Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  She had touched my hand. 'There's probably not a sailor in the whole Southern Hemisphere safer than you in a gale. The Fairlies must have been bora in gales.'

  I felt like adding, died, too.

  Touleier's sponsors had been delighted when I put forward Tafline's suggestion. They, at least, did not seem to share the general misgivings about me. Jubela appeared as glad as the sponsors when I found him drinking mournfully in a shebeen at 10 o'clock in the morning.

  The sea is clean,' he had said. 'And I am like a bushpig in a wallow here.'

  Now he was in his element; gone was the silence and depression which had marked his final days at the wheel of Walvis Bay. I had told him the Waratah story and Tafline had been with me. ‘It is right that one should know the grave of one's ancestors' was all Jubela had replied, 'and this ancestor must have been a great sailor.'

  The mood of the three of us was tight, purposeful, that day when we approached the headland of St Francis, our last southern gateway to the Bashee, still some 200 miles to the north-east, the final point in rounding the 'ankle' of the coast. Touleier herself seemed to share that mood: taut, yet controlled; eager, yet aware of the dangers ahead.

  I took my binoculars and climbed into the rigging. Astern, the horizon had the peculiar blur of purple-blue characteristic of a south-westerly blow, although I felt sure it would not work up into a buster of the calibre which had nearly sunk the Walvis Bay. I had to rely on my own instincts. It would have been fatal for me to have got in touch with the Weather Bureau, and I had no intention of letting Colonel Joubert in on our mission. I had concealed the yacht's departure by slipping out of Cape Town at night, in a growing northwesterly wind. Now, well to the east, rounding that 'ankle' of the South African coastline, I was keeping well clear of the land in order to avoid being caught by some of the violent squalls which sometimes sweep down from the high land. Touleier's thrusting spinnaker would snap the light-metal racing mast like a carrot if it were caught aback. There it was!

  I called to Tafline. 'Cape St Francis!'

  She swung up nimbly alongside me and looked through the binoculars, and then let them hang round her neck on the strap. She put her face against mine, warm by contrast with the cold south-westerly wind and its threat of rain. The dedicated purpose of the voyage was lightened by my joy at being away to sea with her, and having a splendid yacht underfoot. I think she guessed what I was thinking, for she turned and looked into my eyes, and allowed the roll of the mast to sway her hard against my side.

  Touleier raced on.

  Unwilling to break the silence, yet reminded of our mission by the sight of that distant landmark, she said at length, 'You read the sea like a book, Ian. It is what lies ahead now, isn't it? It would be pure magic, you and me and Touleier, if it weren't for the Waratah.'

  I side-stepped it now. I gestured towards some other passing ships. 'We're using the standard northward route close to the coast to avoid the Agulhas Current. That tanker out there is picking up the benefit of its southbound flow. That's the way it has always been. Northbound, you keep close to the land, especially in this sort of wind, which sets up a counter-current shorewards.'

  Without warning, she buried her face in my neck. 'Oh my darling, my darling!' she sobbed. ‘I know all these winds, storms, currents, and the rest are part of the pattern which has been woven into our lives because of . . . of . . .' I felt the warm tears against my skin. 'But it's you I want, free of all these terrifying shackles . . .' She choked gently, and I tried to comfort her, and I tasted the salt of her tears on her lips. She took my face in her hands and searched it with her finger-tips as if to memorize every line; she kissed me as if her heart would burst until even that lively deck and press of sail became oblivion as we raced towards the Bashee.

  There were a hundred things to do to the yacht as Touleier sped northwards. After Cape St Francis, Tafline had insisted, as part of the general state of alertness and preparedness, on being taught the rudiments of helmsmanship, although my heart was in my mouth once when Touleier was caught napping by a sharp squall with her at the wheel; the yacht went far over before I could get to Tafline's side, but Jubela saved the situation by letting fly a halliard.

  I kept Touleier well clear of the big harbour of Port Elizabeth, but beyond we went close to two groups of tiny islands, called St Croix and Bird, which lie in the big bay of Algoa. In these waters the first sailor ever to round the Cape nearly five centuries ago turned back because his crew mutinied: Bartholomew Diaz planted a marble cross, and it is wrongly commemorated by the name Cape Padrone at the north-eastern fringe of the bay. Only in this century, shortly before the Second World War, was the true location of Diaz's cross found slightly to the north.

  Now we were approaching the spot. I was trying to use the weak inshore counter-current about three miles out to help Touleier along and edge past a race of the Agulhas Current which spills over near Cape Padrone. There was muddy water under the yacht, a sure sign that the south-wester was strong enough to generate at least a slight counter to the big main stream further out.

  Jubela was off watch and Tafline sat scanning the sea and the shoreline with my glasses: watching, hoping, tireless.

  'An island!'

  I threw a quick bight of halliard round a cleat and slithered to her side.

  No island had ever been recorded hereabouts.

  'There!' she pointed, giving me the glasses. 'It's dark against the white.'

  The bucking deck and my unsteady hands made focusing difficult.

  Then I saw the tiny cross at the summit. I laughed. I had not realized how keyed up. I really was. My nerves were as stretched as Touleier's rigging.

  'Diaz made the same mistake four centuries ago,' I told her, disappointed. 'The cross is a replica of Diaz' original, which tumbled down and was found in fragments among the rocks below.'

  'But - it looks like an island!' she maintained.

  "That's why it deceived the experts for so long,' I went on. 'Its actual name is False Islet. Diaz logged that he had planted his cross on an island, and for hundreds of years men searched for an island, just as we are doing. Until an acute historian-detective hit on the secret of False Islet.'

  She was still game. 'No chance of the Waratah being ashore there?'

  'Not a chance,' I answered. 'Since the cross was found, thousands of people have visited the place. You can walk from the mainland across a sand causeway to it.' I added, to let her down lightly and not dampen her keenness, 'It's so easy to be deceived on this coast. In a few hours we'll come to a spot called Ship Rock. Another near it is called The Wreck. If you want to imagine things, the natural topography gives one full scope.'

  Towards sunset the wind eased and backed to the south. We took in Touleier's spinnaker for the night, leaving her moving well under the American-cut mainsail and jib. We could not be off the Bashee until the following evening at the earliest, if the wind held. In the crowded shipping lane I decided to rig a spotlight high in the rigging to illuminate the sails so that we would not be run down by some unwatch-ful steamer. Touleier held close to the coast and at intervals the lighted resorts stood out clearer almost than the navigational lights. A thin veil of spume from the breakers hung over the cliffs. It was scarcely necessary for me to listen to the radio met. reports to know that the main front had bypassed the Cape -the change of wind direction southwards was a certain pointer that we had nothing to expect, or to fear, from this particular south-wester.

  As we sat alone in the cockpit-she was half-turned away from me, gazing towards the land - she suddenly said:

  'Did you really see the Flying Dutchman, Ian?'

  She had never spoken of it again since that day when first the news of the Gemsbok panel reached us. My stomach knotted at her words. Gone was the quiet pleasure of sailing.

  ‘I told you, I saw a ship, an ancient ship, sailing against the wind.'

  There was a long pause. She watched the distant coastline. 'You didn't link her in your mind with
the Flying Dutchman!' 'No.’

  She got up quickly, turned to me and dropped on her knees. She scanned my face, deeply, tenderly.

  'My darling - are you quite sure of what you saw?'

  In that moment, I would have traded away a dozen Waratahs for her.

  I leaned forward and touched a wisp of short hair above her ear. She would not let my fingers go.

  'When I was thrown against the rear of the bridge by the big wave,' I explained, 'I wasn't stunned. My sole concern at that moment was to prevent Walvis Bay from broaching to. Nothing was further from my thoughts than the Flying Dutchman-or the Waratah. My only thought was to save my ship. I grabbed the wheel. Then I saw. It was a ship, and she was close, between Walvis Bay and the land. She was darkened. It was all too quick to distinguish any details. I mean, I couldn't distinguish gunports, deckhouses, porthole lights or anything like that.'

  'No human figures? A man with ... with .. .’

  'A bloodied sword? - No.'

  'It was more an outline, then?’

  'She seemed almost on top of us. I saw a high prow and a towering, square stern, and I noticed particularly the way she was heading - south-west. That meant she was sailing right into the eye of the wind.'

  'The sails, what did the sails look like?'

  I paused and considered. 'Now you come to ask, I don't remember seeing any sails. I should, being a sailor. But what struck me most forcibly was the way she was going. Both her stern and bow were quite distinct, both were high and well defined. There was no mistaking them. It was for all the world like one of those pictures you've seen of an old-fashioned caravel.'

  'And you and Phillips-are the only two who claim to have seen this ancient ship? You are sure there is no other record of her? ‘

  'Certain,' I replied. 'You might even discredit my sighting by saying that I had been subconsciously influenced by all my delving into the Waratah disaster. But Phillips himself-no! When Phillips sighted what he himself called the Flying Dutchman, he had no idea even that the Waratah was missing.

  He had brought the Clan Macintyre successfully through a great storm. Half his ordeal was already behind him. No, what Phillips saw, he saw in daylight, not at night.'

  She looked at me sharply, and then helped me slack off the mainsail under the dropping wind, waiting, in her quiet way, for me to continue.

  'Let's discount my sighting for the moment. Phillips knew all about sailing ships. He stated categorically that the mizzen of the caravel he saw was raked back, and the foremast forward.'

  'Your sighting is so recent, and yet Phillips' is much more explicit,' she said quietly.

  'I can't say I saw the masts or the sails,' I went on. 'But I saw the hull clearly. The high bow and stern were exactly as Phillips describes them. And she was definitely sailing against the wind. It scared Phillips. He drank cocoa. I felt more like a shot of rum.'

  'Were you frightened. Ian, like he was?’

  'I knew only fear,' I replied sombrely. ‘I have tried since, over and again, to try and rationalize it. I still go cold when I have a nightmare and see right ahead of me that dark, old-fashioned hull and Walvis Bay about to crash into it. There were seconds only between us and certain death, that I know.'

  She turned away and spoke so softly that I had to crane to hear what she said.

  ‘I saw nothing, yet I felt it all, hundreds of miles away, that night. It's impossible to describe the feeling. It was the same that first day I came aboard and saw your photographs.'

  We left it at that. But had I 'felt' the Waratah then, I would have put the yacht about and nothing would ever have induced me to go in search of her again. As it was, the wind and the sea were quieting; it was a joy to have her close against me in the cold chill as the night wore on. There were no ghosts at sea that night. She was warm, she was alive, she was mine.

  The lid of the Waratah’s coffin lifted next night, and the ghosts escaped.

  At dawn Touleier was south of the Bashee.

  We had sailed all day northwards, never out of sight of the great forests and high cliffs which come down almost to the water's edge. Far out at sea, even, we could hear the breakers. It is an iron shore. One scarcely ever finds a seashell which has not been smashed by the force of the waves. We both grew more tense as Touleier approached the Bashee, and she was very silent. We contented ourselves with minor tasks about the yacht and left unsaid many things. We did not talk about the Waratah.

  The coastline is cut by innumerable rivers, and each one seems to have an exquisite lagoon at its mouth. In the first dim light I could see solid columns of mist marching down each river to the sea, shaped and squared by the cliffs on either side.

  One- two- three flashes.

  Bashee Mouth light.

  Tafline screamed from below.

  For a moment I sat rigid. Her voice seemed to hang against the dark backdrop of the cliffs, the shadowy forests and the river mouth white with breakers.

  I raced to the cabin.

  She was sitting up on the bunk, wide-eyed, shaking. 'The storm, Ian! That wind ... !'

  I held her, trembling. In the dim light coming through the porthole I could see that consciousness had not come fully into her eyes.

  'My darling, the wind is gone. It's a quiet, still dawn. There's no storm.'

  ‘I heard . . .' she shook her head as if to clear it. 'But he stood here, and his oilskins were wet.1 She buried her face against me. 'Thank God, it's you, my darling. It was only a dream.'

  I soothed her. But the strange, deep eyes were full of shadows.

  ‘I can see him now, standing by the bunk,' she said, smiling a little wryly. 'I could hear the wind, and his oilskins were dripping'

  'Who was standing?' I asked gently, cold at the recollection of Sawyer

  'It was just an ordinary person,' she said hesitatingly. 'No not him. There was nothing like that Just a man.' She looked at me searchingly. 'His face was like yours, a little. I could hear the gale. His oilskins were streaming wet, it's all so vivid. Why, what is the matter?'

  It was I who was trembling. She had on almost nothing except a thin slip of a thing; I could see her breasts and her body now where she had pushed aside the bedclothes in her agitation.

  Where before I had seen the mystic the sea-ancestry, the knight with unadorned armour against the panoply of the Waratah in the lists. Now I saw the woman.

  She sat and held my gaze. She extended her arm to touch me. Not taking her eyes from me, she slipped off the wispy thing. She brought my hands to her breasts in the tender lycanthropy of love. We searched for each other's eyes, lips, hair. Then her lips went cold. Her body lost its fervour to be one with mine.

  She drew back. She wept -a quiet, passionless sobbing, a grief as deep, it seemed, as the passion of the moment before.

  'We could love, we could forget,' she said softly, 'but we can't forget, and it would come and take our love away from us. It would only be pretending. You are committed and I am committed. We are not free to commit our love until we find the Waratah. I said before, and my body and my heart say it now, until we are free of this burden, we will not be able to realize our love properly.'

  All I could say, was: 'We're at the place now. South of the Bashee.'

  She ran her hands over her breasts and down her thighs; she clasped them round her knees and hid her face. She gave a last broken, half-sob.

  I moved to comfort her, but she shook her head without looking up. 'I'll dress and come up to you in the cockpit.'

  As I went to the door, she said in a smothered voice, 'When we have the Waratah, I am yours.'

  She was tense, alert, when she came on deck as if being at the Bashee would in itself solve everything. She had come across at once to me at the wheel. She did not kiss me, or stand close, but faced me from the other side of the helm, her hands warm on mine by contrast with the stainless steel circle of the wheel.

  ‘I know now you will never love me less,' was all she said.

  But as we ghosted
through the placid water towards the land, I felt her tenseness and disappointment growing at the sight of the empty sea. With daylight, we could make out the deep cleft the Bashee makes between the forested hills, the signal station on a grassy cliff with more forest for a backdrop, and a group of thatched holiday rondavels nearby.

  Then the bubble of pent-up feeling burst.

  'It's so ordinary!' she exclaimed. 'There's just nothing here, Ian!'

  I took in the sails and Touleier lay in the easy swell, perhaps a mile offshore.

  'It's the normality of it like this which breaks down the picture of whatever I saw in Walvis Bay's path that night,' I replied. I was tired, drained of feeling. Like that moment at the flower-sellers, I hated the Waratah. But, again, I knew she was right.

  'Yet,' she went on, and I still recall her vehemence-'where we are now, maybe right under our keel, a great liner went down and an airliner too. I feel I want to tear the sea apart and look.'

  Tear apart! I remember her words now: the answer was all too improbable, too simple, when one came to think of it. I wonder if we would have accepted it, had we known then, without having to live it out?

  She jumped on the rail and gazed astern, as if to probe that gentle sea for the undefined spot where Alistair had died.

  'I didn't expect anything like this!' She was puzzled, angry. ‘I took it for granted there would be a sinister sea, a sinister setting, somehow. My reason tells me your brother died somewhere right here. You nearly did, too, but I see nothing. We have the most concrete proof that your father sent you a message from "south of the Bashee", but where, where?'