A Bridge of Magpies

C H A P T E R T H R E E

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was caught in a double hammerlock quandary: if I allowed him to jettison the oil where he was he'd destroy the islands; if I permitted him to make for the open sea and dump there, he'd do the same thing for the fish life which thrives so abundantly round the great Benguela current. The Benguela flows to the Sperrgebiet all the way from the Antarctic. It is one of the world's major currents and transports vast quantities of plankton, the fishes' food. There was a third reason for my decision to destroy not only the tanker but also her oil: the sea was in the grip of what is known scientifically as an upwell cell. Once every winter a very powerful, special wind is generated on the Sperrgebiet. It lasts only a few days. It is hot and blows from the desert out to sea, I'd seen sand columns, hundreds of 36 feet high, miles offshore. This wind is so strong that it pushes the surface water bodily out to sea. In turn it is replaced by other water from deep down and far out-icy Benguela water. It's like some gigantic ball-valve mechanism going into operation. It is called an upwell cell because the sea does just that: it wells up on the coast. It hits maximum strength at a spot a little north of where the tanker struck, and consequently produces a strong current which flows up the Sperrgebiet. There was really only one solution. I took the decision off my own bat. Fast, too, because of the danger: I removed the Walewska's crew and fixed delayedaction demolition charges in her holds so that we could get well clear before she blew up. It was a good thing I did. Ships sixty miles away felt that explosion.

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

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

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

Maybe you will before you're through.'

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

'On what?'

'I durum. Depends.'

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

'It takes all types.'

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

'No alcohol allowed.'

'Headman, yes. The rest, no.'

Well, I didn't.'

`So that's it, eh?'

'What's what?'

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

'I'm not running away from anything.'

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

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

Captain Murray seemed nervous. I reckoned he was talking in order to hear the sound of his own voice. Possession was as inviting as a seal rookery-and as smelly,

Weddell,. it'll come back.'

`Let me know when it does,'

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

'Where does he get it from, here?'

'Where do any of them get it from?'

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

Interest:

'Jesus! '

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

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

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

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

He clamped his teeth back on to his pipe and exclaimed, Why can't that bloody boat hurry up from the island? That 39 wreck gives me the willies. It shows what can happen around here.'

'Aren't you staying tonight?'

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

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

'It burns all night, every night. No gamat would stay otherwise.'

Gamet is an affectionate term for the fine half-caste Malay fishermen of the Cape and South East Africa. Their Far Eastern origin-the first were brought as slaves in the seventeenth century-endows their rites and religion with a touch of the supernatural. Like all other sailors, they are deeply superstitious.

Captain Murray measured the distance of the approaching boat.

'If you get a sight of it from the sea through the fog it • looks like a damn ghost itself.'

'Whose ghost is it supposed to be?'

'A woman's. She was drowned in an old windjammer called the Auckland over on the island's west side. A shark took her legs. They say she haunts the place searching for them with two huge hounds for company. They were with her in the Auckland.'

'Nice neighbours I'll be having!'

'It sounds like a vealjapie (brandy) yarn to me. but once you've lived on Possession for a while you'll believe anything. If you want an example, take a gander at that lot!'

'Buffel, ahoy!'

The cry came from a gamat standing in the stern of the approaching island boat, and using a steering oar with great skill. The boat's design was new to me-some whaling ancestry somewhere.

•

'He's the laziest bastard in the isles – Breekbout.' '

Breekbout I You must be joking! That's not a name!' 'He got it because he split his arse in half from sitting on it too much: Breek-bout.'

'It doesn't affect the way he handles that boat.'

'No, he's good. First-class But look at that sonofabitch 40 ruin with him.'

He was the headman I'd come to relief, Van Rensburg. They threw a mooring line from the Buffet It hit him but he didn't make a move to make it fast, He was hipped in his own twilight world.

'For crying out loud!'.

`Maybe Breekbout's sense of humour will save you from going the same way. It's pretty way out, but anything's better than nothing on Possession. Take my tip though-get to know that gamet over there.'

He pointed with his pipe at a fishing cutter riding at anchor at the head of the channel, close to the dangerous shoals.

'Kaptein Denny. Damn fine sailor. He's one off for a gamet. Keeps to himself. If my ship was in trouble I'd like him around.'

He broke off abruptly. They'd tied up the whaleboat while he'd been talking and now Van Rensburg came up the bridge ladder to join us. He might have been one of Possession's strolling ghosts-the stiff way he walked, like a marionette. I decided to leave, quick.

`Totsiens (goodbye) Captain. Thanks for the ride!

I tried to edge past but Van Rensburg blocked my way. His eyes were shuttered and remote.

'Good luck, Captain Weddell You need good luck on Possession.'

His form of address caught me off balance for a moment It had slipped my mind that I was, in the ship tradition of the isles, Possession's new captain. It flashed through my mind that there'd been some leak of the C-in-C's secret when he called me by my naval title. So I didn't answer.

He said in a thin, venomous, unnatural voice. 'A high-hat and a shit, eh? Possession'll cut you down to size damn quick.'

I stopped with one foot on the ladder,

We'll see.'

His laugh was as bad as his voice, mainly because it left his face completely blank, and his eyes, too.

'We'll see I Possession's a prison-house, didn't you know. No escape. Anywhere. Anyhow Good luck, Captain-stuffyou-Weddell I' '

I went quickly overside. A couple of the crew passed down my kit, which I'd had ready on deck. The transceiver from 41

Slivermine I carried, myself, in a battered old leather suitcase which we had specially chosen to hide its contents. Captain Murray began to shout sailing orders.

My first close-up view of Possession turned me off as quick as it apparently did Captain Murray, who was hightailing to sea by the time the whaleboat reached the island's concrete jetty. He was right about the stink The wind, blowing directly off the guano rocks, was pissy and ammoniacal as a shebeen urinal.

Another impression struck me forcibly. I hung for a moment on the rusty iron ladder leading from the water to the top of the jetty and looked down at Breekbout

'There aren't any birds, man!' one. Fly away April. Back in July.

Same every year? I liked his grin.

Away from the jetty the birds' breeding-fiats were walled off from a group of stores, barracks and the headman's cottage. Everything was smeared a dirty unpleasant grey by the guano. As jy daar loop, dan val jy in die nat op jou gat-if you walk there when it's wet you'll fall on your backside,' Breekbout went on. 'Ms waarom ek altyd sit-that' s why I always '

'Jou skelm!-you bastard!'

His cheerfulness was a buffer against the grim, depressing, graveyard air of the place. The first wisps of fog were drifting in from the sea and the grey coastline was becoming greyer. The only man-made object in sight was the cutter, which was named Gaok. Her deck was deserted.

'What's she doing here?' I asked Breekbout.

`Fish.'

'Fishing's banned inside the twelve-mile limit.'

'Kaptein Denny always fishes here,'

We'll see about that tomorrow.'

`Kaptein Denny is a very good sailor.'

`So I hear. But that doesn't give him the right to fish where he shouldn't. Any self-respecting fisherman would be snug at home on a night like this.'

'Kaptein Denny has no wife, no girl. Maybe his prick's too small. Gaok is his home.'

`Gaok- what the devil does that mean?'

Ask Kaptein Denny. He knows everything.'

`He's quite a boy, it seems.'

'Very strong. Very tough. Speaks Unman too.' `

How old?'

'Fifty, fifty-five maybe. He'll live to be a hundred. No women, no brannewyn;

We'll pay him a visit tomorrow,'

He couldn't be doing much out of line, whatever it was, is the Force 5 wind which was kicking up sharp seas in the channel and whistling down the grotesquely-shaped rocks of my new home. Breekbout showed me over Van Rensburg's cottage. Most of the furniture was gone and it shared an air of forsakenness with the empty barracks where the labourers; slept during the guano scraping season. Breekbout had a corner in the barn-like place. I plumped for company rather than comfort and found myself a bunk. There wasn't even the scratting of a mouse to give life to the shadows where the lantern didn't reach. The atmosphere was as relaxing as a blow to the Adam's apple. I would have put two ghost lights in the window. I slept badly.

In the morning Breekbout turned out, from the ship-type galley, a slovenly breakfast of half-burnt mealie-meal porridge and boiled penguin eggs. We ate the mess by lantern light, as the island was still shrouded in impenetrable fog. It dripped in outsized drops off everything. A complex of gutters from the roofs channelled the precious water into big concrete storage tanks. Baths were out.

I wanted to get up and go and explore Doodenstadt but the fog made it impossible. So I killed time by setting up the transceiver. The gleaming set had everything that opened and shut. My code call-sign was wv. 5Bx, the C-in-C's choice. The instrument fascinated Breekbout, so I taught him how to operate it. Transmissions, however, were out because of the C-in-C's ban; but I rang the reception changes from longto short-wave, as well as VHF. There was enough island and ship gossip on the air to give us plenty of practice When I could make out the breakers on the mainland under the haze I decided to set off in the whaleboat. It was about mid-morning. Wisps of fog still clung round the island's stark topography; shorewards it was lighter. Gaok remained bidden in the curtain to the north-east. The previous day's . southerly blow had backed into a light north-wester. Breekbout propelled the boat by means of an odd and seemingly unworkable rowing action with one oar in a stern row43 lock. Once clear of the jetty the murk was still thick on the water and I was lost but he seemed to know where he was all the time.

Gaok showed up unexpectedly. She was a typical sturdy, bluff-bowed job, beautifully built by Fritz Nieswandt's yard in Luderitz. She was about seventy feet long, powered by both sail and diesel. The enclosed deckhouse was aft, and the mainsail boom swung clear above it. Scores of similar vessels I had seen in the fishing grounds had all bad a typical blunt stem but this one had a kind of carved whalebone figurehead added.

'Gaok! Ahoy!'

The deckhouse door opened and a short stocky figure dressed in a sun-faded fisherman's jersey and thick corduroy pants emerged. His head was round and set close on his shoulders and there were a few grey streaks in his otherwise very black hair, not short and curly as a gamat's usually is, but straight and rather long. His face was weatherbeaten, more tawny than copper, and strangely smooth. It had the typical high cheekbones and Oriental appearance of the Malay. He made us fast with large, strong hands. I jumped aboard. My first impression was of his rather dignified aloofness-something natural in his bearing, perhaps-because he was quite friendly.

`Kaptein Denny?'

`Dis my-that's me.'

'Weddell. The new headman of Possession.'

'So?'

I've arrived,'

'I saw.'

He inclined his head towards the long-boat, switching into English. Some of his vowels had unusual values.

`You're out early, Captain Weddell. With a rifle, too: 1 'Your English is pretty good.'

'I thank the Sonop School in Cape Town. I like to give it a workout when I can. I don't get much chance. There's not much need for that rifle around here, Captain.'

It's a standard headman issue.'

'Van Rensburg used his a lot on the seals.'

'I'm not Van Rensburg. It's my job to protect them. And the fish-inside the twelve-mile limit.'

'That's a new duty for a headman. I hadn't heard about it,'

'Every fisherman knows it's illegal to fish inside the twelve. mile limit, Kaptein Denny.'

'Not all fish, Captain'

'All fish.'

'It's cold up here on deck. Come below.'

He led me to a day cabin under the wheelhouse; a second smaller one led off it. Both were much better fitted out than the spartan accommodation I had seen in other cutters. He fiddled at a small mahogany bar. 'Something to keep out the cold-a dop-en-dum (brandy and water)?'

'The sun's not over the yardarm yet,'

He smiled f! eetingly. 'We'll call it night because of the fog. That makes it all right.'

'A small one then.'

He turned to fix the drinks and I almost sat on a cushion which had been crushed down hurriedly on the locker. It half concealed a woman's handbag and a white silk scarf. I supposed the woman was hidden away somewhere below. We must have disturbed them by coming unexpectedly out of the fog. It blew Kaptein Denny's image which Breekbout had given me. Yet it was nothing to do with me if he brought his goodies along to enjoy in the solitude of the Sperrgebiet. He must have noticed the crumpled cushion when he handed me my brandy but gave no sign. He drank orange juice: Breekbout was correct about him there.

'I can't drink alone,' I said,

'It's against my religion-sorry.'

'Don't be sorry. You a Mohammedan?'

'No. Malay. My sect forbids it,'

'Gesondheid!'

'Good health.'

He sat down and stared at me with curious, unreadable eyes. I felt awkward drinking his liquor and pulling my authority while doing it.

'I don't want to crack down on you about this fishing business. It'll be okay if you just clear out. Say it's a friendly warning.'

'I've been coming here every winter for.., over thirty years, it must be. It gives me a sort of squatter's right.'

An unexpected remark from a fisherman, but it gave me a clue to why he had taken over leadership of the Luderitz gamat community,

'In court that would be called argument by false analogy.'

His eyes remained expressionless. He just sat passively regarding me. I felt uncomfortable.

'Look, I don't want to play rough and start acting like a new broom. But you know it's against the regulation' 'I come only in winter.'

'Why?'

'It's the sort of fish. In the summer the current's wrong for them.'

'It could be as you say.'

'I know this coast very well, Captain Weddell, There are some very strange things.'

Strange as hell! Right under his keel was the strangest of all: a lost city. I told myself I mustn't make an overkill of the fishing issue or else he might suspect something. On the other hand I didn't want him hanging around and watching, once Koch arrived. That could be any time. I downed the brandy. 'Thanks for the drink. It's my first day and I'm taking a look-see at my kingdom. I'm on my way for a run ashore.'

'I wouldn't go, Captain Weddell. There's a big blow coming up. You could be trapped.'

We had a gale, yesterday.'

'Come up on deck and show you what I mean.'

The fog bad lifted and visibility was a couple of miles. On the seaward horizon, however, lay a thick bank of it still. It was unusual because between it and the sky was a clear-cut seam of the horizon.

'That means a buster. It'll be here before you've had your run ashore.'

'I've also sailed this coast. That's simply a hangover from the morning fog. It'll be gone in an hour,'

'It means trouble – here, close inshore. A few miles out it's different, There's one weather on the coast and another at set'

He was too concerned about my welfare and it made me suspicious. I must have shown my scepticism.

'It can be blowing only a moderate breeze out to sea when a full gale tears up the channel. You won't like it if you're caught ashore. There isn't any water. You'll be stuck there until the wind drops. Besides, it's almost a full moon.'

'What's that got to do with it?' 46

'It always blows hardest at Possession at the full and change of the moon'

I'm learning.'

'There are always things to learn on the Sperrgebiet, Captain Weddell.'

The odd way he said it clinched my decision to ignore his advice.

'I'll take my chance. Thanks all the same, Breekbout!'

Aye, aye sir?'

`Doodenstadt. Make it snappy!

Kaptein Denny said. 'You can't land on the rocks. The best spot is to the north… there's a bit of a beach…'

I decided to ignore that too. Nor did I ask Kaptein Denny how he came to know where the best landing-place was on a shore where landing was prohibited.

Doodenstadt, when I got close enough, hadn't a chance of convincing me it was a lost city. No way. It was little else-outwardly at least-than an outcrop of formidable rocks of unusual shape; the 'streets' a series of gullies possibly resulting from the erosion of a thousand storms. Of course Koch's fresco was away out of sight, but I was thoroughly disenchanted.

'Keep clear!' I snapped at Breekbout. 'Do you want us to finish up alongside that other bloody wreck?'

`Kaptein Denny was right: no landing here,' he mumbled truculently. When I still hesitated about giving in, he added, '

Kaptein Denny always right'

Okay, blast you. Back to the beach, I want to check the liner.'

Breekbout stayed with the boat at the little beach while I plunged through a tangle of alleys between the sandhills, in the general direction of the City of Baroda. The going opened up farther on when I struck a wide sandy watershed leading towards it. I followed this. It effectively masked my approach to the bow section of the wreck.

Then there were men's voices ahead. There was plenty of cover, and whoever was speaking couldn't see me coming. I crawled forward, making sure my rifle didn't make a giveaway clink. The sound gave me a clear bearing all the time but the nearer I approached the more strident the voices became – distorted, almost mechanical,

They were mechanical!

The gully narrowed and kinked and ended against a platform of rock. Sitting on this in the lee of the wreck, her back to me, was a girl. Next to her was a tape-recorder – whence the voices I'd homed in on!