The Barbary Pirates

“This is what the world looked like when it began,” Cuvier said. “Rock and water.”

“Look at the strata of those cliffs, Georges!” Smith exclaimed. “Eruptions laid down like rows of bricks! We can read them like a book!”

“What shelter this would be for a navy,” Fulton added. “Cliffs you could cuddle under.”

“Or the worst lee shore,” Dragut said. “There are days when the meltemi blows that you do not want to be in here, my friend. It can be an evil place.”

“Evil? I can see the blue domes of half a dozen churches from here.”

“Christian churches are no shield against the devil when Satan awakes.”

“And mosques no shelter from an earthquake. Bad things happen to all of the pious, Dragut. The solution would be to use science to warn of disaster.”

“No, worse things happen to nonbelievers, like savants and French revolutionaries. And no one can warn about the will of God. I put my faith in Allah.”

“Cuvier,” I interrupted, “you described this as one of the oldest places in the world, but I’m not sure what you meant by that,” I said.

“Oldest and newest,” the scientist said. “Old in that it’s like our planet’s beginning, raw and mostly treeless. New in that when that isle in the center belches, hot new rock comes out. The island destroys and remakes itself.”

“It seems an odd place to hide anything you want to keep.”

“And a forbidding place if you want to keep treasure hunters away.”

We made for a small harbor at the base of the island’s cliff, the little port cast in shadow this morning by an escarpment hundreds of meters high. Fishing boats bright as toys bobbed by the rubble quay, their gay colors a contrast to the grim rust, brown, and gray striations towering above. The shoreline was so steep that Dragut could bring his xebec right to the short jetty. We hired donkeys for a slow, sure-footed trek up a switchback trail etched into the face of the somber cliff, the animals bristly, ears twitching, and their clop steady as we swayed. The route had no railings and was slick with manure, the donkeys blinking against the flies. Smith kept making us stop so he could peer at different clumps of ugly rock, as if willing the soil to speak. The cliff looked mute to me, and the view out to the other side of the vast bay was across an unnerving gulf of air. I was anxious to get off the precipitous trail.

At last we gained the top and had a better understanding of the geography of this peculiar island. Thira’s western edge was a crescent of steep cliff, its houses perched at the rim of the crater ridge like nests of birds. To the east of this scimitar the island sloped more gently down to the sea in a broad fan. There the ground was divided by stone fences into pasture, vineyards, and cropland, all of them brown in midsummer. It looked to me that little had changed since Odysseus roamed. Around was Homer’s wine-dark sea, spotted by whitecaps, the wind cooling us after the stillness beneath the cliffs.

“Imagine this slope of land continuing from the sea upward to a peak over what is now the central bay,” Smith said, using the sweep of his hand to fill the void. “It would be an immense mountain, visible for a hundred miles. A cone, like Etna. And then a cataclysm even worse than the one that consumed Pompeii and the peak disappears! In its place is a volcanic crater, hundreds or thousands of feet deep, filled with the sea. That crater is what we just sailed across.”

“But the bay is a league in extent,” Fulton marveled. “What kind of force would turn an immense mountain into such a hole?”

“What indeed,” the geologist said. “While Gage searches for ancient weapons, Cuvier and I are going to be exploring what really drives the world.”

“And what is that?”

“Nature herself. Imagine if we could harness her more fully!”

Our arrival at such a small island could not go unnoticed, but the Ottoman constable seemed more confused than suspicious about it, especially after Dragut offered that we would pay any special immigration fees the portly Turk might invent. We had French documents with colorful stamps the man couldn’t read, and surveying instruments he didn’t understand. Both helped make our mission seem official, or at least important, while at the same time so technical as to be incomprehensible. We said we were making measurements for the French Institute—possibly true—and that our findings were anticipated by the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, which was a cheerful lie. The fat functionary took his coins and wandered off to make a report by slow mail to authorities on the mainland. By the time it reached anyone with the rank to make a decision about us, we’d be gone.

Dragut went down to his ship for what he said would be a quick trading run to a neighboring island. “I will come back to collect you, I promise! Trust Hamidou!”

We meanwhile found lodging in a vintner’s house in the village of Megalochori, a rendezvous set up by Fouche’s agents. Here we were to secretly meet the young doctor whom Napoleon thought might someday lead the Greeks to independence from Turkey: handsome, charismatic Count Ioannis Kapodistrias. When Russia and the Turks set up the Septinsular Republic on the obstinately Christian Ionian Islands, the eloquent Kapodistrias became one of the tiny republic’s two chief ministers. He was only twenty-five, but had the magnetism of a Napoleon or Nelson. By force of personality alone he’d persuaded rebels on Kefalonia to stay within his tiny new nation, and was reportedly guiding it to a constitution based on liberal principles.

Now he was hoping to lead a wider revolt, and chase the same rumors that we were.

While we waited for Kapodistrias to make contact, Cuvier and Smith began surveying the ancient caldera from the cliff rim, trying to calculate the cataclysm required to make it. Fulton wandered off with his bagpipes, saying he wanted to experiment with oils to fill the instrument, and sketch the workings of the island’s windmills. I practiced my fencing against imaginary opponents, worked on temperance by hiking to island vintners for what I told myself was only a judicious tasting, and kept a celibate distance from island women who reminded me of my half-Greek Astiza, dark-haired and olive-skinned. Was I supposed to find some clue about her on this island?

It was a lazy idyll, for one dazzling Mediterranean day.

And then as I walked the trail on the cliff edge at the end of the second day, congratulating myself again on self-discipline, I saw two corsairs sailing into the vast bay at sunset, their sails the color of dried blood. They flew no flag or banner and made no sound, but their decks were crammed with men. Was this Ioannis Kapodistrias, bringing a small Greek army with him? Or Ottoman soldiers, come to catch him or us?

Or some other menace entirely?

Their approach triggered every self-preservation instinct I had.

I hurried back to where we were staying to announce we might not have time to wait for our rendezvous, or Dragut, either. We might have to hide.

Fortunately, our Greek patriot was already there.

Kapodistrias came cloaked and shielded with a broad hat, slipping in quietly from wherever he’d been sequestered here in Turkish territory, since he could be arrested for this trespass. His entourage consisted of only two bodyguards, and he carried no weapon. But once he cast his cloak off with a whirl, he impressed us immediately. The minister was a lean and handsome doctor with cheekbones that could have been chiseled out of Athenian marble. He had a voice that would give credit to the ancient orator Themistocles. Like many of the most able men, he was also refreshingly modest.

“I’m afraid I had no fleet to come with,” he said with a slight frown after I described the new ships. “No navy, no army, no diplomatic passport, and no time. Are you sure it isn’t a routine cargo or ferry to this island?”

“It looked like armed men to me. Did the Turks get word you’re here?”

“Possibly. But it might be pirates, too. In any event, our meeting must be brief.”

“Maybe it’s the gondola men,” Smith said. “We seem to be drawing enemies wherever we go.”

“Gondola men?”

“We were attacked in Venice by a fleet of gondolas. A beautiful woman threw a bomb at us, and a Muhammadan captain charged us two hundred francs to escape. Gage here says there’s some kind of cult called the Egyptian Rite pursuing the same legends we are.”

“By the saints: for a quartet of intellectuals, you attract quite the excitement.”

“Just Ethan. He finds trouble wherever he goes.”

Kapodistrias looked at me warily, as if uneasy that he’d been caught up with my dubious luck. “It’s imperative no one knows I was ever on this island. You realize that if my people did not possibly need French help someday, I