I found nothing. When I shot out into the channel I was seized by an invisible, irresistible power and swept northwards along the side of the gorge. The tide had turned. Keeping with difficulty close to the cliff, I was taken on an underwater tour faster than I could swim and had a salmon-eye view of the rock formations as I was hurried past. I surfaced just in time and found myself swirling round the northern corner of the Stones. From there it was easy enough to swim to our miniature harbour. Elsa was on the rock with her eyes so firmly fixed on the point from which I had dived that she didn’t see me until I came alongside her.
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 pinnacle of rock to act as a bollard.
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 inner circle did not share in the open-hearted rejoicings of the community. They never ascribed the return of the lost property to Nodens as I was sure they would. They knew too well that Elsa must have taken the cauldron from the laboratory and assumed that she was responsible for the entire burglary. From their silences and the contemptuous arrogance of their faces the major had the impression that they were not taken in by his explanation that the burglar had buried the bag intending to return for it later, and that they thought it was Elsa who had done it.
‘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 dinner or in the peace of the forest, but not soon after breakfast.
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 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.
This time I was able to walk beyond the mouth of the cave and hung there pitching ingots into the interior until I was buoyant. Then the face of the gorge began to rush past and I surfaced at much the same point as the day before. The dinghy was too near the current of the flowing tide to be reached by swimming, so I came ashore at the nearest outcrop of the Stones and walked and waded to Elsa and our little harbour.
She was less alarmed than the previous evening, assuming that what I had done once so easily I could do again. As for me, I had had enough and was determined not to dive in the Shoots again for all the gold of the Americas. I dropped the bag on the bottom of the dinghy and showed her the contents.
‘So this is where the golden cauldron came from!’ she exclaimed.
I replied that I was fairly sure it had not. All Marrin’s deceptions were at last clear to me. He could not sell the ingots as they were without giving some explanation of the origin, and so he melted them down and made them into brooches, ashtrays and the rest, which dealers would accept without question as the output of Broom Lodge.
‘But then why the pretence of alchemy?’ she asked.
‘Well, you once told me that he knew a lot about it and used to experiment at home. I think he used the mysterious origin of the gold to increase his hold on the inner circle, encouraging them to believe whatever they liked. He made the cauldron and it was for use at the ceremonies, not for sale. Even Sir Anthony Aslington was astonished by its strange beauty, and the major considers the damned thing is holy.’
‘Any more glyptodonts?’
A wild but just possible guess occurred to me.
‘No. But I may have found the pet’s collar.’
‘I think it was for a woman’s hair,’ she said, chipping away a crust. ‘The ends don’t meet.’
‘They don’t on a dog collar either.’
‘But they must have taken their wives on the ship.’
‘They took their wives and children to the highest ground and left them. And I’m not going back there to look for tiaras.’
Elsa shuddered. My description must have been vivid.
‘No! That horrible funnel!’
‘There’s just time to see if it comes to the surface,’ I said.
We left the dinghy and walked across the Stones to a point a little way back from the edge of the Shoots where a blowhole should appear if the cleft went right up through the rock. All the pools were motionless except one where the water and the floating weed pulsated up and down with an occasional spurt of foam.
It was now obvious to me why Marrin had never cleared the lot out at one go. Weight was the answer. He had no one to help him; he could never be dead sure of his time of arrival; and he would have found the same problem that I had – too heavy or too light and the fast tide ready to punish any miscalculation. So he decided to take no risks, leaving his treasure where it was and drawing on it in small quantities as required.
But I did have a helper. My determination never to dive again vanished. I had asked for trouble by arriving too late and staying too long. Provided I plunged in at the first sign of slack water and remained below for not more than ten minutes, there was little danger.
‘If we had some sort of smooth cylinder that won’t catch on the rock and lowered it down the blowhole at the end of a rope…’
‘You are not to, Piers. You said you wouldn’t.’
‘But this is easy. You at the top. Me at the bottom filling the cylinder. We can collect the lot
in one dive, or two if the weight is too much.’
‘What are we to do with them?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll work it out. There are so many duties.’
The pools were filling now, and we had a longer and more devious walk back to our harbour, often with the rising tide rippling round our ankles. The dinghy was not there. I could see it a quarter of a mile away on its course for Gloucester.
It was my fault. I should have foreseen it. The dinghy was moored with the painter coiled round a large boulder at the far end of the inlet. Rendered half-witted by tiredness, excitement and the safe return to Elsa, I had never looked at the mooring when we walked off to find the pool. Meanwhile the rising tide had lifted the painter off the boulder.
Swimming was quicker than walking. I told Elsa to stay on a ridge of the Stones which would be the last to be covered, and struck out for the New Passage pill and Marrin’s rowing boat. It was where the ebb had left it, high above the water on a slope of mud, fortunately steep. I was nearly up to my waist in it before my feet touched a strip of gravel at the bottom of the stream and the boat slid into the water.
‘We’ll never catch up the dinghy,’ she said when I had rescued her.
‘No. But wherever the tide takes her, it ought to take us.’
She was no longer in sight, for it was after sunset. I rowed out to the point where I reckoned she would have been when we last saw her, shipped the oars and allowed the Severn to take over.
More embarrassment was to come. Evidently we had been watched for some time from the Welsh coast and when the dinghy was seen floating away we were taken for two very foolish tourists stranded on the Stones and in danger of drowning. A boat was racing out and came alongside.
Summon the Bright Water Page 17
