A Twist of Sand

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

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

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

"Mud?" I echoed.  "Mud?"

"That's what I thought."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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