A Twist of Sand

I wished I could have got my hands on him, but Johann was vigilant with the Remington and Stein was quick, mighty quick, with the Luger.

"Care to come?" I asked Anne.

She looked at me in amazement. "What!" she exclaimed. I had half turned from Stein. She caught something in my face. She was as quick as a needle.

"No thank you," she said almost offhandedly for Stein's benefit. "I've done enough walking to last me the rest of my life."

"Very well," I replied, walking away.

"Wait!" she called after me. "Perhaps I will, provided it's only a mile or two."

"As you wish," I said, also casually indifferent.

We must have gone a mile from the camp before either of us spoke.

I lit a cigarette.  My hands were unsteady.

"What is it, Geoffrey?  What is it?  Tell me quickly!"

"A ship," I said hoarsely.   "A ship at anchor."

I half gestured towards the distance.

The eagerness went out of her face. Pity and compassion took its place.

"Yes, of course," she said sadly. "Let's go and look at the ship. At anchor fifty miles from the sea. Is it a nice ship?"

I stopped and grabbed her arm.

"You think I've gone off my mind, don't you? I saw a ship through my glasses. She's lying over there," I nodded with my chin, for I still was wary of Stein and a gesture might give me away.

She shook her head and there were tears in her eyes.

"All right," she said softly. "Go ahead. Show me your ship."

I gave it another half a mile and pulled the lanyard and glasses from my neck. The ship was there, all right.

I gave them to Anne.

"There, take that overhanging reddish cliff as your line. In the sand, at the foot."

I couldn't see her eyes, but her mouth registered her dumbfoundment.

She dropped the Zeiss glasses from her hands and looked unbelievingly in the same direction.

"I don't believe it!" she repeated. "But it's not an ordinary ship, Geoffrey. It's -- my God! -- it's an old-fashioned ship!"

I shared her amazement.

I said very slowly:  "It is a very old ship, Anne."

Her knuckles were white where they gripped round the glasses, worn to the brass by my own hands and those of her one-time owner, a U-boat skipper. I'd won them in Malta in a wild orgy in the mess after some sinkings.

She dropped them from her eyes and looked at me. The eyes, coming quickly back to near-focus, added to her air of being dazed.

"How on earth did it get here? Fifty miles from the sea?  -- why, it looks like, like . . ." she paused uncertainly.

"Say it!" I said. "No one will think you mad except me, and I have seen it with my own eyes."

She said very slowly. "It looks like one of those ships . . . those ships . . . that Columbus . . . no, it's just too fantastic!"

We were getting closer now and we could see her with the naked eye.

"It would take a sailor's sight to have spotted her from where we were," said Anne, still gazing ahead of her in disbelief. "Anyone else would have thought they were just bare branches of a tree."

"She could never have sailed up here," I said, still more shaken as the three masts, with the mizzen awry to take a lateen sail, became clearly visible. "The coast must have changed radically some time during the past centuries --  some enormous volcanic upheaval, perhaps. Just think of all the flat, low-lying country we have come through --  perhaps this was a bay once, hundreds of years ago."

"It could be, behind these mountains," said Anne. "Perhaps the seabed was thrown up and created all those dunes. Maybe the true coastline was here where the mountains and the rocks are. It's quite feasible."

"I've heard strange stories about a ship in the desert," I said. "But they're the sort of yarn one hears when the drinks have gone round a good few times. No one ever substantiated them. I've heard stories of an Arab dhow and a galleon -- but all of them were so surrounded with mist and legend that one simply couldn't credit them. It's a strange coast this -- anything can happen."

"Is she a dhow?" asked Anne. As if we had not trudged all day, we stumbled, sometimes half at a run over the harder patches, towards the ship that had lain dead there for centuries.

"No, never," I said. "She's European. A caravel. Look, you can even see the deadeyes and the cordage holding up the mizzen truck. How those masts have stood. . . ."

"Don't become nautical, I'm just a simple land girl," she grinned back. "What I just simply can't understand is how she has never rotted away."

"The sand and the dry air have unique properties of preserving things," I replied. "I remember reading somewhere that the first British warship which surveyed this coast before the turn of the century found a mummy in a coffin down the coast from Walvis Bay. They took it home and sold it to a sideshow in Blackpool, I think. It was the hit of the place for years."

"A body might be mummified on purpose," said Anne frowning. "But a whole ship. . . ."