The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure

by Jake von Alpen

  It was a happy little community where free spirits and conservatism co-existed in good-natured dialogue, often having meals together, mostly sponsored by the spinsters. Nothing could have prepared them for the shock that was to come and nobody could explain it, although the would-be minister later referred darkly to tormenting spirits sent to afflict certain people.

  It was the lecturer who seemingly lost it all. It was October and hot, with new life pushing so hard in the vines that you could almost hear it. He was plagued with passions, sexual fantasies of the most fantastic sort. It drove him to distraction, to the point where he had trouble doing his work at the university. He was so intensely aware of the sexuality of his young female students that seemed to burst forth at him from under light fabrics that he could hardly concentrate. He needed a woman but he had none.

  At night he walked half-crazed through his darkened cottage, all in the nude. Then one night, sometime after twelve, it happened. The two spinsters woke up. Rocks were landing on their tin roof. Being very practical in these matters, they decided against opening the door but moved a curtain just a bit. Something was moving amongst the shrubs, barely fifteen metres away. They pointed an extra powerful flashlight at it, something that they kept for emergencies such as these. The beam caught him clearly, the lecturer. Stringy and white, not only was he wanting of a single shred of textile, but his body indisputably appeared to be caught in the most intense grip of lust.

  They were delighted and only later on, after reflection, shocked by the sight. The lecturer disappeared in a flash of course, dropping the rock, leaving the spinsters with empty space to look at. Frantically they sent their beam all around for another sighting but it was not to be.

  The lecturer apologised profusely the next day. He simply did not know what came over him, he said. After the incident he kept to himself. At the end of the term the neighbours saw workers in overalls load his things into a closed truck. He moved far, far away, to a small university in a forgotten corner of the Eastern Cape.

  The spirit kept on searching, asking, whispering in inaudible ways. Then it found another one who seemed responsive. This time it was a female, the young wife of a farmer.

  ***

  Just after twelve Grant woke up from his alarm. When he stuck his head out, he found Madeleine in the companionway. She was on her way to call him.

  “It’s gone very quiet,” she said. “It is as if nothing is happening or is going to happen, in fact. The wind is barely moving, there is no lightning anywhere, only clouds.”

  “So you reckon we are safe?” asked Grant.

  “I’m just saying that there is no sign of trouble,” she said. “Maybe it is still coming, but the air is cold and the sea is cold. It’s not the kind of conditions that hurricanes like. I reckon that it will blow out.”

  “I still want a bit of it,” said Grant, “just to give us a little push toward Bermuda. Let’s cut the suspense and have a look at the weather.” He placed himself on the chair at the navigation station, with Madeleine standing by, looking over his shoulder at the laptop screen.

  There was indeed a fresh update of the newly formed hurricane and its progress. They tried their best to make sense of the GRIB files and weather faxes. The new information included a satellite picture.

  “Look at the eye,” said Madeleine. “It is very peculiar.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s so small. The saying goes that the smaller the eye, the stronger the hurricane is.”

  “Do you really think this is a powerful one? It does not seem to cover such a wide area.”

  “The power does not lie in the size of the spread,” said Madeleine. “It is small but from the structure you can deduce that there must be massively powerful winds inside this hurricane. This looks like something you usually see in September, not this time of the year. I think it can stay right where it is.”

  “But it’s not,” said Grant. “It’s running. At six o’clock it was here and now it is over here, closer to the Lesser Antilles, but it is not running east to west.”

  “Where is it going?”

  “It is running north. If it continues, it will pass us to the east and not so very far from where we are.”

  “Hopefully it is not coming too fast.”

  “Let me just measure the distance that it has travelled over the six hours. Aha, it has moved northward almost six hundred kilometres. It’s been running at a hundred kilometres per hour! How is it possible? How can these things move that fast?”

  “They can move even faster,” said Madeleine. “What worries me is its direction.”

  “Ghee whizz,” said Grant. “On the face of it this thing is running toward a point east of us at ten times the speed that we can do. Your theory of cold water had better work out now or we are sitting ducks for trouble.”

  “As I said,” repeated Madeleine, “the air is cold and the water is cold. It will probably fizzle out.”

  “Probably? On the other hand, you are the local expert.” He drew with his finger on the screen. “This is its current course and this is where we are. It will hit us without a doubt.”

  “Unless something happens.”

  “Like fizzling out?”

  “I would say so. Strong as it appears on that satellite picture, it needs water surface temperatures upward of twenty six degrees to grow. I think we have temperatures lower than twenty. These are simply not hurricane conditions.”

  “When they fizzle out, do they stop running?”

  “Usually.”

  “So what do you think we can expect?”

  “I think we will get a storm anyway,” she said.

  “Whether full hurricane or not, the point is that we should avoid it if we can, just in case it is still nasty. Let me look at this chart again. Aha, see here is what it is heading for. Do you see the isobars here, where they are bunched up?”

  “You are getting a little too technical for me.”

  “Ok, let me explain. This here is the subtropical ridge of high pressure. They call it the Horse Latitudes.”

  “Because the ships got becalmed and the Spanish who named it like that had to eat their horses.”

  “Exactly. See, you know what it is. It is like a mountain with a series of peaks. This year it is quite far south, for some reason. It is supposed to be closer to the latitude of Bermuda. You have this series of high pressure peaks here, running east to west and then it stops to the east of us. To the west of us, however, there is another high pressure cell in the same ridge. We are heading for this break between the two cells, which is like a mountain pass of low pressure. My guess is, however, that this storm is heading for the same pass. In other words, it will not turn west or east. It will go north, following the low pressure. It also means that our current course is putting us on a sure collision course with it.”

  “It could be a tight squeeze.”

  “One that I’d like to avoid.”

  “We don’t want to go back, because that’s where the trouble comes from and we don’t want to go north. So we go either east or west and hide inside one of these cells of high pressure.”

  “I say we go east.”

  “It could be the way to go. Not so long ago, however, I’ve heard somebody tell the story of the captain of the Bounty replica. There was a hurricane coming in, closer to the USA. He thought he was clever and that he could sail across its approach. But he was wrong. It caught up with him. They lost the ship and at least one life. Afterward, he did not look so clever at all. If this hurricane surprises us all and keeps on going at its current speed and course, it will hit us with its right front quadrant. Let’s say it is a mild hurricane with winds between a hundred and fifty and two hundred kilometres an hour. When you add the hundred kilometres an hour with which it is running, it makes two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour to three hundred kilometres per hour. This boat has been built for rough conditions but I just don’t want to test it. Do you follow me?”

  “I thi
nk so.”

  “Going into the cell of high pressure to the west could be the better option, in my opinion. I sense that you don’t like it?”

  “Not really.”

  “The Triangle again?”

  “Why don’t we give it just a bit more time? Perhaps it will stop and blow itself out as I predicted, without even getting here.”

  “And we continue on our course?”

  “Yes.”

  Just then they experienced a sensation like going up in a lift in a high-rise building. Up and up they went. Grant slapped the laptop closed, secured it in a split second and scrambled all the way up the stairs. Fighting to keep upright, he slammed the hatch shut in the doghouse.

  ***

  The farmer had a new wife – young, virile and attractive. She was not new to farming. Her parents had a house in a small town on the inland side of the Great Mountains but they also owned a farm of their own not far away. As a child she often wished that they had lived on the farm instead of in the town and stayed there, never to leave again. There was a reason for this. Her father married his cousin, which meant that she had a father and mother of the same surname. In a rural community where everyone knew everyone else’s business this was grist to the rumour mill. Whenever a Van Der Stel child said something daft or downright stupid or acted out the immediate response of the community was that yes, you could not expect otherwise, the parents were so close, practically brother and sister. Poor little kids.

  Little Juliana van der Stel became aware of the whisperings from a very young age. From the start she hated it, regardless of how many times her patient and loving parents advised her to ignore it all. In school she suffered and hated. The girls in her class were generally too diplomatic and too careful to raise her ire, doing their commenting one on one or in tight circles of friends where secrets were kept. The boys, on the other hand, were open and crude and sometimes delighted in calling her attention and everybody else’s to the fact that oh yes, her father and mother had the same surname. She was probably retarded - so what could you expect?. They were only repeating the refrain learnt from their parents.

  She was not retarded at all. At first, during the initial grades, she bit her tongue at times and at other times lashed onto something that would put the boy in bad light. The problem was that the boys never really had a bad thing such as her own to make them feel bad. And so, powerless, the hatred grew and eventually found an outlet in fantasies in the way that powerless passions do. She imagined the most horrendous fates for each of her tormentors and often sat daydreaming in class, enjoying her fake world more than what was going on in class.

  She was already in middle school when she realised that dreams could be turned into action. Being too well aware of her disadvantage, she knew that she could not do anything overtly. Instead, she started studying her tormentors. There were many of them, since she never forgot. A snide received in first grade rankled with her like it was from yesterday. Now, several years into her school career, she began to examine the boys. Everyone had to have a weakness, wasn’t it, even if it was not as bad as her own. And she found them. By listening to her parents and to the talk of other grownups she found out an amazing amount. Often it was just enough to start something going. She became the point of origin for many rumours that even penetrated into the realm of the grownups. So and so’s father had a drinking problem. Another one beat his wife half to death. Farmer Scheepers was losing his farm and his children were going to be given away to welfare. She knew just how to add something special to make it juicy and to ensure that her little packages had wings. She watched, sometimes days and even weeks, before she saw the effects of her labours in a downcast look or a frown that appeared to be stuck on permanently. She celebrated her triumphs in secret.

  She found that she was a lot more effective when she teamed up with the other girls. Soon the school had a gang of teenybopper girls who was forever planning the downfall of this or that boy. Some were from their own grade, some were older and some were younger. Their victims did not have a chance. Many a boy progressed into adulthood carrying a wound that would have had him end up on the couch of a psychologist, were these available during those times.

  As it were, at the time that her victims limped into careers as farmers, prison warders or railway workers, Juliana van der Stel went to the university town of Stellenbosch to study and catch herself a husband. There were prospective doctors, ministers and lawyers to choose from.

  The young woman from the interior found herself amongst many of her ilk and her sex, all of whom had the same idea. Trying to steal a march on the competition, she joined as many associations and organisations as she could, be it culture, theatre or prayer groups, with a fair measure of success. Liaisons started to develop. However, all of the future pillars of society politely gave it up after just a few months or so. With her conditioning, what was a mild comment in her own ears sounded like a vicious attack to her male partners. It made no difference whether her comments were directed at friends of foes, they sensed her darkness and withdrew.

  After almost four years, salvation came in the form of a shy farmer who worked his property not far from the university town. He was a bachelor who had his nose in the clods between his vines and his mind never far from it either, a man very much like the ones she grew up with. They were introduced by mutual friends who identified a common need. The deed was done without undue delay.

  She was incensed. It was tantamount to defeat but she saw no way out. What made the pill easier to swallow was the extent of the farmer’s lands, which spread all across the upper reaches of a wide valley nestled against the Kamberg Mountain.

  The spirit of the mountain, with eons of experience of humankind, loved her from the first contact.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  From every location inside the yacht came the sound of things crashing as the boat tilted to port, first thirty degrees and then quickly to a full forty five. From outside came a sound like that of a powerful waterfall, a sound that was transferred inside as water poured through the hatches, all of which were still open.

  Grant hung on in the doghouse while trying to make out the extent of the monster wave. Inside the yacht Madeleine slid all the way to the galley and into water. They had the sea inside! The lights flickered as a battery or a cable came loose somewhere and then mercifully came back on again while they watched in horror as clothes, empty boxes and plastic wrappers floated about. Madeleine sat up to her hips in it. In the space of two or three seconds the wave had deposited several tons of water into the interior of the yacht.

  It felt like a full minute before the vessel settled back onto an even keel.

  “That was a big one,” was all that Grant could get out. He got into the cockpit. The giant wave had disappeared into the darkness as quickly as it came. He scrutinised the east, listening intently as well, but there were only smaller waves to be seen. Without further ado he swung the yacht around to port.

  Madeleine stood in the companionway. “What happened?” she asked.

  “We just caught a big one. It must have been two waves sitting on top of each other. What a mess. Help me quickly so we can get all the hatches closed up.”

  “How tall do you think it was?”

  “In order to push this yacht on its side like that I’d say nothing under thirty five feet. This is a heavy boat. Nothing pushes her over. There is a correlation somewhere. It think a wave needs to be fifty five percent of the length of the boat in order to knock it flat. We are seventy four feet long, which means my guess is about right. If we were forty feet long this wave could have capsized us completely.”

  “So we were lucky.”

  “We were so, so lucky. Especially with our hatches open. We could have been halfway to the bottom now. Sometimes,” said Grant, “size matters.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “It could have been from anywhere in the east, from north-east to south-east. It definitely came from that side,” he sa
id, indicating to the rear.

  “I thought it came from that side,” said Madeleine, pointing to starboard.

  “Yes, it hit us from that side, but I have just turned the boat to the west.”

  “Oh yes, I can see now, the waves are coming from behind. Isn’t this more dangerous?”

  “Nope. Catching more of these monsters from the side is dangerous. I don’t know how many of them are out there. I’ve heard tales of sailors who met a series of these big ones. They come in pairs or in groups. We cannot take any chances.”

  “But they can swamp us from behind, can they not?”

  “It is safer this way. I have not seen it in action, but this yacht was built with a keel that disturbs the cresting action of a big wave. Which means that it should not be able to poop us.”

  “Theoretically.”

  “I trust the designer and I’ve had experts give me their opinions on the yacht while it was being built.”

  “But you cannot be sure.”

  “What are you saying, Madeleine? We cannot go east, giving our bow to the big waves, because that would put us smack bang in the way of a massive hurricane. We cannot go north. It would be like jostling with a giant to get through very small door. It would be even more irresponsible because there now exists a chance of meeting more of these monsters and we could broach to more severely. We could get skylights smashed in, the yacht completely filling up with water, the electronics knocked out, the engine swamped. We will be a dead in the water. Would you like that? No, I don’t think so. That leaves going west without further delay, searching for that high pressure cell. I say we go west north-west. We will cut across the upper corner of the triangle and see if we cannot shelter in the lee of Bermuda until the storm has passed.”

  “So the Triangle it is.”