Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 32

and on towards the Great Cape some twenty miles away. It was tacking near a low rocky promontory which protruded aggressively from the mainland off its starboard beam. The boat reached towards it, but as it drew close to bear away from its cliffs a fiercely treacherous gust of wind from the high Lycian mountains must have caught the little vessel, because she span around and her stern cracked against the crags of the Cape. As the planking tore open, the heavy cargo must have dragged the hull beneath the waves because she sank instantly, seemingly with nearly all the crew. In a blizzard of expelling air bubbles, she would have plummeted downwards and presumably have come crashing to rest on the steeply shelving rocks deep below the surface.

As far as was ever discovered, there was only one survivor, a badly injured deck hand who told them what had happened. They had been carrying two passengers, so he had explained, a man and a woman, who had sat sullenly on the deck all night. Sometime after dawn the man had asked the woman for something from the bags she was carrying. She rummaged about in one of her baskets and had taken out one of number of small cloth sacks. She handed it to the man with a satisfied grin and he untied the closure strings and poured the contents carefully into his lap. It was a strange thing, said the seaman. The sack contained what appeared to be pieces of dusty old tesserae, used mosaic

THE JOURNEY