A Twist of Sand

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 -- ú 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?"

He shrugged expressively at the fog.

"Cape Frio, by dead reckoning. But the operative word here is dead."

Suddenly the fog blew back westwards, like a curtain-shift at a slick American musical. The whole scene was laid bare to our eyes at the flick of an invisible curtain-hand.

There was the steamer, a liner, with her bows pointing south and east. Beyond was a flat beach, beaten punch drunk to an off-white by the surf, backed by low dun-coloured sand-hills, trailed here and there with a wispy tonsure of grey-green naras plant. I could even see its yellow fruit, something like a melon, rotting away in the sun.

I was astonished to find the girl at my side, tugging at my arm.

"Do something!" she cried. "Only you can save her, Captain Peace! Tell her how to get off the rocks! She'll be ashore in a minute!" She brushed round to be in front of me and in doing so I felt her breast against my forearm. She looked beseechingly up at me. "I don't want to see any more pain and death, do you understand? I've seen enough in my lifetime. Do this one thing and it doesn't matter . . . the past. . . ."

I led her across to the side of the bridge and said gently: "She's been ashore for years. That's the Dunedin Star."

She gave a little sigh.

"Thank God for that!" she exclaimed. This time her lips smiled too.

Stein joined us.

"They beached her after she struck a sunken object at sea. Everyone had great fun and games getting the passengers off that beach. The South Africans seemed simply to throw away tugs and planes and lorries to reach them."

The ill-fated liner, her smoke-stack still gamely erect, held grimly on to her never-never course.

"Look," I said to Anne, handing her my glasses, "you can still see the emergency floats lashed to her decks."

"I can see a locomotive -- and a tank," she exclaimed with a note of excitement in her voice. Until now it had been level and controlled in her conversations with me. "Can't we go in closer?"

John looked dubious as I slowed still further and altered course to take Etosha nearer the famous wreck. Anne's suppressed mood gave a holiday air to the bridge.

"I can see more tanks and guns and look at the huge pile of tyres -- I think it's tyres -- on the beach."