A Twist Of Sand

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

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

He stopped short. I felt it too.

The stern was giving a queer shaking motion.

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are we? " he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

The native shook his head hopelessly.

"Port beam, do you think, John?"

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

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

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

"Squid," said the helmsman.

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

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

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

The Kroo boy at the wheel gave a cry.

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

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

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

I rang the telegraph to " stop."

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

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

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

"Mud?" I echoed. "Mud?"

"That's what I thought."

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

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

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