A Twist of Sand

"Probably escaped ashore when the catastrophe struck," I said. "See, they were obviously expecting trouble. All the guns are run out, but on one side only. It would support our idea, too, that this was the seaward side and the other, the starboard side -- maybe that very same cliff there -- land. Something happened out to sea which made her captain run out a full broadside."

"We'll never know what it was," said Anne, with no change of mood.

"There are no bones about," I said. "That means they must have got away. Let's take a look below."

She glanced round again reluctantly.

"I can't get rid of the feeling that we're intruding, somehow," she said in a low voice.  "All right, if you wish."

I tried the small door leading under the port side of the poop rail. I thought it was locked at first, it was so stiff, but it yielded about a foot. We edged in. The passageway was narrow and so low that I had to stoop. I led. Another door.

I opened it.

A man and woman were making love on the big bunk.

I was too dumbfounded to speak. I gestured to Anne. She squeezed past me and looked. She didn't draw back or make a sound. She just stood looking and, without turning round, drew me in by the arm.

The two lovers, naked, were dead.

He lay on top and slightly on her right side. Her face looked up into his. Her lips were slightly parted, a little lopsidedly to the right, and I could see the line of her white teeth. The hair, dark as passion, lay back across the pillow, filmed with sand. The eye sockets were full of sand. In the erect nipple of her left breast the sand had gathered in the runnels of flesh. Her other breast was somewhere under him. Propped on his left elbow, he looked down -- as he had done for five centuries -- into her eyes. His hair was dark and the hollow of his back was filled with sand. Below the waist, their two bodies were fused -- for ever.

Anne was crying.  She took me by the arm.

"Come," she said.

She led me back over the side and we dropped down into the soft sand near the stern. The sun was falling behind the mountain barrier.

She let a handful of sand run through her fingers.

"That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," she said. "That is how I would wish to die. I'd like to be buried near them."

I took her in my arms. I never knew her more than in that moment. The right eyelid was quite smooth.

A last shaft of light blazed into the big locked stern windows above us. Their stained glass bore the arms of Aragon and Castile.

XIV The Secret of Curva dos Dunas

I thought it only a gigantic black shadow against the rock  -- until it moved. The face, cased in black hair to the end of its square, blunt nose, peered at us in concentrated animosity.

Johann raised the Remington, but Stein spoke swiftly in German. It was a long shot, and upwards as well into the long ledge which ran along the left side of the gorge.

"What is it?" Anne asked me in a whisper of fear.

"Back a little," said Stein.

The four of us withdrew from the gloom of the narrow defile towards the brighter light where the sand of the river still caught, whitely, the sun from overhead, despite the tree-lined banks. It was about ten the next day and we had marched since eight. Stein had had nothing to say when we returned to camp the previous evening from the old ship. I had lain awake long with my own thoughts, and now and then I had heard Anne turning restlessly, too.

For the two hours of the morning's march the river bed had gained altitude considerably, and the gorge narrowed sharply. Now, at a point which I estimated to be half-way between the previous night's camping-spot and our turn-off point down the Nangolo valley flats, a huge spur of the Ongeamaberge threw itself, as if in despair to link up with peaks on the Portuguese side, right into the course of the river, leaving a passage so narrow that in flood time the water must have shot through with the velocity of an open faucet.

We had come upon the narrow gap after rounding a steep bend.

Now we fell back towards some huge trees a couple of cables' lengths from the gap.

Stein turned to me venomously.

"You never mentioned this," he said furiously. "Is there still another cataract? What is that -- that animal?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Let's go and have a look," I said ironically. "Give me the gun."

Johann burst into a cackle.

"If there's any shooting to be done, we'll do it," he snapped. "What is that animal -- is it dangerous ? Can we get past without its tackling us ?"

"How should I know?" I retorted.

"You soon will," he said. He spoke to Johann in his own language again. Reluctantly the U-boat sailor passed him the Remington. Stein carried all the arms now. But he wasn't going to take any chances. He took the Luger in his right hand and swung the rifle under his left.

"Forwards," he said to me. "You and the girl wait here, Johann. If there's any shooting, come after us."

I led. We rounded the bend again, gloomy and overhanging. The giant shadow moved. He was standing sentry.