region.
The others leaned in closer to study the image.
“What does this look like to you?” Gray asked.
He only got frowns and shakes of heads.
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Really?
He sighed, wondering if he wasn’t insane after all, seeing patterns that weren’t there. Director Crowe had recruited Gray for his ability to see what others couldn’t. But what if he’d lost his edge? Rather than noting what was real, was he now chasing phantoms?
Seichan reached to him and squeezed his forearm. Her gaze firmed on him, letting him see her confidence in him. “Show us,” she urged.
He reached over and swiped a finger across the tablet’s screen to transform the same image—now the winding path of lines between the tectonic plates became dashed, indicating a circuitous route through the geological labyrinth.
He held it higher.
Surely they see it now.
Maria was the first to recognize the pattern. She covered her mouth with a gasp. Then Bailey’s eyes widened. Seichan smiled and shrugged, not surprised. Even Mac nodded.
Only Kowalski furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it.”
Maria tried to explain and pointed to the coast of Turkey. “The dotted line—where the Anatolian plate runs up against the Eurasian plate to the north—starts at Troy.”
Bailey continued, “From there, it zigzags through the islands of the Aegean Sea, before sweeping south under Greece.”
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Mac pointed to the Ionian Sea. “And didn’t that tiny silver boat spin along that same path to the coast of Italy? Then under the boot and past Sicily to those little volcanic islands?”
“To Vulcano,” Kowalski said with a nod. “I remember the flaming river swooping from there to southern Sardinia. Then down to Africa and along its coast. The route looked a lot like what’s on your screen.”
Gray nodded. “The path of Odysseus’s ship appears to be following the boundaries between tectonic plates. At least the route revealed by the map. And maybe even what Homer tried to record in a poetic fashion.”
“But how is that possible?” Bailey asked. “How could these ancients know anything about plate tectonics?”
Gray shrugged. “I can only guess. Those same ancients mapped all the volcanic activity of the region, recorded all the major earthquakes in their texts. Perhaps they were able to get some inkling of the pattern of those underlying seismic forces.”
Maria offered another possibility he hadn’t even considered. “We know the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Egyptians were far more advanced in astronomy and navigational mapping. They kept records of significant places. The Giza pyramids. The other Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Even geographical landmarks, like Mount Vesuvius. Maybe by tracking the movements of these major sites over millennia they got some idea of the ground shifting beneath their feet.”
Gray knew that was pretty much how modern geologists mapped the movement of tectonic plates: using interferometry to track the changing distances between radio telescopes or GPS to gather positional data of landmarks on the earth and record their movements.
Mac suggested another option, drawing upon his earth sciences background as a climatologist. “Or maybe there were minute magnetic anomalies along these convergent plate boundaries that were detected and mapped?”
Gray nodded.
Could some combination of these be the answer?
Kowalski asked the more important question. “How does this help us know where to go?”
Gray held his tablet higher and showed where the line between the African plate and Eurasian plate continued to the west, cutting through the tip of northern Morocco. He switched over to a topographic map of Morocco with the convergent boundary drawn on it to better make his point.
“Hunayn obviously couldn’t take his ship overland through Morocco to continue along this path, so he took his dhow around, passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. From there I believe he turned south to the place where this tectonic line reemerges on the far side of the Moroccan coast.”
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Bailey squinted, but slowly nodded. “According to what you and Monsignor Roe discussed, you thought Hunayn was searching for the home of the mysterious Phaeacians.”
Gray nodded. “A place described as far away, at the end of the world.”
“In other words, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar,” Bailey added.
Maria frowned. “But how can we be sure Hunayn ended up going south, looking for the continuation of the African-Eurasian boundary?”
“First, the derivation of the name Phaeacian. It comes from the Greek root Phaios, which means ‘gray.’”
“How appropriate,” Kowalski mumbled.
Gray ignored him. “The name Phaeacians