Free Santorini by Alistair MacLean Page B

meant to be. After a certain arbitrary figure - a hundred thousand, ten thousand, even a thousand, it all depends upon how much your heart and mind can take - any increase in numbers becomes meaningless. And there's also the factor, of course, that we're referring to faceless unknowns in a far-off land.'

    'I suppose,' Hawkins said, 'that that would be what one might call the grand-daddy of them all?'

    'In terms of lives lost, it probably is. We can't be sure. What we can be sure of is that Tangshan rates as no more than third in the cataclysmic league. Just over a century ago the island of Krakatoa in Indonesia blew itself out of existence. That was quite a bang, literally  --  the sound of the explosion was heard thousands of miles away. So much volcanic material was blasted into the stratosphere that the world was still being treated to a series of spectacular sunsets more than three years afterwards. No one knows the height of the tsunami caused by this eruption. What we do know is that much of the three great islands bordering the Java Sea  --  Sumatra, Java and Borneo - and nearly all of the smaller islands inside the sea itself lie below an altitude of 200 feet. No tally of the dead has ever been made. It is better, perhaps, that we don't know.'

    'And perhaps it's also better that we don't know what you're going to say next,' Talbot said. 'I don't much care for the road you're leading us along.'

    'I don't much care for it myself.' Benson sighed and sipped some more gin. 'Anyone ever heard of the word "kalliste'

    'Certainly,' Denholm said. 'Means most beautiful. Very ancient. Goes back to Homeric times.'

    'My goodness.' Benson peered at him through his pipe smoke. 'I thought you were the electronics officer?'

    'Lieutenant Denholm is primarily a classicist,' Talbot said. 'Electronics is one of his hobbies.'

    'Ah!' Benson gestured with his thumb. 'Kalliste was the name given to this little lady before it became either Thera or Santorini, and a more singularly inapt name I cannot imagine. It was this beautiful lady that blew her top in 1450 BC with four times the explosively destructive power of

    Krakatoa. What had been the cone of a volcano became a circular depression  --  we call it a caldera  --  some thirty square miles in area into which the sea poured. Stirring times, gentlemen, stirring times.

    'Unfortunately those stirring times are still with us. Santorini has had, and continues to have, a very turbulent seismic history. Incidentally, mythology has it that there was an even bigger eruption about 1500 BC. However it hasn't done too badly since 1450 BC. In 2.36 BC another eruption separated Therasia from north-west Thera. Forty years later the islet of old Jaimeni appeared. There have been bangs and explosions, the appearances and disappearances of islands and volcanoes ever since. In the late sixteenth century the south coast of Thera, together with the port of Eleusis, vanished under the sea and stayed there. Even as late as 1956 a considerable earthquake destroyed half the buildings on the west coast of the island. Santorini, one fears, rests on very shaky foundations.'

    Talbot said: 'What happened in 1450 BC?'

    'Regrettably, our ancestors of some thirty-five centuries back don't seem to have given too much thought to posterity, by which I mean they left no records to satisfy their descendants' intellectual curiosity. One can hardly blame them, they had too many urgent and pressing matters on hand at the time to worry about such things. According to one account, the explosion caused a tidal wave 165 feet high. I don't know who worked this out. I don't believe it. It is true that water levels on the Alaskan coast, caused by tsunami, earthquake-related tidal waves, have risen over three hundred feet but this only happens when the sea-bed shallows close inshore: in the deep sea, although the tsunami can travel tremendously fast, two, perhaps three, hundred miles an hour, it's rarely more than a