A Twist of Sand

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  She looked at me cynically. "Stein will be paying you well enough."

  I couldn't let it go.

  "I'm doing this free, gratis and for nothing," I snapped. "I'm not getting a penny for this joyride."

  "I don't believe a word of that," she retorted.

  Her composure rattled me. What did a hint — or more — of the truth matter when it blackened Stein?

  "I've been blackmailed into this trip," I said curtly.

  "Blackmailed?" she said incredulously.

  So Stein hadn't told her.

  "Yes," I retorted. "I'm the sort of man you can blackmail — tough, self-centred, anything for personal gain. You said so yourself."

  I had shaken her. I rubbed it home.

  "You're dealing with tough people. I quote you again. You must expect these things."

  She shook her head. "But…"

  "There are no buts," I retorted. "If anyone gets word of this trip, you're in it as much as Stein or myself. If anyone is missing for a month from Walvis, or Windhoek — it's a small place — the police smell a rat, and they're very good at that. Or someone passes the word to Ohopoho that a white man — and a white woman — are in the Skeleton Coast."

  "Where's Ohopoho?" she asked.

  "It's a God-forsaken spot near the Ovambo border," I said. "It's the headquarters of the one official in the Skeleton Coast. There's an airstrip. He's got a radio-telephone. All he needs is a suspicious buzz and they'll send out a couple of jeeps and a truck to round you up without further ado."

  She parried the thrust of my attack by switching her ground.

  "I watched you up on the bridge," she said. "I would have said — for a moment — that you were almost happy."

  I'd learned enough about her in a short while not to fall for that one.

  "Thanks," I replied dryly. "A sharp problem in navigation is always prescribed for the patient in the Royal Navy."

  The rapier-point flickered.

  "Before or after cashiering?"

  This woman with the red gold hair certainly knew how to cut across wounds with a scalpel.

  She followed up the punch, but this time I was ready for it. Ready, like an old windjammer, under snug canvas for the squall.

  "And you left her and followed the course of duty? And made yourself into a human chuck-out, a sort of maritime beachcomber."

  "You've got your metaphors mixed," I stabbed back. "What interest is it to you how tough men spend their oil time? If you really want to know, I went to her flat to sleep with her before going on a suicide cruise — for the last time but I wasn't in the mood. In fact, I never got there."

  Stein broke it up. He bustled in carrying a cardboard cylinder. He looked suspiciously at us both, but said nothing. He took a map from the cylinder and spread it out.

  Here is my plan," he said briefly.

  It was a small map, much smaller than my Admiralty charts, and was headed "Ondangua, World Aeronautical Shark"

  Maps have always fascinated me. "I've never seen this map before," I said. It covered an area roughly from the Haonib River (which is really the southern boundary of the Skeleton Coast) to Porto Alexandre in Angola. It went as far eastwards as the great Etosha Pan, that inland lake where the elephant are counted in thousands and the antelopes thunder by your jeep like the charge' of the Light Brigade. It showed the Cunene River, international boundary between South West Africa and Portuguese Angola, for hundreds of miles into the hinterland. Stein smirked.

  "I'm glad there are some maps of the Skeleton Coast which you haven't seen, Captain Peace. As a matter of interest, you can get this one for five shillings from the Trigonometrical Survey Office in Pretoria."

  He put a couple of ashtrays on the corners to hold it down.

  He jabbed his finger at a light brown patch on the map below the Cunene.

  "That is where I am going."

  The map showed a great welter of mountains on the southern side of the great Cunene River marked "Baynes fountains." Some figures in a neat oblong read "7200 feet." Before one reaches the Baynes Mountains there is another huge range of unfriendly mountains marked Hartmannberge.

  I could not but admire Stein's courage. No white man except Baynes has ever been inside those broken vastnesses. For hundreds of miles inland from the coast and along the shoreline itself the map says simply "unsurveyed." Only the highest peaks are marked. In between might be almost anything.

  I shook my head. I was aware of Anne's eyes on my face. She seemed so self-reliant, so remote. Perhaps her early hardships had given her that air of detachment, almost Oriental acceptance of things as they occurred.

  "What is your route?" I asked Stein flatly.

  "Where are you going to put us ashore?" he countered.

  I looked at the stark map, just about as bare as a Skeleton Coast dune. I had already made up my mind. Curva dos Dunas was my secret and was going to remain so.

  I pointed to the mouth of the great river. There wasn't a single shoal or sand-bar marked. God help anyone who took this official map for his guide!

  "About there. Where it says Foz do Cunene."

  In fact, Curva dos Dunas lay about twenty miles to the south. Stein was pleased.

  "That is excellent," he said. "It ties up nicely with my route. You see, I intend using the river bed as my road into the interior. It's dry at this time of the year. Here, look."

  His enthusiasm was almost catching. Anne came round and looked over my shoulder. The fresh perfume of Tweed mingled with the musty smell of the thick map paper. Nothing ever gets wholly dry in one of these fogs.

  "I'm going to march up here, past Posto Velho — that's the Portuguese guard post — and the river provides me with u gap right through the Hartmannberge. It cuts past the Ongeamaberge, which are right on the river itself. You see these huge wadis coming down from the mountains from the south to the river itself? Well, when I get about seventy miles from the mouth of the river, I'm following one of them by turning south too — at the Nangolo Flats, they call it. See this thin blue line? — that's the Kapupa River, probably only a dry bed anyway. That's my dagger into the heart of the Baynes Mountains. Here's a seven thousand foot peak, the Otjihipo. That's my immediate objective."

  The northern side of the river, the Portuguese side, looked even less hospitable than the southern, or South African side.

  The girl seemed to catch my thoughts.

  She ran a painted nail round a gigantic cluster of tumbled peaks and mountains on the Angola side, completely unmapped and unsurveyed, but with a single title for an area the size of Scotland, "Serra de Chela."

  "It looks just like a rabbit," she mused. "See, here's his tail, opposite our turn-off at the Nangolo Flats."

  The remark caught me off balance. How much of her facade was real, I wondered. She said it gently, humorously, a side of the girl-scientist which was new. I found it attractive. She held my eyes until I dropped them from her steady, level gaze. I took refuge in the job on hand.

  "You'll need all the luck, including a rabbit's tail, that you can find once you get inside those mountains," I said briefly.

  Stein smiled mirthlessly.

  "Captain Peace is a great believer in luck, my dear. Ask him. His luck's so strong that it drove a man off his head."

  She looked at me with a kind of remote disbelief. The cards were down anyway, so I pulled out my little lucky hand. As it lay in my hand she motioned to touch it and then drew back in horror.

  "It really looks like a tiny little hand, shrunken… " she backed away in fear…" You didn't, did you… "

  "Oh, for God's sake, stop regarding me as a monster! All right, if you like, I cut off the hand of one of my victims and by a process unknown to any white man but me, and learned in the course of my nefarious career when I was a pirate off South America… "

  Stein stemmed my outburst.

  "You get them in German villages, particularly in the Black Mountains. But that's not to say no one has died because of that hand. I would sa
y that quite a few men have died because of it; not so, Captain?"

  Stein always waited for the thrust in the back. The fool project he was indulging in, and probably because there would be more blood on my hands before it was out, brought my anger welling up against him. Somehow it wouldn't spark against the girl. A moment before, something of the adventure of the whole thing had taken me out of myself for a moment; now it all backfired.

  "I land you there," I said harshly, stabbing at the mouth of the Cunene. "After that, you can go to bloody hell for all I care."

  "It is just to avoid that unfortunate circumstance," replied Stein smoothly, "that I have come to discuss my route with you."

  Anne had drawn away at my outburst.

  "I land you, and I fetch you — in a month's time," I said restraining myself.

  "You also supply the expedition," Stein went on.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It could not have failed to meet your keen submariner's eye," Stein continued sarcastically, "that even though my party came on board at night, they were without camping equipment, food, water or provisions for a trip which you yourself regard as hazardous."

  I had scarcely given it a thought.

  "I have a list here," and he drew it from a pocket, "of what I will require from your ship's stores. You will give instructions to that effect."

  "But…."

  "There are no buts, Captain." He added impatiently: "Did you want all Walvis to know what was going on — tents, equipment, food, all being loaded aboard your ship? You would never have been allowed out of port without the police coming aboard."

  I said nothing, but took the long, old-fashioned pair of ivory dividers with" its pearl-inlaid top and needles of porcupine quills instead of steel — something which I had found amongst old Simon Peace's things — and stepped off a twenty-mile circle from the mouth of the river. The old dividers looked as if they had originally been in an Indiaman in John Company's service.

  They were plotting the mathematics of my strategy at the moment. Anne was looking at them curiously. The map did not show the great cataract about twenty miles from the river's mouth; it was so great, according to old Simon's chart, that the river sagged like a great intestine to the south in overrunning it. I followed the course of the river with the old dividers. The second cataract, too, within fifty miles of the coast — well, they were Stein's affair. His plan had the virtue of great simplicity, but those mountains would never have remained inaccessible for half a century of white, occupation to the south and north if the path to them were simply up the dry bed of a river. Where Curva dos Dunas lay was simply an unsurveyed light brown patch on Stein's map, which showed an even coastline, sand-hills and escarpment rising through steps of 1,000 and 2,000 feet to the grim fortresses of the Hartmannberge, the first sentry of the Baynes Mountains beyond. The Portuguese cartographers had at least added the words "dunas moveis" — shifting dunes — on their side of the frontier.

  "What are you working out?" asked Stein keenly.

  I must have been completely lost in my own thoughts, for the girl was looking at me also.

  "You see where the river turns northwards right at the mouth?" I asked.

  They nodded.

  "Well, the mouth is actually one mass of sand-bars and often after the rainy season the delta changes its complexion considerably. Depending on the sand and the state of the mouth, I shall decide on the spot where exactly to put you ashore," I lied.

  I'd give them a course for the river from Curva dos Dunas and, after half a day's march, they'd never find it again. It would take a skilled navigator to recognise it anyway, and I was prepared to bet that from the landward side it resembled an anchorage even less than it did from the sea.

  "You mean, you don't know a channel into a landing-spot?" Stein asked suspiciously.

  I laughed. "Look at your map," I retorted. "See any landing-spots?"

  "Of course not," said Stein. "That's exactly why I got you to bring me to the Skeleton Coast. You have it all in your head."

  My round, I thought. "I have the mouth of the Cunene ' in my mind,' too, if you want to know, and that's why I shall decide when we get there. There is also the question of the wind, and the tide, plus inshore currents," I elaborated with equal untruth. "You can't judge these things until you are there."

  "I don't like it," frowned Stein. "I thought you'd do better than this, Captain. Any clever skipper could do what you are intending to do."

  "Then let's turn back and you can get another — with pleasure," I snapped.

  "What's going to happen if the wind and the currents are not right when you come to pick us up again?" he went on.

  I was enjoying myself.

  "That'll be just too bad," I said. "You'll have to wait for the next slow boat to China."

  The cruel mouth tightened. Stein seemed abstracted for a moment or two". I was not to know that my sally was to cost an innocent man his life.

  Etosha tore on through the day. The fog scarcely lightened. In the middle of the morning I left the bridge to John.

  "Call me when it begins to lift," I told him. "I'm going below to catch up on my beauty sleep. We should be somewhere off Cape Frig when it disperses."

  "That's a long day's fog," murmured John, looking at the endless moisture.

  "Damn good for this sort of job," I replied.

  "About Cape Frio, then?" he repeated.

  "Or sooner, if it starts clearing. But I don't think so with the wind in the north-west. Barometer's steady. Not that that means much off this coast. If it starts to blow hard, call me. It could mean we're in for a swell which will shake the guts out of us all."

  "In other words,"- grinned John, if almost anything happens to the sea, the fog or the wind."

  I grinned back.

  "You've got it dead right," I said.

  When I reached my cabin I kicked off my shoes and lay down fully dressed. I didn't sleep right away. I told myself it was the girl's red-gold hair, but my sub-conscious told me I was lying. She had shown me the picture of myself as I was. "No gain but my gain," she had sneered. Tough, like this expedition. Never a leading ideal. She hadn't believed I'd ever been anything else. I thought of the first days of my command in the Mediterranean. I turned restlessly* So easy to say, they made a killer of me. Kill, or be killed. I was prepared to believe her ideal about Onymacris. The fire of hardship had burned away almost everything else — ú you could see it in the tight lines about her mouth, although youth was holding everything in check.

  I fell asleep wondering what sort of person she really was.

  The look-out's cry cut across my sleep. I suppose a sailor develops some sort of "third ear "which always listens, even when his mind is unconscious.

  "Steamer on the starboard bow!"

  It was wrong, all wrong, my mind told me even as it shook off the curtain of sleep and rose to the surface. A steamer on the starboard bow inside the six-mile limit of Etosha's course!

  I had my shoes on and was already half-way up the companionway when I heard John repeat the look-out's call down the speaking-tube to me. I was on the bridge in three bounds. The fog was lifting, as I had told John it would in the middle of the afternoon. I found myself half-blind and blinking in the pale, almost sodium-yellow light.

  John lowered his glasses for a moment in puzzlement.

  "I can't see her, but the look-out did spot her patch. It's lifting. I'll be damned if I know how any ship could be inside us… "

  I moved to the engine telegraphs and cannoned into the girl. I hadn't seen her.

  "Sorry," she said almost contritely. "You said I shouldn't come up here, but you were asleep… "

  Her eyes held the previous challenge, but there was also a smile. I parried the challenge and accepted the smile.

  My last thought before falling asleep was with me. "Just keep out of the helmsman's way and everything will be O.K." I said.

  The challenge softened and the smile warmed, although her lips did not move
. She stood back watching.

  "Slow ahead," I rang down. The eager pant of the great diesels and the angry susurration of their firing, carried through steel plate and rivet to the soles of the feet, slowed. Mac was on the job all right.

  "We're running clear of it, I think — I hope," said John. A day's growth of beard, the white yachting sweater, cap and old serge trousers gave him almost a naval air again.

  "Where are we?" I asked him. "What's the sounding?"

  "Forty-three, twenty-five, twenty-eight — and shallowing."

  "Any fixes?"

  He shrugged expressively at the fog.

  "Cape Frio, by dead reckoning. But the operative word here is dead."

  Suddenly the fog blew back westwards, like a curtain-shift at a slick American musical. The whole scene was laid bare to our eyes at the flick of an invisible curtain-hand.

  There was the steamer, a liner, with her bows pointing south and east. Beyond was a flat beach, beaten punch drunk to an off-white by the surf, backed by low dun-coloured sand-hills, trailed here and there with a wispy tonsure of grey-green naras plant. I could even see its yellow fruit, something like a melon, rotting away in the sun.

  I was astonished to find the girl at my side, tugging at my arm.

  "Do something!" she cried. "Only you can save her, Captain Peace! Tell her how to get off the rocks! She'll be ashore in a minute!" She brushed round to be in front of me and in doing so I felt her breast against my forearm. She looked beseechingly up at me. "I don't want to see any more pain and death, do you understand? I've seen enough in my lifetime. Do this one thing and it doesn't matter… the past… "

  I led her across to the side of the bridge and said gently: "She's been ashore for years. That's the Dunedin Star."

  She gave a little sigh.

  "Thank God for that!" she exclaimed. This time her lips smiled too.

  Stein joined us.

  "They beached her after she struck a sunken object at sea. Everyone had great fun and games getting the passengers off that beach. The South Africans seemed simply to throw away tugs and planes and lorries to reach them."

  The ill-fated liner, her smoke-stack still gamely erect, held grimly on to her never-never course.