A Bridge Of Magpies (5 page)

'The
City of Baroda,'
added
Koch. His manner,
too,
was
hostile now. '. . . the one
I
was telling you about, lying on top of Doodenstadt's rocks.'

It wasn't the barb or the C-in-C's taunt but the sincerity behind it which altered my decision. It
was
the job which was his objective, not me. I believed him now, believed Koch too. If
I
accepted the Possession assignment I'd have a ship of sorts, because they still run the guano islands as ships, and I'd be her captain. Independent command, I grinned to myself. Maybe too bloody independent; with only birds for a crew and bird-shit for a deck. But it might turn out to be fun, and deep-down I knew that a spell away from bottles and women wouldn't do me any harm. Weddell the Happy Hairshirt Hermit . . . I felt happier than I'd been in years .. .

.. we never found out what those heavy guns were that
Gousblom
heard,' the C-in-C was rasping with his eyes stabbing me like a laser beam. 'There was no big stuff, either ours or the Germans', about. But that's beside the point.
It's a
question of guts. If you chicken out . . He made a pansy's wrist-flapping, hand-on-hip gesture which would have won him a music-hall encore and would have been utterly ridiculous if it hadn't been part of his anger. He tugged at the bit of wire and glared at me.

I gave him a moment or two to run down. 'I've changed my mind. I'll go.'

If my turnabout had any effect upon him, he didn't show it. Maybe he claimed all the credit for himself. The frost didn't leave his eyes.

'You're under my orders from now on. No signals, except in emergency. Clear? Koch will fly back to Luderitz the day after tomorrow. All the paperwork is jacked up already. You'll sleep here. Silvermine has plenty of accommodation-part of the nuclear preparedness game. Go and apologize to your mother from me. You will not discuss Doodenstadt with anyone - understood?'

'Understood - sir.'

'Any .

ah, attachments at Santorin?'

'Gigi?
Give me
some credit!'

'Good. That's all.'

Koch took my arm in a friendly gesture as we made for the door.

'Now
what In hell do you think a Minoan
gemsbok
is doing on the Sperrgebiet?'

34

Panther Head
is
the gateway to the Sperrgebiet. Crooks and '

cruisers', gun-runners and guano dopes, New Bedford whalers and pirates–Captain Kidd included–have homed in on this dirty grey chunk of eroded desert, sticking out into the sea about sixty miles north of the Orange River; taken sights on the triple peaks of the
Buchu Berge;
and set course for sinister destinations among the fourteen fog-shrouded, guano-stained islands skirting the coast.

The name itself stirs up the mud of history:
Panther
was a well-armed thousand-toner of the German Navy that kept order on the coast in the first mad days of the diamond strikes. She sailed into notoriety and history before World War I by trying to seize the Moroccan port of Agadir for the Kaiser. Her action almost put forward the world cataclysm by a couple of years.

My pulses quickened when, from the deck of the coaster
Buffel
taking me to Possession, I caught sight of those triple peaks, and the mirror-like flash of
a late
sun reflected by the innumerable salt pans backing the landfall. It is not until about twenty-five miles north of the Orange River that the first break in the monotony of the shoreline occurs, and one begins to sense the mystery and lure of the Diamond Coast. This feeling grows progressively
as
one approaches Panther Head. The duplicity which seems to have soaked into the Sperrgebiet is also at work on the coastline. Captains don't trust what their eyes see here: if they do, it could cost them their ships and their lives.

The
stubby coaster plugged on with a head-down, shambling gait which suited her name,
Buffel–
Buffalo. The wind was fresh and
sharp. The
sky was full of
small
white clouds as if a squadron of gannet, dive-bombing fish, had left their feathers behind after peeling off for the attack. I was
Buffers
only passenger. She was to bring off the islands' last officials before they stopped work for several months, until the laying and hatching season was over. One of the men she was to ptck up was Possession's headman, 35

whose place I would take.

I
drank in the cold air eagerly. It was ten days since my encounter with the C-in-C. I had seen a lot of Koch before he flew to Luderitz some days before my own departure.
1
wondered what the C-in-C's reaction would have been to the sight of the irrepressible Austrian performing the sword dance in a sailors' waterfront dive! I had stayed on at Silvermine to enjoy a crash get-fit course; had visited my mother, a somewhat embarrassed collaborator of the C-in-C; had been made headman of Possession, officially, in Cape Town .. . and now I was here wearing the regulation corduroy clothes and a peaked cap decorated with the badge of office!

Panther Head came closer and a view of Chamois Bay beyond opened up. Four groups of reefs bunker the place about in a rough circle of about six miles. We had to negotiate the southernmost gap between them to enter the bay. Whitecaps creamed on the jagged fangs and threw up a drifting haze of spray. However, the coaster was safe enough. I was tense for a different reason: I was reliving my
Walewska
nightmare. It was here that the tanker had torn out her bottom and made a break for the high seas. I had been about fifty miles away when I'd received her distress signal. I reached her to find a big slick already streaming away to the north-west in the direction of the guano islands. Her load of 150,000 tons was enough to wipe out most of the wild life population of the islands–birds, seals, penguins. The
Walewska's
captain reckoned he could save the ship if he dumped her cargo.

I
was
caught in a double hammerlock quandary: if I allowed him to jettison the oil where he was he'd destroy the islands; if I permitted him to make for the open sea and dump there, he'd do the
same
thing for the fish life which thrives so abundantly round the great Benguela current. The Benguela flows to the
Sperrgebiet all
the way from the Antarctic. It is one of the world's major currents and transports vast quantities of plankton, the fishes' food. There
was a
third reason for my decision to destroy not only the tanker but also her oil: the sea was in the grip of what is known scientifically
as an
upwell cell. Once every winter a very powerful, special wind
is
generated on the Sperrgebiet. It lasts only a few days. It
is
hot and blows from the desert out to sea, I'd seen sand columns, hundreds of 36

feet high, miles offshore. This wind
is
so strong that it pushes the surface water bodily out to sea. In turn it is replaced by other water from deep down and far out–icy Benguela water. It's like some gigantic ball-valve mechanism going into operation. It is called an upwell cell because the sea does just that: it wells up on the coast. It hits maximum strength at a spot a little north of where the tanker struck, and consequently produces
a
strong current which flows up the Sperrgebiet. There was really only one solution. I took the decision off my own bat. Fast, too, because of the danger: I removed the
Walewska's
crew and fixed delayedaction demolition charges in her holds so that we could get well clear before she blew up. It was a good thing I did. Ships sixty miles away felt that explosion.

I looked now for the
Walewska's
stern section, which had been brought back by the current, and spotted it lying on the rocks which flanked the north-western entrance to the bay, white water tooting high up the side of its rusty hulk. The
Walewska
had become something super-heated inside my brain; I cursed the ugly bitch of a thing with a sailor's oath and felt better. The long light made a savage magic out of the desert, the coastal pans and low-rise sandhills. Experts say it hasn't changed a feature in a million years. Captain Murray, a dour Scots-Afrikaner, anchored for the night inside the bay, keeping the coaster's head to the boisterous wind and strong in-shore current. The seas became steep and vicious as they hit the shallow water round Panther Head. It was as comfortable as sleeping on a pogo stick. The fog came down; the bay was full of unidentifiable noises. After an uneasy stay we set off next morning and picked our way past the
Walewska's
hulk, unnaturally large and ghostlike in the thinning fog, en route for the first group of Godforsaken islands, as individual as their names–Little Roastbeef, Sparrowhawk, Sinclair, Black Sophie and Plumpudding. It took most of the day to thump our way up the coast, calling in for brief intervals to take off an odd man here and there, until we reached Possession in the late afternoon. Captain Murray spat nicotine and phlegm over the side of the bridge. 'Possession. Which
being
interpreted is, shit'

It was quite a speech, for him. There'd been little more than grunts out of him the whole way up from the Cape.

'Shut up
in that hole,
I'd start to talk to the penguins. 37

Maybe you will before you're through.'

Perhaps Ill quit by the end of the winter. I don't know. Depends.'

'On what?'

'I
durum. Depends.'

'You're a bit fancy for
a
headman,'

'It takes all types.'

'You ain't brought along any
dop-en-dum,
I sew'

'No alcohol allowed.'

'Headman, yes. The rest,
no.'

Well, I didn't.'

`So that's it, eh?'

'What's what?'

'That's what you're running away from*

'I'm not running away from anything.'

'Weddell . . . Somewhere
I know that name
• •
Can't
think
where.'

I
didn't enlighten him. I was busy watching a boat putting off from the island.
Buffel
had come the safe way through the channel's southern entrance to fetch up at the anchorage opposite a group of prefab huts ashore. Possession is about two
miles long, a
half broad, and seventy feet above the sea at its highest point and shaped rather like a stretched-out version of a human foetus, a bit at the south resembling
a
head and neck. Submerged continuations of the island's northern extremity form the Kreuz shoals lying between it and the mainland at Elizabeth Bay, about four miles distant The shoals make the northern channel very dicey unless the weather is dead calm–which is almost never.

Captain Murray seemed nervous. I reckoned he was

talking in order to hear the sound of his own voice. Possession was as inviting as a seal rookery–and as smelly,

Weddell , . it'll come back.'

`Let me know when it does,'

'My next call is in three months'
time.
Maybe by then you'll be like that poor bugger coming off now in the boat. Started smoking grass. Grew the stuff with tender, loving care in a potty in his cottage, they tell me. If he'd tried outside, the wind would have finished the plants off in
a
day He's on to mainline stuff now.'

'Where does he get it from, here?'

'Where do
any
of them get it from?'

38

a

'Look at his eyes when he arrives. What made you take this job?'

Interest:

'Jesus ! '

He slipped the pipe from his mouth and gestured with the stem at the coastline.

The channel was about two miles wide on a west-east axis and slightly longer from south to north. Then, about another four miles from Possession's northern tip, the mainland changed direction sharply and jutted westwards into the ocean, abruptly terminating the channel's south-north direction. A promontory called Elizabeth Point completed the U-shaped loop of the shoreline. Near it was a cluster of ruins, the site of an abandoned diamond ghost town.

The setting sun that still came over the shoulder of the island picked out the landmarks ashore, through a haze of spray. One dominated all the rest–a gigantic arch of rock opposite Possession, nearly two hundred feet high, whose centre had been completely carried away by the sea, leaving only about twenty feet remaining at
either
end. One leg of the arch was on land, the other in the breakers. The rock, glinting as though polished, looked like a black rainbow, fantastically plucked out of the sky and dumped on the coast–the Bridge of Magpies.

The shoreline round about it was composed of slabs of
dark
and variegated rock which had kept their surprising geometrical square shapes despite the continual scouring of the wind and waves. Doodenstadt. The Town of the Dead. Behind Doodenstadt the desert began again in a series of low, light grey-brown sandhills which rose steeply from the sea, but nowhere reached a height of more than three hundred feet. The Bridge of Magpies was the eye-catcher, but almost rivalling it in the field of the fantastic was the object perched on top of Doodenstadt. Like a great wounded animal, a big two-stack liner sat upright on the rocks, outwardly apparently undamaged. Captain Mu ray's pipe-stem fixed on
it.
'The
City of
Baroda.
Torpedoed in the war and beached. She's out of reach of the waves, else she'd have disappeared long ago.'

He clamped his teeth back on to his pipe and exclaimed, Why can't that bloody boat hurry up from the island? That 39

wreck gives me the willies. It shows what can happen around here.'

'Aren't you staying tonight?'

'Nooit nie! –
never! I'm pulling
out
as soon as you're on your way ashore. That dump also gives me the creeps.
I
see they've got the ghost light going already and the sun's not even down.'

A point of light showed in one of the panes of a prefab. It resembled a chance reflection of the sunset.