Per aiutare un bambino, dobbiamo fornirgli un ambiente che gli consenta di svilupparsi liberamente.

(If you want to help a child, you have to offer it an environment in which it can develop independently.) 

- Maria Montessori

When I got out of the time machine, I felt as if I had returned to the Cretaceous Period. The air was hot, the sun was shining and a dark forest was right in front of me. But this time there was also the sound of waves braking at the shore. We had landed on a beach.

“Welcome to the Island Leviathan”, Mr Tuniak said and together we followed a small path through the wood. It quickly became bigger and then the trees stopped suddenly, as if someone had drawn a line on the ground and told them “you shall not pass”.

“The trees act as a fence”, Mr Tuniak explained. “They've been planted all around the island, so that passing ships can't see the school.”

“That's the school?”, I asked, completely astonished.

Right in front of us was an old Mayan temple. A step pyramid with six levels. But looking closer I noticed things that couldn't belong to the Mayan culture. Some steps had been turned into balconies with canvas chairs, there were glass windows, two satellite dishes and in front of the main entrance several bicycles were lying on the ground.

“Alex, how nice of you to visit!” We turned around and saw two old men coming out of the forest, carrying a shovel and secateurs. But then I looked again. It was only one man coming towards us, not two; one man with two heads.

“May I introduce: Manh and Minh. They're the janitors and gardeners here”, Mr Tuniak said. They were two separate people, I was told later. They were a special case of Siamese twins, where the twins shared the whole body except the head.

“What's going on?”, Mr Tuniak asked them. “It's unusually quiet.”

“Most of the children are on a sailing tour”, Manh explained. “They will be gone for the next several days. But Juan is here. He should be in his office. Alice is also around.”

Mr Tuniak thanked him (although I noticed that the name “Alice” seemed to have stirred bad memories) and we entered the school/temple. Even inside the building could not deny its origin. Sure, there were electric lights, carpets lying on the floor and several pictures were hanging on the walls, but every now and then one could still find the old Mayan reliefs carved into the stone walls.

“Was this really a temple?”, I asked.

“As far as we can tell”, Mr Tuniak answered. “But we have never been able to find out where it actually came from.”

We climbed up a long corkscrew stair, which was right in the middle of the temple and led from the ground floor right to the roof. There Mr Tuniak opened a trap door and we got out. A big compass was standing on the roof, at least half a metre high and suspended on two gimbles – a “Cardan suspension” as Mr Tuniak explained.

The temple was right in the middle of the island. It was surrounded by a green lawn, which in turn was surrounded by the forest. The trees were nearly as high as the temple which meant that we couldn't see the beach and only in some place I caught a glimpse of the horizon.

Mr Tuniak leaned with his back against the banister that went all around the roof and pointed with his hand to the four compass points. “That over there is the playing field”, he said. “You can see our little race track. Where you can see the dark patches of earth, that's where the beds are. They're quite useful if you're teaching biology. The part over there is used for... well everything. If there's something to celebrate or so, we do it there. And finally, there, you can see the little statues. They were all done by the children of this school.”

While we were standing on the roof, I became slightly nauseous. Although we were standing still, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were actually moving.

Next we went to the office of the director of this school.

“The whole idea for the school was his”, Mr Tuniak said. “He couldn't build it himself of course. Philip helped him a lot. But it all started with him.”

We knocked on the door and entered.

A teenager was sitting behind a desk, probably no older than seventeen. At first I thought it was the son of the director, but then Mr Tuniak introduced him as “Juan Tomez, director and founder”.

“Nice to meet you”, I said.

We talked for a few moments – which means that Mr Tuniak talked. He asked about some of the children and explained why I was accompanying him. But we didn't stay long.

“He's always very busy”, he said, after we had left the office. “He is not only the director, but basically the whole administrative staff here. Everyone tries to help out, whenever there's time, but that's not always sufficient.”

“I thought you were here in the 60ies”, I said.

“That's right”, Mr Tuniak answered.

“But how...”, I began before I stopped myself. The explanation had suddenly become very obvious and simple: Juan Tomez was another immortal. That's why Mr Tuniak had taken me to “Shangri-La” last week. And contrary to Eshe or Philip, Juan had stopped ageing when he was still a teen.

Mr Tuniak led me on a tour through most of the building. We visited various class rooms which looked like ordinary class rooms with black boards and computers, desks and chairs for the pupils. He also showed me some of the sleeping rooms which were not used at the moment. They looked pretty much exactly like dormitories all over the world. Some of them had balconies, there were posters in some, but apart from the walls made of solid stone there was nothing unusual about this part of the building. There were a few moments were I completely forgot that I was actually in an old temple.

There even was a doctor’s office. “The doctor is a student of this school”, Mr Tuniak explained. “But he probably went on the sailing tour with everyone else.”

“The whole school?”, I asked.

“Yes. It wouldn’t have been possible when I went lived here, but nowadays the school owns at least four boats.”

We met one of the pupils during our tour. It was a young girl called Carla. She showed us her room which was unique because it had no windows. I thought that Carla didn't see much of the sun, because here skin was so pale that it nearly seemed translucent.

“Michel should be in the lab, he still has to do some chemistry homework”, she said, when Mr Tuniak asked if any other pupils were at school. “Mrs Alice is helping him. Sue is probably in the kitchen... Oh, and Ari is at the beach of course.”

“That's perfect, thank you”, Mr Tuniak said and then turned to me. “Can you dive?”

We searched for Manh and Minh and together we carried the whole diving equipment – including a mask, a jacket, a wet suit, a compressed air cylinder and swim fins – to the beach. Ari, a boy whose name was actually Arturo, was already there, swimming in the water like a fish.

“Arturo will show you the secret of the island”, Mr Tuniak promised. “But you have to look under water for it. Don't worry. He's a great diving instructor.”

“You are not coming?”, I asked, while Manh and Minh were helping me to get into the wet suit and putting the air cylinders on my back.

“I'm a bit too old for that”, Mr Tuniak said and I could hear the regret in his voice. “When I was younger, I loved to dive. In open water, in caves... Once I was diving right in middle of several blue whales. It's unbelievable how gracefully such huge creatures can move.”

I was already standing in the sea, when I put on the swim fins. The air cylinder was so heavy on land that I had nearly fallen down several times. Arturo was waiting for me.

“Where's your compressed air?”, I asked him.

“He only speaks Spanish!”, Mr Tuniak shouted from the beach.

But it turned out that it wasn't a problem. Neither of us could speak under water, but we immediately understood each other's gestures. We dived.

We had only swum ten metres or so, when the sand on the sea floor stopped and was replaced by dark rock and long dead corals. And then the whole sea floor disappeared.

For a few seconds I was confused. I didn't understand what had just happened. It was as if I had just come to a deep canyon where I couldn't see the ground. Arturo pointed in the direction we had just come. There: The sea floor just stopped and dropped down in a straight line. I felt as if I was flying right next to a stone wall. We dived deeper, keeping the wall to our right all the time. I noticed that it didn't go down in a straight line, but bent back. Dead corals were everywhere, but I also saw a few white air balloons anchored to the dark stone.

And then the wall was suddenly above me. Wherever I looked – below, right, left – it was open water as far as I could see. But above me was... the island!

I nearly stopped breathing, when I realized this. I was diving under an island! It had no connection to the sea floor, which was probably a few hundred metres below me. The island was swimming.

We stayed for dinner, which was served in a long room in the temple. Sue, one of the pupils, had prepared it and was anxiously waiting for our verdict. She found the recipe during a Latin lecture, where she had had to translate it. She had then decided to use the newly gained knowledge in a way that benefited us all.

“The best way to get them interested in translations”, Mrs Alice joked.

“It was better than in Ancient Rome itself”, Mr Tuniak said, when he had finished.

“Except the desert”, Michel said. “Which one of you did that?” Sue stuck out her tongue at him as her response.

“And do you know why we call this place the Island Leviathan?”, Juan asked to change the subject.

“Because it swims like a huge fish”, I answered. “But how?”

“Pumice”, Clara said. “It's a volcanic stone with millions of little air holes in it. Because of that it's lighter than water and can swim. The same goes for the corals.”

“How does something like that get created?”, I asked. “With a temple on top of it!”

“We don't know”; Mr Tuniak admitted. “We've tried to find out, but even with the time machine it has turned out to be an impossible task.”

“And what about the air balloons?”

“A safety measure we put there a few years ago”, Juan explained. “The island can swim on its own, but we put them there to be on the safe side.”

“I did that”, Arturo said. On his head he was wearing something that looked like a headband that made sure that his gills were constantly wet. Yeah, the reason why he didn't need diving gear was that he had gills behind the ears. Mr Tuniak explained it to me before we went to dinner. “We all have gills as embryos in our mother's wombs. But we all lose them there as well. Except Arturo.”

Because of this, the Leviathan school was the perfect place for him. And now I also understood why it had been the best place for Mr Tuniak to go to school. Juan, who accompanied us back to the time machine, put it best when he said: “When I founded the school, I wanted to offer a home to everyone who couldn't find one anywhere else.”

NEXT WEEK

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