A Twist of Sand

I Skeleton Coast

Twenty-one and a half feet. I shivered.

The movement shook loose from the edge of my duffle-coat a bead of icy moisture which skidded down my cheek and splashed in a tiny bright spangle on the chart under the concentrated glare of the angled light. I shivered again, half in fear, half in discomfort. The fog was condensing everywhere, and I could feel its sharp tingle in my throat. Dawn in fog is the time for any skipper's fears; dawn in fog off the Skeleton Coast is the time of nightmares.

The drop of moisture made a north-westerly digression over the fold of the chart as Etosha rolled uneasily. Lying on it, the grey photostat page of the old log, with its neat, Victorian script, looked a little weary, despite its shiny rejuvenation at the magic wand of the camera which had plucked it from forgotten oblivion in a fusty London shipping office.

I slid the photostat of the ship's log under the 18-degree line of the chart as if, by placing it in the exact position where she had struck, I might gain some vital information from its meagre sentences.

"British steam vessel Clan Alpine. 13th January, 1890. Bound Tilbury to Cape Town. 5 a.m. Ship, drawing 2iœ feet, struck unknown object, thought to be a shoal, 18' 2" S, 11' 47" E. Position 326 degrees distant about 26 miles from Cape Frio. Doubtful. Making water in Number One hold but proceeding at reduced speed…" The one page of the Clan Alpine's log told all; it told enough; there was nothing later for my purposes.

Twenty-one and a half feet! Hell, that was little enough, and here I was with fully sixteen on Etosha's marks and in the same deadly shoal water. Three hundred and twenty-six degrees — that would put the shoal about three to five miles offshore. If that was right — I shook my head unconsciously — and another droplet splashed down in the fug of the chart-room, warm by comparison with the bone-chilling air of the bridge, where only a canvas dodger stood between me and the naked elements.

The old Clan Alpine log by itself would never do. I'd snap Etosha's back on the same shoal before I knew where I was if I stuck to it alone. The other logs — would they break open the Chinese puzzle? I reached for three other photostats lying on the top right-hand corner of the chart. The heading was uncovered. " Africa — South West Coast" said the writing. " Bahia dos Tigres to Walvis Bay." Who, I wondered vaguely, gave Tiger Bay that sonorous and Miltonic name? Some old Portuguese navigator? Christ! I thought, I'm just the same as one of those old seamen feeling his way down the same unmapped, uncharted coast ot South West Africa south of Angola, the only difference being that I'm using an echo-sounder in this year of grace 1959 instead of a lead-line, as in the year of Our Lord 1486. And mighty thankful I am to have a magnificent modern trawler under me with powerful engines instead of a caravel, unhandy and ungainly, under sail. A sailing ship would be tossing with sails slatting; at least I was holding Etosha under the barest steerage way as I probed into the unknown.

I spread the three other photostats out fanwise on the chart below the old Clan Alpine's log. Pratt at the Admiralty had really done a good job with the old logs. It was purely for old time's sake in the Navy, I knew. that. I certainly had no right to them, under my peculiar circumstances.

"H.M.S. Alecto, 1889," was written in Pratt's copperplate. I grinned to myself. It brought back memories of his meticulous attention to detail at Gib. during the war. " H.M.S. Mutine, 1911 " said the second photostat log heading. " H.M.S. Swallow, 1879," the third was titled. I knew their contents by heart — a five fathom shoal four miles off the coast, reported Alecto; a rock with breakers two and a half miles offshore, reported Mutine; eight fathoms, with breakers, three miles from the coast, reported Swallow. Swallow had added one bit of information. " sand and mud bottom." I grinned wryly. There was something to be said for using a lo-pound lead-line armed with a tallow bottom eighty years ago. It added one tiny little piece to the jigsaw.

I looked at the litter on the chart. By themselves, the inaccurate old logs were enough of a riddle, but the blasted German log threw the whole picture haywire. I wished now I had never dug around in the German archives in Winkhoek and never clapped eyes on or heard the name of the German warship Hyane. But I had, and here lay the salt-marked log just to prove that all my theories about the location of the shoal were wrong. I didn't have to consult it as it, too, lay on the chart…" Breakers during a moderate SSW gale and a high sea, in a position 282 degrees, distant 2 miles from high pointed hill." Two miles! I couldn't credit it. At that distance from the shore the Kaiser's old battle-wagon would have been a dead duck on the iron-hard sand of the shoal. And probably a rock or two through her armour-plating as well. The bearing, 282 degrees, was just about the craziest I had ever encountered.

I straightened up from the chart table. I was being mocked by the ghosts of ships which had long since gone to their graves. Their tall old-fashioned stacks and yardarmed masts seemed to cluster out of the fog round the modern, sharp lines of Etosha like a cerement ushering her to doom. All dead ships — and a shoal of death right under me now.

I shivered again. The dawn made it more morbid still. I looked down at the untidy chart table and cursed them all heartily. I needed fresh air. I cursed the bright light over the chart also: if it had been my old submarine, it would have been red, and I could have gone up on to the bridge without being blind for ten minutes before my eyes accustomed themselves to the blackness aloft.

It was just beginning to get light. The blackness was turning only slightly grey, but it was sufficient to catch a faint glimpse of sea. Jim, the Kroo boy, was at the wheel. The fog was so thick I could not see the top of the signal halliards, and the great beads of moisture, like sweat urged from a man in a fever, dripped thickly from the lower spokes of the wheel. It fretted in runnels uneasily down the canvas dodger. I glanced at the compass.

"Steer five-oh," I ordered, making a minute correction to the north-east.

Etosha was doing perhaps three knots: I must solve the riddle of the shoal this dawn, or I might not ever get the chance again. John Garland wouldn't always be asleep below as he was now and, as one of the finest navigators in the Royal Navy once, he'd smell a rat before long.

With that extra sense that comes when danger is near, I felt rather than heard the man in the chartroom.

I clattered down the companionway.

John stood examining the photostats and my own chart, with its countless annotations and figures.

We stood looking at one another across the baleful light of the angled lamp. He ran his eyes slowly over the photostats. His voice was hard, but laced with professional admiration when he spoke after a long scrutiny.

"That's a very fine chart, Geoffrey," he said. "For a coast which has never been mapped, or never been surveyed, I'd say, in fact, it was a masterpiece." He leaned over my soundings to the south-west of the Clan Alpine shoal. "A masterpiece," he repeated slowly, staring hard at me.

"Where are we now?" he went on in the same voice.

I jabbed a pencil at the five and three-quarter fathom mark. "About there. For what it is worth. It could be nine, or three fathoms."

He blenched. Off the Skeleton Coast a ship's position is every skipper's nightmare. It haunts his mind, waking and sleeping; drunk in a ditch ashore, it is his first waking question.

I had known in my heart of hearts that the showdown with John must come. I would have preferred to have chosen the moment. An icy dawn is not the best time for presenting a case, a shaky case at that, to someone who believes in you.

I made up my mind suddenly.

"John," I said briefly. I drew a line on the chart with the ruler. "I intend to go inside this line. Two things may happen. You may find yourself drowning in the next ten minutes. Or you may find yourself facing a fine of £1,000 or five years in gaol."

"Go on," he said tersely.

"What I'm trying to say is simply this, that this ship is now off the diamond area of the Skeleton Coast. For months I have mapped and charted this coast coming home from the fishing grounds, in your watch below. I bought her for that. Trawling is purely a secondary consideration. It also is good cover. Remember how I insisted that I should take the midnight-dawn trick? " He nodded. " Well, I've faked the ordinary chart, but plotted everything in minute detail on my own special chart, the first accurate one ever of the Skeleton Coast.

John looked puzzled. " You may have hoodwinked me, but what of it? That's not a crime. It's no crime to chart a coast."

I laughed harshly. " It's quite clear you haven't read the Diamond Control Act. I'd say it was the finest combination of threats and penalties I've ever seen. This is the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa, John. Out there — " I gestured beyond the porthole out to starboard "are the richest unworked diamond fields in the world. It would mean a fine of £1,000 or five years' gaol, or both, for you and me. That's just for being here. There are plenty of other smaller items in the Act, each costing about £500 a time and a couple of years, which you undoubtedly would find on the charge sheet also."

"So what? " said John. " This ship is on the high seas. We're not ashore pinching anyone's diamonds."

"Ever hear of the three-mile territorial limit?" I laughed without humour. "And if that wasn't enough, there was that judgement the other day in the Appeal Court governing the rights to prospect and mine diamonds: high water marks, low water marks, territorial limits, etcetera, etcetera."

John sniffed: "No bloody South African Navy ship would find you anyway." He grinned for the first time.

"You're the most cunning submariner who ever outfoxed a destroyer, and I'd say your hand has lost none of its cunning. Look at this set-up now — thick fog, a coast where only you know where you are, funk holes everywhere… "

"Thanks for the compliments, John," I retorted. "But you're a little behind the times. Ever hear of this new border patrol the South African Air Force flies at unannounced times? Long-range Shackletons. I've seen their photographs of the mouth of the Cunene, the first ever taken from the air. They're good. They've got a coat of arms of a bloody great pelican standing on a globe rising out of the sea. I don't want to be snapped up in the beak of that pelican. There's nothing that would stop me afloat, but a Shackleton would take a photograph and — presto, an exact fix. Inside the three-mile limit. Five years inside for you and me. Irrefutable."

"What are you doing all this for, Geoffrey?" asked John quietly.

"I got kicked out of the Royal Navy — remember?" I said harshly. "I wouldn't say where I was — remember? Well, I've got a particular interest in this part of the world. It might have been just an overwhelming compulsion motive in the ordinary course of things, something to justify myself to myself, but since it ties up with the Skeleton Coast, it becomes highly dangerous and highly illegal at the same time. I'm charting this unknown coast rock by rock and shoal by shoal. The compulsion springs from something very deep in my sailor's make-up, and has also something to do with an old man I saw die. In some ways I'm finishing the job he set out to do. But it goes farther than that also, because I have an interest which I may tell you about some time. The immediate point at issue is, though, do you come in on this? You must make up your own mind."

John fobbed off the question by picking up the Hyane's photostat log.

"H'mmm" he mused, casting a glance over the others as well. "Got a problem in navigation on your hands?"

"Here's the shoal where the old Clan Alpine is reported to have struck," I said. If John intended to sidestep the issue for the moment, so would I. " These old logs — Pratt got photostats for me at the Admiralty, though God help him if he was found out giving material like this to a cashiered submarine commander — all place this shoal differently. It is the most important shoal on the coast, because it is the southern gateway to this vital piece of water here to the north. If one could penetrate the Clan Alpine shoal on the inshore side, it would give a safe passage — although in shallow water — away from a six-knot downcoast current which 'I reckon ricochets off here, just about the sixteenth fathom mark on the south-westerly corner of the shoal. It is almost impossible to take a ship in close to the coast at all because of that bouncing current. It races southwards through this mass of shoals, rocks and broken ground between here and the Cunene mouth, but I am convinced it doesn't get too close to the shore… "

"My God! Geoffrey," exclaimed John. "This is magnificent!" He studied the annotated chart. His eyes gleamed. He grabbed the dividers and parallel-rules. Then he snatched up the Hyane's log.

"I've been over it all," I said coldly. "It's no go."

He straightened up.

"Two hundred and eighty-two degrees," he exclaimed in triumph.

"That bearing's balderdash," I retorted.

"I agree," he went on quickly. "But what if you forgot the first number?"

I saw in a flash what he meant. "You mean — eighty-two degrees? Why, that would have put the Kaiser's old warship…"

"Just here!" rapped out John. "Inside the channel. Two miles offshore. Dead right. The old Hyane found the way, all right, although she didn't know it. Some stupid clot must have altered the bearing from 82 to 282 which would have been quite reasonable since she then would have been safe at sea, even if a little close in. Come on, let's get going!"

"Not so fast," I said. " You haven't given me your answer yet."

"That's my answer, blast you!" he grinned. "You'll need another nautical man for company for your five years in quod…"

He stopped short. I felt it too.

The stern was giving a queer shaking motion.

"She's — she's — wagging her tail," he burst out incredulously.

The explosion felt like a huge empty drum dropped on Etosha's stern.

We both covered the distance to the bridge in a couple of bounds.

"Port fifteen," I snapped at the Kroo boy at the wheel.

John stood by me, trying to pierce the veil, which cloyed like cerements round our eyes. A heavy bead of moisture ran off his short brown beard and the condensation on his forehead gave him the appearance of a man literally sweating over something. His anxious tone did not belie it. The drops glistened on his cap and oilskinned shoulders.

"Where are we? " he asked.

I gestured to starboard. "Gomatom bearing about ninety degrees, six miles."

"What the hell's Gomatom? " he rasped.

"It's the native name I gave a high pointed mountain ashore. The name appealed. Sounded like the surf breaking in a south-westerly gale."

The Kroo boy's eyes were standing out of their sockets.

"Where did the explosion come from?" I rapped out.

The native shook his head hopelessly.

"Port beam, do you think, John?"

"More on the quarter," he replied quietly. "I've never heard anything like that before," he went on, craning his head slowly in a small semi-circle, like a searching radar aerial.

"Nor have I," I said, for it was unlike any explosion, mine, torpedo or gunfire, I had ever heard. Yet it was an explosion.

Something heavy and wet hit the deck forward of the main hatch. Near the foremast, I thought, peering into the fog.

"Squid," said the helmsman.

"Keep your eyes on that bloody compass," snarled John. "Cut the cackle."

"Look-out! " I shouted through cupped hands. "What hit us forrard?"

The voice came back faintly, as if the man had turned away as he called back. It had a curious hysterical quality, but then fog does peculiar things to sound, even a hundred feet away. Almost simultaneously came another explosion as if a giant steel drum had been dropped. It was farther away, but clearly on the port beam.

The Kroo boy at the wheel gave a cry.

"Baas, die kompas verneuk my I" (" Skipper, the compass cheats me!") he exclaimed in Afrikaans.

I was at his side in a flash. The compass rose was swinging and by the time I reached the binnacle it had travelled through seven degrees. But the ship's head had remained steady.

"There's a great deal going on that I don't understand and don't like," I rapped out to John, who was looking at the gyrating needle in silent wonder. "I'm going to stop engines and see if we can hear anything. If there's surf dead ahead, we'll hear it. If there's land, we'll smell it."

I rang the telegraph to " stop."

"That'll bring Mac out of his bed," was John's only comment.

"I'm going up above to see if there's anything to be seen from there," I went on. "Did you hear what the look-out said?"

John replied: "Curiously, I thought he said mud."

"Mud?" I echoed. "Mud?"

"That's what I thought."

"Steady as she goes," I told the helmsman.

On the roof of the wheelhouse was an additional deck enclosed by stanchions, where there was a small emergency wheel and, giving the vessel a comically belligerent appearance, a little range-finder which I found extremely useful for my work on the coast. The refraction from the desert dust in the air, however, which took days to subside after a north-eastern blow, was a great handicap to the instrument. I was hoping that by the time we returned to Walvis Bay the small five-mile-radius radar I had ordered would have arrived. The Etosha certainly needed radar at that moment.

To reach the upper deck one had to make one's way round the side of the bridge, giving a much wider view astern and abeam. A glow seemed to light the back of the fog away to starboard. A ship on fire? The sun? I couldn't be sure, with the compass playing tricks for no apparent reason, whether Etosha was headed north-east or south-west. It might be either. She had practically lost way and was pitching uneasily. The only sound was of my boots on the ladder and the faint squeal of a block on the mast aft as the ship lifted with a short, bucketing, unpleasant motion.

Grasping the rail, I tried to penetrate the fog, but I might as well have stayed in the wheelhouse. If there were surf breaking, I would hear it, for on this coast, except in the winter, roars that great almost perpetual breaking swell from the south-west which seems to bring across hundreds of miles of open sea the lashing anger of the great icefields beyond South Georgia, tossed to hysteria by the great peak of Tristan da Cunha where a jet-force wind never ceases to storm, finally screaming out its anger on the desolate shore under the shifting sand dunes. Many a shipmaster, from the Arab dhow captains who rounded the Cape five hundred years ago, to the nerve-ridden men who drove the tea clippers home from China, had his first and last experience on the coast when he heard the breaking surf under his bowsprit in even such a fog as this. The bones of their ships lie in the shifting sands — if you could get close enough to see them.

With the sudden change of temperature which goes with a strong steam heater suddenly switched on, I felt suffocatingly hot and threw open my duffle-coat at the throat. My fingers faltered at the buttons. The swift sweep of warm air cleared the fog and I gasped out loud in amazement at what I saw.

Astern, and on the port quarter and beam, the sea boiled in parturient frenzy. Like a view of the Hebrides I once had from the air, a chain of small islands stretched away, but unlike the calm splendour of the Outer Isles, these were being born; as if merging into the darkness of the womb, they mingled with the bank of fog ahead where the warm air had not yet dissipated it. Each "vibrated and trembled — black mud heaved up from the ocean floor; bickering along these strange, new-born, viscous things was a flame of a colour I have seen neither before nor since, a kind of pure white, blotched and seamed with brown and purple. It was as if one of the roses of the ancients had been born from a living body, full of beauty and terror.

Horror rose in me. As I gazed speechless at the spectacle, my seaman's instinct reacted to what I saw. Apart from the chain of gestated islets astern and to port, the coast itself lay not a mile ahead — a dun forbidding shore of low sandhills, eternally shifting under the great winds which come in from the sea, covered here and there with sparse shrub or creeper-like growths. Unknown to us, Etosha had broken through into old Hyane's channel. Slightly ahead on the starboard bow rose a drab hillock. It stood, calculating and evil, like a huge puff-adder stretched out waiting for the touch of the ship's bow in order to strike back with primitive, coiled-up wrath. The flat hill," dun and serrated on the seaward side, might have been a reptile's flat head and folded throat.

I had only once seen the shore as close from the sea. It struck me that, although the Etosha was practically ashore, there was no surf. Then I realised that, in fact, the surf on which one could normally rely to reveal the position of the shore by its breaking was absent. Treacherous always, the coast had betrayed the Etosha too. Had I not stopped the engines when I did, she would have been aground by now.

John's footsteps came racing up the companionway and his face was grey as he surveyed our predicament. Landmarks — Gomatom, drab hillocks, characteristic splodges on the dunes — all raced through my head as I tried to place our position precisely.

"Christ!" he burst out. "Geoffrey, where in heaven's name are we? And why… " he gestured inarticulately at the lack of breakers. Had there been surf, I realised quickly, it would have lifted Etosha and torn the bottom out of her by now. It was only because she was lying in calm water that she was not bumping on hard sand and biting outcrops of rock.

"Get a lead-line out: sound! sound! sound!" I roared at the petrified native boy who cowered in pitiful terror in the bows. He reached out numbly for the line with its leather and calico markers. "Sound!" I roared, cupping my hands. "Quick!"

With almost elephantine slowness, he took the line. Its heavy lead sinker might have weighed a ton, he was so slow. He cast forward.

"We must be miles off course," said John quietly. "If she strikes, we'll never come out of this alive. We are hemmed in to seaward by the eruption and the shoal and she's so close in that the sand must be stirring under the screws."

"By the deep three," chanted the leadsman feebly. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of several others of the crew who had made their way on deck and were gazing, with the fatalistic resignation of the African, at the shore — and at death.

"What sort of bottom?" I shouted back. He picked up the lead and fumbled with the tallow. His moves seemed to be all in slow motion. "Shingle," he replied.

It confirmed what I wanted to know. I turned to John and smiled. "Do you want to know where we arc? See that hillock — no, not the higher one, that one bearing about: ten degrees? I call it Inyala Hill because you'll see there are stripes of brown and red down the side, for all the world like the markings on an inyala buck's side. It hasn't a name on the chart. And that," said I, pointing to the one towering farther inland, " is Gomatom. With something over three fathoms under us, and shingle at that, do you realise that we are where no ship has ever got before — even Hyane — and just because of the lack of breakers? This place is a maelstrom ordinarily."

"The Swallow Breakers," he exclaimed hoarsely.

"You saw the photostat," I said briefly. "H.M.S. Swallow in '79."

"But," said John incredulously staring out to starboard, " that means we've been carried miles to the nor'ard… "

"There's no damned time to worry about that now," I snapped. MacFadden, the engineer, joined us on the bridge. He looked without a great deal of interest at the shore, the burning islets and the sea.

"What's this all about?" he asked in his broad Scots accent.

"Mac," I said, "for once your bloody double-action diesels are going to get the chance of their lives. Do you see that dark thing sticking out " — I gestured towards the bows — "about a mile and a half ahead? That's what I've named Diaz's Thumb. You won't find it on the chart either. Nor did Diaz, despite having been here four hundred years before us. Take a look almost due north — there, where the fog has just lifted. You see…"

"There's a gap," exclaimed John excitedly.

"Aye, about as wide as a schoolboy's arse," said Mac. "How'll ye ever get her round that rock into a damn near ninety-degree turn, I ask? Fah! Ye're asking me for eighteen knots. This isn't a speedboat."

"Take a look at the alternatives," I said quietly.

"B—— the alternatives," replied Mac. "All I want is to get those diesels at full pelt once before I die. Eighteen knots at three-eighty revolutions." He smiled a thin, cold smile. "Double-action diesels. Fastest things afloat."

He turned and went below to his beloved engines, ignoring the desperateness of the situation.

John and I clattered down to the bridge. I took the wheel from the Kroo boy.

"Full ahead," I snapped. John rang down. "Any moment that surf may break," I said. "We want every knot we can get out of her. If the wind comes up — and you know how it does out of a dead clear sky here — we're finished. Once the surf breaks under her, you can say your prayers."

"Geoffrey," said John, "there have been times when I started to say my prayers before with you in command, and I feel damn like it now. You know this coast better than any skipper living…"

"Cut out the pretty speeches," I said briefly, spinning the spokes. "I'm taking her on a line with that striped hillock." Etosha began to tremble like a horse as Mac opened up the great engines.

John laughed suddenly, as he always did in the face of danger. "Mac's whipping 'em up. Inyala Hill bearing green one-oh, speed fifteen," he mimicked a destroyer man, "Enemy in close range. Bearing all round the bloody compass. Director-layer sees the target — and how!"

Etosha was picking up speed rapidly. As her head steadied on the bearing it seemed sheer suicide to be taking her in at speed. Suicide anyway, with a few feet of water under her keel, water which might start breaking at any moment.

"Get the crew on deck," I told the Kroo boy. "Get their lifejackets on, and your own too. If she strikes, it's every man for himself. Make it snappy!"

"John," I said as Jim made his way aft, never taking his eyes from the deadly shore. "You and I are the only two who know our position. For all the crew knows, we're anywhere at all." I took my eyes from the shore and gazed at him levelly. "No one is ever to know about this little picnic. We've never been away from the fishing grounds, do you understand? I want your word on that."

"You have it," he replied. "But the crew will talk."

"What they saw was a submarine eruption which they imagined was the shore — that's the explanation you'll give. Your charts, not those you saw of mine, will show our position at sea — and nowhere near this coast. Is that clear?"

"No need to come the heavy skipper with me," he grinned. "Just as you say."

I knew that Etosha was fast, but I did not realise that her slim lines underwater and the fine engines would give her such pace. The coast was tearing towards her bows. Diaz's Thumb looked a biscuit toss away. Beyond, the sea smoked evilly and the angle of the turn looked impossibly acute. I began to have grave doubts whether we would make it.

The air was humid and the islets in their birth-throes gave off a peculiar smell, for all the world like newly-sawn stink-wood — a fetid, half sickly-sweet, semi-acrid pungency, combined with the warm odours of superheated steam.

John stood impassive.

"The scientists say this is the oldest coast in the world," I said slowly. "They say it was here that earth first emerged from chaos. Maybe life also emerged first, here, too. We're probably seeing the same thing before our eyes now as happened on the first day of Creation… "

He took up the speaking-tube. There was a curious exaltation about his voice.

"What is she doing, Mac?" he asked.

The voice came indistinctly back, but John gave a low whistle. "Nearly nineteen," he said. "She's splendid. But if she so much as touches anything now—"

"Get a lifebelt on," I said tersely.

"No time now," he said. "I want to watch the last act."

The water creamed under Etosha's forefoot. Diaz's Thumb was now so close that one could see its smooth, wicked fang sticking up a hundred yards away on the port bow. If I could feel any kind of relief, it was that Etosha was now — by no doing of mine — north of the dreaded shoal, although still on the shoreward side of it. She'd run through the vital gateway by the grace of God. I gave the wheel a spoke or two and she leaned over slightly towards the rock. Fifty yards now. The crew stood below me on the deck, some cowering beneath the bridge overhang. The ship roared on like an express train. Then suddenly one of them gave a wild shout — it might have been the leadsman — clambered over the bulwarks and jumped into the sea, swimming strongly towards the jagged pinnacle.

John snatched at a lifebelt.

"No," I snapped. "Don't throw it. Let him go. He's finished anyway. You'll only prolong his agony with that. The first surf will smash him to pieces."

John obeyed, but his hand was shaking. One of the crew shouted something obscene at the bridge, but it was drowned in the crash of the bows through the water.

Twenty yards now.

"Take a grip of something," I said quietly. "Here we go."

I spun the wheel hard to port. At the same time I ordered the port screw to "full astern."

At that moment the wave hit us.

Generated by the great south-west winds which strike at gale force out of a sky so clear it might be yachting weather, the sea in these parts works itself up to a demoniacal fury within a space of minutes. This was the wind and the sea which I had dreaded as I put Etosha at full speed across the open stretch of water in the hope that she might get clear before anything struck. The giant wave carried with it not only the elemental force of the sudden gale, but also the punch of the submarine eruptions. No one had seen it towering up astern as we raced towards the Thumb. I caught sight of the massive chocolate-coloured wall, freckled here and there with the white belly of a dolphin or shark killed in the eruptions, and towering above it all a cream-and-dun crest of breaking water. The port screw had begun to bite and the rudder too as the great mountain of sea struck aft the bridge structure.

I felt Etosha's stern cant and sink under the shock of tons of water and the action of the port screw. There was a great rending sound of metal and wood. The transom felt as if it had been mule-kicked. I started to shout to John, but heard no words above the gigantic clangour. I rang the telegraph to "full ahead." Out of the corner of my eye I saw John snatch an axe and dart aft. The sea poured in over the bridge rails. The stern canted over more steeply.

It is in moments like this that the sailor feels his rapprochement with his craft. The mould of iron, the grain of wood, takes on life as the sea seeks to wrest from it the stuff of its being which man has fashioned. The sea,on its remorseless anvil seeks to redesign. The sailor, and the sailor only, is the witness of that elemental forging, the fight for a new pattern. The man of the sea expresses it simply: "She was like a thing alive." The whip of strained steel, the near-breaking strain of rope and recalcitrant wood challenge the sea. It is a titan's battle. In those moments a man's love of his ship is born and he hears with pain the rendings of that dreadful accouchement.

A brief glimpse showed me the aftermast canted over and buckled about five feet above the deck. John, up to the chest in water, was hacking at the wire and rigging screws which, fortunately, were secured on the bridge abaft the funnel. The stern tilted, but it seemed to have more life in it. Above the din I heard the thuds of the axe. If only the stays would part! The mast would then go overboard and she might right herself. From the foredeck came screams and shouts from the crew. The axe thudded. With a twang like a huge banjo-string the last of the stays parted. It was followed by a rending, tearing, sickening noise which seemed as if half her stern had gone with the mast. Through my hands on the spoke I felt the slight lightening of Etosha's burden of death and then a living movement as the powerful screws thrust. The bow was angled high and the list seemed beyond human power to right. A second later, by the great power of the diesels, I felt she might live if she could only shake herself free. I knew then how my great-grandfather had felt — the story had come down to me as a boy — when the fine-lined clipper he was driving round the Cape of Storms under a great press of sail put her yacht-like counter under the wild seas and he alone had saved her as the water towered over her mizzen chains by cutting adrift the halliards and rigging with his own hands.

Like a cork out of a bottle, Elosha leapt free, shedding astern the debris of the mast, stays, boats and stern fittings. Sea and spray cleared. But we had not escaped. Dead ahead, not more than fifty yards, lay a smoking, new-born islet. Beyond was the open sea. The waves out there were white-crested, and, dear God! under them was deep water. A welter of white broke over the shoal — astern. No power could save Etosha now. Her gallant fight for life with the huge wave had not saved her. But as the sickening realisation hit me, I saw in a flash that the smoking islet, steam-crested, was not the one I had originally noted when Etosha made her great bid for safety. It was new, reared in the few minutes of our travail. As far as the eye could see to starboard now Etosha was hemmed in, cut off from the sea by the advancing, inexorable, ever-growing number of islets. The coast had laid a deadly trap.

Etosha checked and I was thrown forward against the wheel and fetid heat rose about me. I waited for the strike which would rip her plating like calico. But it did not come. She lurched slowly ahead, losing speed. Strangely-coloured flames rose and I saw the paint blister. Another lurch — ú she was cutting through the soft, red-hot mud, as yet un-hardened in the sea! Through the steam, a ship's length away, lay open water. She slowed more and struggled tiredly. The heat and the steam nearly suffocated me. I saw a wave sweeping in from seawards. Etosha was almost at a standstill. Then her bows lifted under the sea. The screws screamed as they rose out of the viscous, turgid mud and bit into water — blessed, salt scawater. She surged clear of the nauseating embrace towards the open sea.

Automatically I rang the telegraph — "Half ahead."

Etosha made her way west — to safety.

John joined me at the wheel, grinning, axe in hand.

"Fried fish for dinner," he said laconically.

"We'll have to open up the hatches and see how much is spoiled," I replied. But I intend to get clear of this bloody part of the world first."

"She was magnificent," said John warmly.

"Much damage astern?" I asked.

"A complete shambles. The mast and boats are gone and the davits are as curly as a Hottentot's topknot."

"Where's Jim?" I asked. "Take the wheel a moment while I see how the crew's fared."

John's face clouded. "Crew!" he sniffed. "Bloody lot of frightened savages. Do you think one of them stirred a hand to help me? They hung on to anything they could find and prayed for their souls — if they have such a thing."

I looked over the bridge. Even where the force of the huge wave had been slightest, the damage was frightening. The wheel valves on the two winches under the bridge were awry, gear was swept in a wild tangle to starboard and lay in the scuppers in confusion; the crew, with fear in their faces, still clung to their handholds. Paint had been stripped as if with a blowlamp. Curled fragments clung to the blackened bulwarks.

"Helmsman!" I roared. The Kroo boy detached himself and came slowly along the deck. "God's truth!" I shouted. "This isn't an old men's home! Shake a leg!"

He came on to the bridge, sullen and frightened.

"Course south by west," I snapped.

The wheel swung over and the ragged welt of the coast, steaming, turbulent, half mist-shrouded, came into view.

John looked at it ruminatively.

"First round to us — over the Skeleton Coast!" he muttered.