A Twist of Sand Read online

  The Kroo boy at the wheel gave a cry.

  "Baas, die kompas verneuk my I" (" Skipper, the compass cheats me!") he exclaimed in Afrikaans.

  I was at his side in a flash. The compass rose was swinging and by the time I reached the binnacle it had travelled through seven degrees. But the ship's head had remained steady.

  "There's a great deal going on that I don't understand and don't like," I rapped out to John, who was looking at the gyrating needle in silent wonder. "I'm going to stop engines and see if we can hear anything. If there's surf dead ahead, we'll hear it. If there's land, we'll smell it."

  I rang the telegraph to " stop."

  "That'll bring Mac out of his bed," was John's only comment.

  "I'm going up above to see if there's anything to be seen from there," I went on. "Did you hear what the look-out said?"

  John replied: "Curiously, I thought he said mud."

  "Mud?" I echoed. "Mud?"

  "That's what I thought."

  "Steady as she goes," I told the helmsman.

  On the roof of the wheelhouse was an additional deck enclosed by stanchions, where there was a small emergency wheel and, giving the vessel a comically belligerent appearance, a little range-finder which I found extremely useful for my work on the coast. The refraction from the desert dust in the air, however, which took days to subside after a north-eastern blow, was a great handicap to the instrument. I was hoping that by the time we returned to Walvis Bay the small five-mile-radius radar I had ordered would have arrived. The Etosha certainly needed radar at that moment.

  To reach the upper deck one had to make one's way round the side of the bridge, giving a much wider view astern and abeam. A glow seemed to light the back of the fog away to starboard. A ship on fire? The sun? I couldn't be sure, with the compass playing tricks for no apparent reason, whether Etosha was headed north-east or south-west. It might be either. She had practically lost way and was pitching uneasily. The only sound was of my boots on the ladder and the faint squeal of a block on the mast aft as the ship lifted with a short, bucketing, unpleasant motion.

  Grasping the rail, I tried to penetrate the fog, but I might as well have stayed in the wheelhouse. If there were surf breaking, I would hear it, for on this coast, except in the winter, roars that great almost perpetual breaking swell from the south-west which seems to bring across hundreds of miles of open sea the lashing anger of the great icefields beyond South Georgia, tossed to hysteria by the great peak of Tristan da Cunha where a jet-force wind never ceases to storm, finally screaming out its anger on the desolate shore under the shifting sand dunes. Many a shipmaster, from the Arab dhow captains who rounded the Cape five hundred years ago, to the nerve-ridden men who drove the tea clippers home from China, had his first and last experience on the coast when he heard the breaking surf under his bowsprit in even such a fog as this. The bones of their ships lie in the shifting sands — if you could get close enough to see them.

  With the sudden change of temperature which goes with a strong steam heater suddenly switched on, I felt suffocatingly hot and threw open my duffle-coat at the throat. My fingers faltered at the buttons. The swift sweep of warm air cleared the fog and I gasped out loud in amazement at what I saw.

  Astern, and on the port quarter and beam, the sea boiled in parturient frenzy. Like a view of the Hebrides I once had from the air, a chain of small islands stretched away, but unlike the calm splendour of the Outer Isles, these were being born; as if merging into the darkness of the womb, they mingled with the bank of fog ahead where the warm air had not yet dissipated it. Each "vibrated and trembled — black mud heaved up from the ocean floor; bickering along these strange, new-born, viscous things was a flame of a colour I have seen neither before nor since, a kind of pure white, blotched and seamed with brown and purple. It was as if one of the roses of the ancients had been born from a living body, full of beauty and terror.

  Horror rose in me. As I gazed speechless at the spectacle, my seaman's instinct reacted to what I saw. Apart from the chain of gestated islets astern and to port, the coast itself lay not a mile ahead — a dun forbidding shore of low sandhills, eternally shifting under the great winds which come in from the sea, covered here and there with sparse shrub or creeper-like growths. Unknown to us, Etosha had broken through into old Hyane's channel. Slightly ahead on the starboard bow rose a drab hillock. It stood, calculating and evil, like a huge puff-adder stretched out waiting for the touch of the ship's bow in order to strike back with primitive, coiled-up wrath. The flat hill," dun and serrated on the seaward side, might have been a reptile's flat head and folded throat.

  I had only once seen the shore as close from the sea. It struck me that, although the Etosha was practically ashore, there was no surf. Then I realised that, in fact, the surf on which one could normally rely to reveal the position of the shore by its breaking was absent. Treacherous always, the coast had betrayed the Etosha too. Had I not stopped the engines when I did, she would have been aground by now.

  John's footsteps came racing up the companionway and his face was grey as he surveyed our predicament. Landmarks — Gomatom, drab hillocks, characteristic splodges on the dunes — all raced through my head as I tried to place our position precisely.

  "Christ!" he burst out. "Geoffrey, where in heaven's name are we? And why… " he gestured inarticulately at the lack of breakers. Had there been surf, I realised quickly, it would have lifted Etosha and torn the bottom out of her by now. It was only because she was lying in calm water that she was not bumping on hard sand and biting outcrops of rock.

  "Get a lead-line out: sound! sound! sound!" I roared at the petrified native boy who cowered in pitiful terror in the bows. He reached out numbly for the line with its leather and calico markers. "Sound!" I roared, cupping my hands. "Quick!"

  With almost elephantine slowness, he took the line. Its heavy lead sinker might have weighed a ton, he was so slow. He cast forward.

  "We must be miles off course," said John quietly. "If she strikes, we'll never come out of this alive. We are hemmed in to seaward by the eruption and the shoal and she's so close in that the sand must be stirring under the screws."

  "By the deep three," chanted the leadsman feebly. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of several others of the crew who had made their way on deck and were gazing, with the fatalistic resignation of the African, at the shore — and at death.

  "What sort of bottom?" I shouted back. He picked up the lead and fumbled with the tallow. His moves seemed to be all in slow motion. "Shingle," he replied.

  It confirmed what I wanted to know. I turned to John and smiled. "Do you want to know where we arc? See that hillock — no, not the higher one, that one bearing about: ten degrees? I call it Inyala Hill because you'll see there are stripes of brown and red down the side, for all the world like the markings on an inyala buck's side. It hasn't a name on the chart. And that," said I, pointing to the one towering farther inland, " is Gomatom. With something over three fathoms under us, and shingle at that, do you realise that we are where no ship has ever got before — even Hyane — and just because of the lack of breakers? This place is a maelstrom ordinarily."

  "The Swallow Breakers," he exclaimed hoarsely.

  "You saw the photostat," I said briefly. "H.M.S. Swallow in '79."

  "But," said John incredulously staring out to starboard, " that means we've been carried miles to the nor'ard… "

  "There's no damned time to worry about that now," I snapped. MacFadden, the engineer, joined us on the bridge. He looked without a great deal of interest at the shore, the burning islets and the sea.

  "What's this all about?" he asked in his broad Scots accent.

  "Mac," I said, "for once your bloody double-action diesels are going to get the chance of their lives. Do you see that dark thing sticking out " — I gestured towards the bows — "about a mile and a half ahead? That's what I've named Diaz's Thumb. You won't find it on the chart either. Nor did Diaz, despite having been
here four hundred years before us. Take a look almost due north — there, where the fog has just lifted. You see…"

  "There's a gap," exclaimed John excitedly.

  "Aye, about as wide as a schoolboy's arse," said Mac. "How'll ye ever get her round that rock into a damn near ninety-degree turn, I ask? Fah! Ye're asking me for eighteen knots. This isn't a speedboat."

  "Take a look at the alternatives," I said quietly.

  "B—— the alternatives," replied Mac. "All I want is to get those diesels at full pelt once before I die. Eighteen knots at three-eighty revolutions." He smiled a thin, cold smile. "Double-action diesels. Fastest things afloat."

  He turned and went below to his beloved engines, ignoring the desperateness of the situation.

  John and I clattered down to the bridge. I took the wheel from the Kroo boy.

  "Full ahead," I snapped. John rang down. "Any moment that surf may break," I said. "We want every knot we can get out of her. If the wind comes up — and you know how it does out of a dead clear sky here — we're finished. Once the surf breaks under her, you can say your prayers."

  "Geoffrey," said John, "there have been times when I started to say my prayers before with you in command, and I feel damn like it now. You know this coast better than any skipper living…"

  "Cut out the pretty speeches," I said briefly, spinning the spokes. "I'm taking her on a line with that striped hillock." Etosha began to tremble like a horse as Mac opened up the great engines.

  John laughed suddenly, as he always did in the face of danger. "Mac's whipping 'em up. Inyala Hill bearing green one-oh, speed fifteen," he mimicked a destroyer man, "Enemy in close range. Bearing all round the bloody compass. Director-layer sees the target — and how!"

  Etosha was picking up speed rapidly. As her head steadied on the bearing it seemed sheer suicide to be taking her in at speed. Suicide anyway, with a few feet of water under her keel, water which might start breaking at any moment.

  "Get the crew on deck," I told the Kroo boy. "Get their lifejackets on, and your own too. If she strikes, it's every man for himself. Make it snappy!"

  "John," I said as Jim made his way aft, never taking his eyes from the deadly shore. "You and I are the only two who know our position. For all the crew knows, we're anywhere at all." I took my eyes from the shore and gazed at him levelly. "No one is ever to know about this little picnic. We've never been away from the fishing grounds, do you understand? I want your word on that."

  "You have it," he replied. "But the crew will talk."

  "What they saw was a submarine eruption which they imagined was the shore — that's the explanation you'll give. Your charts, not those you saw of mine, will show our position at sea — and nowhere near this coast. Is that clear?"

  "No need to come the heavy skipper with me," he grinned. "Just as you say."

  I knew that Etosha was fast, but I did not realise that her slim lines underwater and the fine engines would give her such pace. The coast was tearing towards her bows. Diaz's Thumb looked a biscuit toss away. Beyond, the sea smoked evilly and the angle of the turn looked impossibly acute. I began to have grave doubts whether we would make it.

  The air was humid and the islets in their birth-throes gave off a peculiar smell, for all the world like newly-sawn stink-wood — a fetid, half sickly-sweet, semi-acrid pungency, combined with the warm odours of superheated steam.

  John stood impassive.

  "The scientists say this is the oldest coast in the world," I said slowly. "They say it was here that earth first emerged from chaos. Maybe life also emerged first, here, too. We're probably seeing the same thing before our eyes now as happened on the first day of Creation… "

  He took up the speaking-tube. There was a curious exaltation about his voice.

  "What is she doing, Mac?" he asked.

  The voice came indistinctly back, but John gave a low whistle. "Nearly nineteen," he said. "She's splendid. But if she so much as touches anything now—"

  "Get a lifebelt on," I said tersely.

  "No time now," he said. "I want to watch the last act."

  The water creamed under Etosha's forefoot. Diaz's Thumb was now so close that one could see its smooth, wicked fang sticking up a hundred yards away on the port bow. If I could feel any kind of relief, it was that Etosha was now — by no doing of mine — north of the dreaded shoal, although still on the shoreward side of it. She'd run through the vital gateway by the grace of God. I gave the wheel a spoke or two and she leaned over slightly towards the rock. Fifty yards now. The crew stood below me on the deck, some cowering beneath the bridge overhang. The ship roared on like an express train. Then suddenly one of them gave a wild shout — it might have been the leadsman — clambered over the bulwarks and jumped into the sea, swimming strongly towards the jagged pinnacle.

  John snatched at a lifebelt.

  "No," I snapped. "Don't throw it. Let him go. He's finished anyway. You'll only prolong his agony with that. The first surf will smash him to pieces."

  John obeyed, but his hand was shaking. One of the crew shouted something obscene at the bridge, but it was drowned in the crash of the bows through the water.

  Twenty yards now.

  "Take a grip of something," I said quietly. "Here we go."

  I spun the wheel hard to port. At the same time I ordered the port screw to "full astern."

  At that moment the wave hit us.

  Generated by the great south-west winds which strike at gale force out of a sky so clear it might be yachting weather, the sea in these parts works itself up to a demoniacal fury within a space of minutes. This was the wind and the sea which I had dreaded as I put Etosha at full speed across the open stretch of water in the hope that she might get clear before anything struck. The giant wave carried with it not only the elemental force of the sudden gale, but also the punch of the submarine eruptions. No one had seen it towering up astern as we raced towards the Thumb. I caught sight of the massive chocolate-coloured wall, freckled here and there with the white belly of a dolphin or shark killed in the eruptions, and towering above it all a cream-and-dun crest of breaking water. The port screw had begun to bite and the rudder too as the great mountain of sea struck aft the bridge structure.

  I felt Etosha's stern cant and sink under the shock of tons of water and the action of the port screw. There was a great rending sound of metal and wood. The transom felt as if it had been mule-kicked. I started to shout to John, but heard no words above the gigantic clangour. I rang the telegraph to "full ahead." Out of the corner of my eye I saw John snatch an axe and dart aft. The sea poured in over the bridge rails. The stern canted over more steeply.

  It is in moments like this that the sailor feels his rapprochement with his craft. The mould of iron, the grain of wood, takes on life as the sea seeks to wrest from it the stuff of its being which man has fashioned. The sea,on its remorseless anvil seeks to redesign. The sailor, and the sailor only, is the witness of that elemental forging, the fight for a new pattern. The man of the sea expresses it simply: "She was like a thing alive." The whip of strained steel, the near-breaking strain of rope and recalcitrant wood challenge the sea. It is a titan's battle. In those moments a man's love of his ship is born and he hears with pain the rendings of that dreadful accouchement.

  A brief glimpse showed me the aftermast canted over and buckled about five feet above the deck. John, up to the chest in water, was hacking at the wire and rigging screws which, fortunately, were secured on the bridge abaft the funnel. The stern tilted, but it seemed to have more life in it. Above the din I heard the thuds of the axe. If only the stays would part! The mast would then go overboard and she might right herself. From the foredeck came screams and shouts from the crew. The axe thudded. With a twang like a huge banjo-string the last of the stays parted. It was followed by a rending, tearing, sickening noise which seemed as if half her stern had gone with the mast. Through my hands on the spoke I felt the slight lightening of Etosha's burden of death and then a living m
ovement as the powerful screws thrust. The bow was angled high and the list seemed beyond human power to right. A second later, by the great power of the diesels, I felt she might live if she could only shake herself free. I knew then how my great-grandfather had felt — the story had come down to me as a boy — when the fine-lined clipper he was driving round the Cape of Storms under a great press of sail put her yacht-like counter under the wild seas and he alone had saved her as the water towered over her mizzen chains by cutting adrift the halliards and rigging with his own hands.

  Like a cork out of a bottle, Elosha leapt free, shedding astern the debris of the mast, stays, boats and stern fittings. Sea and spray cleared. But we had not escaped. Dead ahead, not more than fifty yards, lay a smoking, new-born islet. Beyond was the open sea. The waves out there were white-crested, and, dear God! under them was deep water. A welter of white broke over the shoal — astern. No power could save Etosha now. Her gallant fight for life with the huge wave had not saved her. But as the sickening realisation hit me, I saw in a flash that the smoking islet, steam-crested, was not the one I had originally noted when Etosha made her great bid for safety. It was new, reared in the few minutes of our travail. As far as the eye could see to starboard now Etosha was hemmed in, cut off from the sea by the advancing, inexorable, ever-growing number of islets. The coast had laid a deadly trap.

  Etosha checked and I was thrown forward against the wheel and fetid heat rose about me. I waited for the strike which would rip her plating like calico. But it did not come. She lurched slowly ahead, losing speed. Strangely-coloured flames rose and I saw the paint blister. Another lurch — ú she was cutting through the soft, red-hot mud, as yet un-hardened in the sea! Through the steam, a ship's length away, lay open water. She slowed more and struggled tiredly. The heat and the steam nearly suffocated me. I saw a wave sweeping in from seawards. Etosha was almost at a standstill. Then her bows lifted under the sea. The screws screamed as they rose out of the viscous, turgid mud and bit into water — blessed, salt scawater. She surged clear of the nauseating embrace towards the open sea.