Scend of the Sea

CHAPTER FOUR

'A ship without a soul.'

The words took on in my brain the rhythmic thump, break and swish of the seas as they crashed against the bow of Walvis Bay, not coming aboard yet, but with a strange quality of menace-of growing menace-as they raced in from the south-west. I had cut the sea-bottom sampling operation an hour previously because of the increasing motion of the ship, and I didn't like the colour of the sky in the same quarter. Nor did I like the unnaturally high barometer. Usually, a south-westerly buster is preceded by a high barometer, then suddenly it goes down like a lift and, almost without warning, a gale is plucking like a thousand devils at one's ship and the sea. It was after midday and my rendezvous with Alistair was still a good six hours away, there would be no official weather warning to shipping (if it was to come) for another hour yet. As I stood on the bridge trying to size up the coming blow, the counter-combination of sea-strike and screw-thrust took on a beat which found expression in the words-as one frames phrases to the rhythm of a train's wheels — that turned round in my mind.

'A ship — without — a soul.'

Those were the words of some forgotten shipmaster, a phlegmatic, matter-of-fact man of the sea and of action, not given to extra-sensory things, when he first saw the

Waratah on her maiden voyage in Australia. His own ship had been lying alongside a wharf in Melbourne and the brand-new Waratah had berthed alongside. In the tradition of the sea, and with some curiosity for the crack new ship of the Blue Anchor Line, he had gone to pay his respects to Captain Ilbery. Standing by the wharf, looking at the new liner, this captain had suddenly found himself awed. There was something about the new vessel which lay beyond his extensive knowledge of the sea and ships. ‘A ship — without — a soul.'

Now, off the Pondoland coast, the words the captain had uttered to himself as he waited to go aboard the Waratah for a friendly noonday drink and chat thumped in my head to the measure of the gathering storm. I had sailed from Durban as I had arranged so light-heartedly with Alistair — as the Waratah had sailed — the previous evening. On her last fateful departure from Durban the passengers had entertained their friends aboard, the band had played, the ribbons had flown, and the farewells had been said-the last farewells in and to this world. By contrast, Walvis Bay had had only the Director of the Marine Institute to wave her goodbye, and she had slipped a hawser or two and slid silently out to sea. I had travelled at reduced speed down the coast, using the bottom-sampler as a pretext, in order to rendezvous, in the early evening about seven o'clock, with Alistair's Buccaneer between the Bashee Mouth and East London.

What would the weather do?

I handed the bridge over to young Smit and went to my cabin, which was also the chart-room. Pinned to my table was not the chart she had been at such pains to bring me, but my own, with its complex lines and figures. For a moment I stood looking at them; within hours, would that ominous sea and sky in the south-west put them to a fiery test?

During the long watches when the weather ship had been on station in the Southern Ocean, I had plotted, on the basis of all the information I could gather, the exact course of the Waratah after she left Durban on that winter's evening of late July 1909. Side by side with her course, I had traced the nearly coincidental course of the Clan Macintyre, the last ship to speak to the Waratah a few hours before she vanished. Gridded above the two main courses I had added the tracks of the three British cruisers which had searched for her in the days immediately after her disappearance, and had struck far south-eastwards of the Cape in a competent square search on the assumption that she had broken down and been carried away towards Antarctica by the great Agulhas Current. Naval ratings had manned special crow's nests by day, and by night searchlights had swept the seas for the missing liner. I had also added the position of a liner called the Guelph off East London. On the night of the Waratah's disappearance this ship had received a garbled Morse lamp message which ended with the letters 't-a-h'. The identity of the ship which sent the message — known to be a big, fully-lighted liner on correct course for Cape Town-was never established. I had filled in, too, the track of the special search ship Sabine, a merchantman captained by a Royal Navy officer, which, after the fruitless search by the three cruisers, made a 14,000-mile, 88-day voyage through the seas and islands of Antarctica. She found — nothing. Fifteen steamers and two windjammers had been at sea between Durban and Cape Town when the Waratah vanished; their contribution to the mystery I had added in graphic form — courses, wind, storm. My father's projected track as he had flown southwards from Durban over the sea towards East London, ending at the approaches to the port, was precisely drawn in.

It was not so much upon the ships that I concentrated now. I had taken to the Southern Ocean with me in Walvis Bay volume after volume of weather statistics dating back to the beginning of the records, which was after the Waratah had vanished. I resuscitated from oblivion every winter storm of consequence for half a century. They, too, were set off in graphic form 'on my chart, and each had its own separate colour.

Of the storms in which the Waratah had disappeared there were only limited meteorological records. Yet I had painstakingly gathered information from the logs of as many ships in Cape waters at the time of the disaster as I could still obtain. I had also unearthed a copy of the official Board of Trade inquiry into the loss of the Waratah, and from micro-film records I had the day-to-day newspaper reports of witnesses at the hearing.

The inquiry itself had been singularly barren of specific information on the storm; it had concluded vaguely that it had been one ‘of exceptional violence’.

It was small wonder when Tafline came to my cabin that she should marvel that a man could spend months at sea with his only apparent companions some sterile books on meteorology; in actuality, the sifting and correlating of this huge burden of obscure, forgotten, time-sunk data had passed away my months on the weather station only too quickly. How could I explain this when she saw my Waratah chart with its 'lines and figures'; how could I explain it all to a girl whose name I then did not even know?

Dominating all the other storms was the one in which the Waratah had vanished; I outlined it in black.

Now, because of what was happening up on deck, that black-circled storm was being wrenched out of the sphere of academic doldrum to find expression in the wild waters and insane wind which would surely come. How much could I deduce from it? The official forecast I had heard earlier had spoken of a south-westerly gale off the southern Cape coast, but in winter one can count on four or five of them a month. There was no hint of anything exceptional in this one-yet.

I held myself back deliberately for a moment on the threshold of plunging into deductions from that funeral-lettered Waratah storm. She had known none of this when she had stood by the cabinet where I had carefully stowed away all my facts about the Waratah — statistics, photostats, microfilms, comments, legend, a model of the ship even. Yet with some curious perception she had gone to my photograph of the Waratah. Why? Forces? Ultra-sensitivity to the pent-up transmissions of my own mind? She had called it grief, mistakenly, but still she had been aware of something pressing. .

About a year before, when searching ashore for Waratah information, I had come across a folded sheet of notepaper in an archive. It was a lover's note, written that last sailing day from the Waratah. The very sheet of notepaper came from the ornate lounge of the Waratah itself. As I opened the note, my awareness of what I have come to call 'forces' was overwhelming. I knew what that workaday shipmaster meant when he said the Waratah had no soul. The note was signed with endearments, 'for ever and ever'. There were no proper names. What pair of lovers, I asked myself, had the Waratah separated, 'for ever and ever'? That old captain had seen the Waratah herself, not merely a sheet of notepaper, to reinforce the sort of imponderable emotions I felt at the sight and touch of the note. So strange had been his feelings that he had called his quartermaster and asked him what he thought of the Waratah. Quartermasters, especially those of half a century ago, were a breed of men not given greatly to flights of fancy. They had come up in the hard school of sail; they were tough; the sea was their life.

Looking at the pride of the Blue Anchor Line, the quartermaster replied quickly and simply, ‘I wouldn't sail in her for ten times my pay.'

Smit knocked at the door with three radio signals. He came in, glancing inquisitively at my chart. As a yachtsman, he had that indefinable feeling for sea and weather which the plain man of steam lacks.

'In for a blow, sir?'

My assessment would depend on the signals he brought. If they fitted the template of Waratah weather which lay plotted in front of me…

I shrugged before I read them.

Smit said, 'I was round this way once in early winter, and it was bad enough then, especially in a small boat. I thought my last moment had come at the sight of some of those seas.'

'It's a question of what happens to an ordinary-looking gale once it rounds the ankle of the coast,' I said. I grinned as he peeped shyly at the lines and whorls of my old storm fronts.

'Doesn't seem to be any very unusual yet,’ he replied. 'Gale warning, Force 8-40 knots.'

I knew exactly what it all looked like-on paper. I had been through it all a hundred times. But it was the clincher, those unread, apocalyptic messages Smit had brought and which I played with, which would provide the key, the dovetailing pattern, if it existed: I had sailed from Durban on what was a typical, mild winter's evening (warm enough to swim in the afternoon), no threat on the barometer, and scarcely a wind or sea worth speaking about So had Waratah. I had resurrected from oblivion the port captain's weather report of July 26th, 1909.

5 p.m. barometer 28.860; thermometer 74; light north-east wind; harbour entrance, smooth; light north-easterly sea.

My own log read:

5 p.m. barometer 28.862; thermometer 73; light north-east wind; harbour entrance, smooth; light north-easterly sea.

Nothing could be more identical.

From the mustiness of old records I had found the log of the lighthouse-keeper of Cape Hermes telling of the weather that last fateful morning when, in sight of his light off Port St John's, Waratah and Clan Macintyre had exchanged their last signals. 'Hazy but fine,' the keeper had reported.

A little while before Walvis Bay had steamed slowly past Cape Hermes. 'Hazy but fine,' I had logged.

Before coming below, I had requested from East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape St Francis, the projecting 'ankle' of coast near Port Elizabeth, their sea and weather conditions that morning. These were what Smit had given me.

I would have liked to have shared with Smit the secrets of my heavily-scored chart, but there was too much at stake.

'I’ll join you on the bridge in a few minutes,' I told him. He looked disappointed and a little surprised that I had not yet read the radio signals.

Of the weather the day before the Waratah had vanished, I had annotated the chart:

Port Elizabeth — light westerly wind, smooth sea. I unfolded my radio signal. It said:

Port Elizabeth — light westerly wind, smooth sea. I ran my finger down to the crucial Cape St Francis.

Cape St Francis — gentle north-east wind, smooth sea. My signal read:

Cape St Francis — gentle north-east wind, smooth sea. Last was East London, nearest port to where the Waratah disappeared:

East London — gentle westerly wind, smooth sea. There was scarcely any need for me to read the third radio signal:

East London — gentle westerly wind, smooth sea. That was Waratah weather coming up from the south-west to meet Walvis Bay.

I knew what I had to do.

I went quickly on to the bridge. The sky to the south-west was a diseased cobalt. The sea had a peculiar sheen, like a 'wet look' shoe.

'Course, south-west, true,' I ordered Smit. I rang the engine-room telegraph. 'Revolutions for thirteen knots.'

Waratah had been twelve miles offshore in her last fateful hours; I would hold Walvis Bay twelve miles likewise; Waratah had been afloat at this point, and she had passed Clan Macintyre at thirteen knots, overhauling her and crossing her bows from the starboard, or landward, side. I would hold Waratah's course from now until. . until… I paused. Only the Waratah gale could tell me that.

I made a quick calculation. At her Waratah speed -1 could hear the quickened thump of the screws under my feet now — the Walvis Bay would be almost exactly at my rendezvous point with Alistair at seven o'clock.

‘I want you to make everything secure,' I ordered Smit. 'Lash down the radar sweep. I want a half-hourly report on the satellite gyro tracker. Rig lifelines along the foredeck and aft so that we can check the radiosonde hut. All unnecessary gear off the decks.'

'Aye, aye, sir!' Smit grinned. 'Coming up big, sir?'

'Mighty big, as I read the Indian signs,' I replied. I was a little anxious about the delicate satellite observing gear. It had never been used at sea before, and my two technicians aboard had undergone a special course on its intricacies. The basic principle was a platform which was stabilized by a master gyroscope, which held it pointed at a constant angle at the weather satellite as it made its daily pass between the heavens.

‘Double-lash the boats,' I went on. 'Also, bring up a couple of heavy tarpaulins from below in case of emergencies. Tell the cook to get a hand to help him, prepare hard-weather cold rations for the crew. I want hot soup and coffee for the night in the big vacuum flasks. Okay?'

I picked up the speaking-tube to the engine-room. 'Nick? Can you rig an emergency battery circuit to the gyro platform?'

I heard the engineer's whistle of surprise. 'What are you expecting, skipper — a visit from the Flying Dutchman!' I was to remember his remark, later.

'You and the boffins worked it out in Durban in case we ran into trouble in the Southern Ocean, remember?'

'This isn't the Southern Ocean,' he replied with a laugh. 'I'm still thinking of those bikinis on the beach yesterday.'

'You'll want more than a bikini before tonight's out,' I retorted. 'It's coming up rough. Real. .' I choked back the word Waratah '. . Cape of Storms stuff. From the southwest.’

'Will do,' replied the engineer cheerfully. 'But the big problem remains — battery acid, if she starts to buck about.'

I stopped Smit leaving the bridge. 'Take a special look at the Van Veen grab,' I told him. 'It's awkward to secure, hanging outboard like that. I don't want the chains flailing around in the darkness.'

'Aye, aye, sir. I'll get the bo'sun on to it first before the sea comes up.'

Mine was a tough, well-tried Southern Ocean crew. But the stay in Cape Town, and the soft-weather delights of Durban at the height of the winter season, had taken the edge off them. I always had a sneaking sympathy with Odysseus trying to drive his languor-laden crew. Waratah weather wouldn't be the rearing, mile-long swells of the Southern Ocean they were used to; it would be a brutal tossing of short, quick blows and forty-foot waves, a savage, give-no-quarter in fight. It had driven back the search tugs which had gone to look for the lost liner; it had hammered one of the 2200-ton cruisers for nine days until her hull was so strained that they had had to drydock her. Naval divers had had to work on the second cruiser for eight days before she dared put to sea again.

The string of orders and need for action to snug down the ship had taken my mind from the problem which now loomed. Smit brought it home like a dollop coming over the side.

‘Feldman will be coming on duty soon, sir. You'll be able to give him your signals for the Weather Bureau.'

Feldman telescoped the duties of radio operator with first officer. Smit could help out with incoming signals, but was incapable of transmitting.

My preoccupation with the Waratah had driven momentarily from my mind that other track which ended where hers did in a circled question-mark south of the Bashee-Gemsbok.

Gemsbok had flown on a Waratah night; tonight a Waratah night was lying in wait for the Buccaneer!

My next order froze. How could I stop Alistair flying tonight? Even the most guarded message would somehow betray that we had some sort of tryst-the pilot of a crack squadron using a crack plane for some private arrangement with the trusted skipper of an experimental weather ship whose success depended largely on his judgment and seamanship? Beating up shipping in Buccaneers is a court-martial offence: when I had reminded Alistair of it, he had laughed and said: ‘I don't see brother Ian peaching on me, do you? Who's to know anyway in the dark?' We had left it at that.

Send a slightly overstated on-the-spot weather report to the Bureau hoping that they would supply it to the Air Force who in turn would call off the manoeuvre? My mind jeered at me even as I composed it — how would you get away with that one? 'On the basis of my observations of a storm sixty years ago. .!' What else was I basing my assumptions on? Not the tight interwoven system of highly scientific observations from a score of professional stations in this year of grace, transmitted at the speed of light to the central Bureau in Pretoria, digested by computer, and fed by skilled professional weathermen every few hours to hundreds of ships round the coast, scores of jetliners over the land, and squadrons of faster-than-sound military aircraft at a dozen bases. I felt the first tingle of doubt when I turned the spotlight on myself. If I dressed up the message in professional code, someone might see through it and say, Fairlie's been too long in the Southern Ocean, he's losing his nerve. He's lived with these gales so long they're starting to get under his skin.

Signal the Air Force? Even if I knew their wavelength, such a by-passing my own people would invite a rocket which might mean my getting no nearer Antarctica than the next port…

Say even the Weather Bureau were to accept my assessment of the impending gale-against all the skill and advice of their other weather stations — what would their reaction be? Walvis Bay carried a load of scientific equipment whose delicacy had caused a hundred headaches ashore and afloat. The Weather Bureau would play it safe. Get out of the storm area, it would say with complete justification. If there's any risk to the equipment in making the nearest port, turn back to Durban. You can still be there, safe in port, ahead of the storm. If you can't risk that gear in a winter's gale off the Cape, then there's no point in trying it in the Roaring Forties. They would appreciate the finer points of difference between the ocean swells of deep waters and the sort of seas I knew spelled Waratah weather.

My glance at my watch was more instinctive than anything else. It may have even been subconscious, the rendezvous time.

It gave me reason to beg Smit's question. I needed time. I must not miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which offered to try and solve the Waratah mystery.

'The shipping forecast is due in ten minutes,' I said. 'Bring me up one of the transistor portables from the ward-room. Come and hear yourself what the Weather Bureau thinks of it.'

'Good -1 mean, very well, sir.' I liked Smit's unquestioning enthusiasm which burst through his veneer of formality as soon as he came under pressure.

I took another long look at the south-west. That curious sky and blanched sea still told me — Waratah. If it was, or if it wasn't-like a martyr on a gridiron, whichever way I turned I would get myself burned.

The Weather Bureau turned the spit again with its lunch-time forecast.

Siriit came racing up the companionway just as the bland tones of the woman announcer, sitting in her soundproof box 600 miles away inland, said, 'There is a gale warning. We repeat, there is a gale warning.'

Smit grimaced derisively as she shifted the emphasis from one word to another with professional satisfaction.

‘A strong south-westerly wind between East London and Durban will reach thirty to forty knots in the south of the area.'

Forty knots! Smit glanced sideways at me. I could sense his let-down. Here I had been virtually ordering the crew to panic stations with threats of a Force 10/65 m.p.h. gale while the Weather Bureau — the people who had access to all the information and mutations from their weather stations-came up with a piddling little thirty-forty-knot blow which would do little more than wet the weather-ship's decks. My let-down was the kicker to years of patient, often heartbreaking, research and compilation into which I had thrown all my spare time in the Southern Ocean. Had I, as Alistair had said and she made implicit merely by her lovely presence, been simply wasting my time in a self-made statistical funkhole while life rushed by a thousand miles across an ocean waste?

My bitterness rounded on young Smit. 'Switch off that damn thing,' I said harshly.

'Aye, aye, sir,' he said, scared. 'Orders for the ship, sir..?'

'My orders stand,' I snapped. 'Look at that sea, you fool. And that sky. Can't you ...see!’

'No, I mean, yes, sir. Snug the ship down, sir. Grabs to be secured. Emergency …" he forced himself to say the word '. . gale rations from the galley. Galley fire to be doused by 1800 hours. Crew to stand by …'

'Don't go on like a bloody parrot,' I snarled.

He stopped at the bridge ladder. 'In case … in case. . you have to leave the bridge, sir, what course, speed?'

The way he was repeating everything made it all sound doubly ludicrous; now he was trying to use a euphemism to try and say that if my non-existent gale washed me from the bridge. .

‘You heard-as before,' I retorted. 'Course, south-west, true, speed thirteen knots. No reduction or change of course without my express permission.'.

'Aye, aye, sir.' Smit fled down the ladder.

By mid-afternoon the old shipmaster's words had begun not to sound but to thunder in my mind-’a ship — without-a soul'. They took on the rhythmic thump, rip and rend of the seas which now smashed against the bow of the Walvis Bay, throwing themselves in spouting cascades of broken water and tails of spray high over the platform where the harpoon gun had stood, and then spreading themselves feet deep across the decks like ragged, too-eager fingers searching again and again for a weak winch, a fatigued hatchcover, or a loosened stanchion to pluck away over the side. Walvis Bay knew how to toss them clear, and she was still fighting well within herself; nonetheless, I could hear her strain in the shuddering vibration of the hull and propellers. I had stood and watched with a kind of morose satisfaction at the rapid build-up of the sea and the gale until young Smit, oilskins streaming, reported to me before going off duty.

'Handing over, sir.'

I nodded.

'Shouldn't. . er. . it's getting a bit wet up here, sir. Can't I bring you your oilskins …?'

I regretted my curtness earlier. 'Yes, thank you.'

He grinned and said boyishly, 'Looks as if you're right and they're wrong, sir.'

There were too many things on my mind to accept the compliment. I was far too unsure, too. I checked my briefness and said:

'See what the wind gauge says when you go to my cabin.'

He returned and helped me into my waterproofing. 'Only thirty-eight knots, sir.' He sounded disappointed.

I grinned at him now. 'So who's right is anyone's guess.'

'When it gets worse-I mean, if it gets worse, sir, don't hesitate …' He stopped at the presumption.

‘I’ll call you all right if it really blows.'

'Thanks awfully -1 mean, very good, sir.'

In his haste, he nearly bumped into Feldman. Feldman was slightly older than I, an unemotional, rather wooden first officer with a shock of black hair and a full face. He had none of Smit's volatile enthusiasm — the enthusiasm of a man of sail, I told myself. Feldman was reliable, providing the decisions were made for him. He spoke slowly, deliberately, and was, on occasion, almost pernickety.

He greeted me briefly. He held on against the bucking of the ship and took a long look to the south-west, and then westwards towards the hazed shoreline. Jubela had been at the wheel for a few minutes before Feldman's arrival — morose, silent, withdrawn. There had been no conversation between us before Feldman came, except helm orders.

Feldman finished his long scrutiny and then said slowly, as if afraid almost to voice his thoughts, 'Shouldn't we reduce speed a little, sir? She seems to be taking a lot of water. There's the gyro gear …'

My surprise at Feldman's querying a decision of mine shook me for a moment out of my Waratah train of thought. Never in a year at sea had he done anything but follow my orders. He did not look at me but, as if to reinforce his views, he seemed intent on examining the wind-torn sky south-westwards.

Feldman was right: the hull of the weather ship was straining and thumping in the mounting seas. It was not the elated drum of the waves one hears when a racing yacht is running at her maximum speed, or the exhilarating crunch as she planes down one roller and up the hill of the next, but the head-on slug of evenly-matched boxes, the savage soften-ing-up in-fighting to produce the final knockdown. During the past hour I had watched critically the build-up of the sea. No need now to refer to those innumerable painstaking computations. The reality before my eyes brought every fact to mind with startling clarity. My guess was that it had not reached its maximum yet, whatever the Weather Bureau might say. Nor had the wind. Where Walvis Bay was now, the Waratah had been forging ahead at thirteen knots. So, whatever Walvis Bay suffered, she must hold Waratah's speed.

Walvis Bay's course- Waratah's course-was about twelve miles offshire, and this corresponds roughly with the maximum southward flow of the Agulhas Current. This is a river of warm tropical seawater (known as the Mozambique Current north of Lourenco Marques) which touches a surface speed of five knots hereabouts, although divers have reported much higher underwater speeds. What drew my attention now-I could see by the jerky boil of the water between the ship and the land-was that a powerful counter-current was in the preliminary stages of building up, the sure herald (in my view) of a severe south-westerly buster. Despite what the official forecast said, I felt sure that this counter-current, hammering against the mighty Agulhas Current striking south, would create a maelstrom of a sea before the night was out. This was the way it had been with the Waratah. I had the Clan Macintyre's own log to back me, and this is the way it had been with her. She had been only a little way behind the Waratah, and had barely escaped disaster herself. The main instrument in the provocation of these great natural forces was the south-westerly gale, which would move up its own massed battalions of sea to reinforce the counter-current against the dominant Agulhas flow. What would transpire, only the night would show. And I intended to be in a ring-side seat with Walvis Bay to see.

I knew Feldman's devotion to officialdom.

‘It looks worse than it really is,' I jollied him. The wind hasn't reached forty knots yet. The Weather Bureau says there's nothing more than an ordinary blow to it.'

He looked relieved, although still dubious at what lay before his own eyes.

'I've just checked the wind,' I went on. 'A mere thirty-eight knots.'

What I did not say, was that I considered Smit's reading of a little while back already out of date. I guessed it at forty-five knots now — and increasing.

Alistair! My foreboding at the thought of the Viscount's course running dead as it did on my chart jerked me back to an objective assessment of the whole situation. Say the wind way gusting forty-five knots now-what was that, in Alistair's own words, to a machine capable of the speed of sound? Was I not projecting all my Waratah fears and shadows and my own experience as a sailor into a quite different medium without due justification? The night the Viscount had vanished, land stations noted a speed of fifty knots. That was enough to inconvenience, but not threaten, a machine backed by thousands of horsepower. Was I not thinking in sea, rather than air, terms? At the moment there was no way I could see of warning off Alistair, anyway.

Feldman said, after another long look at the south-west, 'I've never seen a sky quite like that. But the weather people must know. They've got all the information which we haven't. .’

By late afternoon, even Feldman's faith had evaporated. He answered in monosyllables only as the weather became wilder, until I could stand his moroseness no longer.

'I'm going up aloft to take a look round,' I said.

It was simply to get away from him; the bridge of the converted whaler was, in fact, the highest point of the ship after we had dismantled the special whaling lookout on the crow's nest at the time of her original conversion.

I made my way to the scrap of deck high up aft near the radio hut

The bridge, which was enclosed, gave only a forward sight of the sea; hanging on to a funnel stay-wire, I had an all-round view. I was taken aback at the wildness of the scene. I was aware that this type of storm developed rapidly, and that its storm centre moved equally quickly, but it was nevertheless startling to see it happening before my very eyes. To the south-west, towards East London, the sky was a curious purple-black over the land, and night-black out to sea. It was like looking from a spaceship at the dividing line between night and day on earth. The dying sun was able to create a lightness over the land, but the sea-black was relentless, ominous. Between Walvis Bay and the great blackness was a kind of no-man's-land of wind-torn sky and cloud flying at impossible speeds; these were the outriders of the main army of the storm, the light armour probing with quick thrusts the WarataWs battlefield of death. All round Walvis Bay the seas leaned to a plume of spindrift; they were not so high as steep, a sure sign that the general engagement with the Agulhas Current still lay ahead; the counter-current was still testing the enemy's defences.

Involuntarily, I looked astern. I found myself reading the situation by hindsight. Sailors of the calibre of Douglas Fairlie and Captain Ilbery were not afraid of a storm, and the Waratah was a new ship, stout, fast, well-found. In the immediate uproar after her disappearance, sailors had no difficulty in believing that Captain Ilbery would have pushed her through the storm. Both men had served in clippers whose captains rejoiced in nothing less than a full gale, men who knew how to pile on canvas to the royals and to use to the full the great westerly winds of the Roaring Forties. They were iron men who battened down their hatches because their decks would run awash for days under the press of sail; they were cruel, proud time-makers who armed their officers with pistols with orders to shoot down any terrified seaman who tried to let fly a halliard.

There was not the least anxiety in the Waratah's last messages to the Clan Macintyre. She had not even reduced speed. This evening's sea would have looked just as wild from the bridge of the Waratah, and she had been nearly twenty times the size of my game little whaler.

A short while before arriving at her present position, the Walvis Bay had passed a curious natural arch of rock known as The Hole-in-the-Wall which rises sheer out of the coast. The massive, soaring slab is pierced by an archway: the low sun broke through the gloom of the land and backdrop of great forests and for a moment the arch appeared like a bright nature-made headlight shining from the black land. One of the stories scouted after the Waratah had disappeared was that she had been sucked into a blowhole similar to The Hole-in-the-Wall and drawn down, by the strong inshore counter-current, into a vast undersea (or underland) cavern. A companion theory was that, under the extremes of gale and sea, a natural vortex had formed in the sea, and into this the liner had been sucked.

How much, I asked myself hanging there and seeing the storm forces unleashing themselves — the same question I had asked Alistair-did we really know about the ocean's secrets? I ran my mind now over my own scanty knowledge of the ocean floor beneath Walvis Bay's keel. Round the coastline of South Africa runs a narrow continental shelf known as the Agulhas Bank, oil-bearing, elusive. It drops away in successive shallow terraces into very deep water. With something of a shock, I realized that the course I was holding was roughly the line of the-final terrace of the Agulhas Bank before it fell away into abysmal depths. Meaningful? Meaningless?

The oil rigs, having drilled unsuccessfully elsewhere, were now planning to move operations to the Pondoland coast. Was enough known about the area to dismiss wholly the theory of an undersea cavern, or a vortex? Why had nothing happened to the thousands of other ships which had used this same route? Would — whatever it was — lie in wait for one of the giant oil rigs and strike it down as it had struck down the Waratah. The most far-fetched speculation was no more absurd than the plain historical fact that a 10,000-ton liner, classed Al at Lloyd's, and commanded by one of the ablest sailors of the day, had vanished utterly, without trace, within sight of the land, in broad daylight, somewhere where I was now.

What had destroyed the ship had been something terrible and swift, something the skilled sailor could not calculate or foresee.

The two banks of blackness ahead of Walvis Bay began to merge; the darkness grew.

I hung on to the lifelines I had ordered earlier in the afternoon to be rigged as Walvis Bay went deep through a huge wave-not a roller, but a short, high, spume-tipped load of water. Her hull trembled, and the screw chewed air and thin water with the same kind of brash rattle that a car makes when the clutch is thrown out and the engine continues at speed. It went against all my seaman's instincts to push the game whaler like this-but I had to know, and this was Waratah weather. Walvis Bay dipped her entire starboard side under, and I ducked gratefully behind the solid bridge and forward superstructure which occupied most of her whole width of beam and was designed specifically to break the force of such as this as they swept aft.

Streaming water, I regained the bridge.

Taylor, one of the two technicians aboard whose function was to care for the scientific apparatus, had turned green.

The gyro doesn't know its arse from its elbow, with this bucking,' he said, hastily averting his eyes from a rearing oncoming sea. 'Nor do I, for that matter.'

'What's the trouble?' I asked. 'It was supposed to hold the platform steady in Southern Ocean seas.'

This isn't the Southern Ocean,' he retorted, gesturing half behind him as if the sight of the seas were too much for his stomach. 'It's different. It's this bucking and lurching that it can't take. Over-compensates. The platform rocks around like. . like. .' he motioned to the sea. 'Now she's overheating. If she burns out…'

'Switch the damn thing off, then,' I snapped.

'Can't — the rest position was designed for rest, not for. . for. . this. No one thought to have any securing bolts. If we switch it off, it'll rock itself to pieces. Can't you do something about this bucking?'

It was my turn to gesture towards the sea. I didn't say, if I'm right it will get a lot worse before the night is out. If the gyro went, the whole purpose of tracking the new satellite would go overboard. Yet here was an opportunity which in the long run might prove far more valuable in saving rigs worth millions of pounds than not taking a chance with the gyro.

I said, 'Go and have a chat with Nick Scannel. He's the engineer, maybe he can suggest some way of securing it.'

Miller, the other technician, came on to the bridge. He eyed me balefully. 'Have you told him?' he asked Taylor.

Taylor did not seem to trust himself to reply. He nodded.

'Gyro's getting hot,' said Miller.

'See Scannel and get on with it,' I said.

'Perhaps if I puke over it, it'll cool down,' coughed Taylor. He vanished hastily.

Feldman stood by during the conversation, silent, lips pursed. Was I, I asked myself quickly, succumbing to the mysterious forces of that soulless ship, dead for over sixty years in her grave, by pushing Walvis Bay down the same Pondoland coast, at the same season of the year, into the same sort of storms, on her same track, at her same speed? With that question, the cold thought swept over my mind, cold now as the sting of the cold rain mixed with bursting spray on my face: am I treading on Waratah’s grave at this moment? I made a quick calculation: no. Although I could not see the land well enough to be sure, Walvis Bay was still approaching, on a line out to sea, the mouth of the Bashee River. Waratah had been twelve miles out to sea; I held Walvis Bay twelve miles offshore likewise. Waratah had still been afloat at this point, and the Clan Macintyre, although eight or ten miles astern of her, had her still in sight. Waratah was by now on the port bow of the Clan Macintyre, having crossed shortly before from the landward side. Waratah had been doing thirteen knots, and the sea had been smashing into her, rising progressively on the southwesterly gale, as it was doing now.

Feldman said cautiously, 'If we reduced speed a little, sir, it might help the gyro.'

Everyone wanted speed reduced-the ship, the men, the gyro I

I controlled my reply and said evenly, 'She's making the best heading under the circumstances — she's taking the run of the sea dead ahead. If I reduced speed, it^- would make the motion worse, not better.'

I knew what I was saying was merely a half-truth, begging the question.

Before he could start to argue, I followed it up. 'No further word from the Weather Bureau?'

'No, sir. Next forecast is not for another couple of hours.' 'Good. Then we can take it things are not really too bad, eh?'

I was using sophistry, not seamanship. Feldman was unconvinced. He gestured to starboard, landwards. Three flashes.

'Bashee Mouth,' he reported formally. He seemed to be wanting to say something more, but he went on, irrelevantly, as if to force conversation, 'Light's situated on the northeastern side of the river.'

We had opened the gate of the Waratah's tomb.

The enclosed bridge gave a sense of security compared with the exposed wildness of the upper deck.

I played along with Feldman. 'How's the wind?’

'Force 8, gusting harder than that, though. Over fifty knots.'

Force 8. The threshold of a real buster-with worse to come. It was still not the gale 'of exceptional violence' which had crippled other ships at sea the day the Waratah had disappeared. Had she not quite plainly rolled over and sunk? It was the complete answer — except that it begged one inescapable fact: not one body, not one shred of evidence of wreckage, had ever been found of the Waratah. If she had turned turtle, there was the Clan Macintyre to find wreckage coming from behind; steaming towards her was another liner, the Guelph. All the search ships had found not one plank.

I told Feldman, 'I'm going to my cabin for a moment.'

I wanted to check that chart in the actual presence of a big storm to see if I could not uncover some new factor, some practical aspect perhaps, which had escaped my academic investigations.

I did not go to the chart, however. I stood for a moment undecided at the same doorway she had stepped through. And it was she, Tafline, who occupied my thoughts at that moment of crucial decision for the ship. I went across and stared at the old photograph as she had done. It meant nothing. It was-simply a photograph. It was the thought of the slim, lovely presence that held me. Was her hair dark or light? Neither. It came to me now-it was the indefinable colour the fronds of kelp have on a clear day in the Southern Ocean as they grace an iceberg, neither dark nor light, yet with some unique quality of vibrancy they take from the refracted light which changes magically as the ice lifts and falls — three qualities of light, one from the sea, one from the ice, one from the sky.

I stood, and looked as she had, at the Viscount.

Bruce Fairlie the pilot had not been afraid of storms. Why should he be? His machine was powered by thousands of horsepower, it had every latest radio and radar device. His last signal to the land had shown no concern for the weather. He had reported simply that he was flying low over the sea in strong wind and rain and would be coming in to land in a few minutes at East London airport … I shrugged off my thoughts impatiently. I had worked all this out before. All it added up to was that the airliner had been over the sea, low, south of the Bashee Mouth.

Bruce Fairlie had also opened the graveyard gate.,

It had closed for ever behind him.

No wreckage, no bodies, had ever been found. Not a plank.

I went to the chart now. On it. Waratah's track ended a little to the south of where Walvis Bay pitched and rolled. The terminal point was approximate, since she may have vanished immediately the Clan Macintyre lost sight of her. Alistair intended to come in to attack East London on a course converging with mine — and the Waratah's. He said he would be so low that there would be no chance of the radar defences picking him up. His Buccaneer would be flying at more than twice the speed of the lost airliner. Would that insure his safety-would he fly tonight? It seemed that whatever had struck down the Waratah and the Gemsbok took no account of speed, if one considered the discrepancy between them.

Where lay the common factor?

I saw.

South-west.

The run of the sea was south-west. The gale was south-west. Waratah's course was south-west. Gemsbok's course was south-west. The Buccaneer's course was south-west. Walvis Bay's course was south-west. The course was death.