“Did he tell you when we’d get there?” It was the second officer’s watch and he was standing in the doorway behind me, the cigarette he’d just rolled hanging unlit from the corner of his mouth.
“Yes,” I said.
“In confidence like.” His leathery, sun-creased face cracked in a grin. “Well, that’s all right by me. Always did like surprises. But there’s others that don’t.”
Lennie Porter was a cockney. He could see the funny side of things even after six days of torrid heat. But as he said, there were others who couldn’t, particularly the first officer, Blake, an elderly, grey-haired man with a sour face and a sour disposition made sourer by his bitterness at being passed over for promotion again.
“It won’t be long now,” I said.
“I should hope not. All these changes of course—you’d think Mr. Strode was trying to teach the old girl the twist.” He winked at me and little creases of laughter crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Another flipping week of this an’ we’d be slitting each other’s throats to pass the time as you might say.” He turned his head. “Ah—re-freshment. What should we do without you, Gunga Din?” There was the welcome clink of ice and the steward appeared with a tray of lemonade.
I took mine to my cabin and lay on my bunk, stripped and wishing I were back in London, anywhere but in the Indian Ocean. It was the monotony of it I found exhausting. The first few days hadn’t been so bad. The conveyor belt and the bulldozer had kept me occupied. They had been lying unused for a long time and the Pakistani mechanics had to be drilled in their operation and maintenance. We had spent two sweltering, exhausting days stripping the conveyor belt right down with the help of the ship’s engineers. Now both machines were running, the engines of the two landing craft lashed on the after hatches had been checked and the small launch on the poop, which had had a hole knocked in its bottom, had been repaired. I had even had the ship stopped so that I could get aboard the barge we were towing. It had shipped a lot of water in a bit of a blow we had had four days back and we had rigged a small mobile pump and got it cleared so that she was now riding high with less strain on the towing hawser. Now there was nothing else for me to do until we got ashore and I lay on my bunk, listening to the beat of the engines and trying to read a dog-eared paperback I had borrowed. But even that seemed too much of an effort. There was no fan in the cabin and the air was stifling. The sounds of the ship drifted soporifically in to me, the open porthole breathing the hot spice smell of curry in my face. Even the flies we’d brought with us from Bombay moved sluggishly. I dozed, thinking about the island, wondering what it would be like working close inshore to a slice of the sea bed only recently emerged.
That evening there was no sunset flaming in the west. The light just faded damply from the sodden air. One minute we were in a pale milky void, the next it was dark and all the steelwork suddenly wet to the touch. Yet the temperature seemed hardly to have dropped. The night was very oppressive.
Reece didn’t appear at the evening meal. He had his curry served in the wheelhouse and all that evening he paced nervously up and down between the empty chart table and the port bridge wing, peering into the pitch black darkness as though he expected at any moment the island to rear up in front of the ship’s bows. Once he sent for Peter. “Was it like this before?” he asked him. “When you came here with the Venturer?”
Peter went out on to the wing of the bridge and stood there sniffing the atmosphere. “No,” he said. “It was hot and humid, but not like this. There’s a lot of electricity in the air to-night.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Reece said. “There’s no moon. We can’t see a thing. It’s like steaming through thick fog. What do you think, Mr. Blake?”
It was the first officer’s watch and he was standing by the chart table sucking at an empty pipe. His short grey hair seemed to stand out on his head like a wire brush. “I think there’s going to be a storm,” he said.
“Storms are very rare in this area.” There was a note of exasperation in Peter’s voice. “If you check the meteorological charts——”
“To hell with the Met charts. They don’t mean a damn’ thing out here.”
Reece nodded. “Blake’s right. They’re generalizations. They’re not specific to this area. They can’t be. Hardly anybody has ever been here.” The Welsh intonation was suddenly very marked. “I think we should heave-to till dawn.”
Peter stared at him. “Whatever for? You’ve empty sea for miles ahead of you.”
“How do you know? You’ve found one new island. There may be others.”
Peter shrugged. “If you’re worried, why don’t you put a lookout in the bows and keep the echo-sounder going through the night?” He crossed to the wall behind the helmsman and switched the instrument on, standing in front of it, watching as the trace arm clicked back and forth like a metronome. “Nothing,” he said. “Too deep. You’re in more than two thousand fathoms here and you’ll be in that depth all night and all to-morrow too.” He was looking straight at Reece. “You’d be recording bottom all right if the sea bed were coming up to meet you.” And with that he turned on his heel and left the wheelhouse.
Reece watched him go and then abruptly turned and stared ahead through the glass of the wheelhouse window. The foremast steaming light cast a faint glow as far as the bows, a ghostly radiance that was a refraction of light from millions of droplets of water as the ship thrust its blunt nose into the hot blanket of humidity that covered the sea. In that strange light the Strode Trader looked much bigger than her 6000 tons. She had been built during the Second World War to the old three-island design, but the changes of deck level were hidden by the equipment she was carrying and this enhanced the effect of size. Immediately below the bridge the tumble-bug was a bright splash of yellow in the dark. This was an American-type scraper truck with floor doors for dumping its load and it had been lashed athwartships across No. 2 hatch cover. For’ard of that the ungainly bulk of the conveyor belt sprawled over No. 1 hatch flanked by the bulldozer on one side and the big crawler tractor on the other. Right as far as the bows the whole fore part of the ship looked like a cross between a scrap yard and a war surplus stores.
“Very well, Mr. Blake. A lookout in the bows and keep your eye on the echo-sounder. I’ll take over from you at the change of watch.” He walked past me then, his eyes avoiding mine. He didn’t like it, but with the older man there he hadn’t quite the self-confidence to order the engines stopped and the ship hove-to.
I stayed with Blake for a time, not because I enjoyed his company, but it was cooler on the bridge than in my cabin. It was shortly after eleven when I turned in. I couldn’t sleep for a while. The air in the cabin was stifling and there was a queer singing in my ears. My head ached, too. I put it down to the atmosphere, which seemed to press down on me. The sweat on my naked body tingled. I must have dropped off into a deep sleep, for I woke suddenly with a start to the certainty that something was wrong. I couldn’t place it at first, but then I became conscious of the silence and realized the engines were stopped.
I jumped out of bed, pulled on my shorts and padded down the alleyway and up the ladder to the wheelhouse. Peter was just ahead of me. “What is it?” I heard him ask anxiously. “What’s happened?” And then Reece’s voice: “Breakers ahead. The lookout spotted them.”
“Breakers? How can there be breakers?”
The ship was steady as a rock, the sea flat calm.
They were out on the starboard bridge wing, their figures two black silhouettes against the peculiar luminosity. “There, man. There. Do you see them? Straight over the bows.” Reece’s voice was pitched high on a note of tension as he turned and called to the helmsman, “Slow astern.” The engine-room telegraph rang and the bridge wing juddered as the shaft turned and the screw threshed the water. There was no other sound; no sound of breakers, and yet there they were, straight over the bows, a long line of white water that made my eyeballs blink with the strain of watching the waves
bursting against—what? Against coral reefs? Against some laval heap that had suddenly reared itself up?
“Full astern. Starboard helm. Hard over, man.” The ring of the telegraph, the wheel turning, and then the bows began to swing. “Christ!” It was Lennie Porter breathing down my neck. “She’s being sucked in.” The ship was broadside now to the white-fanged line of the breakers and they were much nearer, a leaping, plunging cataract of surf.
It was Blake who said quietly—“The white water.”
“What’s that? What did you say?” Reece was shouting, though there wasn’t another sound in the wheelhouse.
“Christ!” Lennie said again and there was a pain in my head and behind my eyeballs as the white line of the breakers engulfed us.
They caught us broadside, great waves of broken water, great combers bursting on all sides, their tops high as the mast and all shot with blinding streaks of light. And not a sound. No hiss of surf, no growl of combers spilling, no crash of breakers thundering aboard, and the ship steady as a rock.
“He is saying”—Peter’s voice was startlingly clear considering that the sea all round us appeared to be violently agitated and boiling like a cauldron—“that this is the white water.”
“What are you saying? What is it, man?” Reece’s face looked ghastly white in the frightful luminosity. Everybody in the wheelhouse had a deathly pallor and his voice, sunk to a whisper, was still clearly audible, for the only sound was the hum of the engines and the click-click-click of the echo-sounder.
“An optical illusion,” Peter said. “I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard about it.”
“I saw it once,” Blake said. “Off the Konkan coast. Let me see—it was wartime—’44 I think. We ploughed straight into a line of breakers. The Old Man knew what he was about. He knew there weren’t any reefs ahead of him, and as we ploughed into it there was a sort of white mist across the bows and then it was gone and all we saw after that was streaks of light and a lot of phosphorescence.” He asked permission then to turn back on to course and Reece gave it to him in a strained voice. “You’ll find it in the Pilot,” Blake said as he gave the necessary orders. “There’s quite a bit about it in the West Coast of India volume under ‘Luminosity of the Sea,’ including an eye-witness report by the master of a merchant ship.”
We were back on course and coming up to our usual eight knots and still the night was stabbed with lines of light and the sea boiled, the waves all moving with the light so that the effect was hypnotic and painful to the eyes. And then suddenly it was gone, the night clear, no humidity and the stars bright overhead.
Nobody said anything. We just stood there, too dazed, too mesmerized by what we had seen to speak. Lennie Porter was the first to find his voice. “What was it? What the hell was it?”
But nobody could explain it. We looked it up in the Pilot. The master of the Ariosto had seen very much what we had seen, but off the coast of Kutch in India more than fifty years ago. In his case the phenomenon had lasted twenty minutes with the appearance of very high seas. He had described them as so agitated that they appeared “like a boiling pot, giving one a most curious feeling—the ship being perfectly still, and expecting her to lurch and roll every instant.” And his report added, “It turned me dizzy watching the moving flashes of light, so that I had to close my eyes from time to time.” On leaving it the line of light had presented the same appearance as on entering, as of breakers on a low beach, and after steaming through a bright, clear cloudless night for a further twenty minutes, the whole thing had been repeated, but if anything slightly worse. The Pilot recorded two other instances, both reported by naval vessels—in 1928 and 1933. But it offered no explanation, merely observing that the phenomenon could occur in the open sea as well as near land and either in calm or stormy water and that it might be caused by “the presence of confervæ or other organic matter in the water.”
Peter had heard about the “white water” from Don Mansoor during his voyage from Mukalla to Addu Atoll. “He told me he had seen it twice and each time his crew had been very frightened, thinking it was Ran-a-Maari.” Ran-a-Maari, he explained, was apparently some sort of a jinn or devil, and he added, “The first man the Adduans recognize is Adam, the second Noah and the third Solomon, whom they call Suleiman. According to legend, Suleiman made a copper ball and confined Ran-a-Maari inside it, but it wasn’t big enough to encase the jinn’s legs.” He smiled, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. “Suleiman threw the copper ball with Ran-a-Maari inside it into the sea and it’s their belief that the white water is the threshing of the jinn’s legs as he struggles to release himself.”
A pleasant enough story to chuckle over beside a winter fire back in England. But out there in the Indian Ocean, in seas that were virtually uncharted, the superstitions of a primitive people seemed less absurd. Whatever the cause of the white water, our sighting of it had an unsettling effect on the ship’s company. At least half the crew had been up on deck and had seen it with their own eyes, and for those who had remained in their bunks or been on duty in the engine-room it was even more frightening since they had it second-hand from their companions and it was much exaggerated in the telling. And it wasn’t only the lascar crew that felt uneasy; the Europeans were affected, too, for it emphasized the uncertainty of the venture, the fact that we were steaming into a little-known area and only one man who knew where we were or where we were going or what to expect when we got there. Uncertainty of that sort can play the devil with a group of men cooped up in a ship and in the morning everybody was very quite, not sullen exactly, but shut in with their thoughts, and the feeling of tension mounted as the sun rose and the heat increased.
As on the previous day we were steaming through an opaque void, the sea flat calm, not even any swell, and the sun’s heat drawing moisture up from the surface of the water so that there was no horizon, nothing ahead of us but a blinding haze. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t think even and the solitude of my cabin was oppressive. I spent most of the morning on the bridge, not talking and my clothes sticking to my body. The second officer had the watch and even Lennie was silent. Reece came in several times, pacing up and down for a while and then returning to his cabin. The little pouches under his eyes were more marked and I could feel the nervous tension in him building up.
And then, just at the change of the watch, something happened to bring things to a head. The sea ahead was suddenly different. Strange patches appeared in the haze, as though the flat surface of it had been paved here and there with cobblestones. Lennie had just handed over to Reece. The course, changed again during the night, was now 145° and Reece had just said something about the chance of a breeze soon, the wireless operator having got a Met forecast from Gan. His body stiffened suddenly as he peered ahead, his eyes narrowed against the glare. I think we all saw it at about the same time.
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The beat of the engines, the hiss of water as the bows ploughed into the sea’s unending flatness, these were sounds that had been with us day and night for just on a week. Nothing had changed and yet suddenly the mood was different. We had sighted something. It came at us out of the haze, like huge plates at first, as though a painter’s brush had tried to break the monotony of calm water by stippling it, the way Seurat painted shingle beaches. The effect was of a sea suddenly become diseased, the skin of it blotched with the grey of some fungus growth.
The engines were slowed and soon we were steaming slowly into great patches of pumice, and ahead of us the patches were closing up so that the whole surface of the sea was a solid grey sheet of the stuff. How we knew it was pumice I don’t know. The look of it, I suppose, though none of us had seen the aftermath of a submarine eruption before. It was all sizes, from mere dust to what looked like rough pieces of rock the size of dinner plates. And it was many hued, from buff through orange and brick-red to grey and near-black, all light aerated stuff that floated like cork and danced bobbing in the bow wave.
The change i
n the engine beat had brought Peter to the wheelhouse and Reece faced him, demanding to know how far we were from the island, how much longer he was expected to drive his ship into an area that was demonstrably volcanic?
“We’ll discuss it in your cabin,” Peter said.
The lunch gong was sounding as they disappeared and all through the meal the ship was held on her course at reduced speed. There was a lot of talk as we ate about the origins of pumice and the effects of shock waves. Evans, the wireless operator, had been in a Japanese port when it was swept by the shock wave of a distant earthquake and Robbins, the chief engineer, had once steamed through a sea of dead fish. But none of us knew very much about submarine disturbances. “All I can say,” Lennie observed, “is that I hope to Christ we’re not anchored off this island when the whole flipping lot goes up.” As usual his words were the echo to our inner thoughts, for the pumice, coming so soon after our experience of the white water, had greatly increased the sense of uneasiness, and uneasiness in the face of the unknown can so easily lead to fear and even panic.
When I went up into the wheelhouse after lunch we were still steaming through a sea of pumice and the ship’s speed was back again to normal. By then it was so thick it looked like loose pack-ice. We ran out of it about an hour later, but I was resting on my bunk then, for I thought there wouldn’t be much sleep that night.
As the sun set and darkness closed in on us the nervous tension that had been building up in the ship all day seemed suddenly a physical thing, so strong you could almost smell it. During the afternoon several of the crew had been fishing with buckets and home-made nets and now there was hardly a soul on board who didn’t have a piece of pumice to prove that he’d sailed through the debris of some underwater upheaval. And somehow they all seemed aware that we were within a few hours’ steaming of our destination.
The Strode Venturer Page 16