Word: minotaure
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While the Metropolitan orchestra placidly unfolded the famed "heavenly lengths" of Schubert's Seventh Symphony, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo toe-danced the Greek legend of Theseus killing the virgin-devouring Minotaur, and finding his way out of the monster's labyrinth by following Ariadne's thread. Against Dali's brightly painted, more or less relevant backgrounds, the confused milling of the lavishly costumed Greeks, pigeons, roosters, dolphins and waves did little credit to the Ballet Russe's seasoned choreographer, Leoride Massine...
Died. Sir Arthur Evans. 90, the British archeologist whose excavations in Cretan pasturelands uncovered the wholly forgotten Minoan civilization and pushed the frontiers of Aegean history back 2,000 years; in Oxford, England. At Knossos he unearthed the labyrinth made famous by Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur; reconstructed the Palace of Minos complete with murals, plumbing and sunken bathtubs; found evidence that the 2,000-year-old kingdom was overthrown suddenly by seaborne invaders who took the city by surprise and burned the palace...
North of Crete-the island where the Minotaur in his labyrinth used to devour sacrificial Greek virgins-6-inch naval gunfire bellowed over the blue Mediterranean one morning last week. The 6,830-ton Australian cruiser Sydney had engaged two Italian cruisers of the 5,06g-ton Condottieri class-the Bartolomeo Colleoni and the Giovanni delle Bande Nere.* These ships can make 38 knots to the Sydney'?, 32.5. They have the same fire power (eight 6-inch guns each) but the Italians are lightly armored, designed especially to catch and destroy destroyers. Two British destroyers spotted them first...
Scientists who were told of these beasts 25 years ago laughed lightly, assured tale-bearers that such things had not walked the earth since Eocene times. Natives who passed Komodo described something which sounded like a dragon. Everyone knew that dragons were as mythological as the Minotaur. But the tales kept coming and in 1912 Major P. W. Ouwens of Java's Buitzenborg Zoo dispatched collectors to Komodo. They brought back creatures which not only closely resembled an Eocene reptile but were also almost exact replicas of the St. George dragon. Zoologist Ouwens named the new species Varanns komodoensis...
Banana-shaped Crete, in the centre, belongs to Greece. There in prehistoric times lived the Minotaur and there men fashioned golden goblets of great beauty and invented the water closet. On Crete at present is the summer home and strategic retreat of Eleutherios Venizelos, sly Grand Old Man of Greek politics...