In less than an hour our long johns and T-shirts had dried in the strong midday sun, and as we pushed out of the inland sea I was trying to ignore my apprehension. Between us and the next creek there were seven kilometers of cliffs where we couldn't go ashore in case of trouble, and it was worse than open sea. In fact, the prime difficulty caused by these cliffs are the cross-currents, and we decided that it might be easier to keep away from shore by a kilometer or so. We reached open sea in a burst of paddling, the cliffs receding behind us to an unthreatening distance. The restless sea was huge and deep, the colour of stagnant sewage in a sewer tank, but our decision was vindicated: it was easier here, if only because the waves were predictable. After a while my feet were cold, and my head hot. I was trying my best to pull my weight despite the muscle spasms in my lower back and upper arms, paddling mindlessly. We didn't speak for what seemed to me a torturous four hours.

"You heard of the submerged town hereabouts?" Bernard said, breaking the silence as we approached the mouth of the mini-fjord at Wied Il-Ghasri. The waves were behind us now.

"Yes. What do you make of it?" I had come across the writings of the geographer Paolo Diacono who, sometime between 352 and 366AD, had written: "There was a generalised earthquake on earth, and the waters rushed out of their normal limits, and many islands around Sicily, and many cities and people were inundated by the waves; and it was at this time that at Cape San Dimitri, in the island of Gozo, close to Malta, several places were swallowed up, so that today, when the waters are calm, one can still see several houses, and the vestiges of places lying under the water."

Bernard shrugged. "It is the same story mentioned in the legend of Saint Dimitri, and all these old legends must have a basis of truth."

"...we slipped into the mini-fjord that meandered inland for 200 metres, entering a sudden respite of crystal clear water..."

In the legend of Saint Dimitri - which was told to us in history class as fact - the saint had morphed out of his fresco in a nearby chapel and galloped across the sea to rescue a boy who had been snatched by Muslim corsairs. The boy's mother thereafter expressed her gratitude by keeping an oil lamp alight twenty-four hours a day, and after an earthquake had plunged the chapel into the sea, the flame could be seen burning underwater by divine intervention. There was no point looking now: the deep sea was blue-black and opaque.

"Can we go ashore?" I shouted over my shoulder. "I am getting cramps. I need to stretch."

The cliffs had petered out to a lip of land twenty metres high, and we slipped into the mini-fjord that meandered inland for 200 metres, entering

a sudden respite of crystal clear water where we could make out the large boulders at the bottom. We beached at the small pebbly shore at the creek's interior, and climbed up the stairs that had been cut into the rocky side to the top to look for the Saltpans of the Clockmaker, which we found on the plateau overhead near the outer mouth of the fjord. In 1773, a clockmaker had invested his life's savings in salt-pans on top of an underwater cave that penetrated underneath the plateau to a depth of about 40 metres; the idea was to dig a pair of shafts through the roof of the cave so that water could be hauled up to fill the salt-pans. I counted 75 salt-pans, and they were well measured and aligned, neatly set in three columns. It was an ingenious idea: the clockmaker got several crops of salt throughout the first summer. But when the wind awoke from its dormancy in autumn, the sea rushed into the cave as if through a funnel and exploded into a geyser that shot from the shafts. The spout of water, rising 20 meters, was blown inland on the wind in a fine mist of seawater which scorched the vegetation, ravaging crops within a radius of three kilometers. The farmers bandied together and angrily demanded compensation. Their claims bankrupted the clockmaker, and he died a few years later.

"The warm quality of the light - especially the crimson-and-purple sunsets - is one of the Mediterranean's unique delights..."

"The horrifying noise made by each of these explosions re-echoed both inside and outside the cave, and was altogether like cannons of different calibre being discharged in rapid succession," wrote Jean Houel, a French traveller who witnessed the plumes of water exploding from the shafts in 1777. "The echoes, being repeated by the surrounding landscape produce an effect similar to that of a peal of thunder or even of several peals of thunder, clashing together. It was terrifying and at every moment it seemed that the cliffs, where this storm was breaking continuously when the winds were extremely strong, were going to come crashing down."

The farmers attempted to block the shafts with stones and mud, but the tremendous waves exploded the shafts open again. Only years later was the farmers' problem solved when the roof of the cave collapsed as far inland as the shafts in a fierce storm. Now we stood on the edge of the broken shafts, peering towards the sea in the cave lashing about like crocodiles trapped in a small space. The sea was breaking into what remained of the cave with a clap followed by a thunderous echo which made the ground underfoot shiver.

We covered the remaining two kilometres to Xwejni in less than thirty minutes, and it was almost dark by the time we scrambled ashore and pitched out tent in a grove of tamarisk trees. My feet were numbly cold - in the clear sky, the warm day had been superseded by a biting chill within an hour of sunset. Bernard made some pasta and I prepared some malt wine (wine simmered with cinnamon, orange, sugar, apple, cloves). Warmed by the wine - a treat to celebrate the passage of the hardest day - we sat outside in the crispy and clear star-lit night. The visibility was good, and peering towards the horizon we could just make out the smudge pinpricks of light in Sicily, 80km north.

By the time we got up the next morning the sun had already warmed the grass, and we crawled out of our tent to find a world of light and openness. Set before us was an amber plateau of limestone riddled by hundreds of small water pools spreading both ways of the hundred-metre-wide plateau. These were manmade salt-pans that produced all the salt Gozo needed, created by pickaxing depressions on the surface - rough copies of the doomed salt-pans of the clockmaker. During mistral windstorms, the waves engulf this whole plateau, and seawater fills the pans that would eventually dry in the summer, when the salt is scraped and collected. The sea beyond was a deep blue, the band of sun glittering across its surface in a dazzling highway of light. The warm quality of the light - especially the crimson-and-purple sunsets - is one of the Mediterranean's unique delights.