Abdullah? Abdullah had given up? For a moment Georges and I, too, stood paralyzed, our eyes turning from the rift of sea, which opened and shut rhythmically at our feet, to the lashed top of the straddled mast. With a foot on each side it was really the mast that had been holding the two halves of the boat together so that the ropes remaining fore and aft had not worn away long before. Norman was suddenly standing beside us, glaring like a tiger about to spring:
"Let's not give up, boys," he said through clenched teeth.
Next moment we were all on the go. Carlo and Santiago pulled out coils of rope and measured and chopped up lengths of our thickest cordage. Georges plunged into the waves and swarm cross-
wise under the Ra with a thick end of rope. Norman and I crawled all over the boat examining the chafed lashings to find out how long it would be before we fell apart. Papyrus stems were floating in our wake, singly and in sheaves. Abdullah stood with the sledge hammer, driving in Ra's huge sewing needle, a thin iron spike v^th an eye at the bottom, large enough to take a rope one quarter of an inch thick. With this needle we were going to try to sew the "paper boat" together. Yuri stood the grueling turn at the rudder-oar alone, hour after hour. First Georges swam under the boat four times crosswise with our thickest rope, which we cinched up on deck like four big barrel hoops, in the hope of holding the bundles together so that the straddled mast would not burst open at the top. Then he ducked under the papyrus bundles in the spot where Abdullah's big "sewing needle" had been pushed through. In the depths Georges had to pull the thin rope out of the needle's eye and rethread it a moment later when Abdullah pushed the needle down again empty in another place. In this way we got the fatal gap "sevm" up again to some extent. But we had lost a lot of papyrus and were consequently lying harder over to windward than ever. The straddled mast was askew, but Ra was still sailing so fast that Georges had to be held on a rope. We were delighted to be able to haul him on board for the last time without his having been spiked through the head by the sharp point of the giant needle.
Carlo apologized for the meal: waves were constantly washing into the galley box and putting out the fire. A big wicker crate from the Ra, contents unknown, was observed at sundovm bobbing up and down on the waves behind us. Before nightfall we inspected the resewn papyrus roll, which represented the whole breadth of the Ra starboard of the cabin. It was wriggling ominously in the thin ropes we had used to sew it on, and was so depleted and waterlogged that we had to wade waist-deep to pass the cabin on that side. Then it was night again. The last thing I saw was the whites of Abdullah's eyes in the corner just inside the door opening, moving up and down above the mattress as he prayed, all amid the grinding and the whining and the gushing of water. Norman received a radio message that the boat Yvonne was trying to charter might be meeting us in four or five days.
On July 10 we awoke heavy-eyed at sunrise. The cases on which
we slept—two under each of us—had been heaving and rolling wildly all night, quite independently of Ra's motion. Norman could not keep his balance on his recalcitrant cases, so he had been lying across the legs of the rest of us. Our first thought was to tighten the four ropes we had secured round the whole boat yesterday. Yet another rope was swum round the place where the mast stood to prevent its legs from doing the splits. All day we went on sewing ourselves together vidth the long needle that was pushed up and down through the papyrus, from deck to bottom.
That day Norman heard that two American photographers were expected on the island of Martinique and that a little motor yacht called Shenandoah was on her way there to pick them up. But Italian television had announced that we were disabled and had taken to the rubber boat. We thought with sardonic humor of the day when we had carved it up. No one missed it. No one would have boarded it if we had had it. We had more than enough papyrus left to float on. While the worst seas were breaking over us, and a yell from Carlo announced that his best saucepans had been carried overboard, Georges suddenly appeared with a dripping red object that he had fished up out of knee-deep water.
"Do we need this, or can I heave it overboard?"
It was a little fire extinguisher from the days when smoking on the starboard side was forbidden. Volleys of laughter followed the apparatus out to sea. Even Safi hung from a mast stay and stared as the fire spray vanished into the depths, baring her teeth and making throaty noises to show that she, too, appreciated the joke.
On July 11 the sea began to compose itself in gentler folds, but even peaceful waves washed a long way in from astern and over the starboard beam. As I stood my evening watch several constellations, and also the Pole Star, appeared for the first time in many nights, and with my nosometer I quickly fixed our position at i5''N.
In the middle of the night some big seas poured in over the submerged starboard beam and drove right through the wickerwork of the cabin wall, so hard that the one case on which Norman had been sleeping up to now, was splintered to matchwood. The case had long been empty, and only broken bits of wood floated about in the seething water inside the cabin. Ra had begun to make some particularly disagreeable noises on the side where the papyrus roll was repaired,
and that night no one heard Safi's cries for help when her perforated sleeping suitcase was knocked off the wall by the next wave. She sailed about, imprisoned, among the splintered fragments of Norman's case until, incredibly, she managed to open the lid and release herself. Santiago was awakened by her sitting, dripping wet, by his cheek, screeching to be admitted into his warm sleeping bag.
On July 12 birds flew out from the coast again to visit us. Over the radio we heard that the yacht that was to meet us would be delayed, as two of the crew had jumped ship when they got to Martinique. The surprise of the day was a literal wreck of a ship that appeared on the horizon to the south and came yawing toward us. At first we thought it was some adventurers in a home-made boat, but then we saw that it was an old, patched up fishing vessel covered with Chinese characters. Dried fish hung everywhere and the crew stood at the railing silently gazing as the Noi Young You staggered past us, some two hundred yards away. There we stood, on our two boats, gazing at each other in commiseration and dismay, and taking photographs on both sides. The Chinese waved nonchalantly, with kindly condescension. No doubt they thought Ra was a native jangdda or primitive balsa raft, out fishing from the Brazilian coast, and they were visibly shaken to see that such a dilapidated heap could still be in use today. The wash from the fishing boat rippled over Ra's afterdeck as it lurched away and then we were left alone with the sea. It began to rain again. The wind rose, and the seas with it. Soon it was pouring down everywhere.
As night began to advance over a pallid, wet, overcast sky, we saw real storm clouds rolling up like a herd of angry black cattle over the horizon to the east and stampeding thunderously after us. We made ready to weather the full gale which came tearing along, flashing lightning, in fiercer and fiercer squalls. There were limits to what the sail could take, but we left it up. We had only a few days left, and we had to hurry. Ra shuddered in the squalls. The seas rose. The Egyptian sail was drawing as never before and once again we seemed to be riding on a wild beast's back. The scene had a savage, barbaric beauty. Black seas grew whiter, boiling, streaked with foam; more showers came from the sea than from the clouds. The wave crests were flattened by the wind and Ra traveled so fast that the torrents of water overtaking us from astern had less force than usual.
But those that did break over us did it so thoroughly that it was impossible to get more than a few seconds' nap between the shocks.
Dangers lurked everywhere unless we were properly secured to cabin wall or papyrus bundles. Heavy masses of water fell with a crash on the basket roof, which was subsiding, saddle-backed, farther and farther toward our noses. Santiago was washed overboard with the rope in his hands, but grabbed a corner of the sail. Now and then Ra heeled so violently that everyone gripped the stays and hung outboard as a counterweight. One of the galley boxes was splintered a
nd Carlo waded around to save the other, which was floating between the masts. The antenna blew off, so the radio was dead. The duck was washed overboard on its line time after time and in the worst of the chaos it broke a leg, which Yuri had to set. Safi was in great form inside the cabin. In the huge wave troughs the biggest schools of flying fish I had ever seen showered to and fro. Just before the watch changed I heard Abdullah trying to sing on the bridge in the darkness. A giant wave fell on the cabin roof from behind, silencing Abdullah; then it was my turn. Abdullah stood roped up, high on the bridge, his hair glistening with sea water in the lamplight.
"How's the weather, Abdullah?" I asked, jokingly.
"Not bad," said Abdullah, undismayed.
The storm raged with varying strength for three long days. It was becoming more and more perilous to have the sail set, but we managed it for the first two days, while Ra raced over the stormy seas. The starboard mast danced alone through the semi-detached oscillations of the loosely resevra roll, which had lost so much papyrus that what was left was pinned under the surface. Consequently the straddled mast was leaning steadily farther into the wind, and this helped us to take the squalls better, even though the block in which the starboard mast foot was set was sinking deeper and deeper into the poorly secured bunch of papyrus. Georges and Abdullah sewed as hard as they could under this mast foot, which seemed to be making its way right through the bottom. The masts bounced up and down in the wooden shoes and only their own weight and all the stays pulled them back into their sockets after each leap. Because of the many ropes that had been worn away and worked loose on the starboard side, the papyrus reeds there were able to absorb unlimited water, and in addition the whole bundle became so limp and flabby that we never
knew how much we could or should tighten the mast stays. When the bipod mast whipped backward, all the parallel rows of stays on either side of the cabin curved like a jump rope, while the next moment they were jerked taut as bowstrings by a wrench of the mast so violent that only the giant hawser tied right round the boat as a bulwark in the ancient Egyptian style prevented the papyrus reeds from being ripped asunder. The single reeds were as tough and strong as after one day in water, and they floated when we lost them. But with every opportunity to absorb water freely, and with the leaning bipod mast throwing all its weight onto the damaged side, the loosely sewn remnants of the starboard bundles became more and more deeply submerged and the flexible wickerwork floor of the basketwork cabin bent elastically with them, without breaking.
We tried to fill up the empty space left by Norman's broken case, but before we had finished a new wave broke in through the wicker crevices and smashed his second case. One case after another was shattered to matchwood under us in the cabin. As each case went, it became more difficult to control those that were left, for now they had room to sail around two by two like small boats in an overcrowded harbor, each pair, with a heaving straw mattress on top. Socks and underclothes disappeared in the undertow inside and popped up in quite different places. Norman and Carlo moved out and lay on provision baskets under the fringe of roof, forward of the cabin. Yuri's two cases were smashed under him before he had emptied them of his medicines, which resulted in an inferno of broken glass bottles, squashed tubes, cartons, pills, ointment and test tubes, all of which emitted an incredible odor. It became dangerous to fall off cases, and we packed mattresses, sleeping bags and anything we could spare into the empty spaces as padding against the waves bursting through the wall, so that we could lie safely on the cases that were left. Yuri moved out. In the middle the roof was sinking lower and lower over our noses and the jiggling kerosene lantern had to be moved up to a higher corner. Jokes and roars of laughter from the three who had chosen to move out to the other side of the thin wicker wall confirmed that spirits were still high, both inside and out.
Outside the gale raged, the lightning flashed, but we could hardly hear the crashes of thunder above the awful sucking sound of water
rushing in on the starboard side and gurghng round us until it disappeared in a backwash through the same starboard wickerwork wall again. The watch aft had a hard stint and we tried to change shifts as often as possible. The stilts under the starboard side of the bridge had sunk with the papyrus rolls, and the platform on which the helmsman stood had become as steep as the sloping roof of a house. We could no longer reach down to the tiller of the starboard rudder-oar. We had to cling to the port corner, where the bridge was highest, and had therefore worked out a system as ingenious as it was laborious. With one rope tied to a foot and another held in the hand, we swung to and fro on the starboard rudder-oar, but only when we could not hold the course with the port oar alone. For brief seconds at a time we made fast all the ropes we could in order not to become completely exhausted. All that mattered was keeping the sail filled, and one tack from each corner of the sail was also secured to the railing of the bridge so that the helmsman could turn the hard-pressed yard if the rudder-oars alone could not cope with the situation. The whole bridge was covered with rope, while the sunken stem behind us acted as a completely unpredictable giant oar, which made steering insanely complicated. If Ra were allowed to thrash helplessly about in the storm, there was an overwhelming danger that the mast would jerk out or force its way down through the papyrus, since our waterlogged raft simply would not capsize.
On July 14 we made radio contact with Shenandoah, now heading east from Barbados. They reported that the storm had reached them too, with waves breaking over the yacht's twenty-foot-high wheelhouse. Their radio ham had sent a signal that they were in danger and they had considered turning back, because the yacht was not built for major gales. Only the thought that we were lying still farther out under the same conditions made them sail on eastward into the storm. The captain gave the maximum speed he could allow as eight knots. That was three or four times as much as Ra could manage, but in the teeth of the storm the yacht would travel much more slowly; at best it might reach us in a day or two, if we were heading straight toward each other on opposite courses. A radio ham had picked up a message that a merchant ship was said to be about thirty miles from our position, in case we needed help. But all of us on board wanted to sail on westward alone.
At one o'clock in the morning Yuri yelled out in the darkness that the yard had broken with a terrific crash. Everybody out. But no one could see anything wrong; the sail was drawing as never before, on a straight yard. But just then steering suddenly became desperately difficult. As we relieved one another through the night we all agreed that steering watches had never been worse; Ra simply would not obey the oars. It was not until sunrise that we realized what had happened, when Carlo discovered that we had all been steering with a mere shaft and no blade. The thick, double-shafted rudder-oar had snapped off again as if struck by a giant sledge hammer, and in the darkness the great oar blade had disappeared forever in the waves. That was the crack Yuri had heard, and we had all been working ourselves to death with two round poles while Ra held her course alone with her submerged stern as the only rudder.
On July 15 the storm reached a climax. The sail could no longer stand the strain, and in squalls that flung us over so hard that an ordinary boat would have capsized, we lowered the sail, whose frenetic flapping sounded like thunderclaps. Lightning flashed, rain fell. With the sail gone the masts, with their gaping ladder bars, stood swaying alone naked in the lightning flashes like a skeleton. There was a ghastly sense of emptiness and apathy without the sail. The waves seemed to pluck up more courage to attack us as our speed slackened. The rest of the galley boxes disappeared into the sea. For a time broken eggs and powdered lime eddied round Carlo's legs, when one jar smashed. Still the foredeck and port side were covered with food in well-secured jars with tight lids. And the sausages and hams remained hanging from the roof and the steps of the mast. Worse than egg yolks was the sudden arrival of a number of Portuguese men-of-war, sailing round the deck with their long, stinging filaments entangled in everything. I stepped on a
bubble body but was not stung. Georges and Abdullah got their legs entwined in stinging threads while they were working waist-deep in water to sew on new ropes where the old had been worn away. Each was thoroughly washed at once with Yuri's improvised natural medicine. Abdullah denied that it hurt. But he also bore the round burn marks of cigarettes which he had stubbed out on his own arm to prove that a man from Chad is indifferent to pain.
Outside, the port side of the cabin was the only place where we
could be safe and more or less dry when the gale was at its height. Here, we could sit on a sort of bench formed by jars along the wall with the door opening. All the film and all the valuable equipment were stowed here too, so that there was scarcely any room left for us. The duck and the monkey now lived in their own baskets one above the other on top of all our private possessions. Inside the cabin, the waves bursting through the walls continued to wreak their havoc. Case after case was smashed. By evening, only Abdullah and I were left inside under the roof; all the others had moved out and were sleeping on the galley baskets, in the mast and on the cabin roof, which had become so sway-backed that it could scarcely support the weight of two or three men. There were only three whole cases left of the sixteen that had once made up our beds. Two belonged to Abdullah and one to me. Because our sleeping places were farthest over to port, our cases had lasted longest, but now our turn had come. The case under my legs had already been smashed and clothes and books mixed like pulp in the porridge floating round us. I balanced a case lid on edge with my heels to prop my feet up and clung to roof and wall so that the case under my back would not overturn when the water mess surged over to our side. It was grotesque. Abdullah knelt praying in the door opening. Then he slipped into his sleeping bag on top of his two intact cases and went to sleep. The gurgling sound about us was diabolical in the dark. My pillow skidded down into the maelstrom which revolved from wall to wall letting nothing escape. It was like being in the stomach of a whale, where the wicker wall was the whalebone filtering the food so that only the salt water escaped. I clutched at my floating pillow and fished up something soft. A hand. A rubber hand or some kind of bloated, water-filled glove from Yuri's surgical equipment. This was too grisly. I sat up and turned off the kerosene lantern, but then I bumped my head and a pool of rain water from the canvas on the roof poured down my neck; with that the lid of the case I was balancing under my feet slipped and vanished into the water. My one remaining case capsized. I crawled out to join the others. It was safer out in the rain. On the lee side, Abdullah was left sleeping alone in our once cozy home.
The Ra Expeditions Page 33