A Twist Of Sand

I'd give them a course for the river from Curva dos Dunas and, after half a day's march, they'd never find it again. It would take a skilled navigator to recognise it anyway, and I was prepared to bet that from the landward side it resembled an anchorage even less than it did from the sea.

"You mean, you don't know a channel into a landing-spot?" Stein asked suspiciously.

I laughed. "Look at your map," I retorted. "See any landing-spots?"

"Of course not," said Stein. "That's exactly why I got you to bring me to the Skeleton Coast. You have it all in your head."

My round, I thought. "I have the mouth of the Cunene ' in my mind,' too, if you want to know, and that's why I shall decide when we get there. There is also the question of the wind, and the tide, plus inshore currents," I elaborated with equal untruth. "You can't judge these things until you are there."

"I don't like it," frowned Stein. "I thought you'd do better than this, Captain. Any clever skipper could do what you are intending to do."

"Then let's turn back and you can get another — with pleasure," I snapped.

"What's going to happen if the wind and the currents are not right when you come to pick us up again?" he went on.

I was enjoying myself.

"That'll be just too bad," I said. "You'll have to wait for the next slow boat to China."

The cruel mouth tightened. Stein seemed abstracted for a moment or two". I was not to know that my sally was to cost an innocent man his life.

Etosha tore on through the day. The fog scarcely lightened. In the middle of the morning I left the bridge to John.

"Call me when it begins to lift," I told him. "I'm going below to catch up on my beauty sleep. We should be somewhere off Cape Frig when it disperses."

"That's a long day's fog," murmured John, looking at the endless moisture.

"Damn good for this sort of job," I replied.

"About Cape Frio, then?" he repeated.

"Or sooner, if it starts clearing. But I don't think so with the wind in the north-west. Barometer's steady. Not that that means much off this coast. If it starts to blow hard, call me. It could mean we're in for a swell which will shake the guts out of us all."

"In other words,"- grinned John, if almost anything happens to the sea, the fog or the wind."

I grinned back.

"You've got it dead right," I said.

When I reached my cabin I kicked off my shoes and lay down fully dressed. I didn't sleep right away. I told myself it was the girl's red-gold hair, but my sub-conscious told me I was lying. She had shown me the picture of myself as I was. "No gain but my gain," she had sneered. Tough, like this expedition. Never a leading ideal. She hadn't believed I'd ever been anything else. I thought of the first days of my command in the Mediterranean. I turned restlessly* So easy to say, they made a killer of me. Kill, or be killed. I was prepared to believe her ideal about Onymacris. The fire of hardship had burned away almost everything else — ъ you could see it in the tight lines about her mouth, although youth was holding everything in check.

I fell asleep wondering what sort of person she really was.

The look-out's cry cut across my sleep. I suppose a sailor develops some sort of "third ear "which always listens, even when his mind is unconscious.

"Steamer on the starboard bow!"

It was wrong, all wrong, my mind told me even as it shook off the curtain of sleep and rose to the surface. A steamer on the starboard bow inside the six-mile limit of Etosha's course!

I had my shoes on and was already half-way up the companionway when I heard John repeat the look-out's call down the speaking-tube to me. I was on the bridge in three bounds. The fog was lifting, as I had told John it would in the middle of the afternoon. I found myself half-blind and blinking in the pale, almost sodium-yellow light.

John lowered his glasses for a moment in puzzlement.

"I can't see her, but the look-out did spot her patch. It's lifting. I'll be damned if I know how any ship could be inside us…"

I moved to the engine telegraphs and cannoned into the girl. I hadn't seen her.

"Sorry," she said almost contritely. "You said I shouldn't come up here, but you were asleep…"

Her eyes held the previous challenge, but there was also a smile. I parried the challenge and accepted the smile.

My last thought before falling asleep was with me. "Just keep out of the helmsman's way and everything will be O.K." I said.

The challenge softened and the smile warmed, although her lips did not move. She stood back watching.

"Slow ahead," I rang down. The eager pant of the great diesels and the angry susurration of their firing, carried through steel plate and rivet to the soles of the feet, slowed. Mac was on the job all right.

"We're running clear of it, I think — I hope," said John. A day's growth of beard, the white yachting sweater, cap and old serge trousers gave him almost a naval air again.

"Where are we?" I asked him. "What's the sounding?"

"Forty-three, twenty-five, twenty-eight — and shallowing."

"Any fixes?"