Journey to Atlantis (9 page)

IT FELT AS IF WE were a soap bubble swirling around and around before going through the bathtub drain. Dozens of ships, large and small, were merging from north and south towards the funnel that was the Strait of Gibraltar. The thicker the traffic at the top of the funnel, the harder it was for us to stay on the surface, until, finally, we couldn’t anymore. As the sun rose and the nearest ship closed to two miles, we submerged. We disappeared from sight and radar. We really had no choice. I supposed we could have sailed on the surface with our flags all quite legally, since we were still outside the twelve-mile zone of any country, but passing
through the Strait would bring us within the legal jurisdiction of both Britain and Spain, and somebody would surely want to know what business we had coming into the Mediterranean.

The Strait of Gibraltar is a narrow channel between Europe and Africa. The northern side belongs to Spain, except for the very bottom tip, which is owned by Britain — a sore spot for Spain. The southern side belongs to Morocco, except for the top corner, which is owned by Spain — a sore spot for Morocco. At its narrowest point the Strait is only eight miles wide. But it’s one thousand feet deep. The top three hundred feet has a strong current pouring into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. The bottom seven hundred feet is pouring back out! And the space where the two currents meet is a wave, just like on the surface, except that it’s three hundred feet below! Military submarines leaving the Mediterranean submerge below the wave, shut everything off and drift out with the current, silent and undetected. Subs coming in do the same,
above
the wave. Well, that sounded easy enough. We would behave just like any other submarine pretending not to be there.

But I needed to sleep first. On battery power I steered towards shallower water. Morocco seemed a better choice than Spain because they didn’t have as powerful a navy, nor were they in an angry dispute with Canada. By mid-morning we settled on the bottom at two hundred and fifty feet, ten miles offshore from Tangiers. I shut everything off and
fell into a blissful sleep. The last thing I heard was Hollie sigh.

We ate a nice breakfast. I treated the crew to tuna fish sandwiches made with buttered bread. I cut them into small bites. Then I opened a can of stinky wet dog food. The crew got excited but I had to hold my nose. We were not going to surface at all for a whole day; I wanted to keep them happy.

To join the stream of traffic I started to pedal, keeping the sub at two hundred and fifty feet. Four hours later I steered into the current, shut the sonar off and let the current pull us through the Strait like a leaf down a river. I made myself comfortable with a cup of tea and a playful dog at my feet. Hollie was preoccupied with the splayed end of a piece of rope. He was so wrapped up in it he didn’t even notice Seaweed pecking at his rubber ball, and I didn’t tell him. If Seaweed destroyed the ball, I would just give him another one. We had about seventeen or so in the engine compartment.

Slowly and silently we drifted through the channel, deaf, dumb and blind. I kept the sonar off so that anyone listening with sensitive equipment wouldn’t hear its pings. It was quiet and still, yet I found myself biting my nails and sighing a lot. It was so quiet it was unnerving. Without sonar we couldn’t even tell if we were actually moving, though I knew we were. We simply had to wait. But it seemed to take forever. When I thought we must have been about halfway through, I checked the clock. Only three hours had passed! Now, whenever I sighed, Hollie sighed. Seaweed was in a
deep sleep. I tried to read a book but couldn’t concentrate. If only I could turn on the sonar I would have something to watch and some way to know where we were and how fast we were drifting. But I couldn’t risk giving our presence away.

And then we hit something.

It struck the bow on the starboard side. It didn’t hit terribly hard but it scared the heck out of me. It was loud. It was a loud hollow scraping sound, as if we had gently bounced off something — a container perhaps? We weren’t drifting very fast, maybe three nautical miles per hour, but likely faster than whatever we hit, because of our dolphin nose and streamlined shape. At least I could tell that we were drifting forwards instead of backwards or sideways, because the object had struck close to the bow. If we were spinning in circles I was pretty sure I’d be able to tell by the feel of it.

The minutes passed like hours, and then we struck something else! This time we hit it dead on, and I heard it drag down the starboard side. Suddenly I had a frightening thought: we were obviously striking objects smaller than the sub — debris perhaps, fallen from ships, like the container we had sunk in the Atlantic. But what if there were mines out there? It had happened in the Azores.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I decided to turn on the sonar for ten seconds then shut it off. I sat down in front of the screen, planning not to blink for ten seconds. I would scan the area immediately around us, determine our depth and try to gauge our speed. If anyone picked up our sonar
wave they would only have ten seconds to locate us. By then we would have disappeared again. Perhaps they would think their reading was just a mistake. Sonar was hardly a perfect science.

I flicked the switch and the screen came alive. There was debris all around us! The Strait looked like a garbage dump under water. No wonder we had struck a couple of objects. We were drifting about three nautical miles per hour, as predicted in my mariner’s manual. I didn’t have time to look closely at everything but I did notice what looked like a long object several hundred feet below drifting in the opposite direction — a military submarine? Probably. In any case, we were hardly alone. There were at least a dozen vessels above, sailing in all directions, in, out and across the Strait. Just before I shut off the screen I read the sea floor depth — one thousand feet. I sat back in my seat. It occurred to me that if there were a mine in the Strait, which was unlikely anyway, it would almost certainly not be drifting at two hundred and fifty feet. I watched Hollie playing with his ball. That seemed like a wise thing to do. I went into the engine compartment and got three for myself. I decided to take my mind off the rest of the time by learning how to juggle.

Fifteen hours later I still couldn’t juggle, but we had entered the mouth of the Mediterranean. Thank Heavens! We had struck a few more objects on the way through but they were small, and none of them exploded. Rising to the surface for the first time in twenty-two hours, I opened the
hatch to a starry sky. Seaweed went out of the portal like a spark from a fire. Even Hollie couldn’t wait, and started to climb on his own, until I scooped him up and carried him out.

We stood in the portal with our noses pointed south. The air was soft and sweet. It was the strangest thing but I really thought I could smell all kinds of things in the air — flowers, honey, wheat, hay … hot sand? Strangest of all, it was a dry air. Here we were surrounded by water, but the air we breathed was dry in our throats. I didn’t know how that could be but it was a pleasant dryness.

I started up the engine and headed southeast. I wanted to reach the Moroccan coast before the sun rose and get Hollie out for a run on the beach. The coast stretched out before us from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, as far east as Egypt. I couldn’t believe it; we had sailed from northern Newfoundland all the way to the continent of Africa!

SOMETIMES GREAT danger is lurking beneath a gentle mask.

The water along the coast was only fifty feet deep in places. After crossing the Atlantic, that seemed like nothing. At fifty feet there was nowhere to hide from the air, although I wasn’t really expecting helicopters. I didn’t know what to expect, actually, except that if we landed on the beach and climbed over the mountains we would find ourselves in the Sahara, the biggest desert in the world!

In the dark I chose a small bay, submerged to periscope depth and motored in until we were in only ten feet of water. The periscope showed no lights on the beach so I surfaced, opened the hatch, dropped our little anchor and inflated the
dinghy. If we saw anyone we would run back to the sub and leave.

Hollie and I paddled to shore. Seaweed was standing on the beach already waiting for us. It was an exciting moment, stepping out of the dinghy onto the continent of Africa. Since there were no houses, power-lines, telephone poles, roads, bridges or signs of human habitation whatsoever, it was easy to imagine we were the first ones to discover the continent, though I knew
that
wasn’t true.

I put Hollie down and watched him run wild in the sand while Seaweed hopped up and down and flapped his wings. Hollie went around and around in circles until I got dizzy watching him. Then he broke the circle and ran all the way down the beach. I followed him. Hollie was a sailor dog through and through. I had found him on the sea, and he was spending his life there, but he sure did love to get out on land and run.

We were about half a mile down the beach when the sun came over the horizon and transformed everything into a golden haze. The air, the sea, the land, all of it changed instantly and became so bright it was almost blinding. Unlike the Atlantic, which was dark and gray, the Mediterranean was light green and sparkled in the sun. It was warmer too when I stepped in it, and saltier when I tasted it. The sand was also lighter and I wondered if that was because the sun had baked it so much. I used to think sand was just sand, but the sand here looked as if it had been painted by the sun.

I sat down and sifted my fingers through the sand and thought of things I had read about this place. Two thousand years ago there were lions on these beaches. The Romans caught them and shipped them across the sea to Rome for bloodthirsty entertainment in their coliseum. Now there were none. Ten thousand years ago the Sahara was a jungle. There were great rivers running through it like a spider’s web. That was hard to believe. The rivers are still there, scientists claim. They flow deep beneath the sand. When I thought about these things, Atlantis didn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

It was time to sleep. I stood up and turned to go back down the beach, then saw something really weird. There was an orange cloud rolling onto the beach from the direction of the desert. The strange thing was, I didn’t feel any wind. And then, I did! And it was coming fast!

I had never seen an orange cloud before. It wasn’t like a normal cloud. It was low, close to the ground and moving like a snake. But why was it orange? In less than a minute I had my answer.

Sand.

I thought sandstorms were things you only found in the desert, not on a beach. Oh well, I thought, it would be interesting to watch. Another minute later I realized something else — you didn’t
watch
a sandstorm, you got the heck out of the way! The sand in the cloud was a lot finer than the sand on the beach. It was more like a powder, and it quickly
started filling my nose, mouth, ears and eyes. My eyes dried out immediately and I couldn’t blink. My throat started to dry and I found it hard to breathe. Suddenly, I couldn’t see anything!

Still, it took me awhile to realize how dangerous the situation was. I thought it was just a small cloud that was going to pass in a few minutes. I shut my eyes, held my breath and covered my ears with my hands. Hollie started to whimper.

“It’s okay, Hollie,” I mumbled. “It’ll pass in a minute.”

But it didn’t. We had to get out of there. I pulled my t-shirt over my head, reached down and picked up Hollie. I started to run, but couldn’t even find the sea! I went this way and that, gagging with the dry powder in my throat, until I felt water under my feet. I figured out the right direction, held Hollie’s face inside my t-shirt with mine and ran as fast as I could down the beach. I kept kicking my feet into the water to make sure I was going the right way.

It took forever to find the dinghy. Instead of blowing away, the dinghy was being buried in the sand. I turned it over and we crawled underneath. That didn’t help much. The fine sand got in everywhere! Hollie kept his eyes closed but he was orange with sand, and it wasn’t the kind of sand you could shake off, it stuck to you. I pulled the dinghy to the water, climbed in and paddled out. But I couldn’t find the sub!

“Come on!” I yelled. “Where
are
you?”

The wind was so strong it blew us quickly from shore. I couldn’t even paddle against it. If I didn’t find the sub, the
sandstorm was going to blow us out to sea! I had to think fast. I left Hollie in the dinghy, jumped into the water and held onto the rope. My body acted as a kind of anchor and slowed the dinghy down. Then I slipped under the surface and looked for the sub. It was a lot easier to see under water, though I couldn’t hold my breath long because I couldn’t take a deep enough breath to start. But I found the sub, pulled the dinghy over and we climbed inside.

I gave Hollie some fresh water. He scratched at his eyes with his paws, the poor thing. I took a drink of water and threw up. Still, it was a huge relief to get inside. There was just one big problem: where was Seaweed?

I sat and thought about it. It made sense to think that he had flown out to sea and stayed ahead of the sandstorm. Maybe that’s what he did. The only trouble with that idea was that seagulls, as a rule, bedded down on the beach during a storm. They let the wind roar over them and waited it out. They didn’t go to sea. I didn’t know how far out to sea this sand was blowing, or how far I’d have to sail to be able to see through it to find him. And if he hadn’t gone out to sea and was stuck on the beach, it would be a long time before I’d be back. Would he survive a sandstorm? I thought of how quickly the sand had been covering the dinghy. I had to go back!

I pulled the anchor free, started the engine and motored in as close to the beach as I dared. I shut off the engine, dropped anchor again, grabbed a long rope, went out and closed the
hatch from the outside. I took a jacket this time. After tying the rope to the portal, I jumped overboard and swam underwater to the beach, with the rope in one hand. I wrapped the wet jacket around my head and fought my way up the beach against the wind. It wasn’t howling the way storms normally do; it was more of a steady roar, like a jet engine.

I wasn’t expecting to find Seaweed by looking. I was hoping that if he heard me yelling his name, he would squawk, and I would follow the sound and locate him. And so I went around yelling as loud as I possibly could, with the jacket in front of my face. I refused to give up.

When I finally heard his squawk, it was weak. He had turned himself into the wind, just as I thought he would. But he had to keep shifting himself around because the sand kept trying to bury him. He was exhausted when I found him. Such a tough bird to have survived!

It was the only time Seaweed ever let me pick him up. It was the only time I ever tried. He didn’t like it. But I ran around until I found the water again, and then the rope, and then the sub. And I was so happy.

We motored out a few miles and settled on the bottom at seventy-five feet. I floated the antenna and turned the radio on low. A different kind of music entered the sub now — wooden flutes and drums and voices. I sat on the floor by the observation window and helped the crew clean the sand from their fur and feathers. After such a crazy and violent storm, the peace and calm inside the sub was heavenly. The
music was peaceful. I didn’t know what language it was but the voices were of children, and they sounded happy. After I fed the crew and had a cup of tea, I lay down on my bed and fell asleep listening to it.