He dialled the knob that made the autopilot cycle quicker. It immediately cut out some of the yawing. After watching for a while he was still not satisfied and took over the wheel himself.
In order to increase speed he steered to the south-east every now and then before returning to their original course. A few times during his watch their slow progress was disrupted as the threat of squalls was realised. They caught only the edge of a cell of rain and wind as he cut and twisted through some very large waves at seven knots, trying to avoid it. On two other occasions, however, he decided to take it on the chin as he saw no easy escape route from the solid blobs on the radar screen. Every time he decided to let Madeleine sleep and reefed the mainsail by himself. He did not want his focus to be interfered with and he felt that he could handle it.
At least the fresh water washed off the salt a bit – on the outside. As far as the inside was concerned, he was sure that he could get a company on Bermuda to steam-clean and shampoo his carpets.
As he battled with the sail settings he once again wished that he had taken a more active part when they were sailing across the Southern Atlantic. It was simply different if you had to do it all by yourself.
On the other hand, half the fun was learning to sail the boat.
***
The morning of day three broke blood red, in contrast to the day before when it was all mellow and gold. The waves were much lower, seven to ten feet but they were still pounding at the yacht, hissing angrily as they passed, trying to push the boat off course. Above him in the rigging the sound effects have not let up either. He looked up to see where the thudding, crashing and smacking came from that accompanied him all night. He had a growing sense that something was going to break somewhere but he could not put a finger on it.
It was time to call Madeleine. “Come see the sunrise!” he yelled through the companionway. “It’s spectacular.”
There was no answer. “Madeleine!’ he called as he climbed below. Still no answer. He knocked on the cabin door, the one that she used for sleeping. After the third knock he opened it. Madeleine was lying fast asleep in a sleeping bag that she had appropriated from him without asking, tangled hair all over the pillow and dead to the world. He was not surprised. He wondered how much she had managed to sleep, given the conditions. But watches were watches. Duty was duty.
“Madeleine!” he called.
For a moment he thought that she was playing the fool with him, but she was not. He could see that she was breathing deeply. He reached over to grab a foot. Just then an urge overpowered him completely. It was massive and took immediate command of all his senses. He put a foot forward toward the figure on the bunk, realising at the same time that he could not control himself. Wordlessly, he screamed a protest in his mind and it somehow worked. He recoiled, staggering back against the bulkhead where he knocked his head. He was completely shocked. Where did that come from? He had no plans to get physical with this girl! On the contrary. There were bigger things at play here, things that were to happen on Bermuda. So what was this all about? He shook his head to get his mind clear again and then he noticed that Madeleine was watching him calmly.
“Is it time?” she asked.
“I’ve given you more time as well,” he said. “Looks as if you needed it. I called several times. If you are quick, you can see the sun come up. It will be spectacular this morning.” He turned away sharply and breathed deeply. Did she notice anything?
Ten minutes later she joined him. Together they watched the sun rise. It was a giant ruby-red disk that pushed itself up over a succession of wave crests. There was blood everywhere. In the sky. On the sea. Reflecting from the white tops of the waves. Reflecting from the surfaces of the yacht around them. They absorbed the spectacle without saying a word. When the sun had definitely risen and changed to its usual appearance Grant could still not say a thing. The experience in the cabin was too close. He wondered if he could trust himself. Madeleine, on the other hand, seemed to be her sweet self.
“Shall I make breakfast for us?” she asked.
“Who is the gourmet chef on the boat?”
Madeleine lifted his empty coffee cup from its holder and disappeared down the companionway. Grant fixed his eyes on the crest of the next wave that was rolling in and firmed up his grip on the wheel in anticipation.
***
Master and apprentice were fully aware of the magnanimity and generosity of the king when they settled on grass mats in the largest house of the settlement. It was a place built for gathering and discussion and the smell of fresh grass confirmed that it was very recently constructed. The master looked out toward the old hut where he used to meet the father of the current potentate. He remembered the rows of brandy flasks that the old man kept inside there, a visible attestation to the power of his trade, which was partly paid in brandy, and to his own alcoholism. He had chided the old man about his taste for the white man’s firewater and reminded him of the wonderful drinks that their own women made from the nectar of the sugar bushes that grew in abundance just behind the king’s residence. The old king ignored his comments. Now he was dead.
The son sat on a low tripod at the head of the circle. On tripods in other parts of the circle sat kings from other tribes. They had arrived several days before for the ceremony that introduced the old king to his forefathers and they were still there, even though all of that was now done. The master found their continued presence intriguing. To find out more, he went walkabout on the previous afternoon, putting a few casual questions here and there and by now he had a fair idea of what it was all about. Even he, however, was to be surprised by the scale of the vision of the new king of the Chainouqua.
The master came prepared. While the kings were still assembling, he grabbed inside his bag and handed each one a small parcel of carefully bound leaves. The old king of the Hanqumqua took his parcel and immediately tears came into his eyes. The Hanqumqua were renowned for growing the best dagga in the world, some of it on the moist ledges and terraces of Snake Mountain, an area that was now inaccessible to them.
“Just look at this,” he said, stroking the little parcel. “Look at the length of the leaves, smell the aroma. Where do you get quality like this?”
It was a master stroke of the old sorcerer to have harvested a few bundles of the choicest leaves on the day before they had left. Each one of the kings appreciated his gift, even the king of the Chainouqua, although he probably realised that his gift was now much smaller than originally intended.
Once everyone was seated, it was the king of the Chainouqua who spoke. Apart from Hadah he was the youngest, but he oozed the belligerence of a pure warrior. “Sorcerers,” he said, “Welcome in our midst.”
The master smiled quietly, again remembering the little bundle that he pronounced fit to live and become king one day. That day had arrived.
“It took the death of my much revered father to bring all the chiefs together,” he continued. Heads nodded in remembrance of the late king. “We could not allow such an opportunity to go wasted. I will now ask the king of the Cochoqua, who is the oldest amongst us, to explain to you what we have in mind.”
The king of the Cochoqua waited until all the attention was on him. “Do you remember,” he asked, addressing his question to the master, “what happened to us when my father was still king of the Cochoqua, when we lost almost all our cattle?”
“I remember very well,” said the master. “It was hurtful to all of us.”
“There was a small misunderstanding between us and the Dutch,” said the king. “Just a small one, but the next thing we knew the soldiers came and started chasing us around. Our soldiers had no time to get the fighting oxen together to shield them from the bullets, so the soldiers did what they wanted and took a lot of cattle.”
“That was not the end of it,” said the master.
“No. Our men were angry. We wanted to take the cattle back, so there was war. Unfortunately the Dutch on their horses were too much f
or us and we lost the battle. Again the Dutch took many, many heads of cattle. Do you remember that?”
“It was so many,” said the master, that the cloud of dust kicked up by the hooves hid the sun from our eyes. Aitsi-!uma was still alive. She and I stood and watched as the Dutch drove the cattle to Cape Town.” At the mention of her name an involuntary shudder passed through the circle.
“That is our history,” continued the king. “Others have a similar story to tell. Who can nowadays go back into the valley by Snake Mountain, or take their cattle, sheep and goats into the shadow of Sea Mountain where it always rains, even in the dry season?”
Heads nodded in agreement.
“The Chainouqua, the Hessequa and the Gouriqua think that they are safe here behind the Great Mountains. But are they? Recent history tells us that the Dutch will expand and take our pastures and out watering places from us even here.”
The master nodded. It was an old theme, shared by concerned grey heads and young warriors alike and it could lead to heated discussion, especially when quantities of the fermented drink from the sugar bush was in evidence. When everybody calmed down, however, nobody was nearer to a solution. He had already guessed that the kings had something more concrete in mind this time and that he and his apprentice were going to play a role in it.
“Aitsi-!uma did more than just look on,” said the king of the Cochoqua.
“Yes, that’s true,” said the master.
“Did she not prepare potions and called the sea serpents?” asked the king.
“She called on the spirit who lives in Snake Mountain,” said the master.
“And was there not a mighty storm that destroyed the fleet of the Dutch in the bay?”
“It was so indeed.”
“Unfortunately it was not enough. It took them a few years to recover and they stayed. This time, however, there is something happening that will make a difference.”
The master nodded his anticipation. He was about be enlightened about something he was unaware of until now.
“The Dutch are dying. They have brought a sickness on their ships from Holland and they are dying from it. It is called the pox.” He looked askance at the master, who said nothing. He had heard of the pox only the day before and knew too little about it.
“It is a Dutch sickness,” he continued. “It makes them weak since everybody dies from it, men, women and children.”
“It is our chance!” said the new young king of the Chainouqua, who could not contain himself anymore. “If most of them die from sickness and the ships are destroyed on top if it they will all go back home!”
“Their ships must be destroyed again,” said the king of the Cochoqua.
The master did not respond at first. Even Hadah was uncomfortable with the faith put into the two of them since he realised that there was no way out for the sorcerers of Snake Mountain without losing serious face. Eventually the master spoke. “We will need strong medicine for something like this.”
Everybody understood what he meant.
“How many will you need from us?” asked the king of the Cochoqua. He remembered very well the price demanded by Aitsi-!uma for the previous operation of this nature. It was still being talked about by the women in his kraal and not fondly so.
The master spread his hands in front of him. He calculated the time available. It was a well- known fact that the homeward bound fleet was due in about a month to two months’ time. The farmers were planting for it and even these KhoiKhoi were making large quantities of butter for it. There was the distance to Snake Mountain, to the place where they had to slaughter these babies, that came into the reckoning as well. With Hadah, however, there were two of them to do the carrying. “We will need ten,” he said. The meeting fell silent. Even though they wanted it, finding ten malformed babies in such a short space of time was going to be a big ask, perhaps impossible.
“We will provide the ten babies,” said the new king of the Chainouqua resolutely.
For the next month the sorcerers travelled far and wide over the lands on the landward side of the Great Mountains. Whenever there was a birth, they were there to appraise the new arrival. Word about their activities spread quickly and nowhere were they welcomed. The hands of the women who handed them the buttermilk that they craved were often shaking and the joyous laughter with which they were initially greeted made way for a sullen silence. Wherever they went, they had to be accompanied by the king’s warriors, since they feared for their lives. Hadah found this unfair, since they were only acting in the interest of the people.
Three times they made the journey to Snake Mountain, each of them with a newborn baby in his leather bag. The master carried a pouch with a good supply of the fat leaves of a plant that grew in the land of the Attaqua and which they traded for dagga. They gave a leaf to the infants to chew on whenever there was a sound and soon they were asleep again.
They chewed on the fat leaves themselves and Hadah was amazed at how it took away all his tiredness on the road. It allowed them to cover the distance to their mountain in one night as opposed to the two nights and three days they initially needed to get to their temporary home in the king’s kraal. The inhabitants of the areas that they ghosted through never knew they were there, unless they noticed their tracks in the morning.
With all their endeavour, however, once the first month was over, they had only managed the six babies. There were just no more that they knew of. Time was getting short. The return fleet was due to arrive any day. There was, however, something else that was also essential.
“We have to travel to Cape Town,” he said. “We need to find parts of ships.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Food came in the form of a wonderful omelette, spiced with bacon, cheddar cheese, green peppers and mushrooms. Grant could smell it the moment Madeleine appeared through the companionway to hand him his plate. He switched to autopilot to free up his hands and just kept an eye on the weather side as he tucked in. He was still embarrassed about the earlier incident in Madeleine’s cabin, but he had a plan.
He spoke between mouthfuls. “Tell me, with regards to all these stories about the Bermuda Triangle, what is actually so interesting about it all?”
“On the one hand we Bermudians don’t like being associated with something negative and on the other hand it is part of the lure of the region. What is it you want to know?”
“What do you actually know?”
“There have been mysterious disappearances.”
“How?”
“Well, things may have been happening in the Triangle for many years, but it was only in the sixties of the last century that somebody coined the phrase ‘Bermuda Triangle’. He was a chap called Vincent Gaddis. He noticed that for a about a hundred years ships and aeroplanes had been disappearing in mysterious fashion in the area covered by the Triangle, that is, an area with Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Florida as its extremities.”
“What do you mean by ‘mysterious disappearances?”
“Well, when a ship or a plane goes down, you usually find a debris field. In all these cases, however, there were no debris fields. It is as if they simply disappeared into thin air. There was no oil slick, now wreckage and no bodies. The other strange thing was that it happened so suddenly. You’d expect a distress signal if there was trouble. In most cases, however, the ship or the plane simply disappeared without any signal. In the few cases where there was radio contact, the people on the vessels seemed strangely disorientated. They had lost their bearings, including the horizon.”
“It sounds a bit spooky.”
“It is a mystery that nobody has been able to explain satisfactorily.”
“There must be a lot of theories out there. How big were the ships that disappeared?”
“There were some really big ships. For instance, there was a Navy supply ship with hundreds of people on board, which simply disappeared just after the First World War. Nobody ever found a sign of her. She was the Cyclops. Other ships
were of a similar size. There was one carrying insecticide and another carrying manganese. What got people’s attention as well was that the weather was often totally calm. The American East Coast is called the Atlantic Graveyard not for nothing, but usually there is a storm, or a ship strikes a reef, which means that you know the cause.”
“And there are remains.”
“Yes, there usually is wreckage of some sort. A ship will go down and it will leak oil and air bubbles for months or even years. But not these ships that I mentioned.”
“So we are talking big ships only?”
“There have been smaller ones, as well as aeroplanes.”
“All of this happened during the wars?”
“We are going back into the nineteenth century, way before the two world wars, or the Cold War era. These things may have been happening a long time already, only nobody noticed because it was in the time before ships and planes carried radio equipment.”
“I’ve heard about those five planes that disappeared.”
“Six, actually. First five and then another one. There were five TBM Avenger bombers on a routine flying exercise. They took off from Fort Lauderdale in Florida in clear weather and a calm sea below. They were to complete a triangle over the sea, about a hundred and forty miles out, then to another point and back. In this case, there was an emergency call. The flight leader called the ground station, saying that they had an emergency. He could not see the land, which was supposed to be visible from where they were. As I said, it was a clear day. Also, when the ground control told them to head west, they told him that they did not know where west was. They were totally confused. The sun was setting in the west, it being late afternoon, but they could not see it. They could not even see the sea below them. The flight leader was panicking and completely at a loss as to what to do. As a result he relinquished command of the flight to another pilot. A little while after that they lost communication in mid-sentence.”
“And nothing was ever found?”
The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure Page 10