The River of Diamonds Read online

  Shelborne looked at his watch. 'We have time yet… We have to climb to the summit of the island back there. Some coffee and rusks from the galley first…'

  It wasn't cookhouse with him, it was galley — still shipboard terms.

  Minnaar nodded at a ship's bell with sealskin on the clapper which hung on the stoep. The brass was ornate, with worked edges.

  'Portuguese gingerbread work,' Shelborne explained.

  I read out the name. 'San Jodo 1888.'

  'Portuguese warship,' he went on. 'She had a strange fate, strange even for this coast: years ago there must have been a lagoon where North Head is now — it's all quicksand today. They brought the San Jodo in for a careen and a repaint, and they could — there were then twenty-six feet of water inside the bar. The crew laid her on her side and — it seems incredible — the sandbars rose and closed the entrance, locking her in. The lagoon silted up. The crew died of thirst and starvation. The wreck's still there.'

  'How do you know all this?' asked Minnaar.

  'I made a rough plank bridge to the wreck when she became exposed after some upheaval of the sands. The San Jodo's log had been conscientiously written up. My signal cannon comes from her as well as the bell.'

  Minnaar, stolid though he was, had become infected by the gloom of the bay. 'Too many wrecks and dead men around here for my liking — and I was nearly a goner myself, damn me.'

  We sat down and Shelborne pulled out what looked like a cigar-holder, carved in soft soapstone. It took me several moments to recognize what it was while he plugged it with tobacco — it was a primitive Hottentot pipe, having no bowl, only a thickened section in front, which jutted out straight. The Coloured cook brought a pot of strong coffee, a bottle of brandy, some brown, oily-looking rusks and a plate of dried peaches..

  Shelborne poured the brew into crude, quart-sized mugs and laced it with a dollop of brandy.

  'We're as dry here as an American warship — only headmen are allowed liquor in the islands,' he said. 'The workers would never be sober if they had drink. At the last wreck up there' — he nodded to the north — 'on Hollam's Bird Island, they looted her and were blind for a fortnight.'

  He handed round the oily rusks. 'They taste better than they look. Basis of refined seal-oil. Keeps you warm. The peaches go with it. Good combination.

  I reached for my mug from the rough table. The turgid liquid slopped gently, spilling over the edge.

  The island was shaking.

  6

  The Sleepless Dead

  Nausea rose in my throat. Disbelievingly, I paused; the crude mug slopped over, although no hand had touched it. Earlier, I had attributed a queasy feeling to sea-legs unaccustomed to land, but now I knew: the island was rocking gently. My nausea was partly physical, partly mental, the first arising from the stench of stale guano, the second from the island's evil ambience. The movement underfoot seemed like something sinister within the rocks themselves. Captain Morrell must have felt the same when he saw the hillocks of dead seals, and this same phenomenon had found a place in the prosaic logs of the guano coasting skippers, a breed not noted for sensitivity.

  The mug! What the hell…?'

  Shelborne shrugged. 'Mercury shakes. Mercury has always shaken.' He was casual, good-humoured.

  The clapper on the bell swung slowly, too. Minnaar was fascinated. 'Why don't you mount this flippin' outfit on gimbals and keep her steady?'

  There must be some explanation,' I persisted.

  'If there is any, I don't know it,' said Shelborne, but his eyes didn't bear out what he said. The island gets its name from the quivering, you know — mercury, quicksilver.'

  'Is it some sort of submarine volcanic eruption?' I asked.

  He laughed. 'It's been going on a long time then steadily for twenty years to my knowledge, and a century before that.'

  Twenty years on Mercury Island! There was a walk of thirty feet ‹of level planking from where we sat, bigger than a windjammer's quarter-deck, maybe, but not much. Everywhere else were jagged rocks stained with old sea-bird droppings, a pocket handkerchief — and a snotty one at that — of raw undersea peak sticking out of the turbulent ocean. God! Twenty years of penal servitude!

  He must have noticed the reaction in our faces. 'Yes, it is something over twenty years since I made Mercury my headquarters — my flagship, to use our jargon.'

  I took a long pull at the strong coffee. The rawness of the brandy in it only worsened my nausea. Suddenly I felt I must get back to my ship, to a clean deck, not a false one dubbed with nautical gimmicks, away from the stale stink of Mercury and its air of being live when it should have been dead for a million years.

  I put my mug down. It slid sideways a foot along the table. Shelborne reached out and caught it. 'You get used to it. Even when we die, we don't lie quiet on Mercury. No rest in peace here. Back there' — he jerked his head in the direction of the back of the hut — 'is the graveyard. We can't dig graves because there is no soil. So we cement the coffins to the rock. They're on the side the storms come from. The coffin lids sometimes blow off and you can see your former mates rolling from side to side.'

  The macabre picture revolted me. I tried to banish it with a rational question. 'Why not take the bodies and bury them on the mainland?'

  'The wind would expose a body in a couple of weeks. Either that, or a strandloper — a seashore hyena. I'd prefer Mercury to being a meal for one of those filthy creatures.'

  I then suggested, 'Why not give them a sea-burial — in the bay or in open water?'

  'Remember I told you how crowded with ships this bay was once,' replied Shelborne. 'It's shallow — and you know how superstitious sailors are. No, they wouldn't have their dead mates just under their keels, liable to be brought to the surface at any moment by the strange currents and eddies round the island. In any case there wasn't time to take a body out to sea, when every guano-loading hour was precious, and besides, it's too rough for a small boat. So our form of burial has become part of the Mercury tradition — tough, but I stick to it.'

  Minnaar said, 'Do you really go and examine the coffins after every storm?'

  Shelborne was staring across the sea. A cormorant feather blew into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it away absent-mindedly. He took a long time to reply. 'A coffin blows open — that is a handhold to the past. There's a chap there wearing a frilly lace shirt and a black hat. Yes — a hat, in his coffin. He used to sport it when the Alabama was taking prizes in these waters. Captain Lem Sherrill, of Connecticut. I've had to put his coffin lid back several times — it seems particularly prone to blowing open. He is history; Mercury is a handhold to — antiquity.'

  The yellow flag flapped heavily against the stay-wires above our heads. I wasn't surprised any more that the emblem of a dead-and-gone day with its off-beat warning motto appealed to Shelborne.

  Minnaar poured another liberal shot of brandy into his coffee. Rough, tough as he was, taking the day as it came, he did not care for the conversation any more than I did.

  'I'd have thrown the old bastard into the sea with a hundredweight of rock tied to his feet, tradition or no tradition,' he said loudly, as if to drown his thoughts.

  Shelborne wasn't even listening. Ignoring Minnaar, he went on, speaking softly, so that some of his words were lost on the wind. 'We deal in symbols here on Mercury, just as the Namib is full of symbols — symbols of life and death. Here the dance of life is held continually against a vast backdrop of death. At any time, in any place, through carelessness or lack of vigilance, you will find yourself in the shadow — for good.'

  'Christ!' muttered Minnaar.

  He went on. 'In human conflict the ultimate objectives of the combatants are the same; the interests they seek to protect are ephemeral. Here on Mercury and in the Namib the level of the fight is different. The symbols and the instruments of the killer are the elements: primitive, ruthless, primal. They have no interests to protect.- They destroy simply to destroy. It goes on all the time, rou
nd the clock. You can't get away from it by calling the time by ships' watches and striking a ship's bell. Look at that cliff face — endless, brutal, purposeless attrition. The one thing which you might call ephemeral are the dunes: they move day and night on the wind, so that the whole countryside gets up and marches.'

  The boards trembled under our feet and the table rattled. It was high time, I felt, to kill this conversation.

  I pointed to the big sun condensers lashed to the roof. 'Do you condense all your own water?'

  Shelborne was not to be moved from his line of thought. 'Water is a prime element. Yes, I distil it, every drop. It is more precious than diamonds…'

  'I'd need my liquor, else I'd go crazy,' Minnaar interjected.

  Shelborne smiled faintly. 'There's no liquor, just for that reason; no drugs, no radio, no television, no sex, no women, no nancy-boys. Life is harder here than pulley-hauley in a sailing-ship, though the food is better; I know. The struggle to keep alive is never-ending, and you need every brain-cell, every sinew.'

  'But the condensers — if it were cloudy for a week…' I began.

  'Then we'd die of thirst,' he replied shortly. 'No, I back the fact that ever since records were taken fifty years ago, it has not rained either on Mercury or on the mainland opposite. Yet — I never swallow a cupful of water without thinking, is there another to follow?'

  'All this talk of water makes me want another drink,' said Minnaar.

  'Help yourself,' said Shelborne. He spoke to me. 'Some men sign on for the islands — ship's articles of course — because of drink. Two years of guano scraping and seafaring diet is better than Alcoholics Anonymous. At the end of a contract, they'll go back to the Cape and booze. But they always return. Of course, they're not all drunks. I have two, however, on Hollam's Bird Island, which falls under me as headman of this group of islands. That's a really tough spot — nothing more than a reef, really, half awash most of the time. My two reformed drunks there are great readers. I take them cases of books. They couldn't go back. They belong, as I belong.'

  More of this from Shelborne and I'd have Minnaar drunk on my hands. So I said: 'I intend to survey the sea-bed from Sudhuk to a mile or two north of North Head. That means roughly the whole of the bay, and a bit to the north and south.'

  Shelborne's eyes came back to the present with a flicker of amusement. 'Is that all?'

  I did not care for the implicit sneer. Well, he had yet to see how I would case his bay and his island.

  'No. I intend to continue out to sea to the twenty-one-fathom line. Mercury falls in that sector.'

  Minnaar said thickly, 'We also want a good anchorage for the ship. You'll know the safest hereabouts.'

  'Anchorage or no anchorage, you'll find yourselves beating out to sea half the time,' replied Shelborne. 'The swell gets very bad at the full and change of the moon. It smashes over the back of the island. It sometimes gets so rough that the seals leave their nursery and shelter here among the huts.'

  'The Praying Mantis is an ex-whaler,' I said. 'She's built to take it.'

  'There's not much wind today — that is, by Mercury's standards,' he replied. 'Maybe it is gusting to twenty knots. If the weather works up suddenly from the south-south-west, that's when you must get out — quick. The spray flies clean over Sudhuk, and there's only one place for a sailor to be — the hell out of Spencer Bay. Mercury is not the only part of the Sperrgebiet you're surveying, is it?'

  'No.' I sketched what I had done at Angras Juntas and our plans for the other guano islands, if the indications justified it.

  He said casually — too casually — 'If your survey is not promising, then Rhennin won't take the Mazy Zed to operate at a particular place — in other words, you are, the key figure?'

  'Yes, I suppose you could call me that. It's strictly a business proposition; and I get a commission on the basis of what I find. The Mazy Zed eats money. We have to take 150 carats a day — you remember what Rhennin told the court.'

  He was silent. He seemed to have a capacity to withdraw himself from his surroundings, and it left me tongue-tied. The wind gusted chill against the back of my neck. Wind! Shelborne had spoken of water, but wind was another of the great elementary symbols of the desert. I felt drawn into his Namib mystery. Wind! Searing, searching, tormenting, never absent… It carried within it the same paradox as water: a force life-giving, yet destructive. Daily the wind brings water to the desert in the shape of moisture-laden fogs. The highly-adapted insect life of the dunes relies on the sea-wind to live. They have no other source of water. And the prevailing south-wester has a rival, a hot wind which breathes across 100 miles of unmitigated desert from the interior mountain plateau, bearing the second element of life essential to the desert insects: vegetable matter. The two winds take advantage of the continuous shuffling movement of the sand from the temporary base of the dune to its smoking crest in order to distribute this organic matter, — the dune becomes a gigantic food mixer. It is the wind which bring food and drink to the blind creatures which stumble about below the surface, eyeless, having surrendered their light in order to survive in these infernal conditions. Just as in the sea currents bring microscopic plankton from afar, so in the Namib, the dry land which first emerged on the third day of Creation, it is the currents of air which sustain life.

  'I'd like to make a thorough investigation of the Glory Hole,' I said. 'How do we get in?'

  The question had seemed to me quite harmless, but Shelborne's eyes chilled me. At my words there was the sinister flash I had seen in the Gquma's cabin, the coruscated hardness at the heart of the green diamond. I knew as well as he did that under Mercury there is an immense, trumpet-shaped cavern with a mouth 150 feet wide at the seaward end.

  He played for time, and Minnaar unwittingly helped him. 'Sailing directions for Spencer Bay — why, the only thing they seem to write about is the Glory Hole: "The waves beat against the island and into the cavern at times with indescribable fury…"'

  Indescribable fury! The Namib sidewinder, a relation of the reptile on Selborne's flag, leaves only its eyes and fangs above the sand when it goes in for the kill: and there was something equally frightening about the way Shelborne swung his high, domed head from Minnaar to me.

  'For once the words come up to the reality of Mercury,' he said. The rough-hewn face might have been carved from his own grim cliff. The muddy skin was taut over the bold bones beneath, a jutting jaw to frame the wide mouth, now clamped shut, the large eyes and arrogant nose.

  He went on: 'To enter the Glory Hole you need two things; a calm day and a dead low tide. I have never known the two coincide. In one year here there are perhaps two or three calm days. Then you find the tide is wrong. No, I have never been in.'

  There must be an entrance from the island itself,' I pressed him, 'some gap in the rocks…'

  'There is none, none whatsoever.'

  'When the going is tough, that is the way I like it in my line,' I said. 'I want to take a look inside the Glory Hole and I mean to. I wish I had one of those fancy American deep-sea cameras.'

  'But you haven't got one?' The voice was relieved, though curious.

  'Hell, no,' I said. They cost the earth. The Praying Mantis is a shoe-string job — essentials, but little else.'

  Minnaar said, 'We could send in a couple of electronic flotation drums and track them with the Hydrodist. We might manage an outline of the interior…'

  That wouldn't tell us much,' I said. 'It's not the shape I want, but what is inside the shape. It can't be so deep — the island itself is not more than a quarter of a mile wide. What surprises me is that the cavern does not extend right through to the other side. I'd expect that, the way the waves must eat away the rock — always coming from the same direction.'

  The tide and the waves… I don't see how you can ever find out much,' said Shelborne.

  I let myself be carried away by the problem. 'There's a gadget called a Kullenberg corer. It collects a long shaft of sediments from the ocean
floor a couple of inches across and up to seventy feet long. I naturally can't afford a thing like that, but I built a modified one myself, which is pretty useful. If there is diamond gravel, I reckon I have a good chance of locating it.'

  'If you want caverns, I can take you up the coast to half a dozen bigger and better than Mercury's Glory Hole,' Shelborne said quietly. 'My cutter is tied up in one of them, you remember, I told you. They are accessible, too.'

  'In my survey area?'

  'At least two of them are.'

  'Have you prospected the sea-bed round Mercury?'

  He parried this, very coolly:

  'Of course — I told the court so. Grabs and dredges,' he said deprecatingly.

  And you — found?'

  'My dear fellow,' he replied with a shrug. 'What do you expect with that sort of equipment?'

  I said, 'You know, I suppose, that the guano islands were once prospected by a government team?'

  'Yes. They found diamonds on Possession Island — 223 carats, to be exact, worth Ј500. The team also went to Penguin Island, Ichaboe and, you'll be interested to hear, Mercury. Not a diamond anywhere except on Possession.'

  Minnaar, feeling the effects of the stiff brandies in his coffee, interjected, 'But one of the islands yielded diamonds. That means it's worth trying the others…'

  Shelborne ignored him. 'The entire prospecting project cost Ј825 and the value of the diamonds they found was Ј500. That speaks for itself. The true wealth of the islands is their guano, the sea-birds, the seals and penguins. They are my first concern…' He glanced at his watch and the defensive note went from his voice. 'Come, we've got to get up to the summit. ETA is 4.30.'