Santorini by Alistair MacLean

‘Yesterday,’ Hawkins said. ‘Just yesterday. Casualties?’

‘Two-thirds of a million dead, three-quarters of a million injured. Give or take a hundred thousand in each case. If that sounds flippant or heartless, it’s not 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 ripple on the surface of the water.

‘The experts — an expert may be loosely defined as any person who claims he knows what he’s talking about – are deeply divided as to what happened. Loggerheads would be too mild a term. It’s an archaeological minefield. The explosion may have destroyed the Cyclades. It may have wiped out the Minoan civilization in Crete. It may have swamped the Aegean isles and the coastal lowlands of Greece and Turkey. It may have inundated lower Egypt, flooded the Nile and swept back the Red Sea waters to permit the escape of the Israelites fleeing from the Pharaoh. That’s one view. In 19503 scientist by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky caused a considerable furore in the historical, religious and astronomical worlds by stating unequivocally that the flooding was caused by Venus which had been wrenched free from Jupiter and made an uncomfortably close encounter with earth. A very scholarly and erudite work, widely acclaimed at the time but since much maligned. Professional jealousy? Upsetting the scientific apple-cart? A charlatan? Unlikely -man was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Then, of course, there was Edmund Halley, he of comet fame — he was equally certain that the flooding had been caused by a passing comet.

‘There’s no doubt there was a huge natural disaster all those millennia ago. As to its cause, take your pick — your guess is as good as mine. Reverting to the situation we find j ourselves in at this moment, there are four facts that can be regarded as certainties or near-certainties. Santorini is about I as stable as the proverbial blancmange. It’s sitting on top of I a thermal plume. Thirdly, the chances are high that it is sitting atop an ancient tectonic boundary that runs east-west under the Mediterranean — this is where the African and Eurasian plates are in contention. Lastly, and indisputably, we are sitting atop the equivalent of roughly 2.00 million tons of TNT. If that goes up I would say it is highly probable — in fact think I should use the word inevitable – that both the thermal plume and the temporarily quiescent earthquake zone along the tectonic fault would be reactivated. I leave the rest

deeply divided as to what happened. Loggerheads would be too mild a term. It’s an archaeological minefield. The explosion may have destroyed the Cyclades. It may have wiped out the Minoan civilization in Crete. It may have swamped the Aegean isles and the coastal lowlands of Greece and Turkey. It may have inundated lower Egypt, flooded the Nile and swept back the Red Sea waters to permit the escape of the Israelites fleeing from the Pharaoh. That’s one view. In 1950 a scientist by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky caused a considerable furore in the historical, religious and astronomical worlds by stating unequivocally that the flooding was caused by Venus which had been wrenched free from Jupiter and made an uncomfortably close encounter with earth. A very scholarly and erudite work, widely acclaimed at the time but since much maligned. Professional jealousy? Upsetting the scientific apple-cart? A charlatan? Unlikely the man was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Then, of course, there was Edmund Halley, he of comet fame — he was equally certain that the flooding had been caused by a passing comet.

‘There’s no doubt there was a huge natural disaster all those millennia ago. As to its cause, take your pick — your guess is as good as mine. Reverting to the situation we find j ourselves in at this moment, there are four facts that can be regarded as certainties or near-certainties. Santorini is about I as stable as the proverbial blancmange. It’s sitting on top of a thermal plume. Thirdly, the chances are high that it is sitting atop an ancient tectonic boundary that runs east-west under the Mediterranean — this is where the African and Eurasian plates are in contention. Lastly, and indisputably, we are sitting atop the equivalent of roughly 2.00 million tons of TNT. If that goes up I would say it is highly probable — in fact think I should use the word inevitable – that both the thermal plume and the temporarily quiescent earthquake zone along the tectonic fault would be reactivated. I leave the rest to your imagination.’ Benson drained his glass and looked around hopefully. Talbot pressed a bell. Hawkins said: ‘I don’t have that kind of imagination.’ ‘None of us has. Fortunately. We’re talking about the combined and simultaneous effect of a massive thermonuclear detonation, a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. This lies outwith the experience of mankind so we can’t visualize those things except to guess, and it’s a safe guess, that the reality will be worse than any nightmare. The only consolation, of course, is that we wouldn’t be around to experience anything, nightmare or reality. ‘The extent of potential annihilation beggars belief. By annihilation I mean the total extinction of life, except possibly some subterranean or aquatic forms. What lava, volcanic cinders, dust and ashes don’t get, the blast, air percussion waves, fire and tsunami will. If there are any ‘survivors — and this could be in an area of thousands of square miles – the massive radio-active fall-out will attend to them. It hardly seems necessary to talk about such things as nuclear winters and being fried by ultra-violet radiation.

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