The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure

by Jake von Alpen

  “They must have been very clever indeed. Our people pray to the moon but these people could ride on it. How did they manage that? Can we do it?”

  “Aitsi-!uma could not tell me how it was possible. I’ve pondered this often when I see the new moon rise from the sea, wondering if it will bring those people back again and if they will teach us how to get rid of the Dutch. Perhaps they could even teach us how to ride on the moon.”

  “I don’t want to leave my country,” said Hadah.

  “Then we will not learn how to ride on the moon.”

  “Has the serpent always been living in the mountain?”

  “No. There was a time when there was no serpent in our mountain. People knew about sea serpents, however. They climbed on top of Sea Mountain and burned potions and danced to keep the Sea Serpents away. Then calamity struck.”

  “What happened?”

  “Here where we are running now, it is dry, right?”

  “It is dry, yes.”

  “Well, at that time, long ago, the sea rose up and covered this land completely. You could not get from Snake Mountain to Sea Mountain anymore. This was all sea. That is why the sand is so white. It is sea sand.”

  “How long ago was that? Was Aitsi-!uma born then?”

  “It was long before her time. But do you see the problem? The people could no longer go to Sea Mountain to ward off the sea serpents and that is why one of them could come around and make its home in our mountain.”

  “So there are more serpents?”

  “There are many more.”

  “Why does our sea serpent have such an angry face?”

  “Because it is hurt and angry. Long ago there was a big war. This war was so violent that the waves of the sea reached up to the stars and washed some of the stars from the heavens. Those stars became sea serpents themselves and they fought in the battles. Our sea serpent was once a star and got wounded in the battle. It managed to crawl into our mountain and now it lives there. It is just like a mortally wounded lion. The lion knows that it has to die sometime but before it dies it will take as many people or animals or even trees and grass with it.”

  “Will it destroy our people?

  “It will, if we do not appease it.”

  “But it likes us.”

  “It likes us because we are the chosen ones.”

  Hadah was not finished with his line of questioning. “Why does it want the babies?”

  The master pulled his face into a mass of folds and jogged on for quite a while before he answered.

  “Perhaps it is because the serpent wants to do the most damage it can. The worst thing you can do to a human is to prevent its spirit from expanding. The human spirit comes into the world in order to grow and expand into a mature man or woman. The serpent is denying these little babies. All of that power is not spent on anything in life. It goes unchanged into the serpent, who uses it for its own purposes.”

  Hadah mulled over the old man’s wisdom as he jogged on. Jogging became much easier now, since the distances that they had covered over the past weeks made him very fit. Eventually he was ready with his next question.

  “Why,” he asked, “when we slaughter the babies, do our manhoods go all hard?”

  “It is the spirit moving in us,” said the master. “In the days when we had many babies Aitsi-!uma would have relations with little boys of just a few days old and she would encourage me to do the same with the little girls. Sometimes they died like that and that is the reason why I have not taught it to you.”

  They were slowly being overtaken by a four-span of horses pulling a closed carriage. As it came closer the master got off the track and jogged several paces to the side, where he stopped. He had tasted the wrong end of the long driver’s whip before. The driver and all the inhabitants were Dutch. There were only women in the carriage. Pale faces under severe bonnets stared expressionlessly at them, unseeing.

  “Something is wrong,” said the master, expressing his usual keen perception.

  They waded through the Eerste River, which flowed all the way from Stellenbosch and refilled their bottle gourds. Not long afterward the master led Hadah a hundred paces off the track, seaward. He stopped in an expanse of sour figs which covered an entire dune with its finger-like leaves. Hadah was pleased. This was food that he grew up with. They managed to find several handfuls of ripe ones ready for eating and even more for storing in their leather bags. They were careful not to overdo it. Too many sour figs could cause a stomach to run severely.

  The rough features of Sea Mountain were becoming clearer by the time the sun stood directly above their heads. Their track joined with the busy one leading to Stellenbosch and the traffic picked up as well. A total of three carriages passed them, one heading for Cape Town and two heading toward Stellenbosch. On each occasion they got off the track, stopped and stared.

  The sun was slanting steeply toward Sea Mountain when the tired travellers approached a hill nowadays called Tygerberg. There were some herders here who looked after flocks that they grazed on the sweet grass that covered the hill. They were met with the usual mixture of respect and distaste but the herders shared what they had. They also shared some news that the master found disconcerting. Yes, the Dutch were dying, but so were the KhoiKhoi.

  The master sat at the fire until late asking questions of his hosts. He wanted to know everything, including what the sickness looked like in people, how they contracted it and how long they lived once they had contracted it. While this was going on they were picking bits off a huge salted snoek fish – payment to the herders for their labour – until only the bare bones were left. Salted Snoek fish was a favourite with the master but tonight he did not seem to enjoy it. His mind seemed to be elsewhere.

  ***

  “More toast?” asked Madeleine.

  “Thanks, but no. This was nice.” Grant handed his plate back.

  “I’ll put the dirty plates in the sink for now,” said Madeleine with emphasis, as she backed down the companionway, “for you to rinse and stack in the dishwasher when you come down.”

  “You’re very eager! But in fact, you are not taking over yet,” said Grant. “I am coming down with you since we have a job below. We need to secure the inside of the boat. We have too many things that fly around when the going gets rough. We’ll work from stern to bow.”

  Once they were done to Grant’s satisfaction he returned to the cockpit. “I’m going to stay on the wheel for a little while longer,” he said. “The waves are lower but we still have the odd ten footer coming our way.”

  “You just don’t want to stack the dishes away,” said Madeleine.

  “That’s not true,” said Grant. “Why don’t you join me here and we continue to solve the mystery of the Triangle?”

  “Why are you so interested? We are not going into the Triangle, are we?”

  “Nope. As I showed you, we beat against the wind until we get to that point on the map that we’ve decided on and then we reach back without touching the Triangle.”

  “What does it mean to reach again?” asked Madeleine.

  “Wind on the wing,” he said. “Put differently, we take the wind at ninety degrees over the right hand side of the boat, more commonly called the starboard side. It means fast sailing. The reasons why I’m interested are purely those of the tourist. The Triangle is such a well-known thing and here we are right next to it. It’s just natural to ask about it and you seem to have it all on your fingertips. It is an opportunity that I cannot let pass.”

  “You can get crazy if you delve into it too deeply,” said Madeleine.

  “But you are still ok?”

  “I am.”

  “You hope.”

  “Yes, I hope so. I’ve done my research but I’ve not taken it too far. It’s never been an obsession.”

  “Are there people who make it an obsession?”

  “Oh, yes. There is my old science teacher.”

  “Your science teacher! I suppose he shoots it all
down.”

  “It is actually just the other way round. He is a believer and too deeply into it.”

  “That’s a bit unexpected.”

  “Exactly. Isn’t it strange?”

  “What is his take on it?”

  “He uses the Triangle phenomena to teach Einstein’s relativity theory.”

  “What! Now that does sound batty! Were you in his class?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And you understood what it was all about?”

  “Not at first. At the beginning I was the last in the class, which is why he called me his slow electron.”

  “That did not go down well?”

  “No, but it helped me to understand some of it.”

  “What did you understand?”

  “E equals MC square.”

  “What?”

  “That is the formula for relativity theory. ‘E’ stands for energy.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember now. It’s been a while. I actually studied that formula somewhere but what does it have to do with the Triangle?”

  “According to my science teacher, everything.”

  “How?”

  “It’s like this. I told you earlier of the people who had disappeared. But not everybody disappeared. Some people survived and we have their reports.”

  “That sounds interesting. What do they say?”

  “For starters, there are quite a number of common factors in their stories.”

  “Like what?”

  “In all known cases the electronics go dead and the compass starts spinning. The engines still function, though, although sometimes at a slower pace.”

  “How did they escape, then?”

  “Before I get to that, there’s more. They all talk about a grey mist, sometimes eggnog in colour.”

  “Mists are common after storms. Also, the warm water of the Gulf Stream will generate mist as it gets in contact with colder air on its way to the north.”

  “There are conditions when you expect mist and others when mist or fog of any kind should be absent. We are talking mist when there was not supposed to by any mist on the sea or even clouds in the sky.”

  “Aha, and the history of the Avengers form part this body of evidence, because they could not even see the sun. They must have been flying in the mist.”

  “Exactly. He would have called you one of the fast electrons in his class.”

  “Tell me, does he actually believe in all of this?”

  “He seems to have it down pat.”

  “Well, continue then.”

  “There is the story of this guy who flew in his plane from the Bahamas to Miami. He thought he was in a very large cloud. Eventually he saw a gap in it and he flew through the gap. When he got to Florida, he realised that he had travelled much faster than he had thought. In fact, it was impossible to travel so fast.”

  “He had lost time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has his story been verified?”

  “He had two passengers with him in the plane. They had all observed the same thing. Once they got out on the airfield in Miami, however, they were so spooked that they did not say a word about it - not to each other, not to anybody. Not for a long time. Then the pilot heard about other people who had had similar strange experiences and he started making enquiries. That is how their story became known.”

  “What were the other cases that they compared their own experiences to?”

  “There was a pilot called Jenson who called in to say that he was lost in a fog. Then they lost contact. Eventually he made contact again. He was still flying but his position was so far away that they could not believe it. He did not have enough fuel in his tanks to have flown that far.”

  “Did he come back?”

  “No, he disappeared without a trace. There are several other stories of aeroplanes. For instance, there was this Catalina. Again, there was a whole crew on board, so it was not just one man’s story. The horizon disappeared in a mist. Then the compass started spinning faster and faster. They had a lot of instrumentation on board but all of it got into a funk. When they checked, however, the power was still there. Everything had power but the instruments were not working. After four hours of this they simply flew out of it and then there was no sign of the mist. They had a printer on board that printed current satellite pictures but the next picture showed no cloud anywhere near them or in the area that they flew through. What had happened was a total impossibility.

  “So the mist comes and goes?”

  “Yes, but there is more to it than that. It appears to be very localised. One day it happened to a ship that was towing a barge. All the instruments showed funny readings or no reading at all and there was a cloud, but this is the interesting part, because the cloud was only enveloping the barge, not the ship that was pulling it. There was otherwise no mist on the sea, only around the barge. This has led him to the conclusion that the grey cloud or mist wraps around a particular vessel. It’s not a general mist. People in those vessels were fooled into thinking that it was a widespread condition but it was not. A grey mist attached itself to the ship or plane while elsewhere there was no mist.”

  “So the grey mist actually attacks a specific aeroplane or ship?”

  “Yes, it appears that way.”

  “Has he got any theory as to what the grey mist is all about?”

  “That is the point. He said it was no mist in the ordinary sense. It was an electronic fog. To understand its effect we have to go into Relativity Theory.”

  ***

  The next morning the two sorcerers did not re-join the main road to Cape Town. Instead, they headed over the grassy flank of Tygerberg Hill directly toward the Atlantic Ocean which lay in front of them. Between them and the ocean was another road, a busy one that led up the West Coast. As they approached, they converged with an ox wagon that carried fresh produce for the market in the city. A young boy was leading the procession with a leather strap attached to a point between the first two oxen. An older KhoiKhoi sat perched on the front of the wagon and levitated a long whip over the backs of the animals, producing a sharp crack every now and then. A third man walked on the side of the oxen, also carrying a whip. For all this activity, the wagon moved no faster than a slow walking pace, the metal bands on the thin wheels digging into the sand by the width of two hands. The driver wore a wide-brimmed hat that once had distinct contours but now flopped over his shoulders in a way that made both master and apprentice sniff with delight. He lifted a portion of it and Hadah recognized an uncle.

  “Your mother is waiting to see you,” he called.

  “I will visit soon,” called Hadah. He grew up in a coastal settlement not two hours’ walk away and he knew exactly where the load of cabbages was from. They have practically arrived in his backyard now but the older sorcerer was his master and he followed where he led, which was directly to the sea.

  The master stopped on the beach. “Look for pieces of ships,” he said.

  They headed in the direction of the town and examined every piece of wood that was not the usual driftwood. There were quite a number of pieces, especially old, crumbling ones higher up where the sand was dry. Hadah pointed them out.

  “There are pieces here from every part of a ship,” he said. “We used to play with them when I was a child.”

  “Of course,” said the master. “Ships were smashed to pieces on the rocks over there just a few years ago and even others before them. Their remains are here on these dunes where the high tide left them. Nobody else had use of these broken things so they left them here for us.”

  They did not put entire planks in their bags but stepped behind the dunes where they found handy rocks, which they used to pound their finds to pieces. Of every plank they took only a sample.

  “Take care,” said the master. “We only take pieces of the Dutch ships, not of the fishing boats.”

  They found straight planks, some bent planks, some painted, some plain. There were also some strangely form
ed wooden things with wheels in them and portions of sea chests and barrels. Everything got smashed and a piece extracted. They even cut up an old rope. They marvelled at its thickness and agreed that it could only have come from a very big ship.

  When their bags were three quarters full they stopped.

  “We’ll get some more on the way back,” said the master.

  Hadah wanted to continue to the town but the master stopped him. “No,” he said. “We will eat some shellfish first.”

  “OK,” said Hadah and saw a chance to show off his superior knowledge of the sea. He came from a tribe of beachcombers after all. “We will have to wait for the low tide in order to get to the rocks with the food.”

  “Then we wait,” said the master.

  They found shade under some hardy bushes and propped themselves up on their bags.

  “Do you think we could have parts of the ships that went down in the time of Aitsi-!uma?” asked Hadah.

  “It is possible,” said the master.

  “What happened on that day?”

  “It was a big day,” said the master. “There were more than thirty ships in the Bay. Then suddenly this violent storm came up. It was so powerful that the ships’ anchors started slipping. The tall waves pushed them out on the rocks where the sea beat them to pieces. Many ships in the fleet were destroyed. After the storm there were pieces of ships and cargo all along the beaches. I am quite sure that we have some of those ships in our bags.”

  “That must have been a good time for the people living here.”

  “They thought so, yes, but the Company had forestalled them. They put soldiers all along the Bay. The soldiers put up gallows at certain places. They had orders to catch anyone who set foot on the beach and hang him right there. There were survivors from the ships lying in the shallow waves, too weak to drag themselves up to dry land. Many of them died there because nobody was allowed to help. Those are the laws of the Company. Cargo is more important than people. I learnt something on that day.”

  “But Aitsi-!uma was happy.”

  “Aitsi-!uma was very happy. It was a very good day for our business.”