There was some cloud around at dusk, but it soon cleared and after that it was cooler for a light breeze came in from the west, darkening the sea. Between nine-thirty and ten Peter took a whole series of star sights. I handled the stop watch for him and jotted down the sextant readings as he called them to me. Afterwards he locked himself in his cabin to work them out and about eleven o’clock came back on to the bridge with Reece and course was altered to 012°.
That last course—the one that took us to within a few miles of the island—I do remember. It has stayed in my mind all these months. But the star sights, no. That would have meant remembering the stars he had selected, the sextant elevation for each shot and the stop-watch time at which it was taken. If I could have remembered all that, accurately, then things might have been different. I tried to when they asked me; that was when they were still desperately searching, before they gave up. But the names of stars and a string of figures and times—it isn’t humanly possible to remember all that. I wasn’t a navigator. I’d never piloted a ship in my life. As a TAS officer I hadn’t been trained to absorb that sort of thing automatically.
A lookout was posted and speed reduced to six knots. “How long on this course?” Reece asked.
“Until three o’clock, say, when you should be about ten miles south of the island.” And Peter added, “I think we should stop engines then and wait for daylight to make the final run in.” He asked to be called at three.
Later he came to my cabin. By then he had been the rounds of the shore party, giving them a final briefing on their duties. There were sixteen of them, including the two Europeans and six Pakistani mechanics who had been engaged to drive and service the heavy equipment. The rest were labourers. “You’ll come in with me in the first boat.” He wanted me to act as a sort of beach master and for half an hour we went all over the stores and equipment. Everything that had to be got ashore was allocated a priority. We listed it all and when we had finished it was past midnight. “You’d better get some sleep,” I said. Besides navigating, he had been working with three of the Pakistanis on the tumble-bug as well as helping our two European mechanics, Ford and Haines, to get the electric generator ready for use. And all the time he had kept an eye on the rest of the shore party, looking after their welfare and seeing that they were occupied so that inactivity didn’t make them a prey to fear. He was quite extraordinarily good with men of a different race, but it had taken a lot out of him and now there were dark shadows round his eyes.
“You’ll knock yourself up if you’re not careful.”
He nodded. But he made no move to go. Instead he stayed talking until almost one o’clock. He wanted company, for the fear that the island might not be there any more was nagging at his mind. “All that pumice around—something’s been going on, some sort of submarine activity. Suppose it’s disappeared? I’d look bloody stupid, wouldn’t I? And the Adduans—Gods knows, they may have sailed by now. I got a message through to Don Mansoor.”
Dimly in the dark hours I was conscious of an unnatural stillness as the engines were stopped and we lay drifting. The ship slept then, quiet as the grave. But at first light it stirred, the padding of feet, the banging of doors, and as dawn broke it came to life with the beat of the engines throbbing at the deck. I dressed and went to the wheel-house; a grey, milky light, the sun not yet risen, and the sea ruffled by a slight breeze. Reece was there, and Peter, all the watch-keeping officers—quite a crowd. And nothing visible, nothing at all. The steward brought coffee and we drank it, peering at that pale horizon, not speaking, each of us in that cold, half-empty state that is midway between the loneliness of sleep and the community of the day’s beginning.
And then suddenly a voice from the port bridge wing—one of the lascar crew. “Starboard bow, Captain Reece, sahib.” The dark face was suddenly animated as he pointed. “Fine on starboard bow.” We all saw it then, a faint smudge as though the line of the horizon had been scored by the point of a black chinagraph pencil. “Starboard a little.” Reece gave the order quietly and steadied the ship as the bows swung to that distant smudge, dipping slightly to the movement of the sea. He stepped back and glanced at the echo-sounder. “When do you reckon we’ll start picking up soundings?”
“About two miles off,” Peter answered. “You should be recording 300 fathoms. After that it gradually shallows. A bit irregularly at times, but you should be able to anchor two cables off in ten fathoms.”
Reece didn’t say anything. He was leaning against the door of the starboard bridge wing and he had the ship’s binoculars pressed to his eyes. “Land all right, and black—nothing growing at all.” He handed Peter the glasses. “Bleak enough—like the back of a whale at this distance.”
Peter took a quick look at it through the glasses. “Yes, that’s it all right.” He said it flatly so that everyone in the wheelhouse should feel that this was a routine sighting, something about which there had never been the slightest doubt in his mind. But though his voice didn’t betray him, his eyes and the quick spring of his movements did, his relief and his sense of satisfaction obvious to all as he crossed to the compass and took a bearing. A few quick pencil jottings on a piece of paper and then he requested an alteration of course to port. “There’s a shallow bay on the western side giving some shelter and reasonable holding. I’d like us to run in with the island bearing 034°. On that course it’s all clear, no obstructions.”
Reece nodded and gave the order. The ship’s head swung and settled to the new course with the dark smudge of the island now broad on the starboard bow. The sun’s rim lipped the horizon, a shaft of bright light turning the sea to molten gold as the burnished disc rose, gathering strength, flooding our world with heat. And as though the sunrise had loosened their tongues everyone was suddenly talking, a flood of speculation, a barrage of questions flung at Peter’s head, and in a moment he had taken the floor like an actor, all his sense of the dramatic pouring out of him as he described to us how they had come upon the island that first time in the Strode Venturer—at night, feeling their way in on the echo-sounder and seeing it suddenly in the moonlight. “It really did look like a whale then, like the blue-black back of a monstrous cetacean.”
The call to breakfast came, but nobody moved. We stood there watching as gradually the bearing changed until at last it was 034° and we altered course and headed straight for the island. It was nearer now and every minute getting perceptibly larger. The night breeze had died, killed by the heat, and the sea was flat again so that the island seemed to be floating in the sky.
About two and a half miles off we found bottom in 328 fathoms and thereafter the soundings decreased fairly steadily. The bridge was silent now. Everyone except the helmsman had one eye on the echo-sounder as though mesmerized by the click-clicking of the trace arm, and gradually the recordings fell until we were in less than 100 fathoms.
“Stop engines.” The telegraph rang to Reece’s command and the engines died under our feet, the ship continuing under her own momentum, silent except for the soft hiss of the water she displaced.
The island was then about a mile away, not floating in the sky any more, but like a black reef exposed by the tide. It had the naked ugliness of slag straight from the furnace, nothing growing and not a vestige of colour, only the texture varied, so that there were shades of black—the light grey of the dust drifts merging to darkest jet where drifts of exposed ore were like clinker and shadowed from the sun. The bottom was uneven now and the flat surface of the sea pocked with little whorls caused by the current.
“Engines half astern.”
Almost everyone except the engine-room staff was on deck now and the anchor watch was closed up with Blake standing in the bows waiting for the word to let go. “And during the cruise we stop at the world’s most beautiful, most exclusive beach….” Nobody laughed. Nobody even smiled at Lennie’s attempt to relieve the tension. The lonely deadness of the place held us awed and a little dismayed.
“You’ll need to
get closer than this.”
Reece hesitated, glancing at the echo-sounder. It was now recording depths of less than fifty fathoms. “No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going any nearer.”
To my surprise Peter accepted this. He was standing very still, his head thrust forward, peering through one of the open windows of the wheelhouse at the long black shore of the island. His face was pale under the tan, his eyes almost luminous with fatigue. Again I was conscious of a trance-like quality, a mood of tension, his body taut. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he snapped and reached for the glasses.
The way was off the ship now and Reece came back into the wheelhouse and ordered the engines stopped. “I thought you said there were depths of ten fathoms within two cables of the shore.”
Peter didn’t answer. He didn’t turn or shift his position. His whole attention was concentrated on the island. But even without glasses we could all see that there were shallows extending at least a quarter of a mile from the shore. It showed in the colour of the sea, for the water was very clear, and here and there a shoal awash pushed its black gritty back above the surface.
Reece stood for a moment undecided. Then he picked up the bow telephone and gave the order to let go the anchor. It fell with a splash into the still water and the cable rattled out, a plume of red dust rising from the rusty hawse-hole. Lennie reached for the telegraph and at a nod from Reece rang down “finished with engines”. We had arrived.
But nobody looked happy about it, not even Peter. He was still standing there at the open window, the binoculars pressed to his eyes. The intensity with which he was examining the island increased my feeling of uneasiness, for this wasn’t an island three miles by two; it stretched a good six miles north and south and the sea at either end was bright green, indicating extensive shallows.
“You’re sure this is the same island?” Reece’s question expressed the doubt in all our minds. If one island had emerged from the depths, there could be others.
“Quite sure.”
“But it’s changed.”
“Yes, it’s changed.” Peter put the glasses down and swung away from the window, facing Reece, his voice harsh: “What the hell did you expect after yesterday? It’s larger, that’s all. There’s more of it. You should be pleased,” he almost snarled. “You’ll get a bigger ship, bigger cargoes.” They faced each other across the wheelhouse, the atmosphere electric, the rift between them wide open. “If you don’t like it—if you’re scared …” But he stopped himself in time and suddenly he was smiling, all the tension wiped from his face. It was a conscious, controlled relaxation of every muscle of his body. “Let’s go and have breakfast. We’re at anchor and there’s nothing to worry about.”
It was sausages and bacon and fried onions, not the most suitable meal for a blistering morning on the equator, but I remember I had two helpings and so did most of the others. We were all damned hungry. I must have had four or five cups of coffee, all of us sitting there smoking, as though by lingering in the familiar surroundings of the saloon we could obliterate the island from our minds. I think perhaps we succeeded for those few minutes, but as soon as we went on deck there it lay, black and sinister-looking against the sun’s glare, separated from us by no more than a mile of flat calm shoaling water.
Work had already started. The cargo booms were being rigged, the barge alongside and the lashings being cleared from the deck cargo. The little runabout we had stowed on the after end of the boat deck was manhandled to davits and lowered into the water. The winches clattered, the first of the landing craft was lifted clear of No. 4 hatch and swung over the side. The ship seethed with activity and a message was wirelessed to Gan for onward transmission to Strode House to say we were anchored off the island and were proceeding to offload stores and equipment for the establishment of the shore base. Whimbrill, at any rate, would be glad to know, and so would Ida. No reference was made in the message to the fact that the island had increased in size or that we had seen evidence of submarine volcanic disturbance.
By eleven o’clock Peter and I were in the runabout and headed for the shore. We took Ford with us and also Amjad Ali, the Pakistani foreman. Reece stayed on board. He wasn’t interested in the island. All that concerned him was the safety of the ship. He had made that perfectly clear to us and he wanted to get away from the place just as soon as he could. A light breeze blew spray in our faces and the wavelets glittered in the burning sun, blinding us with reflected light. But as we approached the first shoal we came under the lee of the island. The water was smooth then and we could see the bottom dark with weed growth.
Ahead of us were patches of emerald-coloured water and after skirting the dark back of the second shoal, the bottom changed to sand of a coarse grey texture. The water here was so clear and still that our shadow followed us, gliding across the flat sands four fathoms deep. We were in a small bay then, its shores a dark sweep of sediment, grey slopes streaked with black and metallic glints of cuprous green. Smooth rock outcropped on the southern shore and at the extremities of the bay’s two arms, which were about half a mile apart, the breaking swell had sucked away the overlying sediment, leaving the nodules exposed in black shingle banks of naked ore. “It was about here we anchored in the Strode Venturer,” Peter said.
His statement came as a shock for I knew the Strode Venturer had anchored in ten fathoms. In the short space of two months the earth’s crust had been lifted almost forty feet.
We landed on the north side of the bay, where beaches of coarse-grained sand ran up like ramps to merge with the caked debris of sun-dried slime and weed. All this shore was ideal for beaching landing craft. But for the barge, which would be ferrying the heavy equipment in on its hatch covers, we needed some sort of a natural quay so that it could be brought alongside. Then when the tide fell and it took the ground the big stuff could be driven straight ashore. We needed a camp site, too, and all this had to be considered in relation to what looked like being the most promising area for open cast working of the ore deposits.
Back of the beach there was a shallow ridge. It was easy walking, the sediment baked hard by the sun, the weed all dead. There were no birds, no sign of any living thing. But shells crunched under our feet and the smell of the dried weed was very strong. The ridge was about thirty feet high and from the top of it we had the beginnings of a view across the island. It was fairly narrow, shaped like the inverted shell of a mussel, the high point towards the south, and it was dark and bare—a lunar landscape. But not hostile; only the neutrality of a dead place.
It was a relief then to turn and face the sea. The Strode Trader looked very small at that distance and only the runabout lying beached below to link this barren island with the cosy familiarity of my cabin on board. I tried to analyse my feelings about the place as I followed Peter along the top of the ridge. I’d seen the bed of the sea before, for I had done a lot of underwater fishing. But it had been alive then, a wet, live world where fish swam and sea grasses grew and there were shells that moved with the purposiveness of living creatures. Here nothing moved. All was dead. No life, no growing thing, nothing—only the skeletal shells of things that had died in the sun and the smell of their death and decay still hanging in the air.
A sudden almost vertical drop and we were on sand, the grain smaller, but sand that was caked and salt-crusted, filmed in places with a filthy livid green as though the whole pan of it was diseased. And then up again, climbing a little higher now, above the tide mark of the last upheaval, clear of the decayed weed growth. We were on the old island then, the place where Peter had landed two months earlier, and here the receding ocean had left the sediment in great banks with exposed ore lying between them in drifts of black cobbles. Wind and rain had carved the sedimental dunes into fantastic shapes and the sun had baked them hard so that they looked like crumbling castles of grey sandstone. Black and grey, this moon-mad landscape lay tumbled about us. All the weed that had once covered it was burned to
dust. It was naked now and hot to the touch in the shadeless sun. Here and there streaks of chemical greens and yellows showed the trace of copper and sulphur and in small pockets there were pans of sea salt shining white. From this height we had a view over many hundreds of acres of newly-emerged land, a desert island shimmering in the heat.
“I’ll show you something,” Peter said, and for ten minutes we scrambled inland towards the centre of the island. Suddenly a leaf stirred, the soft live green of chlorophyll bright in the sun. We clawed our way up a fine drift of dark grit and at the top we were looking down into a hollow about fifty yards across. Three palm seedlings grew there, close together and about five feet high. Three coconut palms. And under them a matted growth of lesser vegetation, the soil there dark with moisture. “A natural rain trap——” Peter stopped and picked up a handful of the wind-blown sediment on which we stood. “It’s like the desert, this stuff,” he said, sifting it through his fingers. “In the high dunes of the Empty Quarter—you’d think nothing could live—and then you come on a Bedou encampment and the sudden green of vegetation.” He trailed the last of the grit through his fingers, watching it fall. “It’s incredible what water can do. The most barren place on earth transformed almost overnight by a single rain storm.” He lifted his head, his eyes on the coconut palms. “And here, on the equator with the sea all round, there is more rain, much more rain—eighty, perhaps ninety inches a year. When I was here last I saw about half a dozen pockets of vegetation like this, but as the surface weathers and the roots of trees get a grip on it, the pockets will spread. A few years and much of the island will be covered by a lush tropical growth.” He was looking around him now, seeing it as it would be then. “With the right seeds introduced at this early stage, it will be like Addu Atoll, it will be capable of supporting human life.”
The Strode Venturer Page 17