'It's thirty to the mountains,' he replied sombrely. 'Not far on a map, but eternity in the Namib. Shall I come?'
'No. This is my party, Felix. Besides, you'll have to keep an eye on the crew in the state they are in.'
'We'll start the diamond pumps within the hour,' he said decisively. 'It'll snap those miseries out of them if they're busy. Once the buzz gets round that the assay was rich, it may also help. This Glory Hole creature of yours…'
I laughed. I felt easy now that I was going — to the Namib, to Shelborne's Strandloper's Water. 'Finish him off by sucking him up the Mazy Zed's pumps!'
'Won't it foul them…?'
'No,' I grinned. 'They're soft. Put the main hoses down right outside the mouth, Felix. It should be richer the farther we go inside.'
He didn't catch my mood. 'You remember Shelborne's threat, John? — if we started mining, he would kill the crew?'
I shrugged. 'We've called his bluff over the Bells. We've called it with the guardian of the cavern. I'm still cautious, though — that's why the journey.'
As if in reply to me, the reverberation of the Bells rang against the steel sounding-board of the Mazy Zed.
Rhennin looked uneasy. 'It gives you the bloody creeps.'
'No wonder we couldn't pinpoint it,' I said confidently. 'It originates anywhere round the island on the sea-bed.' I went on, 'Look, before I go off, let's search Shelborne's quarters, you and I, this afternoon. We may find the key to the whole mystery. It mayn't even be necessary for me to go.'
'Excellent,' he said, more cheerfully. 'But you don't intend going alone…?'
'I'll take Koeltas and Johaar,' I replied. Neither will mind leaving the Bells behind.'
'You couldn't have a better bodyguard than those two toughs.'
'I wish Koeltas hadn't had to leave the FN automatic in the Malgas.'
'You can have my Remington repeater. Are our pistols still in the graveyard. I don't remember Shelborne picking them up.'
'He didn't. I'll recover them.'
'Bob Sheriff's boat has weapons…'
'No, Felix. I'm keeping clear. I'll start from the Sudhuk side, which I know is safe.'
He grinned slightly. 'Like the wind — always from the south-west.'
He telephoned a quickfire of orders to bring the Mazy Zed nearer to the Glory Hole by winching her on her anchor cables. Using the run of the sea, the diamond hoses would be dropped to float inside the cavern itself. Two hours later the Mazy Zed was secured as Rhennin, Koeltas, Johaar and I rounded the seal platform in the dinghy and the strong pulse of the pumps began to vie with the Bells.
There was no clue in Shelborne's hut, which we ransacked thoroughly, although we put everything back in place again. Rhennin gave Koeltas the Remington to keep up his morale as the island trembled. Neither he nor Johaar would go for the pistols.
It was already half-dark when there was an oath from Shelborne's quarterdeck and a metallic rattle as Koeltas fed shells into the Remington's magazine.
'He comes!' he exclaimed in patois.
Rhennin and I craned into the darkness. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear the motor.
'Shelborne hasn't got an outboard,' I said.
Koeltas's fear infected us. 'It's someone from the Mazy Zed,' snapped Rhennin. 'I expressly gave orders that no one was to come…'
The red ball of a Very light rose above the jetty.
'Let's get down there!' I didn't care for searching Shelborne's papers, although there was an almost complete lack of anything personal, not a letter even, to associate the man with the place he had occupied for more than twenty years. Once the trommel's handle swung during a severe tremor. In the twilight I thought fancifully of Caldwell's ghost.
At the landing-stage I cupped my hands: 'Ahoy, there! Who is it?'
The flaming danger-signal burned out in the cold sea. The boat was too far away for me to catch the answer. Instead, another Very light flared, tattooing Johaar's skin with blood and birthmarks.
Again the hail. Koeltas heard; Rhennin swore while he waited for me to translate.
'It's Captain Longstaff. He says, come quickly, for God's sake, come quickly!'
Rhennin yelled. 'Longstaff! Stop firing those bloody lights! Come close, damn you, come close!'
The outboard circled aimlessly, like a ship with a torpedo in her rudder.
Koeltas clicked off the Remington's safety catch.
Johaar said, 'He asks, is it safe?'
These broken, high-pitched and hysterical incoherencies from the normally staid master of the Mazy Zed sounded unreal.
'Come close, blast you!' roared Rhennin.
'Felix, Koeltas says Longstaff says the 'tween-decks men are all dead — sorters, engineers, galley staff. The deck crew seems all right, but there's been a hell of a panic. Some of them have taken to the boats — one overturned and sank. A couple of men have been drowned. The others are up the rigging, on top of the gantry, on the roof of the living quarters…'
'Longstaff! Longstaff! Come here!'
His reply was another Very light. I spotted the captain at the tiller, staring straight ahead of him, like one of those dead figures in lifeboats during the war. Then he wrenched his arm over, as if he had come to a decision, and the outboard headed out to sea. We never saw Captain Longstaff again.
We held a hurried conference. Nothing would persuade Koeltas and Johaar to return with us to the Mazy Zed. The attempt at sea-bed mining off Mercury was over. Rhennin had shrugged angrily when I had called it Shelborne's victory. He decided to signal the tug and tow the Mazy Zed back to Luderitz — a day or two's run if the south-wester wasn't too strong. He seemed to take it for granted that I would go along too. He was startled when I told him that I had no intention of doing so. I still intended to break Shelborne's secret wide open. I was a freelance and not bound to the Mazy Zed, I went on. If I cared to throw my life away on a wild-goose chase in the Namib, that was my affair. At my vehemence, he smiled and shook me strongly by the hand. He was back on my side. The hell with Shelborne! He'd send the tug back after she had towed the Mazy Zed to Luderitz to pick me up in good time before Shelborne returned. I could have anything I wanted from the Mazy Zed for the journey. Koeltas and Johaar, torn between staying on Mercury and the unknown terror of the Bells, decided to come with me, although they refused to venture near the Mazy Zed. Half her crew dead! And every man of my own crew gone. In our mood, we had no hesitation in agreeing to Koeltas's request to keep the Remington in case Shelborne should return unexpectedly.
Rhennin and I set off for the Mazy Zed, lost in thought. It was clear to me that the deadly guardian of the fountainhead centred on the Glory Hole. The seabed gas I had found and the jellyfish screen — these had served only to mask the darker secret killer. Whatever it was, it was clear that Shelborne did not wield it — he could not, being away now — although he knew what it was. It was also intermittent in its lethal strikes. Did Shelborne know at what intervals it would attack, and is that why he left us so confidently to go to Walvis Bay with Mary, knowing we would be dead when he returned? Outflank — the word burned in my mind. I would outflank the Glory Hole and find the secret where I was now convinced he, too, had discovered it — at Strandloper's Water. I could not wait to set off.
The Mazy Zed's strong pulse was dead when we rounded the seal promontory. A corpse floated past, face upwards. Except for the oil-burning riding lights, the Mazy Zed was in darkness. Rhennin took command and signalled the tug, which was about sixty miles away. We battened down every opening and hatchway with the help of some of the braver members of the crew we enticed away from their positions aloft. Superficially, there was nothing to show that the million-dollar Mazy Zed had become a floating coffin.
I had hoped to stock our march from the Mazy Zed's supplies, but there was woefully little that was not below in the 'tween-decks morgue, where it would have been death to venture.
At first light next day Johaar, Koeltas and I went ashore from Mercury to the mainland, careful
ly skirting Bob Sheriff's wreck. Unaccountably, there was no fog and the sun was bright as we climbed in single file, myself leading, the low hills which backed the bay.
Ahead lay the Namib, white as the venom of a mamba.
15
Strandloper's Water
Ancient land barrier!
Sand and sky merged at a distant line of stark, saw-edged peaks, pale cobalt in a vast cyclorama, a line robbed of all decisiveness by the white glare of the sky. Deeply keeled, serried lines of enormous dunes, some of them a thousand feet high, ran north-eastwards in an eccentric, rock-ribbed agglomeration. Barrier it was, for the north was different terrain from the south. The dunes went no farther than the demarcation; on the other side stretched a vast, gravelly plain shot through with razor-edged outcrops — broken, corroded, ripped. Under the vertical eye-glare of the sun the enclaves and divides of the dunes were indistinguishable from their doppelganger shadows, eaten away as canker devours the pearly-white mouth of the puff-adder. I stood incredulous at this nakedness bankrupt of all life, with a lineal pedigree of two hundred million years without the bastardy of one flower, one fully-grown tree, or the crudest prototype of man, a quite unmitigated infinitude of sand. It was absolute, like space; primal as man's killer-instinct; an inexorable as a countdown.
I pointed to the line of mushroom-lipped blowholes, which climbed out of the quicksands into firmer country beyond. That is our route.'
'Jesus!' exclaimed Koeltas. 'I never leave the sea again!'
Johaar kicked a bare foot into the ankle-deep sand. 'Five miles a day, maybe, through this stuff. We want plenty water.'
I carried two of Shelborne's canteens. Johaar had roped to his belt a half-gallon wine jar I had found on the Mazy Zed's deck and Koeltas had two empty brandy bottles in the pockets of his faithful oilskin. The water from Shelborne's room condensers was insipid but there was none available from the Mazy Zed as the tanks were in the sealed-off living quarters. Koeltas carried the Remington and I the short Bernadelli VB automatic as well as Rhennin's superlative Hensoldt Diasport binoculars, pocket-sized and amazingly powerful. Looking at the emptiness before me, I felt a fellow-feeling with Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who had carried the same make of glasses into space. I had commandeered haversacks and some tinned food from Shelborne's larder. The dead buck which covered the beach would have stocked an army, but we dared not venture near.
Koeltas and I had cut out the toes of our veldskoens in 'sandtrapper' tradition to get rid of the sand. Ordinary boots are useless, since the abrasive action of the sand strips the stitching in days. Koeltas wore his greasy skipper's cap and I a big sombrero from Shelbome's slop-chest: Johaar was in a guano-worker's hat.
I had plotted our route beforehand to the Uri-Hauchab mountains, the complex vaguely shown on the map, and now I checked my bearings with a small boat's compass. I had also set the time limit as four days: a little over a pint of water each per day. My first objective, if I could find nothing at the coast to solve the problem of ingress to the Glory Hole, was Strandloper's Water. The immediate interior seemed to offer nothing but signs of death. Farther inland — well, I told myself, Shelborne had lived for a year in it, and there must be water.
'Trap! — March!' I ordered.
We set course into the dunes — for Strandloper's Water.
Four, six, eight, ten steps. The steep incline of the dune and the clinging sand bends our ankles back so that the foot trails like a polio victim's. The toe seeks its hold, penetrates the surface with a curious dry rustle — and finds no firmness. A downward traverse, an uncertain fulcrum at mid-point of the arch, a slow compacting under the ball and toes, a ripple of tautness along the instep muscles, the bones spreadeagled, heel unsupported. Sand pours in the cut-open toe, cold inside, hot on the surface. The foot slides downwards, the knee wrenches, leg muscles cry out.
Four, six, eight, ten steps.
Vapour-trail arabesques smoke at the crests under the rising wind and sand probes through every cavity of shirt, trousers, vest, coating the skin with a white emery abrasive, a goad to straining muscles and a corrosive to the temper.
Four, six, eight, ten steps.
Shelborne had sought expiation and mortification in the dunes: the sun was now a fiery magnifying-glass and the desert its burning-point. Caldwell and Shelborne could not have brought a mule-wagon through this. I looked back. The sand quagmire, the old warship, Mercury — they were as close as they had been two hours before. There was a bloom of smoke seawards — the tug would soon be with the Mazy Zed. My rucksack weighed like a ton of coal on my shoulders. The Bernadelli in a canvas holster on my left hip was balanced against a pocketful of shells on my right; I realized that before long I might have to jettison both. Maybe the binoculars, too. My heavy polo-necked sweater was tied round my waist. The desert would be icy at night and after dark the tightly rolled sleeping-bag above each man's pack would as vital as water.
I drank about two eggcups full of water. It was neutral, unsatisfying, and served only to clog the dried sand and mucus in my mouth. I wiped clean three cartridges for us to suck. The others sat sullen, silent under the threat of the Namib, although we could easily have turned back at this stage and we had plenty of food and water ahead it was impossible to distinguish individual peaks and hills any more for the soft cobalt had now abandoned them to brutal shades of red and orange. Nearby were the skeletons of a group of strange succulents the Hottentots call 'half-mens — half-human,' a man-sized mock-up whose head inclines away to the north. They leaned away from us like a tragic classical Greek chorus foreboding evil for our journey.
We struck towards the ancient river line.
Hours later — blinded, gasping, crying out for water we dared not drink — we stumbled down a wadi. The heat contained in the red-hot defile was appalling. Its sand base absorbed the sound of our footfalls and voices, which fell dead, as in the presence of the dead; we gave up speaking. The open desert had narrowed into a chain of wildly jumbled broken defiles leading to the old watercourse. Koeltas called them gramadullas. The grim flanking cliffs, pitted by heat, flamed every hot colour, red, orange, scarlet, brick. They had a bloom, too, like grapes where the surface of the rock fell in rotten powder. Masses of house-sized rock lay everywhere. We skirted them, pressing onwards — towards what?
We shuffled on, my muscles rebelling at the unnatural sandtrapper gait. The wadi was as tortuous in direction as it was treacherous above. A hundred tons of rock detached itself and fell, noiseless. Dust billowed, but otherwise the rocks' agony was mute. In five minutes we would have been marching across the spot. Johaar, leading, turned and gestured expressively. Yet another bend: we paused in astonishment, even in that region of unlikely colours. The overhang expanded funnel-wise above, but instead of flaming scarlet it was burnished jet-black. It was hornblende, stippled here and there with emerald-green boulders of pure copper. The heat became almost intolerable as the black drank up the sun; two feathery cascades, not of water, but of white sand, ran over the shoulders of the dark cliffs.
Then the gramadullas opened and the terrain became flat — the ancient watercourse!
We threw our packs in the shadow of the banks and lay down exhausted. But even here the late afternoon sun would not leave us alone. The shadow disappeared and there was nothing for it but to return to the stifling defile and the black cliff. The Bernadelli bullets tasted better than the water. I fell asleep sucking raw brass and lead; I was awakened by bitter cold and dark. It was barely eight o'clock and the temperature must have fallen over fifty degrees. There was no fire because there was nothing to burn. We ate an unpalatable meal of bully-beef and dried fruit, washed down with a little water. We decided to trek with the moon and lie up during the heat of the day. The river-bed seemed an impenetrable wash of sand, without a white pock-mark or a dead buck to guide our search for Strandloper's Water.
I shivered in my sleeping-bag and sleep was fitful. I must have fallen into a deeper sleep towards midnight, for I started a
wake as Koeltas shook me. The muted light caught the yellow bronze of his skin; his eyes were two slits of shadow. In his long oilskin, his Tartar face was as unreal in that goblin-land as a goblin itself. What he said was as strange.
'Put on the shoe of Mantis.'
The bullet rattled awkwardly against my teeth. 'For Christ's sake, what are you talking about?'
He turned away so that his silhouette was lost against the black cliff and he said softly, in his thin, harsh voice. The Bushmen say, the moon is the shoe of Mantis. Let us put it on and get the hell out of this spook-land.'
I kept the compass but jettisoned the Bernadelli, the shells and the binoculars — a holster of dried fruit was worth more than a gun. Koeltas, however, kept the Remington. Johaar and I marched with our sleeping-bag? doubled round our waists; Koeltas's was bundled up neatly on his rucksack. In the heat of the previous day he had been least affected. He drank less water than Johaar or myself.
We trekked. We kept no account of time. The river sand was deep, but level. The sandshuffler gait paid off here without the muscle-cracking strain of endless ascent and descent. The cold was formidable. Sockless, open-toed, I soon lost all feeling in my feet and the numbness worked its way up mid-calf like Socrates's hemlock. The stars were radium needles above the serried lines of endless wadis flowing into the main stream. Of water, of life,there was no sign. The Glory Hole, the diamond fountainhead itself, became unimportant beside the need to lift one unfeeling foot in front of the next. The bullet I sucked felt like a drop of warm water in my palm.
I led. I didn't see the dawn, although my face was towards it. My brain was numb, unresponsive: my eyes were conditioned to the next muscle-sapping step. Nor did I notice that the river-bed was widening — flattening into a sort of sand delta. It was colour that pulled my head up. A mile or two away, a slender monolith of rock stood up one hundred feet from the sandy bed. It was not black, or red, or any of yesterday's colours. It was crushed strawberry. For a moment I imagined it to be the coming flush of light, but it was not the magic of sunrise — the rock itself was that colour. The sun brought no warmth but, momentarily, greater cold. We paused in mid-river within sight of the strawberry rock: if I could have rejoiced then in the thought of diamonds I would have done so at the sight of a striated bank: it was bright blue, like the tailings of the Kimberley diamond mines. This began where the river narrowed the way we had come, but farther on as it fanned out the blue gave way to an astonishing display of reds, yellows, pinks and lighter blues, shot through with a white purer even than the sand. I guessed this to be kaolin, and the others not diamond gravel but clays of various kinds.
The River of Diamonds Page 22