succeeding generations by word of mouth. Not until the eighth century B.C. did they begin to write anything down. Much later, when Rome swept over Europe, they considered the Celts little more than uncouth barbarians. And what little the Romans wrote about them was anything but flattering."

"And yet they were inventive," added Perlmutter.

"Contrary to what many people think, the Celts were advanced in more ways than the early Greeks. They only lagged in a written language and elaborate architecture. Actually, their culture and civilization predates the Greeks by several hundred years."

Yaeger leaned forward in his chair. "Does your dating of the artifacts agree with my computer calculations?"

"In the ballpark, I'd say," Boyd replied, "if you consider plus or minus a hundred years a chronologically tight case. I also believe the pictographs give us an excellent time frame for Navinia."

Summer smiled. "I love that name."

Boyd held a remote and flashed an image on a huge monitor covering one wall of the conference room. A three-dimensional perspective of the underwater structure as it might have looked when built filled the screen. "What is interesting," Boyd continued, "is that the structure was not only the dwelling of a very important woman, comparable to a tribal queen or high priestess, but it also became her tomb."

"When you say 'high priestess,' " said Summer, "like in Druid?"

"A Druidess," Boyd answered, nodding. "The intricate carvings and the gold of her ornaments indicate that she very likely held a high position in the sacred world of Celtic Druidism. Her bronze cuirass body armor is especially revealing. There is only one other known to have come from a woman, which is dated between the eighth and eleventh century B.C. At one time or another, she must have fought in battle. When she was alive, she was probably revered as a goddess."

"A living goddess," Summer said softly. "She must have led an interesting life."

"I also found this interesting." Boyd pulled up a photo taken of the foot of the stone funeral bed, with the carved image of a stylistic horse. "Here you see a sophisticated and modern-looking pictograph of a galloping horse. Called the White Horse of Uffington, it was carved into a chalk hillside in Berkshire, England, in the first century a.d. It represents the Celtic horse goddess, Epona. She was worshiped throughout the Celtic world and what would later become Gaul."

Summer studied the horse. "You think our goddess was Epona?"

Boyd shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Epona was worshiped as the goddess of horses, mules and oxen during the Roman era. It's thought that a thousand years earlier she may have been a goddess of beauty and fertility, with the power to throw a spell over men."

"I wish I had her clout," Summer said, laughing.

"What brought down the Druids?" asked Dirk.

"As Christianity gradually took hold and spread throughout Europe, it ridiculed Celtic religion as paganism. Women especially were not accorded the respect they had under the Druids. The heads of the church could not allow any irreverence or opposition to masculine authority. The Romans particularly made a crusade of stamping out the Druid religion. Druidesses were reduced to the category of witches. Women of power were recast as creatures of evil who took up with the devil. Women rulers were especially targeted for exclusion, and were cast from mother goddess to male-oriented domination."

Gunn's academic mind was soaking up every word of Boyd's discourse. "The Romans themselves worshiped pagan gods and goddesses. Why were they driven to erase the Druids?"

"Because the Romans saw the Druids as a source of rebellion against Rome. They were also disgusted by Druid ritual savagery."

"What form of savagery?" asked Sandecker.

"Early Druids conducted human sacrifice. It's claimed that their pagan cult knew no barbaric bounds. Sacrificial blood rites were not uncommon. Another infamous legend concerns 'The Wicker Man.' The Romans recounted events where condemned men and women were placed in huge cane effigies and burned to death."

Summer looked unconvinced. "Were Druidesses known to have participated in these barbaric rituals?"

Boyd made a noncommittal shrug. "It can only be assumed they were as responsible as the Druid priests."

"Which brings us back to the question we've asked ourselves a hundred times," said Dirk. "How did a high-ranking Celtic Druidess come to be entombed on what was once an island in the Caribbean five thousand miles from her homeland in Europe?"

Boyd turned and nodded at Chisholm. "I believe my colleague John Wesley may have some extraordinary answers to your question."

"But first," interrupted Sandecker – he turned to Yaeger—"have you and Max been able to discover how the structure came to be standing under fifty feet of water?"

"Early geological records for the Caribbean are all but nonexistent," replied Yaeger, fanning out a file of loose papers on the table in front of him. "We know more about prehistoric meteor strikes and land movement millions of years ago than we know about geological upheavals three thousand years ago. The best projections from leading geologists whom we've questioned is that Navidad Bank, once an island, sank during an underwater earthquake somewhere between eleven hundred and one thousand b.c."

"How did you arrive at that date?" asked Perlmutter, shifting his huge bulk in a chair too small for him.

"Through various chemical and biological studies, scientists can read how old the encrustations are and how long they took to form on the rock walls, the amount of corrosion and deterioration of the artifacts and the age of the coral surrounding the structure."

Sandecker, reaching in his breast pocket for a cigar and not finding one, began tapping a pen on the table. "The hype-mongers will have a field day claiming Atlantis has been found."

"Not Atlantis." Chisholm shook his head and smiled. "I tossed that one in the air for years. My own opinion is that Plato wrote a fictitious account of the disaster using the eruption of Santorini in sixteen fifty b.c. as background material."

"You don't think Atlantis was in the Caribbean?" said Summer somewhat facetiously. "People claim to have found sunken roads and cities deep under the water."

Chisholm did not look amused. "Geological formations, nothing more. If Atlantis had existed somewhere in the Caribbean, why hasn't one" – he paused for effect—"just onepotsherd or artifact of ancient origin been discovered? Sorry, Atlantis did not exist on this side of the ocean."

"According to paleontology records in my library," offered Yaeger, "the Arawak Indians found by the Spanish when they arrived in the New World were the first humans into the West Indies. They had migrated from South America around twenty-five hundred B.C., or fourteen hundred years before the lady was laid to rest in her tomb."

"Somebody always gets there first," said Perlmutter. "Columbus reported seeing the hulks of large European-built ships abandoned on an island beach."

"I can't tell you how she got there," said Chisholm. "But I might shed some light on who she was."

He pressed a button on the remote and the first image on the stone-carved montage found by Dirk and Summer appeared on the monitor. The scene showed what appeared to be a fleet of ships in procession landing on a shoreline. They looked similar to the Viking longboats, but much stubbier, with flat bottoms that enabled them to travel in shallow coastal waters and rivers. Single masts supported square sails that appeared to be made of hides so they wouldn't shred under the onslaught of Atlantic gales. The hulls had high bows and sterns for sailing through rough seas. Banks of oars extended through locks on the top rails of the hulls.

"The first scene from the stone panel shows a fleet of ships unloading fighting men, horses and chariots." He pressed another button on the remote, creating a montage. "Scene Two, the opposing army is seen rising from a huge ditch surrounding a citadel on a steep hill. The next panel has them charging across a flat plain and attacking the enemy before they can unload their ships. Scene Four is the battle to repel the fleet."

"If it wasn't for all the earthen works and the citadel looking as if it was built of wood," said Perlmutter, "I'd say we were looking at the Trojan War."

Chisholm had the look of a wolf watching a herd of sheep approach his den. "You arelooking at the Trojan War."

Sandecker fell into the trap. "Strange-looking Greeks and Trojans. I always thought they grew beards, not bushy mustaches."

"That's because they were not Greeks or Trojans."

"Who, then?"

"Celts."

Perlmutter's face wore an expression of genuine satisfaction. "I've also read Iman Wilkens."

Chisholm nodded. "Then you know his remarkable revelations about ancient history's greatest misconception."

"Could you please enlighten the rest of us?" Sandecker asked impatiently.

"I'll be happy to oblige," Chisholm replied. "The battle for Troy…"

"Yes?"

"Did not take place on the west coast of Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea."

Yaeger stared at him, looking puzzled. "If not Turkey, then where?"

"Cambridge, England," Chisholm answered simply, "near the North Sea."

32

Everyone, with the exception of Perlmutter, gave Chisholm a look of pure disbelief.

"The skepticism in your eyes is obvious," Chisholm challenged. "The world has been misled for a hundred and twenty-six years, when a German merchant named Heinrich Schliemann declared emphatically that he had found Troy by using Homer's Iliadas his guide. He claimed that the ancient mound called Hisarlik was the perfect location for the fortified city of Troy."

"Don't most archaeologists and historians back Schliemann's case?" Gunn queried.

"It's still a hotly debated subject," said Boyd. "Homer was a man of great mystery. There is no proof that he actually existed. All legend tells us is that a man called Homer took epic poems of a great war that had been passed down orally for hundreds of years, and recorded them in a series of adventure tales in what became the world's earliest written literature. Was he one man or a group, who over the centuries refined the poems until the Iliadand the Odysseybecame history's greatest classics? The truth will never be known. Besides the enigma of his identity, the great puzzle he left behind is whether the Trojan War was fable or fact. And if it really occurred in the Early Bronze Age, were the Greeks the true enemies of the Trojans, ordid Homer write about an event that took place more than a thousand miles away?"

Perlmutter grinned broadly. Boyd and Chisholm were affirming what he had always believed. "What no one considered until Wilkens was that, instead of being Greek, Homer was a Celtic poet who wrote about a legendary battle that occurred four hundred years earlier, not in the Mediterranean but in the North Sea."

Gunn looked adrift. "Then the epic voyage of Odysseus…"

"Took place in the Atlantic Ocean."

Summer's mind was spinning. "Are you implying that Helen's face didn't launch a thousand ships?"

"What I was about to suggest," Boyd countered with a tired smile, "is that the truth behind the myth was not about a conflict fought because of a king's rage for revenge over the abduction of his wife by her lover. Hardly an excuse for thousands of men to fight and die for a promiscuous woman, is it? Wise old Priam, the king of Troy, would never have risked his kingdom nor the lives of his people merely to allow a wayward son to live with a woman, who, if the truth were known, willingly left her husband for another man. Nor was it a quest for the treasures of Troy. Rather, realistically, the conflict was fought over a soft crystalline metallic element called tin."

"St. Julien gave Summer and me a lecture about how the Celts ushered in the Bronze and Iron Ages," said Dirk, looking up from diligently taking notes.

Chisholm nodded in agreement. "To be sure, they launched the industry, but no one can say with any degree of certainty who actually discovered that mixing ten percent tin with ninety percent copper forged a metal twice as hard as anything known before. Even the exact dating is hazy. The best guess is that it appeared around two thousand B.C."

"Smelting copper was known as far back as five thousand B.C. in central Turkey," said Boyd. "Copper was in abundance throughout the ancient world. Mining took place on a grand scale in Europe and the Middle East. But when bronze came along, there was a problem. Tin ore is rare in nature. Like later gold rushes, prospectors and traders spread throughout the ancient world in search of the ore. They eventually found the largest deposits in Southwest England. The British Celtic tribes quickly cashed in and built an international marketplace for dealing in tin that they mined, smelted into bars and traded throughout the ancient world."

"Due to the high demand, the ancient Brits quickly developed a monopoly and commanded high prices from foreign traders," added Chisholm. "Though traders from rich empires such as Egypt could afford to trade in expensive goods, the Celts of Central Europe had only handmade objects and an abundant supply of amber to offer. Without a bronze industry, they had little hope of going beyond an agricultural society."

"So they decided to band together and seize the tin mines from the Brits," Yaeger anticipated.

"Precisely," Boyd replied. "The Celtic tribes on the continent formed an alliance to invade southern England and seize the mines in a territory then known as the Troad, or later Troy. The capital city was called Ilium."

"So the Achaeans were not Greeks," said Perlmutter.

Boyd gave a slight nod of his head. "Achaeanwas a loose term for allies. The Trojans generally referred to themselves as Dardanians. Just as Egypt was not the title for the Land of the Pharaohs."

"Hold on," said Gunn. "Then where did the name Egypt come from?".

"Before Homer, it was known as Al-Khem, Misr or Kemi. Not until hundreds of years later, when the Greek historian Herodotus gazed upon the pyramids and the temple of Luxor, did he call the fading empire Egypt, from a land described in Homer's Iliad.From then on, the name stuck."

"What evidence does Wilkens give for his theory?" asked Sandecker.

Boyd looked expectantly at Chisholm. "Do you want to take the ball, Doctor?"

"You probably know as much about it as I do," Chisholm said, with a pleased smile.

"May I jump in?" asked Perlmutter. "I've studied Wilkens's book Where Troy Once Stood."

"Be our guest," Boyd acquiesced.

"There is a mountain of evidence," Perlmutter began. "For one thing, almost nothing that Homer described in his epic works stands up to scrutiny. Nowhere does he call the invading fleet 'Greeks.' During eleven hundred B.C., when the war supposedly took place, Greece was sparsely populated. There were no major cities that could support a large fleet of fighting ships and crews. The early Greeks were not considered seafaring people. Homer's reports of the ships and the men who rowed them across the sea seems better suited to the Vikings two thousand years later. Also, his descriptions of the sea more closely match the Atlantic European coastline than the Mediterranean.

"Nor do his climate narratives jibe. Homer recounts heavy, constant rain, thick mists or fog and sleet. Weather conditions more common for England than southern Turkey, which is just across the Med from the Sahara Desert."

"And there is the vegetation," Boyd prompted.

"To be sure," Perlmutter said with a modest nod. "Most all the trees Homer details are better suited to the damper atmospheres of Europe than the more arid land of Greece and Turkey. He talks mostly of deciduous green-leafed trees, while Greeks would be more familiar with evergreen conifers. And then we have horses. The Celts were a horse-loving people. The use of horses by ancient Greeks in battle was unheard of. The Egyptians and the Celts used chariots as fighting platforms, but not the Greeks or Romans. They preferred to fight on foot, using chariots only for transport and races."

"Any differences on the subject of food?" inquired Gunn.

"Homer mentions eels and oysters. Eels start from their breeding ground in the Sargasso Sea and migrate to the cold waters around Europe. He used the term diving for oysters,which are far more prevalent in the oceans outside the Mediterranean. If a Greek dove, it would have been for sponges, which were common in Greece at the time."

"What about the gods?" Sandecker put forth. "The Iliadand Odysseyare filled with the interference of the gods on both the Trojan and Greek armies."

"The Celts were there first. Classical scholars have concluded that the gods Homer portrayed were originally Celtic and inherited from Homer's works by later Greeks." Perlmutter paused and then added: "Another interesting point. Homer stated the Greeks and Trojans cremated their dead. This was a custom of the Celts. People around the Mediterranean generally interred their deceased."

"Intriguing hypothesis," said an unconvinced Sandecker. "But conjecture just the same."

"I was coming to the best part." Perlmutter showed his teeth in a wide smile. "Wilkens's most extraordinary revelations prove convincingly that the cities, islands and nations that Homer wrote about in his epic poems either did not exist or were called something completely different. The geography and the topography in the Iliadsimply do not match with the existing land and seascapes around the Mediterranean. Wilkens discovered that Homer's names for towns, regions and rivers have their source in continental Europe and England. The Greek names do not fit the neighborhood of both Troy and the kingdoms of the Greek heroes, nor do the descriptions of settings match geophysical reality."

"The list goes on," said Chisholm. "Homer describes Menelaus with red hair, Odysseus with reddish brown and Achilles as blond. Also, some warriors were depicted with fair skin. None of these are characteristic of Mediterranean people. It's almost as if they came from another time and dimension."

"The invading Achaean tribes came from the bronze-making regions of France, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Holland, Germany and Austria. Their fleet probably assembled at what is now Cherbourg and sailed across the Sea of Helle, which gave its name to the Hellespont in Turkey and is now known as the North Sea. They landed in a large bay once called the Thracian Sea, which is now labeled on present-day maps simply as the Wash in Cambridgeshire. The waters touched the shores of the East Anglian plain."

Boyd added another plus to Perlmutter's report. "Homer mentioned fourteen rivers in and around Troy. There is an amazing correlation with the fourteen rivers near the East Anglian plain. Wilkens discovered that even after thirty centuries their names remained very similar in spelling and could easily be compared. In Greek, for example, Homer alludes to the Temese River. This translates to the Thames."

"And the Trojans?" queried Sandecker, still not totally convinced.

"Their army came from all over England, Scotland and Wales," Perlmutter moved on. "They were also aided by allies from Brittany and Belgium on the continent. And now that we have the bay and the plain we can begin zeroing in on the battleground and defenses. Two immense parallel ditches still exist northeast of Cambridge. Wilkens believes they were built by the invaders, much like the trenches of World War One, to keep the defenders from attacking the camp and ships."

"Then where was the citadel of Troy?" Sandecker persisted.

Perlmutter took up the challenge. "The best bet goes to the Gog Magog Hills, where large earthworks of round fortifications with deep defensive ditches have been discovered and excavated, which revealed evidence of wooden palisades and many bronze artifacts. Funeral urns and vast numbers of skeletons that showed signs of mutilation have also been uncovered."

"Where did the odd name of Gog Magog come from?" asked Summer.

"Many years ago, as residents began accidentally uncovering an army of bones, they referred to it as the site of a great battle or war with immense slaughter. They were reminded of Ezekiel's biblical conjuring up of evil spirits in a war launched by King Gog of Magog."

Sandecker looked from Boyd to Chisholm. "All right, now that we've heard how the Trojan War was fought in southern England over tin mines, what has it got to do with the Celtic discoveries by Dirk and Summer on Navidad Reef?"

The two scholars exchanged amused looks. Then Boyd said, "Why, everything, Admiral. Now that we're reasonably sure the true battle site of the Trojan War was in England, we can begin to tie Odysseus' great voyage of adventure to Navidad Bank."

You could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the conference room. The bombshell was so unexpected that it was nearly half a minute before anyone could bring themselves to respond.

"What are you saying?" asked Gunn, trying to digest what he had just heard.

Sandecker turned slowly to Perlmutter. "St. Julien, do you go along with this craziness?"

"Not crazy at all," said Perlmutter, with a broad grin. "It was written in Homer's epics that Odysseus was king of the island of Ithaca. But the Greek island never had a kingdom nor does it have any significant ruins. Wilkens shows, to my satisfaction, at least, that Odysseus' kingdom was not in Greece. A Belgian attorney from Calais, France, Theophile Cailleux, after much research, claimed that Cadiz, Spain, was the site of Homer's Ithaca. And although the land has filled in over the past three thousand years, geologists can show the outline of several islands that are now part of the mainland. Cailleux and Wilkens have identified most of Odysseus' ports of call, none of which are in the Mediterranean."

"I have to agree," said Yaeger. "By using all the known information on Odysseus' itinerant voyage, Homer's descriptions, Cailleux and Wilkens's theories, Bronze Age navigation methods, tides and currents, Max and I have arrived at a travel plan for his ports of call."

Yaeger picked up the remote and pressed a numbered code. A chart of the north Atlantic Ocean filled the screen. A red line traveled down the coast of Africa from southern England before it crossed over the water past the Cape Verde Islands into the isles of the Caribbean. He used a laser beam as a pointer and began to trace Odysseus' journey from England.

"Odysseus' first landfall after being swept out to sea was what he described as the Land of the Lotus Eaters. According to Wilkens, this was probably the West Coast of Africa at Senegal. Lotus here is a genus of the pea family and readily consumed by the natives for thousands of years, since it has a narcotic effect. From there, the winds took him west to the Cape Verde Islands, which is the logical choice for the island of the Cyclops, because Odysseus' description matches them almost perfectly."

"That land of one-eyed people," Sandecker said with a tight smile.

"Nowhere does Homer suggest all of the people had one eye," Yaeger explained. "They had two, only Polyphemus had one, and it wasn't in the middle of his forehead."

"If I recall my Odyssey,"said Gunn, "after escaping the Cyclops, Odysseus was then blown west across the sea to the Aeolian Isle."

Yaeger merely nodded. "By computing the prevailing winds and currents, I put Odysseus' next landfall somewhere on one of the many islands south of Martinique and north of Trinidad. From there, he and his fleet were driven by a storm to the Land of the Laestrygonians. Here, one of the small islands called Branwyn, off Guadeloupe, fits the bill. The high cliffs on each side of the narrow channel he described his ship entering matches the island geography to a T."

"This is where the Laestrygonians destroyed Odysseus' fleet," added Perlmutter.

"If that were true," said Yaeger, "the ships loaded with treasure would still lie in the silt of the harbor."

"What is the name of the island?"

"Branwyn," responded Yaeger, "was a Celtic goddess and one of the three matriarchs of Britain."

"What country owns the island?" asked Dirk.

"It's privately owned."

"Do you know by whom?" asked Summer. "A rock star, an actor, maybe some wealthy businessmen?"

"No, Branwyn is owned by a wealthy woman." He paused to check his notes. "Her name is Epona Eliade."

"Epona is the name of the Celtic goddess," said Summer. "Now there's a coincidence."

"Maybe more than mere serendipity," said Yaeger. "I'll check it out."

"Where was Odysseus' next port?" asked Sandecker.

"Now with only one ship out of twelve," Yaeger continued, "he sailed to the island of Circe, called Aeaea, which computes as Navidad Bank, a spot Homer placed on the edge of the world."

"Circe!" Summer gasped. "Circe was the woman who lived and died in the structure we found?"

Yaeger shrugged. "What can I say? This is all conjecture, which is next to impossible to prove."

"But what brought her across the ocean so many centuries ago?" Gunn wondered aloud.

Perlmutter placed his folded hands on his ample stomach. "There was more travel back and forth between the continents than anyone has envisioned."

"I'd be interested in learning where you place Hades," said Sandecker to Yaeger.

"The best guess is the Santo Tomás caverns on Cuba."

Perlmutter daintily blew his nose, then asked, "After he left Hades, where did he meet with the Sirens, Scylla the monster and Charybdis the whirlpool?"

Yaeger threw up his hands. "I have to write those events off to Homer's wild imagination. No geographical location works for any of them this side of the Atlantic." He paused a moment before picking up Odysseus' journey on the chart again. "Next, Odysseus sails eastward until he reaches Calypso's island of Ogygia, which Wilkens and I agree is St. Miguel in the Azores."

"Calypso was the beautiful sister goddess of Circe," said Summer.

"They were women of the very highest rank. Didn't Odysseus and Calypso spend a romantic interlude together in a virtual garden paradise after his affair with Circe on her island?"

"He did," Yaeger replied. "After Odysseus leaves a tearful Calypso on the shore, his final stop is a detour by adverse winds to the palace of King Alcinous, which works out to be Lanzarote Island in the Canaries. After relating his adventures to the king and his family, he is given a ship and finally makes his way home to Ithaca."

"Where do you put Ithaca?" inquired Gunn.

"As Cailleux said, the port of Cadiz in southwestern Spain."

There came a few moments of silence around the table as everyone assimilated the classic tale and the multitude of theories. How much was remotely close to the truth? Only Homer knew, and he hadn't spoken for three thousand years.

Dirk smiled at Summer. "You have to give Odysseus credit for masculine charisma, having affairs with the two most beautiful and influential women of his time. Before he came along and seduced them, both ladies were chaste and inaccessible."