On the 12th and 13th, however, much to the astonishment of our pessimistic dive hosts, the north-easterly lulled, the angry seas subsided and we were able to take the lutzu out and begin searching with the echo-sounder for Zeitlmair’s uncharted sea-mount between 2.5 and 3 kilometres from shore.
Within an hour of zigzagging back and forth across water generally 40 to 70 metres deep we suddenly stumbled upon a shallow point where the echo-sounder gave a depth of just 7 metres – more or less exactly as Zeitlmair had promised. It was with the air of a man vindicated, therefore, that he stood by beaming short-sightedly as the lutzu was anchored and we prepared to dive.
But we couldn’t find his temple – only a series of disparate features that in some way resembled, but did not actually seem to be, the features that Shaun Arrigo had videoed a few months previously in July 1999.
I felt incredibly disappointed, crushed and depressed after those dives, which had seemed so promising initially, and began to believe that we might never find the site if we went on this way – for the same reason that the man on the beach can never count all the grains of sand. By close of business on the 13th, therefore, I had decided to set pride aside, go back to the Arrigos cap in hand, and beg them to take me to their – or Zeitlmair’s – or whoever the hell’s temple it was.
In my opinion no one owned the temple … if it existed at all. I certainly had no desire to own it or lay any kind of claim to it. I just wanted to dive it.
Reuben Grima’s short dive in a thunderstorm
Malta, 19 June 2000
The ‘Zeitlmair file’ in my laptop during my first visit to Malta in November 1999 had contained a report from the journal Archaeology that seemed to write off the significance of the underwater temple right from the start. According to that report Reuben Grima, archaeology curator at Malta’s National Museum, had dived at the Sliema site and was ‘unconvinced that the stones on the sea-floor are indeed a temple’. Quoted alongside Grima was Professor Anthony Bonanno of the University of Malta, who made the point that even if a ruined temple had been found underwater, its submersion did not necessarily mean that all Maltese temples had to be redated.20
Bonanno’s observation was completely correct. It would be necessary to establish the mechanism of submergence of the site (land subsidence versus sea-level rise) before jumping to any conclusions about the age of any structures on it – and this had not been done yet. On the other hand there would be little point in establishing anything at all about the site if the ‘megaliths’ and ‘kidney-shaped rooms’ that had been seen and photographed there were not in fact parts of a temple at all but just natural formations that had been misinterpreted by excited amateurs – as Reuben Grima seemed to have concluded after his dive.
In November 1999 I had been too depressed to do anything much but stubbornly and repeatedly go diving myself in the cold waters off Sliema – trying to get some hands-on experience of the structure so that I could form my own opinions. I hadn’t contacted Reuben Grima then, so he was still on my agenda when I returned in June 2000 to resume the dive search.
I had arranged our appointment for 19 June – rather than any other day – with a certain ulterior motive. Santha and I wanted permission to be inside the ‘lower temple’ at the megalithic site of Mnajdra at dawn on the 20th, the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. Reuben Grima was one of the few people who had the power to grant this very rare privilege – and he did so with good grace and one telephone call to supervisory staff at Mnajdra. ‘I understand the effect is spectacular,’ he said with a smile, ‘but you should be there before 5 a.m. The watchmen will be expecting you …’
I told him that I wasn’t any kind of archaeologist, just a popular writer, so he should excuse me in advance if I seemed ignorant of archaeological procedures and facts or if I asked naive questions. There was, however, something bothering me about the dating and ‘sequencing’ of the megalithic temples of Malta within the period 3600 to 2500 BC, and the dating of the first human habitation of Malta to 5200 BC. ‘How have you arrived at these dates?’ I asked.
As I had been expecting, Grima explained that the primary tool in establishing Malta’s prehistoric chronology had been radiocarbon-dating (based on the rate of decay of C-14 stored in all formerly living matter).21 My views about C-14 are on the record.22 I think it should be only one amongst several tools and techniques brought to bear on the dating of megalithic or rock-hewn sites. It is a truism, but worth repeating nevertheless, that C-14 cannot date stone – only such organic materials as are found around or in association with stone ruins. It is an assumption (more or less safe depending on the stratigraphy and general circumstances of the site but still, at the end of the day, an assumption) that organic materials found close to megalith B or trilithon A or dolmen C, etc., do in fact date from the same period as the quarrying and erection of the megaliths concerned.
To this extent the excavation of a megalithic site is a bit like a crime scene. If the scene has been properly protected from contamination and intrusive elements, then the results of any forensic tests are likely to be much more accurate and useful than they will be if the scene has been disturbed. C-14 dating is a forensic test. And looked at as crime scenes, Malta’s megalithic temples are pre-eminently ‘disturbed’ – since they have been used as quarries and goat pens by local farmers for millennia, in some cases arbitrarily reconstructed on a whim,23 and dug over with great enthusiasm and little skill by amateur archaeologists for at least 200 years before the introduction of carbon-dating in the mid-twentieth century.
But when I put these objections to Grima he brushed them aside: ‘Look, of course it’s possible that new evidence might yet be unearthed which would require some revision of our chronology for Maltese prehistory. But I think, after all these years and the application of so many eminent minds to the problem, that we’ve probably got things pretty well right. If we’re wrong it will be at the most by a few centuries, not by millennia. So we’re not expecting any big surprises.’
‘How many carbon-dated samples does the orthodox chronology here actually depend on?’ I asked.
‘For the temples?’
‘Yes, and the Hypogeum too.’
‘Well, very few actually.’
‘Do you remember how many?’
‘Off the top of my head, I don’t. But I can easily check. I know it’s not a large number.’
‘And out of this not very large number of carbon-dated samples from the temple period how many were actually taken from underneath undisturbed megaliths?’
‘As far as I know none were,’ replied Grima.
This seemed a good moment to turn the conversation to the subject of the underwater temple off Sliema.
‘I understand you dived on it,’ I said. ‘What did you make of it?’
Grima raised his hands in a theatrical shrug: ‘Not very much. But then to be fair, I didn’t see it properly’.
He had gone to the site with Shaun Arrigo, he explained, rather late one afternoon with a thunderstorm brewing. The conditions had looked bad. Moreover, Arrigo claimed not to be sure of the precise location of the ‘temple7. Then soon after they dropped into the water and began to look for it, Grima discovered that by mistake he had strapped on a half-empty tank. Bearing in mind the deteriorating surface conditions he had therefore been obliged to abort the dive after only ten minutes. ‘The visibility was awful,’ he added, ‘and we might not even have been in the right place, but what I saw looked like pretty much just ordinary sea-bottom to me.’
‘It might well have been. But the question is – was what you saw the same thing that Zeitlmair is claiming is a temple?7
Grima clearly had some difficulty taking Zeitlmair and his ancient astronauts seriously and I could understand why he might be sceptical of any claims emanating from such a source. However, irrespective of his, or my, or anyone else’s views on Zeitlmair, I felt that the proposition of a submerged, man-made prehistoric structure off Sliema was an eminen
tly testable hypothesis which could be proved or disproved empirically by diving on it, thoroughly photographing it and collecting samples.
Grima’s ten minutes in a thunderstorm didn’t even begin to qualify as a test. So no matter how wacky its proponents might seem to be, the hypothesis that a temple could be there had still not been refuted as far as I was concerned. Besides, there had been nothing wacky about Commander Scicluna.
As I was leaving his office at the National Museum in Valletta, I asked Grima if he was aware that six years before Zeitlmair, Scicluna had also reported the existence of a megalithic temple underwater off Sliema, and at pretty much the same depth.
Grima said he knew nothing of the case and asked me to whom it had been been reported.
‘To Tancred Gouder, amongst others. I understand he was Director of Museums at that time. Scicluna mentioned the discovery in a letter to the Sunday Times of Malta in March 1994. I’m really surprised it wasn’t followed up …’
Bird’s-eye view … (5)
Malta, 24 June 2001
We’ve left Marfa Point and are flying over the sea parallel to the wall of sheer cliffs, in some places hundreds of metres high, stacked up along the western coast of Malta. I’m told that these cliffs exist because this side of the island has been slowly but steadily rising over several millions of years as a result of geological upheavals along the submarine Pantalleria Rift – levering itself up out of the sea-bed at an annual rate of a millimetre or two and causing the eastern side of the island, by the law of equal and opposite force, to tilt downwards.24 That means that the Sliema coast, with its rumours of an underwater temple, has experienced some degree of submergence during the past 17,000 years not only on account of rising sea-levels at the end of the Ice Age but also because of the longer-term process of land-subsidence that is still underway today.
We skip over Paradise Bay and then, in quick succession, Anchor Bay, Golden Bay, with its beach umbrellas and racks of lobster-pink tourists, Ghajn Tuffieha Bay and Gnejna Bay. Then we turn inland over the Bahrija valley and the Wied ir-Rum with the twin medieval towns of Mdina and Rabat to our left and the sea to our right.
Malta’s landscape is everywhere rugged and stony, sliced through with plunging valleys, crumbling escarpments and dark defiles – a racked and tortured topography twisted, moulded and scoured out by extreme natural forces over aeons. It is easy to overlook the implications of so much rocky ruggedness and drama being compressed into such a small space, but as Anton Mifsud explains:
The present surface area of the Maltese islands is not sufficient to account for the extensive valley formations such as the Wied il-Ghasel, Wied il-Ghasri and Wied ix-Xlendi, amongst others. The creation of such deep and precipitous valleys would have required a very extensive land surface to hold the waters which dug them out over the millennia.25
And Mifsud is right. The Maltese archipelago was once much bigger – indeed so much bigger that it wasn’t an archipelago at all. Around 17,000 years ago, at the Last Glacial Maximum when sea-level was more than 120 metres lower than it is today, the three main islands of Malta, Comino and Gozo, as well as little Filfla in the south, were all joined into one landmass, itself joined by a wide and extensive land-bridge to Sicily 90 kilometres to the north – which was in turn joined to the ‘toe’ of the Italian mainland. Glenn Milne’s inundation maps, as we shall see in chapter 19, leave no doubt about the overall picture while more detailed bathymetric studies reveal the antediluvian central Mediterranean to have been an area of potentially enormous interest to the story of human civilization that has been almost entirely neglected by the responsible scholars.
Hubertworld … (5)
Malta, is November 1999
Malta is a small place, word of the search that Zeitlmair and I had been conducting off Sliema had got around, and I used the same lutzu and crew for diving with the Arrigos that I had used to try to locate ‘their’ site with a competitor dive-shop just a couple of days previously. None of this heavy-handedness helped to promote good relations, and I am certain that Shaun and Kurt Arrigo, and their father whose name I presently forget, must have regarded me as an entirely unpleasant and untrustworthy customer and a complete idiot into the bargain.
We spent the 14th engaged in angry discussions, recriminations and speeches of self-justification but on the 15th we went diving. Kurt couldn’t make it, nor could Arrigo senior, so I dived with Shaun Arrigo, who looks like a pirate. He is young – about thirty and physically fit, with long black hair, a hawk nose, hooded eyes and seven days of stubble. To my surprise, however, he claimed that he was not sure of the exact location of the site and that we would have to search for it. With a sense of déjà vu I stood by as the boat zigzagged back and forth over a range of depths, bearings and distances from shore with Shaun Arrigo repeatedly asserting that the site was not as far out as Zeitlmair still believed.
‘Well, how far out is it?’ I asked.
‘Three kilometres,’ interjected Zeitlmair.
‘One kilometre,’ insisted Arrigo.
We used the echosounder to chart the bottom at both distances and at all points in between, but couldn’t find the right profile anywhere. Meanwhile, the weather, which had been calm a little earlier, had changed character, assuming an ominous tone as clouds massed overhead. Beneath the keel of the lutzu all of us could feel the long rolling upsurge of a heavy swell – more scary in a way than breaking waves because of its aura of suppressed violence and power. The waters that had been blue just half an hour before were now transmuted to dark grey, almost black, and the air temperature had plunged. Even wearing a wetsuit I shivered. The shoreline between Sliema and Saint Juliens seemed far off across the heaving sea. Was I seriously planning to dive in this?
Then the captain called out from the cabin that the echosounder was giving a depth of 20 metres … 19 … 18.5 … 18 metres.
‘We’ll go in here,’ yelled Arrigo, peering wildly over the side and already strapping on his tank and BCD.
I hurried to follow suit while the boat was brought to a standstill. By then, however, we had drifted off the 18 metre contour and the captain announced that we were now in between 25 and 30 metres of water.
‘We’ll go in here,’ Arrigo repeated. ‘If it’s the right place we’ll find that the reef slopes up fairly steadily from 25 metres to 7 or 8 metres. All we should have to do is follow the slope of the reef as it gets shallower and that will bring us to the plateau where the temple is …’
‘But what if it isn’t the right place?’ I asked plaintively.
Shaun Arrigo clasped his mask and regulator to his face, jumped overboard and disappeared silently beneath the waves.
Bird’s-eye view … (6)
Malta, 24 June 2001
The helicopter passes above Dingli now, where the golfball domes of a modern radar station overtop the steep cliffs. Then we come to a sloping area of exposed limestone between Buskett Gardens and the sea. Approximately 2 kilometres square, it is incised with a tremendous network of curving parallel tracks – one of the few surviving tableaux of Malta’s famous ‘cart-ruts’.26
I have walked here several times during previous visits in 1999 and 2000 and know that the ruts are often sheer-sided, sometimes a metre or more deep and up to two hands-breadths wide at the base. Nicknamed locally ‘Clapham Junction’, the area is preserved as a tourist attraction today. And as we hover 120 metres above it – I can see that it does indeed resemble a junction point where multiple railway lines converge and diverge. Some of the pairs of tracks run straight; some curve; some cross over one another. But there is no particular sense of organization or pattern – which is one among many reasons why no universally accepted explanation of this peculiarly Maltese phenomenon has ever been given.27 Archaeologists don’t even have a clue how old the ‘ruts’ are, although it is certain that those at Clapham Junction were already in place 3000 years ago when datable Punic tombs were cut through a number of them.28 It is certain, too, that they were not sim
ply worn away in the tough limestone by the passage of cart-wheels over periods of centuries, as many have wrongly theorized; on the contrary, there is no proof whatsoever that cart-wheels ever ran in these ruts – which were initially carved or cut out of the bedrock with the use of tools.29 Some archaeologists associate them with the megalithic temples;30 others believe that they date from the Bronze Age, between 4000 and 3000 years ago after the culture of the temple-builders had collapsed.31 The truth is nobody really knows anything at all about what they are, or who made them, or when, or why.
As with so much in Maltese prehistory their origins may belong in an underworld that scholars do not seem anxious to explore. However the existence – to which we can now attest with photographs and film – of ‘cart-ruts’ on a gigantic scale underwater at Marfa Point raises the possibility that this phenomenon may have much older origins that any scholar has previously suspected.
Hubertworld … (6)
Malta, 15 November 1999
I jumped immediately after Shaun Arrigo but he was already far below me and it took me a moment or two of hard finning to catch up with him. Contrary to the indications of the echo-sounder – unless we had already been carried far from our entry point by what was proving to be quite a brisk current – the bottom here was deeper than 25–30 metres. In fact, as we continued to sink, it became clear that it was deeper than 40 metres …
Arrigo was a strong swimmer and I found it hard to keep up with him, but we forged ahead against the current until we did finally encounter a reef of bedrock gradually sloping up from 30 metres or so through 28 metres, then 24 metres, before levelling off into what seemed to be a vast submarine plain covered with undulating fronds of seagrass, at about 22 metres. Because of the stormy overhead light, visibility at this depth was poor – like diving at dusk – and even if the plain did lead to an eminence at some point it was obvious that we would only stumble across it by chance.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 45
