Uncharted Seas (18 page)

The moon was rising watery and haloed through the faint haze that still obscured the stars, and they might have sat there until the small hours of the morning if they had not been interrupted. Footsteps sounded below them in the forewell of the ship and a bulky figure emerged from the shadows. It was Vicente.

He had come off duty at eight o’clock, had a bath to cleanse himself after his labour in the stokehold, changed into clean clothes, and scented his person lavishly in preparation for another
tête-à-tête
with Synolda. Not finding her in the lounge he had dined there on his own and spent the last twenty minutes searching the ship for her.

‘ ’Ullo!’ he said.

‘Hello!’ replied Luvia cheerfully. ‘What d’you want?’

‘It becomes late—yes.’

‘Well, what about it?’

‘It comes to me that the Señora would like to know that it is nearly ten o’clock.’

‘Thanks, Grandpa. If there’s going to be any curfew on this ship it’s Juhani Luvia who’ll order it.’

‘But the Señora likes ’er sleep now that she ’as much work to which she is not accustomed.’

Luvia frowned. ‘I guess you’d better get some sleep yourself since you go on again at midnight.’

‘That I know; but I require little sleep and I was looking forward to a few minutes’ talk with the Señora before she turn in.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you won’t get it. You can see for yourself she’s busy. G’night.’

‘As the Señora wishes. Good night, then.’ The Venezuelan bowed courteously to each of them in turn, swung on his heel, and, with fury in his heart, walked slowly away.

‘What a neck!’ exclaimed Luvia as Vicente disappeared from sight. ‘Damn the fellow, he’s always monopolising your time. Acts just as though he had some claim on you. Well, he won’t get you to himself much after tonight; I mean to see to that.’

Synolda laughed, but she didn’t feel like laughing. The big man at her side had quite unconsciously come too near the truth. Vicente
had
a claim on her, and there was going to be the most awful trouble if Luvia started in to try and keep her to
himself. She knew she had been acting like a fool to even let herself get interested in the good-looking Finn, and a double fool to encourage him by sitting up there on the fo’c’sle with him all this time, but it would make things too obvious now if she left him suddenly.

They talked for another half-hour, but the charm of their earlier conversation had vanished with its interruption. By half past ten they had fallen silent and shortly afterwards decided to break up the party. He took her below by a ladder under the bridge-deck so they did not pass the entrance to the lounge where Vicente was sitting, waiting for her. The passageway to her cabin was empty, so Luvia kissed her before saying good night, and this time she responded warmly to his embrace.

Once in her cabin reaction gripped her. She felt certain that Vicente was furiously angry; policy demanded that she should soothe him down as soon as possible; yet she could not bring herself to face a row that night.

Having succeeded in avoiding him on her way below she thought it a safe bet that he would continue to assume that she was still occupied on the fo’c’sle until he had to go on duty at twelve o’clock; from then until four he would be hard at it in the stokehold. After that, as he had been up since soon after dawn, he would need to get some sleep.

As a precaution against his invading her cabin in the early hours she locked the door behind her. She knew she had got herself into an unholy mess and must pay for her fun in the morning, but in spite of her anxiety she fell asleep feeling happier than she had for a long time.

The following morning broke fairly clear but a distant mist still shut out the horizon. Luvia was on the bridge by six studying the surrounding scene with De Brissac. They could now rake the seas for some miles on every side with their glasses. Both of them had long since given up all hope of sighting a ship in this limitless expanse of watery desert to which the hurricane and southward currents had carried the
Gafelborg
, but they searched the great emptiness with no less anxiety.

During the night the weed had thickened. It no longer presented the appearance of islands in an archipelago, but rather, a low, coastal region intersected here and there, with winding creeks. Down one of these, almost stern first now, the
Gafelborg
was drifting. The two men strained their eyes to catch a glimpse of the open sea, but it seemed they had been borne away from it during
the hours of darkness, and, as the ship had turned, they were no longer quite certain in which direction it lay.

De Brissac pointed. ‘The weed seems to be most broken over there.’

‘But that’s the south-west,’ Luvia protested. ‘We’re wise to that from the sun. The open ocean must be somewhere to the north.’

‘I know it. Yet to go due north you must cut directly across these great fields of weed. The channels seem to run roughly east and west twisting gradually to southward as far ahead as we can see. Is it not possible that we are nearly through this big weed area and shall strike open water again if we head south-west?’

‘More than likely, I’d say. I’ve never seen the damn’ stuff so massed as this any place before. It can’t be anything but local, though, and a decent wind would disperse it.’

De Brissac sighed. ‘A wind, yes. How I would welcome a good fresh breeze. There is something unnatural about this stillness. I don’t know why, but it makes me unquiet in my mind.’

‘So you’ve felt that too, eh?’ Luvia gave a quick glance at the Frenchman; a virile, wiry figure having still an air of dash and gallantry in spite of the stains that now marred his once spotless uniform of horizon blue. ‘Queer, isn’t it? This devilish quiet kind of gives you the jitters.’

‘It is not the quiet only, but a feeling that one must get away; a sense of panic almost. I do not understand myself because it is not usual for me to be afraid.’

‘I get you. Sort of wanting to cut and run with no pausing to look over the shoulder for fear what you might see. The moment I came on deck I had an impulse to put on full steam ahead and snap right out of this unhealthy spot just as quick as I could.’

‘Why do you not do that then? You said yesterday that steamships could easily cut through such weed.’

‘Sure. So they can. I’m not batting my head about that, but the quickest way to make it. If we head north, as I’d like to, we’ll make mighty slow progress nosing our way through chunks of solid weed. I’d a hope we could get back to good blue water quicker some other way. I’ll shin up to the crow’s nest and have a look-see from there.’

While he was gone De Brissac slowly paced the bridge, a prey to nameless forebodings. The solitude and utter dreariness of the scene weighed upon his volatile spirit. He examined the channels on either side through his glasses again, and wondered if he only
imagined it or if they were in fact growing gradually narrower as the ship drifted on.

When Luvia returned there was a serious set expression on his bearded face. He had made his decision.

‘I’m going south-west,’ he said. ‘There’s not a sign of a break to north or east, and it looks as if this channel’s closing in a couple of miles behind us. When we’re through this first wide bank on the starboard beam we’ll strike that broader waterway and run down it a few miles. From what I can see it’ll lead us into that less congested area you spotted.’

He gave careful instructions to Bremer, who was at the wheel, put his hand on the engine-room telegraph, and turned it to ‘Slow Ahead’. It rang for the first time in eleven days.

The
Gafelborg’s
propellers began to thresh the water. Slowly she moved forward until her nose had made a deep indentation in the opposite bank of weed. The telegraph rang again and she backed away. The process was repeated until Luvia had brought her round. She was now headed due south-west with a clear two hundred yards of open water in front of her. He switched the telegraph to full speed ahead and she throbbed to the beat of her engines.

Soundlessly and without the slightest impact she hit the weed at an angle. For a hundred yards she ploughed through it without a perceptible decrease in her speed, then she began gradually to slow down. When she had covered less than a quarter of a mile her way was checked entirely although her engines were still turning over at full speed.

Luvia swore profoundly, rang the telegraph to ‘Stop’ and went forward to the fo’c’sle to see what was baulking her.

De Brissac accompanied him and, looking over the bow, they saw that a great heap of the weed had been forced up out of the water so that its countless tendrils were holding the ship back like the tangled skein of a vast, many-stringed bow.

Returning to the bridge Luvia threw the engines into reverse. The wake of the ship was almost free of weed as she had cleared a narrow waterway by her passage. The propellers churned and she slowly backed out into the main channel.

The failure of the
Gafelborg
to cut through the weed surprised and annoyed Luvia. It was denser, and its main growths very much thicker, than he had imagined. Some stalks that he had caught a glimpse of in the tangle beyond the bow had been fully as large as a woman’s wrist. He did not relish the idea of being
hung up there for several days pushing and nosing his way from one small lagoon to another before he could set a course for South America.

After another visit to the crow’s nest he said to De Brissac abruptly: ‘We’d best follow the creek westward. Farther on it bends a bit towards the south. Maybe we’ll reach the open that way.’

For over an hour they steamed in the direction they had been drifting earlier in the morning. Eight bells sounded and Jansen joined them on the bridge, but De Brissac did not go below to get his breakfast. A vague alarm was steadily growing in him and he was already too troubled to think of food. Gradually all the other members of the off-duty watch straggled up on deck and stood in the fore part of the ship, studying the uniform surface of the weed on either hand and speculating in low voices about it.

Just before ten they came to a place where the creek was split by a peninsula of weed and a choice of two waterways lay before them. A fresh survey from the look-out of the scene ahead convinced Luvia that the left-hand fork offered the best prospect. It was the southernmost and although slightly narrower it appeared to lead almost directly to the broken water that De Brissac had sighted in the far distance that morning. This watery area in the continent of weed was now only about four miles away on their port bow and it seemed to stretch as far as they could see.

Still at half-speed, they crept towards it, but when they had covered about two-thirds of the distance the channel they were following suddenly began to narrow. Half a mile farther on it petered out altogether.

The sight of the free water, dotted only with islands of the weed, now no more than three-quarters of a mile distant, decided Luvia on another attempt to force a passage. Where the channel should have continued the weed seemed less dense than at all other points, so he headed the
Gafelborg
for it.

She progressed easily for five hundred yards and then slowed down again; a further two hundred and she was stuck. Backing her a little, he turned her slightly so as to clear her bows of the weed she had piled up, and made another attempt. But now that they were in the thick of the weed she was checked almost at once. Again and again he drove her forward, first at one angle then at another, but each time the great mass of weed she pushed before her brought the ship to a halt until a great ridge of it, wet, green and glistening, had been forced up in a rough semicircle, barring
the way to the more open water as effectively as if it had been a twenty-foot-thick stone wall. Much time had been taken by their efforts and it was long after midday when he was at last forced to give up.

They suddenly discovered that they were desperately hungry, and, as there was no point in leaving anyone to watch, all snatched a hasty meal together. In depressed silence they ate until they had satisfied their appetites, and, the moment they were done, hurried back on deck.

During the morning their attention had been so fully concentrated on endeavouring to force a way forward that they had neglected to keep watch astern. Now, when Luvia went aft to signal directions for backing out into the channel he saw that, unnoticed by them, the weed had closed in across their wake. He stared at it glumly for a moment and was then seized with a sudden feeling of panic. It could not be his imagination; the main masses of weed had shifted and the channel itself lay much farther away than it was before.

Hurrying up to the bridge he put the ship’s engines into reverse and edged her backwards till her rudder just touched the weed, then he brought her forward again at dead slow. In three-quarters of an hour he had succeeded in turning her right round and had her headed back to the now distant channel, but the weed in her old wake had thickened and it was no longer possible to force a passage even with her bow.

The broken area they had striven so desperately hard to reach lay tantalisingly no more than a quarter of a mile away towards their stern; but the banks they had piled up in the morning had now seeped back so that the clear water around them was reduced to a mere two ship’s lengths.

All through the afternoon and early evening Luvia manoeuvred and charged the weed which always gave under the pressure, but never broke. Twilight fell; the open water with its archipelago of islands appeared to be farther off than when they had first tried to break through it. The drear, eerie silence of the weed continent seemed to become intensified with the failing day. When the sun sank down under the horizon there was no longer room to manœuvre, and with sinking hearts they knew that they were trapped.

That night was not one for love-making. Owing to the nervous tension which had beset them all day Synolda had so far escaped the interview with Vicente she so much dreaded. Both their minds had been occupied so fully in following Luvia’s efforts to get the ship into free water that little time had been left for thinking of anything else.