The River of Diamonds

5

Eighteen months later the Mazy Zed was no longer a project of models and blueprints but a reality of ships and men.

The mining barge had been launched in Table Bay. Cape brandy for the launch. Flags, bunting, sirens. Ministerial speeches. Unique project, unique undertaking. Spirit of adventure. Unique ship: not another like it afloat. Planning, fitting-out, machinery, — machinery, more and more specialized machinery. Pumps, hoses, pumps, pumps. Refitting and strengthening the tug which was to nursemaid the odd craft. Tow-wires, special heavy winches, tougher cables. Breaking strain tests off the Cape of Storms in a gale. Curses, bruises, broken fingers, seas streaming across unprotected decks, life-lines rigged. A bitch of a ship. She looked like a block of flats and rolled like a whore. Mazy Zed. The Mazy Zed. She was headlines from the moment she was conceived.

I was busy on my own ship. Before the Oranjemund court hearing I had taken an option on an old South African Hydrographic Survey vessel, formerly an Antarctic whaler. The Southern Floe was old, whalers don't grow old like other ships. Her 1850 horsepower triple expansion engines wouldn't give the sixteen knots of her prime, but she was still good for a couple less and with new sealed casings for reducing their noise, she sounded sweeter than she really was. Just over 400 tons, she had high rounded bows and a cruiser stern. It was the marked flare of her bows and the squat way she sat in the water which gave me her name — the Praying Mantis. The mantis is the sacred good-luck bringer of the Namib Bushmen: we'd need all the luck for the Mazy Zed venture.

The navy had left some of its obsolete surveying equipment in the ship, and it was thrown in with the bargain basement price of Ј3000. My plans for a quick victory over the Sperrgebiet coast centred, however, on a special electronic instrument, developed recently in South Africa, known as the Hydrodist. The echo-sounder barely passed muster, while the superb American Sonoprobe, which gives a sort of X-ray picture of the ocean floor, was outside my resources. I was glad they'd left the crow's nest and heavy rigging on the foremast, which would assist me to con her through the shoals and rocks. It took me nearly six months to get the Praying Mantis ready for sea. I went ahead of the main outfit to Angras Juntas on a lesson-filled shake-down cruise and returned to Cape Town two months later with a detailed survey and a deep respect for the coast.

I found the name Caldwell back in the news. Mary's mother had died. Normally, I suppose, the death of the invalid old lady would have passed unnoticed, but a hawk's eye on the — news desk must have spotted her name in the death notices after the court build-up. Again, Mary was fair game for the reporters. I'd not seen her since the Oranjemund hearing. Although her home was in Rondebosch, not five miles from the docks, I was too busy with the Praying Mantis to keep in touch. There were times, however, when I recalled our afternoon on the Oyster Line. If Oranjemund had forged any bond, it was an odd one, and her mother's death gave me an opportunity of getting in touch with her again. She was pleased to hear me on the telephone and invited me round. The home was Caldwell, Caldwell, all Caldwell — chunks of rose quartz from the lunar mountains of the middle Orange River, agates and chalcedony from wind-swept beaches, and other prospecting bric-a-brac.

Mary needed a job. With her mother's death she was penniless. I felt good, somehow, when I remembered Shelborne's request to me to get her a sorter's position aboard the Mazy Zed, and I rang Rhennin. Rhennin Hesitated: Mary would be the only woman among fifty-rive men; the tradition of the sea is that a woman aboard is bad luck. I asked her bluntly about it. She shrugged wanly and said she had no commitments, no ties anywhere, and she'd join the Mazy Zed if Rhennin would have her. After a sorting test Rhennin not only wanted her, he redoubled his first offer and forgot about the bad luck legend. She had an almost uncanny touch, intuitive flair, when it came to spotting and handling gems. The Caldwell touch lived in her.

The Mazy Zed was now anchored off Angras Juntas under the shadow of the guano island of Sinclair where, among millions of birds, seals and penguins, the guano workers scraped away a zombie existence in rags and isolation. The guano islands — run under government supervision — are divided into small groups, each under a headman, and the workers are shifted from island to island by him to gather in the 'white gold'. Having seen Angras Juntas's guano men — crude, moronic, bitter as the ammoniacal stink of the rocks — I wondered about Shelborne's remark that Mercury had a bad name in the islands. If Mercury were bad after Sinclair…

Angras Juntas had been no more than a reconnaissance. My real mission was at hand: I was off the Sperrgebiet in my own ship, bound for the place where instinct and inclination guided me — Mercury Island.

'Rockets to port! Red, green, blue!'

Minnaar, the burly South African mate, was out on the port wing of the Praying Mantis's bridge. He had tried to bluff me that he couldn't sleep because of the unnatural clamminess of the night, but in fact he felt as uneasy as I did about the grim Sperrgebiet coastline abeam. The only other white man aboard was Sven, the Swedish engineer. The others were Coloured and Malay fishermen, recruited down the coast.

The rockets burst out to sea. I grabbed my Japanese night-glasses and in a moment I was at Minnaar's side.

He pointed. 'Bloody Russian trawlers!'

There was nothing except the nightly bank of sea fog rolling in, no boat or ship in distress. I strained into the blackness. This was the second strange phenomenon within hours. A magnificent sunset had flared the great landmark Saddle Hill into a red-hot slag heap, dying to a clear cold indigo in a cinnamon-and-green sea-sky.

'There!'

Through the gauze sputtered a brilliant pyrotechnic change and interchange, linked up with whorls, discs and rays.

'Christ!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'Looks like the whole goddamned Second Soviet Atlantic Group!'

'We'll investigate — steer west by south by a quarter south,' I told the man at the wheel. Fishermen, they steered by time-honoured commands. Two hundred and fifty-six degrees would have meant little to them.

The wheel went down and our wake turned molten gold. Forrad, another radial of flares soared behind the fog. I laughed shakily when I realized what it was: 'Phosphorescence!'

Minnaar was incredulous. 'I've been south in the ice, but I've never seen anything like this, not even the Aurora.'

I turned to the helmsman. 'Belay there. Course, speed, as before.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

The superb display bickered round the old whaler, transforming her hastily red-leaded plates into squares or glory; the foremast's tracery of rigging shed its workaday Cinderella black for princess green and electric blue; the long racing seas from the south-west glanced with ethereal light until I wished the wind itself would become substantial and take colour. A reef, half-awash, was a diadem and a lonely bird-voyager — it could have been an albatross — flashed incandescent radiance in losing altitude to follow the sullen cliffs.

'I don't like it,' said Minnaar gloomily. 'It means trouble.'

'Trouble?'

'Ag, man, fancy sunsets and this sort of thing at night' — he waved at the evanescent colours — 'and the way I feel, it all means trouble.'

'What do you mean, how you feel?'

He said rather apologetically. 'My cabin's sticky and warm. It's winter, it's cold, and the cabin should be chilly, especially with that fog coming up. Also, my nose tickles — inside.'

I laughed. 'You've got nothing more than a head cold coming.'

'No man.' He was uneasy. 'It's this Sperrgebiet and those colours. I'm not sick.'

'Why don't you turn in?' I asked. He was voicing fears which I preferred to leave undefined.

He went on. 'We lost the Cape Cross near Mercury on a night just like this, and that's why it gives me the willies too — a bit fresh, but hot, sort of. There was also one hell of a sunset the night before.'

'But no phosphorescence?'

'No — I would have remembered.'

I played it down. 'Everyone in Luderitz says old Captain Walker was as drunk as a fiddler's bitch the night he put the Cape Cross ashore.'

'I wouldn't know how drunk he was.' retorted Minnaar. 'But he was a fine sailor, even when he was full of pots. He'd already got busy and slipped the cable by the time I got on deck and started organizing things.'

'I'd guess by that time you were almost ashore.'

'You'll see where,' he replied grimly. 'Right at the foot of the cliff. We all but got clear.'

'I'll make the wreck our landfall, then,' I said more cheerfully than I felt. Captain Walker had been drowned and Minnaar, one of eight men to escape, was lucky to be alive. He had tramped along the wild coast towards Luderitz for help; a party of Boy Scouts had found him just in time on a dune outside the town, raving. There were only two miles to go, but he had been too exhausted to make it.

At first light, our nerves frayed and stretched from searching for landmarks, I spotted Minnaar's old ship at the entrance to Spencer Bay, lying at the base of a 600-foot cliff which rose sheer out of the sea. It was Sudhuk, the notorious Little Gibraltar of the Sperrgebiet, although the Mediterranean could not have produced the desolate loom of shoreline or heavy swell which left markers of white menace across reefs and half-submerged rocks. The fog cleared momentarily under a gust of wind. The forlorn wreck was close — closer than I had thought.

'North by east.'

I rang for half-speed ahead from slow: I'd need extra knots with the run of the sea bucking under the stern.

'There's all sorts of ruddy sets and currents hereabouts,' growled Minnaar, unshaven, still uneasy. 'For Christ's sake don't put this bastard ashore!'

It was Mercury, not Sudhuk, I wanted to see. I knew it lay less than a mile to the north. The butterflies in my stomach weren't all because of the job of entering the bay through the vicious southern channel. I had warned Minnaar that Shelborne might cause trouble.

The wind gusted. The fog fell back. The bay was clear.

Mercury!

A sharp, rocky pyramid, with a base about a quarter of a mile long, lay like a discoloured, off-white fang in the bleak grey gums of the bay. The notorious Namib, desert of diamonds and death, reached right down to the water's edge. The sunlight, following the fog, was as harsh and unremitting as the naked bulb of the condemned cell. Shadows cowered under eroded scraps like grief etched by death in the face of a corpse. The bay was an over-exposed photograph having an amateurish bleach of ill-defined light to the north-east so that my eyes could not distinguish between the surf of the shore and the sand-smoke of the dunes.

There was no doubt, however, about the puff of white smoke which burst from the island.

'By Jesus!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'He's firing on us!'

The grey-white puff blew downwind like an amorphous tumbleweed.

'East by north, a quarter north! Slow ahead!' I corrected the Praying Mantis's swing on entering the channel, the torque of the single screw competing with the unaccountable sets and rebounds of current off Sudhuk.

My binoculars were on the puff. I saw the gun all right. A second cotton-wool puff billowed, soundless, as the wind carried it away. A flag broke out yellow from a jackstaff. The hoist and the gun were too neatly timed. At a busy port they would have been a matter for congratulation; here, on this gloomy and uninhabited coast, they were sinister. They meant the whaler was being watched into the bay.

'It's a signal gun,' I said tersely.

Minnaar had seen the flag, too. 'It's a sort of snake, it looks like, against a plain yellow background…' He started to spell out: 'D-o-n-t-t-r-e-a-d-o-n-m-e.'

'Don't tread on me!'

It came into my lenses. The snake stretched from corner to corner of the flag and the motto was underneath. 'Looks like a sidewinder to me.'

'More like a rattlesnake.' said Minnaar.

'What do you make of it?'

'I don't like it any more than the sight of that flippin' island — and I've seen enough of that from the wreck to last me all my life.'

'Let go forrad,' I ordered.

The anchor went overside with a crash and we were at rest a couple of cable-lengths away from Mercury. There was not a plant, a tree, greenery or shelter, natural or artificial, among the reflecting rocks, except a black encrustation of marine growths at high-water mark. On a flat stretch of rock stood two prefabs, dingy, grey, streaked with salt, anchored by heavy stay-wires like an Antarctic hutment. Two men stood at the old brass signal cannon, — the only other movement was the flapping of the strange yellow flag.

The place repelled, chilled, rejected me. It wasn't only Captain Morrell who had commented on the desolate, necrogenic air of the island. Like a thread through the records of the guano islands the sinister comment on Mercury recurs: 'the mind recoils with horror at this ocean death-cell'; again, 'it is dead, but behold it liveth' (from an old Quaker skipper's log). It was odd, too, that there was no sign of the guano, the 'white gold' I had seen the zombies scraping at Sinclair.

'Here comes the reception committee,' remarked Minnaar.

From one of the prefabs seven men emerged at a run. They split neatly into two files at the jetty and then, to our astonishment, swung themselves under it.

'Is this a circus?' exclaimed Minnaar.

I recognized it: Shelborne's windjammer welcome, an island tradition rigidly adhered to for the arrival of strangers — the flag, the gun, the trot to the boat, the bos'n's pipe shrilling. That was the ceremony, but what of our personal meeting? Shelborne must have seen me through his glasses. The boat broke from under the jetty, six oars pulling like clockwork, making effortlessly for the Praying Mantis.

That's smart, damn' smart seamanship,' conceded Minnaar.

I told him about Shelborne and his master's ticket in sail.

'Is that him at the tiller?'

'Yes. I wouldn't know what the hell he is wearing, though.'

We didn't look so good ourselves: unshaven, red-eyed from the long night's vigil, Minnaar in an old British battledress top, myself in a roll-top sweater and windcheater.

With an ease born of long practice the boat's oars went astern together under our lee. A big roller brought both craft together. Shelborne leaped nimbly, grabbed the foremast stays lightly with one hand, and dropped easily to the deck.

'He's over seventy, remember,' I told Minnaar.

'At thirty-five I couldn't do it that easy,' he replied.

My Coloured crew stared, a little awe-struck, as the big man came quickly towards the bridge ladder, making no sound on the planking. He wore moccasins and a black suit of shining sealskin, the collar framing his face in which the lines from the base of the long straight nose were more severely etched than I remembered; above the right cheekbone was a little dune of flesh, as if the wind had banked it up there.

'So you came to see for yourself?' His tone was not hostile, not friendly, but calculating, distant, as if he were out of my reach — a strange, disquieting aura of strength.

'Minnaar,' the mate introduced himself.

Shelborne jerked his head towards Sudhuk. The Cape Cross?'

It seemed the Praying Mantis was not alone in the bay, for in addition to the Cape Cross wreck, a small guano coaster rode apparently at anchor off the solitary beach.

Shelborne followed my glance. 'She's dead, you know, dead as the Cape Cross next door. Been there for thirty years.'

The wreck had the same life-in-death impact on me as Mercury itself. I shuddered. The way Shelborne spoke, he might have been the ascetic introducing the novice to the hairshirt and the whip.

'I told you; Mercury has a bad name.'

Minnaar growled, 'Why in hell's name didn't you come and take us off the Cape Cross? I walked all the way to Luderitz and damn' near died on a dune outside the place.'

'I tried for three days. You saw the sea. You had set off for Luderitz by the time I managed to get the flatboom in close. The crew were in the rigging still, but they were all dead…'

'Flatboom?' I asked. I wanted to stay on neutral ground.

He gestured at the boat which had brought him. 'It's a specialized craft which the New Bedford whalers left behind them here.'

'New Bedford?… I didn't know…'

He smiled, and I could not help being drawn to him. 'About a hundred years ago there were 250 ships at anchor off Mercury — the first big guano strike, you know. There was a rebellion among the crews humping the stuff aboard. They sent a British man-o'-war squadron. They came in the same channel as you did, firing grape — canister double-loaded above the round-shot.

You can still see some of the wrecks, although they're high in the dunes now — the coast changes quite a bit.'

The shore was an odd dun colour, relieved in the north-eastern corner of the bay by a rough T-shaped patch of pure white, which stood out like a pock-mark. I spotted another, and then another — a curious line of fan-shaped markers running inland out of sight.

'Is that where your flag came from — "don't tread on me"?'I asked.

'Not from those wrecks. Mine's an old American Revolution flag — Carolina's — in which they wrapped a true-blue skipper for burial on Mercury. Someone thought they were wasting a good flag and salvaged it. They called it the Rattlesnake Flag. I fly it for the benefit of my rare visitors.'

Thank you for the bos'n's pipe,' I added. 'It was good enough for the rights and authority of our Judge.'

His voice became harsh, bitter. 'Rights and authority! Take a look, will you! It's sixty miles by sea to the nearest police post from Mercury! Try the land and walk it — well, ask our friend here what that's like. It's the Namib, man, don't you understand…' He pulled up short. It looked as if my survey wasn't going to be a bed of roses. He went on quietly: 'Rights and authority? — I'm the headman here, and I have wide powers to protect the birds and seals. I won't have you disturb them in any way.'

I said placatingly, 'I'm not aiming to disturb the birds or seals. I'm using a special electronic surveying instrument which will make the minimum interference with them. But I must rig a couple of what we call "slave" transmitters ashore to operate it. For other readings I'll float some drums with small automatic transmitters in the bay — there'll be none of the old-fashioned business of putting up beacons, climbing rocks for vantage points, or the rest of it.'

'Where's Rhennin?' he asked.

'At Angras Juntas.' I told him about the Mazy Zed and Mary's job aboard her, following her mother's death. Shelborne was very silent, his eyes straying across the bay as if seeking something — I had no idea what it was — amidst the gaunt desolation.

It was so long until he spoke that Minnaar and I began to feel uncomfortable. 'It was good of you to get her the job. The Mazy Zed…' He tailed off. The strange eyes fixed me.

Then he glanced at his watch. His anger over Oranjemund, his detachment, seemed to vanish when I told him about Mary. There was now almost a schoolboyish, conspiratorial air about him. 'Perhaps you two would like to come ashore at six bells this afternoon? — I'll show you a sight you'll never forget. I'll send the flatboom for you.'

'Where's the Gquma — you've still got her, I hope?' I asked.

He was pleased. 'Of course. Her permanent mooring is in a sea-cave a mile or two up the coast. It's too exposed here — I'd lose her in a blow. At six bells, then?'

He was gone — silently, agilely.

'That bastard has a lot on his mind,' said Minnaar.

'He lost…' I told him the Oranjemund story in detail.

'Makes me feel almost sorry for the old so-and-so,' he said when I had finished. 'I'll say this for him, he was out in his boat that first morning after Walker put that old crap-shop ashore in a sea which would have made you piss yourself. I watched him for six hours dodging the waves, let alone the rigging and the hull. If anyone could have pulled it off, Shelborne would have.'

At three o'clock precisely the flatboom came skilfully alongside. It looked like a ship's boat of an older day, except that it was broader in the beam and the bows were slightly flared. Shelborne, at the tiller, greeted us with a preoccupied air. We pulled across to the stained and rusty jetty. Mercury from close up looked even more inhospitable. Landing from a boat lifting twenty feet with each swell was a hair-raising business, which meant jumping to the jetty on the roll. When the boat had been secured Shelborne led us up a short concrete path to the first prefab; the other, to which it was linked, was for the guano workers. The concrete, roughened to give a grip to the boot, was cracked and packed with eggshell fragments and feathers. The prefab was fronted by a long wooden platform resting on rusted metal piles and a short metal ladder led from it to the path. The windows were opaque with sea-scum.

Shelborne looked at his watch. 'We have time yet… We have to climb to the summit of the island back there. Some coffee and rusks from the galley first…'

It wasn't cookhouse with him, it was galley — still shipboard terms.

Minnaar nodded at a ship's bell with sealskin on the clapper which hung on the stoep. The brass was ornate, with worked edges.

'Portuguese gingerbread work,' Shelborne explained.

I read out the name. 'San Jodo 1888.'

'Portuguese warship,' he went on. 'She had a strange fate, strange even for this coast: years ago there must have been a lagoon where North Head is now — it's all quicksand today. They brought the San Jodo in for a careen and a repaint, and they could — there were then twenty-six feet of water inside the bar. The crew laid her on her side and — it seems incredible — the sandbars rose and closed the entrance, locking her in. The lagoon silted up. The crew died of thirst and starvation. The wreck's still there.'

'How do you know all this?' asked Minnaar.

'I made a rough plank bridge to the wreck when she became exposed after some upheaval of the sands. The San Jodo's log had been conscientiously written up. My signal cannon comes from her as well as the bell.'

Minnaar, stolid though he was, had become infected by the gloom of the bay. 'Too many wrecks and dead men around here for my liking — and I was nearly a goner myself, damn me.'

We sat down and Shelborne pulled out what looked like a cigar-holder, carved in soft soapstone. It took me several moments to recognize what it was while he plugged it with tobacco — it was a primitive Hottentot pipe, having no bowl, only a thickened section in front, which jutted out straight. The Coloured cook brought a pot of strong coffee, a bottle of brandy, some brown, oily-looking rusks and a plate of dried peaches..

Shelborne poured the brew into crude, quart-sized mugs and laced it with a dollop of brandy.

'We're as dry here as an American warship — only headmen are allowed liquor in the islands,' he said. 'The workers would never be sober if they had drink. At the last wreck up there' — he nodded to the north — 'on Hollam's Bird Island, they looted her and were blind for a fortnight.'

He handed round the oily rusks. 'They taste better than they look. Basis of refined seal-oil. Keeps you warm. The peaches go with it. Good combination.

I reached for my mug from the rough table. The turgid liquid slopped gently, spilling over the edge.

The island was shaking.