Mid-Mediterranean time machine

Deep history adds drama to the beauty of Malta, writes Dennis J. Buster in Star Tribune of Minnesota:

As my wife and I worked our way through the market, I sensed a country with a foot far in the past, inching the other toward the future. And I thought, not for the first time in our week here, that if geography were fair, the three-island Republic of Malta would be a much bigger country.

Malta and its islands, Malta, the main island, and Gozo and Comino, is a land of soaring cliffs that edge the turquoise sea, vast beaches, ancient archaeology, terrific scuba diving and churches that send the spirit soaring. Walled cities, still occupied after more than a thousand years, dot the islands.

Stone temples predate Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Malta played key roles in two history-changing wars 400 years apart. And it's one of the most ancient of Christian lands; St. Paul, who was shipwrecked here in 60 A.D. as he was being taken to Rome to be tried for sedition, converted residents to Christianity during his three-month stay. All this makes Malta a mid-Mediterranean time machine.

We used Malta's mass-transit system -- itself a blast-from-the-past fleet of bright yellow, chugging, mostly 1950s-era British buses -- to get around the pint-sized republic. Usually, we climbed aboard in front of our sleek 21st-century hotel in Sliema, a resort town across Marsamxett Harbor from the ramparts of Valletta, Malta's Lilliputian fortress of a capital city.Sometimes, we got off in the 16th century. Other times, in the 12th..

The rocks of the temples -- some weighing as much as 50 tons -- are carved with intricate designs and patterns. How did a primitive culture organize itself to corral the labor needed to stack and build with such megaliths? And what were the people trying to say? My wife and I pondered those questions as we sat on some rocks at Mnajdra, perfect seats on the Malta time machine, and looked out over the ruins to the sea. It's the same sea the ancients saw.

They must have listened in vain, just as we did, to hear the slap of the Mediterranean against the cliff face far below. We took leave of the ruins and hiked back down the hill to wait for the bus that would take us back to the 21st century, winding the clock in the Malta time machine forward again.