In front of my very eyes now was the exposed rock into which Walvis Bay had nearly crashed headlong. In a flash I saw why the sea had not struck down the weather ship after her hideous downward drop, or Touleier a few minutes before: the ship-shaped island provided a perfect lee, a powerful natural bulwark, against the force of the gale and the run of the sea.
We stared unbelievingly at the rock, an island unmarked on any chart.
But it was not upon the rock that our eyes were riveted. She gave a half-sob and buried her face against my shoulder. It was the ship.
The barnacle-fouled hull was mortised so deftly between the 'bow' and 'stern' of the rock that it seemed part of it; indeed, its regular line enhanced the resemblance to a deck between the two projections. Its roundness, curved inward and upward, added to the man-made appearance. At the 'stern' the deception ended with brutal plainness.
Two huge screws projected into the air.
The ship was upside down.
A steamer, keel and screws in the air, lay sandwiched between the two rock eminences some hundreds of feet apart. The island seemed scarcely wider than the steamer's beam.
When I spoke, I did not recognize my own voice. 'We'll get a jury stay rigged on to the mast and go closer and look.'
She bit her lips fearfully and looked at the hulk.
'How. .?'
I turned to go aft. I stopped dead. There had been nothing for me but that fatal little caravel-shaped island ahead. Until now. Then I saw.
Behind the yacht towered a grey incline of sea. It was high enough for me to have to look up and see the waves bursting and racing. Touleier, sheltered from gale and sea, was in comparative calm.
I held her, frozen, round the shoulders.
'A valley — a valley in the sea! We've toppled down a valley. .' I pointed to a sort of shallow valley formed in the sea itself.
The stunning simplicity of it was incredible. The violence of the sea created a sort of hollow in its surface. The gale brought with it a massive run of the sea in the opposite direction to the Agulhas Current, and the two opposing streams banked up and formed a hollow. Something in the undersea topography must have helped, this being over such a limited area. This 'seamount' was a needle-like pinnacle which reared up from the ocean floor, and only an exceptional gale uncovered it, sixty feet deep, not high! Normally it was no danger to ships, but a Waratah gale bared it, and it turned into the Flying Dutchman! Then when the gale eased, the Agulhas Current became master again, the valley and the seamount disappeared, and so did the Flying Dutchman. .'
'Quick! We must be quick, Ian, before it disappears! We must see that hulk!'
Jubela and I hastily lashed up a jury stay from the mast stump to take a rag of canvas. Tafline brought my camera from below.
Touleier edged closer to the hulk on the seamount. It gave us a lee which became progressively smoother, the closer we approached.
The high promenade deck which had caused so much controversy lay crushed and concertina-ed under the 10,000 tons deadweight. Somewhere, too, under the telescoped superstructure, on which the whole weight of the ship rested, was the ruin of the single high funnel with its once-proud insignia.
The camera's electric flash cut across to below the eighteen-foot double screws, sea-fouled and trailing seaweed.
She called out the name, upside down, emblazoned on the stern.
'Waratah:
‘The gale's holding steady,' I replied. ‘So long as it does, the water should stay where it is. We must be quick. Every minute counts. It's now or never, to see the Waratah. Watch out especially when we get to the keel, the wind could blow us off our feet.'
Leaving the yacht in Jubela's care — he seemed to want to concentrate on physical tasks to avoid looking at the dead monster towering above us — we made for the stern. It looked easier to climb than any other part of the hull. We had a rope to lash ourselves fast to the decaying screws against the sea.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
That fantastic roll of hers, when she dropped down like we did, must have been the death-stroke. She must have rolled right over, clean on to the seamount, and come to rest lodged as we saw her. No wonder there were neither wreckage nor bodies. The weight of the ship trapped everything underneath. Her upper decks were completely crushed. All the loose gear the world debated about for so long must be lying under all that weight.'
‘It must have been all over very quickly,’ Tafline said quietly. 'They had a merciful end, those 211 souls.’
'Three minutes, some expert worked out. They reckoned at the time that had she capsized, it wouldn't have been longer than that. I expect, too, that in a storm like that everyone was below decks. All the bodies are probably still inside-or what's left of them.'
The hulk had a complete unreality for me. I could not credit that this was the ship whose every detail I had studied for so long. It reminded me of my first visit to the Cutty Sark at Greenwich dry-dock. As a boy, I had studied her plans, knew every interior lay-out, every deck, as if I had trodden them myself. Then came the day when I went aboard. It was at once familiar and strange. Now I looked with the same new-old eyes at the crushed, corroded hull resurrected from its sea-grave by the extraordinary phenomenon of gale and sea.
Astern, the power of the gale held back the incline of water, so willing to engulf the Waratah as of old; here, in the shelter of the seamount's lee, we could hear ourselves speak, although the storm thundered by on either flank, giving a curious, disembodied effect to our presence, like being in a capsule — aware, seeing, fearing, but at the same time partially divorced from it.
Touleier lifted and heaved too much to allow us to bring her safely more than perhaps a quarter of a cable's length from the wreck. Moreover the wind was masked by the immediate lee effect of the seamount, so that the way was almost off her. I was gravely concerned about the mast and the trailing clutter of rigging.
Yet I was drawn to the thing which I had sought so long.
The exorcism had begun. It was not over.
I must know still more about the Waratah.
She, too, wanted it and said, 'There's the airliner, your father's message. He must have been here too!'
What awful secrets still lay hidden in that rusted hulk, its propellers so grotesquely turned to the sky? The swell seethed and swished, enveloping the wreck to the first line of cabin ports, tight closed, as they must have been that same day sixty years ago, against the ancestor of the gale which again today had laid its offering on the altar of a sea which could not yet wholly claim its dead.
Tafline shuddered, a spasm of fear.
Jubela shuddered, too, and would not reply when I explained rapidly to him in Zulu. I had grabbed his oilskins and sweater for him from the cabin and he pulled the sou'wester hard over his forehead, pretending that handling the yacht needed all his concentration.
I made up my mind.
'Bring her round — handsomely now,' I told him. The yacht handled clumsily with the trailing debris alongside; the way the mast stump whipped at the flap of the tiny jib brought my heart into my mouth.
'Clear away that mess as quick as you can,' I told Jubela further. 'Keep a tight watch. I'm taking the dinghy to have a look. :
Tafline helped me inflate the rubber coracle from an air bottle while Jubela got busy on the wreckage with an axe.
'Her boat deck used to be fifty-five feet above the sea,' I said, 'but it's flat now, so there'll not be as much as that to climb. With all those barnacles and growths on the hull, it should be easy to find footholds.'
What about. .?' She pointed at the hovering incline of sea.
The gale's holding steady,' I replied. ‘So long as it does, the water should stay where it is. We must be quick. Every minute counts. It's now or never, to see the Waratah. Watch out especially when we get to the keel, the wind could blow us off our feet.'
Leaving the yacht in Jubela's care-he seemed to want to concentrate on physical tasks to avoid looking at the dead monster towering
above us — we made for the stern. It looked easier to climb than any other part of the hull. We had a rope to lash ourselves fast to the decaying screws against the pluck of the wind.
We paddled to the nearest porthole. My heart raced. I tried to look in. The glass was opaque with green growth. Even my strong flashlight would not penetrate it.
Disappointed, we dipped and splashed our way to the rudder. Lying inverted, the old-fashioned counter, designed before the cruiser stern became fashionable in passenger liners and showing clearly its affinity with the days of sail, provided us with an easy first step up towards the rudder pintles. Higher still were the propellers.
I edged in. Tafiine's face was hidden by her sou'wester. The swell receded. Unexpectedly, she stood up and jumped lightly on to the counter. How many years was it since human foot trod that fated hull? She stood poised for a second, then swung round to face me. She pushed back her sou'wester. I see her still: her face radiant, the short hair light against the old dark hull.
She tapped each heavy brass letter, green from years of immersion, with her right toe.
'W-a-r-a-t-a-h' she spelled out, never taking her eyes from my face across the couple of feet of heaving water.
She held out her arms.
'Come to me.'
I jumped. She put her lips close to my ear, and for a moment the caravel-rock, the sea and the wreck ceased to be.
'I have the Waratah, and now I have my love.'
Then she eased me a little from her, and the question was in her eyes.
'Yes,' I said. 'We must look further.’
Had it been like an ordinary wreck, perhaps we should not have chosen to go on. But, because the hull was completely intact — tribute to those Clydeside builders who had claimed to be among the world's best — it had a shut-off quality, unlike the piteous rends, torn plating, or broken back of a ship aground on a merciless reef. The long, sinister, corroded hull, doubly odd because of its lack of upperworks, lay there, its ports closed, waiting.
There was nothing to stop us.
I had brought a boathook and a length of rope, but for our initial progress up the incline of the counter they were unnecessary. The clusters of barnacles gave us adequate foothold. We were able to stand comfortably when we reached the rudder, holding on to the huge slab of rusted metal. This was braced by four massive transverse strips of iron, each about four inches wide and nine feet apart, so that it was a relatively easy matter to use them as footholds to the eighteen-foot screws towering above our heads, their bronze still surprisingly bright against the general shabbiness of the hull.
I used the boathook to haul myself up on to the first pintle, reaching down and helping her up beside me on to the narrow iron shelf. From this higher position we were able to see for the first time something of the seamount behind the ship. The rock was covered in thick marine growths; she started momentarily at a movement, but it was only one of a colony of outside rock lobsters. How long would the seamount stay above water? — long enough to make it part of the air-element which was so alien to it and so kill off the teeming life of lobsters, mussels, barnacles and other rock-and-sea creatures?
She gave a gasp at a movement above us. I whipped round, my nerves strung to breaking-point. A magnificent albatross, holding himself skilfully against the wind, came to rest above one of the propeller shafts and then plucked eagerly among the sea-creatures.
We breathed again. We pushed on.
I secured the boathook over the next pintle, and we climbed yet higher.
My eyes went automatically to Touleier, so safe-for the moment-in the lee of this rock-and-metal hill of death and enigma. My sailor's heart skipped a beat at the sight of the seas which boiled behind her, and on either side of the seamount. We were held in a tight, ephemeral cell of safety. We could not see a defined line where the sea-valley began or ended. We were protected, where we stood, from the blowing spray and lash of wind, but I feared that when we got higher further exploration might be impossible because of it.
How long could, or would, the phenomenon last? Precious minutes were racing by. We had to see the top of the hull!
I bent to help Tafline. In doing so, my line of vision was through the gap between rudder and hull. ‘What is it, Ian?'
I stopped transfixed. She could not see from where she was.
A fuselage, one wing attached and the other piled upright against the side of the hull, lay in a crumpled, untidy heap on the far side of the wreck. The tail-section had snapped half off and the airliner lay broken-backed across a rock, as if a giant had begun to break it across his knee and then grown tired of the game and cast it from him.
My hands were shaking as I hauled her up. I pointed.
'Four engines!' she exclaimed.
I found my voice. 'Airscrews! Alistair's was a jet!'
Some of the propeller blades were broken off and others were wrapped round each other and the turbine casings.
'Gemsbok’ she exclaimed. 'Gemsbok and the Waratah — crashed together!'
I craned forward to try and see more. 'Those experts were right about her going in at' full power-look! They said she first touched something and then slewed round. Dad must have been sitting on this side, nearest to us, and the wing on his side came off in the final moments of the crash and landed up against the hull of the ship.'
'How could he have come alive out of that?' she exclaimed. 'Ian, he must have had some time to have cut loose that panel!'
'He crashed at night, remember. Maybe that would account for the peculiar writing.'
'Do you see anyone, in the immediate shock of a crash, calmly setting about chopping off a piece of the aircraft? And then, of all things, deciding to make a testament out of it? He must have seen the name Waratah, and that would need daylight. That means the seamount must stay above water for a good few hours..
I agreed. We felt safer to go on.
She took a firm grip of my hand and leant out to see as far beyond the hull as she could.
‘Ian! Ian-there are two tails! There's another against the side of the ship!'
Cautiously, fearfully, I eased her back to safety on the slippery shelf to enable me to see. One slip would have been fatal; our precarious perch was twenty-five feet above the rocks.
I extended my range of vision by using the boathook. I, too, peered out round the bulge of the stern. That high tail was unmistakable. The Buccaneer!
It projected from the hull slightly forwards of where I judged the bridge must be and almost on a level with where we were standing. Only the tail was visible. There was no sign of the rest of the machine.
I edged myself back on to our narrow place of safety.
'It's Alistair's plane,' I said numbly. The tail sticks out of the hull up for'ard. The jet must have gone right through this rotten old hull like a bullet. Only twenty feet higher, and he'd have missed it!'
We stood silent, shaken. The gale roared past and the sea probed at the base of the hulk. The earlier radiance in her face was gone. I was filled with a sick hatred for the wreck.
'Let's go back, Ian! Haven't we come far enough to know all we want to know? Remember what Alistair himself said — what if you do find the Waratah! All there'll be is a lot of skeletons! Among those skeletons are your father and your brother. .'
I poised myself uncertainly on the slippery foothold. At that moment I held her life in my hand. I did not know it
What made me go on?
I could not answer that any more than what brought her that day to the dockside and Walvis Bay. In retrospect, however, I think it was that the blank, rotting hull provided no way into the Waratah mystery, not so much even as an open port. It was a shape, a thing, a hulk, and even in the moment of discovery, it shut itself fast.
To the top-only,' I replied. 'From there we can see along the whole length of the keel. It won't take a couple of minutes.'
The massive struts from the stern to the propeller shaft tunnels, which bulged unnaturally big once one was against
them (normally they would be deep under water and not seen) gave us an easy passage to the keel. We were careful when we lifted our heads above the level of the hull and exposed ourselves to the gale. Another albatross appeared magically out of the spindrift and coasted down to settle near the remnants of the Viscount. This time she did not admire but shuddered — had the birds once feasted on human flesh as well as on the delicacies the seamount brought from the deeps?
The long level of the keel stretched away; the salt and wind stung our eyes. Tafline pointed at what appeared to be a larger accretion of deep-sea things round a rusted stump of metal. It was the only projection along the ship's bottom.
I pulled her down close to speak into her ears.
'Engine-room ash chute. Burnt coal from her furnaces was dumped through it into the sea. It goes right through the ship, clean through the watertight compartments and into the engine-room itself.'
‘What is that supposed to be, then?' She indicated the metal stump.
'It's a loosely-hinged metal cover to the chute. The mechanism is simple. When the weight of the ash discharged from her furnaces was greater than the sea pressure thirty feet below the waterline, the chute opened automatically. Experts thought it might have stuck open and allowed the sea to flood the ship from the engine-room.'
She screwed up her eyes and looked along the spume-swept hull. 'Then why don't we open the hatch and look inside?'
We had found entry to Waratah. It was as simple as the device itself.
We inched along the keel at a crawl to the outlet, which faced sternwards to form a final outcurve of the interior passageway. This 'lip' of metal, now heavily encrusted and black with rust and immersion, was about two-and-a-half feet high, roughly curved with a kind of primitive streamline like a ship's ventilator. Where it met the hull there was a metal hatch cover, about three feet wide and four feet long, hinged at the forward end. The small half-cupola of the lip also acted as a brake to prevent the hatch cover from swinging open too wide. It would come to rest at an angle of about sixty degrees when fully extended, the speed of the ship providing a natural motion to sweep the spent ash clear. It was simple and ingenious.
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