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?