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permit, the island of Crete is the top of a submerged mountain
and, although there are excellent bathing beaches, around most of its coast the seabed slopes rapidly away, plunging precipitously to depths of hundreds of feet.
    If Crete isn’t a popular diving destination, the islands of Gavdopoúla and Gávdos are even less so. The only above-surface projections of another seamount lying some twenty
miles to the south of Crete, the islands are tiny – Gávdos is the biggest at about five miles long by three wide – and, as with Crete itself, the seabed slopes rapidly to depths
in excess of a thousand feet. Gávdos has a population of around fifty, while Gavdopoúla is unoccupied apart from a bunch of goats.
    But between Gavdopoúla and Gávdos lies a saddle, a section of seabed that almost joins the two islands and lies at an average depth of only one hundred feet below the surface of
the Mediterranean. And it was there that Aristides had found the wreckage.
    When he first spotted the case, he didn’t realize what it was. Caught in the powerful beam of the underwater torch, the object swayed slightly, almost imperceptibly, from side to side. A
bulky, squared shape festooned with brown and green marine growth, it rocked very gently with the slight current. But it caught his attention because of where it was, rather than what it was.
    Visibility underwater in the Mediterranean is usually good, but at a depth of eighty-five feet the light is grey and weak, and Spiros Aristides could see clearly only what his torch beam
illuminated. And what it illuminated puzzled him. He lowered the beam and again played it around what was left of the aircraft’s cabin.
    Aristides knew little about aircraft but even he could recognize an executive jet when he saw one. Or what once had been an executive jet.
    After he’d discovered the seat the previous afternoon, he’d guessed that there was more to find, but it had taken him all of three dives to locate the remains of the cabin. The
section of wing, torn away from the fuselage, had been easy, one end embedded in the sand, the other pointing up towards the surface in mute entreaty. He’d found bits of unidentifiable
twisted metal, and a long and heavy chunk of corroded steel and aluminium that he’d guessed was an engine, but it wasn’t until he looked among the rocks fifty metres to the south of
where the wing lay that he’d found the cabin. And even then he’d nearly missed it.
    Covered in marine growth, it had looked pretty much like another rock, until Aristides’s trained eyes had spotted the three more or less regular shapes of what had once been windows along
one side of it.
    Aristides had checked his chronometer before doing anything else, and realized any exploration of the wreckage would have to wait. He’d looped a rope through two adjacent holes in the
fuselage and secured it with a loose knot, then tied the other end to one of his lifting bags. He’d partially filled the bag, using expelled air from his aqualung, enough to give it
sufficient buoyancy to hang in the water some twenty feet above the wreck. That had acted as a marker on this, his next dive.
    The front of the fuselage had been ripped off, leaving a wide opening through which Aristides now peered. Bubbles from his exhaled breath foamed and swirled above his head, forming an irregular
silvery mass in the centre of the cabin roof. There had once been six seats in the passenger compartment, but only five were still secured to its buckled floor. The sixth lay about two hundred
metres away, tipped on its side on the seabed some ninety feet below the surface. That same seat, and its grisly occupant, was what Aristides had found first.
    Three shrunken, skeletal shapes peered impassively back at him from the seats they had now occupied for over thirty years. He rested the beam of his torch on them, one at a time. Their clothing
had largely vanished, as had their flesh and the fabric of the seats they