A Twist Of Sand

"I watched you up on the bridge," she said. "I would have said — for a moment — that you were almost happy."

I'd learned enough about her in a short while not to fall for that one.

"Thanks," I replied dryly. "A sharp problem in navigation is always prescribed for the patient in the Royal Navy."

The rapier-point flickered.

"Before or after cashiering?"

This woman with the red gold hair certainly knew how to cut across wounds with a scalpel.

She followed up the punch, but this time I was ready for it. Ready, like an old windjammer, under snug canvas for the squall.

"And you left her and followed the course of duty? And made yourself into a human chuck-out, a sort of maritime beachcomber."

"You've got your metaphors mixed," I stabbed back. "What interest is it to you how tough men spend their oil time? If you really want to know, I went to her flat to sleep with her before going on a suicide cruise — for the last time but I wasn't in the mood. In fact, I never got there."

Stein broke it up. He bustled in carrying a cardboard cylinder. He looked suspiciously at us both, but said nothing. He took a map from the cylinder and spread it out.

Here is my plan," he said briefly.

It was a small map, much smaller than my Admiralty charts, and was headed "Ondangua, World Aeronautical Shark"

Maps have always fascinated me. "I've never seen this map before," I said. It covered an area roughly from the Haonib River (which is really the southern boundary of the Skeleton Coast) to Porto Alexandre in Angola. It went as far eastwards as the great Etosha Pan, that inland lake where the elephant are counted in thousands and the antelopes thunder by your jeep like the charge' of the Light Brigade. It showed the Cunene River, international boundary between South West Africa and Portuguese Angola, for hundreds of miles into the hinterland. Stein smirked.

"I'm glad there are some maps of the Skeleton Coast which you haven't seen, Captain Peace. As a matter of interest, you can get this one for five shillings from the Trigonometrical Survey Office in Pretoria."

He put a couple of ashtrays on the corners to hold it down.

He jabbed his finger at a light brown patch on the map below the Cunene.

"That is where I am going."

The map showed a great welter of mountains on the southern side of the great Cunene River marked "Baynes fountains." Some figures in a neat oblong read "7200 feet." Before one reaches the Baynes Mountains there is another huge range of unfriendly mountains marked Hartmannberge.

I could not but admire Stein's courage. No white man except Baynes has ever been inside those broken vastnesses. For hundreds of miles inland from the coast and along the shoreline itself the map says simply "unsurveyed." Only the highest peaks are marked. In between might be almost anything.

I shook my head. I was aware of Anne's eyes on my face. She seemed so self-reliant, so remote. Perhaps her early hardships had given her that air of detachment, almost Oriental acceptance of things as they occurred.

"What is your route?" I asked Stein flatly.

"Where are you going to put us ashore?" he countered.

I looked at the stark map, just about as bare as a Skeleton Coast dune. I had already made up my mind. Curva dos Dunas was my secret and was going to remain so.

I pointed to the mouth of the great river. There wasn't a single shoal or sand-bar marked. God help anyone who took this official map for his guide!

"About there. Where it says Foz do Cunene."

In fact, Curva dos Dunas lay about twenty miles to the south. Stein was pleased.

"That is excellent," he said. "It ties up nicely with my route. You see, I intend using the river bed as my road into the interior. It's dry at this time of the year. Here, look."

His enthusiasm was almost catching. Anne came round and looked over my shoulder. The fresh perfume of Tweed mingled with the musty smell of the thick map paper. Nothing ever gets wholly dry in one of these fogs.

"I'm going to march up here, past Posto Velho — that's the Portuguese guard post — and the river provides me with u gap right through the Hartmannberge. It cuts past the Ongeamaberge, which are right on the river itself. You see these huge wadis coming down from the mountains from the south to the river itself? Well, when I get about seventy miles from the mouth of the river, I'm following one of them by turning south too — at the Nangolo Flats, they call it. See this thin blue line? — that's the Kapupa River, probably only a dry bed anyway. That's my dagger into the heart of the Baynes Mountains. Here's a seven thousand foot peak, the Otjihipo. That's my immediate objective."

The northern side of the river, the Portuguese side, looked even less hospitable than the southern, or South African side.

The girl seemed to catch my thoughts.

She ran a painted nail round a gigantic cluster of tumbled peaks and mountains on the Angola side, completely unmapped and unsurveyed, but with a single title for an area the size of Scotland, "Serra de Chela."