by Sarban
‘That was their tale, and no matter how Jirji shouted and upbraided them he could get nothing more out of them. The true facts were of course quite plain to me from this meagre account: Colombani had got them to sail him to the nearest anchorage to the Juzur ul Ghaur and then had paddled off to the islets, proposing to rejoin the boat either that night or the next morning. Whether he had been able to explain this by gestures to the boatmen was doubtful, but in any case, they were not going to admit that they had seen him making for the haunted islets and been afraid to follow on and accompany him. In a characteristically indirect way they had gone to Jirji instead of coming to me, and perhaps, as Jirji declared, they would not even have told him if some people, including the coastguard, had not seen them returning to the boat harbour without the doctor and questioned them. Besides, they were a canoe to the bad and expected compensation. Jirji cursed them and threatened them with the wrath of all the authorities from the King down.
‘I told him and Kobus my guess at what had happened, and we climbed up to the roof once more. There was very little point in doing that, for the islets were far away, and in any case there was a low yellow heat-haze that reduced visibility to about five miles, but I suppose Kobus’s instinct was to have a look at the weather as soon as he heard of an accident at sea. The wind, I noticed then, had got round into the south east; the air was appreciably drier and the temperature much higher; I felt the tickling in the nose that comes before you get the full blast of the hot wind off the desert.
‘I didn’t believe Colombani would drown; he might well have upset his huri, but those dug-outs don’t sink, and though it’s more than one man can do—or one white man, anyway—to right them in deep water, you can cling to them or push them along swimming. If Colombani had upset himself between the reefs and Juzur ul Ghaur he could have made the land: a swim of two or three miles was nothing to him. Only, it was very deep water; in spite of his assurance I thought of the sharks. . . .
‘My launchman was waiting at the boat-harbour to take Kobus off to the Mahrusa after lunch. We put together some bread and meat for our lunch and caught up some bottles of water and drove in my old Chevrolet down to the harbour. Jirji, with I don’t know what threats of prison and fetters and palm-ribs, forced the Rais of Colombani’s boat to come with us. That was a mistake; for I saw from the fellow’s mutterings with Ridha as soon as we got on board my launch and the sick look Ridha gave me when I told him to steer north, that my guess was right. They knew Colombani had gone to Juzur ul Ghaur. I expected the launch then to be on its worst behaviour. Kobus, however, knew that launch. When we got well out in the boat channel he told Ridha to go alongside the Mahrusa.
‘ “Better take my engineer with us,” he said.
‘With some bawling in Flemish he routed out his engineer, a frowzy old Belgian who crept out in his trousers and singlet and after listening, with much yawning and scratching, to Kobus’s explanation, climbed barefoot over the side and dropped into the launch. He rolled a cigarette and sat down keeping a sourly disapproving eye on the stuttering and stinking old engine, not saying a word to anyone; but when the engine died on us and Ridha looked appealingly at me for the word to abandon the expedition, the Belgian shoved him out of the way and got the thing going again.
‘Colombani’s Rais was supposed to pilot us through the reefs to the point where he had first anchored the night before, but he ran us aground twice. We poled her off without any appreciable damage, and then I took the wheel, and Kobus, standing in the bow, conned us through the twisting channels by his own good judgement until we reached the stretch of deep blue water on the landward side of Juzur ul Ghaur.
‘I headed straight across for them and the Belgian opened the engine up to her full speed. I was predisposed, no doubt, to receive the impression, but I felt a momentary sinking of my heart at that loud, mechanical throbbing and the fierce hiss of the bow-wave as we cut through the slight, slow swell: it was a feeling that we had declared ourselves, thrown down an irrevocable challenge and must fight it out, now. The low, dun bars of sand and bleached coral drew nearer. They were utterly bare and desolate; not even a tern hovering about them.
‘The two Arabs crouched in the bottom of the launch and I could hear Ridha intoning in a low whine something from the Koran: ‘I take refuge with the Lord of Daybreak from the evil that he hath created . . . I take refuge with the Lord of Men . . . from Jinn and from Men. . . .’ The old fellow’s face had turned from its normal near-black, first to olive green and now to a colour nearer that of a lizard’s belly than I’ve ever seen on any human skin before or since.
‘Kobus called “Half speed!” and I steered to go between the first two islets of the group. They were a little archipelago; the deep water, intensely blue, lapped the foot of their miniature cliffs of weathered coral, and their sandy surfaces gleamed white under the pale, hot sky. Our wash sent a wave clucking and sucking, startlingly loud in the hollows of the coral shores on either hand. I felt then how utterly still and dead that archipelago had been before our invasion, and I knew I would not for the world have gone there alone, like Colombani. I looked over the side, straight down through the deepening blue, until vision was baffled by a profound blackness, and I felt that there, in those gulfs between, not up here, on the pale, unsubstantial-looking islets, in the thin air and the sunlight spreading through a vague sand-haze, was the reality of the place: what shall I say? was its character, its life. I felt the frightening power of that great depth of water as it lifted us and moved us.
‘There was no risk of going aground here. Those coral towers whose mere tops formed the islets that we saw went sheer down. I steered as Kobus directed me, and we followed the blue lanes, turning round islet after islet, while Kobus, Jirji and the Belgian scanned the little sandy humps and hollows. We threaded almost the whole archipelago without seeing a sign of the man or his canoe, without seeing a sign of any living thing, until, going dead slow, we began to round a promontory of what must have been about the biggest islet of the group. Its sides were five or six feet high and we could not see the surface of the land above. Kobus was signalling with his hand for me to edge in to the side, and I supposed he was going to scramble ashore. Then, as I brought her nose round the point of the promontory, I saw three great fish.
‘Ridha saw them before I did; but I don’t think the others saw them at all. They had their eyes on the islet; I was looking at the water ahead. My old launchman gave something between a grunt and a groan and began to wail, “I have believed in God and in His Angels. . . .” He startled me with that, but I did not at that moment connect his sudden bursting into the confession of the faith with his sight of the three fish: I thought it was only that he was terrified at our preparing to land on the island. I say fish, because, obviously, they could be nothing else; but they were not sharks. Even in the split second when I saw them glancing and just breaking the surface I was convinced of that. They had no dorsal fin. There had seemed—I cannot say I saw in so infinitely brief a moment of time—there had seemed to be a rounded head, and then, with a curious turning motion, something like a hump, or a rounded back had appeared; a glistening of wet skin between the wink of the water and the flash of the sunlight, and then nothing but the vaguest of shadows melting through the distorting blue glass of the deeps. You might have said dolphins, but dolphins also have a dorsal fin and they show chocolate-coloured as they break surface, with a gleam of pale buff belly as they turn. These things were black, or rather a blackish green.
‘I could not speculate about them then, for just as we rounded the point, Kobus sang out, “There he is!”. The surface of the islet sloped away beyond the promontory, and on the slope, where he had been hidden from us until we rounded, lay Colombani.
‘I ran her in; Jirji thrust the boat-hook into the coral and we jumped ashore. Colombani lay like a corpse, face down on the sand. He was in his swimming trunks but he had lost one of the sand-shoes that he wore when exploring the reefs. His water-tight, gogg
led mask was clutched in one hand, as if he had torn it off when he scrambled ashore and had collapsed, still holding it. We lifted him and he gave a deep groan and opened his eyes. He rolled them, and then, amazed, we saw his lips draw back from his teeth and his whole countenance take on an expression of the wildest terror. He opened his mouth wide and tried to scream but all he could utter was a dry, grating noise in his throat. I think we were so shocked that we fell back a little. Then I saw that his limbs and body were all scored with long straight cuts as if he had dragged himself across the sharp edges of the living reef. They were not deep cuts, but they had bled freely and must have been painful. I thought we must have hurt him in moving him and that had made him scream. So we went to lift him more gently, but he fought us and struggled so that it took all our strength, the three of us, to get him the few yards down to the launch. With Jirji’s help there we held him down and tried to make him swallow a little water, but without much success. He thrashed about like a new-landed fish, rolling his eyes till there was nothing to be seen but the whites, writhing his lips and gurgling in his throat like a man in a fit. Someone had to hold him all the way back to the harbour; otherwise it seemed certain he would have flung himself overboard.
‘We were aghast. We had expected him—if we found him—to be in a bad way from thirst and exposure to the sun, for, though he was used enough to the sun and burned as brown as an Arab, no white man could have endured ten hours of that intense heat and glare, unclothed and without water or shade, and not suffered some degree of sun-stroke. But we had not expected this raving delirium, and we did not know what to do for him. There was no doctor in Qunfida just then. The Syrian pill-merchant who made a living there had gone off to Jedda. Kobus’s little tub, of course, didn’t carry a doctor. All our notions of treatment, when pooled, amounted only to keeping the patient in a dark room, putting wet cloths round his head and trying to give him a sedative—which Kobus could provide.
‘We partially succeeded in this. To the extent, at any rate, that when we got him to bed in my house he subsided and fought us no more—if I except one brief struggle when I took the rubber ear-plugs out of his ears. He wore these when he was doing much swimming underwater and he had not taken them out when he pulled off his mask on the island. When I got them out he kept pressing the palm of his hands hard against his ears and clenching his teeth, as though he were suffering from violent earache. I could only think that he had injured the drums by some exceptionally deep dive out at Juzur ul Ghaur; but as he tossed and moaned there, grimacing and covering his ears it looked almost as if he were terrified of hearing our voices, as if he were trying to shut out some fearful sound.
‘There was only one thing to do about him. I had never seen such a bad case of sun-stroke, and naturally I feared there was something else wrong with him. The only thing was to get him over to Port Sudan and into hospital. Kobus was sailing the next day, and providentially his next call was at Port Sudan. He wasn’t equipped for carrying passengers on his hot and poky little lugger, but there was one two-berth cabin that he used to give me when I wanted to go over, turning out the Goanese mate and second engineer who usually inhabited it. It’s only one night’s trip, of course. I made up my mind to go over with Colombani.
‘I felt a certain responsibility. He was a Frenchman, of course, and if it came to shipping him back to Europe, the French Consulate would have to deal with that; but he had come to me with a recommendation from our Chief Manager, and our firm was handling his money, too. Kobus agreed to give us the cabin on the Mahrusa, and so I began packing up Colombani’s things.
‘The Rais had returned the equipment he had left in the boat but there was no means of telling what he had lost in the canoe. I made an inventory as I packed, and when I came to add the observation that some property had possibly been lost in the accident to the canoe, I began to speculate more concretely on what could have happened. The canoe would sooner or later be found, drifting upside down, or ashore somewhere, but it would not tell much. We should have to wait until the delirium left Colombani to discover the truth. But why had he not swum back to the landward reef when he lost his canoe? Why lie out on the exposed islet when little more than a mile of deep water separated him from the reefs? A swimmer like Colombani could have done it; and from the reefs, by wading and swimming short stretches he could have gained the shore. Something had stopped him from swimming back across that stretch of deep water. Had he seen something there? Something that he dare not encounter?
‘I thought of my glimpse of the three great fish. Were they, could they be the rare sea-monster I had guessed at, the “sea-things” of the Arabs? I had not recognised them, but had Colombani, with his far greater knowledge of marine creatures recognised them for something dangerous, totally unexpected there, and not ventured to cross the deep where they swam? Had he encountered them in the water and barely escaped by his powerful swimming, after some fearful exertions that had exhausted him, and managed only to drag himself up onto that low islet, just out of the sea-things’ reach? I had heard of sharks following rafts and small boats at sea after a shipwreck. Had those dark glistening things pursued him to his refuge and cruised round the islet prisoning him there, waiting with the blind, fixed purpose of their voracity for him to enter their element again? I could believe that they had been beating slowly back and forth there, a few yards from where he lay, and were only frightened off when the loud threshing of my launch’s screw broke the silence of their haunt. I dare not dwell too long on that picture: the purposeful hunting, the cold intention to slay and devour with which a creature of another element moves is reasonable enough from a scientific point of view, but it is horrible in the imagination.
‘I passed a sleepless night with Colombani. The delirium was on him all night and I dare not leave him. I dared touch him only with the utmost caution, for he threshed about in a kind of dream terror whenever he felt my hand. I began to think my theory was right: he had encountered those beasts, and the last thing his conscious mind had recorded was the terror of them, and he fought to escape them in the nightmare of his fever.
‘In the morning he seemed calmer; his temperature was lower and he kept his eyes shut instead of rolling them and staring in the ghastly way he had done the night before. But still I could get no reasonable speech out of him, only broken mutterings and gasps and groans; and all the time he kept pressing his hands to his ears.
‘We took him on board soon after noon and put him to bed in the cabin. Kobus was anxious to get clear of Qunfida as soon as possible, because the weather was thickening. The wind had moved further round into the east, blowing from the hot land as from the mouth of a furnace and the air was yellow with a haze of fine, suspended dust. But the loading went as slowly as usual and it was not until an hour and a half before sunset that we could get the anchor up. You can appreciate Kobus’s anxiety. The approaches to Qunfida were not properly marked at all; none of the three Kreuzer Line captains—and that was the only steamship line that ever called there in those days—liked having to make that anchorage, and when the hills behind the town were obscured, as they were by four o’clock that afternoon, navigation was doubly difficult. Besides obliterating the landmarks with the dust cloud it carries, the east wind has a marked effect on the depth of water over the shoals and shallows. I’ve seen the inshore reef laid quite bare for the width of a mile during an east wind where at all other times there would be two or three feet of water above it.
‘All seemed to be going well, however, when I went up to Kobus’s cabin for a drink. We were creeping out towards a curiously hot, orange-coloured sunset, with a circle of dry yellow fog round us and an oily smooth black sea under us running in long, low swells. Behind us a dense indigo curtain of dust-cloud had rolled over the land and seemed slowly to be following us out to sea; but the dust kept low; immediately above us the air was fairly clear and I could see the white radiance of the moon beginning to shine from behind that dark dust rampart in the east. As the angry
red haze ahead of us cooled and faded and the blackness of the ship’s side became indistinguishable from the black water below, the moonlight began to irradiate the dust-fog round us, so that we were girdled with a wall of pale golden luminosity. The Mahrusa had not much speed at the best of times; shut in by those queer soft walls, and with all the stars except the brightest ones in the Lyre and the Swan in the dark-blue circle overhead washed away by the moonshine, I could think the vibrations of the engine a mere mechanical vanity and that we moved only with the lift and roll of the sea, proceeding nowhere.
‘Kobus came in for a drink and then went out to the bridge again, leaving the Belgian engineer and me with the bottle of Dutch gin between us. I was not sure now that I had done right in coming over. Colombani seemed to be recovering of his own accord. During the afternoon, once or twice, he had seemed to me to have recovered complete consciousness: I caught him following me with his eyes, and he had ceased holding his head between his hands as if his ears—or the apprehension of what might enter them—no longer troubled him. Indeed, once I saw him turning his head and raising himself a little as though he were listening for some sound. But when I spoke to him he did not reply; he did not even seem to hear me. By sunset, however, he was sleeping normally, as far as I could judge, and, as I say, I began to wonder whether the rest, and our primitive treatment of keeping him quiet and out of the light, might not have effected the cure. If so, our Chief Manager might take a poor view of my leaving the branch’s business to the care of the Sudanese clerk for a fortnight without his permission.