The River of Diamonds

7

'Make the control switch!'

From my vantage-point on the summit of Sudhuk, the Praying Mantis in the bay half a mile away looked farther than she actually was; however, the electronic instrument I was testing told me it was no more than that. I glanced along the line of sight and gave my orders into the two-way radio telephone. The ship was anchored in the lee of the serrated rocks Shelborne had called Hottentot's Reef. The Hydrodist, as the instrument was called, calculates the travel time of radio waves between two points and is wonderfully accurate — it has an error of only about three parts in a million. A South African invention, it was first used for land surveying and then adapted to marine work with outstanding time-and-effort saving results.

Minnaar's flat-vowelled voice came back from the master instrument aboard the old whaler: 'Standing by to calibrate A-pattern phase.'

It had not taken him long to grasp the principles of the instrument and I felt elated as I stood on top of Sudhuk knowing that soon I would have on paper a picture of Mercury and its surrounding sea-bed. The Hydrodist, on a wooden tripod the height of a man, looked like a portable public telephone, except that in front was set a metal dish the size of a soup plate in which was placed a cathode tube. Below the tube itself, on the face of the reflecting dish, were calibration scales like saddle-stitching in metal.

I fiddled with the cavity tune control on the left of the control panel. 'A-pattern test,' I said into the built-in radio telephone. 'Standard megacycle frequency — how are you receiving?'

'Fine, man, okay,' replied Mannaar from the ship. 'No stray reflections in the microwave beam.'

'What about ground reflections?'

'Negligible, negligible,' he said. 'That's a fine spot for a slave station you've got up there on Sudhuk, Skipper.'

'Plenty of wind,' I replied.

'Christ!' He laughed. 'Wish I had it down here! How these bladdy birds stink!'

I had decided to establish two 'slave stations' — the necessary shore adjunct to the master instrument aboard the Praying Mantis — one of them on top of the towering cliff, from where I was now carrying out a series of calibration tests between the Hydrodist and the ship. The other 'slave station' was to be at the northern end of the bay. It takes a day or two to calibrate the master instrument and after that surveying goes ahead. My modern electronic method made the laborious old coastal triangulation system, using large numbers of floating beacons as well as land points, as out of date as a piston-engined aircraft. My system enabled a continuous and accurate plot to be made in about one-twentieth of the time taken by old methods and, unless atmospheric conditions were particularly bad, surveying could go on day and night, if necessary in darkness, mist, rain or fog, the latter being a big consideration on the Sperrgebiet where overnight fogs do not usually lift until the middle of the morning.

In such a fog I had come ashore hours before with Shelborne, who had surprised me by coming alongside in his flatboom and offering to transport my heavy gear ashore. I had accepted, and on landing he had surprised me further by humping the heavy Hydrodist and its batteries up the rough path to the top of the cliff. The desert persisted right to the high-water mark, and towards North Head the shoreline rocks and desert merged into one vast cyst of rotten tissue. This, Shelborne told me, pointing to a curious transom of sandcliff intersected by a narrow sloping ledge about one thousand feet long from beach to summit, was the Lange Wand or Long Wall, an unstable cliff which held back the quicksands from the sea and was dreaded because of its unheralded sandslides, which a loud echo was sufficient to provoke. He himself had been terrified while climbing the narrow path, which had seemed to shift under his weight, up to the tuftless, sucking, deathly wilderness where lay the remains of the old Portuguese warship — surely the most curious death of a ship in the history of the sea. This region also was pocked with bright white patches stretching into the distance. Nearer us and away from this pitiless desolation were low hills of wind-filled rock in whose eroded defiles 'ran' rivers of sand.

Our landing-beach below Sudhuk had a backdrop of rock twisted and eroded as if eaten by some nightmare death-watch beetle. The crumbled whiteness revealed softer boulders embedded in it, rounded and smoothed, arid veining standing out grotesquely. There was a chain of pits, minor caves, grottoes, overhangs and convoluted striations. Dried seasuds and dead deflated jelly-fish lay in the cavities of this great carious pumice stone, like lather dried white by the frenetic worrying of the wind. Piles of driftwood, bleached the same general grey-white of the surroundings, were scattered in untidy profusion everywhere. In the bright sun after the fog I could scarcely bear to burn my eyes on the unreal landscape.

I checked successively the circle amplitude switch, focus and brilliance, and saw that the circle presentation was correctly positioned on the graticule assembly. The pattern selector, which is for individual pattern frequencies, brought a satisfactory response from the ship.

Shelborne, hatless, had discarded his sealskins for a khaki shirt and trousers. He came close. I had expected him to smell of birds and seals, but it wasn't that: the sweat on him had a dry, bland odour, a sort of mustiness like dry-rot. His eyes were searching, probing for something more than understanding how the Hydrodist worked.

'All your equipment in working order?' he asked.

'Yes,' I replied. 'All this calibration and checking seems a waste of time, but it really pays off in the long run.'

'Yes,' he said slowly, 'it's the same with any worthwhile project: years of preparation, maybe. Justification, agony, self-recrimination — then the ecstasy.'

'No ecstasy here,' I laughed. 'This is a job. Soon I'll have your island and your bay buttoned up.'

He smiled with that curious, searching scrutiny of his. Had it merely been a job to me, I would have been plodding my way section by section up the coast as Rhennin had wanted. Instead, I was stretching my nerves on a lot of imponderables and backing an ill-defined hunch: Mercury, Strandloper's Water, Caldwell, Shelborne, the engraved pistol, diamonds. And the sea, Mercury's sea, that was so strangely mated with the Namib. And a U-boat ace's medal — he must have been an ace to win the Knight's Cross; who was this Captain Rhennin? Not Felix Rhennin, but Dieter Rhennin. Who was he?

'Buttoned up!' Shelborne repeated. 'Buttoned up! A curious modernism and too absolute for my liking; the desert and the sea are not so easily buttoned up.'

'I'll skip the philosophizing,' I said. 'I'm working to a tight schedule. That includes some Scuba diving for visual observations of the sea-bed…'

'Scuba diving?'

'Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Skin diving.'

'You surely can't dive deep enough…?'

'Up to thirty fathoms maximum. The charts show nowhere deeper than twenty fathoms in the bay, but I'll rely on my own readings.'

'So you've given up your idea of exploring the Glory Hole?'

A slightly unusual inflexion made me turn: his eyes were resting — with a studied affection it seemed to me — on Mercury, now white-grey under a new season's varnishing of guano. It had been a relief to get away from the lee of the island, not only because of the stink Minnaar belly-ached about but the birds' farmyard din which brought us cursing from our bunks at dawn. Internecine battles started with the day, and mingled with the grunts and roars of seals and the braying of penguins.'

'Of course not,' I replied. 'I've just been trying to work out some details. Like to help, apart from lending us the flatboom, I mean?'

'I should very much like to.' Still the odd note among the resonant vowels. 'Why don't you make a… what-do-you-call-it?… Scuba dive inside the cavern?'

My own view was that Scuba diving was as risky as using a boat in the wild entrance. 'I'll discuss it with Minnaar.'

He cocked his head. Not to acknowledge my remark, but at a sound below us. A thousand tons of sand slipped sullenly, almost noiselessly, 600 feet down the cliff into the sea.

'Yes, anything can happen in this sea.' Again there was an overtone I didn't care for. Was he deliberately trying to lure me into a dangerous dive? I'd make up my own mind about the Glory Hole, I told myself angrily; I wasn't going to be jockeyed by Shelborne, but if there were diamond-bearing gravel on the sea-bed, the Glory Hole was where it would accumulate.

I changed the subject abruptly: 'You said you laid down beacons along the shore years ago. I don't see one.'

There they are!' His eyesight was superb. Look! To the right above the landing-place. There are another two directly opposite the Praying Mantis on the high-water mark. And another on the seaward edge of North Head — see?'

I followed with my binoculars. 'Do you know that every one is between thirty and forty yards from where you originally sited them?'

'According to your instrument. Ground reflection errors, maybe.' He threw my jargon at me.

'No. Minnaar and I took ten or twelve readings on successive carrier frequencies. I checked the carrier shift and Minnaar followed all the fine A-pattern readings as we went along. I concede you an error of not more than two or three inches.'

He shrugged. 'Uplift of the land relative to the sea, eh? That would also account for the way the sandbars formed and trapped the old warship. It must have been pretty quick though.'

'Volcanic upheaval,'I suggested.

'No. There's not a sign of lava…'

If Shelborne knew about what we call continental lift — land tilting and sea receding — then he knew a great deal else. He wasn't a simple old prospector, I reminded myself: he'd been with Caldwell on the Oyster Line…

I played it down. 'There's a hell of a layer of sand, maybe forty or fifty feet, and there may be anything underneath it. It would require thorough investigation.'

He smiled. 'You didn't come to Mercury to talk like Stratum.'

'There's such a thing as scientific proof…'

He was staring fixedly in the direction of the old beacons. He said abstractedly, 'We'll relocate the beacons, then, on the basis of space-age equipment.'

He paused; another sandslide tobogganed soundlessly into the sea.

I said nervously. 'Those slides… What happens when…?'

I did not finish the sentence. Shelborne's gaze was riveted on the shoreline dunes where they lapped the foot of the cliff.

I saw nothing. 'What's going on?'

'Quick!' he rapped. 'Quick! Get this thing packed! Come on!' Without waiting for me, he spun the wingnut holding the instrument to the tripod and thrust it into my hands. 'Get it into the case!'

'There's nothing…'

Shelborne swept up the batteries and heavy instrument case and started off not for our landing-beach, but towards the dunes inland. I trailed awkwardly with the tripod and by the time he had reached the bottom of the cliff, I was fifty yards behind. The rough descent he had made loaded with equipment seemed to make no impression on him; his breathing was scarcely more than normal when I reached him.

'Across there, towards that rise.'

I hadn't enough breath to question him. The whole place looked exactly the same as on our way up. Our new course seemed purposeless, into the desert away from the flatboom, away from Sudhuk. Shelborne plunged into sand up to the ankles of his moccasins, and fell into a peculiar shuffling gait without lifting his feet; but he travelled fast. I'd only seen it once before; the old half-Bushman guide who had taken me up Mount Bruk-karos to the American solar ray station had used it. It is the hallmark of the desert wanderer, the 'sand-trapper' or sandshuffler as they call him in the Namib. After less than a mile into the high seas of sand, Shelborne stopped and waited for me.

'Look!'

The crest of the next dune was alive with tiny creatures, jumping, rolling like balls in eddies of wind, leaping, cavorting.

'Beetles!' I panted. 'Beetles! God's truth, I haven't been dragged all this way to see beetles!'

Shelborne did not answer, but shuffled to where the beetles were thickest, cartwheeling about in the air almost as if they could fly properly. I stumbled in his wake, trying to get my breath. He knelt, took a beetle between his fingers, and held it up to me. It was transparent: I could see right into it, like one of those plastic anatomical models.

He was excited. I had not seen him like this before.

'Look at those sandshoes! If I had them, I'd be able to go up and down dunes like a bat out of hell!'

Tiny snow-shoe-like bristles and brushes spun round and round.

He laughed in a relaxed way. 'You know, Tregard, I once had ideas of modelling a pair of my own shoes on these. Of course, it didn't work…' Then his mood changed and he said, 'It'll be one hell of a storm.'

I still had hardly enough breath to comment on this non sequitui. I gasped. 'Storm? What the devil have beetles to do with a storm?'

The migrating legions rolled, jumped and spun, swarming by the ten thousand.

Shelbome was not disconcerted. 'It's a sure sign. A mass migration heralds a storm. But this is a surer pointer still.' He held up his captive. This section of his body becomes diaphanous in moist air — it's highly hygroscopic, it absorbs water from the air. No man-made instrument if half as sensitive.'

I found some breath. 'Did you pick that up from Caldwell too?'

I can see him yet, kneeling with the beetle in his fingers while the rest of the host rolled by. He looked up sharply at Caldwell's name, but his animation remained. 'I learned everything about the desert from Caldwell.' He freed his beetle, watching it thoughtfully as it scrambled away at high speed. 'You really think you'll strike it lucky, you and Rhennin and the Mazy Zed?.'

'Yes. I'm backing my hunch. That's why I'm here.'

'You mean, at Mercury?'

'Generally, Mercury — in particular, perhaps, Strandloper's Water.'

'Tregard,' he said quietly. 'I've spent a whole lifetime looking for something. You're trying to take a short cut. It doesn't work, you know. The Namib sees to that.'

'You say you have spent your whole life looking for a diamond field under the sea?'

His voice dropped, became mysterious. It was almost as if he was talking to himself when he replied. 'No. What I told the court about dropping a few grabs and, dredges was quite true. That was about the extent of my sea-bed prospecting. Our search — Caldwell's and mine — was for… something really…'

He fumbled, choosing his words, but he couldn't prevent that mysterious private stratum of his thoughts breaking through, like a gold reef in a quartz hillside.

'I heard you talk a lot of bull about the Hottentots' Paradise.'

He smiled faintly. 'I agree, it was bull. But you mustn't forget how different our orientation was in those early days. The next strike might have been the Oyster Line, Oranjemund, Kleinzee…'

'You are listing only Caldwell's failures.'

'We were like the early explorers who sailed beyond the horizon, not knowing whether or not they would fall over the edge of the world.'

'The Atacama, the Takla Makan, what about them? You've got two images in your mental rangefinder; they're irreconcilable, you can't match them up together.'

The concept remains basic, it is only the physical aspects which differ.'

'Why didn't you sell that night aboard the Gquma? You're on to something big, aren't you?'

He came close so that I was aware of that dry-rot odour which I recognized now as coming from the dunes.

'I have told you, you can't take a short cut to it.'

'What is it?'

'Caldwell

'I'd rather talk about Shelborne.'

'What if the Oyster Line itself were only an adjunct, a supplement as it were to…'

'What do you mean?'

'I tried to tell the Judge, it isn't only the diamonds, although they are woven into the fabric of the thing. That is why…'

That is why you killed Caldwell.'

For a moment the green flame flickered in his long eyes, but almost at once there was a pity, a compassion. I knew then that I had missed my trick as he gathered his cards, as it were, from the table. The confession was over.

'You must beat out to sea before the storm strikes. You must follow my directions.'

I was not interested in a hurricane at the moment. I tried to drag the conversation back. 'Shelborne, it is not too late for that deal: your knowledge, your secret, if you like…'

He laughed softly. There was a ruthless note too, as I was later to remember. 'Confessions are always dangerous, are they not?'

'In melodramas they may lead to murder.'

'The storm,' he said urgently. 'You must get to your ship.'

'Blast the storm and blast the beetles!'

'You wouldn't last a day in the Namib, Tregard. The storms here hit like a piston: one moment it's peaceful like now and the next it's a howling mass of solid sand so you can't see your hand in front of your face and the sea is breaking over Sudhuk.'

'You can't tell all that from one beetle.'

'We're getting out of here… fast. Dump that tripod if it worries you. Or give it to me.' He snatched it up as if the extra weight were nothing and struck off towards the landing-beach. Soon he had gained a quarter of a mile. By the time I reached the boat, breathless, she was riding at the oars and Shelborne's eyes were on the south-west. The wrecks stood like ghouls on the eroded shore. We swung alongside the Praying Mantis.

'Where's your barometer… in the wheelhouse?'

I nodded and he grabbed his sealskin coat and jumped aboard. Only later was I to ask myself why he wanted to see the barometer when he was so sure that his beetles were more sensitive than any man-made instruments, and why he took his coat, which had lain in the boat while we had been ashore.

Minnaar called out in surprise. 'What's up? Why did you cut off the test? What's eating that old bastard?'

'We made a snap expedition into the desert. Saw some fascinating beetles. Going to be a God-almighty storm, the beetles say.'

'Well, bugger me!' exclaimed the big South African. He looked at the clear sky. 'Plenty of storm around!'

Here on the deck of the ship the whole thing seemed more ridiculous still. Shelborne came racing down the ladder from the bridge.

'Use your full revolutions,' he snapped. 'Steer due north until North Head bears 50 degrees. Got that? — North Head must bear 50 degrees…'

My voice was ironical. 'What does the barometer say?'

'High and steady now, but in a moment it will drop like a gannet. The beetles…'

'For crying in a bucket!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'Are you trying to get rid of us?'

He swung his head in his odd way from Minnaar to me. 'Good luck!' He said to Minnaar, who was grinning. 'I showed Captain Tregard the significance of the hygroscopic membranes on the beetles. They mean a storm, a big storm.'

Caldwell's goodbye rose spontaneously to my lips as Shelborne started to leave: '"Good luck to you, Shelley, perhaps my luck will change now."'

Had I struck him the reaction could not have been more sudden. His face blanched. He reached out in a reflex action and grabbed my shirt front. Then he dropped his hand slowly and I stood staring into the green depths of those strange eyes.

'I'm sorry you said that,' he said softly, 'I'm really very sorry. Like ex-champs, you never come back in the Namib.'

'Is that a threat, Shelborne?'

He clasped the heavy sealskin jacket close. 'Mary Caldwell…' he began, then checked himself. He stood for a moment absorbed in his thoughts. Then he said formally, Thank you for being kind to Mary Caldwell. It'll be pretty rough. I'm sorry.'

He spun on his heel and jumped into the waiting boat, which shot away towards Mercury.

Minnaar said, That's what being alone on a dump

like Mercury does. Nuts. Staring, raving nuts! Beetles and storms. Ag, hell!'

I shrugged it off. 'We'll work on the slave stations again this afternoon. Maybe I'll get the Sudhuk one rigged.'

My eyes went to the towering cliff.

There was no land.

A grey cloud raced towards the Praying Mantis, hanging like a wave breaking and, although the crest curled, it did not smoke.

Sand!

Namib sand!

It obliterated Sudhuk, the wrecks, the line of breaking surf, the weird landing-beach and the desert beyond. Shelborne was right.

'Minnaar!' I yelled. 'Minnaar! Get forrad with some men and cut the cables while I get her under way…!'

I jumped for the bridge. With the swift oblivion of an anaesthetic mask, the sand gagged my shouted orders. I could not see the bridge, let alone the bows. A moment before I had been breathing clean salt air; now I was spitting a semi-solid mixture which choked and blinded me as I tore up the rungs to the wheel. It whirled and blanketed the deck, the bridge, the men rushing to the anchors. The sand probed and needled its way into every crack, every orifice, every crevice; it was already inside my shirt, clinging where I had sweated. A scorpion scuttled under my feet, blown from the land. North Head, my key bearing, was still visible. Shelborne's instructions thrummed in my brain: I must steer for that, steer the way he had said. The deck leaned, and above me the ship's siren sobbed impotently against the howl of the wind. I found the terrified Coloured helmsman hanging on to its cord when I fought my way in, cut, stung, half-blinded. The bridge door hung ajar. I tried to ram it closed, but the cant of the vessel and the savage wind smashed it out of my hands, ripping off a fingernail.

I seized the speaking-tube to the engine-room. 'Sven! In the name of all that's holy, 300 revs! Everything you've got!'

'Diesels are cold, Skipper,' came his anxious reply. 'I didn't think we'd need them again so soon after the trip…'

Minnaar burst in. 'Cut? Shall I cut the cables?'

'No! Belay there! The diesels are cold. Sven wants ten minutes…'

'She'll drag long before that!' He snatched the voice-pipe from me. 'Sven, give them the gun, for Christ's sake! If you saw what's up aloft…'

The wind struck another hammer-blow. The whaler wheeled away stern-on, and then came up with a sickening thump forrad.

'One anchor cable gone!' Minnaar shouted above the roar of the wind. 'The other…'

He never finished. The whaler sprang free as the second cable parted. She had been secured facing the south-west and now she plunged backwards into the maelstrom. The water poured ankle deep on to the bridge. The all-pervading sand changed the thrashed-white spume a dirty grey. I pulled myself from the gratings where I had been thrown. The voice pipe whistled for attention. I grabbed it. Minnaar lay half-stunned in a corner.

'You boys play roller-coasters?' asked Sven in his broken English. 'That was one hell of a dive arse-ways. Revs in two minutes.'

'Minnaar!' I propped him up. 'Pull yourself together, man! She'll be under power in a minute! Take that wheel!'

The spokes spun madly as the whaler yawed again, completely out of control.

Minnaar dragged himself up. 'Where's her bitching head?' he mouthed, wiping a runnel of blood from his mouth. The bitch! The flippin' bitch! What did that bastard Shelborne say…?'

'Due north. Get her due north, for God's sake!'

I rang down to Sven. 'Half astern! Gently, man, gently, or she'll never come round!'

'Due north, aye aye sir!' Minnaar shook the cobwebs out of his brain. Bows to wind, the whaler's motion eased momentarily. The sand, now wet with flying spray, stung more but it was easier to breathe. I could not see any farther than the bridge dodgers.

'Port twenty! Speed for 250 revolutions!'

Her head fell off and she lay beam-on to the sea until the gratings under my feet were awash. She was capsizing, being swamped. But she hadn't ridden the Roaring Forties for nothing, my old whaler. Though she was dying, she was dying very hard. But I knew she would never come up.

I went through the motion of giving orders. 'Hard aport! Full ahead!'

It may have been the torque action of the single screw or a freak shift of the wind which did bring her head up. She rolled upright Wearily, hundreds of tons of water pouring off her upperworks, tearing away the gunnels like rotten paper and then — like an off-course missile — she jinked downwind.

'Due north! Due north!'

Minnaar understood. The compass needle steadied. Thank God! I breathed. Shelborne's directions would save us yet. There was a loom of rock way ahead. North Head!

The fact penetrated even Minnaar's fogged senses. 'We can't have got so far so soon…' He peered into the binnacle. 'Shoot that bearing now, Skipper, if there is any bladdy thing left to shoot it with.'

'Steer three-one-zero. Steady as she goes.'

Minnaar peered uncertainly at the compass needle. 'This flaming thing looks sick, it's coming round so slowly…'

It was the last time Jan Minnaar looked at a compass rose. The ship leapt high into the air. The steel keel and plating screamed as she planed, in full career, across the reef. The old whaler stopped, pivoted amidships across a spine of rock, and her guts spilled into the white water. Then she broke off slightly after the foremast, leaving the bridge as a square, sawn-off section. The mast shuddered for a moment before pitching overboard with the forepeak and tophamper. I think most of the crew were drowned at that moment. The bridge tilted stern-ways under my feet. The rudder disintegrated as it smashed on to the reef. The wheel mule-kicked: Minnaar screamed. A spoke of the wheel had caught his lower jaw, — it gibbered agape, a bloodied mass of dismembered sinews and broken teeth. Another lurch sent him through the doorway and over the side. The shattered stern gave another jerk. I had to jump overboard on to the reef before the stern took me to the bottom with it. The rock was black under me. The ship canted, and I threw myself headlong. The rock tore at me, and the sea was cold, cold. The Benguela current, I told myself between consciousness and unconsciousness, it's been cold for a million years since it closed the coast and brought its tribute of ice-white diamonds. A million years, and it's still cold.

I saw some big rocks on my right and beyond a kind of flat plateau. Between ridges and gullies the water raced and creamed. While I kept to the ridges I might be safe. I inched forward on my hands and knees, ripping my trousers on the barnacles. I found one rock, a peardrop-shaped thing about the size of a tennis-court. Two others, each the size of a cottage, acted as bastions on my left against what I feared — the wrench and grip of the ravaging sea. The smaller of these two was at the base of the plateau. I could see a sort of inlet in this. Slipping, half-in and half-out the water, I dragged myself into it. For the first time — in hours it seemed — I was able to breathe. The hole was fashioned like a corkscrew stair, not dry, but at least sheltered. I crawled cautiously forward. It was dark, like twilight. I manoeuvred myself to the top of the rocky stair, afraid that the demented wind might pluck me away when my head emerged. It led to a platform half an acre in extent, high and safe. A blinder reef! That's what they call them on the Sperrgebiet — mostly half awash but with some shelter, they are favourites of birds and seals. This was the kind of spot on which the two educated drunks sweated it out on Hollam's Bird Island.

I eased forward. I lost my footing and slipped, heavily.

I fell on a body.

There was not one body, there were scores of them!

My cushion gave a loud grunt. Seals! Blinder reef seals! I'd fallen into a seal nursery. The big wet glossy creatures grunted, slithered and bellowed. I expected to be savaged. I made for a corner, where a bull snarled and bared his fangs. I screamed hysterical obscenities at them above the wind, but apart from grunting they remained quiet. An occasional dollop of sea found its way into the nursery. There must have been several hundred seals, but in the half-light I could not be sure. I lay where I was.

The darkness of the sky became the darkness of senselessness.

Wood crunched into bone, sickeningly. I awoke, and I smelt blood. All I could see was the stars. Then a wooden club rose in silhouette. It was all bloody, held by a naked, massive fist. It was not the sight of the club which drew my dry scream of terror so much as the grotesque grouping of piebald blotches on the skin of the upraised arm. The scream died in my throat and all I managed to get out was a strangled whisper.

'God, Koeltas, a white man!'

The club sank out of sight and with it the piebald arm and torso. The silence in the darkness was as unnerving as my rise to consciousness to find that death-dealing club poised.

Then a thin voice, harsh and authoritative, rasped, 'Johaar, hold that torchie nice and low, will you!'

The light blinded me as I raised myself on an elbow.

A third voice said, 'Cut his bladdy throat, man — it's one of Shelborne's men!'

I said, 'Do you know Shelborne? Shelborne of Mercury Island?'

There was another scarifying silence. The torch swept across me, picking out my sodden, torn clothes.

'I'm saying to you, cut his throat!' repeated one voice.

The thin, metallic voice said, 'Hold your big jaw, Kim, you stupid bloody poacher!'

I guessed at the type behind the thin voice. I had heard that note too often in my childhood in the Richtersveld to be mistaken. It was one of the savage little nomads who escaped extermination during the brutal German-Hottentot war at the turn of the century. A mixture of Hottentot, Bushman and Strandloper — that Stone Age survivor on the Sperrgebiet who stinks worse than a hyena — these little men are either outlaws or fishermen on the coast; indeed, I had two or three in my crew of the Praying Mantis. No effective control can be exercised over the isolated communities on the coast who live wandering lives between the shore and the desert. They are superb seamen who live a twilight existence poaching, stealing seals, smuggling illicit diamonds from native workers at Oranjemund to undercover spots in Angola and West Africa, and running law-breakers from civilized ports to remote hideouts on the coast. They are small-boned, short, wiry men with heads of tight curls like Bushmen; they are intelligent and authoritative and generally crew their ships with half-breed Malay and Cape Coloured fishermen. They are a dying race — tuberculosis and alcohol have an appalling annual toll.

I dropped into the Hottentot-Bushman patois of the wild mountains, a series of broken clicks like a hungry man swallowing oysters and cracking the shells in his teeth. 'If you're poachers, then come and poach something worthwhile with me, not these seals which bring you a couple of shillings a pelt!'

There was a rumble from the piebald man I associated with the name Johaar. 'Ag, God, he asks us nice and sweet, come and poach with me when he lies like a wet poop on the rocks!'

The thin voice said, 'You speak like us — how is this in a white man?'

My life depended on my reply. 'Diamonds!'

The torch swivelled and they laughed softly, sinisterly, yet impressed by my use of their patois. There were three of them.' Koeltas, a thin, spare, yellow man with a rudimentary nose and oblique eyes, to my dazed senses he looked like one of Genghis Khan's ancient Tartar riders. A yellow oilskin hung below his knees. This was a genuine Hottentot sailor-nomad, Johaar, of the naked torso, was a giant half-caste. Hand-sized splotches of piebald skin stood out like the markings of some dread disease in the faint light. The third, Kim — which I took for a shortened form of Gakim, which meant Malay blood in his mixed ancestry — was peering at me sardonically, aquiline nose thrust forward. It was he who wanted to cut my throat. Savage, dangerous, unpredictable outcasts with a wayward sense of humour which could win or lose a life in a flash. If I could make them laugh I might be safe.

'Did you ever hear a seal talk Hottentot?'

Koeltas did laugh. 'Even Kim never thought of having a love-affair with a seal.'

The three of them joined in the silent mirth.

'Who are you?'

'John Tregard. My ship was wrecked.'

A look of cunning and avidity spread across the yellow face. 'Where is she, this ship of yours? Was she carrying diamonds?'

'Any brannewyn — brandy?' Johaar followed up quickly.

Kim leaned down until his face was six inches from mine. He had an odd Semitic look about his rather handsome half-caste features. 'You lie about diamonds.'

'My ship wasn't carrying diamonds…' I began.

'You lie!' Koeltas asserted flatly. 'You lie about the ship too.'

'Cut his bloody throat!' said Kim.

My life hung in the balance. A fight would have been hopeless. I remembered the diamonds in the German Knight's Cross. Had it survived my jump and desperate crawl through the rocks? I fumbled in my pocket. Perhaps Johaar thought I was going for a gun, because he held the club poised. I breathed thankfully as my fingers closed on the medal.

I showed it to them. 'See this — diamonds! There are lots more where I am looking.'

Koeltas demanded, 'Where is the ship?'

I hung the cross by its gold chain round my neck. I tried to get to my feet, but I was too weak. 'I'll show you.'

Johaar said, 'Let's go then. I'll carry this bastard since he can't walk. A ship on the rocks is better than killing seals.'

The Tartar-like Koeltas held a knife in his left hand. These were the types Shelborne had spoken of, men who came in blacked-out ships under darkness and plundered his carefully-tended nurseries for the sake of a few score pelts and were gone again before dawn. They were as predatory and hungry-looking as the jackals along the shore.

Koeltas's laugh had no humour in it. 'Tonight you are lucky — twice. We don't use the dynamite (he pronounced it dinnameet) because we don't want the noise, unnestan'? Other nights we float in an old oil drum filled with dinnameet and a time-fuse. It kills the seals — whoof! Why aren't you Shelborne's man?'

I told him simply and briefly something of my survey, the Mazy Zed, the sea-bed diamonds, and finally of Shelborne's directions when the storm blew up. Koeltas's face aped a comic rubber mask when he heard Shelborne's instructions to me. He spoke quickly to the other two in a curious mixture of English, Afrikaans and patois. The three of them rocked with silent laughter.

The little yellow man said, 'Shelborne wants to kill your ship, so he steers you on to this blinder. Every one of us poachers knows this rock lies across the northern entrance. But, by Jesus, it is we who get your ship instead!'

'You mean Shelborne deliberately…?'

My anger flared. I recalled how carefully Shelborne had repeated his directions to me. Why, if he had been so certain about the storm, had he troubled to go to the barometer in the wheelhouse? Was it the barometer he went to see? Minnaar's remark about the compass being slow hit me like a left hook. Had Shelborne deliberately fiddled with the compass to send us to our deaths? Had he concealed something in his sealskin jacket which he had been at such pains to take from the flatboom?

I said thickly, 'Listen, Koeltas, I need a ship. I want your ship. You can have what is left in my whaler. That and Ј500 to sail me where I want to go.'

The cunning eyes were two slits. 'Spencer Bay? Mercury?'

'Yes.'

'I have a good ship,' he replied with a touch of pride. 'Name Malgas — the Mad Goose. You know, the birds that dive for fish in the islands. Schooner. No engines. Not good for seal poaching. I sail her anywhere.'

Koeltas would know every tide, every rip, every rock and blinder along the Sperrgebiet. I meant to get back to Mercury. He was my man.

He went on. 'If Shelborne sees me, he kills me. He knows I steal his seals.'

'I'm chartering you,' I said. 'He can't do a damn about that. I can charter whoever I like. I have the right to prospect this coast.'

I told him about the court ruling giving us the prospecting rights. He seemed puzzled, but I let it go.

'Okay,' he said, breathing a formidable oath against Shelborne. He went on, 'For fifteen years now I sail the Sperrgebiet. Sometime I would like to see Mercury in daylight.'

He signalled Johaar, who heaved me up on his piebald shoulders. We set off for the wreck.

I nodded at the peardrop-shaped rock. 'I crawled up that way. The stern must lie close over there — if it hasn't slipped into deep water.'

The water isn't deep,' Koeltas replied confidently.

Less than thirty feet from the main bulk of the blinder we found what was left of the Praying Mantis. There was no sign of life. Rigging lay in a wild tangle: stays, running gear and cables thumped dismally against the torn plating.

'Fine ship.' Koeltas paused for a moment before jumping nimbly from rock to rock to the hulk. It was as good an epitaph as any, but it did not mitigate my cold rage against Shelborne for his deliberate murder of my team. Minnaar had been tough, likeable and dependable, the crew the pick of the fishing fleet — fine sailors, loyal and attached to me. Kim followed Koeltas, Johaar and I bringing up the rear. On the bridge Koeltas used his torch cautiously. The place was a shambles. Gratings and deck were ripped up; the wheel was intact, but the binnacle was split wide open, probably from the savage jar the rudder had given when she struck.

The Hottentot's eyes almost closed with amusement when he shone the torch into the shattered compass housing. 'Shelborne — the sonofabitch!'

In a fist-sized chunk of rock were two diamonds.

I felt weak, shattered, at this evidence of some new evil, coming hard on the heels of the loss of my crew. With an oath, more to sustain my morale than anything, I bent to look. Koeltas's fingers, hard as a vulture's talon, bit into my shoulder. He stood transfixed. The others froze, listening.

Across the water, from the direction of Mercury, came a weird, reverberating sound. It wasn't music, it wasn't gunfire, it wasn't depth-charges. It sounded hollow, chesty. It rumbled, grew, ebbed. Wonderment, but chiefly fear, was in their faces.

Koeltas's click-clack vowels rattled like a machine-gun. 'Quick, quick! We get the hell out of the bay — now, now, now!'

I hung back. I had to get to the bottom of the binnacle mystery. 'What the hell…?'

His fingers clamped hard. 'Come! The Malgas! Quick!'

That noise…'

He rounded on me. The skin was drawn tight over the high cheekbones. It was ash rather than yellow.

'The Bells of St Mary's,' he whispered.