'What the hell are you talking about?' I asked.
The black mood was gone and he seemed like a schoolboy starting a holiday.
'I want to know what sort of bottom there is in the bay…' I began to say, but he rose, smiling.
'You can have your sea-bed and its diamonds. Come on!'
We climbed the steel steps behind the huts. Shelborne moved at a great pace, Minnaar and I trailing. The defined path ended 150 feet above the hut. From there onwards to the summit it was simply a series of zigzags through sharp rocks.
Minnaar and I stopped at the same moment, hit by the realization that the whitened rocks and hollows, scuffed by countless thousands of beaks, wings and talons, were empty.
There was not a bird to be seen.
I tried to catch up with Shelborne to ask him, but he moved too fast. Slipping and puffing, I needed all my breath. The wind blew the sealskin collar so that it masked the lower half of his jaw. The words of the prophet rose of their own accord into my mind — a diamond harder than flint have I made thy forehead! And his was a forehead and head for an artist. Diamonds! All my analogies were of diamonds. What had Shelborne really found? How much did he know? Why his passivity when I would have expected hostility, or at least his non-cooperation? His facts and figures about the official prospecting team seemed very glib.
We switched into a long transverse gully which split the island half-way to the summit. The late winter afternoon light was fading, leaving the rocks an unlovely grey. The island sloped from left to right, the highest part being on my left, or south-west, facing the entrance channel, tapering away on the right to three small isolated rocks which were linked to the main island by plank bridges. Shelborne's pace was killing. We skirted an enormous rock, which looked like a crucified man, and on to the summit plateau. Minnaar and I were gasping when we joined Shelborne there.
'Where are the birds?' I had begun to ask, when Shelborne interrupted me. His words were strange after what I had been thinking scrambling up:
'Do you know what the ancient meaning of the word diamond was?' he asked. 'Untameable. You can't tame it by fire or blows. Mercury is like that, too. Look!'
Minnaar and I gulped lungfuls of the south-west wind. Far below, thousands of seals had cornered a rocky platform on the sea's edge. The rock was polished black by their bodies.
Shelborne glanced at his watch. 'Look!'
'Jesus! exclaimed Minnaar. The ship!'
I saw the massive line squall creaming in from the north-west. A cold sensation of fear gripped me. I knew what that white meant — a squall vicious enough to suck up the sea; and now it was racing in towards our anchorage. It seemed to stretch endlessly, angry, white, grey-white.
Shelborne was relaxed, exultant. 'They're coming!'
The ship!' I got out desperately. 'Shelborne…!'
He gestured to the onrushing squall. His voice had a curious intonation. 'Four-thirty! You thought — I saw it in both your faces — that I was lonely, alone for my twenty-odd years on Mercury. I have been, indeed I am, when — ' he waved at the oncoming mass — 'the birds are away.'
'Birds!' Minnaar said it in a quiet, wonder-filled way, as if there had been no hard-case years, no brandy-filled tramping the coast.
The whole sky was filled with a fluid whiteness of feathers, wings and flight.
The glory of the stupendous sight was upon Shelborne. 'For twenty years they have returned from their winter migration at exactly one bell in the first dog-watch,' he said. 'Here they are today. They've been away for four months now. Soon Mercury will be white with guano, but we won't start scraping until a thick enough layer forms. I'm sending my team of workers off tomorrow to Hollam's Bird Island. I'll be alone for the next two months.'
The great snow descended. Flake by flake the solid cloud disintegrated into fragments, individuals. They swooped unerringly, Shelborne told us, to last year's nest, each knowing his place. Gannets, duikers, cormorants, solan-geese — the whole air chuckled with their welcome-home shouts. They came unafraid to our feet, vocal, quarrelling. Birds! Birds! Birds! There was not the smallest bare patch to be seen anywhere: Mercury had become one great breeding-flat, and the rocks were white with millions of them.
'I thought it was the squall to end all squalls,' I remarked thoughtfully. The salt had started to blur the sheen of Shelborne's sealskin reefer jacket. The weather seemed to be working up.
'I'm glad the wind wasn't hard for my birds,' he replied. 'A gale could blow us clean away, standing up here. The water comes so high sometimes that we find fish, big ones, right here up among the rocks.'
Minnaar was restive. I, too, was anxious for the ship.
'Where is the best holding-ground in the bay?' I asked.
He was a long time in replying, but when he did, it was as if he had come to some conclusion, for his voice was decisive and his eyes alive to the scene about us.
'I think I'll assign you to the lee of Hottentot Reef.'
There were curious overtones in his voice. At the time I put it down to his preoccupation with the birds.
'Where the hell is that?' asked Minnaar. I, too, did not remember Hottentot Reef on the charts, but to trust them was as chancy as Russian roulette.
'It's about three cable-lengths to the nor'-nor'-east of where you are now. You should get some protection there, and you'll also benefit by the lee of Mercury.'
I laughed nervously. 'At the whisper of a rising sea, you can count on a high-tailing start from me.'
Shelborne said, 'It never does to write off the sea. Rhennin should remember that.'
Was it a statement of fact or was there a concealed threat in the calm, resonant voice?
I went right on, not caring about his reaction earlier about the Glory Hole. 'Where is the entrance to the Glory Hole?'
Relaxed, he pointed beyond the seal colony; he might have been a tourist courier at a beauty spot. To me it looked exactly like any other part of the rock-bound shore.
'I'd like to have a closer look,' I said.
'Not without ropes,' he warned. 'One slip and you'd be into the sea.'
'I'll use a boat then — soon, maybe.'
'Take my flatboom, rather — it's built for these seas.'
I was puzzled about Shelborne's sudden change of attitude. I knew how bitter he was about losing the concession and yet he was being helpful — helpful enough almost to have justified something of Rhennin's Ј10,000 — even to offering his own boat.
The encompassing arms of the bay were opaque behind a veil of spray. An ordinary wave smashes on to rocks with a force of 4000 lb. to the square foot; this sea was the Joe Louis of them all. From the deep ocean the waves — kicking, squirming, trying to break free of the wind's grip — were marched towards Mercury by the south-wester and pitched mercilessly at the rocks. The stricken water burst into a thousand fragments and was scattered as spray high up the slopes, almost up to where we were standing. A great single burst of shattered sea catapulted from the shore for fully a hundred feet upwind.
'Good God!' I exclaimed.
Shelborne smiled. 'The Glory Hole. Compressed air.' The heavy thud came to our ears, like a distant shell-burst. 'You see, the waves compress into the Glory Hole. There comes a point of no return. The air literally explodes under the pressure. It throws the water back even against the power of the wind, as you see.' He voiced my own anxieties. 'You'll have fun in the Mazy Zed in a sea like this.'
I wasn't going to let him know what I was thinking, however. 'You saw the model. The low freeboard and absence of gunnels will cope with it.'
Shelborne nodded towards the two wrecks at the base of Sudhuk. 'They also knew how to cope. When do you start your survey?'
'Tomorrow.'
'If Mercury permits, you mean.'
I deliberately faced away from him. He seemed to have an uncanny knack of being one jump ahead. There was a rough incline on the right. On it were a number of shaped oblongs, all the same size. For a moment I paused, trying to make o
ut what they were. Then I shuddered. The scores of sinister chevrons, covered in a patina of unscraped guano, were the coffins of the unquiet dead of Mercury, cemented to the rock face. A rough little hut, which presumably contained the implements for the final committal of these sleepless ones, stood against a low wall. The coffins were whiter than the corpses inside; the hut, too, was whitewashed in guano.
Shelborne followed my glance. 'It is the one place on the island I don't allow guano to be scraped. I can't keep the birds out — after all, they were here first.' I could see them settling down among the coffins. 'I put up a wall to keep out the seals, but the birds found a use for it. Look!'
A gannet spread his six-foot wingspan and ran along the wall, mimicking a carrier take-off.
'Come,' said Shelborne.
Driven by a sort of compulsive horror, Minnaar and I followed him to the cemetery. We climbed into it over a rough stile bridging the wall. Gannets barred our path. A small colony of penguins, fighting a rearguard action against extermination by the birds, held on to a corner of the graveyard. The birds struck at Shelborne's ankles, but he side-stepped adroitly. I kicked out involuntarily when a vicious beak dug into me. In a moment, a dozen more powder-blue beaks and yellow heads were arcing at me. I swore and kicked them aside. My sea-boot dug into the guano. Something small and bright was dislodged. I picked it up.
It was a German Knight's Cross, with Swords and Diamonds.
The tiny lettering engraved on it stifled my call to the other two ahead. I thrust it quickly into my pocket.
It read: 'Korvettenkapitan Dieter Rhennin. U-68. May 1942.'
7
The Bells of St Mary's
'Make the control switch!'
From my vantage-point on the summit of Sudhuk, the Praying Mantis in the bay half a mile away looked farther than she actually was; however, the electronic instrument I was testing told me it was no more than that. I glanced along the line of sight and gave my orders into the two-way radio telephone. The ship was anchored in the lee of the serrated rocks Shelborne had called Hottentot's Reef. The Hydrodist, as the instrument was called, calculates the travel time of radio waves between two points and is wonderfully accurate — it has an error of only about three parts in a million. A South African invention, it was first used for land surveying and then adapted to marine work with outstanding time-and-effort saving results.
Minnaar's flat-vowelled voice came back from the master instrument aboard the old whaler: 'Standing by to calibrate A-pattern phase.'
It had not taken him long to grasp the principles of the instrument and I felt elated as I stood on top of Sudhuk knowing that soon I would have on paper a picture of Mercury and its surrounding sea-bed. The Hydrodist, on a wooden tripod the height of a man, looked like a portable public telephone, except that in front was set a metal dish the size of a soup plate in which was placed a cathode tube. Below the tube itself, on the face of the reflecting dish, were calibration scales like saddle-stitching in metal.
I fiddled with the cavity tune control on the left of the control panel. 'A-pattern test,' I said into the built-in radio telephone. 'Standard megacycle frequency — how are you receiving?'
'Fine, man, okay,' replied Mannaar from the ship. 'No stray reflections in the microwave beam.'
'What about ground reflections?'
'Negligible, negligible,' he said. 'That's a fine spot for a slave station you've got up there on Sudhuk, Skipper.'
'Plenty of wind,' I replied.
'Christ!' He laughed. 'Wish I had it down here! How these bladdy birds stink!'
I had decided to establish two 'slave stations' — the necessary shore adjunct to the master instrument aboard the Praying Mantis — one of them on top of the towering cliff, from where I was now carrying out a series of calibration tests between the Hydrodist and the ship. The other 'slave station' was to be at the northern end of the bay. It takes a day or two to calibrate the master instrument and after that surveying goes ahead. My modern electronic method made the laborious old coastal triangulation system, using large numbers of floating beacons as well as land points, as out of date as a piston-engined aircraft. My system enabled a continuous and accurate plot to be made in about one-twentieth of the time taken by old methods and, unless atmospheric conditions were particularly bad, surveying could go on day and night, if necessary in darkness, mist, rain or fog, the latter being a big consideration on the Sperrgebiet where overnight fogs do not usually lift until the middle of the morning.
In such a fog I had come ashore hours before with Shelborne, who had surprised me by coming alongside in his flatboom and offering to transport my heavy gear ashore. I had accepted, and on landing he had surprised me further by humping the heavy Hydrodist and its batteries up the rough path to the top of the cliff. The desert persisted right to the high-water mark, and towards North Head the shoreline rocks and desert merged into one vast cyst of rotten tissue. This, Shelborne told me, pointing to a curious transom of sandcliff intersected by a narrow sloping ledge about one thousand feet long from beach to summit, was the Lange Wand or Long Wall, an unstable cliff which held back the quicksands from the sea and was dreaded because of its unheralded sandslides, which a loud echo was sufficient to provoke. He himself had been terrified while climbing the narrow path, which had seemed to shift under his weight, up to the tuftless, sucking, deathly wilderness where lay the remains of the old Portuguese warship — surely the most curious death of a ship in the history of the sea. This region also was pocked with bright white patches stretching into the distance. Nearer us and away from this pitiless desolation were low hills of wind-filled rock in whose eroded defiles 'ran' rivers of sand.
Our landing-beach below Sudhuk had a backdrop of rock twisted and eroded as if eaten by some nightmare death-watch beetle. The crumbled whiteness revealed softer boulders embedded in it, rounded and smoothed, arid veining standing out grotesquely. There was a chain of pits, minor caves, grottoes, overhangs and convoluted striations. Dried seasuds and dead deflated jelly-fish lay in the cavities of this great carious pumice stone, like lather dried white by the frenetic worrying of the wind. Piles of driftwood, bleached the same general grey-white of the surroundings, were scattered in untidy profusion everywhere. In the bright sun after the fog I could scarcely bear to burn my eyes on the unreal landscape.
I checked successively the circle amplitude switch, focus and brilliance, and saw that the circle presentation was correctly positioned on the graticule assembly. The pattern selector, which is for individual pattern frequencies, brought a satisfactory response from the ship.
Shelborne, hatless, had discarded his sealskins for a khaki shirt and trousers. He came close. I had expected him to smell of birds and seals, but it wasn't that: the sweat on him had a dry, bland odour, a sort of mustiness like dry-rot. His eyes were searching, probing for something more than understanding how the Hydrodist worked.
'All your equipment in working order?' he asked.
'Yes,' I replied. 'All this calibration and checking seems a waste of time, but it really pays off in the long run.'
'Yes,' he said slowly, 'it's the same with any worthwhile project: years of preparation, maybe. Justification, agony, self-recrimination — then the ecstasy.'
'No ecstasy here,' I laughed. 'This is a job. Soon I'll have your island and your bay buttoned up.'
He smiled with that curious, searching scrutiny of his. Had it merely been a job to me, I would have been plodding my way section by section up the coast as Rhennin had wanted. Instead, I was stretching my nerves on a lot of imponderables and backing an ill-defined hunch: Mercury, Strandloper's Water, Caldwell, Shelborne, the engraved pistol, diamonds. And the sea, Mercury's sea, that was so strangely mated with the Namib. And a U-boat ace's medal — he must have been an ace to win the Knight's Cross; who was this Captain Rhennin? Not Felix Rhennin, but Dieter Rhennin. Who was he?
'Buttoned up!' Shelborne repeated. 'Buttoned up! A curious modernism and too absolute for my liking; th
e desert and the sea are not so easily buttoned up.'
'I'll skip the philosophizing,' I said. 'I'm working to a tight schedule. That includes some Scuba diving for visual observations of the sea-bed…'
'Scuba diving?'
'Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Skin diving.'
'You surely can't dive deep enough…?'
'Up to thirty fathoms maximum. The charts show nowhere deeper than twenty fathoms in the bay, but I'll rely on my own readings.'
'So you've given up your idea of exploring the Glory Hole?'
A slightly unusual inflexion made me turn: his eyes were resting — with a studied affection it seemed to me — on Mercury, now white-grey under a new season's varnishing of guano. It had been a relief to get away from the lee of the island, not only because of the stink Minnaar belly-ached about but the birds' farmyard din which brought us cursing from our bunks at dawn. Internecine battles started with the day, and mingled with the grunts and roars of seals and the braying of penguins.'
'Of course not,' I replied. 'I've just been trying to work out some details. Like to help, apart from lending us the flatboom, I mean?'
'I should very much like to.' Still the odd note among the resonant vowels. 'Why don't you make a… what-do-you-call-it?… Scuba dive inside the cavern?'
My own view was that Scuba diving was as risky as using a boat in the wild entrance. 'I'll discuss it with Minnaar.'
He cocked his head. Not to acknowledge my remark, but at a sound below us. A thousand tons of sand slipped sullenly, almost noiselessly, 600 feet down the cliff into the sea.
'Yes, anything can happen in this sea.' Again there was an overtone I didn't care for. Was he deliberately trying to lure me into a dangerous dive? I'd make up my own mind about the Glory Hole, I told myself angrily; I wasn't going to be jockeyed by Shelborne, but if there were diamond-bearing gravel on the sea-bed, the Glory Hole was where it would accumulate.
The River of Diamonds Page 9