Then his mother saw what he was doing, and took the pottery vessel from him, explaining the while about the footloose, adventuring uncle who'd brought it here all the way from Crete.
A lump formed in Burke's throat as he recalled her patience ... how when she'd found him returning again and again to the attic and the trunk, she'd brought the bowl down and given it a place on the livingroom table, where he could examine it all at will.
Someone even told him about Minos and Theseus and Pasiphae and Ariadne and the Minotaur, and all the rest of the legendry that went with Bronze Age Crete.
Yet the legends were never quite enough. They raised too many questions; left too much unsaid.
The fragments of fact he picked up proved even less satisfactory.
How had a civilization rich and powerful and advanced as that of the Minoans ever risen on a sea-isolated island such as Crete?
Where had the Minoans learned their skills, their arts?
Above all, why had their culture vanished? What brought about Great Knossos' fall?
Questions without answers, all of them. Mysteries like the Cretan's strange, undeciphered writing, and the final fate of lovely Princess Ariadne, Minos' daughter, and how Theseus, bare-handed, could have slain the mighty Minotaur.
It was all enough to drive a seven-eight-nine-ten-year-old boy to distraction!
Then a careless visitor's elbow knocked the bowl to the floor. It shattered into shards.
At ten, a boy's too old to cry--before company, at least. So he'd clenched his fists behind his back, and blinked back the tears, and held his mouth to a stiff white line till he could be alone, face pillow-muffled, behind the closed door of his room.
And from that moment he'd known that sometime, somehow, he himself would find his way to Crete.
School became a place where he greedily snatched up crumbs of mythology and history between dreary hours spent battling his way through all the other subjects his teachers demanded that he learn.
High school brought a broader view. He began to see the interrelatedness of learning. Literature, chemistry, physics, Latin--of a sudden he found he loved them all.
Yet always, always, there ahead lay Knossos, beckoning.
How old had he been when, avidly, he plowed his way through Sir Arthur Evans' "Palace of Minos", groping his way by context past all the unfamiliar words? Thirteen? Fourteen?