A Twist of Sand

A shout from one of the crew, who had been busy watching the antics of the Pikkewyn, cut across my anger. A couple of cables' lengths away, as if brought up with the wind of the schooner, was one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever seen at sea. The sea boiled as if from a thousand torpedo-tracks, all running parallel. It foamed, it roared, it churned. Ahead, like a convoy escort, and in perfect formation of threes, a dozen or more huge rays rose, splashing back into the sea with breath-taking slaps. A school of porpoises, helplessly bewildered, were being shouldered along the surface, and my glance of amazement caught a fifteen foot shark struggling to force his way down into the seething mass carrying him along.

It was the barracouta, or snoek, as we call them. The cartoonists' butt from the hard days of food rationing merits more than the contempt poured on the snoek then. He is the finest fighter in the seas, more brutal and relentless than a shark. In these waters the snoeking season generally ends in early winter, but snoek is one of the most important catches in South Atlantic waters.

The sight was like one of those gigantic migrations of springbok in the Namaqualand desert when scores of thousands of buck, moving in gigantic phalanxes a dozen miles across, pour across the countryside, oblivious of fences, oblivious of homesteads, of guns, fire and man. They pour on and on, in countless numbers, and once they threw themselves by the thousand into the sea. Why they do it, man still has to learn.

And the barracouta were the same. As far as I could see, the water boiled with them.

"Get your lines overboard, quick." I roared at the crew. Here was the chance to fill our holds in an hour. Lines flew over the side, scarcely baited. Then the first solid phalanx roared under the ship. The helpless porpoises rolled and kicked, trying to get free of the seething mass. The barracouta ignored the lines but some, like those luckless springbok of the giant herds which impale themselves on barbed wire while the others push until the wire breaks, got caught up in the hooks. There was no catch. Again and again the lines went over the side into the apparently unending mass roaring by, but they were ignored as the huge school, intent on some hidden goal, swept by. They crashed oblivious into the ship's side. They jumped and seethed and milled, like nothing I have ever seen. I stopped the screws for fear of fouling them. Then suddenly, after about fifteen minutes, the water ceased to boil and they had passed. But not quite.

Like a destroyer escort astern of a convoy, three giant rays followed.

On the bridge we were too thunderstruck to utter a word. Now the keenness of our disappointment at missing the catch of our lives emerged. It was John who put the thought into words that Stein was the hoodoo.

He jerked his head at the distant schooner.

"Stein's the Jonah," he said. "We'd have got them if he hadn't been around."

Her sails merged into the gathering night.

III Four Beers for the Wrong Man

the dust, in suspension with hot diesel fumes from the engine, seeped -steadily into the bus. The driver changed down for one of the hummocky dunes across which the road straggles out of Walvis Bay, and the jerk brought in fresh clouds. A bounce against the upholstery of the seat in front was enough to bring on its own little sand-storm, for the whole vehicle was impregnated with it, after doing this route every day for I do not know how many years. The dust in the deserts of South West Africa is laden with fine particles of mica. Normally this is a mixture to be shunned, but add to it blinding heat, sweat, discomfort and thirst, and it -becomes an irritant like mild pepper. Not only the nostrils, but the eyes and the ears get choked with the fine, irritating atoms. I have heard hay-fever sufferers (and the majority of people seem to have some sort of catarrhal complaint) sneeze thirty times running. Lower down the coast, near the mouth of the Orange River, there is a settlement where ninety per cent of the wretched inhabitants have tuberculosis.