'The memory of sweet days ferments inside me,' he sighed. '

I remember once, in Athens, a bottle from Santorin… slightly sweet, but it had a fire.

'You can swop boozy reminiscences later,' snapped the C-in-C. 'He hasn't accepted yet, Koch. Tell him about the fresco.'

'The admiral's put you in the picture about Doodenstadt?' '

Aye.'

'Here's the set-up: there are these enormous blocks of rock half-in and half-out of the breakers. There's the old wreck of a big liner lying on top of them. I was snuffling about there for middens one exceptionally low tide-a rare good chance for me: you don't often see the water as low as that. Or so cairn, also a rarity in those parts. A large cave, originally a fault in the rock strata, had been opened up and formed by wave action. I went in. At its landward end the cleft led to a regular-shaped rock tunnel which ran clean under the desert. This tunnel was higher than the sea cave and out of reach of the water, and so quite dry. I went in only a little way, as I was scared of being trapped by the tide returning. But I spotted this with my torch and got a shot of it,'

He tossed me a photographic colour slide. I held it up to the light.

It might have been a duplicate-with variations-of one of the most precious finds to come out of Santorini it was 31 a small fresco showing two gemsbok, or oryx, cavorting, tails swishing, heads held high. Certainly the artists' treatment-light and graceful-was uncannily similar in the two cases. The Santorin scene had presented the pundits with an inexplicable enigma: had oryx (in modem times found only in the Middle East and Africa) once inhabited the Aegean islands? Or had there been a land link, now submerged by the ocean?