A Twist of Sand

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."

"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?"