The River of Diamonds

6

Nausea rose in my throat. Disbelievingly, I paused; the crude mug slopped over, although no hand had touched it. Earlier, I had attributed a queasy feeling to sea-legs unaccustomed to land, but now I knew: the island was rocking gently. My nausea was partly physical, partly mental, the first arising from the stench of stale guano, the second from the island's evil ambience. The movement underfoot seemed like something sinister within the rocks themselves. Captain Morrell must have felt the same when he saw the hillocks of dead seals, and this same phenomenon had found a place in the prosaic logs of the guano coasting skippers, a breed not noted for sensitivity.

The mug! What the hell…?'

Shelborne shrugged. 'Mercury shakes. Mercury has always shaken.' He was casual, good-humoured.

The clapper on the bell swung slowly, too. Minnaar was fascinated. 'Why don't you mount this flippin' outfit on gimbals and keep her steady?'

There must be some explanation,' I persisted.

'If there is any, I don't know it,' said Shelborne, but his eyes didn't bear out what he said. The island gets its name from the quivering, you know — mercury, quicksilver.'

'Is it some sort of submarine volcanic eruption?' I asked.

He laughed. 'It's been going on a long time then steadily for twenty years to my knowledge, and a century before that.'

Twenty years on Mercury Island! There was a walk of thirty feet ‹of level planking from where we sat, bigger than a windjammer's quarter-deck, maybe, but not much. Everywhere else were jagged rocks stained with old sea-bird droppings, a pocket handkerchief — and a snotty one at that — of raw undersea peak sticking out of the turbulent ocean. God! Twenty years of penal servitude!

He must have noticed the reaction in our faces. 'Yes, it is something over twenty years since I made Mercury my headquarters — my flagship, to use our jargon.'

I took a long pull at the strong coffee. The rawness of the brandy in it only worsened my nausea. Suddenly I felt I must get back to my ship, to a clean deck, not a false one dubbed with nautical gimmicks, away from the stale stink of Mercury and its air of being live when it should have been dead for a million years.

I put my mug down. It slid sideways a foot along the table. Shelborne reached out and caught it. 'You get used to it. Even when we die, we don't lie quiet on Mercury. No rest in peace here. Back there' — he jerked his head in the direction of the back of the hut — 'is the graveyard. We can't dig graves because there is no soil. So we cement the coffins to the rock. They're on the side the storms come from. The coffin lids sometimes blow off and you can see your former mates rolling from side to side.'

The macabre picture revolted me. I tried to banish it with a rational question. 'Why not take the bodies and bury them on the mainland?'

'The wind would expose a body in a couple of weeks. Either that, or a strandloper — a seashore hyena. I'd prefer Mercury to being a meal for one of those filthy creatures.'

I then suggested, 'Why not give them a sea-burial — in the bay or in open water?'

'Remember I told you how crowded with ships this bay was once,' replied Shelborne. 'It's shallow — and you know how superstitious sailors are. No, they wouldn't have their dead mates just under their keels, liable to be brought to the surface at any moment by the strange currents and eddies round the island. In any case there wasn't time to take a body out to sea, when every guano-loading hour was precious, and besides, it's too rough for a small boat. So our form of burial has become part of the Mercury tradition — tough, but I stick to it.'

Minnaar said, 'Do you really go and examine the coffins after every storm?'

Shelborne was staring across the sea. A cormorant feather blew into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it away absent-mindedly. He took a long time to reply. 'A coffin blows open — that is a handhold to the past. There's a chap there wearing a frilly lace shirt and a black hat. Yes — a hat, in his coffin. He used to sport it when the Alabama was taking prizes in these waters. Captain Lem Sherrill, of Connecticut. I've had to put his coffin lid back several times — it seems particularly prone to blowing open. He is history; Mercury is a handhold to — antiquity.'

The yellow flag flapped heavily against the stay-wires above our heads. I wasn't surprised any more that the emblem of a dead-and-gone day with its off-beat warning motto appealed to Shelborne.

Minnaar poured another liberal shot of brandy into his coffee. Rough, tough as he was, taking the day as it came, he did not care for the conversation any more than I did.

'I'd have thrown the old bastard into the sea with a hundredweight of rock tied to his feet, tradition or no tradition,' he said loudly, as if to drown his thoughts.

Shelborne wasn't even listening. Ignoring Minnaar, he went on, speaking softly, so that some of his words were lost on the wind. 'We deal in symbols here on Mercury, just as the Namib is full of symbols — symbols of life and death. Here the dance of life is held continually against a vast backdrop of death. At any time, in any place, through carelessness or lack of vigilance, you will find yourself in the shadow — for good.'

'Christ!' muttered Minnaar.

He went on. 'In human conflict the ultimate objectives of the combatants are the same; the interests they seek to protect are ephemeral. Here on Mercury and in the Namib the level of the fight is different. The symbols and the instruments of the killer are the elements: primitive, ruthless, primal. They have no interests to protect.- They destroy simply to destroy. It goes on all the time, round the clock. You can't get away from it by calling the time by ships' watches and striking a ship's bell. Look at that cliff face — endless, brutal, purposeless attrition. The one thing which you might call ephemeral are the dunes: they move day and night on the wind, so that the whole countryside gets up and marches.'

The boards trembled under our feet and the table rattled. It was high time, I felt, to kill this conversation.

I pointed to the big sun condensers lashed to the roof. 'Do you condense all your own water?'

Shelborne was not to be moved from his line of thought. 'Water is a prime element. Yes, I distil it, every drop. It is more precious than diamonds…'

'I'd need my liquor, else I'd go crazy,' Minnaar interjected.

Shelborne smiled faintly. 'There's no liquor, just for that reason; no drugs, no radio, no television, no sex, no women, no nancy-boys. Life is harder here than pulley-hauley in a sailing-ship, though the food is better; I know. The struggle to keep alive is never-ending, and you need every brain-cell, every sinew.'

'But the condensers — if it were cloudy for a week…' I began.

'Then we'd die of thirst,' he replied shortly. 'No, I back the fact that ever since records were taken fifty years ago, it has not rained either on Mercury or on the mainland opposite. Yet — I never swallow a cupful of water without thinking, is there another to follow?'

'All this talk of water makes me want another drink,' said Minnaar.

'Help yourself,' said Shelborne. He spoke to me. 'Some men sign on for the islands — ship's articles of course — because of drink. Two years of guano scraping and seafaring diet is better than Alcoholics Anonymous. At the end of a contract, they'll go back to the Cape and booze. But they always return. Of course, they're not all drunks. I have two, however, on Hollam's Bird Island, which falls under me as headman of this group of islands. That's a really tough spot — nothing more than a reef, really, half awash most of the time. My two reformed drunks there are great readers. I take them cases of books. They couldn't go back. They belong, as I belong.'

More of this from Shelborne and I'd have Minnaar drunk on my hands. So I said: 'I intend to survey the sea-bed from Sudhuk to a mile or two north of North Head. That means roughly the whole of the bay, and a bit to the north and south.'

Shelborne's eyes came back to the present with a flicker of amusement. 'Is that all?'

I did not care for the implicit sneer. Well, he had yet to see how I would case his bay and his island.

'No. I intend to continue out to sea to the twenty-one-fathom line. Mercury falls in that sector.'

Minnaar said thickly, 'We also want a good anchorage for the ship. You'll know the safest hereabouts.'

'Anchorage or no anchorage, you'll find yourselves beating out to sea half the time,' replied Shelborne. 'The swell gets very bad at the full and change of the moon. It smashes over the back of the island. It sometimes gets so rough that the seals leave their nursery and shelter here among the huts.'

'The Praying Mantis is an ex-whaler,' I said. 'She's built to take it.'

'There's not much wind today — that is, by Mercury's standards,' he replied. 'Maybe it is gusting to twenty knots. If the weather works up suddenly from the south-south-west, that's when you must get out — quick. The spray flies clean over Sudhuk, and there's only one place for a sailor to be — the hell out of Spencer Bay. Mercury is not the only part of the Sperrgebiet you're surveying, is it?'

'No.' I sketched what I had done at Angras Juntas and our plans for the other guano islands, if the indications justified it.

He said casually — too casually — 'If your survey is not promising, then Rhennin won't take the Mazy Zed to operate at a particular place — in other words, you are, the key figure?'

'Yes, I suppose you could call me that. It's strictly a business proposition; and I get a commission on the basis of what I find. The Mazy Zed eats money. We have to take 150 carats a day — you remember what Rhennin told the court.'

He was silent. He seemed to have a capacity to withdraw himself from his surroundings, and it left me tongue-tied. The wind gusted chill against the back of my neck. Wind! Shelborne had spoken of water, but wind was another of the great elementary symbols of the desert. I felt drawn into his Namib mystery. Wind! Searing, searching, tormenting, never absent… It carried within it the same paradox as water: a force life-giving, yet destructive. Daily the wind brings water to the desert in the shape of moisture-laden fogs. The highly-adapted insect life of the dunes relies on the sea-wind to live. They have no other source of water. And the prevailing south-wester has a rival, a hot wind which breathes across 100 miles of unmitigated desert from the interior mountain plateau, bearing the second element of life essential to the desert insects: vegetable matter. The two winds take advantage of the continuous shuffling movement of the sand from the temporary base of the dune to its smoking crest in order to distribute this organic matter, — the dune becomes a gigantic food mixer. It is the wind which bring food and drink to the blind creatures which stumble about below the surface, eyeless, having surrendered their light in order to survive in these infernal conditions. Just as in the sea currents bring microscopic plankton from afar, so in the Namib, the dry land which first emerged on the third day of Creation, it is the currents of air which sustain life.

'I'd like to make a thorough investigation of the Glory Hole,' I said. 'How do we get in?'

The question had seemed to me quite harmless, but Shelborne's eyes chilled me. At my words there was the sinister flash I had seen in the Gquma's cabin, the coruscated hardness at the heart of the green diamond. I knew as well as he did that under Mercury there is an immense, trumpet-shaped cavern with a mouth 150 feet wide at the seaward end.

He played for time, and Minnaar unwittingly helped him. 'Sailing directions for Spencer Bay — why, the only thing they seem to write about is the Glory Hole: "The waves beat against the island and into the cavern at times with indescribable fury…"'

Indescribable fury! The Namib sidewinder, a relation of the reptile on Selborne's flag, leaves only its eyes and fangs above the sand when it goes in for the kill: and there was something equally frightening about the way Shelborne swung his high, domed head from Minnaar to me.

'For once the words come up to the reality of Mercury,' he said. The rough-hewn face might have been carved from his own grim cliff. The muddy skin was taut over the bold bones beneath, a jutting jaw to frame the wide mouth, now clamped shut, the large eyes and arrogant nose.

He went on: 'To enter the Glory Hole you need two things; a calm day and a dead low tide. I have never known the two coincide. In one year here there are perhaps two or three calm days. Then you find the tide is wrong. No, I have never been in.'

There must be an entrance from the island itself,' I pressed him, 'some gap in the rocks…'

'There is none, none whatsoever.'

'When the going is tough, that is the way I like it in my line,' I said. 'I want to take a look inside the Glory Hole and I mean to. I wish I had one of those fancy American deep-sea cameras.'

'But you haven't got one?' The voice was relieved, though curious.

'Hell, no,' I said. They cost the earth. The Praying Mantis is a shoe-string job — essentials, but little else.'

Minnaar said, 'We could send in a couple of electronic flotation drums and track them with the Hydrodist. We might manage an outline of the interior…'

That wouldn't tell us much,' I said. 'It's not the shape I want, but what is inside the shape. It can't be so deep — the island itself is not more than a quarter of a mile wide. What surprises me is that the cavern does not extend right through to the other side. I'd expect that, the way the waves must eat away the rock — always coming from the same direction.'

The tide and the waves… I don't see how you can ever find out much,' said Shelborne.

I let myself be carried away by the problem. 'There's a gadget called a Kullenberg corer. It collects a long shaft of sediments from the ocean floor a couple of inches across and up to seventy feet long. I naturally can't afford a thing like that, but I built a modified one myself, which is pretty useful. If there is diamond gravel, I reckon I have a good chance of locating it.'

'If you want caverns, I can take you up the coast to half a dozen bigger and better than Mercury's Glory Hole,' Shelborne said quietly. 'My cutter is tied up in one of them, you remember, I told you. They are accessible, too.'

'In my survey area?'

'At least two of them are.'

'Have you prospected the sea-bed round Mercury?'

He parried this, very coolly:

'Of course — I told the court so. Grabs and dredges,' he said deprecatingly.

And you — found?'

'My dear fellow,' he replied with a shrug. 'What do you expect with that sort of equipment?'

I said, 'You know, I suppose, that the guano islands were once prospected by a government team?'

'Yes. They found diamonds on Possession Island — 223 carats, to be exact, worth Ј500. The team also went to Penguin Island, Ichaboe and, you'll be interested to hear, Mercury. Not a diamond anywhere except on Possession.'

Minnaar, feeling the effects of the stiff brandies in his coffee, interjected, 'But one of the islands yielded diamonds. That means it's worth trying the others…'

Shelborne ignored him. 'The entire prospecting project cost Ј825 and the value of the diamonds they found was Ј500. That speaks for itself. The true wealth of the islands is their guano, the sea-birds, the seals and penguins. They are my first concern…' He glanced at his watch and the defensive note went from his voice. 'Come, we've got to get up to the summit. ETA is 4.30.'

'What the hell are you talking about?' I asked.

The black mood was gone and he seemed like a schoolboy starting a holiday.

'I want to know what sort of bottom there is in the bay…' I began to say, but he rose, smiling.

'You can have your sea-bed and its diamonds. Come on!'

We climbed the steel steps behind the huts. Shelborne moved at a great pace, Minnaar and I trailing. The defined path ended 150 feet above the hut. From there onwards to the summit it was simply a series of zigzags through sharp rocks.

Minnaar and I stopped at the same moment, hit by the realization that the whitened rocks and hollows, scuffed by countless thousands of beaks, wings and talons, were empty.

There was not a bird to be seen.

I tried to catch up with Shelborne to ask him, but he moved too fast. Slipping and puffing, I needed all my breath. The wind blew the sealskin collar so that it masked the lower half of his jaw. The words of the prophet rose of their own accord into my mind — a diamond harder than flint have I made thy forehead! And his was a forehead and head for an artist. Diamonds! All my analogies were of diamonds. What had Shelborne really found? How much did he know? Why his passivity when I would have expected hostility, or at least his non-cooperation? His facts and figures about the official prospecting team seemed very glib.

We switched into a long transverse gully which split the island half-way to the summit. The late winter afternoon light was fading, leaving the rocks an unlovely grey. The island sloped from left to right, the highest part being on my left, or south-west, facing the entrance channel, tapering away on the right to three small isolated rocks which were linked to the main island by plank bridges. Shelborne's pace was killing. We skirted an enormous rock, which looked like a crucified man, and on to the summit plateau. Minnaar and I were gasping when we joined Shelborne there.

'Where are the birds?' I had begun to ask, when Shelborne interrupted me. His words were strange after what I had been thinking scrambling up:

'Do you know what the ancient meaning of the word diamond was?' he asked. 'Untameable. You can't tame it by fire or blows. Mercury is like that, too. Look!'

Minnaar and I gulped lungfuls of the south-west wind. Far below, thousands of seals had cornered a rocky platform on the sea's edge. The rock was polished black by their bodies.

Shelborne glanced at his watch. 'Look!'

'Jesus! exclaimed Minnaar. The ship!'

I saw the massive line squall creaming in from the north-west. A cold sensation of fear gripped me. I knew what that white meant — a squall vicious enough to suck up the sea; and now it was racing in towards our anchorage. It seemed to stretch endlessly, angry, white, grey-white.

Shelborne was relaxed, exultant. 'They're coming!'

The ship!' I got out desperately. 'Shelborne…!'

He gestured to the onrushing squall. His voice had a curious intonation. 'Four-thirty! You thought — I saw it in both your faces — that I was lonely, alone for my twenty-odd years on Mercury. I have been, indeed I am, when — ' he waved at the oncoming mass — 'the birds are away.'

'Birds!' Minnaar said it in a quiet, wonder-filled way, as if there had been no hard-case years, no brandy-filled tramping the coast.

The whole sky was filled with a fluid whiteness of feathers, wings and flight.

The glory of the stupendous sight was upon Shelborne. 'For twenty years they have returned from their winter migration at exactly one bell in the first dog-watch,' he said. 'Here they are today. They've been away for four months now. Soon Mercury will be white with guano, but we won't start scraping until a thick enough layer forms. I'm sending my team of workers off tomorrow to Hollam's Bird Island. I'll be alone for the next two months.'

The great snow descended. Flake by flake the solid cloud disintegrated into fragments, individuals. They swooped unerringly, Shelborne told us, to last year's nest, each knowing his place. Gannets, duikers, cormorants, solan-geese — the whole air chuckled with their welcome-home shouts. They came unafraid to our feet, vocal, quarrelling. Birds! Birds! Birds! There was not the smallest bare patch to be seen anywhere: Mercury had become one great breeding-flat, and the rocks were white with millions of them.

'I thought it was the squall to end all squalls,' I remarked thoughtfully. The salt had started to blur the sheen of Shelborne's sealskin reefer jacket. The weather seemed to be working up.

'I'm glad the wind wasn't hard for my birds,' he replied. 'A gale could blow us clean away, standing up here. The water comes so high sometimes that we find fish, big ones, right here up among the rocks.'

Minnaar was restive. I, too, was anxious for the ship.

'Where is the best holding-ground in the bay?' I asked.

He was a long time in replying, but when he did, it was as if he had come to some conclusion, for his voice was decisive and his eyes alive to the scene about us.

'I think I'll assign you to the lee of Hottentot Reef.'

There were curious overtones in his voice. At the time I put it down to his preoccupation with the birds.

'Where the hell is that?' asked Minnaar. I, too, did not remember Hottentot Reef on the charts, but to trust them was as chancy as Russian roulette.

'It's about three cable-lengths to the nor'-nor'-east of where you are now. You should get some protection there, and you'll also benefit by the lee of Mercury.'

I laughed nervously. 'At the whisper of a rising sea, you can count on a high-tailing start from me.'

Shelborne said, 'It never does to write off the sea. Rhennin should remember that.'

Was it a statement of fact or was there a concealed threat in the calm, resonant voice?

I went right on, not caring about his reaction earlier about the Glory Hole. 'Where is the entrance to the Glory Hole?'

Relaxed, he pointed beyond the seal colony; he might have been a tourist courier at a beauty spot. To me it looked exactly like any other part of the rock-bound shore.

'I'd like to have a closer look,' I said.

'Not without ropes,' he warned. 'One slip and you'd be into the sea.'

'I'll use a boat then — soon, maybe.'

'Take my flatboom, rather — it's built for these seas.'

I was puzzled about Shelborne's sudden change of attitude. I knew how bitter he was about losing the concession and yet he was being helpful — helpful enough almost to have justified something of Rhennin's Ј10,000 — even to offering his own boat.

The encompassing arms of the bay were opaque behind a veil of spray. An ordinary wave smashes on to rocks with a force of 4000 lb. to the square foot; this sea was the Joe Louis of them all. From the deep ocean the waves — kicking, squirming, trying to break free of the wind's grip — were marched towards Mercury by the south-wester and pitched mercilessly at the rocks. The stricken water burst into a thousand fragments and was scattered as spray high up the slopes, almost up to where we were standing. A great single burst of shattered sea catapulted from the shore for fully a hundred feet upwind.

'Good God!' I exclaimed.

Shelborne smiled. 'The Glory Hole. Compressed air.' The heavy thud came to our ears, like a distant shell-burst. 'You see, the waves compress into the Glory Hole. There comes a point of no return. The air literally explodes under the pressure. It throws the water back even against the power of the wind, as you see.' He voiced my own anxieties. 'You'll have fun in the Mazy Zed in a sea like this.'

I wasn't going to let him know what I was thinking, however. 'You saw the model. The low freeboard and absence of gunnels will cope with it.'

Shelborne nodded towards the two wrecks at the base of Sudhuk. 'They also knew how to cope. When do you start your survey?'

'Tomorrow.'

'If Mercury permits, you mean.'

I deliberately faced away from him. He seemed to have an uncanny knack of being one jump ahead. There was a rough incline on the right. On it were a number of shaped oblongs, all the same size. For a moment I paused, trying to make out what they were. Then I shuddered. The scores of sinister chevrons, covered in a patina of unscraped guano, were the coffins of the unquiet dead of Mercury, cemented to the rock face. A rough little hut, which presumably contained the implements for the final committal of these sleepless ones, stood against a low wall. The coffins were whiter than the corpses inside; the hut, too, was whitewashed in guano.

Shelborne followed my glance. 'It is the one place on the island I don't allow guano to be scraped. I can't keep the birds out — after all, they were here first.' I could see them settling down among the coffins. 'I put up a wall to keep out the seals, but the birds found a use for it. Look!'

A gannet spread his six-foot wingspan and ran along the wall, mimicking a carrier take-off.

'Come,' said Shelborne.

Driven by a sort of compulsive horror, Minnaar and I followed him to the cemetery. We climbed into it over a rough stile bridging the wall. Gannets barred our path. A small colony of penguins, fighting a rearguard action against extermination by the birds, held on to a corner of the graveyard. The birds struck at Shelborne's ankles, but he side-stepped adroitly. I kicked out involuntarily when a vicious beak dug into me. In a moment, a dozen more powder-blue beaks and yellow heads were arcing at me. I swore and kicked them aside. My sea-boot dug into the guano. Something small and bright was dislodged. I picked it up.

It was a German Knight's Cross, with Swords and Diamonds.

The tiny lettering engraved on it stifled my call to the other two ahead. I thrust it quickly into my pocket.

It read: 'Korvettenkapitan Dieter Rhennin. U-68. May 1942.'