The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure (4 page)

He decided on a pre-packed beef curry and nothing for her.
She could help herself when she felt like it. He warmed up the curry in a saucepan
on the gas cooker and took the whole pan out with him into the cockpit. Eating straight
from the saucepan meant that there was one less plate to wash. Only two things,
in fact, because he ate it all with a single spoon.  This was perfectly in line
with the unofficial meal code that prevailed on the trip up to St Martin. For
dessert he stood up and took a beer from the fridge. It was delicious.  The
second one no less so. It was simply remarkable how much nicer a good quality
beer tasted after a day of exposure to sun and sea. Especially if it was fully
deserved. It happened to be the perfect sundowner. Yes, he considered the
general rule about how much alcohol the person on the watch was allowed to
consume, which was nothing at all. But the beers were there and somebody had to
drink them.

The short dusk of the lower latitudes was soon a thing of
the past. A gibbous moon rose and reflected off the glassy swells. He looked up
at the stars. They were so amazingly bright out here, where there were no
lights from a city to interfere with the darkness. He realised that he was
looking for the stars of the southern hemisphere. Where was the Southern Cross?
His searching eyes found it on the horizon.  And then where was the Pole Star? This
was the northern hemisphere after all. It did not take him a long time to
locate it. For somebody from the southern hemisphere this first discovery was a
special moment, almost magical. It was supposed to be on the other side of the
main mast for the course that they were taking and close to the Big Dipper,
which he also identified. He leaned out to the starboard side and found it
hugging the horizon. Every now and then a gentle sea pushed the yacht off
course and he caught a better glimpse of it.  Sailing by the Pole Star. How far
back have people been doing exactly this? He felt a close connection to
generations of seafarers from the earliest dawn of man. What did the vessels
look like that these people used right at the beginning? He tried to remember
from TV programmes what a Viking boat looked like. He looked out over the
shimmering seascape and saw a wooden vessel with a high bow and high stern,
about the same length as his own, the moonlight reflecting off a square sail,
running before the breeze.

He dreaded the night for its long hours of boredom but it
turned out not to be so bad. Mostly, it was because of the phosphorous effects.
On their journey across the Atlantic he could remember perhaps two nights that
were this spectacular. The yacht left a sparkling trail so bright that it
competed with the night sky. He could be sailing amongst the stars for all that
brightness. Also, all around him the sea came to life. On the port side fiery
loops approached and threatened the boat. Were these dolphins? Probably. On the
starboard side another set of pyrotechnics developed, round and round. These
were big fishes chasing smaller fishes, the experienced hands explained. He
looked over the side into the water and could see an occasional comet with a
tail of sparks pass in the depths several metres below. Probably a shark. Or
another dolphin. He looked for tell-tale sparks of fishes that were following
the yacht like they had done in the doldrums of the Southern Atlantic but saw
nothing. They were going just a bit too fast for that.

The effects of the phosphorescence all around gave him a
sense of the wildlife in the sea. It was far from a watery salt desert but a
complete world in itself. As a sailor he travelled on the intersect, where one
world met another. He thought about dipping into the world on which they sailed.
He had several fishing rods stashed in their covers and he knew where to find
the lures in the tackle box. He enjoyed the spectacle around him so much,
however, that he decided against it. Rather, he’d try to put some of his
observations down in the log. He got hold of the notebook that he used,
recorded their departure time and the conditions, which were most favourable and
thought about something memorable to say that would remind him of this balmy
night. It took him several hours to pen a few sentences. No, he was not a
writer.

At about twelve o’ clock he was tired of writing and walked
up to the pulpit for a better look ahead. There was only moonlit sea. He wondered
what John, his former skipper, would have said if he saw him sailing in the
middle of the night with the sea directly to starboard. He was always the one
who warned against the surprise wave. “You don’t know what has happened behind
the horizon,” he liked to say. “Sometimes a wave just climbs on top of another
and it will throw you on your beam ends before you know it.” He must have had a
few experiences like that in the Atlantic before, though not on their trip
together. It was a pretty uneventful journey during which nothing hit them but
normal sized seas and a steady south-easterly trade wind.

There was plenty sea-craft that John had imparted to him
while he was working on his own skipper’s licence. The man was his mentor in a
very real sense. The problem was that he was now completely shocked in this
guy. If he was untrustworthy, what about his teaching? Perhaps he was just
lucky to have passed his final examination for the skipper’s licence two months
after arriving at St Martin. What the heck. He was just happy to be out here,
in charge of his own boat for the very first time.

Thinking about his former skipper had prompted a question,
however, which did not quite go away. He surveyed the rollers coming in from
the east with renewed interest. The yacht went up and down in a sleepy rhythm
as they passed below. Surely nothing bad could come from that direction. To
make sure, he made his way to the navigation station and downloaded a fax with
the latest weather forecast onto a laptop. Nothing but mildness for now, with a
steady wind from the east, varying from south-east to east. The trade winds
ruled. In his favour. He decided to leave the course as it was.

His thoughts refused to stay idle but returned to the thing
that burned him most over the last number of weeks: the thing that these three
guys had done. Which one of the three had the imagination to come up with such
a scheme?

With a grin he remembered the reactions of the other yachtsmen
and their crews at the marina in Simpson’s Bay when he left. They had observed
him prepare for the journey. He made no secret of the fact that he was leaving
and where he was going. Many of them saw him throw off his mooring lines and
motor out towards the exit for the last time. There were some frowns amongst
his drinking pals and he could only guess what they were all thinking. He never
told anyone that he had figured out the truth, which was that there was no such
thing as the ‘Curse of the Mountain’. It was simply his three paid crew trying
to scare him into selling his yacht. If he was not a sportsman with a code he
would have exposed them as frauds. But who wanted his boat so bad? What was he
prepared to pay? And what was the buyer prepared to pay in ‘commission’ to his
three crew members? Those were the questions he still had no answers for. What
he was quite sure about was that he rejected with complete contempt the notion
that there could be any other explanation to the so-called ‘Curse of the
Mountain’. There was not more truth to that than to the Triangle thing.

In the early hours of the morning Grant was distracted from
his creative attempts slash ruminations when there was a thumping noise in the
sails and then a harder one as something hit the deck. Immediately, he grabbed
the rubber bucket that they kept for just this purpose - and bailing, should it
ever be required. He scrambled forward with the flashlight in one hand and the
bucket in the other. The flying fish was flopping about on the deck, trying to fly
off but unable to launch itself without the water to give it speed.

“In you go,” said Grant and scooped the fish into the
bucket. It look disappointingly small in the light of the torch. A few minutes
later the ritual repeated itself. Eventually he had four flying fishes for
breakfast, all small. Perhaps they just did not grow big in the Northern
Atlantic.

It was hardest in the hour just before dawn, as it always is.
He longed for his bunk. He walked around on deck and decided to put a reef in
the mainsail to slow things down just a tad more for when he was sleeping,
which, by his reckoning was forty minutes away. Fine, it might mean that they
arrive at their destination one day later but they were not in a race.

Day two announced itself in a golden glow that reflected
from the wavelets around the yacht. Just before sunrise Grant took his grimy
coffee mug into the galley and started preparing the fishes. All four fitted
into the pan.

Maybe it was the sizzling noise that attracted her but
Madeleine appeared. Grant was pleased. Firstly, he now knew for sure that she
was still on the boat. Secondly, she appeared to be in better shape. There was
life in the hazel eyes that was not there the last time he saw her.

“You look much better this morning,” he said, hoping against
hope that he was right. 

“Oh, I do,” she said and lifted her arm. “This wrist band
works wonders.”

Grant figured that keeping the gentle swells at right angles
to the boat had more to do with it but he kept his opinion to himself.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Absolutely. What are you frying?”

“Flying fishes. Fresh from last night. I’ll show you how to
catch them.”

“I’ve never had flying fish before.”

“They are nice. Where is your plate?”

They had the fish and then decided on a full English
breakfast with eggs, bacon and croissants, which they had with butter imported
from the Netherlands and preserves made from a mix of French berries. For her
size, Madeleine had quite an appetite.

Grant had called up a radar screen at the navigation station
and kept a casual watch while they were eating below in the saloon. “Do you
understand this?” he asked, pointing to the screen.

“No,” she said.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d take over the watch now,” he
said. “All you need to do is to sit outside in the cockpit and keep a lookout.
However,” he continued, “you need to call me when the following happens:  If
you see a ship anywhere, to the front or the back, left or right. If the wind
changes and the sails start flapping and don’t fill up again, you call me as
well. I am going to sleep now but I will relieve you in four hours.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. Just sit there and keep your eyes open. Don’t
touch anything. Don’t press any buttons or levers and don’t try to steer. Everything
is set as it should be. The autopilot will take care of everything.”

 He accompanied his crew on deck and took a last look around
before heading for the companionway. Five minutes later he had occasion to
shout. Madeleine rushed below and found him in his office.

“What happened?” she asked.

“It’s Tencent,” he said, “Tencent dropped by twenty
percent.”

 “Really? Which ten cents are you talking about? Are you OK?
Weren’t you going to bed?”

“I’m all right,” he said.

“What were you shouting about then?” Madeleine looked at him
quizzically. The bleary-eyed, unshaven yachtsman looked rather incongruous in
front the polished desk with three oversized monitors arranged around it.

“I shorted Tencent. Tencent is not change in your pocket. It
is a massive internet service provider in China, one of the biggest in the
world. I put in a short two weeks back and a few hours ago the stock fell by
twenty percent.”

“Which means what?”

“It means that I have just made a ton of money.”

“Really? How much?”

“Five hundred and thirty two thousand US dollars.”

“Whow! That’s not bad at all! So what do we do now? Are we
celebrating? I saw the champagne bottles.”

“No, not now. Later. Now I want to sleep.”

Madeleine was still intrigued. “How can you sleep?  You
don’t make this kind of money every day, or do you?”

“Not every day,” he laughed. “But regularly. At least once
every two months.”

“It’s still good,” she said. “How do you do that so regularly?”

 “I’m a trader with my own secret recipe,” he said.

“It sounds interesting. It last I know where your money
comes from. What do you trade in?”

“I trade in shares, commodities, indexes, currencies - the
works.”

“Where?”

“On all the major stock exchanges of the world.”

“But aren’t you on holiday now?”

“Not at all. This is my office. The only one I have. From
here I trade anywhere I like.”

 “Congratulations! You appear to be very good at what you
are doing.”

“I’m the best. In my country there’s nobody who comes even close.”

“So what do you do with all your money?”

“I’m getting myself an entire farm on a mountain not far
from Cape Town. Up there I’m going to build a castle from where I can look down
on everybody else.”

***

On the hot side several layers of ancient sea beds clung to the
basalt core of the mountain. Remarkably, every layer was still perfectly
horizontal, even after six million years. The two
KhoiKhoi
sorcerers
scrambled downwards over the old sea beds, which were now crumbling sandstone
terraces. Soon they disappeared into a dense growth of what the Dutch – and the
KhoiKhoi
nowadays - called Sugar Bush.  In winter these bushes sported
masses of conical flowers, ranging in colour from dark red to shocking white.
All of these flowers produced copious amounts of sweet nectar, which excited
the sunbirds and the bees and attracted even larger animals such as baboons. In
fact, in the flowering time the four troops of baboons that called the mountain
home practically camped in these bushes, hunting scorpions for protein and
drinking nectar for energy. In addition, it has never been beyond the human
inhabitants of the land, past and present, to bend over a freshly opened cone,
thereby allowing the nectar to flow directly into the mouth. Both
KhoiKhoi
had done this before. Both of them knew the alcoholic brew that the
KhoiKhoi
wives concocted from it. Now, in summer, however, the cones were dry and hard
and all that was to be had from the dense growth that reached to twice their
height, was shelter.