Tristan Jones - AKA

Tursiops truncatus, a subspecies of the family Delphinidae, of the order Ceteacea, is known to sailors as the bottle-nosed dolphin. In North America some landsmen call them the common porpoise.

THE LONGEST AKAS DOLPHIN TRIBE ever stays in one area is when the females give birth. All through their history, as long as the legends of their Wise Ones reached back, their calves had been born in the warm waters that wash the two lonely rocks in the equatorial mid-Atlantic.

Aka and the Wise Ones, in the tale-telling times, transmit holographic images to the rest of the 143 bottle-nosed dolphins in the tribe of how their home had once been, before the seas rose and covered all but the two tiny islets, the very top of the highest peak of the beautiful land that had been Atlantis, the home-island of the Sea Kings. The Atlanteans had been different from modern Man, say the Wise Ones. True, they had fished, but they had never harmed or purposely murdered the dolphins. On the contrary, the Sea Kings had learned to communicate with them, and had included the dolphins in their pantheon of gods, and in return the dolphins had herded the fish for the Atlanteans and accompanied the Sea Kings on their voyages of trade and exploration.

Eventually, after eons of time, the waters had swiftly risen and it had been time for the last of the Sea Kings to leave once-lovely Atlantis in the warm seas. On their long graceful ships with purple sails the Sea Kings had figureheads of dolphins cast in gold, and as they hauled their anchors for the last time their high priest had made a vow that when they reached their new home in the inland sea, they would raise a temple which would be the new center of the world and they would name it in honor of their sea gods. Eh-ee, the name of the temple, had come down in the dolphin legends through twelve thousand years and twelve thousand treks around the North Atlantic Ocean. It was the closest the dolphins could come to pronouncing the human word Delphi.

Each August, when the calves are two to three months old, the dolphins of Akas tribe leave the lonely rocks, now known to humans as St. Pauls, and make their way, by taste and their guiding stars, into the west-flowing Guinea Current, warm after its long traipse up the west African coast. They do not hurry. The fish scouts and the shoal herders range up to a hundred miles either side of the main body of 112 dolphins. After two months in the warm Guinea Current, they join the North Equatorial Current, which flows down the coast of Africa from the north and swings west across the ocean to the West Indies. The tribe roams around the West Indies Islands for three months; there the fish abound from October to December. Then it is time to move northeast, into the Gulf Stream. It takes the tribe four months to make its way east across the North Atlantic, ranging north almost as far as Iceland, to their traditional landfall of Cape Finisterre, the northwest tip of Spain. From then on, as they continue south, is their mating time, from Finisterre to the Moroccan coast.

From Finisterre, the dolphins steadily make their way south during March and April, south in the cool Portugal current, in a vast area which extends right down the coast of Portugal, across the herring, cod, and pilchard-teeming Straits of Gibraltar, right down to the coast of Mauritania, where the shoals of mullet darken the oceans like undersea clouds. They do not swim along in a direct route, but range as far west as Madeira and the Canary Islands, and sometimes they even visit into the Mediterranean as far east as the Balearic Islands and Corsica; but, by their ancient law, no further.

By mid-April each year the tribe has plowed its way through the Cape Verde Islands and, always with several females heavy with calf from the previous years mating, heads southwest by south, right across the Guinea Current again, in a line as straight as an arrow, guided as always by their taste and the stars, back to the two lonely warm islets and the safe inlet, which is all that remains of Atlantis, which has always been their ancestral home, ever since the dawning of their recorded history twenty million years ago.

Conan reread the telegram, picked up the phone, and as he dialed, reminded himself not to mention the name Josephine. Outside, the New York traffic roared.

Ruth, he said in a slight Scottish burr, I want to see you urgentlyno, I dont want to discuss it on the phoneI have to go away for a while

He listened for a moment, then he said, Okay, Formellis then, at seven. He waited for another minute, listening. Then he smiled and murmured, I love you, too, and hung up the phone.

Conan picked up the cable again and scanned it. His hand shook as he read it, then he groaned quietly to himself and let the cable fall onto his desk. He was in corduroy pants and shirt sleeves. He was of medium build, sinewy yet not thin, with thinning dark hair and trimly shaped graying beard. He held his head slightly thrust forward, as if he were sniffing the air. His gray eyes were now half-closed in shock and sorrow.

For a few minutes he stared out of his fifth-floor apartment window at the Seventh Avenue traffic rumbling below. As Conan stood at the window he held both feet planted apart, as if he were on the deck of a ship at sea. Every move he made, even as he turned his head to look along the avenue, was as decisive as if it had been considered beforehand. He had the look of a man who is accustomed to making up his mind and acting upon his decisionthe kind of man whose obvious inner strength is, when all is well, resented by weaker beings. He was the rare kind of person who was disbelieved in by those who had no inkling of the furnace in which Conans strength had been forged.