A Twist of Sand

XI A Lady for Onymacris

"It lighteneth," observed John biblically. He raised his night glasses from their strap and rubbed off the moisture with the tip of his elbow, heavily swathed in an off-white sweater.

And almost a biblical figure he looked, too, in his thick sweater and balaclava cap dripping droplets of moisture, the whole picture slightly out of focus in the swirling fog.

I glanced at the compass card.

"Christ!" I exploded at the Kroo boy. "Can't you keep on course without swinging a point or two either way!"

He looked truculent. More truculent than scared, although in his hands lay the fate of Etosha and us all, ripping through this cursed darkness with all the power of the great diesels. The telegraph stood at full ahead; she had her head, striding out through the murky water almost dead into the light breeze from the nor'-nor'-west. She had been doing gloriously since I rang down to Mac hours ago when Etosha slipped out of Walvis into the fog. The winter fog was ideal cover for our movements, and if the wind did not freshen from the north-west, it would hang around until the middle of the afternoon.

I steadied the wheel over the Kroo boy's shoulder. The fog came in through the open bridge windows, wet, clammy, but fresh with the sea — unlike the land smog with its tale of filth and cities.

"When do you think we should sight it?" asked John.

"In about ten minutes, if this black bastard can keep his mind on the job that long," I replied acidly. "Bearing oh-five-oh. You can't miss it."

"You can miss anything in this fog," rejoined John.

"No, you won't," I said. "I've been keeping her about six miles offshore all night…" I saw him wince as he thought of the shoals and the rocks as close in, and the wicked currents which come and go along the Skeleton Coast… "and in about ten minutes the sun will be at a sufficient angle to refract under the fogbank. You won't miss the hill in Sierra Bay. It's about six hundred and fifty feet high, and you'll catch a glimpse of white water as the sun glances off the fogbank."

"Neat as a problem in physics," laughed John.

"Oh, for God's sake!" I burst out. Then I regretted it. My nerves were shot to hell, tearing through a fogbank like this at sixteen knots and never being sure that I was' not taking Etosha — to a sudden and dreadful death. "Sorry," I said. "But this isn't a pleasure cruise to me — and you know anything can happen on this coast."

John grinned. "Forget it," he said. "I'm only an unskilled help. You're the backroom boy — you've got it all in your head. I must say it frightens the pants off me."

"Well," I said, mollified by his calm which was always a tonic to me in a tight corner, "I had to get well clear of Walvis before any of the fishing fleet started cluttering things up. At this speed, if Etosha hits anything, we will all take a nose-dive to the bottom. I'm making like a bat out of hell for Sierra Bay, and I think I'll get a fix on the high hill there. About eight miles to the north-west will be Cape Cross and when we spot the white water there.I'll change from this course nor'-nor'-west to nor'-west. But I'm holding her close in so that we'll be in fog most of to-day, and by this afternoon when it clears we should be somewhere around the Swallow Breakers."

John winced again. "Where I put up my classic boob and nearly had us ashore."

I looked at him sombrely. "I can't promise you I won't do exactly the same. I hope to get another fix there, and then we'll beat it for the mouth of the Cunene." I dropped my voice. "That's where our friend is going to be dumped."

John looked at me; the fog distorted the size of his eyes.

"Dumped?"

"Put ashore," I hastily corrected myself. I wondered if John guessed I had no intention of bringing Stein back alive.

"Tricky," he said, turning away and raising his glasses.

"Watch this boy," I told John. "I'm going up above to see if I can get a glimpse of the breakers."

"Aye, aye," said John.

The fog seemed thicker up on the "flying bridge." I strode over to the starboard wing and my anger and frustration at the whole project boiled when I saw a duffle-coated figure looking landwards. If I was going to taxi Stein around this perilous coast, at least I wasn't going to have him or any of his party on my bridge.

I grabbed the coated shoulder.

"Get off my bridge," I snarled. "Get the hell out of here back to the saloon."

The hood fell back as the figure turned. It was a girl. Even in my anger I noticed that the long, red-brown hair seemed more to tumble out of her hood than anything else in its profusion.

I looked at her in stupefaction. The fog perhaps distorted her eyes, but I can see the look in them still. She gazed at me silently.

"As you wish," she said in a low voice.

She started to brush past me. All my pent-up anger at Stein and his machinations broke loose.

"What the bloody hell are you, a woman, doing on my ship?" I burst out. "If Stein thinks he can bring along his home comforts on a trip like this, then, by God, he's mistaken!" A plan flashed through my mind. Cape Cross! Yes, I'd send her ashore in the surf-boat under cover of the fog — there was a primitive settlement there — and she could have a look at life in the raw.

"Out there," I snapped, waving my hand landwards, "is a series of shacks round a saltpan. I'm putting you ashore there — and you'll bloody well like it, understand? I'm not having any woman on board my ship on a trip like this."

She eyed me coolly and it may have been a gesture of nervousness, or a woman's instinct, that made her fumble to undo the top button of her duffle-coat.

"I think we should discuss this question with Dr. Stein, don't you?" she asked levelly.

"I won't discuss anything with Stein," I snapped back. "I'm not having his bloody woman on my ship. Having him is quite enough."

"Stop saying ' his woman '," she retorted. She stared at me hard and I remember still that there was a slight crumple of flesh between her right eyelid and eyebrow as she frowned. "So you are the famous Captain Peace," she went off at a tangent.

I started to reply, but John's hail came floating up.

"Breakers bearing oh-four-oh, six miles. Geoffrey! Geoffrey!"

I stood, torn between my anger at finding Stein's woman, and the imperative need to con Etosha.

She smiled. "Go on, Geoffrey," she mocked. "You can deal with me later. Your ship needs you now."

I went.

"I just caught a glimpse of it," said John, "there, I think, bearing now oh-three-five."

I waited for a moment for the refracted light to strike back.

"No," I said, "I don't think so. Oh-three-five is too fine. I think it must have been a mirage off the smaller saltpan, which lies just south of the point. How much water under her?"

John flicked a glance at the echo-sounder.

"Nine — and a bit, shallowing."

I grinned at him. "Oddly enough, it's not shallowing just here. As we come opposite the point we'll get up to thirteen fathoms. I wish we would get a bit of sun, though."

Etosha tore on. John, I could see, was plainly nervous. So was I. Toying with a trick of the light for a reliable bearing on the Skeleton Coast is about as safe as playing Russian roulette.

The fog dripped, but it was lighter to the east. If I missed this bearing, I would, at best, have to fumble my way northwards to Palgrave Point and Cape Frio and beyond that, in the foul ground towards Curva dos Dunas — I felt myself sweating even at the thought.

I trained my glasses on a fixed bearing. At thirteen fathoms under Etosha, that should be just about right.

"How much water under her now?"

John's voice was surprised.

"By the deep twelve."

"Good. Take the helm, will you, John? We should pick it up in a moment. It'll be tricky. I don't want that Kroo boy spoiling things."

A flicker of light, like a halo, twitched across the landward side of the fog. Here it comes… I thought.

A bright shaft, almost like a searchlight, struck the outward opaque edge. The sun, as I had assumed, had glanced off the startling white surface of the great saltpan north of Sierra Point; along its beam I hoped to see the bald, eroded hill which stood out at the back of the two saltpans.

Like a revelation, the fog opened and my landmark was as clear as day.

"High hill bearing red oh-three-three," I grinned at John, enjoying the complicated problem in navigation.

But my professional pleasure was spoiled. Stein was on the back of the bridge with the woman.

"You see, my dear; what I mean when I say that Captain Peace knows the Skeleton Coast quite as well as they say in the bars at Walvis. Look! no charts, no references — it's all in his head. It looks so very simple, does it not? But do you realise that if he didn't know exactly what he was doing, he'd tear the bottom out of her in three minutes?"

The girl said nothing. I couldn't worry about them now.

"Steer three-four-oh," I said in a flat voice.

Etosha came round in a sweeping arc, blinking into broad sunlight for a minute as she cocked a snook at the dun coastline with its balding fringes of windswept weed here and there.

"Steady as she goes," I said to John. "Put the Kroo boy on now."

I had my fix and Etosha. was set for Cape Frio. Beyond that…

Fortunately it was just as suitable for dropping a boat off Cape Cross.

I turned to Stein.

"In half an hour," I said acidly, "I shall stop the engines and drop a boat over the side. This woman of yours is going ashore." I looked at the composed face under the duffle-coat hood.

"You've got about twenty minutes to get your things together."

Stein grinned his ray-like grin. This was the sort of situation he loved.

"May I introduce," he said calmly, "Dr. Anne Nielsen, of the National Zoological Museum in Stockholm."

I gazed at her in cold rage.

"You're losing time," I snapped. "If your things aren't ready, I'll throw them over the side after you."

"Dr. Nielsen," Stein continued, "is the only scientist in the world — at least in this generation — to have actually examined the species Onymacris in the flesh, or shall we say, in the shell?"

I still did not catch on.

"What all this mumbo-jumbo has to do with me, I am at a loss to know," I retorted. Etosha was cutting through the fog and it gave an eerie air of making everything a little larger — like her eyes.

"Shall I explain, that Dr. Nielsen is my principal assistant on this trip and she will accompany me in order to establish whether or not the Onymacris beetle lives on the Skeleton Coast. It will be a discovery of the first importance, both to science and the world. Captain Peace," he said and his voice hardened, "you will understand that there is no question of putting Dr. Nielsen ashore? She comes with me."

The thought gave me a jolt. If I did away with Stein, she'd have to be a victim too. I must have been pondering this deeply until suddenly I was aware that I was staring at her; the only sound on the bridge was the click of the ratchet on the helm.

I looked from her to him.

"Very well," I said, "but I hadn't bargained for a woman. On a ship like this there's not much room. You'll have to find a corner somewhere. Mister Garland will see to that. And — Stein — if you have any more surprises in your party, you'd better tell them to me quickly, or else…" I left the sentence unfinished.

Stein said smoothly. "My personal bodyguard and general factotum is, of course, Johann."

"Johann!" I gasped. "That mad U-boat rating! God's truth, Stein, what is this?"

"It's my expedition and you are going to put us ashore at a spot which — I hope sometime to-day you will be good enough to show me on a chart. My objective on land is slightly west of the Baynes Mountains."

I stared at him in open disbelief. The woman first, the mad German rating second, and the Baynes Mountains third.

"The Baynes Mountains!" I exclaimed. "You're crazy, Stein! No white man has ever set foot inside them."

"Except Baynes," retorted Stein.

"And do you really expect me to hang around the Skeleton- Coast while you traipse off to the Baynes Mountains ú — you'll take a month at least to get there."

"Depending," interrupted the girl, "where you put us ashore."

"That's fair enough," I replied. The freshening wind blew back the hood. Her hair was very lovely. "But when I undertook to convey you to the Skeleton Coast, I understood that you were making a quick run ashore — at the most two or three days. There was no mention of a specific objective."

"You will fetch us in a month's time, depending on where you are putting us ashore," said Stein. I didn't like the way he said "will."

This new development meant I must disclose the whereabouts of Curva dos Dunas — at least vaguely. Well, I ruminated grimly, they've all signed their own death warrant. Pretty girl or no pretty girl, Curva dos Dunas was mine. I salved my conscience quickly. I could perhaps arrange a "leak "through Mark and the police would round them up, but then I would be involved if Stein spoke — and I felt quite sure he wouldn't hesitate if he found I had turned the tables on him. I shelved the question for the moment.

Stein was speaking again.

"I think the best plan is if we go to the saloon and I shall indicate exactly where I am going."

I nodded. The girl went first.

I found myself alone in the saloon with her. She slipped off the unshapely duffle-coat and I was surprised at the slim figure underneath. She wore corduroy slacks and a tangerine shirt. It looked as if it had come straight from the laundry. Her breasts barely filled the curve of the shirt.

She caught my glance and smiled.

"Not exactly the rig for the Skeleton Coast, thinks Captain Peace?"

"I don't think this coast is any place for any woman at all," I said gruffly, half irritated at her close scrutiny of myself. I hadn't shaved as I had been on the bridge all night and I could feel the sticky mixture of salt air and fog moisture on the bristles. My eyes probably looked like a drunk's.

"Cigarette?" she asked, pulling out a packet of Peter Stuyvesant.

"I don't smoke," I said, "or practically never."

There was a reserved, mocking smile on her lips.

"Spoils the ability to smell where you are off the Skeleton Coast?" she asked lightly.

I looked at her, but there was no laughter in my reply.

"Stein didn't tell me he was bringing a woman along with him. Particularly an attractive woman. I just don't like the whole idea."

There was no laughter this time from her either.

"Your idea or his idea?" she asked penetratingly.

I fenced it off, but it gave me the measure of her intelligence.

"The two ideas must necessarily combine. I supply the landing-point — so I thought. That is my business. Where it is is also my business. I wasn't bargaining for a return pick-up in a month's time."

"Return pick-up sounds awfully like some kind of tart," she grinned.

But she cut short my return grin and I found myself feeling rather inane with it hanging on my lips. She took a quick draw on the cigarette — I noticed she had almost smoked half of it in our brief conversation — and said crisply, as if she regretted her sally: "You're Captain Macdonald, alias Lieutenant-Commander Peace, aren't you?"

I didn't like the way she said it.

I nodded.

"That's right," I sneered. "Lieu tenant-Commander Geoffrey Peace, D.S.O. and two Bars, Royal Navy, cashiered. Now a fisherman. At present engaged in dubious unspecified activities off the Skeleton Coast."

"I just want you to get it quite clear what my position is in all this," she went on decisively. "Let's get the record straight before we start. The first thing that springs to your mind when you see me is that I'm Stein's woman. Those were your own words."

"What else was I to think?" I rejoined lamely. "An attractive young woman…" My words petered out.

"Exactly," she snapped, grinding the cigarette savagely. "To you a woman means only one thing — and you had the impertinence to say it to a complete stranger. Get this clear; I don't like Stein any more than I like you on first acquaintance."

"Then there's nothing more to be said," I snapped back.

"There's a great deal more," she said. "I know the sort of man Stein is, and I know the sort of people he hires to work for him."

We stared across the table in open hostility.

"If you know all about slumming, why come along?" I sneered back. "Why dirty your lily-white hands with all this human offal?"

She lit another cigarette angrily.

"Don't you know what a living Onymacris means to science?"

"No," I replied, "and I don't give a damn either.. Stein is no more hunting an extinct beetle than I am. I don't see him as the scientist in his ivory — or is it uranium — tower devoting his life and fortune to restoring one little beetle to the sum of human knowledge."

"I was absolutely right in my assessment of you," she said. "Tough, ruthless, self-centred, no gain but my gain. You wouldn't know what it felt like to have a leading ideal about a thing like this."

I was more curious than angry now.

"And you have — of course."

"Look," she said, "I was born during the civil war in China…"

"Is this autobiography really necessary?" I asked.

The barb went home. She flushed. She turned away to the porthole.

"It only is because it illustrates why I am here," she said. "I haven't got any illusions about Stein — or about you, for that matter. Or this expedition. But Onymacris matters — matters, oh, so much."

I wasn't going to let her get away with all that.

"There must be something darkly Freudian about conceiving a passion for a beetle," I said.

"Damn your cheap flippancy," she snapped. "When did you last speak decently to a woman?"

"I never do. It was one of the charges when they cashiered me."

She ignored this. "My father was one of the world's leading authorities on beetles," she said. "Without boring you with tales of hardship and being only one jump ahead of death for months on end, ahead of one opposing army or the next, he and I eventually got to the edge of the Gobi Desert. Mother, who was English, died long before that. He rediscovered Onymacris there. When at last we escaped from China, he died one night suddenly of a heart attack aboard a sampan near the Yangtse mouth. I didn't know about it till morning. The body was robbed by the coolies. His precious three beetles, which we'd kept alive when we thought we'd die of starvation ourselves, had been stamped flat. Just a couple of squashed things at the bottom of an old shoebox. A lifetime's work for science crushed out by some careless foot. I'm going to find Onymacris again — for science. I've got to. That's why I'm here."

"It must sound a pretty obvious question," I said. "But why not go back to the Gobi and get some more, if you're so keen?"

"First," she said a little didactically, and I could see now that she was a little older than her looks and figure would seem to indicate, "it's behind the Iron Curtain. Second, the place where we found them is now a prohibited area, anyway. Probably a sputnik launching site. An Iron Curtain behind an Iron Curtain. I know. I've tried."

"It seems a tough proposition." I agreed.

She came back shortly: "Onymacris is a tough proposition, Captain Peace. And I expect to find only tough circumstances where it is. That's what makes it so precious to science. It's not one of the things you find by chance on a Sunday afternoon walk. You've got to work for it. It's a tough proposition."

"Like this outfit," I said ironically.

She looked at me levelly. "Like this outfit, Captain Peace. Like yourself, Captain Peace. Like this coast, Captain Peace, which I am told you know so well. I'm after something tough, just like you, that's why I accepted Stein's invitation without hesitation. You can forget about the woman-comfort side of things. I thought I'd explain this clearly to you before you start showering your protective instincts on a helpless female."

"I don't see how you could be a doctor of science at Stockholm…" I began.

"Why not?" she flashed. "Every moment of my life I've slept, eaten, talked beetles. What's so strange about it? My father taught me everything — and more — a university ever could. A doctor's degree is a necessary appendage, that's all. It couldn't have been easier. A piece of cake." She lit another cigarette. She came back at me remorselessly.

"Why are you so cagey about this whole landing affair? Why don't you think it's safe?"

"Listen," I rapped out, fast losing patience, for she was so damnably sure of herself and her precious beetle. "Everyone loves this blasted beetle so much, you'd think it was pure gold. You'd think each one of us was acting within the law, when we're just as far outside it as could be. I'm putting you ashore — illegally — at an illegal spot on the ú Skeleton Coast. You and Stein have absolutely no right to I be there. You yourself admit it isn't going to be easy. I say so too. I'm aiding and abetting a crime."

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 say 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.

"Look," I said to Anne, handing her my glasses, "you can still see the emergency floats lashed to her decks."

"I can see a locomotive — and a tank," she exclaimed with a note of excitement in her voice. Until now it had been level and controlled in her conversations with me. "Can't we go in closer?"

John looked dubious as I slowed still further and altered course to take Etosha nearer the famous wreck. Anne's suppressed mood gave a holiday air to the bridge.

"I can see more tanks and guns and look at the huge pile of tyres — I think it's tyres — on the beach."

Stein said heavily: "She was carrying tanks and guns to the British in the Middle East, as well as tyres for the Eighth Army. Her loss must have hit them pretty hard at that time, I guess."

Anne gave him a long, considered look. It almost seemed as if she thought as little of him as I did. I could see him mentally rubbing his hands. His gloating satisfaction rather sickened me. Somehow the thought that she wasn't on Stein's side pleased me. One way and another, Onymacris must be quite a beetle.

Etosha came closer in and we could see the pitiful abandon of a ship left to the waves and the birds.

"It was a stroke of luck, her hitting a submerged object like that — for the Germans, I mean," went on Stein in his mincing voice. "The court of inquiry thought she smacked on to an outlying spur of the Clan Alpine Reef. You'd think the British captain would have kept away from a coast like this instead of coming in so close. Not unless Captain Peace was in command. He must have known he was taking a big risk."

"If you'd really like to know," I said quietly, "the Dunedin Star was sunk by a German torpedo."

"Rubbish," snapped Stein. "It was a reef. Slipshod. If he'd been a German captain we'd have shot him. The Dunedin Star was off course. There was never any mention of an explosion."

Etosha circled her dead friend of the sea. Stein knew a lot about the Dunedin Star. I wondered to myself how much he was concerned in knowing her movements — in time of war.

"Did you ever hear of the Type XXXI U-boat torpedo?" I asked.

I had Anne's and John's full attention now.

"No? Well, Blohm and Voss developed it. Acoustic, of course. The torpedo that sank the Dunedin Star was fired from a secret type of German submarine. I'll reconstruct it for you. What went through the U-boat commander's mind when he saw the Dunedin Star, laden with weapons of war, in his sights? He didn't press the button and send her to the bottom. Sooner of later — probably sooner — there would have been a hunting force up here looking for him. So he just tagged along behind the Dunedin Star while he drew the main charges from his Type XXXI's because he knew that at fifty knots — and they did every bit of fifty knots — a close salvo would tear right through any liner's plating like butter. There'd only be a dull thump. Four little beauties and a hole like a house, and a deadweight cargo that would take her to the bottom like a load of lead. The U-boat skipper went even one better. He waited until Dunedin Star was among the worst foul ground in the world Then he fired. The whole world believed that the Dunedin Star struck a hidden reef and tore her bottom out. I would have liked to have met that U-boat man."

Stein gazed at me like a man entranced.

"By God!" he said. "It would take a German to do that."

Anne's dry interruption gave me the measure of her thoughts about Stein. In words at least, it aligned her on my side.

"You forget, the solution has been worked out by a British submarine captain." She looked levelly from him to me. "Very ingenious, Captain Peace. No wonder they loaded you up with decorations." She must have sensed something of the drift of my thoughts, and the barb followed with all the flickering speed of the Bushmen's arrows out there in the desert behind the wreck. "But I'd really like to know something about your last fling that didn't come off."

I thought our truce was peace, but I was wrong.

"Course three-one-oh," I snapped savagely at the Kroo boy. I rang the telegraphs.

"Half ahead."

"I'll take over," I went on to John, quite unreasonably. "You get some rest, unless you really want to tag along here. I'm going outside the Clan Alpine. The chart says sixty fathoms, but I'd swear it's nearer six at fifteen miles offshore. There's a lot of discoloured water and breakers between the shoal and the coast. I don't want to risk it — particularly as it will be dark quite soon."

Stein left.

"You said I could stay…" Anne began.

"Yes," I retorted curtly and I saw, to my surprise, the hurt in her eyes. "I repeat, you can stay. But don't get in the way of anybody. And any fortuitous comment will be out of place."

She went over to where she could see the coastline — for what it was worth — and leaned out across the starboard wing of the bridge. For an hour or more Etosha, her port bow towards the lowering sun, shook herself free of the grim tentacles of the Skeleton Coast — the innumerable, shifting shoals of sand, the uncharted, hidden rocks and the sailor's nightmare which is put down on charts in the classic understatement of "foul ground, discoloured water." The laic afternoon was clear but cold — even in midsummer, let alone midwinter, the mercury falls owing to the peculiar juxtaposition of desert and Antarctic air which comes on the wings of the perpetual south-westerly gale. The afternoon's winteriness and the morning's fog arise from the warmer, moist air which sweeps in in June and July from the humid, tropical seas to the north, creating a fog similar to that of the Grand Banks of America.

Anne stood alone without looking round for that whole hour. The coastline was clearer than at any time during the morning and in the far distance I could see the ragged tumble of blue which marked the mountains of the interior, anything up to a hundred miles from Etosha.

I jammed myself on the opposite side of the helmsman away from the girl. It needed all the cold, fresh sea air to dampen my anger against her. What damnable nerve! I brooded to myself. I was angry at her unconcealed opinion of me and at the same time puzzled when I thought of the other side of her I had seen for a moment when she believed I could do something about the Dunedin Star. Then the holiday mood on the bridge — which was real, the cool, self-poise, or the holiday mood? She seemed to have an ability, a kind of psychological homeopathic flair, for bringing pain. I thought the old wound was healed. Why should I put up with her anyway? I asked myself savagely. I thrust myself back on the smooth surface of the stool and almost slipped over backwards. How she'd laugh if I did, I told myself with unnecessary heat. Why should I find myself snarling; what the hell did it matter what she did or didn't think? I glanced overtly at the slim back and line of her buttocks beneath her corduroy slacks. I couldn't tell myself she was just one of Stein's minions — she'd made it perfectly clear she'd come on the expedition with her eyes open — wide open — to both Stein and myself. And yet I couldn't reconcile her devoted scientific attitude, her "keep-off-the-grass" line to me, with those moments looking at the old wreck. She'd come out in my defence over the sinking of the Dunedin Star — if that meant anything after what followed. I'd handed Stein the black spot, and that meant her too, I brooded, taking my eyes from her back. It was a fair fight between Stein and myself but Anne was so obviously in a neutral corner… The wide expanse of sea seemed weary with the day's care. The strange light did nothing to alleviate my mood. Too much sea and too much Skeleton Coast!

I got up suddenly and joined her at the rail. She said nothing. She seemed scarcely aware of me. She continued to stare out towards the coast.

I fumbled for something to say.

"It gets cold towards evening. You'll want something more than that thin sweater," I said lamely.

She barely glanced towards me. An opening gambit like that deserves it, I told myself in a moment of introspection.

I was wrong. She gestured towards the dimming coastline. I felt as lost among her vagaries of mood as I once did among the shoals of Curva dos Dunas.

"It tends to get a hold on one, doesn't it?"

She turned without straightening so that she looked up from the level of my chest into my eyes. The movement caught a wisp of hair and blew it across her forehead. The underside was more red than gold.

She followed the movement of my eyes.

"I'll shave it off, and that will shake you when you pick us up again," she said. The sun, at its sinking angle, cast the left side of her face into faint shadow. It showed me, for the first time, the lovely disproportion of the two sides.

I wasn't going to lay myself open again. I started to say something about sending my razor ashore with her, but it died on my lips and I turned shorewards under the scrutiny of her calm gaze.

She leaned her elbows on the rail. There wasn't a landmark or a hill worth mentioning to break the conversational impasse.

She surprised me by doing so.

"That was a lovely old pair of dividers you had in there," she said. "I'd like to have a closer look at them."

My surprise must have shown on my face.

"I'll do it on an exchange basis," she smiled, and it flashed across my mind how wonderfully it lit up the muscles which seemed to be more in the power of pedantry or self-defence when in repose. She dug a hand into the pocket of her slacks. She took something out and held it behind her back. It was almost the teasing attitude of a small girl. I would have fallen for it right there, had I not been forewarned. "I'll show you what's in my hand if you'll go and get the dividers."

"Of course," I replied guardedly. "Stay here, and I'll slip below and get them."

"I couldn't run very far, could I?" she responded lightly.

I took my time about going down the bridge ladder. She seemed such a mass of contradictions. I returned with the dividers.

She took the instrument from me and held it by the mother-of-pearl tip. She ran a finger down the ivory and stopped in surprise at the bottom.

"Why," she said, "they're so old that they haven't even got steel points. What is it?"

"Porcupine quill," I replied.

She opened her own hand. There was a tiny Chinese figure of a water-carrier, done in ivory. It was yellow and discoloured. The water-jug was gone.

"Just as you carry your lucky hand, so I carry this round," she said. I couldn't fathom this unburdening. "See, the water-jug got broken. It was in a fire when the soldiers first burned down our home. We were always on the run after that for years."

With a deft movement she put the dividers in the empty socket of the little water-carrier and swung them round and round.

She eyed me.

"Measurement, calculation, plot… " she murmured. "I suppose there comes a time when measurement becomes all-important, becomes an end in itself. The same with calculation."

I tried to laugh it down. I remembered the "keep-off-the-grass "sign.

"I'll bet the old John Company captain never thought his dividers would become part of a moral tale. Particularly in the abstract."

She didn't laugh.

"Calculation is important in your life, isn't it?" she said.

"If it weren't, you might be swimming for it now," I replied flippantly.

Her next remark came out of the blue.

"Have you killed many men, Captain Peace?"

"Thanks for the memory," I said bitterly. The grey light, the mica dust-blinded evening, made it all grey. I needed a drink.

The wind flickered a wisp of hair across her face. The crumple of her eyelid was accentuated. Etosha creaked against the night swell.

"You can feed any sort of information into a calculating machine," she went on. She seemed to be weighing something almost judicially in her mind. "I remember seeing a ' Zebra.' computator, one of those electronic brain affairs, which could work out things to sixty-four decimal places. It also worked out how much a worker did or didn't do in a lifetime's employment. Equally, it gave the exact radius blast of a hydrogen bomb. It had all the answers, and it didn't matter to it whether it was people dying or people living. It didn't hear them scream. When you live close to a thing like that you begin to see things the way it does, only as a matter of computation, no other issues." She swivelled round on me.

"You've lived a long time with the Skeleton Coast, Captain Peace."

"Yes," I said, "a long time." My anger wouldn't ignite.

"Listen," I said, "I'll show you tomorrow. You ask about killing men. You'll see the corpses. Seventy-five in one beautiful steel coffin and twenty-seven in another."

"You — were responsible?"

"The first lot," I said harshly, "I would do it again for the same reasons — and the same consequences. Those seventy-five men had to die if thousands more wanted to live. That's fair enough. They took their chance, like I did. I won."

"But, from what I hear, the Royal Navy didn't seem to think so."

"No," I said shortly.

"But you had a defence?" she probed.

"For God's sake, yes," I burst out and I caught a glimpse of the helmsman's eyes flickering sideways at me. "I had a defence all right. It… it lies out there."

I gestured to the north-east, to Curva dos Dunas.

She missed nothing.

"But you took the rap? And that's where we're going — going ashore?"

I nodded.

"What does it matter?" I snapped, for she had brought pain from what I thought was a dead wound. "After all, what does an ultimate weapon matter now? The dead men are history. Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Peace is history. Or maybe he's dead, too, in a sense."

She eyed me for a long time.

"Down in the Antarctic," she said, "on those little gale-lashed islands like Heard and Marion, the ordinary housefly has so adapted himself to conditions that he has shed his wings, so the continual gales can't blow him away. It's an entomological fact. You've become so part of the Skeleton Coast that you-are just pure computation, nothing else."

"A sort of living computing machine," I sneered. "Only I can't work out sixty-four decimal places."

"No," she answered steadily. "But whatever fact is fed to you, you digest it… purely for plot and counter-plot, measurement and counter-measurement. What I like to think is that, like those flies, you once had wings."

I was shaken.

"If you have a cigarette," I said, "I'll break my non-smoking rule and have one."

She passed the carton of Peter Stuyvesant without a word. She lit mine, and one for herself.

"If the first was a fair fight, I gather you think in your own mind, the second — the twenty-seven — wasn't?"

"It was an old Greek freighter," I said quietly. "If there'd been anyone left to put an obituary notice in The Times, you could have looked me up. Presumed lost at sea. She didn't stand a chance… "

Anne was looking at me calculatingly.

"Look," I went on rather desperately, "I wasn't responsible, or only indirectly. Even if I'd been on the bridge that night I couldn't have saved them."

"But you weren't on the bridge, and so indirectly you were responsible," she said.

"You don't know the facts," I hurried on.

"I don't suppose anyone ever will, if what I hear about you is true," she countered. "I suppose it was all illegal?"

I shrugged and turned away. "Like this little jaunt, it was well outside the law. Only one man would be interested now and he would deal with me — outside the law — if he knew. Stein promised to tell him."

She looked at me and her voice was tired.

"I thought it would be something like that. I didn't know the details. It simply confirms my ideas about Stein."

"And about me, too," I followed up.

She evaded it.

"I am sure you can find some neat analogy from the great world of nature," I said sarcastically.

"Yes," she replied. "Yes, I can. It was in my mind even before you spoke. Out in those dunes there lives a blind beetle. It once had eyes like any other beetle. It always lived on the shadowed side of the dunes, digging down deep out of the sun. It has now completely adapted itself to its environment. But it's quite blind as a result." She stared at me. "Quite blind, do you understand? It can't even see its fellows, but all its other senses are doubly developed. It lives by its senses. But it will never see again."

"Why do you tell me all this?" I asked.

It may only have been a last dart of light from the sun that caught her eyes.

"Purely in the interests of science," she said.

I looked squarely at her, but the face was withdrawn, full of a sadness as weary as the eternal vigil of the shoals and the desert of the Kaokoveld.

"And so Stein doesn't come back either?"

I reached out and touched her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but I gripped it and I felt the crescent of her collar-bone under the wool. I turned her gently round until she faced me. I knew what I had to do, then.

"You weren't meant to either," I said softly.