I looked from his hunched back to the shadowy, grimy little room, and I thought pessimistically: This is going to be a long, lonesome summer.

Frederick didn’t give me time to be lonely. I was too busy. The routine began early next morning, with Frederick dragging me out of my sleeping bag. (There had been a mattress in my room, but I buried it.) We spent the morning-and it was a long one-at the dig. The area was about a block from the house, at the bottom of a ravine. There were a dozen or so bored-looking men scratching away at the ground. When we appeared they scratched a little faster. I couldn’t see that they were finding anything much.

“You’ll direct this group,” Frederick said, leading me to where three men were poking around in a cleared space about three feet square. He spoke to the men in Greek. One of them grinned at me. I grinned back. It was the first smile I had seen that day, and it looked good. Still grinning, I said out of the corner of my mouth,

“You’re crazy, Frederick. I can’t direct anything. I don’t know what they’re doing, and even if I did, I can’t talk to them.”

“You’ll learn,” said Frederick.

I learned. I had to revise my impression that he would make a rotten teacher. He wasn’t entertaining, but he was effective. For the next few days my head felt swollen with all the information he was jamming into it. But there’s nothing like experience on the job; he could explain things as they came up, and in a surprisingly short time the things made sense. Oh, I couldn’t have handled it without him right there, ready to jump in when I hit something I didn’t know about. But I got by. It’s amazing what you can communicate with gestures and goodwill. The men went home for lunch and a siesta break, but I didn’t; I stayed on the job, munching crackers while Frederick lectured and demonstrated. In the evening he lectured some more and showed me how to record and classify pottery fragments.

We found more pottery than anything else. Pottery is practically indestructible. I mean, it breaks, but the pieces don’t decay the way wood or cloth do, and it’s so cheap it isn’t worth stealing. Another reason why archaeologists find so much pottery is that it was the universal storage container in ancient times. People then didn’t have tin cans or bottles or brown paper bags. Pots were used not only to store food but all kinds of things, from clay tablets to dead bodies. The area we were working in had been a storeroom back in Minoan times. We found one jar with a few desiccated grains of cereal still in it.

The side of the ravine was a colored diagram of the geological history of the island. At the bottom was a level of brownish-black soil-ground level in 1500 B.C., before the big eruptions began. It was at this level, or just above it, that the Minoan remains were found. Above that was a pinky-red layer of pumice ten to fifteen feet thick-debris thrown out by the first stage of the eruption. The volcano had been quiescent for some years after that; a narrow sandy layer above the pumice showed signs of normal weathering. Then came a layer of white ash, thirty feet of it; thick enough to bury houses, kill crops, choke springs and fountains. It had been hot, too; earlier diggers had found burned human teeth. The ash fall was enough in itself to make the island uninhabitable, but it had only been the prelude to the final explosion. Having emptied itself, the volcanic chamber collapsed, and the sea rushed into the chasm.

Seeing the actual remains of the catastrophe made it seem very real. The work was fascinating, actually, but I was too inexperienced to see that it was also rather peculiar. There was an amateurishness about the whole business that was out of keeping with Frederick ’s reputation and temperament. The very fact that he would allow a novice like me to handle his precious antiquities, even broken pieces of pottery, should have alerted me to the truth: that the digging wasn’t his main concern. It was a blind, hiding his real interest.

I was up to my eyeballs in pots and new experiences, and I didn’t draw the obvious conclusion. Oh, I knew Frederick wanted me to dive, but I assumed the underwater work would be an extension of what we were doing on land. I was soon to learn that I had been way off base on that assumption.

One thing happened during that period of time. It was an insignificant thing in itself, but it made an odd impression on me.

I was sitting in the courtyard one evening washing potsherds. This occupation is not quite so boring as it sounds. The Minoans made some pretty painted pottery, and every now and then a scrap with a flower or shell or spiral pattern would turn up. It was like magic, seeing the vivid colors and vigorous shapes appear as the masking crust of dirt washed away.

Even painted pots can pall, however; that particular evening I was squatting there with my hands trailing in the water, staring absently at the view and thinking about how bored I was. The wall of the courtyard was in bad shape; parts of it had collapsed completely, and there was a wide gap where a wooden gate had once stood. The sun had just gone down behind the crest of the mountain, and the sky looked like one of Mother’s modern embroidery pieces, silky, shiny crimsons and oranges, with sparkles of reflected light like patches of gold thread. There were a few stunted trees on the ridge nearest the house; they made grotesque silhouettes against the garish sky.

Then I realized that there was another shape silhouetted against the sunset, that of a man on horseback. In contrast to the dwarf-sized trees, he and the animal looked larger than life. They were utterly still, so still that they resembled a monumental equestrian statue instead of creatures of flesh and blood. As I watched, they disappeared, almost as if they had melted into the darkening stones below and beyond them.

I had the impression that the man had been staring straight down into the courtyard. Straight at me.

There was no reason why this should have disturbed me even if it had been true. Nor was there any reason why the sight of him should bring back memories of those unnerving hours in Crete. I hadn’t exactly forgotten that experience, but I had rationalized it as the result of sunstroke or illness. I had not felt a single twinge of discomfort since I arrived on Thera, and if my problem in Crete had been an upsurge of ancestral memory, I ought to have experienced it again here, when my fingers actually touched the baked clay those long-dead hands had fashioned.

But the man on horseback was an archaic figure, out of the old legends with which I was now familiar. I couldn’t remember whether the Homeric heroes had ridden horseback or not; but they had used horses to pull their chariots. Poseidon was also Hippios, the horse god. The old gods seemed to linger on, here in the regions where they had once been supreme. It was fitting that Poseidon should haunt Thera, for he was both a sea god and a maker of earthquakes.

Frederick came out just then, grousing because I wasn’t washing pots fast enough, and I forgot my fantasies. I forgot about the horseman, too-for a while.

Toward the end of the week I had learned more about ancient Crete than I wanted to know. My brain was reeling and my body was cramped with squatting among broken pots. I might have rebelled anyway, but something happened that gave me a good excuse for changing my routine.

We went up to the dig as usual that morning. As a rule the men were there waiting for us, but that morning the place was deserted. I expressed surprise, and Frederick explained that they weren’t coming. It was a holy day, a saint’s day or something. He added a few comprehensive curses on the Greek Christian pantheon.

It was cool down there in the ravine, and deeply shadowed; but when I looked up I could see a slash of blue sky and a bird soaring high and free. I stood up, brushing dirt off my knees.