Scend of the Sea

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Touleier planed swiftly down the following sea, rose, and shook herself with an exulting motion as she raced out of the trough under full power of her great racing blue nylon spinnaker. A dollop of cold sea came aboard as she lifted and sloshed past me as I went forward to trim the jib a little so that all the spent wind of the spinnaker would spill into it, just as the mainsail was giving its overflow to the spinnaker itself.

'Watch it!' I warned Jubela at the helm.

Touleier was making a good eleven knots with a bone ' between her teeth’, and I was driving her hard. Her sails were as taut and eager as I to get to the Bashee. Touleier liked it that way-she was a thoroughbred and could take what I handed out and, even in the rising sea and fresh south-westerly wind on the port quarter, she did not roll much because of her lean, streamlined hull. She was steady, tense, alive, and seemed to be exhilarating in being taken from her winter confinement as much as I did driving her. Between Touleier and myself there was that imponderable rapport which comes sometimes between a man and his ship perhaps that is why I won the South American race in her — and I understood her every mood. It was this, perhaps, which made me a little particular about Jubela steering her, although he was handling the superb flier magnificently, grinning now and again as she picked up an extra knot or two in a downward plane, or giving a slight correction to the helm as he watched the taut, towering pyramid of canvas above him.

Tafline watched us from the cockpit as we handled the yacht. Like us, she wore oilskins, but no hood, and the wind blew her short hair forward over her forehead. Something of the pure joy of the yacht's speed touched her, too, and relaxed the urgency of our forward flight; she spoke only a little now and then to ask me some technicality of sailing.

Touleier drove for the Bashee.

I had emerged from my unhappy engagement with the colonel and the reporters to the easement of that moment with her by the flower-sellers stunned, bewildered, raw, confused, certainly with no idea of repeating my search for the Waratah. The fact that the liner lay somewhere accessible, not hundreds of feet deep out of reach in some forsaken patch of sea, beat like a drum in my brain, but equally imperative was the unconcealed hostility of the authorities and their conviction that they had to do with an irresponsible nut. Whether I would ever be allowed to command the Walvis Bay again and resume the weather watch was open to the gravest doubt. At any moment I expected to be summoned to Pretoria to account for using the weather ship as a springboard for what the Weather Bureau undoubtedly now regarded as a private investigation of the Waratah mystery and nothing else.

Because my whole being was a ripple of hurt nerves, I had responded badly to her suggestion that we should go and search for the vanished liner.

How could we hope to succeed, I asked her roughly, where squadrons of specially equipped aircraft, helicopters and warships had failed? It was barely a fortnight since Major Bates and his men had been over it. Bates had button-holed me on leaving the Conference, and asked my permission to read in the transcript, in the interest of his Maritime Group, my statements about off-shore currents and winds. 'Only providing you don't also use it as evidence against me,' I had said firmly.

I had used Bates's own words to justify my own reluctance.

The air-search revealed nothing. Bates himself has said so, I argued with her. 'I myself sailed the Waratah's exact course, and I saw nothing, I assure you.'

She had paused, in that guarded way of hers, her face buried in her nosegay.

True,' she replied quietly. There was no island for Bates and his fliers to see, no mysterious underwater cavern, no hulk. But you saw what there was. You saw that ancient ship, sailing against the wind.'

I had felt uncomfortable and on the defensive. I regretted having told even her.

'It might have been anything — some sort of optical illusion caused by the waves and the light. One can't start a search on anything as nebulous as that.'

'Phillips of the Clan Macintyre saw it too,' she replied.

'I am not denying it,' I hedged. 'All I am saying is that it is certainly not substantial enough to approach the authorities. If I came along now, after all that has happened, with a story that I had seen the Flying Dutchman, I think they'd clap me in a lunatic asylum straight away. When it came to the point, I couldn't even bring myself to tell the C-in-C. In order to convince them that they should renew the air-sea search, they need some completely down-to-earth, substantial, and tangible facts.'

She smiled. 'I said, we must go and look, you and I. I didn't mention the authorities.'

'What do you mean?'

'Touleier.'

'Touleier, I expostulated. 'But she's laid up for the winter. You can't just go off in a yacht which doesn't belong to you anyway, but to a syndicate. Besides, it's winter, the worst time of the year.. ’

The idea came to me during the Conference when I turned and looked at you,' she went on. 'Touleier's ready for the round-the-coast race in the spring, you told me so yourself. You also said they wanted you to skipper her, although you probably couldn't, if you're on the weather watch. She's got a new suit of sails and that untried self-steering device. Nothing would please the sponsors more than that the winner of the South American race should take Touleier on a quick shake-down cruise round the coast while his own ship is being repaired.'

I gasped, then I laughed. It might still lie within my grasp to justify everything I had done and said about the Waratah.

'It's so simple and so fantastic I’ I exclaimed, a little unsteadily. 'Jubela-I could get him to crew with us. It's a big strain handling a fast boat like Touleier by oneself, and Jubela knows his stuff. We can expect some rough weather..'

'We want rough weather, we want another big gale,' she said firmly. 'It's the way we'll find the Waratah secret.'

This time I'll take a camera along — a very good camera,' I remarked. 'If we see anything like my old sailing ship, I can at least bring back a picture for the doubting Thomases.'

The thought of the wild sea and frenetic wind sobered my enthusiasm for a moment. 'We can count on at least half a dozen winter gales in those parts. However, the one I hit in Walvis Bay and the sort of gale which hit the Waratah was no ordinary winter gale. But we do know that the storm that hit Waratah was followed shortly afterwards by two other exceptional gales. We may be lucky-or unlucky. It's also very different being out in a blow in a small boat like Touleier and a ship even of Walvis Bay's size. The going will be rough.'

She had touched my hand. 'There's probably not a sailor in the whole Southern Hemisphere safer than you in a gale. The Fairlies must have been bora in gales.'

I felt like adding, died, too.

Touleier's sponsors had been delighted when I put forward Tafline's suggestion. They, at least, did not seem to share the general misgivings about me. Jubela appeared as glad as the sponsors when I found him drinking mournfully in a shebeen at 10 o'clock in the morning.

The sea is clean,' he had said. 'And I am like a bushpig in a wallow here.'

Now he was in his element; gone was the silence and depression which had marked his final days at the wheel of Walvis Bay. I had told him the Waratah story and Tafline had been with me. ‘It is right that one should know the grave of one's ancestors' was all Jubela had replied, 'and this ancestor must have been a great sailor.'

The mood of the three of us was tight, purposeful, that day when we approached the headland of St Francis, our last southern gateway to the Bashee, still some 200 miles to the north-east, the final point in rounding the 'ankle' of the coast. Touleier herself seemed to share that mood: taut, yet controlled; eager, yet aware of the dangers ahead.

I took my binoculars and climbed into the rigging. Astern, the horizon had the peculiar blur of purple-blue characteristic of a south-westerly blow, although I felt sure it would not work up into a buster of the calibre which had nearly sunk the Walvis Bay. I had to rely on my own instincts. It would have been fatal for me to have got in touch with the Weather Bureau, and I had no intention of letting Colonel Joubert in on our mission. I had concealed the yacht's departure by slipping out of Cape Town at night, in a growing northwesterly wind. Now, well to the east, rounding that 'ankle' of the South African coastline, I was keeping well clear of the land in order to avoid being caught by some of the violent squalls which sometimes sweep down from the high land. Touleier's thrusting spinnaker would snap the light-metal racing mast like a carrot if it were caught aback. There it was!

I called to Tafline. 'Cape St Francis!'

She swung up nimbly alongside me and looked through the binoculars, and then let them hang round her neck on the strap. She put her face against mine, warm by contrast with the cold south-westerly wind and its threat of rain. The dedicated purpose of the voyage was lightened by my joy at being away to sea with her, and having a splendid yacht underfoot. I think she guessed what I was thinking, for she turned and looked into my eyes, and allowed the roll of the mast to sway her hard against my side.

Touleier raced on.

Unwilling to break the silence, yet reminded of our mission by the sight of that distant landmark, she said at length, 'You read the sea like a book, Ian. It is what lies ahead now, isn't it? It would be pure magic, you and me and Touleier, if it weren't for the Waratah.'

I side-stepped it now. I gestured towards some other passing ships. 'We're using the standard northward route close to the coast to avoid the Agulhas Current. That tanker out there is picking up the benefit of its southbound flow. That's the way it has always been. Northbound, you keep close to the land, especially in this sort of wind, which sets up a counter-current shorewards.'

Without warning, she buried her face in my neck. 'Oh my darling, my darling!' she sobbed. ‘I know all these winds, storms, currents, and the rest are part of the pattern which has been woven into our lives because of. . of. .' I felt the warm tears against my skin. 'But it's you I want, free of all these terrifying shackles. .' She choked gently, and I tried to comfort her, and I tasted the salt of her tears on her lips. She took my face in her hands and searched it with her finger-tips as if to memorize every line; she kissed me as if her heart would burst until even that lively deck and press of sail became oblivion as we raced towards the Bashee.

There were a hundred things to do to the yacht as Touleier sped northwards. After Cape St Francis, Tafline had insisted, as part of the general state of alertness and preparedness, on being taught the rudiments of helmsmanship, although my heart was in my mouth once when Touleier was caught napping by a sharp squall with her at the wheel; the yacht went far over before I could get to Tafline's side, but Jubela saved the situation by letting fly a halliard.

I kept Touleier well clear of the big harbour of Port Elizabeth, but beyond we went close to two groups of tiny islands, called St Croix and Bird, which lie in the big bay of Algoa. In these waters the first sailor ever to round the Cape nearly five centuries ago turned back because his crew mutinied: Bartholomew Diaz planted a marble cross, and it is wrongly commemorated by the name Cape Padrone at the north-eastern fringe of the bay. Only in this century, shortly before the Second World War, was the true location of Diaz's cross found slightly to the north.

Now we were approaching the spot. I was trying to use the weak inshore counter-current about three miles out to help Touleier along and edge past a race of the Agulhas Current which spills over near Cape Padrone. There was muddy water under the yacht, a sure sign that the south-wester was strong enough to generate at least a slight counter to the big main stream further out.

Jubela was off watch and Tafline sat scanning the sea and the shoreline with my glasses: watching, hoping, tireless.

'An island!'

I threw a quick bight of halliard round a cleat and slithered to her side.

No island had ever been recorded hereabouts.

'There!' she pointed, giving me the glasses. 'It's dark against the white.'

The bucking deck and my unsteady hands made focusing difficult.

Then I saw the tiny cross at the summit. I laughed. I had not realized how keyed up. I really was. My nerves were as stretched as Touleier's rigging.

'Diaz made the same mistake four centuries ago,' I told her, disappointed. 'The cross is a replica of Diaz' original, which tumbled down and was found in fragments among the rocks below.'

'But — it looks like an island!' she maintained.

"That's why it deceived the experts for so long,' I went on. 'Its actual name is False Islet. Diaz logged that he had planted his cross on an island, and for hundreds of years men searched for an island, just as we are doing. Until an acute historian-detective hit on the secret of False Islet.'

She was still game. 'No chance of the Waratah being ashore there?'

'Not a chance,' I answered. 'Since the cross was found, thousands of people have visited the place. You can walk from the mainland across a sand causeway to it.' I added, to let her down lightly and not dampen her keenness, 'It's so easy to be deceived on this coast. In a few hours we'll come to a spot called Ship Rock. Another near it is called The Wreck. If you want to imagine things, the natural topography gives one full scope.'

Towards sunset the wind eased and backed to the south. We took in Touleier's spinnaker for the night, leaving her moving well under the American-cut mainsail and jib. We could not be off the Bashee until the following evening at the earliest, if the wind held. In the crowded shipping lane I decided to rig a spotlight high in the rigging to illuminate the sails so that we would not be run down by some unwatch-ful steamer. Touleier held close to the coast and at intervals the lighted resorts stood out clearer almost than the navigational lights. A thin veil of spume from the breakers hung over the cliffs. It was scarcely necessary for me to listen to the radio met. reports to know that the main front had bypassed the Cape — the change of wind direction southwards was a certain pointer that we had nothing to expect, or to fear, from this particular south-wester.

As we sat alone in the cockpit-she was half-turned away from me, gazing towards the land — she suddenly said:

'Did you really see the Flying Dutchman, Ian?'

She had never spoken of it again since that day when first the news of the Gemsbok panel reached us. My stomach knotted at her words. Gone was the quiet pleasure of sailing.

‘I told you, I saw a ship, an ancient ship, sailing against the wind.'

There was a long pause. She watched the distant coastline. 'You didn't link her in your mind with the Flying Dutchman!' 'No.’

She got up quickly, turned to me and dropped on her knees. She scanned my face, deeply, tenderly.

'My darling — are you quite sure of what you saw?'

In that moment, I would have traded away a dozen Waratahs for her.

I leaned forward and touched a wisp of short hair above her ear. She would not let my fingers go.

'When I was thrown against the rear of the bridge by the big wave,' I explained, 'I wasn't stunned. My sole concern at that moment was to prevent Walvis Bay from broaching to. Nothing was further from my thoughts than the Flying Dutchman-or the Waratah. My only thought was to save my ship. I grabbed the wheel. Then I saw. It was a ship, and she was close, between Walvis Bay and the land. She was darkened. It was all too quick to distinguish any details. I mean, I couldn't distinguish gunports, deckhouses, porthole lights or anything like that.'

'No human figures? A man with … with.. ’

'A bloodied sword? — No.'

'It was more an outline, then?’

'She seemed almost on top of us. I saw a high prow and a towering, square stern, and I noticed particularly the way she was heading — south-west. That meant she was sailing right into the eye of the wind.'

'The sails, what did the sails look like?'

I paused and considered. 'Now you come to ask, I don't remember seeing any sails. I should, being a sailor. But what struck me most forcibly was the way she was going. Both her stern and bow were quite distinct, both were high and well defined. There was no mistaking them. It was for all the world like one of those pictures you've seen of an old-fashioned caravel.'

'And you and Phillips-are the only two who claim to have seen this ancient ship? You are sure there is no other record of her? ‘

'Certain,' I replied. 'You might even discredit my sighting by saying that I had been subconsciously influenced by all my delving into the Waratah disaster. But Phillips himself-no! When Phillips sighted what he himself called the Flying Dutchman, he had no idea even that the Waratah was missing.

He had brought the Clan Macintyre successfully through a great storm. Half his ordeal was already behind him. No, what Phillips saw, he saw in daylight, not at night.'

She looked at me sharply, and then helped me slack off the mainsail under the dropping wind, waiting, in her quiet way, for me to continue.

'Let's discount my sighting for the moment. Phillips knew all about sailing ships. He stated categorically that the mizzen of the caravel he saw was raked back, and the foremast forward.'

'Your sighting is so recent, and yet Phillips' is much more explicit,' she said quietly.

'I can't say I saw the masts or the sails,' I went on. 'But I saw the hull clearly. The high bow and stern were exactly as Phillips describes them. And she was definitely sailing against the wind. It scared Phillips. He drank cocoa. I felt more like a shot of rum.'

'Were you frightened. Ian, like he was?’

'I knew only fear,' I replied sombrely. ‘I have tried since, over and again, to try and rationalize it. I still go cold when I have a nightmare and see right ahead of me that dark, old-fashioned hull and Walvis Bay about to crash into it. There were seconds only between us and certain death, that I know.'

She turned away and spoke so softly that I had to crane to hear what she said.

‘I saw nothing, yet I felt it all, hundreds of miles away, that night. It's impossible to describe the feeling. It was the same that first day I came aboard and saw your photographs.'

We left it at that. But had I 'felt' the Waratah then, I would have put the yacht about and nothing would ever have induced me to go in search of her again. As it was, the wind and the sea were quieting; it was a joy to have her close against me in the cold chill as the night wore on. There were no ghosts at sea that night. She was warm, she was alive, she was mine.

The lid of the Waratah’s coffin lifted next night, and the ghosts escaped.

At dawn Touleier was south of the Bashee.

We had sailed all day northwards, never out of sight of the great forests and high cliffs which come down almost to the water's edge. Far out at sea, even, we could hear the breakers. It is an iron shore. One scarcely ever finds a seashell which has not been smashed by the force of the waves. We both grew more tense as Touleier approached the Bashee, and she was very silent. We contented ourselves with minor tasks about the yacht and left unsaid many things. We did not talk about the Waratah.

The coastline is cut by innumerable rivers, and each one seems to have an exquisite lagoon at its mouth. In the first dim light I could see solid columns of mist marching down each river to the sea, shaped and squared by the cliffs on either side.

One- two- three flashes.

Bashee Mouth light.

Tafline screamed from below.

For a moment I sat rigid. Her voice seemed to hang against the dark backdrop of the cliffs, the shadowy forests and the river mouth white with breakers.

I raced to the cabin.

She was sitting up on the bunk, wide-eyed, shaking. 'The storm, Ian! That wind …!'

I held her, trembling. In the dim light coming through the porthole I could see that consciousness had not come fully into her eyes.

'My darling, the wind is gone. It's a quiet, still dawn. There's no storm.'

‘I heard. .' she shook her head as if to clear it. 'But he stood here, and his oilskins were wet.¹ She buried her face against me. 'Thank God, it's you, my darling. It was only a dream.'

I soothed her. But the strange, deep eyes were full of shadows.

‘I can see him now, standing by the bunk,' she said, smiling a little wryly. 'I could hear the wind, and his oilskins were dripping'

'Who was standing?' I asked gently, cold at the recollection of Sawyer

'It was just an ordinary person,' she said hesitatingly. 'No not him. There was nothing like that Just a man.' She looked at me searchingly. 'His face was like yours, a little. I could hear the gale. His oilskins were streaming wet, it's all so vivid. Why, what is the matter?'

It was I who was trembling. She had on almost nothing except a thin slip of a thing; I could see her breasts and her body now where she had pushed aside the bedclothes in her agitation.

Where before I had seen the mystic the sea-ancestry, the knight with unadorned armour against the panoply of the Waratah in the lists. Now I saw the woman.

She sat and held my gaze. She extended her arm to touch me. Not taking her eyes from me, she slipped off the wispy thing. She brought my hands to her breasts in the tender lycanthropy of love. We searched for each other's eyes, lips, hair. Then her lips went cold. Her body lost its fervour to be one with mine.

She drew back. She wept — a quiet, passionless sobbing, a grief as deep, it seemed, as the passion of the moment before.

'We could love, we could forget,' she said softly, 'but we can't forget, and it would come and take our love away from us. It would only be pretending. You are committed and I am committed. We are not free to commit our love until we find the Waratah. I said before, and my body and my heart say it now, until we are free of this burden, we will not be able to realize our love properly.'

All I could say, was: 'We're at the place now. South of the Bashee.'

She ran her hands over her breasts and down her thighs; she clasped them round her knees and hid her face. She gave a last broken, half-sob.

I moved to comfort her, but she shook her head without looking up. 'I'll dress and come up to you in the cockpit.'

As I went to the door, she said in a smothered voice, 'When we have the Waratah, I am yours.'

She was tense, alert, when she came on deck as if being at the Bashee would in itself solve everything. She had come across at once to me at the wheel. She did not kiss me, or stand close, but faced me from the other side of the helm, her hands warm on mine by contrast with the stainless steel circle of the wheel.

‘I know now you will never love me less,' was all she said.

But as we ghosted through the placid water towards the land, I felt her tenseness and disappointment growing at the sight of the empty sea. With daylight, we could make out the deep cleft the Bashee makes between the forested hills, the signal station on a grassy cliff with more forest for a backdrop, and a group of thatched holiday rondavels nearby.

Then the bubble of pent-up feeling burst.

'It's so ordinary!' she exclaimed. 'There's just nothing here, Ian!'

I took in the sails and Touleier lay in the easy swell, perhaps a mile offshore.

'It's the normality of it like this which breaks down the picture of whatever I saw in Walvis Bay's path that night,' I replied. I was tired, drained of feeling. Like that moment at the flower-sellers, I hated the Waratah. But, again, I knew she was right.

'Yet,' she went on, and I still recall her vehemence-'where we are now, maybe right under our keel, a great liner went down and an airliner too. I feel I want to tear the sea apart and look.'

Tear apart! I remember her words now: the answer was all too improbable, too simple, when one came to think of it. I wonder if we would have accepted it, had we known then, without having to live it out?

She jumped on the rail and gazed astern, as if to probe that gentle sea for the undefined spot where Alistair had died.

'I didn't expect anything like this!' She was puzzled, angry. ‘I took it for granted there would be a sinister sea, a sinister setting, somehow. My reason tells me your brother died somewhere right here. You nearly did, too, but I see nothing. We have the most concrete proof that your father sent you a message from "south of the Bashee", but where, where?'

She gestured helplessly. One of the big supertankers ploughed south; a coaster was coming up fast behind us, closer inshore.

'The sea has a lying face,' I retorted. 'I know. I know how savage and remorseless it can be, this stretch of apparently guileless water, and it does cover up the Waratah’s secret; we have narrowed it down to here.’

She looked at me and said: 'Maybe I was wrong to make you come. Maybe I am wrong about the Waratah. If I am wrong about her, then I am wrong about last night.'

I gave the wheel to Jubela and sat beside her, looking south-west.

'No,' I replied. ‘I am the only person who has seen the other side of the coin and lived to tell it.' 'That's what I believe.'

'Everything else, all speculation for sixty years, every sea and air search ends here, south of the Bashee.'

It is not enough simply to be here, Ian. There must be something more.'

'The murderers of my brother, my father and my grandfather, were never brought to trial.'

'What do you mean, Ian?'

‘The sea, and the wind.’

She gestured at the gentle sea, turning a deep blue-green in the new light. 'It seems impossible to credit.'

'Except for the Skeleton Coast, there are more wrecks to the square mile along this coast than anywhere else in the world,' I replied.

Tafline shivered, and she was silent a long time, staring at the empty sea. Then she said. 'If this thing — whatever it is-occurs only at long intervals, what is the use of our coming so soon after it hit at Walvis Bay! I was crazy to suggest we come in a small boat like Touleier. We're simply risking our. necks to no purpose, if the same wind and sea conditions recur.'

My thoughts were only half on my reply. The Waratah now held to ransom the slim, lovely creature beside me; my throat constricted at the recollection of her a few hours earlier. Find the Waratah and find my love! For her sake, for my sake, there must be no mistake!

I answered, far from convinced: 'It's just the other way round. The bigger the ship, the less chance it has, because it has a much longer length exposed to a wave. A sixty-foot wave would threaten a long ship whereas a small thing like Touleier would simply rise to it.'

She did not seem quite reassured and did not reply. Then she turned and I found my pulses racing at those deep eyes.

'Darling, perhaps you have already solved the Waratah problem and don't know it? Isn't it simply a question of the Waratah being overwhelmed by one of those monster waves, despite all the experts said about her stability?'

Her tone made me yearn to play traitor and agree. Reluctantly, however, I said, The answer to that is, no bodies or wreckage were ever found, and the place was alive with ships within a couple of days. When a big vessel goes down, wreckage would spew out of her hatches; the engine-room boilers would explode.'

She broke in hopefully, and I loved her for it. 'Isn't it all too cut and dried, just as the experts were about the Waratah and her stability?'

I smiled back. 'Maybe as an expert I'm in danger of not seeing the wood for the trees. I can only take the picture so far, and no farther. All I know is that a danger area lay right across the track of the Waratah, and she went straight into it. Then there came into play some unknown, lethal, death-dealing factor which can swallow up a 10,000-ton liner as easily as it does a modern airliner or a supersonic fighter-jet.'

'Do we simply wait around here, then, hoping for this unknown factor to manifest itself?'

My heart sank when I looked at her, but I forced myself to say it. 'No. We have to run the gauntlet. That means the south-west. We must get up to Port St John's. Then, if a gale comes, we must sail the Waratah's course from there-south-west. It's the only way I see if we want to find out.'

She came close to me, the first time since the night. ‘I don't think I am afraid of dying; I am only afraid of losing you.'

We sailed to Port St John's from a sea as empty as the hour after the Waratah had vanished.