Books: The Ulysses Voyage

The Ulysses Voyage

(Extract)

'As we approached the island of Anticythera eight or nine northbound dolphins crossed paths with the galley and promptly swam over to amuse themselves by leaping and playing round Argo's ram. They came bursting jauntily out of the water before ducking down and racing away with exuberant wriggles of their streamlined bodies. One dolphin was so consumed with curiosity that he lingered for twenty minutes about twenty yards ahead of the galley, occasionally heaving himself vertically into the air for three quarters of the length of his body to look over the gunnel and get a better view. .. As the dolphins tumbled and curvetted, their joyous leaps were so like the painted dolphins speeding across the wall frescoes of Minoan palaces that I couldn't help thinking that perhaps the finest context ever to see this aquatic spectacle was from a Bronze Age galley, slipping through the water with a dolphin shape and questing eye, another natural sea creature.

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