A Twist Of Sand

"It looks just like a rabbit," she mused. "See, here's his tail, opposite our turn-off at the Nangolo Flats."

The remark caught me off balance. How much of her facade was real, I wondered. She said it gently, humorously, a side of the girl-scientist which was new. I found it attractive. She held my eyes until I dropped them from her steady, level gaze. I took refuge in the job on hand.

"You'll need all the luck, including a rabbit's tail, that you can find once you get inside those mountains," I said briefly.

Stein smiled mirthlessly.

"Captain Peace is a great believer in luck, my dear. Ask him. His luck's so strong that it drove a man off his head."

She looked at me with a kind of remote disbelief. The cards were down anyway, so I pulled out my little lucky hand. As it lay in my hand she motioned to touch it and then drew back in horror.

"It really looks like a tiny little hand, shrunken…" she backed away in fear…" You didn't, did you…"

"Oh, for God's sake, stop regarding me as a monster! All right, if you like, I cut off the hand of one of my victims and by a process unknown to any white man but me, and learned in the course of my nefarious career when I was a pirate off South America…"

Stein stemmed my outburst.

"You get them in German villages, particularly in the Black Mountains. But that's not to say no one has died because of that hand. I would say that quite a few men have died because of it; not so, Captain?"

Stein always waited for the thrust in the back. The fool project he was indulging in, and probably because there would be more blood on my hands before it was out, brought my anger welling up against him. Somehow it wouldn't spark against the girl. A moment before, something of the adventure of the whole thing had taken me out of myself for a moment; now it all backfired.

"I land you there," I said harshly, stabbing at the mouth of the Cunene. "After that, you can go to bloody hell for all I care."

"It is just to avoid that unfortunate circumstance," replied Stein smoothly, "that I have come to discuss my route with you."

Anne had drawn away at my outburst.

"I land you, and I fetch you — in a month's time," I said restraining myself.

"You also supply the expedition," Stein went on.

"What do you mean?"

"It could not have failed to meet your keen submariner's eye," Stein continued sarcastically, "that even though my party came on board at night, they were without camping equipment, food, water or provisions for a trip which you yourself regard as hazardous."

I had scarcely given it a thought.

"I have a list here," and he drew it from a pocket, "of what I will require from your ship's stores. You will give instructions to that effect."

"But…"

"There are no buts, Captain." He added impatiently: "Did you want all Walvis to know what was going on — tents, equipment, food, all being loaded aboard your ship? You would never have been allowed out of port without the police coming aboard."

I said nothing, but took the long, old-fashioned pair of ivory dividers with" its pearl-inlaid top and needles of porcupine quills instead of steel — something which I had found amongst old Simon Peace's things — and stepped off a twenty-mile circle from the mouth of the river. The old dividers looked as if they had originally been in an Indiaman in John Company's service.

They were plotting the mathematics of my strategy at the moment. Anne was looking at them curiously. The map did not show the great cataract about twenty miles from the river's mouth; it was so great, according to old Simon's chart, that the river sagged like a great intestine to the south in overrunning it. I followed the course of the river with the old dividers. The second cataract, too, within fifty miles of the coast — well, they were Stein's affair. His plan had the virtue of great simplicity, but those mountains would never 1 have remained inaccessible for half a century of white, occupation to the south and north if the path to them were simply up the dry bed of a river. Where Curva dos Dunas lay was simply an unsurveyed light brown patch on Stein's map, which showed an even coastline, sand-hills and escarpment rising through steps of 1,000 and 2,000 feet to the grim fortresses of the Hartmannberge, the first sentry of the Baynes Mountains beyond. The Portuguese cartographers had at least added the words "dunas moveis" — shifting dunes — on their side of the frontier.

"What are you working out?" asked Stein keenly.

I must have been completely lost in my own thoughts, for the girl was looking at me also.

"You see where the river turns northwards right at the mouth?" I asked.

They nodded.

"Well, the mouth is actually one mass of sand-bars and often after the rainy season the delta changes its complexion considerably. Depending on the sand and the state of the mouth, I shall decide on the spot where exactly to put you ashore," I lied.