A Twist of Sand

"No," she answered steadily. "But whatever fact is fed to you, you digest it ... purely for plot and counter-plot, measurement and counter-measurement. What I like to think is that, like those flies, you once had wings."

I was shaken.

"If you have a cigarette," I said, "I'll break my non-smoking rule and have one."

She passed the carton of Peter Stuyvesant without a word. She lit mine, and one for herself.

"If the first was a fair fight, I gather you think in your own mind, the second -- the twenty-seven -- wasn't?"

"It was an old Greek freighter," I said quietly. "If there'd been anyone left to put an obituary notice in The Times, you could have looked me up. Presumed lost at sea. She didn't stand a chance. . . ."

Anne was looking at me calculatingly.

"Look," I went on rather desperately, "I wasn't responsible, or only indirectly. Even if I'd been on the bridge that night I couldn't have saved them."

"But you weren't on the bridge, and so indirectly you were responsible," she said.

"You don't know the facts," I hurried on.

"I don't suppose anyone ever will, if what I hear about you is true," she countered. "I suppose it was all illegal ?"

I shrugged and turned away. "Like this little jaunt, it was well outside the law. Only one man would be interested now and he would deal with me -- outside the law -- if he knew. Stein promised to tell him."

She looked at me and her voice was tired.

"I thought it would be something like that. I didn't know the details. It simply confirms my ideas about Stein."

"And about me, too," I followed up.

She evaded it.

"I am sure you can find some neat analogy from the great world of nature," I said sarcastically.

"Yes," she replied. "Yes, I can. It was in my mind even before you spoke. Out in those dunes there lives a blind beetle. It once had eyes like any other beetle. It always lived on the shadowed side of the dunes, digging down deep out of the sun. It has now completely adapted itself to its environment. But it's quite blind as a result." She stared at me. "Quite blind, do you understand? It can't even see its fellows, but all its other senses are doubly developed. It lives by its senses. But it will never see again."

"Why do you tell me all this?" I asked.

It may only have been a last dart of light from the sun that caught her eyes.

"Purely in the interests of science," she said.

I looked squarely at her, but the face was withdrawn, full of a sadness as weary as the eternal vigil of the shoals and the desert of the Kaokoveld.

"And so Stein doesn't come back either?"

I reached out and touched her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but I gripped it and I felt the crescent of her collar-bone under the wool. I turned her gently round until she faced me. I knew what I had to do, then.

"You weren't meant to either," I said softly.

XII Madness of the Sands

Stein saw the white death in front of him and blenched. His face turned a sickly green and he pulled out the Luger.

"Get back!" he screamed.  "Astern, astern!"

He groped madly for the telegraph, pitching John, who was at the wheel, on to the plating of the bridge. Anne retreated, her white face accentuated by her scarlet polo-necked sweater and matching lipstick, to the head of the bridge ladder.

I wasn't afraid of Stein, but I was scared to death of the sand-bars of Curva dos Dunas.

"You bloody fool!" I shouted, making a grab at the spinning spokes as Etosha yawed twenty degrees off course. As I spun the wheel back I hit Stein across the face with the back of my left hand and he went reeling to his knees. Anne picked up his gun uncertainly.

Well, if that's the way he wants it, he'll get it, I thought grimly. "Full astern" I rang on the telegraph. Etosha slowed to a halt, like a horse about to take a jump, and then reined back almost in mid-flight.