The Strode Venturer (21 page)

As on the previous day we were steaming through an opaque void, the sea flat calm, not even any swell, and the sun’s heat drawing moisture up from the surface of the water so that there was no horizon, nothing ahead of us but a blinding haze. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t think even and the solitude of my cabin was oppressive. I spent most of the morning on the bridge, not talking and my clothes sticking to my body. The second officer had the watch and even Lennie was silent. Reece came in several times, pacing up and down for a while and then returning to his cabin. The little pouches under his eyes were more marked and I could feel the nervous tension in him building up.

And then, just at the change of the watch, something happened to bring things to a head. The sea ahead was suddenly different. Strange patches appeared in the haze, as though the flat surface of it had been paved here and there with cobblestones. Lennie had just handed over to
Reece. The course, changed again during the night, was now 145° and Reece had just said something about the chance of a breeze soon, the wireless operator having got a Met forecast from Gan. His body stiffened suddenly as he peered ahead, his eyes narrowed against the glare. I think we all saw it at about the same time.

Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The beat of the engines, the hiss of water as the bows ploughed into the sea’s unending flatness, these were sounds that had been with us day and night for just on a week. Nothing had changed and yet suddenly the mood was different. We had sighted something. It came at us out of the haze, like huge plates at first, as though a painter’s brush had tried to break the monotony of calm water by stippling it, the way Seurat painted shingle beaches. The effect was of a sea suddenly become diseased, the skin of it blotched with the grey of some fungus growth.

The engines were slowed and soon we were steaming slowly into great patches of pumice, and ahead of us the patches were closing up so that the whole surface of the sea was a solid grey sheet of the stuff. How we knew it was pumice I don’t know. The look of it, I suppose, though none of us had seen the aftermath of a submarine eruption before. It was all sizes, from mere dust to what looked like rough pieces of rock the size of dinner plates. And it was many hued, from buff through orange and brick-red to grey and near-black, all light aerated stuff that floated like cork and danced bobbing in the bow wave.

The change in the engine beat had brought Peter to the wheelhouse and Reece faced him, demanding to know how far we were from the island, how much longer he was expected to drive his ship into an area that was demonstrably volcanic?

“We’ll discuss it in your cabin,” Peter said.

The lunch gong was sounding as they disappeared and all through the meal the ship was held on her course at reduced speed. There was a lot of talk as we ate about the origins of pumice and the effects of shock waves. Evans, the wireless operator, had been in a Japanese port when it
was swept by the shock wave of a distant earthquake and Robbins, the chief engineer, had once steamed through a sea of dead fish. But none of us knew very much about submarine disturbances. “All I can say,” Lennie observed, “is that I hope to Christ we’re not anchored off this island when the whole flipping lot goes up.” As usual his words were the echo to our inner thoughts, for the pumice, coming so soon after our experience of the white water, had greatly increased the sense of uneasiness, and uneasiness in the face of the unknown can so easily lead to fear and even panic.

When I went up into the wheelhouse after lunch we were still steaming through a sea of pumice and the ship’s speed was back again to normal. By then it was so thick it looked like loose pack-ice. We ran out of it about an hour later, but I was resting on my bunk then, for I thought there wouldn’t be much sleep that night.

As the sun set and darkness closed in on us the nervous tension that had been building up in the ship all day seemed suddenly a physical thing, so strong you could almost smell it. During the afternoon several of the crew had been fishing with buckets and home-made nets and now there was hardly a soul on board who didn’t have a piece of pumice to prove that he’d sailed through the debris of some underwater upheaval. And somehow they all seemed aware that we were within a few hours’ steaming of our destination.

There was some cloud around at dusk, but it soon cleared and after that it was cooler for a light breeze came in from the west, darkening the sea. Between nine-thirty and ten Peter took a whole series of star sights. I handled the stop watch for him and jotted down the sextant readings as he called them to me. Afterwards he locked himself in his cabin to work them out and about eleven o’clock came back on to the bridge with Reece and course was altered to 012°.

That last course—the one that took us to within a few miles of the island—I do remember. It has stayed in my mind all these months. But the star sights, no. That would have meant remembering the stars he had selected, the sextant elevation for each shot and the stop-watch time at
which it was taken. If I could have remembered all that, accurately, then things might have been different. I tried to when they asked me; that was when they were still desperately searching, before they gave up. But the names of stars and a string of figures and times—it isn’t humanly possible to remember all that. I wasn’t a navigator. I’d never piloted a ship in my life. As a TAS officer I hadn’t been trained to absorb that sort of thing automatically.

A lookout was posted and speed reduced to six knots. “How long on this course?” Reece asked.

“Until three o’clock, say, when you should be about ten miles south of the island.” And Peter added, “I think we should stop engines then and wait for daylight to make the final run in.” He asked to be called at three.

Later he came to my cabin. By then he had been the rounds of the shore party, giving them a final briefing on their duties. There were sixteen of them, including the two Europeans and six Pakistani mechanics who had been engaged to drive and service the heavy equipment. The rest were labourers. “You’ll come in with me in the first boat.” He wanted me to act as a sort of beach master and for half an hour we went all over the stores and equipment. Everything that had to be got ashore was allocated a priority. We listed it all and when we had finished it was past midnight. “You’d better get some sleep,” I said. Besides navigating, he had been working with three of the Pakistanis on the tumble-bug as well as helping our two European mechanics, Ford and Haines, to get the electric generator ready for use. And all the time he had kept an eye on the rest of the shore party, looking after their welfare and seeing that they were occupied so that inactivity didn’t make them a prey to fear. He was quite extraordinarily good with men of a different race, but it had taken a lot out of him and now there were dark shadows round his eyes.

“You’ll knock yourself up if you’re not careful.”

He nodded. But he made no move to go. Instead he stayed talking until almost one o’clock. He wanted company, for the fear that the island might not be there any
more was nagging at his mind. “All that pumice around—something’s been going on, some sort of submarine activity. Suppose it’s disappeared? I’d look bloody stupid, wouldn’t I? And the Adduans—Gods knows, they may have sailed by now. I got a message through to Don Mansoor.”

Dimly in the dark hours I was conscious of an unnatural stillness as the engines were stopped and we lay drifting. The ship slept then, quiet as the grave. But at first light it stirred, the padding of feet, the banging of doors, and as dawn broke it came to life with the beat of the engines throbbing at the deck. I dressed and went to the wheel-house; a grey, milky light, the sun not yet risen, and the sea ruffled by a slight breeze. Reece was there, and Peter, all the watch-keeping officers—quite a crowd. And nothing visible, nothing at all. The steward brought coffee and we drank it, peering at that pale horizon, not speaking, each of us in that cold, half-empty state that is midway between the loneliness of sleep and the community of the day’s beginning.

And then suddenly a voice from the port bridge wing—one of the lascar crew. “Starboard bow, Captain Reece, sahib.” The dark face was suddenly animated as he pointed. “Fine on starboard bow.” We all saw it then, a faint smudge as though the line of the horizon had been scored by the point of a black chinagraph pencil. “Starboard a little.” Reece gave the order quietly and steadied the ship as the bows swung to that distant smudge, dipping slightly to the movement of the sea. He stepped back and glanced at the echo-sounder. “When do you reckon we’ll start picking up soundings?”

“About two miles off,” Peter answered. “You should be recording 300 fathoms. After that it gradually shallows. A bit irregularly at times, but you should be able to anchor two cables off in ten fathoms.”

Reece didn’t say anything. He was leaning against the door of the starboard bridge wing and he had the ship’s binoculars pressed to his eyes. “Land all right, and black—nothing growing at all.” He handed Peter the glasses. “Bleak enough—like the back of a whale at this distance.”

Peter took a quick look at it through the glasses. “Yes, that’s it all right.” He said it flatly so that everyone in the wheelhouse should feel that this was a routine sighting, something about which there had never been the slightest doubt in his mind. But though his voice didn’t betray him, his eyes and the quick spring of his movements did, his relief and his sense of satisfaction obvious to all as he crossed to the compass and took a bearing. A few quick pencil jottings on a piece of paper and then he requested an alteration of course to port. “There’s a shallow bay on the western side giving some shelter and reasonable holding. I’d like us to run in with the island bearing 034°. On that course it’s all clear, no obstructions.”

Reece nodded and gave the order. The ship’s head swung and settled to the new course with the dark smudge of the island now broad on the starboard bow. The sun’s rim lipped the horizon, a shaft of bright light turning the sea to molten gold as the burnished disc rose, gathering strength, flooding our world with heat. And as though the sunrise had loosened their tongues everyone was suddenly talking, a flood of speculation, a barrage of questions flung at Peter’s head, and in a moment he had taken the floor like an actor, all his sense of the dramatic pouring out of him as he described to us how they had come upon the island that first time in the
Strode Venturer
—at night, feeling their way in on the echo-sounder and seeing it suddenly in the moonlight. “It really did look like a whale then, like the blue-black back of a monstrous cetacean.”

The call to breakfast came, but nobody moved. We stood there watching as gradually the bearing changed until at last it was 034° and we altered course and headed straight for the island. It was nearer now and every minute getting perceptibly larger. The night breeze had died, killed by the heat, and the sea was flat again so that the island seemed to be floating in the sky.

About two and a half miles off we found bottom in 328 fathoms and thereafter the soundings decreased fairly steadily. The bridge was silent now. Everyone except the
helmsman had one eye on the echo-sounder as though mesmerized by the click-clicking of the trace arm, and gradually the recordings fell until we were in less than 100 fathoms.

“Stop engines.” The telegraph rang to Reece’s command and the engines died under our feet, the ship continuing under her own momentum, silent except for the soft hiss of the water she displaced.

The island was then about a mile away, not floating in the sky any more, but like a black reef exposed by the tide. It had the naked ugliness of slag straight from the furnace, nothing growing and not a vestige of colour, only the texture varied, so that there were shades of black—the light grey of the dust drifts merging to darkest jet where drifts of exposed ore were like clinker and shadowed from the sun. The bottom was uneven now and the flat surface of the sea pocked with little whorls caused by the current.

“Engines half astern.”

Almost everyone except the engine-room staff was on deck now and the anchor watch was closed up with Blake standing in the bows waiting for the word to let go. “And during the cruise we stop at the world’s most beautiful, most exclusive beach….” Nobody laughed. Nobody even smiled at Lennie’s attempt to relieve the tension. The lonely deadness of the place held us awed and a little dismayed.

“You’ll need to get closer than this.”

Reece hesitated, glancing at the echo-sounder. It was now recording depths of less than fifty fathoms. “No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going any nearer.”

To my surprise Peter accepted this. He was standing very still, his head thrust forward, peering through one of the open windows of the wheelhouse at the long black shore of the island. His face was pale under the tan, his eyes almost luminous with fatigue. Again I was conscious of a trance-like quality, a mood of tension, his body taut. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he snapped and reached for the glasses.

The way was off the ship now and Reece came back into
the wheelhouse and ordered the engines stopped. “I thought you said there were depths of ten fathoms within two cables of the shore.”

Peter didn’t answer. He didn’t turn or shift his position. His whole attention was concentrated on the island. But even without glasses we could all see that there were shallows extending at least a quarter of a mile from the shore. It showed in the colour of the sea, for the water was very clear, and here and there a shoal awash pushed its black gritty back above the surface.

Reece stood for a moment undecided. Then he picked up the bow telephone and gave the order to let go the anchor. It fell with a splash into the still water and the cable rattled out, a plume of red dust rising from the rusty hawse-hole. Lennie reached for the telegraph and at a nod from Reece rang down “finished with engines”. We had arrived.

But nobody looked happy about it, not even Peter. He was still standing there at the open window, the binoculars pressed to his eyes. The intensity with which he was examining the island increased my feeling of uneasiness, for this wasn’t an island three miles by two; it stretched a good six miles north and south and the sea at either end was bright green, indicating extensive shallows.