Geoffrey Jenkins

The River of Diamonds

1

The Collector of Deserts

'East of the sea and west of the dunes.'

Whether it was the Miltonics inherent in the phrase which came so spontaneously from the lips of the tall man in the witness-box, or the chance ending of the tape-recording spool which underlined and gave weight to what he said, I am not sure; but I know that in my own mind I date the fate of the Mazy Zed from that instant.

I have read the court transcript since in order to be able to delineate, not chronologically but in its proper perspective, the figure which emerged as our enterprise progressed; I prevailed upon the authorities to give me the actual recording of his words, and it is now revolving slowly on my desk as I write. I still find in his educated, resonant English voice an indication of the well-springs of that drive which made him for so long an outlaw — in his own mind at least — from his friends, from the fellow prospectors who admired his work and hoped to avoid his fate, and most, God knows, from his family. It is easy, therefore, for me to set down exactly what he said, and although the picture of him that I give is taken from my mind's eye, that impress is no less strong upon me than upon anyone else with whom he came in contact. The sea and the dunes — those two were so much part of the man that my narrative starts naturally from the point at which he spoke of them to the court.

Fred Shelborne stood before the microphone at the end of the courtroom farther from the Judge and two assessors. Mr Justice de Villiers presided at the head of a horseshoe-shaped table; Younger and du Plessis, both barristers and diamond experts, flanked him. Their table was on a dais and below, at floor level, there was a double row of other tables, covered in green plastic, for counsel. The witness-box was between the two rows, so that Shelborne faced the whole room. Outside the door at his back was a lawn and bushes, as incongruously green as was the diamond town itself among the desert dunes. A green pattern of lawns and bright cottages, with a swimming-pool and red-steepled church, lay branded, man-made, on the ochre surface of this, the richest diamond field in the world.

Shelborne was not on trial: the Government had set up a special court at Oranjemund, the only town of the Sperrgebiet, the forbidden diamond coast of South-west Africa, to hear the most radical prospecting application in the history of mining.

We wanted to mine diamonds from the sea.

We asked for the right to prospect for 250 miles along the Sperrgebiet from a point roughly 450 miles north of Cape Town. Along this savage, treacherous and mainly unexplored littoral lie a dozen small islands, close off shore, which are covered with the droppings of millions of seabirds — the 'white gold' of guano.

We had come to Oranjemund from Cape Town, 370 miles to the south, well prepared for our case. Presenting our application were three leading barristers, with supporting juniors. We had expected opposition — in the diamond game there are always the old-timers to stake a preposterous claim. Shelborne looked like one of them: an old sports jacket, shirt washed to the colour of bleached driftwood, blue trousers pale with wear, the ghost of some once-fashionable club in his tie's Windsor knot.

He repeated, as the new recording spool started to spin: 'East of the sea and west of the dunes.'

He coughed, not apologetically, but asthmatically.

Shardelow, the Queen's Counsel leading our legal team, misjudged him as much as I had at first glance.

'Mr Shelborne,' he said with studied patience, 'please answer my question. I asked, were you aware of the existence of a so-called treasure trove of diamonds on the Sperrgebiet coast in a place known euphemistically as "the Hottentots' Paradise". You replied, yes. I asked where it was. Your reply is, "east of the sea and west of the dunes".'

Shelborne's air of preoccupation was intense. 'That is correct.'

Shardelow fiddled with some papers and flicked a glance at the Judge. He was fine-drawn, sallow, with a high forehead and slicked-back hair. It was a face from an old Flemish master.

'Mr Shelborne, I see here you hold a master mariner's certificate?'

'In sail.'

'That presupposes a knowledge of navigation?'

'Naturally.'

'Assume you are on the deck of your windjammer — making your way along the coast of South-west Africa…'

'Yes.'

'You are about to enter an unknown harbour…'

'There are no unknown harbours. There is only one port between Oranjemund and Walvis Bay — Luderitz.'

'We are theorizing, Mr Shelborne. For the sake of my analogy, grant me an unknown harbour on the Sperrgebiet.'

Shelborne nodded. There was not a single hair on his head. Its domed smoothness contrasted with the deep gullies round his nose and eyes.

'Your first mate says the harbour entrance lies "east of the sea and west of the dunes". You would consider that definite enough to pinpoint the entrance — specific, exact navigational indications?'

'No.'

'Yet you feel you can state — under oath too — to this court that the locality of the Hottentots' Paradise, this nirvana where there are all the diamonds and all the girls to be had for the taking, is known to you; and that it lies east of the sea and west of the dunes?'

'Yes.'

'Perhaps you would explain?'

'A harbour entrance could be half a mile wide, it could be a couple of hundred yards. I am talking about a desert 100 miles wide. On the west is the sea and on the east the dunes. Somewhere between the two lies the Hottentots' Paradise.'

'You are sure it exists?'

'When I was first in the Sperrgebiet nearly fifty years ago, several expeditions set out to find it. None came back.'

'What, in your opinion, prevented their returning, Mr Shelborne — the diamonds or the dancing girls?'

A snigger ran round the court. A barrister at the table opposite me leaned forward and scribbled on his pad. His movement revealed a young woman sitting behind him. Unlike the others, she was not smiling: she stared at Shelborne.

Shelborne rode the wisecrack. 'Neither. The desert did.'

The deep resonant voice is there in the recording still, but the tape does not capture the curious air of preoccupied dedication which put paid to Shardelow's humour. From that moment he knew he was crossing swords with a man of calibre.

Shelborne went on: 'They adventured into a terrible wilderness of dunes which, to this day, has never been explored. The Namib is the most savage desert in the world.'

'Come, come, Mr Shelborne — the most savage in the world? There are other deserts, you know.'

'I know. The Namib is small — about one-thirtieth the size of the Sahara. It is older than any other — the Gobi, the Rub' al-Khali in Arabia, the Mohave in North America, the Takla Makan in Turkestan. When the earth's crust solidified, it did so first along the coast of South-west Africa. The Namib was born. The only other desert which in some way resembles it is the Atacama coastal desert of South America. But the Atacama is a mild, comfortable place compared to the Namib…'

Shardelow hitched his gown round his shoulders. 'You have some extraordinary attributes for a simple prospector, Mr Shelborne. Your range seems to include even the second day of the Creation.'

Shelborne smiled. 'The third day, I think. Dry land emerged out of chaos on the third day.'

The Judge smiled too. It was the sort of thrust which appealed to his cool mind.

Shardelow glowered. 'Now, Mr Shelborne: you have just named the… ah…' he consulted a scrap of paper handed to him by his junior counsel '… the Atacama desert in South America and the… ah… Takla Makan in Turkestan.' He turned to the bench. 'I am sure, my lord, that if I had had the prior opportunity of consulting the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I, too, could have adduced these names…'

The Judge turned sharply to Shelborne. 'What, do you know of these two deserts?'

'I have crossed them both on foot, my lord.'

The ball was squarely in Shardelow's court. His face already pink from good living flushed still more, but he was professional enough not to let it pass. I glanced at Felix Rhennin next to me. He was frowning and biting his nails. After all, he was investing over a million dollars in- our project. Shardelow's professional instinct told him, discredit the man; discredit him. He studied his papers with forced deliberation. 'Your affidavit to the court, Mr Shelborne, describes you as a prospector. In view of what you have just said, I think it would be fairer to describe you as an adventurer?'

The gaunt man paused. Then he said quietly, 'No. I am a collector of deserts.'

'A collector of deserts?'

'That is correct.'

'And how does one collect deserts, Mr Shelborne? Like butterflies, like birds' eggs — how exactly?'

The quiet conviction of the reply startled us all. It seemed to mesmerize the young woman I had noticed earlier. He spoke to the Judge, as if giving the question full weight. 'It is a sort of enterprise of the spirit, my lord. Part is tangible — the heat, the sand, the hunger, the thirst, the diamonds. Part, again, is less tangible: endurance, a quest, a new horizon beyond a smoking crest — one becomes an entrepreneur in things which are difficult to expound in the learned atmosphere of a court because they belong to a less definable world. Someone once said, "Something lies hid behind the ranges, go and look behind the ranges".'

There was a pause. The only sound was the whirring of the tape-recorder and a sighing of the desert wind through the triple-masted electric pylons in the street outside which complemented it. Shelborne's eyes wandered round the room, momentarily fixing mine. They passed on, deeply preoccupied. I'd seen the affidavit Shardelow had quoted, but I attached so little importance to it that I could not remember why he was opposing us. I say us, but it was really Rhennin's outfit. I was to survey the Sperrgebiet sea-bed on a freelance basis ahead of the mining unit.

Shardelow resumed ungraciously: 'The intangibles of which the witness speaks — and indeed his deserts — are of no interest to this court or to my client. Neither are they germane to an application for sea-bed diamond rights.'

'That is what I felt in the first place.' remarked the Judge with a touch of astringency.

Shardelow winced. 'Mr Shelborne, you have knowledge of Mr Rhennin's project?'

'Not beyond the fact that there is some big scheme to mine diamonds from the sea.'

'Perhaps it may clarify — even condition — your attitude if I put you in the picture.'

Shelborne inclined his head.

'Briefly, my client, Mr Felix Rhennin, who is a karakul farmer from South-west Africa, proposes to sink a million dollars in a project known as the Mazy Zed which is to extract diamonds from the sea. Sea-bed mining has never been attempted anywhere before. A revolutionary process will be employed. Diamonds will, in fact, be sucked up from the ocean floor as if by a giant vacuum cleaner.'

I could sense the tenseness in the old prospector. 'What is the Mazy Zed, if I may ask?'

Shardelow laughed. I knew he would score off Shelborne if the chance offered. The Mazy Zed is the name of a special type of barge which we have planned, a floating diamond mine…'

The Judge cut in: 'Mr Shardelow, you will of course be calling expert technical evidence to explain all this to the court?'

'Of course, my lord. We also intend bringing similar expert evidence as to the nature of diamond-bearing marine terraces like those at Oranjemund.'

The Judge leaned forward towards Shelborne. 'On what grounds are you opposing the Mazy Zed application?'

Shelborne began to fumble inside his worn jacket.

Shardelow said quickly, 'Have you prepared a scheme like the Mazy Zed!'

Shelborne paused, his hand at his inside pocket. I thought he was about to reply to the taunt. For a moment there was a flicker in his strange green eyes. Then he took out an envelope, extracted a thick sheet of paper, and smoothed it out. He read: 'German Imperial Decree, 13 November 1913…'

The Judge stopped him. 'What is this document?'

Shelborne held it out. 'It is a decree of the German Imperial Government, issued in Berlin before the First World War, vesting the mining and prospecting rights within the territorial waters of South-west Africa in Frederick William Caldwell.'

'Caldwell!'

The name seemed to send an electric thrill through those sitting in the court. Shardelow snapped his fingers at his junior counsel for the affidavit.

The Judge seemed taken aback. There is scarcely any need to ask who Frederick William Caldwell was, Mr Shelborne, but for the sake of the record I shall ask the pro forma question.'

Shelborne became withdrawn. 'Caldwell was a prospector. Thirty, forty years ago he was a legend in the Sperrgebiet. He was linked with all the great discoveries — Oranjemund, Kleinzee, The Cliffs. He was popularly credited with having discovered these very fields at Oranjemund four years before anyone else…' He seemed to hesitate, as if unwilling to commit himself.

'Yes, Mr Shelborne?'

'He has been dead for many years. He set out to find the Hottentots' Paradise. That was more than thirty years ago. He died in the desert.'

'How do you know this?'

'I went with him — part of the way.'

'You knew him, then?'

'Yes, well. We prospected together. We were here at Oranjemund when it was nothing but dunes, trackless, 'unexplored. It hadn't even a name.'

Shardelow could scarcely wait for him to finish. 'I must take the strongest exception to this document being presented in this manner. It is common practice to lay documents before the court beforehand, and not in the manner of a deus ex machina. I have not had the opportunity of studying this alleged concession by the German Government. I have been given no chance to call evidence or witnesses in connection with it…'

'Proceed, Mr Shelborne,' said the Judge curtly. 'Are you handing that paper in?'

'I am, my lord.'

Shardelow bristled. 'May I ask what a concession — which was made out half a century ago in the name of Caldwell — has to do with the claims — the alleged claims — of Mr Shelborne, collector of deserts?'

The Judge smiled without humour. 'Mr Shardelow, I must ask you to restrain your sarcasm. The court will assess its validity. Mr Shelborne, how does this bear on your opposing the Mazy Zed application?'

'The sea-bed prospecting rights were ceded to me by Fred Caldwell.'

Shardelow bent down and spoke rapidly to Rhennin.

'Ask for an adjournment then, for God's sake!' said Rhennin under his breath. He turned and whispered to me, on his other side. 'This could be dangerous, John. I may have to buy the old bastard out if what he says is true.'

The Judge said, 'You have proof of this, Mr Shelborne?'

'Yes. You will see from the document that Caldwell ceded the rights to me when we parted at Strandloper's Water

'Where?'

'Strandloper's Water, my lord. It was the jumping-off place for the Hottentots' Paradise, so we thought. The name is there — Caldwell wrote it in before signing.'

Shardelow said angrily, 'I wish to ask for an adjournment so that we may have the opportunity of scrutinizing this alleged document…'

'Alleged, Mr Shardelow?'

'We do not know under what circumstances this cession took place. It may have been under duress. I might want to call the notary who signed it…'

It was Shelborne's turn to smile. 'There are no notaries at Strandloper's Water. The nearest human being was several hundred miles away at the time. The place is simply a dip in the sand between two semi-permanent dunes. There may have been water there once. There are a lot of bones.'

'That reinforces my argument for an adjournment, my lord.'

'You will be prepared to amplify your claim under oath, Mr Shelborne? Much may hinge on the legality of this deed of cession.'

I could sense the keyed-up restraint of Shelborne's replies. He seemed to have neither personal capital or backing. Why had he hung on to the concession for so long? To me there seemed something hidden behind his cautious replies about Caldwell. There was his hesitation, his studied choice of words, his lack of deference, almost, in speaking of the famous dead prospector. I tried to picture the parting of the two tough prospectors at Strandloper's Water, one returning to the coast and the other going forward to try to penetrate the pitiless wastes. Shelborne hadn't been bluffing when he spoke of the famous deserts he had conquered. I didn't see him staying behind while Caldwell went on to break open the Namib. Something did not add up about Shelborne. Men try desperate things for diamonds and I found myself wondering whether Caldwell's disappearance — itself a legend within the legend — could be laid at Shelborne's door.

The court adjourned and the Judge had scarcely gone when Shardelow beckoned impatiently for the deed of cession. 'Christ! I thought I was dealing with some broken-down old prospector trying to bum a ride on the Mazy Zed; instead I'm faced with… with… that!' He gestured after the tall figure, disappearing behind the Judge.

Rhennin himself was silent. He always was when the going was tough. During the war he had been personal Intelligence assistant to the Obeibefehlshaber der Marine, the German Naval High Command, and he was an immensely cool and capable man. Forty-eight years of age, he was seven years older than I, and though he hadn't a grey hair, his heavy-lidded eyes were heavier now that he was worried. Shorter than myself, he was in splendid physical trim; my own out-of-doors job kept me in pretty good shape, but I knew that I would have to be in top form for the task of surveying the Sperrgebiet. I had been on the fringe of the Namib myself and I knew Shelborne had not exaggerated when he called it a terrible wilderness.

I strolled out into the early winter sunshine. A glorious, incongruous burst of roses flanked the pavement, which had specially high kerbs to keep back the sand. The sea fog was rolling back to the sea, whence it commuted every day, and the air was fresh. I dodged a Lambretta which came buzzing along the street — private cars are prohibited among the 2500 whites and 5000 non-whites in Oranjemund for reasons of security. Only Land-Rovers and the trucks used by the mining company for transporting workers are allowed. The town is as much of a freak as the diamond fields which surround it: when the great diamond strikes were made in the late 1920s and 1930s, the diamond company, Consolidated Diamond Mines, established a small settlement of prefabs in the desert, all supplies except water had to be brought from a railhead 175 miles to the north by mule wagon. There is a small harbour, Port Nolloth, sixty miles south, but the Orange River floods cut it off from Oranjemund for months. The river, the biggest in Africa south of the Tropic of Capricorn, forms a vast muddy estuary, the mouth stopped up by innumerable sandbars. Since World War II, however, Oranjemund has been transformed by the bridging of the river: as our plane from Cape Town circled low over it the previous afternoon, Oranjemund was branded green on the dun flank of the desert. There was a still greener patch to the north of the town — a hydroponics farm, where all the town's vegetables are grown with an economy and cunning which rivals the compactness of a space rocket's commissariat. In fact, as I strolled about the town, the place reminded me of a cafe capsuled in space; only here, instead of space, there was desert. The red-roofed cottages seemed unreal in their snug suburban-looking security among lawns and shrubs on a spot where once men died in their frantic search for diamonds. Today, a fifth of a ton of gems is brought up yearly from beneath forty feet of desert sand, and it is sold for eighteen million pounds.

I was glad to get back to the realities of the courtroom. When the Judge had taken his seat Shardelow rose: 'Touching the validity of the German document, my lord…' There was a stir on the far side of the court, near where the girl sat. A big, pleasant, red-faced man, conspicuous in white bush-jacket, white shorts and pipeclayed shoes, was beckoning urgently to the court orderly. The orderly rose uncertainly. The Judge held up his hand to silence Shardelow.

'Watch this!' Rhennin whispered.

The big man seemed unaware of the ominous silence and the eyes turned upon him. He gave the orderly a note, who handed it to the Judge.

'What is your locus standi?' he snapped.

The newcomer looked nonplussed. 'I beg your pardon, my lord?'

'Who are you and what do you want? I will not have the proceedings of my court interrupted in this way…'

The white-clad man was very sure of himself. 'I am Colonel Duvenhage. I am in charge of security at Oranjemund.'

'I see. And that, you think, gives you the privilege of breaking into these proceedings?'

'It might.'

Mr Justice de Villiers was more icy still. 'Do I take it that you suspect someone in this court of smuggling diamonds?'

'Not as yet, my lord.'

'What do you mean?'

Duvenhage looked across at Shelborne. 'I wish to ask this gentleman a few questions. I want to know how he comes to be inside the security zone without having passed through any of the security checkpoints. I want to know where he comes from. I would like to search him.'

The Judge said tersely, 'You may put your questions through the court. You can search him at your leisure.'

Duvenhage smiled. 'A formality, my lord, to which you and your party were also subjected, you will remember, when you landed: X-rays. Frisking has been out of date for quite a while at Oranjemund.'

The Judge turned to Shelborne. 'Answer the questions.' Shardelow grinned to himself. Duvenhage had done more to discredit Shelborne in the fudge's eyes than half an hour of hostile cross-examination could have done.

One could see what was going on in his legal mind: if Shelborne were inside the security zone illegally, it would be easy to imply that there was also something shady about his prospecting concession.

Shelborne said, 'I came from the sea. In a twenty-ton cutter.'

'Nonsense,' snapped Duvenhage. 'The mouth of the river is not navigable. Everything is behind the barbed wire. There are police posts everywhere…'

'My cutter is anchored in Anvil Creek. I saw a road nearby and thumbed a lift in a lorry. I got off at this courtroom.'

Duvenhage paled under his tan. 'My God…!'

'This is a court of law, Colonel Duvenhage. Restrain your language.'

'Anvil Creek!' he exclaimed. 'I don't know any Anvil Creek

Shelborne smiled. 'Perhaps not, Colonel. It's probably got a new name since Caldwell and I discovered it.'

Duvenhage wiped the sweat off his hands with a handkerchief. He appealed to the fudge. 'My lord, it is simply not possible for any boat to negotiate the breakers and sandbars at the mouth and get right through to Oranjemund's doorstep, so to speak. No boat could survive…'

'Apparently it has been done, Colonel Duvenhage. Earlier this court heard that Mr Shelborne was a master mariner — in sail. It appears that he has not understated his qualifications.'

'But it cannot be done…'

The Judge cut him short. 'You also asked where Mr Shelborne came from. I trust we are in for no more surprises.'

'I sailed from Mercury Island.'

'Mercury!' exclaimed Duvenhage. 'Why, that's over 200 miles up the coast from here… in a twenty-ton cutter? Where is your crew…?'

'I have no crew. I sail single-handed.'

The Judge said: 'Mr Shelborne, to sum up: you sailed 200 miles or more from Mercury Island to the mouth of the Orange River, entered it by a feat of seamanship which leaves some doubts in Colonel Duvenhage's mind about the impregnability of his security arrangements, and your cutter is now lying at anchor close to the town in a creek which you found many years ago?'

That is correct.'

'What were you doing at Mercury Island?'

'I am the headman, my lord.'

It was my turn to be surprised. Shelborne was obviously an educated man, a prospector and a master mariner, the island headmen were bucko mate types. They had to be to supervise the gangs of coloured guano scrapers. I knew vaguely that Mercury was one of a dozen or so guano islands off the Sperrgebiet coast which are run under government supervision for fertilizer collecting. Then I remembered that Mercury had a bad reputation, even among those God-forsaken islands, and that the only way to get guano workers there was to offer them a special bonus.

Shelborne was addressing the Judge: '… the islands are run as sailing ships, my lord. The tradition began with the great guano rush of the last century when the crews of the.hundreds of sailing ships which gathered there took their jargon ashore. We call a kitchen a galley, a wardrobe a slop-chest; our time is reckoned in ships' watches, not in hours…'

'Any further questions, Colonel Duvenhage?'

Duvenhage darted a glance, half admiration, half puzzlement, at the man in the witness-box.

'All I can say is that the last time a man tried to navigate the river mouth was eighty years ago. He used a canvas boat. They never found his body.'

The Judge dismissed Duvenhage and nodded to Shardelow to resume. 'Mr Shelborne… or should I say Captain?… I have studied this so-called deed of cession. I accept as genuine the German Imperial Seal. I see it is countersigned by Dr Heinrich Goering — who was he?'

'Formerly Reichskommissiondr for Luderitzland — what is today the Sperrgebiet. He' conquered it for Germany. He was the father of Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War.'

'Thank you. Now to the actual deed of cession…'

Shelborne gripped the edge of the witness-box. He kept an even voice. He was making a great effort to control himself. 'Yes?'

'It is signed by Frederick William Caldwell and Frederick Shelborne, Strandloper's Water, 13 February 1930.'

'Yes.'

'You ask us to accept that the late Mr Caldwell ceded this right to you in return for — what exactly?'

'A wagonload of stores, a case of Cape brandy, and two sixty-four-gallon hogsheads of water.'

Shardelow tapped his teeth with his pencil. He gestured through the window towards the big man-made dune flanking the diamond recovery plant.

'What would you say was the annual value of diamonds taken at Oranjemund?'

Shelborne was obviously surprised at the oblique query. 'I can't say — many millions, of course.'

'If I said eighteen million pounds, you would accept that?'

'Yes.'

'You feel that the shoreline deposits of diamonds similar to those found at Oranjemund must continue under the sea; that in other words, since there are diamonds in terraces along the beach, it is logical to suppose that those terraces do not simply end where the breakers begin, but extend under the waves?'

'Important technical considerations…'

'Answer the question, Mr Shelborne! Do you believe that there are diamonds under the sea?'

Shelborne seemed reluctant to answer. Why? The cardinal point of the hearing was the assumption that the diamond terraces on the coast were also to be found on the sea-bed. Rhennin was staking a million dollars on it.

Shelborne remained cagey. 'Do you mean, are there diamond fields similar to the Oranjemund terraces, or are you referring to a different type of deposit…?'

Shardelow sensed that, he was on to something. 'I mean diamonds, Mr Shelborne. Diamonds in any shape or form. Diamonds under the sea.'

Shelborne seemed to relax. 'Yes.'

'Thank you. Assuming that there are sea-bed diamonds, then, would you consider their value to approximate to that of shore diamonds?'

'It could be; but…'

'It could be. Therefore, you sold a wagonload of stores, a case of brandy and two casks of water to Caldwell for the equivalent of many million pounds?'

'It wasn't in those terms…'

'I'm sure it wasn't, Mr Shelborne. No one in his senses would sell a wagonload of stores for millions of pounds.' He proceeded at once. 'Do you always write such a neat hand?'

'What do you mean?'

Shardelow handed the document up to the Judge. 'Please notice the two signatures. The one, Frederick William Caldwell, is a scrawl. The other, Frederick Shelborne, is in neat, scholarly italics. Perhaps, Mr Shelborne, you would sign your name on this piece of paper…'

'With pleasure.'

He wrote rapidly. Shardelow gave it a quick glance and passed it to Rhennin. I saw the beautiful italic writing — like printing almost, it was so fine.

Shardelow shrugged. His effort to discredit Shelborne's signature had failed. It could have been blown into a major point, but clearly he had another shot in his locker. He said, 'My lord, I shall accept that the two signatures were not written by the same hand.'

The Judge said, 'I think we should establish the exact position of Strandloper's Water. Mr Shelborne..?'

'About half-way up the Sperrgebiet coastline is a place called Meob Bay. Strandloper's Water is near it.'

'Inland — in the desert?'

'Yes. It is not marked on maps. They say, "unsurveyed, shifting sands".'

'How near Meob?'

Shelborne hesitated. 'Between where and Meob?' repeated the Judge.

It wasn't meant as a trap, but it served that purpose for Shardelow.

'About half-way between Meob and Mercury Island.'

Shardelow leaned forward and rapped out, 'And Mercury Island is where you are headman, is it not, Mr Shelborne?'

'Yes.'

Shardelow said, 'My lord, in view of the curious parallels which have come to light, I think it would profit the court to learn the exact circumstances of Mr Shelborne's parting with the late Mr Caldwell. The two comrades sat down at Strandloper's Water and Caldwell signed over his rights to a fortune greater than he could ever have hoped to find in the desert…'

The Judge looked intently at the tall man. The top of his bald head was beaded with sweat.

'You are, on your own admission, the last person to have seen Caldwell alive.'

2

Death of a Legend

The tape-recorder whirred. It was the only sound in the room. It still holds that long silence. Then Shelborne squared his shoulders, as if this had been the moment he had been waiting for. The length of his neck was accentuated by the size of his head. There was no disproportion, but one sensed the physical and mental power of the man.

He said, That is correct. On 13 February 1930.'

He gripped the front of the witness-box when Shardelow began. The eyes of the courtroom were upon him.

'Mr Shelborne, why were you at Strandloper's Water?'

'As I said previously, Caldwell and I were on an expedition to try to find the Hottentots' Paradise.'

'You still believe in this so-called treasure trove?'

'No.' '

'No? Yet you set out…'

Shelborne's voice was deep, sure. 'Until diamonds were found in the Sperrgebiet the Namib desert was shunned, unknown. Prospectors then touched on the fringes, but even today it is largely unexplored. The desert became a mirror for men's greed. Upon it they projected their dreams. They said, the remoter the desert, the richer the strike. The diamond legend requires to be woven round something intangible, something wildly improbable and inaccessible, for it exists in the mind alone. The Namib has all the necessary qualities. The treasure trove existed in Caldwell's mind.'

'Yet you went with him.'

'We hired an old fishing-boat at Walvis Bay. There is what passes for a landing-beach. A couple of the mule-team were drowned. We pushed inland. The going was cruel. At Strandloper's Water I became convinced that it was madness to go on. But Caldwell was determined. I returned to the boat.'

'If Caldwell had not chosen so opportunely to buy your stores, what would you have done with them?'

'Taken them back to the boat, I suppose.'

'And left your comrade to die?'

'Of course not.'

'Could you have re-embarked the mules and wagon?'

'No. They were both expendable. We intended to shoot the mules and eat them, and to abandon the wagon later on.'

'But rather than take the risk, you abandoned your partner and friend with them, and in gratitude he signed away his undersea prospecting rights to the entire diamond coast?'

'Yes.'

'And he carried the document on his person? That was most considerate of Mr Caldwell.'

'He had it with him.'

'A document with a potential of millions? Surely a bank safe was the place for it?'

'He carried it.'

'What else?'

'A rifle, water-bottle, blankets — that sort of thing.'

'Nothing to prospect with? Come, come, Mr Shelborne!'

'We had a small portable trommel, or jig, a hammer, and some chemicals.'

'Than at Strandloper's Water you turned back because you funked it?'

A deep flush spread across Shelborne's face and neck and the veins knotted in his forehead, but he kept himself under control.

'I didn't funk it. I considered it inadvisable and hazardous in the extreme to continue.'

'Yet other notorious deserts like the Takla Makan and the Atacama held no such terrors for you?'

'The Namib is the worst…'

'Yes, yes. We have your unsupported assertion for that. When you considered it — I quote you — inadvisable to continue, in what terms did you put it to your partner that you were backing out — after you had planned it together for years?'

'Strandloper's Water is a sort of dry flat pan; ahead were the barchan dunes — they're the type which shift all the time. The mules could never have made it…'

'But you were fully prepared to trade them away, knowing that?'

'Caldwell was as well able to assess the risks as I was.'

'What did you say to him?'

'We had a discussion… an argument. I reckoned the boat would still be there because the wind was wrong…'

'Most peculiar, Mr Shelborne. What if the boat had gone? Your bridges both in front and behind you were burned.'

'Yes.'

'For a man of your intrepidity, and a collector of deserts to boot, you seem to have taken more chances than a greenhorn.'

'There are always risks in the desert.'

'Now — you had an argument. Whose idea was the bargain?'

'I don't remember.'

'No, I don't suppose you do. Was Caldwell fit when you parted?'

'What do you mean?'

'Simply, was he in good health, unhurt?'

Shelborne ran his tongue round his dry lips. 'Yes.'

'How did you finally separate?'

The young woman leaned forward, rapt.

'I wished him good luck and started for the coast.'

'Was it morning or afternoon?'

'Early morning.'

'Caldwell said nothing? He was still angry with you about your defection?'

'I did not say he was angry. He said, "Good luck to you, Shelley, perhaps my luck will change now".'

'You did not wait to see how far the mule-team went before it stuck?'

'No.'

'You had driven your bargain and were satisfied?'

Shelborne did not reply. Shardelow threw down his pencil with a clatter.

'Thus, then, died the diamond legend of our time.'

'I always hoped he would come back. No one knows where he died, or how.'.

Shardelow was easy, smooth. 'Is it not strange how mankind refuses to believe when one of its heroes vanishes: Lawrence of Arabia, Kitchener?' His words whipped across the court like a straight left. 'Perhaps Caldwell did not die, Mr Shelborne?'

'He is dead. Caldwell is dead.'

'Why are you so sure? Perhaps you saw him die?'

Shelborne was silent for a moment. He said steadily, 'I have told you how I left him.'

'Yes. You left him to die.'

'No. He elected to go on — against my judgement. That is all.'

'It was a shabby end to a great life, was it not?'

The tall man did not reply.

Shardelow went on. 'His signature — was it always shaky like this?'

'What do you mean…?'

'Yours is precise — it might have been written at your desk — but his… was he ill that his hand should shake so?'

Shelborne put up his right fist to wipe the sweat from his upper lip. It shook like a leaf.

'lust as your hand is shaking now, Mr Shelborne.'

'I had blackwater fever,' Shelborne retorted. 'It did this to me…' He gestured at his bald head. 'Even as a young man I was completely bald.'

Shardelow went in for the kill: 'You contracted black-water fever at Strandloper's Water, then?'

'I suppose I must have — I was taken ill on the boat going back…'

'So your partner might himself have died of blackwater?'

'Yes.'

Shardelow waved the deed of cession. 'Are you sure you did not obtain the shaky signature on this document from the hand of a man you knew was ill, so ill that he must die?'

'No! No!'

'Is that why you are so sure he did die?'

'No!'

'And you left him to die, having first extorted this vast potential wealth from him, under circumstances we shall never rightly know?' 'No! It wasn't like that…'

Then how was it, Mr Shelborne?'

'As I have told you.'

Shelborne's faded clothes were soaked with sweat under the armpits, and he wiped his hairless head with a crumpled handkerchief.

Shardelow merely stood and looked at him while the tape recorded only silence. Then he said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'We'll leave Caldwell's death and go on to the next point: it is particularly germane to my client's case.

I presume you began prospecting the sea-bed immediately?'

'No. I had no resources.'

Shardelow picked up Shelborne's affidavit. 'I see that on your return to Walvis Bay from Strandloper's Water you signed on in a deep-sea Swedish sailing ship.'

'That is correct.'

'Your first step towards becoming a master mariner in sail?'

'Yes.'

'How long did it take — from ordinary seaman to master mariner?'

'Close on ten years.'

'What was your first command?'

'I signed off before — in South America.'

'Remarkable! You were nearly ten years in sail — with no doubt poor food and a hard life — in order to achieve a master's ticket and then you signed off without trying for a ship. Why? On the run from your conscience?'

'I crossed the Atacama desert.'

That is in Chile, is it not?'

'Yes.'

'Just keeping your hand in with deserts?'

Shelborne grinned for the first time. 'You can call it that.'

Then?'

'I signed on as first mate in a Finnish windjammer loading nitrates in Valparaiso. We sailed across the Pacific to Vladivostok. From there I went inland and crossed the Takla Makan desert.'

That's Tibet — Turkestan, rather. The roof of the world.'

'Yes.'

'You successfully braved these two deserts, which are as remote as you could hope to find anywhere in the world, yet you were not prepared in 1930 to venture in companionship with an experienced man like Caldwell into a. small desert just over 100 miles wide because you thought the going would be too tough?'

Shelborne remained silent.

'Although a self-styled collector of deserts, you shrank from putting on the hook, so to speak, the gem of them all?'

'I returned to Mercury just before the outbreak of war. I have been there ever since.'

The guano islands are, geologically and geographically speaking, part of the Namib — the desert which is rich in diamonds?'

The tension seemed to have gone out of Shelborne. 'Yes.'

Then there must be diamonds on the islands?'

'By no means. Nowhere in South-west Africa are diamonds found more than twelve miles inland. The absence of diamonds in the desert — except for that twelve-mile coastal strip — is an undeniable fact; and an inexplicable one.'

Shardelow, in reply to the Judge, said that the Mazy Zed outfit intended to call expert evidence regarding the nature of the diamond deposits off the Sperrgebiet. The fudge glanced at the big wall clock. Shelborne had been questioned for more than three hours.

Shardelow said, 'One last point, Mr Shelborne: have you ever made use of your so-called right to prospect the sea-bed?'

'In a manner of speaking, yes.'

'Yes or no? Have you or have you not prospected the off-shore concession area?'

Shelborne seemed uneasy. 'It is one of the wildest coastlines in the world… It has a formidable reputation…'

'Answer the question!' snapped the Judge.

'I have prospected as best I could. My equipment was somewhat primitive — grabs and dredges, weighted buoys with grease-traps to bring up samples from the ocean floor.'

Rhennin pulled at Shardelow's sleeve and whispered urgently. Shardelow grinned and nodded.

'Remembering an old custom among prospectors never to visit another's claim unless invited, I shall not ask you what you found,' he said blandly. 'You did say, however, that your equipment was… er…?'

'Somewhat primitive.'

'Somewhat primitive.' He turned the phrase appreciatively over on his tongue. 'And in your opinion wholly inadequate for the immense task of prospecting a wild coastline of 250 miles?'

'Yes, wholly inadequate. You see…'

'Quite so, quite so. Suppose you were floating a company to mine undersea diamonds, what would you estimate to be the capital required?'

'Half a million sterling at least.'

Shardelow almost bobbed. 'Thank you, Mr Shelborne, thank you very much. That is all I wanted to know.'

The proceedings, when the court sat again after lunch, lacked the tense air of the morning. Shelborne sat near the young woman. Dr Clive Stratton, Chief Government Geologist for Northern Namaqualand (which included Oranjemund), was round, sun-tanned, didactic. The Judge listened patiently while he explained how a diamond was a piece of carbon which had crystallized under heat and pressure. There were, he said, three distinct types of diamonds in South Africa — the mined diamonds from famous places like Kimberley and Premier Mine, Pretoria; ordinary river alluvial stones; and South-west African stones. He paused as he drew this last distinction.

Shardelow was on to it at once. 'Why do you stop there, Dr Stratton? What is so different about Southwest African stones?'

'They are distinct in kind; in fact, they are unique, though there are similarities with Brazil diamonds…'

'They are neither alluvial nor mined diamonds?'

'No. They occur in marine terraces close to the sea.'

'What are marine terraces, Dr Stratton?'

'I'll put it this way: millions of years ago diamonds in the Sperrgebiet were deposited in rock which has since been covered with sand — up to forty feet of overburden, as we call it. The sand must be scraped away until the diamonds are exposed in gravel beneath or in rocky potholes. We know the approximate age of the diamond deposits because of the Oyster Line…'

The Oyster Line, Dr Stratton?'

The Oyster Line, Dr Stratton explained, had been named and discovered by a German-born geologist, Dr Hans Merensky, in 1927 at the Orange River mouth. Dr Merensky had a theory about the origin of diamonds, a revolutionary theory which was widely derided at the time — until he found the Oyster Line. Dr Merensky believed that diamonds on the Sperrgebiet would be found in conjunction with ancient fossilized oyster shells in marine terraces. Dr Merensky had traced a line of these ancient prehistoric shells on the seashore. He sank a trench a few feet long — and took from it a king's ransom in diamonds. He had discovered the greatest diamond field the world has ever seen.

Shardelow said, 'Might one therefore assume that the same agency which distributed diamonds in the marine terraces of the Oyster Line a million years ago also deposited them on the bed of the sea?'

Stratton looked uncomfortable. 'No, not quite… You see…'

The Judge interrupted: 'The court does not see, Dr Stratton. Are you trying to convey to us that the diamonds in the Oyster Line terraces had a different point of origin from those in the sea proper?'

Stratton became voluble. There had been conflict for over half a century about the origin of the South-west Africa diamonds. There were three main theories: first, that the diamonds had been released by weathering from the ancient crystalline rocks of the basement system, but this had been exploded when no gem stones showed up among the shoreline rocks. The second theory had likewise been exploded, namely, that the South-west Africa stones had come originally from deep within the South African hinterland, had been washed down by the Orange River to the sea, and then been scattered by the powerful Benguela current. A variant of this second theory placed the point of origin in South-west, rather than South Africa, but this did not hold water either, because no diamonds had been found along the course of the Orange or of any other of the ancient rivers.

'And the third theory, Dr Stratton?' Shardelow pressed. Stratton had hesitated, as if unwilling to present something damaging to his academic reputation.

'Some people think there is a diamond pipe or pipes — you could call it the fountainhead or parent rock — buried under the sea off the Sperrgebiet, from which all diamonds have for thousands of years been spread along the coast by the current.'

What do you, as an expert, think of that?'

'Frankly, I think it is nonsense…'

Shardelow wasn't having the Mazy Zed's chances spoiled by Stratton's academic sectarianism. He said, smoothly:

'But it was a view held — propounded even — by no less an authority than Dr Merensky himself, was it not?'

'Merensky held radical theories which have not been proved.'

'That is what the experts said about his Oyster Line theory — before he discovered Oranjemund.'

The Judge intervened: 'Has evidence been brought forward, one way or the other, to prove or disprove this idea of an undersea origin of all the diamonds?'

'No, my lord. I said at the outset, that there is considerable controversy about the origin of diamonds on the Sperrgebiet. But we who have worked here with them for a lifetime…'

'Thank you, Dr Stratton. To sum up, then, you would consider it not unlikely that there are diamond deposits on the sea-bed off the Sperrgebiet?'

'Subject to various qualifications, yes.'

Stratton stood down as the Judge nodded for the next witness.

The court orderly rose.

'I call Mary Caldwell.'

3

The Gquma

The young woman sitting opposite me rose.

Shelborne, a few chairs away from her, had also half-risen. I thought it was out of courtesy — until I saw his face. It was like lead. The bald head was thrust forwards and sideways towards the smart, black-hatted figure in a poinsettia red costume very much a la mode. Incredulity, doubt, fear one might almost have said, were perceptible in his face as she edged past him.

Shardelow leaned across towards Rhennin and myself: The old man from the sea is in trouble.'

Shelborne may or may not have taken leave of Caldwell in the way he had described, but the past was certainly coming up and hitting him right now.

Mennin, the counsel who had brushed off our inquiry by saying he was merely holding a watching brief for an important client, grinned across at the Mazy Zed side, scarcely able to contain his triumph at our discomfiture. Until that moment it seemed to have been generally accepted that Caldwell had been a bachelor.

Rhennin muttered, Three-sided fight now. I wonder what sob-stuff she's going to put over about dear old Dad.'

The Judge's ascetic, inquisitorial face held little promise for that line of approach.

The orderly intoned, 'You are Mary Caldwell and the evidence you shall give…'

She raised her black-gloved hand — which perfectly set off her elegant suit — and was duly sworn.

'Your age, Miss Caldwell?' Mennin asked.

Her voice was slightly husky, deeper than usual in a woman.. The hazel eyes were flecked with amber. 'Thirty-three.'

'Where were you born?'

She looked amused; I liked the smile. 'Do you really want to know?'

The fudge's voice was edged. 'Miss Caldwell…'

'In a train.'

'In a train?'

'In the desert south of here. The engine driver was trying to make his best time to the nearest railhead; my mother…'

'Yes, Miss Caldwell. Your occupation?'

'Diamond sorter.'

The best diamond sorters are Bushmen because of their keen eyesight. I had not heard of a woman sorter before. Certainly she wasn't dressed out of a sorter's pay.

Rhennin said in an aside to me, 'Looks as though Caldwell must have left money after all, despite his jinx.'

Mennin said, 'Isn't that a somewhat unusual occupation for a woman?'

She was defensive. 'I've trained for it, although I've never actually done it. For a number of years I have been a companion to my mother, who is an invalid.'

Shelborne was slumped forward, chin in hand, eyes fixed on Mary Caldwell.

Mennin said formally, 'My lord, the application I am making to this court is that the undersea prospecting rights of the Sperrgebiet seaboard rightly belong to Caldwell's widow, Mrs Kathleen Caldwell, at present resident in Cape Town and, as you have heard, a permanent invalid, and therefore unable to attend this hearing. My client contests the validity both of the claim of Frederick Shelborne and that of the Mazy Zed organization as counter to rights already accorded by the former German Government. We contest this cession made at Strandloper's Water on grounds that it was made under dubious circumstances.'

'Why then did you not cross-examine Mr Shelborne?'

Mennin smiled.

The reason is simple, my lord. Mr Shelborne had the document — the original — for which my client has been searching for many years. The best we were able to do was to produce a sworn copy from the records of the former German authorities. Mr Shelborne was good enough to produce irrefutable proof of my client's claim.'

The fudge said, 'Very well. Now, Miss Caldwell, why cannot your mother attend?'

She fumbled in her handbag. 'I have a medical certificate here. She has had a stroke and is not able to speak, or properly comprehend.'

The fudge nodded and Mennin asked, 'Your late father, the famous Mr Caldwell, made your mother his sole legatee and, one presumes, after her death yourself?'

'Not quite. My mother inherited nothing of value from my father.'

I could see the fudge's disbelief.

'May I explain. My father went away on his last adventure leaving us poor. We were living at a place called Kleinzee…'

Kleinzee! It was one of the great strikes of the diamond coast!

'We had a house, more of a shack really. My father went away. My mother has told me that a few days later she wanted some lime to whitewash the house; we

couldn't afford to buy paint. She searched in the veld for some likely rock to grind up. She kicked up a piece. It came away — full of diamonds. It was a diamond matrix.

The ground was next to our shack. Its owner made my mother a grant — a very handsome grant — for her lifetime. He soon became a millionaire. It ceases when she dies.'

'So, Miss Caldwell, the ill-luck which had dogged your father all his life once more had come into play?'

'Yes. He was recalled from what is now Oranjemund — four years before Merensky's strike — when he was on the point of making the discovery of discoveries. He'd found diamonds here…'

'And from what you have just told the court, he missed another fabulous fortune on his very doorstep at Kleinzee by going off into the unknown?'

She looked a little tired. 'Yes. His bad luck was proverbial. There was also The Cliffs, near Port Nolloth. He…'

She made a little defeatist gesture. Shelborne's hand on his chin twitched and he coughed asthmatically. His face seemed even more gaunt.

Mennin went on: 'Mr Shelborne, having been a close companion of your father's on many expeditions, must have been well known to your family?'

She looked puzzled. 'No. My mother never mentioned such a person.'

'Did he ever come to your home at Kleinzee?'

'I was a few months old when he went away, and I never heard of the name when a child.'

'After your father's… ah… final disappearance he did not show up?'

'No. My lord, all this is new to me. I have been told that the newspapers were full of the disappearance of my father. For months — even years later — there were articles about him. He was a name associated almost romantically with diamonds and I think people somehow expected him to come back, crowned with luck, you might say. Luck had eluded him so desperately all his life.'

Mennin said, 'Yes the only man who could have shed light on your father's disappearance was — we have his own words for it — training to become a master mariner, and then later crossing deserts in the remotest corners of the globe?'

She nodded and shot a glance at Shelborne, who was staring at the floor.

'Nevertheless, today, more than three decades later, he comes forward with a paper signed by your father ceding him the undersea prospecting rights. For half a lifetime he has done nothing about these rights except drop a few dredges and buoys with grease traps…'

'Ask questions, Mr Mennin — do not put words into the witness's mouth.'

'As your lordship pleases. Now, Miss Caldwell: do you remember what your father looked like?'

The Judge intervened. 'Mr Mennin, the witness could not have been a year old at the time of her father's disappearance.'

'I was about to say, my lord, that I naturally have no personal recollection of him. My mother, however, described him as big and dark.'

'Bearded or clean-shaven?'

She dug again in her bag. 'Here is a photograph of my father and mother, taken in Port Nolloth a few weeks after my birth. You'll see, he was bearded, with a shock of thick black hair. My mother said he could run down a buck in the desert, he was so strong.'

'After your father vanished, your mother never had any further communication from him?'

'None.'

Mennin, having created his impression, handed her over to Shardelow to cross-examine.

'Miss Caldwell, you are Mary Caldwell, are you not?'

She looked puzzled. 'Yes, of course.'

'Can you prove it?'

'You're implying that I am an impostor…'

'I said nothing of the kind. I merely asked, can you prove your identity?'

The judge leaned forward. The inquisitor disappeared momentarily. In its place was a rare kindliness which illuminated the medieval face. 'Can you produce a birth or baptismal certificate, Miss Caldwell? — something which would identity you positively?'

'I expect so, my lord.'

Shardelow was too clever to weaken his own case through a lengthy verbal duel. 'That is all, my lord.'

'All, Mr Shardelow?'

'Yes. The opposition of the Mazy Zed project by these two witnesses stems, in fact, from the same fundamental premise, and I propose to treat them as one. Perhaps one further question, though: did you ever undertake sea-bed prospecting, Miss Caldwell?'

She laughed, easily, warmly. 'Of course not.'

Shardelow seemed pleased, though for different reasons. 'No, of course not.' He sat down.

'Any questions, Mr Shelborne?' asked the Judge.

The old prospector got to his feet, glanced at the witness-box, and then suddenly sat down again, as if he had changed his mind. 'None, my lord.'

The court orderly put on the lights. I had scarcely noticed, during the long exchanges, how the afternoon had slipped away. Company Land-Rovers and trucks ground past bringing men in from the workings and field screening plants. Every night Oranjemund and its villas became a fortress besieged by an army of dunes. Man-made security completed the laager. The desert's silence and its corrosive fogs fell in cold dun hostility on the scrapers, the massive tournadozers, tournapull scrapers and bucket excavators, dulling their burnished steel blades a little before they started next dawn to tear out its guts in the endless hunt for precious stones.

As we adjourned for the day, I rose quickly to intercept Shelborne. Rhennin had decided to make him an offer to withdraw his claim and I was to be the intermediary. It was distasteful to me, but I was keen to meet the strange figure. Shelborne stood uncertainly in the doorway. Mary Caldwell paused when she reached him on her way out with Mennin. She gave him a searching, quizzical look and then smiled. His eyes were upon her so that he did not notice either myself or Colonel Duvenhage waiting for him.

Duvenhage said, 'Mr Shelborne, I'm afraid we'll have to search your boat. I'm sending one of my men — MacDonald, who is a good fellow…'

Shelborne replied abstractedly, 'Of course, of course. He can sleep aboard, if you wish.'

That won't be necessary,' said Duvenhage, 'but we will have to search again before you leave.'

I said, 'Perhaps you won't mind if I go along to the cutter with MacDonald, Colonel. I have something to discuss with Mr Shelborne.'

Close to Shelborne, the latent power of the man was even more evident.

'I'm John Tregard,' I added.

' The Mazy Zed?'

'Yes, and partly no,' I replied. 'I'm a freelance surveyor for the outfit.'

'Can we not discuss your business with me here, Mr Tregard? It has been a long day, and you won't find the amenities of the Recreation Club aboard my boat.'

It was another way of saying he wouldn't butter up the opposition with a couple of drinks. The man fascinated me. Atacama and Takla Makan were names with a magic resonance for me.

'No,' I said. 'It's private, and you may want to think it over.'

He nodded without speaking.

'Come on, then,' said Duvenhage. The security Land-Rover, parked nearby with MacDonald at the wheel, was conspicuous as the only vehicle in the street now. I sat in the back and Shelborne climbed in next to the driver, Jerrycans of petrol and water were slung on the tailboard. The fine 9-mm Mauser and.45 Colt, sealed by plastic strips in leather cases, were not for playing sheriff around this diamond town. When we reached the first dune beyond the limits of the town MacDonald flicked a switch. The dashboard lighting died and in its place was the green-white glow of a compass. He pulled the vehicle round until the needle settled on south-west. We churned across the roadless waste.

Shelborne glanced at the stars. 'I would have steered a little more south.'

'It's near enough,' replied MacDonald. 'We can run parallel with the creek until we strike your boat.'

The headlights were puny in the great emptiness. Shelborne's coming inland up the disused waterway could have taken Oranjemund completely by surprise.

MacDonald was brooding upon it: 'I never knew this creek joined the river and I thought, until you came along, that the mouth was effectively sealed by the sandbars.'

Shelborne's voice was alive. He was among the things he knew. 'I wouldn't care to come through mouth with a really stiff south-wester blowing.'

'I wouldn't care to try it at any time — period,' replied MacDonald. 'Man, the thought frightens me — those bloody awful sandbars and cross-currents. We've got a fishing club here, but the mouth is out of bounds since we lost a couple of fellows off the bars.'

'There she is,' said Shelborne.

The mast, spreaders and tracery of rigging looked wholly incongruous among the waterless dunes. Mac-Donald cut the engine. The silence was immense. I got out and paused at the gangplank, my torch on the name.

'Gquma.' Pride made Shelborne's voice more resonant. 'It's a Bushman word, meaning "the roar of the sea".'

She was a lovely little craft, gaff-rigged, a little old-fashioned perhaps, with a long-handled tiller and dinghy atop the coach house. The message of her clean, uncluttered sweep of deck, soaring sailplan, simple gear and deep, self-draining cockpit was clear: speed and seaworthiness. The flaring bow would stamp down the savage Sperrgebiet seas, and she looked sweet and easy to handle.

He sensed my enthusiasm. 'Thesen's at Luderitz built her to my own design. They know boats. They have built everything worth while on the coast.'

'I like that bow,' I said.

He grinned and looked twenty years younger as that pucker of flesh under his right eye which had appeared so harsh during the hearing smoothed away.

'Maybe that was the secret of getting through the sandbanks. I prayed that the seas would not be short and steep and the wind light, or else she's inclined to lift her head a bit high. She practically sails herself with the wind anywhere near astern. I'd take her anywhere, she's so certain in rough seas.

'She's all yours,' he told MacDonald, leading through to the saloon where two arm-chairs were built in at the stove. He pulled up the collapsible table from the floor. Forward of the mast was a curtain and through a gap I could see a pair of bunks.

'Brandy?' asked Shelborne.

MacDonald rummaging about outside was the only sound in the silence.

Thanks.'

He pulled a bottle and only one glass from a cupboard. He shook his head in reply to my unspoken question; he wasn't intending to talk with MacDonald within earshot. I admired the waxed red cedar of the interior fittings. We talked small-ship talk. There was nothing to give a clue to the man himself.

MacDonald emerged after a quarter of an hour, a little apologetic, gave a perfunctory look into the lockers in the saloon, and arranged to pick me up later and Shelborne in the morning.

'Now, Mr Tregard?' asked Shelborne, when he had gone.

'I want to make clear at the outset that I am acting on behalf of the Mazy Zed organization.'

'To quote Mr Justice de Villiers, you are clarifying your locus standi?'

We both laughed. Perhaps the small-ship talk, an enthusiasm mutually shared, had something to do with it, or perhaps it was just the man himself, but I felt at home aboard the cutter. At that moment, I would have liked nothing better than to have gone cruising among the islands with the crack old sailor.

I side-stepped my unpleasant mission: 'I'd like to see your islands.'

He was non-committal. 'Know them — or the Namib?'

'Not the islands. My job — if we win — will be to resurvey them, as well as the sea-bed. You know what existing charts are like.'

'It will be a big job, if…'

He, too, seemed unwilling to drag the court battle into our conversation. 'Know the Namib?'

'Scarcely. I've been on the eastern side only — the easy sector where the mountain plateau rises up from the desert. Not really the sort of wilderness you were describing to the court, but it was tough enough. But then I had a railway only two days' hike away — no roads, of course.'

'Were you prospecting the mountains?'

He was sitting back, keen, it seemed, to hear about myself.

I found myself telling him: 'No, it was my first job after the war, one of those miscellaneous things. I was with the South African Hydrographic Survey for the duration — for me there were no glorious battles, no medals, only routine surveys. Then the Smithsonian Institution…'

He looked at me keenly. 'You mean Mount Brukkaros?'

I nodded. 'That's it… I didn't think many people knew. The Institution had a solar research station right on top of that ruddy extinct volcano for years. It's a superb site — I've seen 100 miles from the summit on a clear day. Anyway, they couldn't find anyone to man it any longer. There were some instruments and equipment to bring down. It sounded interesting to me. It was.'

It was he who jerked us back into the present. 'So is sea-bed prospecting, Mr Tregard. You didn't come here to tell me your life story.'

'No.' I replied slowly. I sugared the pill the best I could. 'The Mazy Zed organization is big, Mr Shelborne. There is room for a man like you. Rhennin and I saw your enthusiasm in court. Rhennin wants you… would like you… in our project.'

The lamp shadowed the lower part of his face as he leaned forward. I was aware only of the power and anger of his eyes. 'At a price, not so?'

I had known it wouldn't be easy. This wasn't a charlatan looking for pickings. I felt cheap and softened the offer which I had jibbed at making in the first place. 'We could use your services, your knowledge, your drive. We have very big problems before we bring up the first diamond from the sea-bed. We would like you to join us.'

'Come, come, Mr Tregard, while I hold the sea-bed rights?'

'Not hold them, cede them. As Caldwell ceded them to you. Except our price is not a wagon load of stores and a case of brandy. It is five thousand pounds.'

'Five thousand pounds for what the Judge said was a potential of millions?'

The sneer gave an edge to his voice. I became angry — angry with myself really, I told myself afterwards — in the face of this stand.

'Listen, Shelborne, you won't bring up a single pay-load of diamonds and you know it. For thirty years you've done damn-all. Here's your chance to come in with a big, progressive organization.'

'No.'

'I am authorized to go up to ten thousand pounds.'

'Not for fifty thousand pounds.'

His curt rejection stung me. I might have guessed he couldn't be bought. My tongue ran away with me: 'What did you do with Caldwell, Shelborne? Why were you so shaken to see his daughter in court today?'

The lamp etched the lines in his face. His eyes blazed. 'Leave her out of it,' he said thickly, 'you can't…'

'… right an old injustice, can you?'

'What do you mean?'

My next words were thrown out as a taunt. I suppose his vehement reaction must have been an unconscious aftermath of Shardelow's needling him in court; I think that it was at that moment that I formed my first suspicion of Shelborne.

'Only you and God know what happened to Caldwell.'

'Only — me — and — God!'

I might have been alone, he was so withdrawn. Then he burst out savagely: 'In the desert, Tregard, strange things happen to men. They dream dreams…' He stopped short and then went on quietly. 'What happens about the girl?'

I shrugged. 'Shardelow said we regard both your applications as one. We'll fight you both.'

'No, I mean, are you approaching her — like me?'

'What the hell for? Yours is the original document. The fight's on, it seems — at your choosing. The girl comes second. She catches it anyway.'

He said, very quietly, 'And her mother?'

'Mother? What has she got to do with it?'

'She said she's had a stroke — you know what that means: she'll die.'

'Don't drag that sort of sentimental stuff into this, Shelborne. You know bloody well that if you wanted to help her, you need never have produced your document and the cession which Caldwell is supposed to have made you.'

The strange green eyes, rather widely set, stared at me, almost hypnotically. 'If you win — and the girl's mother dies — won't you offer her a job? She'll be penniless.'

'Why should we?'

'She's a diamond sorter. Good ones are hard to come by these days. She could be very useful to the Mazy Zed…'

I was uncomfortable, angry at myself, at Rhennin and the whole set-up. 'And if you win, I presume you'll offer her a job dropping dredges and greasy buoys?'

He didn't rise. 'Mine has been a long search, Tregard. I know what I am after and how far I have progressed.'

He said it so sincerely that I regretted my anger and sarcasm.

'That means you'll go back to Mercury — I'll come and look you up on my survey.'

He didn't relax. 'Mercury has an evil name on the coast, you know.'

'I'll come and see for myself.'

'Its reputation began at the very beginning, when the American explorer Captain Ben Morrell discovered it: he found half a million seals dead there. Mass suicide.'

I laughed, but there was something deep, sinister, about the way he spoke. Was it an indirect threat at me?

'So I must be scared off by an unexplained phenomenon which happened 140 years ago?'

'Not scared, but warned. Shortly after I took over as headman, millions of sea-birds died — equally mysteriously.'

'I expect it was some epidemic.'

He didn't seem to hear me 'In my time on Mercury several men have died — without reason. It is a very dangerous coast, Tregard, and there are many wrecks. Some of those men have died horribly.'

A ripple of fear ran through me at the way he spoke, and it triggered a retort:

'Did you murder Caldwell, Shelborne?'

For a split second the fine tracery of veins stood out against his forehead. If he rushes me, don't hit him too hard, he's old, I told myself. Just hard enough…

There was no need. Shelborne was on his feet and the gun was pointing at me. It was long, old-fashioned, and the light struck back from the beautiful engraving and inlay work on the barrel. I recognized it — the father of the modern Luger, a 7.65 mm Borchardt, first of the automatics. I knew that inside was a magazine with eight rounds. It was a superb collector's piece — and a killer's weapon.

Shelborne's thumb, moving as if of its own accord, patted the toggle. His hand was rock-steady. I'd have to risk the first shot. I'd be able to jump him before the second got me — the long heavy breechblock had to be activated by a relatively low-powered bullet before the next round came up from the magazine — and the next round would certainly kill me. But I hadn't got the modern Luger's mamba-quick repeat strike to deal with. Again the old centrefire cartridge wouldn't have the certainty of a modern rimfire. He might be using modern Mauser-types of the same calibre, though; in which case…

Shelborne must have seen it in my face. 'Don't…' he snarled.

I kicked the stay of the collapsible table and dived under it. I heard simultaneously the crash of the shot and the thud of the bullet into the thick planking top. I rocketed out at a crouch and grabbed his legs in a flying tackle. The second shot went into the coach roof above our heads. Time-lag — not Mauser. Completely off-balance, he tried for a moment to use the two-and-a-half-pound pistol to club me, but we went reeling against the side. His head struck the wood and he went limp.

I pulled myself clear and picked up the Borchardt. Keeping an eye on Shelborne, who was breathing heavily, I examined it. The Luger ancestry was clear in the delicate balance and long, tapering barrel. The toggle and breechblock were longer and heavier than in its modern counterpart — that is what had saved my life. But its beauty lay not only in its functionalism but in the engraving and gold and platinum inlay work on the butt and barrel. Even the crescent-shaped recoil-spring housing at the back was chased. I turned it over on to its right side. The cover-plate for the frame was circled by a thin line of gold engraving enclosing a masterfully executed Sperrgebiet gemsbok, looking almost like a unicorn.

But it was the lettering cut deep into the metal, which riveted my eyes.

It said: 'f.w. caldwell.'

So Shelborne had killed Caldwell at Strandloper's Water and taken his gun! There was no doubt in my mind about what had happened. I looked down at the big gaunt man, — he was only stunned. The skin had not been broken where his head had crashed against the woodwork, but he'd have a lump and a bruise. I slipped out the eight-shot clip and smiled grimly. They were the old low-velocity, special bottle-necked cartridges. If they had been Mausers I would not have been standing there.

From the direction of the desert I heard MacDonald coming back to fetch me. I slipped out the remaining cartridges. There should have been six. There were only five. The spring pushed up two objects under the last shell and they fell out with the bullets into my palm.

They were two small uncut diamonds.

I put the shells into my pocket and the diamonds back into the magazine. I snugged it home and put the fine old weapon next to the unconscious figure. He stirred slightly as he started to come round.

I went out into the dark.

4

The Oyster Line

'Mazy Zed?'

Mr Justice de Villiers presented his inquisitorial features to the world. Perhaps he hadn't slept any better than I had; the incident with Shelborne kept chasing through my head. The tall, gaunt prospector was in his place near Mary Caldwell, detached, although he had smiled back at her when he came in. I had told Rhennin only of his refusal, nothing of the fight. I could see no sign of a bruise on his head, which was turned sideways from me. It was our day, the Mazy Zed's day, and Rhennin was in the witness-box, but the Judge had pulled him up before he got into his stride.

'I am head of the Mazy Zed.'

The Judge professed ignorance: 'Mazy Zed?'

'Mazy Zed is a name, my lord.'

'I am well aware of that. I am seeking some meaning behind what you will agree is rather unusual nomenclature.'

'A Mazy Zed is a step in an old-time minuet, my lord.'

'Why not something modern like the Twist?'

A titter ran round the court. 'Perhaps if I explained…'

'That is what I have been trying to elicit from you for some time.'

The ship — or rather barge — which we intend for undersea mining operations is rather an ungainly craft. In fact, I have taken the liberty of bringing a model to the court. There are no engines. The barge will therefore roll and pitch heavily.'

'What has this to do with an old-time minuet?'

'My lord, I thought the bobbing and curtsying movement of the barge had a parallel in the bobbing and curtsying step in the minuet known as the Mazy Zed.'

The Judge snorted. Shardelow took up the running smoothly.

'You are Felix Rhennin?'

'Yes.'

'Occupation?'

'Farmer, promoter of companies.'

'A karakul farmer, I should add, my lord. My client has a large ranch in the southern part of South-west Africa. He was responsible for the introduction of several prize-winning strains of karakul ewes after the war, when he settled here permanently from Germany. Mr Rhennin was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, hence his fluency in what is, in fact, a foreign tongue to him. Age?'

'Forty-eight.'

The slightly world-weary droop of the eyelids belied the dynamic go-getter beneath. He'd make a fortune out of karakul, but his heart was in diamonds. He was Spartan in his tastes, although his bachelor estate near Keetmanshoop was a show-place. We'd first met when I was on the Brukkaros job for the Americans, since Keetmanshoop is_ the jumping-off place for the extinct volcano.

'The object of your project, Mr Rhennin?'

To mine diamonds from the sea off the Sperrgebiet coast.'

'You consider this a feasible proposition?'

'Yes. I am prepared to sink about a million dollars into it.'

'Your own, Mr Rhennin'

'The Mazy Zed is to be financed by floating a company in which I shall be the major shareholder.'

'Which brings me automatically to my next question: this is a big venture?'

'Very big.'

'You would agree with Mr Shelborne that capital — lots of it — as well as pioneering enterprise, are required for a unique undertaking of this nature?'

'Yes. I consider Mr Shelborne's estimate of half a million sterling to be conservative. This is the first time in the history of mining — in South Africa or anywhere else — that diamonds are to be mined from the sea.'

The fudge was carping: 'You say mined, Mr Rhennin. You mean, to be mined or, if we take Mr Stratton literally, not to be mined in the conventional sense at all?'

'That is correct, my lord.'

Shardelow eased the Judge away from his man. 'You are aware that in the past the South African Government, which exercises complete control over the diamond rights along the Sperrgebiet, has set its face against small prospecting enterprises — what one would term, in mining parlance, wildcat ventures?'

'I am.'

'Would you amplify that?'

'I quote a statement from the Minister of Mines, — "In the past few decades the Government, in the face of increasing pressure for diamond prospecting rights to be granted off the coast of South-west Africa, has refused to allow such ventures because it is felt that knowledge, equipment and finance are prerequisites. I should like to explain that, having regard to the marine hazards and to the scale of operations required to make a success of such a huge venture, the Government feels convinced that it would be doing a disservice not only to the country but to the persons concerned if they were thus induced to risk their capital — perhaps with more enthusiasm than understanding of the magnitude of the task involved — in a project of this nature".'

'Do you feel that the Government's stated policy would apply to the previous two applicants, namely, Mr Shelborne and Miss Caldwell?'

'Yes.'

'But not to the Mazy Zed?'

'No.'

These are wide and generalized asseverations, Mr Rhennin,' snapped the Judge. 'You are prepared to go into detailed technicalities?'

Rhennin said dryly, 'I had barely started, my lord. I was clearing the ground…'

'Prospecting the overburden, rather, Mr Rhennin?'

'Your lordship could put it that way. Here at Oranjemund they move twenty tons of sand to win one carat of diamonds, which weighs 1/142nd part of an ounce. The ratio is eighty million parts of sand to one of diamonds. The major part is rubbish.'

'Diamond mining and court proceedings seem to have a lot in common.'

'I bow to your lordship's superior experience.'

The two glared at one another. The girl and Shelborne were amused. They could afford to be. A few more cracks like that and the Mazy Zed project would be as good as in Davy Jones's locker.

Shardelow rushed to the rescue. He whipped an opaque plastic covering from the object which had intrigued everyone but us, a model of the Mazy Zed. It was about four feet long and eighteen inches high. Even as a model it looked more like a block of flats than a ship.

Rhennin stepped down and pointed with a ruler.

'You will notice at first the complete lack of gunnels and the low freeboard, my lord.'

'I had not done so. Why?'

'The Mazy Zed has no engines. She has to be towed and manoeuvred by a tug. Here are her six anchors.'

'Six?'

'Yes. The seas along the Sperrgebiet are persistently heavy. The water will break right across the barge.'

'Will it float, Mr Rhennin? It seems top-heavy.'

It was a question we had asked ourselves.

'We have carried out tank tests under simulated conditions of wind and sea. She floats all right.'

'I'd say she'd roll like — like…'

Shardelow grinned. 'The correct sea term, my lord, in case your lordship does not see fit to use it as coming from the bench, is "she rolls like a bitch".'

'Thank you, Mr Shardelow: the expression will go under your name in the record.'

'I was saving your lordship that embarrassment.'

Rhennin pointed to the box-like structures. 'These are the living quarters for fifty-five men. Under these big ventilators are kitchens, — five-course meals will be standard. Water is distilled from the sea by electric separators, like car battery plates. Stores are for three months. There will be expert technicians both for mining and maintenance of this floating mining unit, which is what I prefer to call the Mazy Zed.'

'What are those curious-looking cranes and hoses on the deck?' asked the Judge.

Those are the heart of the Mazy Zed, so to speak. The thick rubber hoses will be lowered on to the ocean floor by means of derricks and gantries.'

'I think it would be easier if my client explained the underlying principle,' said Shardelow.

The Judge nodded and Rhennin resumed. 'The rubber hose will go down about 200 feet. Attached to the end are heavy steel nozzles. The apparatus is known as a jet lift.'

'You could say that the principle is similar in operation to a vacuum cleaner?'

'Yes. In fact, we have coined the phrase, Hoovering the sea-bed.'

'In practice, how do the hoses operate?'

'When the pipes fill with water, highly compressed air is forced through the nozzles into the mud and gravel on the ocean floor. As it is disturbed, it whirls about and moves up the pipe. The outside pressure of the ocean forces gravel and diamonds to the top where processing and sorting take place. The residue is dumped. The air forced into the hose creates a siphon effect and at the same time stirs up the sea-bed.'

'It amounts then to diamond mining by suction? This is not simply theory, Mr Rhennin? — you've tested the idea?'

Rhennin smiled. It illuminated the rather drawn, authoritative face. 'When one is staking a million dollars, one does test beforehand, my lord.'

'Thank you, Mr Rhennin. You may return to the witness-box.' He peered at the model. 'An extraordinary craft, Mr Shardelow.'

'If I might revert to my expression earlier, my lord, a bitch.'

A glow overlaid for a moment the medieval chill., 'I might almost agree in my private capacity, though not of course as an officer of the law.'

Shardelow turned to Rhennin. 'The Mazy Zed application covers prospecting and mining rights over about 2500 square miles of open sea, does it not?'

That is correct.'

'What size do you estimate the undersea field?'

'About sixty million cubic yards of diamond-bearing gravel. If my calculations are correct, the Mazy Zed may recover up to fifty tons of gem-quality diamonds.'

'A net yield of about twelve pounds ten shillings per carat. How many carats per day must you bring up to pay your way?'

'Roughly 150.'

'How long will it be until the field is exhausted?'

That is impossible to say until operations get under way. At Oranjemund it has taken thirty years to scrape away 150 million tons of overburden.'

'A final question, Mr Rhennin: do you consider your new method superior to grabs and dredges?'

'The Mazy Zed will employ a revolutionary principle. Grabs and dredges have been used for two centuries and any improvement has been purely superficial.'

I felt sorry for Shelborne and the girl. As Rhennin spoke, they involuntarily turned towards each other, in a curious spontaneous gesture which I was to remember later.

Shardelow sat down.

The Judge said, 'Mr Rhennin, there are still one or two points which have arisen in the mind of the court. The first is security. The prevention of illicit diamond buying and smuggling of stones from what proposes to be a very large venture is the concern of this court; it is indeed the concern of any such court to prevent crime and the infringement of the diamond laws.'

'Security aboard the Mazy Zed will be much easier than ashore,' replied Rhennin. 'The barge is a self-contained unit completely cut off from the shore. Leave will be granted only once in three months. There are no harbours where we will operate. If a man were rash enough to steal our diamonds and by some means got ashore, the desert…'

Rhennin paused and glanced at Shelborne.

'Yes, Mr Rhennin?'

'The desert would take care of him, as it did of Caldwell.'

It was an unnecessary thrust. The girl turned white. I didn't care for the look on Shelborne's face.

The Judge did not miss it either. 'Yes — I see. The second question is, how far from the shore do you intend to operate?'

'Up to the thirty-fathom line. The sea-bed mud persists…'

'You miss my point. How far, in terms of miles, from the shore?'

'Within territorial limits.'

Three miles in other words?'

Rhennin looked uneasy. 'Well, the South African Government has recently extended the limit of territorial waters from three to twelve miles for trawlers. It is not generally recognized by some other countries, however.'

'What have other countries to do with it, Mr Rhennin?'

'To be frank, my lord, we are not happy about the presence of so-called Russian trawling fleets off the Sperrgebiet. Fishermen say their fishing gear lies rusting on deck while they pursue… ah… other activities. The Poles have spent large sums on improving the port of Conakry, in Guinea near Freetown, which they use as a trawler base for these waters…'

Shardelow got to his feet. 'I have here a statement from the Chief of the South African Naval Staff. It says that the Russian ships belong to the Second Atlantic Group of the Kalingrad People's Sea Administration.'

'Whatever that might mean.' The Judge continued his questions: 'You expect trouble, then, outside the three-mile limit, Mr Rhennin?'

'We are taking precautions.'

Shardelow softened the blunt words: 'Perhaps it would be better to say that the Mazy Zed will be protected by local measures…'

'What precautions, Mr Rhennin?'

'Patrol boats — radar — radio listening devices.'

Mr Justice de Villiers leaned back. 'Maybe you'll have a private war on your hands.'

Shardelow played it down. 'Scarcely, my lord. Inside territorial waters we are assured of the protection of the South African naval forces. The two patrol boats are just in case…'

'Of a surprise raid, Mr Shardelow?'

The reporter was writing furiously. Shardelow tried to steer the Judge away from the subject. 'No. Just so that no one will think the Mazy Zed is a sitting duck, so to speak. There will be a fortune in diamonds aboard if we are successful. As an additional safety measure, we have had special brass containers manufactured to hold the diamonds. These have buoys attached in case they have to be thrown overboard if there is trouble…'

'The court wishes to hear more about your patrol boats and radar.'

Rhennin said, 'I have an option on two hydrofoil highspeed boats at Messrs Samuel White's, of Cowes. They were originally ordered for the Royal Navy, but are now redundant because of budgetary considerations.'

I grinned to myself. Rhennin wasn't telling the Judge that both boats were armed with heavy-calibre machine-guns forrad.

'Speed?'

'Fifty, maybe fifty-five knots.'

The Judge's eyebrows went up. 'They must be absorbing a slice of capital, Mr Rhennin.'

'It was fortunate that they were redundant and the price… Like the radar, it is first-class equipment, but cheap.'

'You seem to have thought of everything, Mr Rhennin.'

'I hope so. There is a lot at stake, and we know that the sea and the Sperrgebiet in themselves will present major problems.'

'Thank you, Mr Rhennin.' He stepped down. The Judge addressed the court generally. 'The Consolidated Diamond Mining Company has kindly arranged for those concerned in these proceedings to make a visit to the site of the diamond workings this afternoon. I and my learned assessors feel that an inspection in loco may give us all an insight into the problems and rewards of diamond mining on this unfriendly coast. We will proceed in parties by Land-Rover to the field plants. Colonel Duvenhage has arranged to make the security search purely nominal.'

I grinned to myself. The fudge was really taking time off; there was no need to inspect the Oranjemund workings since they bore no relation to sea-bed mining, but the trip would give us a welcome break to the cut-and-thrust of the court proceedings.

When MacDonald came to collect me in the afternoon, however, my anticipation turned to dismay. With him were Shelborne and Mary Caldwell. It is one thing to be opposed in a court of law where a buffer of formality takes the edge off the hostility, quite another to be confined in a small vehicle with a man who pulled a gun on you. The Gquma's cabin was too fresh in my mind for me to be anything but hostile, although Shelborne nodded formally to me.

I drew MacDonald angrily on one side. 'What the devil is this — I want to go with Rhennin.'

'Orders. You three stay together with me.'

'Whose orders?'

'Colonel Duvenhage's.'

Did the security chief think my chat with Shelborne in the boat had something more to it than met the eye?

'And under orders, we're all to be friends together now? You too?'

'I hope so.'

The mailed fist. The velvet glove was very velvet still, but I reckoned MacDonald could become pretty tough if he wanted to.

'All right,' I snapped. 'But don't expect anything from my side. I'm going purely for the ride.'

He smiled. 'I wonder.'

Shelborne sat in front with him, and Mary and I behind.

'We'll make for Area G first,' called MacDonald.

Approaching the mining area, I saw the mast of the Gquma above Anvil Creek. To the right was Oranjemund, unbelievably green; to the left, the wild agglomeration of sea, sandbars and surf which is the mouth of the Orange. The fog from the sea had lifted, and the light was direct, brutal, flanking the high dunes with black shadow.

Shelborne peered out, searching for something. He was shaking, as if from blackwater fever. His concentration was so intense that I found that I too was looking among the grey-white dunes riding endlessly to the horizon, though I did not know what for.

'Hold her north-west by a half north — there's something I want to see.' The lapse into seafaring terminology showed how preoccupied he was.

MacDonald laughed good-naturedly. 'Come again, chum, it don't make sense.'

Mary had changed from the elegant outfit of the courtroom into a pair of white slacks with a green Paisley top. She broke the tension — deliberately, I felt. 'He's a windjammer captain — ask him in terms of degrees.'

MacDonald took his cue, grinning. He wasn't the sort to keep up the strained atmosphere. 'Come again, Captain! I have to hold the tiller, or else we'll be pooped!'

Shelborne relaxed, too, although his eyes were on the seaward side. I couldn't see anything. 'Steady on three-two-zero degrees, then,' he smiled.

Close to the beach, quite near to the first workings he called out, 'Stop! This is the place.'

The surrounding dunes were featureless, but to the north the dun of the desert was torn yellow. As far as the eye could see into the dust-and-spray-hazed horizon were rows of undulations like a draped evening gown. On the left lay the sea. The diamond workings reched to the high-water mark. The area was laagered for its first part by a wall of sand at right angles to the sea, but about a mile inland it turned parallel with the coastline. A road intersected the workings on the seaward side and next to it was a gigantic horseshoe-shaped dump from the field screening plant, which stood out orange and red against the dun dunes, like a surrealist Coney Island roller-coaster. A succession of dumps receded northwards along the road, giving a curious quilted effect to the desert, like a Tibetan Sherpa's jacket. Here the Namib had been violated by huge tournadozers, tourna-pull scrapers and spitting rotary bucket excavators; bright yellow salt-proofed chassis and blue tyres made a moving line of colour thirty feet down in the diamond trenches. Everything has to be protected against sand and sea at Oranjemund, for the blowing sand is abrasive enough to strip a car of its paint within hours. Past the machinery, from the desert as far as the sea, a conveyor-belt ran the length of the field screening plant carrying its precious gravel. Grease tables and electro-static separators take the stones mechanically from the gravel, but the final sorting is by human hand and eye. Still farther north, where Area G tailed off, there was a succession of other workings: Uub-Vley, Mittag, Kerbe Huk and Affenrucken.

We got out and stood ankle-deep in the warm sand. I cursed Duvenhage inwardly, although I admitted to myself it was hard to think of our relaxed companion as the same man as my formidable opponent in the yacht's cabin. I tried to keep out of the conversation. Shelborne picked up a big horn-shaped shell, weighing it in his hand.

'I saw these here four years before Merensky.'

MacDonald gasped. 'You were here before Merensky?'

'Yes. Caldwell and I camped right here.'

Mary said, 'Tell me about those early days with my father. Did he really find diamonds here before the Oyster Line? Did he know it was a major strike? Is the legend true?'

Shelbome said softly: 'If he didn't actually prove it before his luck called him away, at least he guessed. More than guessed. You see, we had our next trip to Oranjemund all planned. Our first big find here had made it possible — a beautiful 16 1/2 — carat stone, a pure blue-white, which we took from the surface just over there.' (He pointed to a spot about a hundred yards away.) 'It was enough to finance our next journey.' He shrugged. 'You know the rest. Caldwell's usual destiny. When he came back later there were 1000 claims pegged, and Merensky had taken a fortune from a small trench at the start of the Oyster Line.'

'You returned with my father?'

He said with strange sadness: 'Yes, I was always with Caldwell.'

MacDonald interrupted. 'What are you looking for, Mr Shelborne? I want still to show you something of the new prospecting area, but we won't have time if we hang around here.'

'Come,' said Shelborne. We trailed through heavy sand to the crest of the dune. 'There it is. I'm glad they didn't disturb it.'

There was a small cairn about fifty yards away.

'My wife's grave.'

'My God!' exclaimed MacDonald. 'You didn't bring a woman up here in the old days!'

'I did. For nearly forty years now I have regretted it.'

'You mean to say,' said Mary, 'that your wife died here while, you and my father were prospecting? You didn't leave her alone…'

He went to her side with a curious affectionate gesture. 'No, my dear. It was only a short, three-day trip with your father. She had a tent and plenty of water and supplies. Of course, there wasn't a thing here then. It was desert, nothing but unadorned desert. When we came back we found her dead and the babe gone.'

'Baby? There was a baby too?… How?'

'Mary had been shot and the camp looted. There must have been more than one of them, whoever murdered her, for there were a lot of tracks, human and horses', leading away into the desert. The little boy was gone.'

'Didn't you look for him…?'

'He wasn't very old, maybe eight or nine months. We searched, of course, but we never found the body. It haunts me still. Maybe a strandwolf…'

MacDonald was shaken too by Shelborne's story, and asked him if he wanted to go over to the grave. Shelborne said yes.

'I'll wait here,' Mary said.

'So will I,' I murmured. Despite everything, I found myself drawn to Shelborne. Deep down, I respected him for his refusal, and his curious air of inner power fascinated me. We watched the two trudge down the dune towards the forlorn cairn.

'By comparison, it makes my being born in a train seem pretty civilized,' she said. The amber flecks in her eyes were blurred with tears. I noticed for the first time a tiny vein close to the surface of the skin between the bridge of her nose and right eyebrow. Later I came to recognize it as a signal flag of her emotions.

I gave a short laugh. 'That puts me nowhere. I don't know where I was born, or who my parents were, even.'

She put her hand on my arm. For the first time I was aware of her warmth. 'John Tregard…'

I'd lived with it too long to be unduly concerned. Tregard was a missionary — in these parts, actually, south of the big bend in the Orange River in the Richtersveld — and you know what that means. He thought there were a lot of souls in need of salvation among the Hottentot gangs. He adopted me after finding me running wild.'

'And your parents?'

'It was pretty rough up here then. I haven't a clue who they were. The Tregards were kind — while they lasted. Then the usual pattern: orphanage, Sunday visits out to kind old ladies, fight for education — you know, it's been repeated a thousand times.'

'But only once for John Tregard, and that's what counts.'

That's a strange thing to say.'

'Now you're a surveyor, a skilled professional.'

I smiled at her defence of me. All the penniless years, the frantic fight for schooling, the dreary digs, the endless study — somehow it all seemed worth while then.

'I got there in the end.'

'I'd guess sooner, not later.'

'I was the youngest graduate of my year at Cape Town University.'

She said impetuously, 'I hope the Mazy Zed wins — for your sake.'

'I'm a freelance…' I started to say, but she broke in.

'You're a loner, aren't you, both in your job — and in yourself.'

I shrugged, but it made me feel good to tell her, none the less. 'You heard the John Tregard story.'

She said slowly, 'I thought you seemed pretty intense in court, especially today. I'd say this was more than a job to you.'

I was back in the Gquma's cabin. I was seeing that name engraved deeply on the ornate butt of the Borchardt. It was her father. I could not bring myself to tell her.

I said lightly, 'I'm the sort of John the Baptist of the outfit — the one who goes before.'

She wasn't deceived. 'What you mean is that at the first opportunity you'll strike out for Mercury…'

'And Strandloper's Water.'

She turned seawards and wrinkled her eyes against the sun, as if seeking an answer out across the white-green water.

'Why? Why should I?' she demanded, coming close to me. 'Why should I accept Shelborne's account of my father's death…? Yet I do.'

I told her about Shelborne's flat rejection of our offer aboard the cutter, not the rest.

'I would have sold. I… I like him — I like you both.'

'I don't believe his story of your father's death,' I said flatly.

'Yes, but why, even if you don't, should you involve yourself in something which can't possibly do any good, whichever way you look at it?'

I could not have answered her very explicitly at that stage myself. If Atacama and Takla Makan rang for me, then Mercury and Strandloper's Water were like those old-time wreckers' bells placed on the rocks to draw the victim's ship, although he himself might be fairly sure of his position. I had to go.

She said, 'You didn't approach me with an offer.'

'You heard what Shardelow said: for the purposes of the Mazy Zed application we are treating you as one.'

She didn't reply, but went on staring at me with a curious, searching look. I took refuge in words. 'You didn't make much of your case, did you? You let him get away with all the handwriting doubts and didn't press him about Strandloper's Water.'

'Strandloper's Water again,' she echoed.

I wanted to be out of that quiet, deep scrutiny. I bent down and picked up a handful of sand, letting it trickle through my fingers. She squatted down next to me. 'The sand — it holds so many secrets: my father, Shelborne, the woman they killed over there, the baby. You don't think Shelborne told the truth about my father?'

She had to know what I felt: 'I believe he extracted the cession and then murdered him.'

'No! no! He wouldn't have, not him…'

'Maybe simply left him to die in the dunes.'

'He is not that sort of man…'

'Listen,' I said harshly, thinking of the Borchardt, 'Shelborne is tough, mighty tough. But I admit there's a lot more to him than mere toughness. There's that spark, that "beyond the ranges" spark, which I cannot put my finger on. I admit that I cannot reconcile that side of him with what I've just said. There's a kindliness, too — but the fascination is that — that…'

'Adventurer of the spirit.'

'Yes, yes, that's it. There's a sort of mortification of the body about him, he endures in order to humble the body — deliberately — in some greater cause.'

'Lawrence of Arabia's camel ride.'

'Shelborne's Atacama. Shelborne's Takla Makan.'

'Shelborne's Namib.'

She, too, let the sand run through her fingers, the only break in our long silence. Then she ended it abruptly with a curious gesture to the north, which in my hypersensitive frame of mind I took to include Mercury and its dangers, the evil of which Shelborne had spoken, and — wonderfully — a care within herself for me.

Her words did not cover the compass of her gesture. 'I like Shelborne and I like you — it's as if I were falling back on… on… a bond already forged. But put diamonds on the table, and we're fighting like a pack of dogs.'

I replied drily, 'It happens. Look at your father and Shelborne.'

The two men were returning. She stood up, looking down at me. I can still see her. 'For God's sake be careful when you go near Mercury, John.'

I looked up at her. I said nothing.

'For my sake too, John.'

Shelborne and MacDonald came within earshot. I don't think either she or I heard much of MacDonald's expositions of diamond mining, from prospecting trenches to sweeping out potholes with brooms for the precious stones, — we were as silent as the great machines which, electric-powered, tear away soundlessly at the desert. The power is fed in in the face of immense technical difficulties: salt, corrosion, salt fogs, distance, sand, but they have all been beaten by the backroom boys of Oranjemund.

We returned to our security-hedged fortress as dark was falling.

Next day the tension in the courtroom was heightened by a late start. Shelborne sat drawn and haggard, his faded clothes carefully pressed. Mary, elegant in black suit and small hat, said a brief word to me and hurried past. Rhennin was glum after a long session the previous night with Shardelow.

'Silence in court!'

Mr Justice de Villiers gave full weight to the drama, walking slowly to the bench, inclining his head gravely to Shardelow, Mennin and the rest of us.

He sat down and said briefly: 'Mr Shelborne, I shall not require to re-examine you, as I had thought earlier.

There is nothing more to be gained by questioning Miss Caldwell further either.'

He paused meaningfully and consulted some notes.

Shardelow whispered, The bastard! Every time he plays that trick I get a new ulcer!'

The Judge said in formal tones: 'The court has before it the application of Frederick Shelborne, prospector, for the maintenance of rights granted and ceded to him by Frederick William Caldwell, prospector, in 1930 in pursuance of a German Imperial Decree vesting those rights in Mr Caldwell in 1913. The court finds there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the document submitted by Mr Shelborne.'

'Christ!' muttered Rhennin to me. 'Listen to his tone. Here we go for a ride!'

Shardelow muttered urgently: 'You'll appeal, of course?'

Rhennin nodded. It looked as if the gamble had paid off for Shelborne. We'd fight, of course, and perhaps come to terms; one of those neat out-of-court settlements when counsel, bland and suave with extra fees, announce that the parties have mutually agreed…

'The court, however, cannot accept the deed of cession. There are serious discrepancies…'

Rhennin said under his breath, 'Will the girl sell, John?'

'Yes, she said she would. She'll take Ј5000 any day.'

Rhennin passed my message on to Shardelow. Mary was white-faced. The shadows round her eyes, skilfully concealed by make-up, were visible nevertheless — under the courtroom lights, which were on because the sea fog was still down. The courtroom felt cold and alien to me.

'Look at the old man,' said Rhennin quietly.

Shelborne leaned forward, and to the top of his bald head his colour was like lead. His hands were twitching and he coughed — a sharp, rattling, nervous cough.

'The court has heard the application of the organization which styles itself the Mazy Zed, an odd name. Unfortunately the court has no jurisdiction over the naming of companies. I find it is duly registered…'

'Thank God for that!' Rhennin whispered to me. 'He'd have called us the Undermarine Octahedron Exploration Company!'

'The court is called upon to assess the value of the present application in terms of a past concession. I note there is no pro forma application by either of the other two parties in respect of present-day rights. After the First World War the South African Government allowed certain German diamond companies to continue mining in the territory. In law, however, such an ex parte dispensation cannot be construed as allowing of the reverse, namely, that the grant of a prospecting concession by the previous German regime should have force and effect in law.'

'Jesus!' exclaimed Rhennin softly. He was sweating, despite the coldness of the court. The pendulum had swung back to our side; small wonder Shardelow had ulcers.

The Treaty of Versailles, to which the then South African Government under General Smuts was signatory, makes no mention of this. No principle is laid down by either the treaty proper or by subsequent codicils.'

Rhennin pushed me a note from Shardelow. It read: 'I want a blue-white, five carats, first one out of the sea as a memento — and no charge!'

I nodded and grinned. It was practically in the bag now.

The validity of the concession submitted by the first applicant, namely, Frederick Caldwell, is therefore irrelevant…'

Shelborne was on his feet, his face livid. He was trying to say something. Everyone's eyes were upon him.

The Judge went on. 'I beg your pardon, a slip of the tongue. The first application was in the name of Frederick Shelborne. I ask the recorder to take special note: Frederick Shelborne, not Frederick William Caldwell.'

Shelborne sank back into his chair, his eyes staring.

'Likewise the second application, that of Mary Caldwell, fails. The German concession, in the eyes of myself and of my two learned assessors, lapsed when the armed forces of Germany signed the surrender to General Botha's army in July 1915.

There remains only the Mazy Zed application. This not only has the scope, but is in accordance with certain prerequisites of capital and outlay specified by the authorities. The Mazy Zed application is accordingly granted. May I take this opportunity of wishing the venture — a unique venture in the history of mining — success.'

I went that afternoon with MacDonald to Anvil Creek. He had been assigned to make sure that Shelborne and the Gquma left the security area. I waited in the parked Land-Rover while he made his search. It did not surprise me when he came back empty-handed, without the Borchardt or its diamonds. I had not mentioned either to MacDonald — I felt it was something between Shelborne and myself. Shelborne spoke neither to him nor to me. Then, with almost frightening skill, he tacked the beautiful cutter down the narrow waterway to the river proper. He sat, hard-faced, in the open cockpit at the tiller; we followed him in our vehicle along the river bank to the sandbars, where the spindrift broke over us on the wind. The Gquma, head reaching on the starboard tack, merged her white sails in the white of broken water and bars at the river mouth. Would she live? For more than an hour we watched and wondered. Then, against the green of the sea; we saw the topsail emerge, a sail as unmistakably individual as the lonely man who sailed her. Round she came, close-hauled, and disappeared to the north.

5

'Don't Tread on Me'

Eighteen months later the Mazy Zed was no longer a project of models and blueprints but a reality of ships and men.

The mining barge had been launched in Table Bay. Cape brandy for the launch. Flags, bunting, sirens. Ministerial speeches. Unique project, unique undertaking. Spirit of adventure. Unique ship: not another like it afloat. Planning, fitting-out, machinery, — machinery, more and more specialized machinery. Pumps, hoses, pumps, pumps. Refitting and strengthening the tug which was to nursemaid the odd craft. Tow-wires, special heavy winches, tougher cables. Breaking strain tests off the Cape of Storms in a gale. Curses, bruises, broken fingers, seas streaming across unprotected decks, life-lines rigged. A bitch of a ship. She looked like a block of flats and rolled like a whore. Mazy Zed. The Mazy Zed. She was headlines from the moment she was conceived.

I was busy on my own ship. Before the Oranjemund court hearing I had taken an option on an old South African Hydrographic Survey vessel, formerly an Antarctic whaler. The Southern Floe was old, whalers don't grow old like other ships. Her 1850 horsepower triple expansion engines wouldn't give the sixteen knots of her prime, but she was still good for a couple less and with new sealed casings for reducing their noise, she sounded sweeter than she really was. Just over 400 tons, she had high rounded bows and a cruiser stern. It was the marked flare of her bows and the squat way she sat in the water which gave me her name — the Praying Mantis. The mantis is the sacred good-luck bringer of the Namib Bushmen: we'd need all the luck for the Mazy Zed venture.

The navy had left some of its obsolete surveying equipment in the ship, and it was thrown in with the bargain basement price of Ј3000. My plans for a quick victory over the Sperrgebiet coast centred, however, on a special electronic instrument, developed recently in South Africa, known as the Hydrodist. The echo-sounder barely passed muster, while the superb American Sonoprobe, which gives a sort of X-ray picture of the ocean floor, was outside my resources. I was glad they'd left the crow's nest and heavy rigging on the foremast, which would assist me to con her through the shoals and rocks. It took me nearly six months to get the Praying Mantis ready for sea. I went ahead of the main outfit to Angras Juntas on a lesson-filled shake-down cruise and returned to Cape Town two months later with a detailed survey and a deep respect for the coast.

I found the name Caldwell back in the news. Mary's mother had died. Normally, I suppose, the death of the invalid old lady would have passed unnoticed, but a hawk's eye on the — news desk must have spotted her name in the death notices after the court build-up. Again, Mary was fair game for the reporters. I'd not seen her since the Oranjemund hearing. Although her home was in Rondebosch, not five miles from the docks, I was too busy with the Praying Mantis to keep in touch. There were times, however, when I recalled our afternoon on the Oyster Line. If Oranjemund had forged any bond, it was an odd one, and her mother's death gave me an opportunity of getting in touch with her again. She was pleased to hear me on the telephone and invited me round. The home was Caldwell, Caldwell, all Caldwell — chunks of rose quartz from the lunar mountains of the middle Orange River, agates and chalcedony from wind-swept beaches, and other prospecting bric-a-brac.

Mary needed a job. With her mother's death she was penniless. I felt good, somehow, when I remembered Shelborne's request to me to get her a sorter's position aboard the Mazy Zed, and I rang Rhennin. Rhennin Hesitated: Mary would be the only woman among fifty-rive men; the tradition of the sea is that a woman aboard is bad luck. I asked her bluntly about it. She shrugged wanly and said she had no commitments, no ties anywhere, and she'd join the Mazy Zed if Rhennin would have her. After a sorting test Rhennin not only wanted her, he redoubled his first offer and forgot about the bad luck legend. She had an almost uncanny touch, intuitive flair, when it came to spotting and handling gems. The Caldwell touch lived in her.

The Mazy Zed was now anchored off Angras Juntas under the shadow of the guano island of Sinclair where, among millions of birds, seals and penguins, the guano workers scraped away a zombie existence in rags and isolation. The guano islands — run under government supervision — are divided into small groups, each under a headman, and the workers are shifted from island to island by him to gather in the 'white gold'. Having seen Angras Juntas's guano men — crude, moronic, bitter as the ammoniacal stink of the rocks — I wondered about Shelborne's remark that Mercury had a bad name in the islands. If Mercury were bad after Sinclair…

Angras Juntas had been no more than a reconnaissance. My real mission was at hand: I was off the Sperrgebiet in my own ship, bound for the place where instinct and inclination guided me — Mercury Island.

'Rockets to port! Red, green, blue!'

Minnaar, the burly South African mate, was out on the port wing of the Praying Mantis's bridge. He had tried to bluff me that he couldn't sleep because of the unnatural clamminess of the night, but in fact he felt as uneasy as I did about the grim Sperrgebiet coastline abeam. The only other white man aboard was Sven, the Swedish engineer. The others were Coloured and Malay fishermen, recruited down the coast.

The rockets burst out to sea. I grabbed my Japanese night-glasses and in a moment I was at Minnaar's side.

He pointed. 'Bloody Russian trawlers!'

There was nothing except the nightly bank of sea fog rolling in, no boat or ship in distress. I strained into the blackness. This was the second strange phenomenon within hours. A magnificent sunset had flared the great landmark Saddle Hill into a red-hot slag heap, dying to a clear cold indigo in a cinnamon-and-green sea-sky.

'There!'

Through the gauze sputtered a brilliant pyrotechnic change and interchange, linked up with whorls, discs and rays.

'Christ!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'Looks like the whole goddamned Second Soviet Atlantic Group!'

'We'll investigate — steer west by south by a quarter south,' I told the man at the wheel. Fishermen, they steered by time-honoured commands. Two hundred and fifty-six degrees would have meant little to them.

The wheel went down and our wake turned molten gold. Forrad, another radial of flares soared behind the fog. I laughed shakily when I realized what it was: 'Phosphorescence!'

Minnaar was incredulous. 'I've been south in the ice, but I've never seen anything like this, not even the Aurora.'

I turned to the helmsman. 'Belay there. Course, speed, as before.'

'Aye, aye, sir.'

The superb display bickered round the old whaler, transforming her hastily red-leaded plates into squares or glory; the foremast's tracery of rigging shed its workaday Cinderella black for princess green and electric blue; the long racing seas from the south-west glanced with ethereal light until I wished the wind itself would become substantial and take colour. A reef, half-awash, was a diadem and a lonely bird-voyager — it could have been an albatross — flashed incandescent radiance in losing altitude to follow the sullen cliffs.

'I don't like it,' said Minnaar gloomily. 'It means trouble.'

'Trouble?'

'Ag, man, fancy sunsets and this sort of thing at night' — he waved at the evanescent colours — 'and the way I feel, it all means trouble.'

'What do you mean, how you feel?'

He said rather apologetically. 'My cabin's sticky and warm. It's winter, it's cold, and the cabin should be chilly, especially with that fog coming up. Also, my nose tickles — inside.'

I laughed. 'You've got nothing more than a head cold coming.'

'No man.' He was uneasy. 'It's this Sperrgebiet and those colours. I'm not sick.'

'Why don't you turn in?' I asked. He was voicing fears which I preferred to leave undefined.

He went on. 'We lost the Cape Cross near Mercury on a night just like this, and that's why it gives me the willies too — a bit fresh, but hot, sort of. There was also one hell of a sunset the night before.'

'But no phosphorescence?'

'No — I would have remembered.'

I played it down. 'Everyone in Luderitz says old Captain Walker was as drunk as a fiddler's bitch the night he put the Cape Cross ashore.'

'I wouldn't know how drunk he was.' retorted Minnaar. 'But he was a fine sailor, even when he was full of pots. He'd already got busy and slipped the cable by the time I got on deck and started organizing things.'

'I'd guess by that time you were almost ashore.'

'You'll see where,' he replied grimly. 'Right at the foot of the cliff. We all but got clear.'

'I'll make the wreck our landfall, then,' I said more cheerfully than I felt. Captain Walker had been drowned and Minnaar, one of eight men to escape, was lucky to be alive. He had tramped along the wild coast towards Luderitz for help; a party of Boy Scouts had found him just in time on a dune outside the town, raving. There were only two miles to go, but he had been too exhausted to make it.

At first light, our nerves frayed and stretched from searching for landmarks, I spotted Minnaar's old ship at the entrance to Spencer Bay, lying at the base of a 600-foot cliff which rose sheer out of the sea. It was Sudhuk, the notorious Little Gibraltar of the Sperrgebiet, although the Mediterranean could not have produced the desolate loom of shoreline or heavy swell which left markers of white menace across reefs and half-submerged rocks. The fog cleared momentarily under a gust of wind. The forlorn wreck was close — closer than I had thought.

'North by east.'

I rang for half-speed ahead from slow: I'd need extra knots with the run of the sea bucking under the stern.

'There's all sorts of ruddy sets and currents hereabouts,' growled Minnaar, unshaven, still uneasy. 'For Christ's sake don't put this bastard ashore!'

It was Mercury, not Sudhuk, I wanted to see. I knew it lay less than a mile to the north. The butterflies in my stomach weren't all because of the job of entering the bay through the vicious southern channel. I had warned Minnaar that Shelborne might cause trouble.

The wind gusted. The fog fell back. The bay was clear.

Mercury!

A sharp, rocky pyramid, with a base about a quarter of a mile long, lay like a discoloured, off-white fang in the bleak grey gums of the bay. The notorious Namib, desert of diamonds and death, reached right down to the water's edge. The sunlight, following the fog, was as harsh and unremitting as the naked bulb of the condemned cell. Shadows cowered under eroded scraps like grief etched by death in the face of a corpse. The bay was an over-exposed photograph having an amateurish bleach of ill-defined light to the north-east so that my eyes could not distinguish between the surf of the shore and the sand-smoke of the dunes.

There was no doubt, however, about the puff of white smoke which burst from the island.

'By Jesus!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'He's firing on us!'

The grey-white puff blew downwind like an amorphous tumbleweed.

'East by north, a quarter north! Slow ahead!' I corrected the Praying Mantis's swing on entering the channel, the torque of the single screw competing with the unaccountable sets and rebounds of current off Sudhuk.

My binoculars were on the puff. I saw the gun all right. A second cotton-wool puff billowed, soundless, as the wind carried it away. A flag broke out yellow from a jackstaff. The hoist and the gun were too neatly timed. At a busy port they would have been a matter for congratulation; here, on this gloomy and uninhabited coast, they were sinister. They meant the whaler was being watched into the bay.

'It's a signal gun,' I said tersely.

Minnaar had seen the flag, too. 'It's a sort of snake, it looks like, against a plain yellow background…' He started to spell out: 'D-o-n-t-t-r-e-a-d-o-n-m-e.'

'Don't tread on me!'

It came into my lenses. The snake stretched from corner to corner of the flag and the motto was underneath. 'Looks like a sidewinder to me.'

'More like a rattlesnake.' said Minnaar.

'What do you make of it?'

'I don't like it any more than the sight of that flippin' island — and I've seen enough of that from the wreck to last me all my life.'

'Let go forrad,' I ordered.

The anchor went overside with a crash and we were at rest a couple of cable-lengths away from Mercury. There was not a plant, a tree, greenery or shelter, natural or artificial, among the reflecting rocks, except a black encrustation of marine growths at high-water mark. On a flat stretch of rock stood two prefabs, dingy, grey, streaked with salt, anchored by heavy stay-wires like an Antarctic hutment. Two men stood at the old brass signal cannon, — the only other movement was the flapping of the strange yellow flag.

The place repelled, chilled, rejected me. It wasn't only Captain Morrell who had commented on the desolate, necrogenic air of the island. Like a thread through the records of the guano islands the sinister comment on Mercury recurs: 'the mind recoils with horror at this ocean death-cell'; again, 'it is dead, but behold it liveth' (from an old Quaker skipper's log). It was odd, too, that there was no sign of the guano, the 'white gold' I had seen the zombies scraping at Sinclair.

'Here comes the reception committee,' remarked Minnaar.

From one of the prefabs seven men emerged at a run. They split neatly into two files at the jetty and then, to our astonishment, swung themselves under it.

'Is this a circus?' exclaimed Minnaar.

I recognized it: Shelborne's windjammer welcome, an island tradition rigidly adhered to for the arrival of strangers — the flag, the gun, the trot to the boat, the bos'n's pipe shrilling. That was the ceremony, but what of our personal meeting? Shelborne must have seen me through his glasses. The boat broke from under the jetty, six oars pulling like clockwork, making effortlessly for the Praying Mantis.

That's smart, damn' smart seamanship,' conceded Minnaar.

I told him about Shelborne and his master's ticket in sail.

'Is that him at the tiller?'

'Yes. I wouldn't know what the hell he is wearing, though.'

We didn't look so good ourselves: unshaven, red-eyed from the long night's vigil, Minnaar in an old British battledress top, myself in a roll-top sweater and windcheater.

With an ease born of long practice the boat's oars went astern together under our lee. A big roller brought both craft together. Shelborne leaped nimbly, grabbed the foremast stays lightly with one hand, and dropped easily to the deck.

'He's over seventy, remember,' I told Minnaar.

'At thirty-five I couldn't do it that easy,' he replied.

My Coloured crew stared, a little awe-struck, as the big man came quickly towards the bridge ladder, making no sound on the planking. He wore moccasins and a black suit of shining sealskin, the collar framing his face in which the lines from the base of the long straight nose were more severely etched than I remembered; above the right cheekbone was a little dune of flesh, as if the wind had banked it up there.

'So you came to see for yourself?' His tone was not hostile, not friendly, but calculating, distant, as if he were out of my reach — a strange, disquieting aura of strength.

'Minnaar,' the mate introduced himself.

Shelborne jerked his head towards Sudhuk. The Cape Cross?'

It seemed the Praying Mantis was not alone in the bay, for in addition to the Cape Cross wreck, a small guano coaster rode apparently at anchor off the solitary beach.

Shelborne followed my glance. 'She's dead, you know, dead as the Cape Cross next door. Been there for thirty years.'

The wreck had the same life-in-death impact on me as Mercury itself. I shuddered. The way Shelborne spoke, he might have been the ascetic introducing the novice to the hairshirt and the whip.

'I told you; Mercury has a bad name.'

Minnaar growled, 'Why in hell's name didn't you come and take us off the Cape Cross? I walked all the way to Luderitz and damn' near died on a dune outside the place.'

'I tried for three days. You saw the sea. You had set off for Luderitz by the time I managed to get the flatboom in close. The crew were in the rigging still, but they were all dead…'

'Flatboom?' I asked. I wanted to stay on neutral ground.

He gestured at the boat which had brought him. 'It's a specialized craft which the New Bedford whalers left behind them here.'

'New Bedford?… I didn't know…'

He smiled, and I could not help being drawn to him. 'About a hundred years ago there were 250 ships at anchor off Mercury — the first big guano strike, you know. There was a rebellion among the crews humping the stuff aboard. They sent a British man-o'-war squadron. They came in the same channel as you did, firing grape — canister double-loaded above the round-shot.

You can still see some of the wrecks, although they're high in the dunes now — the coast changes quite a bit.'

The shore was an odd dun colour, relieved in the north-eastern corner of the bay by a rough T-shaped patch of pure white, which stood out like a pock-mark. I spotted another, and then another — a curious line of fan-shaped markers running inland out of sight.

'Is that where your flag came from — "don't tread on me"?'I asked.

'Not from those wrecks. Mine's an old American Revolution flag — Carolina's — in which they wrapped a true-blue skipper for burial on Mercury. Someone thought they were wasting a good flag and salvaged it. They called it the Rattlesnake Flag. I fly it for the benefit of my rare visitors.'

Thank you for the bos'n's pipe,' I added. 'It was good enough for the rights and authority of our Judge.'

His voice became harsh, bitter. 'Rights and authority! Take a look, will you! It's sixty miles by sea to the nearest police post from Mercury! Try the land and walk it — well, ask our friend here what that's like. It's the Namib, man, don't you understand…' He pulled up short. It looked as if my survey wasn't going to be a bed of roses. He went on quietly: 'Rights and authority? — I'm the headman here, and I have wide powers to protect the birds and seals. I won't have you disturb them in any way.'

I said placatingly, 'I'm not aiming to disturb the birds or seals. I'm using a special electronic surveying instrument which will make the minimum interference with them. But I must rig a couple of what we call "slave" transmitters ashore to operate it. For other readings I'll float some drums with small automatic transmitters in the bay — there'll be none of the old-fashioned business of putting up beacons, climbing rocks for vantage points, or the rest of it.'

'Where's Rhennin?' he asked.

'At Angras Juntas.' I told him about the Mazy Zed and Mary's job aboard her, following her mother's death. Shelborne was very silent, his eyes straying across the bay as if seeking something — I had no idea what it was — amidst the gaunt desolation.

It was so long until he spoke that Minnaar and I began to feel uncomfortable. 'It was good of you to get her the job. The Mazy Zed…' He tailed off. The strange eyes fixed me.

Then he glanced at his watch. His anger over Oranjemund, his detachment, seemed to vanish when I told him about Mary. There was now almost a schoolboyish, conspiratorial air about him. 'Perhaps you two would like to come ashore at six bells this afternoon? — I'll show you a sight you'll never forget. I'll send the flatboom for you.'

'Where's the Gquma — you've still got her, I hope?' I asked.

He was pleased. 'Of course. Her permanent mooring is in a sea-cave a mile or two up the coast. It's too exposed here — I'd lose her in a blow. At six bells, then?'

He was gone — silently, agilely.

'That bastard has a lot on his mind,' said Minnaar.

'He lost…' I told him the Oranjemund story in detail.

'Makes me feel almost sorry for the old so-and-so,' he said when I had finished. 'I'll say this for him, he was out in his boat that first morning after Walker put that old crap-shop ashore in a sea which would have made you piss yourself. I watched him for six hours dodging the waves, let alone the rigging and the hull. If anyone could have pulled it off, Shelborne would have.'

At three o'clock precisely the flatboom came skilfully alongside. It looked like a ship's boat of an older day, except that it was broader in the beam and the bows were slightly flared. Shelborne, at the tiller, greeted us with a preoccupied air. We pulled across to the stained and rusty jetty. Mercury from close up looked even more inhospitable. Landing from a boat lifting twenty feet with each swell was a hair-raising business, which meant jumping to the jetty on the roll. When the boat had been secured Shelborne led us up a short concrete path to the first prefab; the other, to which it was linked, was for the guano workers. The concrete, roughened to give a grip to the boot, was cracked and packed with eggshell fragments and feathers. The prefab was fronted by a long wooden platform resting on rusted metal piles and a short metal ladder led from it to the path. The windows were opaque with sea-scum.

Shelborne looked at his watch. 'We have time yet… We have to climb to the summit of the island back there. Some coffee and rusks from the galley first…'

It wasn't cookhouse with him, it was galley — still shipboard terms.

Minnaar nodded at a ship's bell with sealskin on the clapper which hung on the stoep. The brass was ornate, with worked edges.

'Portuguese gingerbread work,' Shelborne explained.

I read out the name. 'San Jodo 1888.'

'Portuguese warship,' he went on. 'She had a strange fate, strange even for this coast: years ago there must have been a lagoon where North Head is now — it's all quicksand today. They brought the San Jodo in for a careen and a repaint, and they could — there were then twenty-six feet of water inside the bar. The crew laid her on her side and — it seems incredible — the sandbars rose and closed the entrance, locking her in. The lagoon silted up. The crew died of thirst and starvation. The wreck's still there.'

'How do you know all this?' asked Minnaar.

'I made a rough plank bridge to the wreck when she became exposed after some upheaval of the sands. The San Jodo's log had been conscientiously written up. My signal cannon comes from her as well as the bell.'

Minnaar, stolid though he was, had become infected by the gloom of the bay. 'Too many wrecks and dead men around here for my liking — and I was nearly a goner myself, damn me.'

We sat down and Shelborne pulled out what looked like a cigar-holder, carved in soft soapstone. It took me several moments to recognize what it was while he plugged it with tobacco — it was a primitive Hottentot pipe, having no bowl, only a thickened section in front, which jutted out straight. The Coloured cook brought a pot of strong coffee, a bottle of brandy, some brown, oily-looking rusks and a plate of dried peaches..

Shelborne poured the brew into crude, quart-sized mugs and laced it with a dollop of brandy.

'We're as dry here as an American warship — only headmen are allowed liquor in the islands,' he said. 'The workers would never be sober if they had drink. At the last wreck up there' — he nodded to the north — 'on Hollam's Bird Island, they looted her and were blind for a fortnight.'

He handed round the oily rusks. 'They taste better than they look. Basis of refined seal-oil. Keeps you warm. The peaches go with it. Good combination.

I reached for my mug from the rough table. The turgid liquid slopped gently, spilling over the edge.

The island was shaking.

6

The Sleepless Dead

Nausea rose in my throat. Disbelievingly, I paused; the crude mug slopped over, although no hand had touched it. Earlier, I had attributed a queasy feeling to sea-legs unaccustomed to land, but now I knew: the island was rocking gently. My nausea was partly physical, partly mental, the first arising from the stench of stale guano, the second from the island's evil ambience. The movement underfoot seemed like something sinister within the rocks themselves. Captain Morrell must have felt the same when he saw the hillocks of dead seals, and this same phenomenon had found a place in the prosaic logs of the guano coasting skippers, a breed not noted for sensitivity.

The mug! What the hell…?'

Shelborne shrugged. 'Mercury shakes. Mercury has always shaken.' He was casual, good-humoured.

The clapper on the bell swung slowly, too. Minnaar was fascinated. 'Why don't you mount this flippin' outfit on gimbals and keep her steady?'

There must be some explanation,' I persisted.

'If there is any, I don't know it,' said Shelborne, but his eyes didn't bear out what he said. The island gets its name from the quivering, you know — mercury, quicksilver.'

'Is it some sort of submarine volcanic eruption?' I asked.

He laughed. 'It's been going on a long time then steadily for twenty years to my knowledge, and a century before that.'

Twenty years on Mercury Island! There was a walk of thirty feet ‹of level planking from where we sat, bigger than a windjammer's quarter-deck, maybe, but not much. Everywhere else were jagged rocks stained with old sea-bird droppings, a pocket handkerchief — and a snotty one at that — of raw undersea peak sticking out of the turbulent ocean. God! Twenty years of penal servitude!

He must have noticed the reaction in our faces. 'Yes, it is something over twenty years since I made Mercury my headquarters — my flagship, to use our jargon.'

I took a long pull at the strong coffee. The rawness of the brandy in it only worsened my nausea. Suddenly I felt I must get back to my ship, to a clean deck, not a false one dubbed with nautical gimmicks, away from the stale stink of Mercury and its air of being live when it should have been dead for a million years.

I put my mug down. It slid sideways a foot along the table. Shelborne reached out and caught it. 'You get used to it. Even when we die, we don't lie quiet on Mercury. No rest in peace here. Back there' — he jerked his head in the direction of the back of the hut — 'is the graveyard. We can't dig graves because there is no soil. So we cement the coffins to the rock. They're on the side the storms come from. The coffin lids sometimes blow off and you can see your former mates rolling from side to side.'

The macabre picture revolted me. I tried to banish it with a rational question. 'Why not take the bodies and bury them on the mainland?'

'The wind would expose a body in a couple of weeks. Either that, or a strandloper — a seashore hyena. I'd prefer Mercury to being a meal for one of those filthy creatures.'

I then suggested, 'Why not give them a sea-burial — in the bay or in open water?'

'Remember I told you how crowded with ships this bay was once,' replied Shelborne. 'It's shallow — and you know how superstitious sailors are. No, they wouldn't have their dead mates just under their keels, liable to be brought to the surface at any moment by the strange currents and eddies round the island. In any case there wasn't time to take a body out to sea, when every guano-loading hour was precious, and besides, it's too rough for a small boat. So our form of burial has become part of the Mercury tradition — tough, but I stick to it.'

Minnaar said, 'Do you really go and examine the coffins after every storm?'

Shelborne was staring across the sea. A cormorant feather blew into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it away absent-mindedly. He took a long time to reply. 'A coffin blows open — that is a handhold to the past. There's a chap there wearing a frilly lace shirt and a black hat. Yes — a hat, in his coffin. He used to sport it when the Alabama was taking prizes in these waters. Captain Lem Sherrill, of Connecticut. I've had to put his coffin lid back several times — it seems particularly prone to blowing open. He is history; Mercury is a handhold to — antiquity.'

The yellow flag flapped heavily against the stay-wires above our heads. I wasn't surprised any more that the emblem of a dead-and-gone day with its off-beat warning motto appealed to Shelborne.

Minnaar poured another liberal shot of brandy into his coffee. Rough, tough as he was, taking the day as it came, he did not care for the conversation any more than I did.

'I'd have thrown the old bastard into the sea with a hundredweight of rock tied to his feet, tradition or no tradition,' he said loudly, as if to drown his thoughts.

Shelborne wasn't even listening. Ignoring Minnaar, he went on, speaking softly, so that some of his words were lost on the wind. 'We deal in symbols here on Mercury, just as the Namib is full of symbols — symbols of life and death. Here the dance of life is held continually against a vast backdrop of death. At any time, in any place, through carelessness or lack of vigilance, you will find yourself in the shadow — for good.'

'Christ!' muttered Minnaar.

He went on. 'In human conflict the ultimate objectives of the combatants are the same; the interests they seek to protect are ephemeral. Here on Mercury and in the Namib the level of the fight is different. The symbols and the instruments of the killer are the elements: primitive, ruthless, primal. They have no interests to protect.- They destroy simply to destroy. It goes on all the time, round the clock. You can't get away from it by calling the time by ships' watches and striking a ship's bell. Look at that cliff face — endless, brutal, purposeless attrition. The one thing which you might call ephemeral are the dunes: they move day and night on the wind, so that the whole countryside gets up and marches.'

The boards trembled under our feet and the table rattled. It was high time, I felt, to kill this conversation.

I pointed to the big sun condensers lashed to the roof. 'Do you condense all your own water?'

Shelborne was not to be moved from his line of thought. 'Water is a prime element. Yes, I distil it, every drop. It is more precious than diamonds…'

'I'd need my liquor, else I'd go crazy,' Minnaar interjected.

Shelborne smiled faintly. 'There's no liquor, just for that reason; no drugs, no radio, no television, no sex, no women, no nancy-boys. Life is harder here than pulley-hauley in a sailing-ship, though the food is better; I know. The struggle to keep alive is never-ending, and you need every brain-cell, every sinew.'

'But the condensers — if it were cloudy for a week…' I began.

'Then we'd die of thirst,' he replied shortly. 'No, I back the fact that ever since records were taken fifty years ago, it has not rained either on Mercury or on the mainland opposite. Yet — I never swallow a cupful of water without thinking, is there another to follow?'

'All this talk of water makes me want another drink,' said Minnaar.

'Help yourself,' said Shelborne. He spoke to me. 'Some men sign on for the islands — ship's articles of course — because of drink. Two years of guano scraping and seafaring diet is better than Alcoholics Anonymous. At the end of a contract, they'll go back to the Cape and booze. But they always return. Of course, they're not all drunks. I have two, however, on Hollam's Bird Island, which falls under me as headman of this group of islands. That's a really tough spot — nothing more than a reef, really, half awash most of the time. My two reformed drunks there are great readers. I take them cases of books. They couldn't go back. They belong, as I belong.'

More of this from Shelborne and I'd have Minnaar drunk on my hands. So I said: 'I intend to survey the sea-bed from Sudhuk to a mile or two north of North Head. That means roughly the whole of the bay, and a bit to the north and south.'

Shelborne's eyes came back to the present with a flicker of amusement. 'Is that all?'

I did not care for the implicit sneer. Well, he had yet to see how I would case his bay and his island.

'No. I intend to continue out to sea to the twenty-one-fathom line. Mercury falls in that sector.'

Minnaar said thickly, 'We also want a good anchorage for the ship. You'll know the safest hereabouts.'

'Anchorage or no anchorage, you'll find yourselves beating out to sea half the time,' replied Shelborne. 'The swell gets very bad at the full and change of the moon. It smashes over the back of the island. It sometimes gets so rough that the seals leave their nursery and shelter here among the huts.'

'The Praying Mantis is an ex-whaler,' I said. 'She's built to take it.'

'There's not much wind today — that is, by Mercury's standards,' he replied. 'Maybe it is gusting to twenty knots. If the weather works up suddenly from the south-south-west, that's when you must get out — quick. The spray flies clean over Sudhuk, and there's only one place for a sailor to be — the hell out of Spencer Bay. Mercury is not the only part of the Sperrgebiet you're surveying, is it?'

'No.' I sketched what I had done at Angras Juntas and our plans for the other guano islands, if the indications justified it.

He said casually — too casually — 'If your survey is not promising, then Rhennin won't take the Mazy Zed to operate at a particular place — in other words, you are, the key figure?'

'Yes, I suppose you could call me that. It's strictly a business proposition; and I get a commission on the basis of what I find. The Mazy Zed eats money. We have to take 150 carats a day — you remember what Rhennin told the court.'

He was silent. He seemed to have a capacity to withdraw himself from his surroundings, and it left me tongue-tied. The wind gusted chill against the back of my neck. Wind! Shelborne had spoken of water, but wind was another of the great elementary symbols of the desert. I felt drawn into his Namib mystery. Wind! Searing, searching, tormenting, never absent… It carried within it the same paradox as water: a force life-giving, yet destructive. Daily the wind brings water to the desert in the shape of moisture-laden fogs. The highly-adapted insect life of the dunes relies on the sea-wind to live. They have no other source of water. And the prevailing south-wester has a rival, a hot wind which breathes across 100 miles of unmitigated desert from the interior mountain plateau, bearing the second element of life essential to the desert insects: vegetable matter. The two winds take advantage of the continuous shuffling movement of the sand from the temporary base of the dune to its smoking crest in order to distribute this organic matter, — the dune becomes a gigantic food mixer. It is the wind which bring food and drink to the blind creatures which stumble about below the surface, eyeless, having surrendered their light in order to survive in these infernal conditions. Just as in the sea currents bring microscopic plankton from afar, so in the Namib, the dry land which first emerged on the third day of Creation, it is the currents of air which sustain life.

'I'd like to make a thorough investigation of the Glory Hole,' I said. 'How do we get in?'

The question had seemed to me quite harmless, but Shelborne's eyes chilled me. At my words there was the sinister flash I had seen in the Gquma's cabin, the coruscated hardness at the heart of the green diamond. I knew as well as he did that under Mercury there is an immense, trumpet-shaped cavern with a mouth 150 feet wide at the seaward end.

He played for time, and Minnaar unwittingly helped him. 'Sailing directions for Spencer Bay — why, the only thing they seem to write about is the Glory Hole: "The waves beat against the island and into the cavern at times with indescribable fury…"'

Indescribable fury! The Namib sidewinder, a relation of the reptile on Selborne's flag, leaves only its eyes and fangs above the sand when it goes in for the kill: and there was something equally frightening about the way Shelborne swung his high, domed head from Minnaar to me.

'For once the words come up to the reality of Mercury,' he said. The rough-hewn face might have been carved from his own grim cliff. The muddy skin was taut over the bold bones beneath, a jutting jaw to frame the wide mouth, now clamped shut, the large eyes and arrogant nose.

He went on: 'To enter the Glory Hole you need two things; a calm day and a dead low tide. I have never known the two coincide. In one year here there are perhaps two or three calm days. Then you find the tide is wrong. No, I have never been in.'

There must be an entrance from the island itself,' I pressed him, 'some gap in the rocks…'

'There is none, none whatsoever.'

'When the going is tough, that is the way I like it in my line,' I said. 'I want to take a look inside the Glory Hole and I mean to. I wish I had one of those fancy American deep-sea cameras.'

'But you haven't got one?' The voice was relieved, though curious.

'Hell, no,' I said. They cost the earth. The Praying Mantis is a shoe-string job — essentials, but little else.'

Minnaar said, 'We could send in a couple of electronic flotation drums and track them with the Hydrodist. We might manage an outline of the interior…'

That wouldn't tell us much,' I said. 'It's not the shape I want, but what is inside the shape. It can't be so deep — the island itself is not more than a quarter of a mile wide. What surprises me is that the cavern does not extend right through to the other side. I'd expect that, the way the waves must eat away the rock — always coming from the same direction.'

The tide and the waves… I don't see how you can ever find out much,' said Shelborne.

I let myself be carried away by the problem. 'There's a gadget called a Kullenberg corer. It collects a long shaft of sediments from the ocean floor a couple of inches across and up to seventy feet long. I naturally can't afford a thing like that, but I built a modified one myself, which is pretty useful. If there is diamond gravel, I reckon I have a good chance of locating it.'

'If you want caverns, I can take you up the coast to half a dozen bigger and better than Mercury's Glory Hole,' Shelborne said quietly. 'My cutter is tied up in one of them, you remember, I told you. They are accessible, too.'

'In my survey area?'

'At least two of them are.'

'Have you prospected the sea-bed round Mercury?'

He parried this, very coolly:

'Of course — I told the court so. Grabs and dredges,' he said deprecatingly.

And you — found?'

'My dear fellow,' he replied with a shrug. 'What do you expect with that sort of equipment?'

I said, 'You know, I suppose, that the guano islands were once prospected by a government team?'

'Yes. They found diamonds on Possession Island — 223 carats, to be exact, worth Ј500. The team also went to Penguin Island, Ichaboe and, you'll be interested to hear, Mercury. Not a diamond anywhere except on Possession.'

Minnaar, feeling the effects of the stiff brandies in his coffee, interjected, 'But one of the islands yielded diamonds. That means it's worth trying the others…'

Shelborne ignored him. 'The entire prospecting project cost Ј825 and the value of the diamonds they found was Ј500. That speaks for itself. The true wealth of the islands is their guano, the sea-birds, the seals and penguins. They are my first concern…' He glanced at his watch and the defensive note went from his voice. 'Come, we've got to get up to the summit. ETA is 4.30.'

'What the hell are you talking about?' I asked.

The black mood was gone and he seemed like a schoolboy starting a holiday.

'I want to know what sort of bottom there is in the bay…' I began to say, but he rose, smiling.

'You can have your sea-bed and its diamonds. Come on!'

We climbed the steel steps behind the huts. Shelborne moved at a great pace, Minnaar and I trailing. The defined path ended 150 feet above the hut. From there onwards to the summit it was simply a series of zigzags through sharp rocks.

Minnaar and I stopped at the same moment, hit by the realization that the whitened rocks and hollows, scuffed by countless thousands of beaks, wings and talons, were empty.

There was not a bird to be seen.

I tried to catch up with Shelborne to ask him, but he moved too fast. Slipping and puffing, I needed all my breath. The wind blew the sealskin collar so that it masked the lower half of his jaw. The words of the prophet rose of their own accord into my mind — a diamond harder than flint have I made thy forehead! And his was a forehead and head for an artist. Diamonds! All my analogies were of diamonds. What had Shelborne really found? How much did he know? Why his passivity when I would have expected hostility, or at least his non-cooperation? His facts and figures about the official prospecting team seemed very glib.

We switched into a long transverse gully which split the island half-way to the summit. The late winter afternoon light was fading, leaving the rocks an unlovely grey. The island sloped from left to right, the highest part being on my left, or south-west, facing the entrance channel, tapering away on the right to three small isolated rocks which were linked to the main island by plank bridges. Shelborne's pace was killing. We skirted an enormous rock, which looked like a crucified man, and on to the summit plateau. Minnaar and I were gasping when we joined Shelborne there.

'Where are the birds?' I had begun to ask, when Shelborne interrupted me. His words were strange after what I had been thinking scrambling up:

'Do you know what the ancient meaning of the word diamond was?' he asked. 'Untameable. You can't tame it by fire or blows. Mercury is like that, too. Look!'

Minnaar and I gulped lungfuls of the south-west wind. Far below, thousands of seals had cornered a rocky platform on the sea's edge. The rock was polished black by their bodies.

Shelborne glanced at his watch. 'Look!'

'Jesus! exclaimed Minnaar. The ship!'

I saw the massive line squall creaming in from the north-west. A cold sensation of fear gripped me. I knew what that white meant — a squall vicious enough to suck up the sea; and now it was racing in towards our anchorage. It seemed to stretch endlessly, angry, white, grey-white.

Shelborne was relaxed, exultant. 'They're coming!'

The ship!' I got out desperately. 'Shelborne…!'

He gestured to the onrushing squall. His voice had a curious intonation. 'Four-thirty! You thought — I saw it in both your faces — that I was lonely, alone for my twenty-odd years on Mercury. I have been, indeed I am, when — ' he waved at the oncoming mass — 'the birds are away.'

'Birds!' Minnaar said it in a quiet, wonder-filled way, as if there had been no hard-case years, no brandy-filled tramping the coast.

The whole sky was filled with a fluid whiteness of feathers, wings and flight.

The glory of the stupendous sight was upon Shelborne. 'For twenty years they have returned from their winter migration at exactly one bell in the first dog-watch,' he said. 'Here they are today. They've been away for four months now. Soon Mercury will be white with guano, but we won't start scraping until a thick enough layer forms. I'm sending my team of workers off tomorrow to Hollam's Bird Island. I'll be alone for the next two months.'

The great snow descended. Flake by flake the solid cloud disintegrated into fragments, individuals. They swooped unerringly, Shelborne told us, to last year's nest, each knowing his place. Gannets, duikers, cormorants, solan-geese — the whole air chuckled with their welcome-home shouts. They came unafraid to our feet, vocal, quarrelling. Birds! Birds! Birds! There was not the smallest bare patch to be seen anywhere: Mercury had become one great breeding-flat, and the rocks were white with millions of them.

'I thought it was the squall to end all squalls,' I remarked thoughtfully. The salt had started to blur the sheen of Shelborne's sealskin reefer jacket. The weather seemed to be working up.

'I'm glad the wind wasn't hard for my birds,' he replied. 'A gale could blow us clean away, standing up here. The water comes so high sometimes that we find fish, big ones, right here up among the rocks.'

Minnaar was restive. I, too, was anxious for the ship.

'Where is the best holding-ground in the bay?' I asked.

He was a long time in replying, but when he did, it was as if he had come to some conclusion, for his voice was decisive and his eyes alive to the scene about us.

'I think I'll assign you to the lee of Hottentot Reef.'

There were curious overtones in his voice. At the time I put it down to his preoccupation with the birds.

'Where the hell is that?' asked Minnaar. I, too, did not remember Hottentot Reef on the charts, but to trust them was as chancy as Russian roulette.

'It's about three cable-lengths to the nor'-nor'-east of where you are now. You should get some protection there, and you'll also benefit by the lee of Mercury.'

I laughed nervously. 'At the whisper of a rising sea, you can count on a high-tailing start from me.'

Shelborne said, 'It never does to write off the sea. Rhennin should remember that.'

Was it a statement of fact or was there a concealed threat in the calm, resonant voice?

I went right on, not caring about his reaction earlier about the Glory Hole. 'Where is the entrance to the Glory Hole?'

Relaxed, he pointed beyond the seal colony; he might have been a tourist courier at a beauty spot. To me it looked exactly like any other part of the rock-bound shore.

'I'd like to have a closer look,' I said.

'Not without ropes,' he warned. 'One slip and you'd be into the sea.'

'I'll use a boat then — soon, maybe.'

'Take my flatboom, rather — it's built for these seas.'

I was puzzled about Shelborne's sudden change of attitude. I knew how bitter he was about losing the concession and yet he was being helpful — helpful enough almost to have justified something of Rhennin's Ј10,000 — even to offering his own boat.

The encompassing arms of the bay were opaque behind a veil of spray. An ordinary wave smashes on to rocks with a force of 4000 lb. to the square foot; this sea was the Joe Louis of them all. From the deep ocean the waves — kicking, squirming, trying to break free of the wind's grip — were marched towards Mercury by the south-wester and pitched mercilessly at the rocks. The stricken water burst into a thousand fragments and was scattered as spray high up the slopes, almost up to where we were standing. A great single burst of shattered sea catapulted from the shore for fully a hundred feet upwind.

'Good God!' I exclaimed.

Shelborne smiled. 'The Glory Hole. Compressed air.' The heavy thud came to our ears, like a distant shell-burst. 'You see, the waves compress into the Glory Hole. There comes a point of no return. The air literally explodes under the pressure. It throws the water back even against the power of the wind, as you see.' He voiced my own anxieties. 'You'll have fun in the Mazy Zed in a sea like this.'

I wasn't going to let him know what I was thinking, however. 'You saw the model. The low freeboard and absence of gunnels will cope with it.'

Shelborne nodded towards the two wrecks at the base of Sudhuk. 'They also knew how to cope. When do you start your survey?'

'Tomorrow.'

'If Mercury permits, you mean.'

I deliberately faced away from him. He seemed to have an uncanny knack of being one jump ahead. There was a rough incline on the right. On it were a number of shaped oblongs, all the same size. For a moment I paused, trying to make out what they were. Then I shuddered. The scores of sinister chevrons, covered in a patina of unscraped guano, were the coffins of the unquiet dead of Mercury, cemented to the rock face. A rough little hut, which presumably contained the implements for the final committal of these sleepless ones, stood against a low wall. The coffins were whiter than the corpses inside; the hut, too, was whitewashed in guano.

Shelborne followed my glance. 'It is the one place on the island I don't allow guano to be scraped. I can't keep the birds out — after all, they were here first.' I could see them settling down among the coffins. 'I put up a wall to keep out the seals, but the birds found a use for it. Look!'

A gannet spread his six-foot wingspan and ran along the wall, mimicking a carrier take-off.

'Come,' said Shelborne.

Driven by a sort of compulsive horror, Minnaar and I followed him to the cemetery. We climbed into it over a rough stile bridging the wall. Gannets barred our path. A small colony of penguins, fighting a rearguard action against extermination by the birds, held on to a corner of the graveyard. The birds struck at Shelborne's ankles, but he side-stepped adroitly. I kicked out involuntarily when a vicious beak dug into me. In a moment, a dozen more powder-blue beaks and yellow heads were arcing at me. I swore and kicked them aside. My sea-boot dug into the guano. Something small and bright was dislodged. I picked it up.

It was a German Knight's Cross, with Swords and Diamonds.

The tiny lettering engraved on it stifled my call to the other two ahead. I thrust it quickly into my pocket.

It read: 'Korvettenkapitan Dieter Rhennin. U-68. May 1942.'

7

The Bells of St Mary's

'Make the control switch!'

From my vantage-point on the summit of Sudhuk, the Praying Mantis in the bay half a mile away looked farther than she actually was; however, the electronic instrument I was testing told me it was no more than that. I glanced along the line of sight and gave my orders into the two-way radio telephone. The ship was anchored in the lee of the serrated rocks Shelborne had called Hottentot's Reef. The Hydrodist, as the instrument was called, calculates the travel time of radio waves between two points and is wonderfully accurate — it has an error of only about three parts in a million. A South African invention, it was first used for land surveying and then adapted to marine work with outstanding time-and-effort saving results.

Minnaar's flat-vowelled voice came back from the master instrument aboard the old whaler: 'Standing by to calibrate A-pattern phase.'

It had not taken him long to grasp the principles of the instrument and I felt elated as I stood on top of Sudhuk knowing that soon I would have on paper a picture of Mercury and its surrounding sea-bed. The Hydrodist, on a wooden tripod the height of a man, looked like a portable public telephone, except that in front was set a metal dish the size of a soup plate in which was placed a cathode tube. Below the tube itself, on the face of the reflecting dish, were calibration scales like saddle-stitching in metal.

I fiddled with the cavity tune control on the left of the control panel. 'A-pattern test,' I said into the built-in radio telephone. 'Standard megacycle frequency — how are you receiving?'

'Fine, man, okay,' replied Mannaar from the ship. 'No stray reflections in the microwave beam.'

'What about ground reflections?'

'Negligible, negligible,' he said. 'That's a fine spot for a slave station you've got up there on Sudhuk, Skipper.'

'Plenty of wind,' I replied.

'Christ!' He laughed. 'Wish I had it down here! How these bladdy birds stink!'

I had decided to establish two 'slave stations' — the necessary shore adjunct to the master instrument aboard the Praying Mantis — one of them on top of the towering cliff, from where I was now carrying out a series of calibration tests between the Hydrodist and the ship. The other 'slave station' was to be at the northern end of the bay. It takes a day or two to calibrate the master instrument and after that surveying goes ahead. My modern electronic method made the laborious old coastal triangulation system, using large numbers of floating beacons as well as land points, as out of date as a piston-engined aircraft. My system enabled a continuous and accurate plot to be made in about one-twentieth of the time taken by old methods and, unless atmospheric conditions were particularly bad, surveying could go on day and night, if necessary in darkness, mist, rain or fog, the latter being a big consideration on the Sperrgebiet where overnight fogs do not usually lift until the middle of the morning.

In such a fog I had come ashore hours before with Shelborne, who had surprised me by coming alongside in his flatboom and offering to transport my heavy gear ashore. I had accepted, and on landing he had surprised me further by humping the heavy Hydrodist and its batteries up the rough path to the top of the cliff. The desert persisted right to the high-water mark, and towards North Head the shoreline rocks and desert merged into one vast cyst of rotten tissue. This, Shelborne told me, pointing to a curious transom of sandcliff intersected by a narrow sloping ledge about one thousand feet long from beach to summit, was the Lange Wand or Long Wall, an unstable cliff which held back the quicksands from the sea and was dreaded because of its unheralded sandslides, which a loud echo was sufficient to provoke. He himself had been terrified while climbing the narrow path, which had seemed to shift under his weight, up to the tuftless, sucking, deathly wilderness where lay the remains of the old Portuguese warship — surely the most curious death of a ship in the history of the sea. This region also was pocked with bright white patches stretching into the distance. Nearer us and away from this pitiless desolation were low hills of wind-filled rock in whose eroded defiles 'ran' rivers of sand.

Our landing-beach below Sudhuk had a backdrop of rock twisted and eroded as if eaten by some nightmare death-watch beetle. The crumbled whiteness revealed softer boulders embedded in it, rounded and smoothed, arid veining standing out grotesquely. There was a chain of pits, minor caves, grottoes, overhangs and convoluted striations. Dried seasuds and dead deflated jelly-fish lay in the cavities of this great carious pumice stone, like lather dried white by the frenetic worrying of the wind. Piles of driftwood, bleached the same general grey-white of the surroundings, were scattered in untidy profusion everywhere. In the bright sun after the fog I could scarcely bear to burn my eyes on the unreal landscape.

I checked successively the circle amplitude switch, focus and brilliance, and saw that the circle presentation was correctly positioned on the graticule assembly. The pattern selector, which is for individual pattern frequencies, brought a satisfactory response from the ship.

Shelborne, hatless, had discarded his sealskins for a khaki shirt and trousers. He came close. I had expected him to smell of birds and seals, but it wasn't that: the sweat on him had a dry, bland odour, a sort of mustiness like dry-rot. His eyes were searching, probing for something more than understanding how the Hydrodist worked.

'All your equipment in working order?' he asked.

'Yes,' I replied. 'All this calibration and checking seems a waste of time, but it really pays off in the long run.'

'Yes,' he said slowly, 'it's the same with any worthwhile project: years of preparation, maybe. Justification, agony, self-recrimination — then the ecstasy.'

'No ecstasy here,' I laughed. 'This is a job. Soon I'll have your island and your bay buttoned up.'

He smiled with that curious, searching scrutiny of his. Had it merely been a job to me, I would have been plodding my way section by section up the coast as Rhennin had wanted. Instead, I was stretching my nerves on a lot of imponderables and backing an ill-defined hunch: Mercury, Strandloper's Water, Caldwell, Shelborne, the engraved pistol, diamonds. And the sea, Mercury's sea, that was so strangely mated with the Namib. And a U-boat ace's medal — he must have been an ace to win the Knight's Cross; who was this Captain Rhennin? Not Felix Rhennin, but Dieter Rhennin. Who was he?

'Buttoned up!' Shelborne repeated. 'Buttoned up! A curious modernism and too absolute for my liking; the desert and the sea are not so easily buttoned up.'

'I'll skip the philosophizing,' I said. 'I'm working to a tight schedule. That includes some Scuba diving for visual observations of the sea-bed…'

'Scuba diving?'

'Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Skin diving.'

'You surely can't dive deep enough…?'

'Up to thirty fathoms maximum. The charts show nowhere deeper than twenty fathoms in the bay, but I'll rely on my own readings.'

'So you've given up your idea of exploring the Glory Hole?'

A slightly unusual inflexion made me turn: his eyes were resting — with a studied affection it seemed to me — on Mercury, now white-grey under a new season's varnishing of guano. It had been a relief to get away from the lee of the island, not only because of the stink Minnaar belly-ached about but the birds' farmyard din which brought us cursing from our bunks at dawn. Internecine battles started with the day, and mingled with the grunts and roars of seals and the braying of penguins.'

'Of course not,' I replied. 'I've just been trying to work out some details. Like to help, apart from lending us the flatboom, I mean?'

'I should very much like to.' Still the odd note among the resonant vowels. 'Why don't you make a… what-do-you-call-it?… Scuba dive inside the cavern?'

My own view was that Scuba diving was as risky as using a boat in the wild entrance. 'I'll discuss it with Minnaar.'

He cocked his head. Not to acknowledge my remark, but at a sound below us. A thousand tons of sand slipped sullenly, almost noiselessly, 600 feet down the cliff into the sea.

'Yes, anything can happen in this sea.' Again there was an overtone I didn't care for. Was he deliberately trying to lure me into a dangerous dive? I'd make up my own mind about the Glory Hole, I told myself angrily; I wasn't going to be jockeyed by Shelborne, but if there were diamond-bearing gravel on the sea-bed, the Glory Hole was where it would accumulate.

I changed the subject abruptly: 'You said you laid down beacons along the shore years ago. I don't see one.'

There they are!' His eyesight was superb. Look! To the right above the landing-place. There are another two directly opposite the Praying Mantis on the high-water mark. And another on the seaward edge of North Head — see?'

I followed with my binoculars. 'Do you know that every one is between thirty and forty yards from where you originally sited them?'

'According to your instrument. Ground reflection errors, maybe.' He threw my jargon at me.

'No. Minnaar and I took ten or twelve readings on successive carrier frequencies. I checked the carrier shift and Minnaar followed all the fine A-pattern readings as we went along. I concede you an error of not more than two or three inches.'

He shrugged. 'Uplift of the land relative to the sea, eh? That would also account for the way the sandbars formed and trapped the old warship. It must have been pretty quick though.'

'Volcanic upheaval,'I suggested.

'No. There's not a sign of lava…'

If Shelborne knew about what we call continental lift — land tilting and sea receding — then he knew a great deal else. He wasn't a simple old prospector, I reminded myself: he'd been with Caldwell on the Oyster Line…

I played it down. 'There's a hell of a layer of sand, maybe forty or fifty feet, and there may be anything underneath it. It would require thorough investigation.'

He smiled. 'You didn't come to Mercury to talk like Stratum.'

'There's such a thing as scientific proof…'

He was staring fixedly in the direction of the old beacons. He said abstractedly, 'We'll relocate the beacons, then, on the basis of space-age equipment.'

He paused; another sandslide tobogganed soundlessly into the sea.

I said nervously. 'Those slides… What happens when…?'

I did not finish the sentence. Shelborne's gaze was riveted on the shoreline dunes where they lapped the foot of the cliff.

I saw nothing. 'What's going on?'

'Quick!' he rapped. 'Quick! Get this thing packed! Come on!' Without waiting for me, he spun the wingnut holding the instrument to the tripod and thrust it into my hands. 'Get it into the case!'

'There's nothing…'

Shelborne swept up the batteries and heavy instrument case and started off not for our landing-beach, but towards the dunes inland. I trailed awkwardly with the tripod and by the time he had reached the bottom of the cliff, I was fifty yards behind. The rough descent he had made loaded with equipment seemed to make no impression on him; his breathing was scarcely more than normal when I reached him.

'Across there, towards that rise.'

I hadn't enough breath to question him. The whole place looked exactly the same as on our way up. Our new course seemed purposeless, into the desert away from the flatboom, away from Sudhuk. Shelborne plunged into sand up to the ankles of his moccasins, and fell into a peculiar shuffling gait without lifting his feet; but he travelled fast. I'd only seen it once before; the old half-Bushman guide who had taken me up Mount Bruk-karos to the American solar ray station had used it. It is the hallmark of the desert wanderer, the 'sand-trapper' or sandshuffler as they call him in the Namib. After less than a mile into the high seas of sand, Shelborne stopped and waited for me.

'Look!'

The crest of the next dune was alive with tiny creatures, jumping, rolling like balls in eddies of wind, leaping, cavorting.

'Beetles!' I panted. 'Beetles! God's truth, I haven't been dragged all this way to see beetles!'

Shelborne did not answer, but shuffled to where the beetles were thickest, cartwheeling about in the air almost as if they could fly properly. I stumbled in his wake, trying to get my breath. He knelt, took a beetle between his fingers, and held it up to me. It was transparent: I could see right into it, like one of those plastic anatomical models.

He was excited. I had not seen him like this before.

'Look at those sandshoes! If I had them, I'd be able to go up and down dunes like a bat out of hell!'

Tiny snow-shoe-like bristles and brushes spun round and round.

He laughed in a relaxed way. 'You know, Tregard, I once had ideas of modelling a pair of my own shoes on these. Of course, it didn't work…' Then his mood changed and he said, 'It'll be one hell of a storm.'

I still had hardly enough breath to comment on this non sequitui. I gasped. 'Storm? What the devil have beetles to do with a storm?'

The migrating legions rolled, jumped and spun, swarming by the ten thousand.

Shelbome was not disconcerted. 'It's a sure sign. A mass migration heralds a storm. But this is a surer pointer still.' He held up his captive. This section of his body becomes diaphanous in moist air — it's highly hygroscopic, it absorbs water from the air. No man-made instrument if half as sensitive.'

I found some breath. 'Did you pick that up from Caldwell too?'

I can see him yet, kneeling with the beetle in his fingers while the rest of the host rolled by. He looked up sharply at Caldwell's name, but his animation remained. 'I learned everything about the desert from Caldwell.' He freed his beetle, watching it thoughtfully as it scrambled away at high speed. 'You really think you'll strike it lucky, you and Rhennin and the Mazy Zed?.'

'Yes. I'm backing my hunch. That's why I'm here.'

'You mean, at Mercury?'

'Generally, Mercury — in particular, perhaps, Strandloper's Water.'

'Tregard,' he said quietly. 'I've spent a whole lifetime looking for something. You're trying to take a short cut. It doesn't work, you know. The Namib sees to that.'

'You say you have spent your whole life looking for a diamond field under the sea?'

His voice dropped, became mysterious. It was almost as if he was talking to himself when he replied. 'No. What I told the court about dropping a few grabs and, dredges was quite true. That was about the extent of my sea-bed prospecting. Our search — Caldwell's and mine — was for… something really…'

He fumbled, choosing his words, but he couldn't prevent that mysterious private stratum of his thoughts breaking through, like a gold reef in a quartz hillside.

'I heard you talk a lot of bull about the Hottentots' Paradise.'

He smiled faintly. 'I agree, it was bull. But you mustn't forget how different our orientation was in those early days. The next strike might have been the Oyster Line, Oranjemund, Kleinzee…'

'You are listing only Caldwell's failures.'

'We were like the early explorers who sailed beyond the horizon, not knowing whether or not they would fall over the edge of the world.'

'The Atacama, the Takla Makan, what about them? You've got two images in your mental rangefinder; they're irreconcilable, you can't match them up together.'

The concept remains basic, it is only the physical aspects which differ.'

'Why didn't you sell that night aboard the Gquma? You're on to something big, aren't you?'

He came close so that I was aware of that dry-rot odour which I recognized now as coming from the dunes.

'I have told you, you can't take a short cut to it.'

'What is it?'

'Caldwell

'I'd rather talk about Shelborne.'

'What if the Oyster Line itself were only an adjunct, a supplement as it were to…'

'What do you mean?'

'I tried to tell the Judge, it isn't only the diamonds, although they are woven into the fabric of the thing. That is why…'

That is why you killed Caldwell.'

For a moment the green flame flickered in his long eyes, but almost at once there was a pity, a compassion. I knew then that I had missed my trick as he gathered his cards, as it were, from the table. The confession was over.

'You must beat out to sea before the storm strikes. You must follow my directions.'

I was not interested in a hurricane at the moment. I tried to drag the conversation back. 'Shelborne, it is not too late for that deal: your knowledge, your secret, if you like…'

He laughed softly. There was a ruthless note too, as I was later to remember. 'Confessions are always dangerous, are they not?'

'In melodramas they may lead to murder.'

'The storm,' he said urgently. 'You must get to your ship.'

'Blast the storm and blast the beetles!'

'You wouldn't last a day in the Namib, Tregard. The storms here hit like a piston: one moment it's peaceful like now and the next it's a howling mass of solid sand so you can't see your hand in front of your face and the sea is breaking over Sudhuk.'

'You can't tell all that from one beetle.'

'We're getting out of here… fast. Dump that tripod if it worries you. Or give it to me.' He snatched it up as if the extra weight were nothing and struck off towards the landing-beach. Soon he had gained a quarter of a mile. By the time I reached the boat, breathless, she was riding at the oars and Shelborne's eyes were on the south-west. The wrecks stood like ghouls on the eroded shore. We swung alongside the Praying Mantis.

'Where's your barometer… in the wheelhouse?'

I nodded and he grabbed his sealskin coat and jumped aboard. Only later was I to ask myself why he wanted to see the barometer when he was so sure that his beetles were more sensitive than any man-made instruments, and why he took his coat, which had lain in the boat while we had been ashore.

Minnaar called out in surprise. 'What's up? Why did you cut off the test? What's eating that old bastard?'

'We made a snap expedition into the desert. Saw some fascinating beetles. Going to be a God-almighty storm, the beetles say.'

'Well, bugger me!' exclaimed the big South African. He looked at the clear sky. 'Plenty of storm around!'

Here on the deck of the ship the whole thing seemed more ridiculous still. Shelborne came racing down the ladder from the bridge.

'Use your full revolutions,' he snapped. 'Steer due north until North Head bears 50 degrees. Got that? — North Head must bear 50 degrees…'

My voice was ironical. 'What does the barometer say?'

'High and steady now, but in a moment it will drop like a gannet. The beetles…'

'For crying in a bucket!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'Are you trying to get rid of us?'

He swung his head in his odd way from Minnaar to me. 'Good luck!' He said to Minnaar, who was grinning. 'I showed Captain Tregard the significance of the hygroscopic membranes on the beetles. They mean a storm, a big storm.'

Caldwell's goodbye rose spontaneously to my lips as Shelborne started to leave: '"Good luck to you, Shelley, perhaps my luck will change now."'

Had I struck him the reaction could not have been more sudden. His face blanched. He reached out in a reflex action and grabbed my shirt front. Then he dropped his hand slowly and I stood staring into the green depths of those strange eyes.

'I'm sorry you said that,' he said softly, 'I'm really very sorry. Like ex-champs, you never come back in the Namib.'

'Is that a threat, Shelborne?'

He clasped the heavy sealskin jacket close. 'Mary Caldwell…' he began, then checked himself. He stood for a moment absorbed in his thoughts. Then he said formally, Thank you for being kind to Mary Caldwell. It'll be pretty rough. I'm sorry.'

He spun on his heel and jumped into the waiting boat, which shot away towards Mercury.

Minnaar said, That's what being alone on a dump

like Mercury does. Nuts. Staring, raving nuts! Beetles and storms. Ag, hell!'

I shrugged it off. 'We'll work on the slave stations again this afternoon. Maybe I'll get the Sudhuk one rigged.'

My eyes went to the towering cliff.

There was no land.

A grey cloud raced towards the Praying Mantis, hanging like a wave breaking and, although the crest curled, it did not smoke.

Sand!

Namib sand!

It obliterated Sudhuk, the wrecks, the line of breaking surf, the weird landing-beach and the desert beyond. Shelborne was right.

'Minnaar!' I yelled. 'Minnaar! Get forrad with some men and cut the cables while I get her under way…!'

I jumped for the bridge. With the swift oblivion of an anaesthetic mask, the sand gagged my shouted orders. I could not see the bridge, let alone the bows. A moment before I had been breathing clean salt air; now I was spitting a semi-solid mixture which choked and blinded me as I tore up the rungs to the wheel. It whirled and blanketed the deck, the bridge, the men rushing to the anchors. The sand probed and needled its way into every crack, every orifice, every crevice; it was already inside my shirt, clinging where I had sweated. A scorpion scuttled under my feet, blown from the land. North Head, my key bearing, was still visible. Shelborne's instructions thrummed in my brain: I must steer for that, steer the way he had said. The deck leaned, and above me the ship's siren sobbed impotently against the howl of the wind. I found the terrified Coloured helmsman hanging on to its cord when I fought my way in, cut, stung, half-blinded. The bridge door hung ajar. I tried to ram it closed, but the cant of the vessel and the savage wind smashed it out of my hands, ripping off a fingernail.

I seized the speaking-tube to the engine-room. 'Sven! In the name of all that's holy, 300 revs! Everything you've got!'

'Diesels are cold, Skipper,' came his anxious reply. 'I didn't think we'd need them again so soon after the trip…'

Minnaar burst in. 'Cut? Shall I cut the cables?'

'No! Belay there! The diesels are cold. Sven wants ten minutes…'

'She'll drag long before that!' He snatched the voice-pipe from me. 'Sven, give them the gun, for Christ's sake! If you saw what's up aloft…'

The wind struck another hammer-blow. The whaler wheeled away stern-on, and then came up with a sickening thump forrad.

'One anchor cable gone!' Minnaar shouted above the roar of the wind. 'The other…'

He never finished. The whaler sprang free as the second cable parted. She had been secured facing the south-west and now she plunged backwards into the maelstrom. The water poured ankle deep on to the bridge. The all-pervading sand changed the thrashed-white spume a dirty grey. I pulled myself from the gratings where I had been thrown. The voice pipe whistled for attention. I grabbed it. Minnaar lay half-stunned in a corner.

'You boys play roller-coasters?' asked Sven in his broken English. 'That was one hell of a dive arse-ways. Revs in two minutes.'

'Minnaar!' I propped him up. 'Pull yourself together, man! She'll be under power in a minute! Take that wheel!'

The spokes spun madly as the whaler yawed again, completely out of control.

Minnaar dragged himself up. 'Where's her bitching head?' he mouthed, wiping a runnel of blood from his mouth. The bitch! The flippin' bitch! What did that bastard Shelborne say…?'

'Due north. Get her due north, for God's sake!'

I rang down to Sven. 'Half astern! Gently, man, gently, or she'll never come round!'

'Due north, aye aye sir!' Minnaar shook the cobwebs out of his brain. Bows to wind, the whaler's motion eased momentarily. The sand, now wet with flying spray, stung more but it was easier to breathe. I could not see any farther than the bridge dodgers.

'Port twenty! Speed for 250 revolutions!'

Her head fell off and she lay beam-on to the sea until the gratings under my feet were awash. She was capsizing, being swamped. But she hadn't ridden the Roaring Forties for nothing, my old whaler. Though she was dying, she was dying very hard. But I knew she would never come up.

I went through the motion of giving orders. 'Hard aport! Full ahead!'

It may have been the torque action of the single screw or a freak shift of the wind which did bring her head up. She rolled upright Wearily, hundreds of tons of water pouring off her upperworks, tearing away the gunnels like rotten paper and then — like an off-course missile — she jinked downwind.

'Due north! Due north!'

Minnaar understood. The compass needle steadied. Thank God! I breathed. Shelborne's directions would save us yet. There was a loom of rock way ahead. North Head!

The fact penetrated even Minnaar's fogged senses. 'We can't have got so far so soon…' He peered into the binnacle. 'Shoot that bearing now, Skipper, if there is any bladdy thing left to shoot it with.'

'Steer three-one-zero. Steady as she goes.'

Minnaar peered uncertainly at the compass needle. 'This flaming thing looks sick, it's coming round so slowly…'

It was the last time Jan Minnaar looked at a compass rose. The ship leapt high into the air. The steel keel and plating screamed as she planed, in full career, across the reef. The old whaler stopped, pivoted amidships across a spine of rock, and her guts spilled into the white water. Then she broke off slightly after the foremast, leaving the bridge as a square, sawn-off section. The mast shuddered for a moment before pitching overboard with the forepeak and tophamper. I think most of the crew were drowned at that moment. The bridge tilted stern-ways under my feet. The rudder disintegrated as it smashed on to the reef. The wheel mule-kicked: Minnaar screamed. A spoke of the wheel had caught his lower jaw, — it gibbered agape, a bloodied mass of dismembered sinews and broken teeth. Another lurch sent him through the doorway and over the side. The shattered stern gave another jerk. I had to jump overboard on to the reef before the stern took me to the bottom with it. The rock was black under me. The ship canted, and I threw myself headlong. The rock tore at me, and the sea was cold, cold. The Benguela current, I told myself between consciousness and unconsciousness, it's been cold for a million years since it closed the coast and brought its tribute of ice-white diamonds. A million years, and it's still cold.

I saw some big rocks on my right and beyond a kind of flat plateau. Between ridges and gullies the water raced and creamed. While I kept to the ridges I might be safe. I inched forward on my hands and knees, ripping my trousers on the barnacles. I found one rock, a peardrop-shaped thing about the size of a tennis-court. Two others, each the size of a cottage, acted as bastions on my left against what I feared — the wrench and grip of the ravaging sea. The smaller of these two was at the base of the plateau. I could see a sort of inlet in this. Slipping, half-in and half-out the water, I dragged myself into it. For the first time — in hours it seemed — I was able to breathe. The hole was fashioned like a corkscrew stair, not dry, but at least sheltered. I crawled cautiously forward. It was dark, like twilight. I manoeuvred myself to the top of the rocky stair, afraid that the demented wind might pluck me away when my head emerged. It led to a platform half an acre in extent, high and safe. A blinder reef! That's what they call them on the Sperrgebiet — mostly half awash but with some shelter, they are favourites of birds and seals. This was the kind of spot on which the two educated drunks sweated it out on Hollam's Bird Island.

I eased forward. I lost my footing and slipped, heavily.

I fell on a body.

There was not one body, there were scores of them!

My cushion gave a loud grunt. Seals! Blinder reef seals! I'd fallen into a seal nursery. The big wet glossy creatures grunted, slithered and bellowed. I expected to be savaged. I made for a corner, where a bull snarled and bared his fangs. I screamed hysterical obscenities at them above the wind, but apart from grunting they remained quiet. An occasional dollop of sea found its way into the nursery. There must have been several hundred seals, but in the half-light I could not be sure. I lay where I was.

The darkness of the sky became the darkness of senselessness.

Wood crunched into bone, sickeningly. I awoke, and I smelt blood. All I could see was the stars. Then a wooden club rose in silhouette. It was all bloody, held by a naked, massive fist. It was not the sight of the club which drew my dry scream of terror so much as the grotesque grouping of piebald blotches on the skin of the upraised arm. The scream died in my throat and all I managed to get out was a strangled whisper.

'God, Koeltas, a white man!'

The club sank out of sight and with it the piebald arm and torso. The silence in the darkness was as unnerving as my rise to consciousness to find that death-dealing club poised.

Then a thin voice, harsh and authoritative, rasped, 'Johaar, hold that torchie nice and low, will you!'

The light blinded me as I raised myself on an elbow.

A third voice said, 'Cut his bladdy throat, man — it's one of Shelborne's men!'

I said, 'Do you know Shelborne? Shelborne of Mercury Island?'

There was another scarifying silence. The torch swept across me, picking out my sodden, torn clothes.

'I'm saying to you, cut his throat!' repeated one voice.

The thin, metallic voice said, 'Hold your big jaw, Kim, you stupid bloody poacher!'

I guessed at the type behind the thin voice. I had heard that note too often in my childhood in the Richtersveld to be mistaken. It was one of the savage little nomads who escaped extermination during the brutal German-Hottentot war at the turn of the century. A mixture of Hottentot, Bushman and Strandloper — that Stone Age survivor on the Sperrgebiet who stinks worse than a hyena — these little men are either outlaws or fishermen on the coast; indeed, I had two or three in my crew of the Praying Mantis. No effective control can be exercised over the isolated communities on the coast who live wandering lives between the shore and the desert. They are superb seamen who live a twilight existence poaching, stealing seals, smuggling illicit diamonds from native workers at Oranjemund to undercover spots in Angola and West Africa, and running law-breakers from civilized ports to remote hideouts on the coast. They are small-boned, short, wiry men with heads of tight curls like Bushmen; they are intelligent and authoritative and generally crew their ships with half-breed Malay and Cape Coloured fishermen. They are a dying race — tuberculosis and alcohol have an appalling annual toll.

I dropped into the Hottentot-Bushman patois of the wild mountains, a series of broken clicks like a hungry man swallowing oysters and cracking the shells in his teeth. 'If you're poachers, then come and poach something worthwhile with me, not these seals which bring you a couple of shillings a pelt!'

There was a rumble from the piebald man I associated with the name Johaar. 'Ag, God, he asks us nice and sweet, come and poach with me when he lies like a wet poop on the rocks!'

The thin voice said, 'You speak like us — how is this in a white man?'

My life depended on my reply. 'Diamonds!'

The torch swivelled and they laughed softly, sinisterly, yet impressed by my use of their patois. There were three of them.' Koeltas, a thin, spare, yellow man with a rudimentary nose and oblique eyes, to my dazed senses he looked like one of Genghis Khan's ancient Tartar riders. A yellow oilskin hung below his knees. This was a genuine Hottentot sailor-nomad, Johaar, of the naked torso, was a giant half-caste. Hand-sized splotches of piebald skin stood out like the markings of some dread disease in the faint light. The third, Kim — which I took for a shortened form of Gakim, which meant Malay blood in his mixed ancestry — was peering at me sardonically, aquiline nose thrust forward. It was he who wanted to cut my throat. Savage, dangerous, unpredictable outcasts with a wayward sense of humour which could win or lose a life in a flash. If I could make them laugh I might be safe.

'Did you ever hear a seal talk Hottentot?'

Koeltas did laugh. 'Even Kim never thought of having a love-affair with a seal.'

The three of them joined in the silent mirth.

'Who are you?'

'John Tregard. My ship was wrecked.'

A look of cunning and avidity spread across the yellow face. 'Where is she, this ship of yours? Was she carrying diamonds?'

'Any brannewyn — brandy?' Johaar followed up quickly.

Kim leaned down until his face was six inches from mine. He had an odd Semitic look about his rather handsome half-caste features. 'You lie about diamonds.'

'My ship wasn't carrying diamonds…' I began.

'You lie!' Koeltas asserted flatly. 'You lie about the ship too.'

'Cut his bloody throat!' said Kim.

My life hung in the balance. A fight would have been hopeless. I remembered the diamonds in the German Knight's Cross. Had it survived my jump and desperate crawl through the rocks? I fumbled in my pocket. Perhaps Johaar thought I was going for a gun, because he held the club poised. I breathed thankfully as my fingers closed on the medal.

I showed it to them. 'See this — diamonds! There are lots more where I am looking.'

Koeltas demanded, 'Where is the ship?'

I hung the cross by its gold chain round my neck. I tried to get to my feet, but I was too weak. 'I'll show you.'

Johaar said, 'Let's go then. I'll carry this bastard since he can't walk. A ship on the rocks is better than killing seals.'

The Tartar-like Koeltas held a knife in his left hand. These were the types Shelborne had spoken of, men who came in blacked-out ships under darkness and plundered his carefully-tended nurseries for the sake of a few score pelts and were gone again before dawn. They were as predatory and hungry-looking as the jackals along the shore.

Koeltas's laugh had no humour in it. 'Tonight you are lucky — twice. We don't use the dynamite (he pronounced it dinnameet) because we don't want the noise, unnestan'? Other nights we float in an old oil drum filled with dinnameet and a time-fuse. It kills the seals — whoof! Why aren't you Shelborne's man?'

I told him simply and briefly something of my survey, the Mazy Zed, the sea-bed diamonds, and finally of Shelborne's directions when the storm blew up. Koeltas's face aped a comic rubber mask when he heard Shelborne's instructions to me. He spoke quickly to the other two in a curious mixture of English, Afrikaans and patois. The three of them rocked with silent laughter.

The little yellow man said, 'Shelborne wants to kill your ship, so he steers you on to this blinder. Every one of us poachers knows this rock lies across the northern entrance. But, by Jesus, it is we who get your ship instead!'

'You mean Shelborne deliberately…?'

My anger flared. I recalled how carefully Shelborne had repeated his directions to me. Why, if he had been so certain about the storm, had he troubled to go to the barometer in the wheelhouse? Was it the barometer he went to see? Minnaar's remark about the compass being slow hit me like a left hook. Had Shelborne deliberately fiddled with the compass to send us to our deaths? Had he concealed something in his sealskin jacket which he had been at such pains to take from the flatboom?

I said thickly, 'Listen, Koeltas, I need a ship. I want your ship. You can have what is left in my whaler. That and Ј500 to sail me where I want to go.'

The cunning eyes were two slits. 'Spencer Bay? Mercury?'

'Yes.'

'I have a good ship,' he replied with a touch of pride. 'Name Malgas — the Mad Goose. You know, the birds that dive for fish in the islands. Schooner. No engines. Not good for seal poaching. I sail her anywhere.'

Koeltas would know every tide, every rip, every rock and blinder along the Sperrgebiet. I meant to get back to Mercury. He was my man.

He went on. 'If Shelborne sees me, he kills me. He knows I steal his seals.'

'I'm chartering you,' I said. 'He can't do a damn about that. I can charter whoever I like. I have the right to prospect this coast.'

I told him about the court ruling giving us the prospecting rights. He seemed puzzled, but I let it go.

'Okay,' he said, breathing a formidable oath against Shelborne. He went on, 'For fifteen years now I sail the Sperrgebiet. Sometime I would like to see Mercury in daylight.'

He signalled Johaar, who heaved me up on his piebald shoulders. We set off for the wreck.

I nodded at the peardrop-shaped rock. 'I crawled up that way. The stern must lie close over there — if it hasn't slipped into deep water.'

The water isn't deep,' Koeltas replied confidently.

Less than thirty feet from the main bulk of the blinder we found what was left of the Praying Mantis. There was no sign of life. Rigging lay in a wild tangle: stays, running gear and cables thumped dismally against the torn plating.

'Fine ship.' Koeltas paused for a moment before jumping nimbly from rock to rock to the hulk. It was as good an epitaph as any, but it did not mitigate my cold rage against Shelborne for his deliberate murder of my team. Minnaar had been tough, likeable and dependable, the crew the pick of the fishing fleet — fine sailors, loyal and attached to me. Kim followed Koeltas, Johaar and I bringing up the rear. On the bridge Koeltas used his torch cautiously. The place was a shambles. Gratings and deck were ripped up; the wheel was intact, but the binnacle was split wide open, probably from the savage jar the rudder had given when she struck.

The Hottentot's eyes almost closed with amusement when he shone the torch into the shattered compass housing. 'Shelborne — the sonofabitch!'

In a fist-sized chunk of rock were two diamonds.

I felt weak, shattered, at this evidence of some new evil, coming hard on the heels of the loss of my crew. With an oath, more to sustain my morale than anything, I bent to look. Koeltas's fingers, hard as a vulture's talon, bit into my shoulder. He stood transfixed. The others froze, listening.

Across the water, from the direction of Mercury, came a weird, reverberating sound. It wasn't music, it wasn't gunfire, it wasn't depth-charges. It sounded hollow, chesty. It rumbled, grew, ebbed. Wonderment, but chiefly fear, was in their faces.

Koeltas's click-clack vowels rattled like a machine-gun. 'Quick, quick! We get the hell out of the bay — now, now, now!'

I hung back. I had to get to the bottom of the binnacle mystery. 'What the hell…?'

His fingers clamped hard. 'Come! The Malgas! Quick!'

That noise…'

He rounded on me. The skin was drawn tight over the high cheekbones. It was ash rather than yellow.

'The Bells of St Mary's,' he whispered.

8

Too Big for Fate

It rolled across the water after our tiny dinghy racing for the schooner. The Bells of St Mary's! They weren't bells; it was a monstrous death-rattle in the wind's breathing, some undefined weirdness choking out its life behind us in the fog. And Mercury lay behind. The rumble ended with a paroxysm, as if boulders had been shaken together for a poker-dice throw. Koeltas shuddered.

'Bells?' I rasped. 'The Bells of St Mary's…?'

His dead panic made the oaths come tumbling from Koeltas's lips. 'The sonofabitch, the bladdy sonofabitch Shelborne! He makes the Bells back there on Mercury. It is his name for them, the Bells of St Mary's. He tells the skipper so. He kills us with them. He knows the Malgas comes…'

I recalled Shelborne's vigilant flag-hoist; he would always be on the alert. Shelborne's attitude towards intruders was pretty rough — there was no doubt now that he had sent the Praying Mantis to her doom — and it would be rougher still towards the likes of Koeltas and the Mad Goose. I wished now I had got more out of Shelborne when he had talked out in the dunes. He'd spoken freely because — I thought grimly — dead men tell no tales. From now on I'd need men of the ruthless calibre of Koeltas, Johaar and Kim. I didn't intend to be so gentle myself when I returned to Mercury.

I tried to quiet Koeltas's fear. 'He can't see any of us, or your ship, in this fog. Pull yourself together, man. These Bells — it's something quite simple, we'll find out.'

Shelborne must have played somehow on the superstitions of the Coloured and Malay fishermen — I had had an example on the passage to Mercury when I found my Malay helmsman changing course against orders to pass to windward of a school of porpoises. They were; he told me, the angels of the sea and to pass to leeward was an insult to the sea-dead. I suspected Shelborne of rigging some sort of loudspeaker gear.

Koeltas snarled, 'Shut your trap! What the hell do you know about the Bells? They'll kill us all if we don't get out quick!'

Fear sharpened his uncanny instinct for the whereabouts of his ship. In a few moments the Malgas was right ahead. She was a schooner of about 150 tons with very long hardpine masts, painted an indeterminate khaki to merge into the dun background — like the disguise of Namib plants whose young leaves exude a stickiness to which blown sand clings and camouflages them with a fine rough-cast which makes them indistinguishable from the desert. The foremast had been stepped right forward into the eyes of the schooner I had a glimpse of her heavy sparring as we vaulted over the low rail. It was enough to tell what the Malgas was: a strandloper of the ocean, the sea-going equivalent of the starving carrion scavengers of the Sperrgebiet beaches.

Johaar left the dinghy to trail astern while he shot below. Half a dozen men, Coloureds and Malays, were hauling on the sheets before they had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. Johaar did not have to spur them on, the Bells did that. The whole operation of running up the fore and mizzen sails, the jib and flying jib above the bowsprit, was done in silence. Each knew he appointed task. No orders were given. Kim took the wheel, came forward to watch the luff of the big mainsail, ochre-coloured like the others. The wind was fluky. Koeltas went over to Kim and spoke in a low voice. They got the foregaff on her as Kim brought her round on to the port tack — her heading struck a chord of fear into me.

'You're crazy, Koeltas — you can't beat out by the southern passage!'

He stood by the rail, listening, peering into the fog.

'Shut up!' he snapped in a low urgent voice. There was a flicker in the thin eyes above the Tartar cheekbones. 'Who says so — Shelborne?'

'Yes!'

He gave a derisive, harsh little chuckle. He came close. He was sweating. The smell of fear blended with the bitter, repugnant stench of the oilskin. 'In a moment, we see a rock — there!' He thrust an arm out to starboard. 'We are on course, then — dead between Mercury and Sudhuk. Sudhuk blocks the wind. Past the rock we get a little more wind, maybe. Look for the rock!'

I looked. It wasn't a rock I saw. It was Shelborne's face.

The flatboom was right under our forefoot. Shelborne was at the tiller. He half-rose in the sternsheets. The Malgas was upon him.

'Jesus!'

Kim saw it too. He gave the wheel a spoke or two. The tower of sail eased. The schooner leaned away from the flatboom. Shelborne's face was white and taut against the sealskin collar. Then — faces, oars, rowers were gone, lost in the fog astern. My words would not come when I saw the rock seconds later. Koeltas, too, said nothing, but threw out his hand towards the key-point with the stiff, stylized motion with which the desert Bushman throws his scanty food into the eye of the desert wind to placate his gods. The Malgas, turning at the rock, hung in stays for an agonizing moment. Then her head came round and she moved silently under a full press of sail out to the open sea.

Koeltas said, without preliminary, 'How much diamant?' He seemed to be having second thoughts about my charter, which to him meant smuggling diamonds, not mining them. 'One of my fren's — also a schooner skipper — takes diamant out to the ships fishing out deep — there! Russian. Jan. Maybe Jap, I dunno. He gets five years in jail. Johaar!'

Koeltas fired a volley of crackling vowels and staccato consonants at him. Even for me it was too quick, but here and there I caught the word diamond. Johaar laughed when Koeltas mentioned the Praying Mantis. I was too raw over her loss to join in.

Koeltas said, 'Mister, Johaar, Kim and me like the job. But Shelborne chases us away, us all in the Malgas. Lots of trouble. When he sees the Malgas he shout, voetsak you Malay bastard, get to hell out of my bay.'

'It isn't his bay,' I replied. Simply, and in some detail, I explained that the Mary Zed project was under licence, legitimate, not outside the law. It was almost impossible to convey this last fact to him.

'I must get back to the wreck before Shelborne,' I told them: 'I want to see what I can salvage of my gear, the diving suits especially.'

I wondered how- much damage the Hydrodist had suffered. It was not irreplaceable but it would take time to get a new one. With or without it, by modem or old-fashioned methods, I intended to survey the bay. More than survey it — investigate it. Priority number one was the inside of the Glory Hole. The three of them grinned as I spoke, Kim from the wheel nearby. The wind had died away and the Malgas, despite the spread she was carrying, ghosted along, barely under way.

'I know about wrecks,' said Koeltas. That was the biggest understatement I had heard since coming aboard. I also wanted to find out what Shelborne had put in the binnacle.

Johaar was a jump ahead of me. 'I get the two diamonds in the magnetite?'

'Magnetite! Was that magnetite?'

He grinned. 'I am two years at Oranjemund, driving rotary bucket excavator. Lots of diamonds — too many, a few are meant for Johaar. But they are bladdy slim and clever at Oranjemund. They find my diamonds with an X-ray security check.' He laughed good-humouredly. 'Now I work for Koeltas. The pay is not so good, but it is more fun, eh?'

'What do you know about magnetite?'

'My English good,' he grinned. 'Magnetite inclusions, that is what the boss called it. Every Saturday night we get drunk and play the racehorse game with magnetite. Like a magnet. Little iron horses on the table and you pull the magnetite underneath and make the horses run. Fun!'

Shelborne had played a deep, subtle game to destroy me. Magnetite! In other words, he had put a piece of lodestone, which is a common matrix for diamonds, into the compass housing when he went to look at the barometer. It was a brilliant piece of opportunism, using the storm and wrong sailing directions. No wonder we had fetched up on a reef. No wonder, too, that he had been thoughtful when he had asked on Mercury whether I was the key figure in determining where the Mary Zed would operate. He was planning then to eliminate the kingpin. Shelborne! — I found myself using Koeltas's own savage oaths.

'Yes, Johaar,' I said slowly. And then, if Shelborne could afford to throw away two fair-sized diamonds in a chunk of magnetite, he knew where he could get plenty more. I recalled the Borchardt's magazine also. 'Yes, you can have the two diamonds when we go back.'

He turned to Kim. 'Maybe two, three carat. Aaaaaah! I get so drunk!'

'Johaar,' said Kim. 'Give me five quid. I need a woman bad.'

Koeltas laughed. 'You mean, a bad woman, you bastard you! You see what honest money does, mister? It makes us bad.'

I was tired and I didn't want the unpredictable little skipper changing his mind while I was asleep. The diamonds in the Knight's Cross hung round my neck were enough to make them cut my throat.

'What are you going to do with your share of the diamonds, Koeltas?' I asked.

He paused, as if trying to remember something. What he said was by rote from the catalogue: 'A ship, schooner-rigged, ninety feet long, twenty feet beam, ten feet of hold. Bows like a knife. Planking, American elm and teak. Sail plan…'

I said to myself, in English. 'And a star to steer her by!'

Kim crackled. 'Bugger me!' he said.

Johaar grinned. 'If we hadn't been there when we pulled him off the reef, I'd say he was walking two rows of brandy tracks!'

'Ag, this white lightning — it makes a man do anything,' added Koeltas" 'Pick up your backsides, you lot of Sperrgebiet gamats and get the sails in!'

The Malgas lay in the long swell.

Koeltas said, 'We go in the night, eh?'

He probably knew his way round the bay better by night than by day anyhow. And I needed sleep during that day.

'Good,' I replied. 'Get my clothes dry for me while I sleep, will you? Are you taking the Malgas out to sea until we make the bay?'

Koeltas shrugged. 'We lie up today.'

'Where?'

'There are places. Shelborne won't find us.'

Kim led me below to a stuffy little cubby-hole to take off my sodden, torn clothes. He gave me a doggy blanket and I threw myself down on the hard bunk. I was too exhausted to sleep. There was no doubt that Shelborne had tried to do away with me. Yet there was a curious element of reluctance, of compassion, in his attitude towards me which would not let me write him off as a cold-blooded killer. He himself had hinted that he was on the trail of something. What? Had he killed Caldwell for it. If it were a pocket of diamonds in the Glory Hole there was no need for his elaborate play about a lifetime's search. He could wash enough stones to keep him well-off for life. If it wasn't big, there was no point in trying to do away with me and thus thwart or prevent the arrival of the Mazy Zed. If Shelborne had come along with a strike, Rhennin would have welcomed him liberally; moreover, he might have swayed the court in his favour had he made any attempt to show that he had prospected as his concession entitled him to. He had, by contrast, played down his efforts. Why his concern and thanks about Mary Caldwell — was it reparation for what he had done to her father? Then there was the curious side issue of the U-boat's Knight's Cross. Who was the Rhennin who had been at Mercury in the war? I had to get back to Angras Juntas to equip myself for a new thrust into Shelborne's territory; I would find out from Felix Rhennin then. Last of all, what were the dreaded Bells of St Mary's and why did Mercury shake?

I slept.

It was dark when Kim's rough hand shook me awake. 'Dry togs. I hang them in the rigging all day. Damn' fine pants.'

They didn't look so fine to me — creased, torn and stained with sea water and mud. I judged the schooner to be under full sail, the way she lay over.

'Where are we?'

'Off Saddle Hill. Come on deck and see.'

The night was clear towards the land, but seawards the great black bank of nightly fog blocked the horizon. The landmark, Saddle Hill, stood out. A jagged fissure cut across its gaunt 1000-foot height, like a tooth kicked out in a street brawl. Northwards to Sudhuk ran eleven miles of threatening cliffs. We were so close inshore that I could see white water. Koeltas was picking his way through the maze of foul ground with consummate seamanship: I would not have dared to take a ship under power where he did under sail.

Koeltas said, without greeting, 'Lots of fog off Sudhuk.'

'You're not going in again through the southern channel — in the dark, under sail?'

He laughed his thin, harsh laugh. 'No one sees the Malgas because I hide behind Sudhuk — just like a big spook.'

Johaar was there with the laughs. 'And you look like a spook with your knife and your Standard Police Issue revolver.'

Kim chipped in: 'Man, that silencer!'

I had not noticed the heavy.38 calibre Smith and Wesson police revolver, undoubtedly stolen, in Koeltas's belt. It had attached an ancient bulbous Maxim silencer. He was naive enough to think a revolver can be silenced; in fact only a hand-loaded, locked-breech weapon can. I, too, laughed — for my own reasons.

Koeltas joined in. 'You goddamned gamat!'

'Ag, Gawd, we've got to have our fun,' roared Johaar.

Koeltas drew the weapon. 'Softy, softly, if Shelborne is on the reef.'

'I also got something to show you,' Johaar told me. He slipped below and came back carrying a NATO-type FN Rifle.

He grinned proudly. 'This is good. Automatic.'

'I know,' I answered grimly, taking it from him. 'Where did you steal this?'

He was amused. 'My brother is a fisherman at Walvis Bay… Soldiers are there… you know…'

'I don't. What else have you hidden away below?'

'Not much.' They grinned at my concern. 'You like a pistol for tonight or a knife — special knife?'

'A knife.'

Special it was — a long sealing-knife, tapered and razor-sharp.

Two hours later we were off Sudhuk, very close in. Koeltas seemed unafraid of the swell bursting heavily against the towering cliff. The water was deep and we had not yet got the protection of Dolphin Head, Sudhuk's northern extremity. The fog was closing but not as quickly as Koeltas would have liked. He stood listening, tense, head forward. I knew that if the Bells he dreaded were sounding it would be hopeless to expect him to enter the bay and inspect the wreck.

Conversation had fallen away to whispers — out of deference, it seemed, to Mercury.

'What about a leadsman?' I asked Koeltas anxiously. The shoreline was death: he seemed overconfident.

'Nine fathoms for two cables out to sea here,' he replied curtly.

I saw the light then.

It was burning at the seaward side of the cliff near where I had calibrated the.Hydrodist. That seemed a long time ago, somehow. I took Koeltas's arm and gestured silently.

'Shelborne!' he muttered under his breath. 'Shelborne — he clears out from Mercury when he makes the Bells so that they don't kill him along with us. Now he camps on Sudhuk, waiting.'

Kim and Johaar stared balefully at the flickering light.

Kim said under his breath, 'He'll see us and start the Bells.'.

Koeltas's nerves were iron. Take the ship in — close! I want to feel the breakers.'

Johaar slid forward and ropes ran silently through their well-greased sheaves. The schooner creaked as she turned shorewards. I caught my breath, she drove in so far. The water was already white before she resumed her previous course.

Kim doused the binnacle light. He steered by the soles of his feet and the wind on his neck. 'Fog thick behind Sudhuk,' he consoled me. 'Here, the wind blows it away.'

Furtively, noiselessly, every nerve on edge, we inched past Dolphin Head under Shelborne's fire. To see us, he would have had to lean right over the edge. Then Kim put the helm down until we were moving almost due east, following the cliffs beyond the point. The fog thickened, as he had predicted, and we turned north again, presumably into the channel. It was not the moisture of fog I felt when my hand clenched the mizzen shrouds — it was the sweat of cold fear and of colder anger and delayed shock at Shelborne's callous murder of the fifteen men of my crew with whom I had worked and lived. At that moment, I could not think of anything else.

We stole across the bay.

A lighter patch may have been the loom of Mercury. We stole past it, making for a point known only to Koeltas's instinct. As stealthily, Koeltas brought the Malgas to anchor off the Hottentots' Reef — I do not know how he found it. Then the sails were off her, the anchor down, and she hung shrouded in the fog, as invisible as her namesake, the mad goose, over a shoal of pilchards.

Johaar and Kim were first at the wrecked bridge of the Praying Mantis after a quick pull in the dinghy from the Malgas.

'Look!' exclaimed Johaar, grinning and shining his torch cautiously. 'Shelborne not come.'

The diamonds gleamed balefully in their black matrix in the compass housing.

Kim sighed. 'Plenty of women now. Bad women.'

Johaar held the lodestone. 'This plays racehorse games with the compass.' The needles followed it as he moved it around. 'See?'

Koeltas nodded at the diamonds. 'It cost him plenty, that little trick.'

'It still is going to cost him plenty — plenty,' I replied savagely. 'Have you been inside the Glory Hole?'

'It is a bastard,' Koeltas summed up. 'No. Much better caves on the shore.' That is what Shelborne had said, too. The fleas in them make you scratch like a mongrel. But good hiding-places.'

He didn't elaborate.

'Let's take a look at the rest,' I said. I did not care for the business of stripping my own ship for the benefit of these professional wreckers, but that was the bargain. Koeltas had already prised off some of the bridge instruments with a jemmy. The afterhold was a shambles, but three Scuba suits and their air bottles were intact. There was no sign of the Hydrodist. My cabin was half-flooded, but I managed to extract a shirt or two and another pair of trousers. My drawing instruments and parchment chart blanks were under six feet of water. Johaar unearthed a case of whisky and some clothes. We could not penetrate the flooded engine-room, but a submerged arm in a white overall like Sven used to wear told its own tale.

As I stood staring at it, Koeltas said, 'If I don't kill Shelborne, then you do, eh?'

I wondered whether it was as simple as that. Then Koeltas froze. Like the tail-end of a muttered curse, the strange reverberation came across the water from Mercury, not loud as before, but soft, sinister. Maybe it was the sight of the dead arm or the dead ship, or maybe I, too, had become infected by fear of the Bells, but I was in the dinghy as soon as the others. We set all sail for Angras Juntas.

Angras Juntas — the bay of the meeting of the captains! After a day's beat down the Sperrgebiet from Mercury, the dune-backed bay named by the first Portuguese navigators was in sight. Malgas tacked between two guano islands, one of which, Kim pointed out with relish, was called Black Sophie Rock in honour of a dead-and-gone Cape Town whore. The sea was dead calm.

'Jesus!' Koeltas was not exclaiming at the scenery, — he was seeing the Mazy Zed for the first time. The floating diamond mine — cumbersome, unshiplike, like a Showboat stage prop of a Mississippi sidepaddler — lay in a welter of foam from her own pumps. Forrad — or aft, it was hard to tell which — a massive derrick cradled what looked like a tanker's oiling hose. This was to link the ship to the sea-bed like an umbilical cord. Around it, to a height of twenty or thirty feet, clustered a collection of steel masts, crudely red-leaded platforms and thick pipes; crowning all was a curious object like a hopper bin. This conglomeration took up half the vessel's length; flat-like living quarters, broken by high ventilators, occupied the rest. Along the superstructure was painted, in garish six-foot letters, Mazy Zed.

The thud of powerful pumps and the splash of water came across the bay. The Mazy Zed looked like an elephant giving itself a shower-bath with its trunk.

Koeltas ran his eye over the Malgas's slim lines. It was not so much pride as reassurance. 'In a wind — look, six anchor cables out!'

'She'll need them all in a blow,' I said. 'The water is supposed to break right over her — that's the theory, anyway.'

Kim said, 'She sucks up the diamonds just like a bloody calf sucking milk!'

'You gamat, always sucking on the hind tit!' jeered Johaar.

It had been a long, tough beat from Mercury to Angras Juntas, hard inshore, dodging blinders and sandbars as Koeltas conned the Malgas from the bowsprit, which he had straddled like some strange figurehead in his yellow oilskin. His way of navigating had enabled me to see every feature of the Sperrgebiet: the desert wilderness, yellow-grey as smoke seen through a periscope; the iron-bound coast, indented, vicious; the glaring white mirror of a saltpan; a valley where the sand moved uncannily northwards in a broad, slow stream, almost as if of its own will. Koeltas had sailed almost under a great 170-foot high natural arch of rock known as Bogenfels, a gigantic crocodile's mouth held agape by an equally gigantic rock resembling a half-open flick-knife. Next to it was an angled patch of smooth white sand, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter broad. This crescent-shaped storm beach helped to create the legend of sudden, untold riches in South-west Africa; from it came diamonds worth a royal exchequer in a couple of months.

Later, my heart had been in my mouth when Koeltas took the Malgas among an awe-inspiring nightmare of rocks known as Die Doodenstadt — The Town of the Dead. Doodenstadt has never been inhabited; there are houses, streets and churches, but they are solid inside, solid rock; they have been fashioned as if by humans by a curious, macabre trick of the south-west wind. Among the dead rocks lay a dead ship, the British City of Baroda, a U-boat torpedo in her side.

'Polisie!'

Koeltas's astonishment turned to a snarl. He pointed. Astern, from behind a cluster of broken reefs, raced two motor-boats. On reaching open water, they rose up on what looked like water-skis on each side of the hull, and, keel clear of the sea, they arrowed forward. Hydrofoils! They broke company and made to circle the schooner, like two lions spreading for the kill

'We've got nothing to worry about,' I assured Koeltas. Maybe Duvenhage had sea patrols as well as his smart security land force at Oranjemund. 'Rhennin will vouch for me.'

Koeltas replied laconically. 'For you, yes, but not for me, or this ship.'

The schooner had to tack to clear Black Sophie Rock. Our innocuous change of course brought instant reaction. Like one, the two craft rose higher in the water; throttles were rammed wide open. One on either beam, they screamed past the Malgas.

'Look!' I exclaimed.

Tarpaulins were whipped off forward mountings. Heavy quick-firing guns followed us round. I realized then that they were not police craft but Rhennin's watchdogs, the fast patrol boats he had spoken of in court. My eye went to the top of Sinclair Island and there was the complementary half of the Mazy Zed's defence — a radar post. What looked like an enlarged version of the Hydrodist's cathode ray dish was tracking the schooner.

One of the boats throttled back and eased alongside the Malgas. The loudhailer snapped on. The voice was very English.

'Who are you and what do you want?'

I took Koeltas's hand megaphone. 'Tregard here. John Tregard. Tell Rhennin, the Praying Mantis, repeat Praying Mantis, has been lost off Mercury Island. No survivors except myself. This schooner is under my charter. She's okay.'

'She'd better be,' the voice replied. 'Keep away until I have presented your credentials. Especially, keep clear of the Mazy Zed. Today's the day,'

'You look bloody warlike.' I called.

'Have to be, old boy.' It was pure Royal Navy. 'Guarding the Bogenfels Approaches and all that, don't you know. You're the surveyor chappie, aren't you?'

'Was,' I corrected.

'Is the old whaler sunk?'

'That's what I said. Most of the equipment too.' I heard his whistle of surprise. 'You should have taken us along to keep your pants dry. Dirty work at the crossroads?'

'Plenty,' I replied grimly. 'It's a long story — later.'

'Good-oh! Anything to relieve the monotony, I say. Thanks for making our day with tales of pirates and deep water. Your clapped-out sailer is the first to try and run my blockade.'

'Others may.'

The voice became more cheerful. 'Greetings then to the bearer of joyful tidings. Now get those sails stowed, or what ever you do aboard the ancient mariner.'

We dropped anchor half a mile north of the low island. Angras Juntas was a replica of what we had seen all day: a rock-bound coast flanked by steep cliffs, inland, notched ridges and stark chains of naked hills, running north-south, and backing on to a drear, sand-shot infinitude of awe-inspiring desolation.

Inside ten minutes the patrol boat was back. 'Rhennin wants you aboard the Mazy Zed right away,' called the Royal Navy voice.

The sleek craft edged close. Hands grabbed me as I landed on the immaculate deck. The Royal Navy man eyed me quizzically. My trousers were shrunk to half-calf length and most of my shirt buttons were missing. My last shave had been aboard the Praying Mantis.

'Some people have all the fun,' he grinned. 'Rough house?'

I told my story briefly. He grinned again. 'Bob Sheriff's the name. I must admit to noticing a slight pong of seal now that you've come aboard.'

We sped towards the Mazy Zed. Smoke was now pouring from her curious high twin stacks. Diesels thumped heavily. A group of men were gathered round the heavy hose which led, pulsing and shaking, from the gantry into the sea. Where it entered the 'hopper bin' high up, another group was busy. Water cascaded everywhere.

Sheriff said, 'Your untimely arrival has held up the proceedings.'

'You mean…?'

'First diamond run, old boy. Carats in the morning, carats in the evening, carats at supper-time; I hope-so, anyway.'

We swung on to the steel deck. The air of tension was obvious. There were no gunnels and the deck was barely a foot or two above the water. Where the rough coat of red lead had been chipped, the steel had rusted from the corrosive sea fogs. We picked our way though a confusion of metal platforms, derricks, pumps, hoses, pipes and men into a dank corridor which smelt like the deep ocean and was as wet as a submarine. Condensation showed in the light of a weak bulb set into a steel beam, where red-leaded rivets nestled in rows like frogs' eggs. I pulled open a watertight door. The strip lighting was bright after the corridor. About half a dozen men in white overalls stood round a dull steel table like an operating theatre. Rhennin was in faded khaki overalls and a red sweater.

Mary spun the circular hand sieve and, with a peculiar deft movement, upturned it and emptied its gravelly contents on the table.

In the centre lay a handful of diamonds.

I didn't hear the hubbub of congratulations as the men leaned forward, peering eagerly at the first stones ever won from the sea in all man's long quest for riches.

I was oblivious of the superb machinery in the sorting-room — the six-foot-high glass retorts and six-inch-diameter transparent tubes through which sea water, still carrying its deep-sea life in the shape of lobsters and small fish, made its way to the gravitational sorter; the grease table with its greasy yellow roller to catch the stones; the surrealist electro-static separator flickering with a savage blue charge of 25,000 volts; the aluminium-decked vibrator shaking stones into fourteen categories at a rate faster than the eye could follow… I saw none of these. I saw a man with a sieve standing where his daughter stood now, skilfully swilling the diamond-bearing gravel round in the old-fashioned way on the Oyster Line, and I was sensible of the presence of Destiny, his inescapable, malign fellow-traveller, who had snatched his life's-search from the precious gravel not once, but three times in a short life.

'You should have used Caldwell's trommel.' The words thudded in my brain like the pulse of the Mazy Zed's pumps.

They all turned and looked at me. The wash of water in the tubes and the heart-beat of the pumps filled the long silence.

Then Mary said, wide-eyed, 'Why do you say that?'

The forceps in her fingers played idly, unseeingly, in the pile of diamonds before her.

We stared at one another. 'The first diamonds from the sea — a Caldwell has made history again. Perhaps you've killed the Caldwell jinx, too.'

Rhennin frowned. 'You've had a going-over, John. Better get a change and clean-up. Draw some fresh clothes from the stores.' He turned to Mary. 'You're the wardrobe mistress — Mike and Jim can go ahead with the sorting — will you fix John up?'

I said, 'Shelborne would have called it the slop-chest, not wardrobe.'

Mary was puzzled, uncertain, but excitement brought a remarkable clarity to her hazel eyes. She undid a top button of her surgeon's smock, pulled out a magnifying glass, the sort jewellers use, and held it out on a thin gold chain to me. I walked over to her, frowning, for something which had been dredged up in my mind at the sight of those first sea-diamonds now eluded me, something important on the point of definition. But it was gone now.

Mary held a stone in her forceps. There was an intricate tracery of fine lines which seemed at first glance to be a blurring.

She cupped the diamonds into a small pile. 'Look! They're frosty!'

The blurring, on looking closer, resolved into a mass of fine cobwebs. There was a green at the heart of it like the green I had seen in Shelborne's eyes.

I handed back the glass. 'Felix, I want to tell you how Shelborne

There's plenty of time to talk. Get Mary to find you the clothes first. How many carats are there, Mary?'

Twenty, thirty maybe.'

Rhennin spoke to the group at the sorting-table. 'We've found sea-diamonds, and that's a pretty big thrill for all of us. Remember, though, that what's here on the table isn't a quarter enough to pay her way for one day.

You all know that it could simply be an isolated pocket…'

Mary gestured to me and we went to a big room in the Mazy Zed's 'flatland' which was filled with shirts, overalls, jackets, jerseys, trousers, shoes, socks. It looked like a small department store for men.

'Is this really part of your job?' I asked.

She laughed. 'Woman's touch and all that. Being the only female aboard, Mr Rhennin put the slop-chest, as you call it, in my care.' She looked at me appraisingly. 'Sixteen collar, forty vest?'

I nodded. She put them into my hands.

'Why did you say "Caldwell's trommel" the way you did?'

'It seemed appropriate that what the father missed the daughter should have.'

She shook her head. 'That explains the words, yes. But not the way you said them.' She paused when I did not reply. 'And Shelborne?'

'When a man has just tried to kill you, it is difficult to get it out of your mind.'

'Kill your

I told her about the Praying Mantis and the Borchardt.

She said flatly, 'Shelborne isn't the type. There is some other explanation.'

'Are you trying to find excuses for your father's murderer?'

She flushed. 'I don't believe that either.'

'He made me a nice goodbye speech, practically saying it would be the last time we would meet. He was pleased, too, that I'd helped you get this job — why, I don't know. I think that was the reason he showed me over Mercury.'

She handed me a pair of shoes and socks. 'John, I know in my heart that Shelborne isn't a killer. He is complex, brilliant, and there's something inward-looking about him which I find hard to define or comprehend. And I feel an affinity — a rapport, you could call it that — with him which I cannot understand…'

The whole thing's quite simple: Shelborne got your father to Strandloper's Water, extorted the concession from him, and then did away with him. How, we shall never know.'

'He's not like that at all. I know it, I feel it. Shelborne lives on different planes — and one of them is an exalted state where it is difficult to come anywhere close to him. Rarefied, maybe, but exciting and unique, not murderous. If something on one plane stood in the way of his ideas on another…'

'In other words, Shelborne has his price, too. Like Strandloper's Water. I wish I knew what the price was — the concession wasn't the half of it.'

She said angrily, 'It isn't like that either, and you know it. You're oversimplifying. You're working the facts backwards to try to incriminate Shelborne. It doesn't work. He…'

'Look, Mary, I saw your father's own pistol, with his name engraved on it — F. W. Caldwell. Shelborne had it, but no one parts with a gun like that, custom-made for his own hand only…'

'You know a lot about guns,' she flashed at me.

'Yes,' I said, 'I do. I've collected them, studied them, used them…'

She remained silent and I went on: 'To act the way Shelborne is capable of acting, or think the way he thinks, you have to have a motive — a compulsive motive force. I sat on his stoep, his quarter-deck, and watched his mental processes at work not longer than a couple of days ago. He frightens me, just as his island frightens me. Look at the facts: a sea-bed diamond concession, some guano islands which are literally only for the birds, and he refuses a handsome offer to cooperate with the Mazy Zed outfit. It doesn't add up to the man who sat there with me on that grim little island. Caldwell

'Why do you keep bringing my father into it?'

'Because I feel him as a presence. In the sorting-room back there too. I know, I know — he's been dead thirty-odd years. But Caldwell is diamonds.'

'Now Mary Caldwell is diamonds too,' she added quietly.

I waited before I spoke. 'What if Shelborne has in his hands the luck that eluded Caldwell?'

She stared at me, wide eyes. 'What do you mean?'

'Caldwell became the legend because the world knew it was really he who found the great strikes, — but each was taken from him at the moment of putting the golden cup to his lips, so to speak, by a cruel stroke of luck. Oranjemund is the star example. He should have been a millionaire half a dozen times over.' I chose my words slowly, carefully. 'What if there were something else, his biggest strike of all?'

'What are you trying to say?'

'A great prospector with a kindly, gentle and, it seems, slightly credulous nature, walks out on his home, his child, on everything that is dear to him, vanishes, and is seen only once again at Strandloper's Water. He just went prospecting? No!'

'But he had the German concession for the sea-bed.'

'Why?' I demanded. 'Why the sea-bed, why, why, why?'

'Because he thought…'

'Caldwell didn't think, he didn't go on guess-work — he knew. Shelborne knows too.'

'What, John, for God's sake?'

I told her. Until that moment it had been undefined, uncrystallized in my mind.

She looked carefully at me. Then she burst out. 'No! No! You must be mad. It's too big…'

'That's just why,' I said. 'It's too big. Too big altogether. So was Caldwell's fate.'

9

Gruppe Eisbar

There was a little vein by the bridge of her nose; it began to beat noticeably.

'My father!' she exclaimed. 'My father! It isn't possible.'

'It fits the facts. That is why they were at Strandloper's Water. A name like the Hottentots' Paradise was good enough to camouflage their real reason.'

We stood staring at one another, while the enormous implications of what I had said dawned upon us. The little vein pulsed again. I gathered up the clothes she had selected.

'Rhennin must know about this — at once.'

She nodded without speaking, and we set off down the damp, wet-slicked corridor towards his quarters. She stumbled over the high lintel of the first water-tight door we came to.

Breaking the seriousness of our mood, I said, 'That's almost a Mazy Zed in the minuet.'

She smiled and hummed softly: '"… for she is such a sweet little craft, such a neat little, sweet little craft, such a bright little, light little, trim little craft…"'

Despite my preoccupation with what was racing round in my mind, I found myself grinning, too..'Koeltas puts it much more forcibly than Gilbert and Sullivan.'

She wrinkled her nose at my closeness. 'Seal!'

'They were sort of kind to me.'

She said, 'I thank the seals, but I think it will be better for everyone if I keep your fresh clothes until… until…'

I laughed at her shyness. '… until I can sample the Mazy Zed's bathrooms.'

I knocked on Rhennin's door and he opened it quickly. The cabin was as bare as the desert: a big desk and some untidy chairs matching the battleship grey of the uncarpeted steel decking. Big-headed rivets marched in battalions along the overhead beams. An air conditioner whined softly against the heavy pulse of the diamond pumps. Fluorescent lighting robbed Mary's make-up of colour and left her lips and nails a weird violet-blue. The cabin was stacked with charts — old German and new British ones on easels as well as my detailed surveys; a blown-up version of Angras Juntas hung over the back of a Kennedy rocking-chair near the desk. On its surface lay a glass tube of sea-diamonds.

Rhennin opened his mouth to greet us, but it closed again in surprise at our air. For a moment I looked at Mary. She knew what was coming.

I said without preamble, 'Felix, you believe in sea-diamonds, don't you?'

He was puzzled, uneasy. He shrugged. 'You two are damnably serious about something. Is this a conspiracy?'

I waited, not sure where to begin. The idea was so big, so fantastic, I had to put it to Rhennin the right way.

He got up, considering, watching our faces, and poured three brandies. 'Naturally I believe in sea-diamonds, John. You remember that when we started the Mazy Zed project nearly four years ago now we thrashed out whether there could be such a thing. It was basic to the project. It seems the most reasonable thing geologically that there should be an extension of shoreline deposits such as were found at Oranjemund into and under the sea. We know marine terraces exist. There is no reason to say that just because the high-water mark is here or there, the shoreline deposits should end at that line. Of course they don't. And today we've proved it — the Mazy Zed became history when she took diamonds from the sea.'

I shook my head. 'It wasn't history, Felix. It was all known before. There was nothing original about it at all.'

He became puzzled and angry. 'What the hell has bitten you, John? For years you've planned and schemed with me, backing your hunches, and now today, when the Mazy Zed has proved herself, you change your mind. I don't understand. Has Shelborne's attempt against you given you cold feet?'

I went over to the porthole. All that the light had left of the implacable shore was a faint luminosity. There was a distant sound of an engine being revved up: Bob Sheriff was on the job.

Mary came across and looked at the faint coastline with me. Caldwell would have felt proud of her, as I did, when she spoke. 'Diamonds are travellers, you know. Like all travellers, they seem to head instinctively for the sea. They are tough voyagers, though. Look at today's stones — you can't find any wear on them to measure the length of their journey. If they did show it, what John is about to tell you would be easier to demonstrate. I just want you to remember that — the diamonds on the Sperrgebiet, washed as they are by the ocean currents, did not come far.'

Mary's was a true Caldwell analogy; Caldwell had been that above all, a traveller. He had the wanderlust.

Rhennin waited. Mary went on: 'Currents, waves — remember them also. They shift all sorts of material from place to place and sort it, tirelessly, twenty-four hours a day, and they have done so for thousands of years.'

We saw the iron-bound Sperrgebiet, the wind and the sea, as a gigantic sorting-jig; Shelborne saw them as symbols of life and death.

Mary had given me the opening, and I followed up quickly. 'Felix, Mary is right: diamonds are travellers. But travellers must come from somewhere, mustn't they?'

'What are you trying to say?'

'Stratton told the court…'

'Stratton was a bore.'

The words tumbled out, not the way I had meant to muster them, but with the same rush and thud as the water through the Mazy Zed's pumps.

'Stratton told how diamonds were washed down by the Orange River, or other unnamed prehistoric rivers, into the sea and were then thrown back along the coast by the action of the currents…'

'We went into all this at the outset, John.'

'What we didn't go into was where do they come from, Felix? Today's haul, for example?'

'From the sea.'

The sea didn't make them.'

'You mean, from what part of the sea-bed did they originally come?'

'Listen: I believe that under the sea off the Sperrgebiet coast somewhere lies a single volcanic pipe, a bigger and better source of diamonds than either Kimberley or Cullinan, from which diamonds are washed ashore today — as they have been washed ashore for a million years…'

Mary supplemented, 'We think there is a parent crater, an undersea fountainhead.'

'Shelborne knows where it is,' I resumed. 'Caldwell discovered it. Shelborne murdered Caldwell for his seabed concession. That's why he fought us in court. That is why he won't give in, even now. That is why he could afford to throw away a couple of big diamonds in a lodestone matrix to kill me. He knows the whereabouts of this fountainhead, but it is too big for him to tackle…'

Rhennin was on his feet: 'But not too big for the Mazy Zed}'

The Hottentots' Paradise was so much hooey. A man of Caldwell's integrity would not fall for that one. Nor would he abandon everything, including his wife and infant daughter…' I waved at Mary. '… for the sake of a pub tale like that. The parent crater under the sea from which all South-west Africa's fabulous diamonds have orginated — don't you see, man, how that discovery would have righted the balance, cancelled all Caldwell's previous monumental failures and ill luck? Oranjemund, the richest field in the world, is paltry compared to the fountainhead, because Oranjemund has only got in its terraces stones the parent rock can spare. Caldwell went after his big chance — his fate — but he missed again because Shelborne killed him at Strandloper's Water.'

Mary said quietly, 'I still don't believe that.'

Rhennin's voice trembled with excitement. 'By God, John! We've all become so bemused with the technical problems of mining diamonds — on land at Oranjemund or at sea in the Mazy Zed — that we've lost sight of the cardinal question of where they come from. We've had it so good that we never thought to look farther! We have been satisfied with the eighteen million pounds a year from diamonds that we can lay our hands on.'

'It took a man like Caldwell to find it,' I said, turning to Mary. 'He had to play the stakes big. Fate had tossed down the odds three times before and each time he had lost. He was playing for everything.'

Rhennin was carried away: 'When I started on the Mazy Zed idea I spent months analysing the diamond returns of defunct German companies which first worked the shore deposits. I wanted some indication whereto begin…'

The words died on his lips. I had left the porthole to put down my glass on a low table. Incredulity and amazement showed in his face as his eyes fell on the opening in my shirt, which sagged open, buttonless, as I bent down.

The Knight's Cross hung on its golden chain.

He started forward and snatched it so that the chain broke.

'Where did you get this?' he managed to say in a strangled voice.

'Read the back,' I said.

His hands were shaking so that he could hardly turn it over.

'"Korvettenkapitan Dieter Rhennin. L7-68.. May 1942." Did… did you find Dieter's body?'

'No,' I replied. 'I didn't find a body. I found a graveyard, though. First I want to know who Dieter Rhennin was.'

'He was my brother. Is he dead?'

I told him about Shelborne's death-in-life acre overlooking the sea. He sat down hard on the desk chair. The strip lighting blanked out his right side, etching the left in severe, tired strokes. In the middle of what I started to say he got up and splashed three more brandies for us, without asking.

'What was Dieter Rhennin doing at Mercury?' I asked.

He said slowly, 'I was once a German Naval Intelligence officer. I mean to find out.'

'At the expense of the Mazy Zed project?'

'No,' he said. 'Let me tell you.' He ran his hand through his hair and closed his eyes. 'I used to be personal staff officer to the Oberbefehlshaber der Marine — the High Command Number One. You get used to sorting things out.'

'But you didn't sort out your brother's death — that's why the sight of that gave you a shock. What has Dieter's death got to do with the Mazy Zed?'.' I demanded.

'I knew he was in the area. He and five U-boats. A whole U-boat Rudel, a wolf-pack as you call it.'

'What were they doing?'

He replied, 'Korventtenkapitan Rhennin was one of the most daring of the latter-day U-boat aces. He was too late for the great early battles in the North Atlantic, but still he won this…' He balanced the diamond-studded Knight's Cross in his hand. 'He had the same dash, the same intuitive flair for the Schwerpunkt as the great captains…'

'Schwerpunkt?'

He gestured with his hand. 'Our U-boat terms — the British and the Americans hardly understood them. The U-boat men used words which began as having one meaning and then, in the Western Approaches, the blood and the flames and sinkings passed into the words and they mutated. They had a name for diesel oil which meant death by choking, death by flame. Death could come via a crack in the casing under the depth-charges… There were delicate nuances of meaning… It could come through nothing more than a blurred periscope graticule…'

Mary prompted him: ' Schwerpunkt?'

'Ah, yes,' he replied. 'The centre of gravity, perhaps we might translate it thus.' The English term was bald and cold compared to the mystic savour he gave it; he had been at the heart of the U-boat offensive. 'A convoy, a port, a warship, any of these might be a Schwerpunkt. Not a target. A pivotal point, whose destruction might be success or failure. It takes a great captain to know where that centre of gravity is when everything is fire, explosion, sudden death.'

We waited. The air conditioner whined, the pumps thudded.

His words became a torrent: 'They gave Dieter four of the finest U-boat captains. He himself was the fifth; there was no doubt about the choice of leader. The boats were all new — the IXC class, all of them, eighteen knots on the surface, seven submerged; each had six torpedo tubes and a crew of forty-eight. They made up Gruppe Eisbar, the Polar Bear Group. They sailed to destroy the British round the Cape of Good Hope. My brother sent a signal. The attack was ready…'

I thought of the almost magical prognostications of the Submarine Tracking Room at the Admiralty.

They were all sunk,' I said.

He looked at the Knight's Cross. 'I wish to God I knew.' In his agitation he repeated himself. 'They rendezvoused and sent a signal. Then — Gruppe Eisbar vanished.'

Mary said, 'The British knew the rendezvous? Where was it?'

Rhennin's voice was thick. He waved to the porthole. 'Angras Juntas. The bay of the meeting of the captains.'

The old Portuguese name for the bay! Four hundred years ago Henry the Navigator's captains had gathered here to find a way to sail across the world. What had been Gruppe Eisbar's mission?

Mary was obviously mystified by the dramatic disappearance of the crack squadron.

Rhennin went on, 'There are four faces to the kill when the U-boat is hunting. Dieter — first, the awareness of the victim: tension, lips thrust forward, eyes leftwards under the Turcoman cap he always wore in action; second, close for the attack, cap gone, lips parted, death and pity, the eyes shadowed; third, the widening of the nostrils, the head thrown back, the desperate ticking of the seconds on the stop-watch while the torpedoes run; fourth, the smile, the relaxed smile of success.'

Mary was staring at him. I remembered Shelborne's symbols of life and death.

'You hear death in the noise of your own motor alternator when they've forced you 400 feet down, those British destroyers above with the ping-scratch of the Asdic. You've got to use the compass gyroscope and hydrophones in spite of the noise of that motor. You know it is death to use it; it might be death not to.'

It was fully a minute before I broke in, he was so carried away. 'Why Angras Juntas, Felix? There's more to this than meets the eye, — it's like Shelborne. Five U-boats… a powerful raiding force like Gruppe Eisbar does not simply disappear. There are signals, prearranged exchanges, orders between such a group and operations staff. It is still easy to check back: all the records of U-boat operations were published at the time of the Nuremberg trials.'

'Seekriegsleitung was a highly efficient machine,' replied Rhennin. 'I should know. I was at headquarters.'

'Why didn't Seekriegsleitung order Gruppe Eisbar to rendezvous on the high seas in the safe area south of St Helena? Dieter wasn't after shipping at the Cape, was he? Was he looking for what you are looking for: diamonds!'

A slight flush spread up Rhennin's face. For a moment I thought he would get up and thump the table in the best German officer manner, — instead he poured himself another stiff drink, tossing the Knight's Cross up and down in his palm.

'Yes, John, you are right, they were after diamonds. This is the story: it was a double mission. I'm speaking of June-July 1942. British shipping was pouring round the Cape in the build-up of men and supplies for the Battle of El Alamein. SKL — Seekriegsleitung — guessed that the British knew after they had sunk the Bismarck in 1941- that we had a refuelling rendezvous deep in the South Atlantic near St Helena. The British patiently gathered their information. Then they struck. I forget how many vital supply ships we lost when they did. So Seekriegsleitung decided to assign Gruppe Eisbar a land rendezvous. Angras Juntas would be safe, we reckoned. It was out of range of the land-sea patrols and the nearest radar was 300 miles away. There were no humans except a few Bushmen in the desert.'

Mary said, 'I remember the excitement in Cape Town when the U-boats came close.'

Rhennin smiled faintly. That must have been later. Before Gruppe Eisbar the U-boats had left the Cape route alone. Polar Bear was meant to be the big — the first — surprise. In June 1942 a convoy of fifty-three ships was to gather in Table Bay, headed by the Queen Mary, with a whole division of troops aboard. There was also the Mauretania, the Aquitania, the lie de France, all big ships. Gruppe Eisbar had orders to annihilate the convoy.'

'Indiscriminately?'

Rhennin nodded. 'Indiscriminately. At anchor, in Table Bay. Cape Town's defences were worth nothing: the air patrols were poor and the radar useless.'

Rhennin was too sure, too confident. Gruppe Eisbar had probably foundered on similar cocksureness.

'I suppose Gruppe Eisbar finished up in the British minefields guarding the port.'

Rhennin shook his head. 'No. We knew where the minefields were. The British had put a new channel into use just before the convoy arrived. We had sent another U-boat in weeks before to reconnoitre. We could scarcely believe her report that a hostile port was so lightly defended. Everything was like peace-time. There was no black-out and the lighthouses were all shining.'

'Walvis Bay was an alternative mustering-place for the deep-sea convoys.' I added.

'I know,' he went on irritably. 'We all knew. The Rudel, the Gruppe Eisbar wolf-pack, followed our surface raiders' Route Anton — the German secret route through the South Atlantic where U-boats were forbidden to attack — and they were off Angras Juntas on schedule. One of the boats — U-504 I think it was — had some trouble with her hydroplanes, but she kept station. The captains used to say later that the hydroplanes of the big boats were too small to keep them steady in the heavy seas of the Cape of Storms and you only have to read their logs to see how many torpedoes they wasted because of this…'

Mary said diffidently, breaking in, 'I suppose the Royal Navy intercepted Gruppe Eisbar.'

'No! no! The British never sank Gruppe Eisbar! I've been through all the Nuremberg records. The British South Atlantic Command knew that U-boats were on the way to attack the Cape, but only in a general way, nothing particular. No, Gruppe Eisbar simply vanished. It caused the greatest dismay and heart-searching at headquarters.'

I shook my head. 'Five U-boats, armed to the teeth, with fighting crews, don't vanish without a trace. There would be some wreckage, oil, clothing — something.'

'I know! I know!' He clenched his fists. 'I know! Listen!' He wrenched open a drawer of the desk and pulled out a paper. 'This is my brother's sighting signal. It was in code, of course, but here it is plain: Commander Eisbar to OKM. Rendezvous on schedule. No sign defences or enemy activity. Shore recognition signal satisfactory.'

'Shore recognition signal?'

He laughed uneasily. 'I see you are both bursting to know about the diamonds. After all, whether or not Gruppe Eisbar was lost or not lost, and whether my brother lived or died, is purely of academic interest to you.'

'Are you looking for U-boat wreckage with the Mazy Zed's equipment and not for diamonds at all?'

'No, Mary, it's diamonds I'm after all right.'

I added, 'And Dieter was after diamonds too.'

'Not the same diamonds or in the same way,' he replied. Some of the tension seemed to go out of him. 'You remember, Caldwell's concession was countersigned by Goering, Reichskommissionar for the Protectorate of Luderitzland, the Luftwaffe chief's father? Doctor Heinrich Goering had the same love of finery and medals as our Field-Marshal. Bismarck sent him out originally to get the local native and Hottentot chiefs on Germany's side. South-west Africa was then the centre of a big diplomatic game. Doctor Goering, in white uniform, cocked hat, sword chased in gold, rode in as the conqueror. He had an army with him — twenty half-castes, riding broken-down donkeys! Goering himself rode an ox. It was pure comic opera.'

'Luftwaffe Goering wasn't comic opera,' said Mary.

'Nor was this Goering really,' said Rhennin. 'He was in fact very shrewd. He also became one of the world's richest men. He could have bought out a brace of Rockefellers.'

'So Goering sent out a powerful U-boat raiding force…'

'Goering didn't. But Gruppe Eisbar was, nevertheless, to bring home the bacon, the Goering bacon of diamonds to Germany. He had enough stashed away in a cave on the Sperrgebiet coast to have made a big impression on neutral countries at a time when Germany's economy was on the rocks…'

'Come, come,' I interjected. 'Not enough to make any difference to Germany's bankruptcy. I don't believe it.'

'We wanted the hoard as a showpiece to create the impression among South American neutrals that we had millions and millions more like it,' Rhennin replied.

'And Dieter required five U-boats to convey the cache, which at most could not have weighed as much as a quarter of a sack of coal?'

Rhennin flushed at my tone. 'No. I said, it was a double operation. The shore recognition signal was from a spy who knew exactly where the sea cave was. It wasn't situated at Angras Juntas, that I know. I never saw Dieter's secret orders. Dieter, as commander of the Gruppe, would carry the diamonds. The U-boats would then go on to the Cape and destroy the great convoy. Tormentoso, the British gave it a code-name. Not very imaginative.'

'Cabo Tormentoso — the Cape of Storms,' echoed Mary.

I said, 'Divide the cache between four U-boat captains and 240 men, and you still have a sizeable fortune left for every individual. Winner's pickings to the commander, too, in the best piratical style.'

Rhennin didn't explode, as I thought he would do. 'The same was said by even those who knew and trusted Dieter,' he replied levelly. 'Every German agent in South America was warned to watch out for Korvettenkapitan Rhennin and his- notorious Gruppe Eisbar, if he showed up. He never did. Gruppe Eisbar simply vanished.'

'Where was the sea cave?' asked Mary.

'It was somewhere close to Angras Juntas — .the spy knew where. Local knowledge was essential to find it.' -

I said quietly. 'Below Mercury lies just such a sea cave — the Glory Hole. No one has entered it. In the graveyard above I found that.'

Mary exclaimed, 'Shelborne could not have done it!'

Rhennin's eyes blazed. 'No, one man cannot destroy a whole U-boat pack. But we shall go and have a look. I, too, mean to see what is inside the Glory Hole.'

'So do I,' I said. I went into some detail of my dispute with Shelborne aboard the Gquma and then of his oddly co-operative mood, by contrast, at Mercury itself.

'The key to it all seems to be, who was the spy?' said Mary.'

'Shelborne?' I followed up.

'No, no,' replied Rhennin. 'I know who he was — don't forget, I was right in on it as one of the most senior officers in German Naval Intelligence. His name was Werner, Abel Werner. He had worked for the old German Administration in South-west Africa.'

'Could have been Shelborne masquerading under another name. He knows every hidey-hole on the coast. In war-time it would have been easy for him to have slipped down the coast and taken over the spy's role…'

Rhennin laughed. 'You've got Shelborne on the brain, John. Grant you everything: so Shelborne, single-handed, disposes of five U-boats and their crews and successfully conceals hundreds of bodies and five submarine hulls? No!'

There is his graveyard…' I replied lamely; but what Rhennin said was›true.

He went on grimly: 'I intend to look into that, too, John, even if I have to break open every coffin to find Dieter's body.'

Mary shuddered. 'You know, people are as different as diamonds — they also feel different from one another. Today's diamonds were the coldest I've ever touched. Ordinarily the stones are cold — it's not like touching glass, you know — but today's from the sea were the coldest.'

Rhennin said, 'My study of the old records showed that on the Sperrgebiet coast they increase in average size as one moves north…'

I said meaningly, 'Towards Mercury and towards Strandloper's Water.'

'Schwerpunkt,' said Mary. 'Centre of gravity.'

'By God!' exclaimed Rhennin. 'Yes, by God!'

She went on: 'You are both set on going to Mercury, for the diamonds and for your brother, Felix.'

I interrupted. 'Felix, was there any indication that the Goering cache was — protected?'

'Protected? We were certain there were no defences!'

'No, not that sort of defences.'

He came nearer to me, and I thought I detected some fear in his eyes. 'Well, how were they defended then, if not militarily? The only other enemy we had was the sea.'

I picked my words. 'If there were some other guardian, a guardian capable of disposing of five U-boats and their fighting crews?'

'What are you driving at, John?'

I told them about the Bells of St Mary's, and of Koeltas's fears and those of the seal robbers. Mary seemed paler in the cold light.

Rhennin shook his head like a boxer after a head punch. 'And this — guardian you call it — Shelborne controls?'

'Not controls. I think he understands it.'

'Isn't he afraid of it?'

'He's afraid of it all right.'

'Why?'

'Otherwise he would have exploited his secret. I believe he also knows how the diamonds are distributed from the fountainhead to the point where the currents take over.'

There was a long silence. The thudding of the pumps echoed my heart beats.

'A guardian of the hoard, that Shelborne understands but is afraid of.' Rhennin turned it over. 'I mean to find out what it is.'

'You'll take the Mazy Zed to Mercury then?'

'We'll cut the diamond run tomorrow.'

Mary said, 'I want some fresh air after this superheated discussion. Take me up on deck please, John.'

'One last thing, Felix: your U-boats didn't carry grabs or dredges — equipment like that?'

'No. What they were after was transportable; they weren't trying to mine diamonds.'

'Was there nothing else at all…?'

'Dieter had orders to report by radio every day at 1700 hours. SKL chose that time specially for the South Atlantic because it is half-light and half-dark and a submarine surfaced is very difficult to spot. When he reached Angras Juntas, Dieter signalled dead on time. A U-boat captain would unless he were in big trouble. Then nothing. Nor ever again. But…'

'Yes?'

'One of our surface raiders, the Lohengrin, was near St Helena the day after Dieter signalled from Angras Juntas. She reported receiving a garbled message shortly before 1700 hours. It was a jumble — not code, not anything. But en clair half-way through it said plainly in German, "fouler Zauber". You could translate it by "silly humbug".'

'Lohengrin didn't get a D/F bearing on the message?'

'No. It was quite strong, but hopelessly confused. It was German, but where it came from was anyone's guess.'

'St Helena,' I said. 'She was close enough to Angras Juntas then to pick up even a weak message.'

'Or close enough to Mercury,' said Rhennin.

We left him silent, preoccupied, and went on deck. The night was dark except for Orion's studded belt. We paused at a pair of steel nozzles, each as tall as myself, in a rack. The intakes were strongly shielded by thick metal bands. These were the 'Hoovers' for the ocean bed. Compressed air, forced down a small inner pipe, bubbled and disturbed the mud, — water rushed into and up the outside pipe into the Mazy Zed's sorting machinery. It was the jet lift principle applied on a massive scale.

Mary slapped the metal impatiently with her open palm. 'There's something awry in our ideas, John. I feel we should stir up our ideas, disturb the mental mud, as these pipes do, and throw out the accumulated residues of preconceived ideas we're more and more fitting into a pattern. We're wrong somewhere, I tell you, we're wrong. I know it deep down.'

'It all fits. So does Shelborne.'

She smiled, leaning back against the nozzles. 'It doesn't. You know, John, we should both be wearing diamonds — they were once considered a cure for lunacy.'

'Where's the lunacy?'

'I can't pinpoint it, John — I wish I could, but there's some error somewhere in your working out of this thing.' She straightened up so that she was close to me. 'It's funny; it was always the men who used to wear diamonds. They were thought to have magic powers, and were worn as amulets. It's really only recently that women have taken to them.'

'I am sure I am right about Shelborne.'

'I could believe that he has some sort of magic power. Maybe he picked it up from being near diamonds all his life.'

'You believe in him because he was close to your father: it blinds you to the rest.'

There was a flare from one of the Mazy Zed's smokestacks high above us. I saw the flecks in her eyes and the minute pulse of the vein by her nose.

'Diamonds are in the sky, too, you know. Look at a meteorite — it's graphite, and that's cousin to diamonds. They have predetermined paths up there…' She gestured to Orion.

I opened my mouth to reply. A lazy stream of lights arced in from the sea. They weren't meteorites. Blue, red, white. Tracer bullets! The brittle rattle of a machine-gun outpaced them.

They were coming at the Mazy Zed. I dragged Mary to the deck. The glowing arc ripped through the thick hose and struck a welter of sparks off the big nozzles. I threw myself across her. A hot ricochet plucked at my shoulder and I smelt the acrid cordite. „Then the whole world seemed to explode as a torpedo crashed into the Mazy Zed.

10

Sookin Sin

I broke surface and retched sea water. I breathed air again, great gulps of it, instead of water. Whether the blackness was the blackness of unconsciousness, or of blindness, or of night, I could not tell — all I knew was that the air was merciful and I was getting lungfuls of it. I rid myself of more sea water. There was a phosphorescence next to me. Then a slim arm was round me, holding me as I choked.

Thank God!' It was Mary. 'Thank God, I've found you, John. Here!'

She came close and thrust something under my hands.

'What is it?'

To my dazed senses it felt like a chunk of the Loch Ness monster.

'It's some of the Mazy Zed's hose — the explosion must have blown it clear.'

Half-submerged, it was safer than a rescue dinghy and rough, like a car tyre. Its semi-floating state made it easier to grasp. She levered me up so that I lay spread-eagled, face down.

She was sobbing convulsively. 'I thought… I thought it was you… when I touched it first…'

I put out a hand to her in the darkness. Her shoulder was trembling and rags of her overall slopped about.

Her voice was thick with shock and emotion. 'I'm in a mess. My shoes are gone — I slipped them off when I swam looking for you — and…'

My anger exploded: 'I'll have Shelborne's guts for tonight's work. Radar! Patrols!.. bah!'

'Steady,' she said shakily. 'Steady, John. I've got you, which is the most important thing.'

She supported me while I choked and coughed, still half-dazed. I wanted to know what was going on, but I found myself still too weak, and put my head against her, drawing in deep breaths of fresh air.

She said softly, a little wanly, I thought, 'I could almost thank whoever did it — for this.'

I felt lulled by her presence but the lethargy which was starting to creep across my limbs was a danger sign of delayed shock. I shook the cobwebs out of my head. They sneaked right in under Bob Sheriff's patrols and torpedoed the bloody ship!'

Take it easy, John,' she said. 'You know Shelborne hasn't a fleet any more than I have. And the Kalingrad People's Atlantic Fleet…'

I had to see. I trod water and tried to heave myself up higher on the hosing, but I wasn't very successful. There was no sign of the Mazy Zed. I could not credit that one torpedo, even of the large calibre type, would have sent the Mazy Zed with all her watertight compartments to the bottom.

I said, 'It must have been a motor-boat and she still must be somewhere around. One torpedo isn't enough…'

Torpedo?' she echoed. 'Was that a torpedo?'

A line of light streaked across the part of the night that I was looking at. Tracers! Another parabola answered the first — Bob Sheriff!

The bastards!' I swore. The bloody bastards…!'

'A submarine…?' said Mary.

'No — that burst of fire was from a fast boat, maybe a hydrofoil like Sheriff's.'

They went straight for the mining equipment, didn't they?'

'Yes. It doesn't look as if they were after the diamonds we'd sucked up today, or else she would not have tried to sink the Mazy Zed. No, she was out to stop us mining — just as Shelborne tried to settle me.'

'You're wrong about him, John.'

'We'll sort that out later,' I replied roughly. This was the second time in a matter of days that I had found myself hanging on to life by a thread, thanks to Shelborne. She drew away at my tone. I went on, conciliatory. 'Was there one torpedo or two. Was there a second explosion?'

'I don't think so. I only remember a fearful crash and then I found myself in the water — looking for you.' She caught my arm, and whispered, 'Listen!'

I would have known that voice anywhere: thin, it rattled as harshly as a compressor drill, that remarkable Bushman-Hottentot patois. Skipper Koeltas! The Malgas must be close at hand, unless they were survivors like ourselves. The staccato vowels clicked like handcuffs. I started to shake with silent laughter. Never had I heard anything like it — and they're pretty tough in the Richtersveld.

'What is he saying?'

'It's about the torpedo-boat captain.' I grinned. 'Koeltas says — do you really want to know?'

'Yes. How he manages those clicks and clacks I shall never know.'

'He says the captain is a pimp and his mother the village whore — there's a lot more, a sort of potted genealogical table, a la Koeltas.'

'A la Koeltas!' she echoed.

I cupped my hands. 'Ahoy, Koeltas! You Sperrgebiet-poacher-sonofabitch!' I broke into an expletive which must have brought all Koeltas's ancestors, buried in their customary seated position, back on their feet.

The thin voice cut off in mid-sentence, and then crackled like static. The water gurgled against the thick hose, there was a north-flowing current in the bay, setting from the Mazy Zed's anchorage towards Black Sophie Rock and Plumpudding Island. These two were in the northern part of the bay among jagged reefs about a quarter of a mile from the shore. The two islets were close together and Malgas's berth was about fifty yards from Black Sophie.

Silence.

'Koeltas! Johaar! Kim!'

There was a ripple alongside the hose. Mary screamed, 'Shark! Shark!'

Her scream ended in a strangle. Someone had a hand over her mouth. I couldn't see a face, only a gleam of steel in the starlight, fluid-blue as the sea itself.

'Quiet! It is Johaar! Shut up — come. That bastard hear and shoot us up.'

The knife was in his teeth. Mary cringed against me. The improvised life-raft was pulled along by Johaar's powerful stroke. I saw the schooner's masts, then hands reached down and dragged us over the low rail on to the deck.

'Keep down!' snarled Koeltas, with a reflex burst of Richtersveld profanity.

'By Jesus, it is a woman!'

'Kim, you bladdy womanizer! I'll cut your throat if you don't shut your trap!'

From somewhere behind Plumpudding came a heavy fusillade, coupled with the drum of engines pushed beyond the limit of their revs.

Koeltas said softly, 'He's coming back for the Mazy Zed.'

'So he didn't sink her?' I asked.

'There was a hell of a bang and her lights went out,' he replied. 'No, man she's afloat. That's why he comes back…'

'With one tit hanging low,' leched Kim.

'What do you mean?'

'One of the shells went off, but the other is stuck.' said Koeltas.

By shells he meant torpedoes. One had run, but the second was fast in its firing-tube.

'Where are Commander Sheriff's men?' I went on.

Johaar laughed derisively. They were caught with their pants down, all right. They're okay for chasing a ship like the Malgas and bluffing themselves, but that bastard sank one of them. The other is throwing a lot of stuff around, but he doesn't know what in hell he's firing at.'

'Where did the boat come from?' asked Mary in a small voice.

'Lady,' said Koeltas with an odd note of deference. 'I know this place well. I know a way through the rocks between Black Sophie and Plumpudding…'

'That Cape Town tart,' said Kim, 'she was before my time.'

'Ag sis, don't be so saucy, man!' snapped Koeltas. 'Lady, I smell a ship out at sea. She waits. That's where the boat comes from.'

. 'A ship?' I echoed. 'What sort of ship waits off a peaceful coast with a torpedo-boat ready slung…?'

Koeltas laughed in his harsh, metallic laugh. 'Mister, you don't know the Sperrgebiet. There are diamonds. The Mazy Zed finds diamonds, but not for the right people. There are ships — strange ships, black ships, fast ships — and you don't see them by day. They hide themselves against the sea like the stoneplants of the Richtersveld; what is stone and what is plant you do not know.'

'Look!' exclaimed Mary. A faint luminescence, a defined line of light, was becoming visible. The moon was rising behind the dunes. Very soon the enemy would give the Mazy Zed the coup de grace.

'We must sink her.'

It was light enough for me to see the wiry little yellow man lying on the deck in his oilskin. The Tartar's eyes were as savage as his voice. Mary lay next to me, shivering in a pool of sea water. I could sense Kim's eyes burning on the outline of her body under the soaked remnants of her overall.

'With your Standard Police Smith and Wesson,' sneered Johaar. 'Yes, we'll sink her all right, man.'

'He'll think you're a spook with that silencer,' added Kim. 'Yes, let's shoot him up with the thirty-eight!'

They all laughed, including Koeltas.

'Wait!' snapped Koeltas. 'Listen!'

A strong roar of motors reverberated from the direction of Plumpudding Island, but Black Sophie Rock cut across our line of vision. It was growing lighter. Then, about 1000 yards away, I saw a vicious cream of water and the torpedo-boat shot into view. She was a fine sight, blurred in her own spray but listing to port as she rode high on the hydrofoils. A torpedo hung, half-in and half-out, of one firing tube. She raced towards the Malgas at fifty knots, I reckoned. Out of sight there came another scream of hard-pressed engines. Bob Sheriff was far behind. Then the enemy boat was abreast the Malgas. I looked into the twin muzzles of the quickfirer mounted on the cabin roof as they bore on us. I dragged Mary nearer, waiting for the guts-tearing, flaring rip of incendiary bullets which would reduce the schooner to a flaming mass of wooden splinters. Perhaps she was saving the whole weight of her metal for the Mazy Zed, for she simply thundered past, rocking us wildly.

'She sits up like a dog,' said Koeltas admiringly. 'You sink her, mister?'

They all turned and looked at me. Their best and most effective weapon, the FN automatic, would be useless against the hydrofoil craft. And the Malgas was immobile — a sailing ship at anchor against a fifty-knotter!

'Anyone see her name?' I asked lamely.

'Sookin Sin,' said Mary.

'What the hell's that?' growled Koeltas.

'It's not important anyway,' I replied, trying to think as the enemy lined herself up to rake the Mazy Zed. Six anchors! They couldn't even cut the ungainly barge adrift. I visualized the anchorage, Sinclair Island and its nearby promontory. The enemy would have to continue on between the Mazy Zed and Sinclair because at her speed there would be no room to turn; if she did, she'd run into Sheriff, who was now screaming out from behind Plumpudding in pursuit. Between Sinclair and the shore there was less than 300 yards. There came into my mind the idea of a trip-rope. Three hundred yards… Black Sophie was closer than that to the Malgas. If only… I glanced across the water to the rock, feverishly measuring, calculating. If I could rig a heavy cable between the schooner and the rock…

'Johaar! Could you swim to Black Sophie and fix a line…' I outlined my plan while we stood transfixed, waiting for the ripping burst at the Mazy Zed, visible now under the rising moon.

There it was! A polka-dot of flame bickered along the upperworks.

'He's stopped firing!' exclaimed Mary.

That short volley could not have done much harm.

'Gun jammed,' I said tersely. 'He'll clear the stoppage and return.'

Koeltas's eyes were so slitted that they seemed closed. He was dubious about the kingpin of my plan. 'That bastard does not wish to make war on an old ship like the Malgas. Unless…' — he switched into patois to express himself. 'The jackal is very, very cunning, and if you put a trap down with meat, he comes and smells human and laughs and goes away. But if you can make him really think it is not a trap, then…'

'That boat is not a seal you can hit over the head with a club.' said Kim.

Seals! The idea was born with the word! What had Koeltas himself said when they fished me, half-dead, off the blinder? — 'other nights we float in an old oil drum with dinnameet and a fuse.' Oil drums charged with dynamite! But we'd have to be quick, mighty quick, if my plan were to have a chance of succeeding. The torpedo-boat was already making for the gap between Sinclair Island and the promontory. The north-flowing current which had helped save Mary and myself had its place in my trap. Koeltas confirmed that the current was strong between Black Sophie Rock and the shore. A dozen mathematical problems of time and distance leapt into my mind; I needed an electronic computer, not a slow human brain. How much fuse should I allow? How long.would the torpedo-boat take before reaching the Malgas again, granting her fifty knots? Would she follow the same course. Would she skirt the foul ground, the, rocks and the blinders through which she had torn so gracefully before? Seeing she was now headed seawards she might prefer the" main entrance to Angras Juntas instead of the way she had come in first time. If she did, my whole plan fell to the ground.

'Kim! Get me six drums of dynamite — do you have to fill them?'

'No, he grinned. 'They're loaded, ready. Just cut the fuse the right length…'

'How much dynamite in each drum?'

'Some have thirty pounds — for the small jobs — some fifty…'

Fifty pounds of high explosive! That was better than I had hoped for. It would have to be a really old-fashioned firing job, coupled with a most up-to-date piece of calculation. If the drums detonated before the torpedo-boat was firmly committed to a course near the Malgas, she would simply veer out of harm's way round the northern flank of Black Sophie and bear directly down on her main sitting target, the Mazy Zed, from the other direction.

'Bring six fifty-pounders.' I ordered.

Kim's voice rippled with excitement. 'And fuse — how much?'

I paused. The length of fuse was vital. 'Koeltas, the current — three knots?'

The thrill of action was in his harsh voice too. 'Nee, nee! Four, maybe four and a half.'

Four and a half knots! Say the hydrofoil would complete a five-mile circuit at fifty knots, followed by a three-mile run-in to her target the length of the bay — 'Seven and a half minutes!' I told Kim. 'And cut that bloody fuse exactly!'

'Kim knows how!' grinned Johaar. 'Now give me the rope and I swim to Black Sophie.'

'Swim to Black Sophie!' Kim started for the explosives, reaching, and drawing a heavy clasp-knife to cut the fuse.

'Cut the cackle!' My nerves were ragged. The pay-off if the fuse were too long or too short would be a bellyful of heavy machine-gun bullets. 'Where is the torpedo-boat now?'

'She's between Sinclair Island and the promontory,' replied Mary. 'You can hear the sound of the engine choking off the cliffs.'

'That's where I hoped she would make for. Johaar, how long will it take you to swim to Black Sophie?'

'Six, seven minutes.'

'With the line around you?'

'Easy.'

I turned to Koeltas. The rope.'

'I pull down the rigging to get that bastard.'

Johaar slipped a light line round his waist, putting the knife between his teeth again. He wore only a pair of shorts. He stood poised on the low rail while two of the crew hastily knotted the pilot line to a two-inch manila from the forrad sail locker.

'If I catch anyone, I cut his throat?' Johaar inquired genially.

'No! I want him alive — I want to find out who is at the bottom of all this.'

Johaar shrugged. 'Okay. But I'll beat him like a donkey first.' He went over the side.

Zero hour! I checked my watch.

'Prepare to get the drums overboard! One from the bows, one from the stern, and the rest at intervals along the side!'

Koeltas flayed his men with his thin voice, good though they were. 'Not altogether, you stupid clots! I want a neat line of drums in the sea!'

The crew grabbed the canisters and took station. I borrowed a battered old Ronson from Koeltas. Then, one after another, six fuses came sputtering to life. Three hundred pounds of high explosive, with fuses burning!

Seven minutes to go!

I raised my hand. 'Let go!'

Expertly, the crew got the drums clear. They fanned out as they floated away. The sinister red tops and pinpoint fuses formed a deadly line under the hard moon.

Six minutes!

Mary was at my side. 'Johaar is in trouble.'

I raced to the stern with her, Koeltas and Kim. We could see his head and the powerful thrash of his arms. He had underestimated the current; he was being swept away from Black Sophie. The way he was going, he'd finish up among the drums as they exploded. Koeltas, wordless, seized my wrist and looked at my watch. His eyes went to the guano-daubed rock and then to the white scar of the torpedo-boat's track.

'He'll never make it' — the patois was strained, brittle, a cacophony of clicks and clacks.

He snatched up an axe from the belaying-pin rail and cut Johaar's rope.

'What the hell…!' With one stroke, Koeltas had wrecked my whole operation. I grabbed at him, but with the strength of a steel spring he shook me clear and lumped on to the low rail, cupping his hands. The foam was at the corners of his mouth from the rattle of words. 'Johaar! Let go! Swim there! I'll shoot a rope. Fasten it on Black Sophie!'

Five minutes!

Koeltas dived below. Free of the rope, Johaar turned like an eel and struck strongly towards the rock. Koeltas came back with a small rocket line-gun, the sort of thing for firing a light line to rig a breeches buoy.

Four and a half minutes!

The hydrofoil swung in from the sea.

Koeltas did not wait for Johaar to reach shore. He touched the fuse. We stood back. Mary's face flared blue in its light. The line arced over Johaar's head. We saw the marker burning bright among the rocks.

Four minutes!

The torpedo-boat emerged from the lee of Plumpudding Island. Sheriff's craft was still out at sea. The enemy boat did a series of dainty side-steps through the blinders.

Three minutes!

Johaar scrambled ashore. He snatched the light line and started hauling in the heavier manila. The crew paid it out in return, shouting and gesticulating at the approaching menace.

Two minutes!

The heavy rope reached Johaar. He vaulted over rocks, stumbled, rose, making for a pinnacle about twelve feet high. In my anxiety over him, I had lost sight of the line of drifting drums. The torpedo-boat was rushing towards them at fifty knots; they drifted across at four knots.

One minute!

Johaar raised a dripping arm. I saw his grotesque, python-like piebald markings in the moonlight.

Throttle wide open, bumping against the set of the current, the torpedo-boat screamed down at the schooner. This time there was no doubt about her intentions. The twin muzzles were locked on us.

Zero!

Black Sophie Rock abeam!

The first drum exploded far to port of the enemy, almost among the breakers. The second, closer, followed almost at once. The boat shied like a Polaris breaking surface. The helm went over hard and she streaked for the gap between the Malgas and Black Sophie. Mary, Koeltas, Kim and I — and the rest of the crew — stood at the rails without a thought of the deadly twin muzzle's. They were swinging hard now, trying to regain their lost target. Four other drums exploded like a badly-timed broadside. The craft skidded sideways, hydrofoils fighting for a grip, away from the ragged detonations. She lay hard over on her starboard side: the loose torpedo jinked up and down. Fifty knots and a live torpedo hanging loose! Let her touch the trip-wire with that…

I never saw her die. One moment the superb craft was creaming along as fast as a torpedo itself, the next — the Malgas jerked on the end of the rope. There was a shattering roar, a blinding flash. The torpedo exploded. The gun-mounting cartwheeled high into the night, like a discarded space booster rocket. A foul dribble of obscenities dripped from Koeltas's mouth and the yellow skin was taut to whiteness over the high Tartar cheekbones.

Kim mouthed, 'Black Sophie! My beautiful bitch! My Beautiful bitch!'

I caught the flash of Johaar's knife blade waved in frantic glee. Then he took a flying header into the breakers and came ploughing across to us. He and Bob Sheriff's boat arrived simultaneously. The power cut and she sank on her hull, gliding to the schooner's side.

'Give us a light, blast you!'

I wasn't surprised at Sheriff's tone, standing outlined in the torch beam, capless, oilskins streaming.

'What the hell gives?' he demanded, jumping on to the deck. 'What sort of party is this, Tregard? I heard a couple of small explosions and then one hell of a big one. The other craft's disappeared…'

Kim said, aping the Royal Navy's accent. 'Simple matter of a trip-rope, old boy. Nothing simpler. Nothing at all, on my oath!'

Sheriff turned on him savagely. 'Who the hell are you anyway?'

I think Koeltas, Johaar and Kim would have torn him to pieces if I had not intervened. 'These are my pirates,' I said placatingly. 'They are capable of almost anything. Don't give them too many excuses.'

Sheriff shrugged and called across to the patrol boat, 'Watson, if there's any trouble aboard this ship, you know what to do.'

The bearded figure at the gun nodded. 'Aye, aye, sir.'

'Listen,' I said. 'That's not the sort of threat I care for, any more than your tone with these chaps. We have done your job — we sank her almost with our bare hands.'

'Christ!' he exploded. 'That's exactly what I'm bitching about! How the hell did you get here from the Mazy Zed?'

Mary laughed, and her voice eased the tension. 'We went into orbit.' She explained the torpedoing, our rescue, the canisters of dynamite, the trip-rope.

Sheriff listened in amazement and then laughed ruefully. 'Seems you boys know a lot about in-fighting that I don't.' He came over and gripped my arm, a sort of clubman's gesture, and said formally to Koeltas, 'Thank you for your invaluable assistance.'

Koeltas looked disconcerted. The vowels clicked and I translated. '"That's all right, we just buggered him up nicely."'

Kim leered. 'Man, he talks like a fancy love-boy, but underneath I think he's tough.'

Johaar refused to be left out of the accolades. 'I swim. I tie the rope.'

'Is this Man Friday or Long John Silver?' Sheriff asked.

I grinned. 'All of us have got scores to settle up the coast.' I gestured to the north. 'We intend going about it in our own way…'

'I hate to think what that might be.'

'If you'd like them on your side, you only have to offer them a ride in your speedboat.'

He laughed. 'Hell, of course! I have to report to the Mazy Zed anyway.'

Across the anchorage at the barge, a small emergency light had been rigged on the wrecked gantry.

'Come on, chaps, let's get going.'

It was too short a distance to the Mazy Zed to use the hydrofoils, although Koeltas begged a quick feel of the helm. Watson, the gunner, gazed at the lot of us with the sort of disapproval that only a former Chief Petty Officer of the Royal Navy can exude.

I found a windcheater for Mary, who had become very quiet. 'Cold?' I asked.

'Yes, John,' she replied. 'Cold inside. We seem to be being guided inexorably into violence and death. I fear Mercury and I fear your meeting Shelborne again. I like you both — terribly, and I can't bear it. It's like two express trains who believe the points are right but are racing for head-on collision.'

The small figure stood in a pool of sea water — torn, ragged, her hair astray. The swift passage of phosphorescence was reflected in her amber eyes. Once again, I was puzzled by my feelings for her — warmth, closeness, a curious intuition of her moods, but lacking in something. She looked at me, and I at her.

We bumped alongside the Mazy Zed.

Under the jury light I could see where the machine-gun bullets had stripped metal and rubber raw. A big section of hose was missing, probably the piece Mary and I had used as a raft. The hull had a hole about the size of a piano. For a radius of about twenty feet round it the plating was buckled. It did not seem too bad for me. The explosion had largely dissipated itself.

Rhennin was shouting orders when he caught sight of Mary and myself. He helped us aboard. 'Thank God! I thought you both had bought it up on deck… Venter! Get a couple of blankets! Rustle up a steward. I want hot drinks — rum. No, coffee and rum. Quick!'

'Don't thank me, Felix, thank my pirates.'

'You sank her?'

I told him briefly. He whistled at the name Mary had seen on the boat. 'Sookin Sin — know what that means?'

I shrugged.

'I do,' he said quietly. 'It's Russian. Sonofabitch. Pretty low class. Koeltas category.'

I too exclaimed. 'That Second Atlantic People's Fleet, or whatever it calls itself?'

'Could be. Hell on them! I don't want the Mazy Zed spotlighted in an international incident.'

I shrugged. 'She made the attack, not us. What is the Mazy Zed like below?'

'She shipped some water, but it was more a hell of a noise than anything. I thought we'd sucked up Davy Jones himself from his locker — bellowing!'

'And the machine-gunning?' Mary asked.

'They shot away the hoses, but we have hundreds of feet of it in reserve below. A couple of hours will see that fixed. And it's going to be fixed. The nozzles still look okay to me; no bullets penetrated.'

The electric power snapped on. The deck was white under the floodlights, set up for working twenty-four-hours-a-day shifts. Mary and I in our blankets were a couple of scarecrows in the general untidy picture of the deck"- twisted metal, scarred steel, blackened plating.

'I want a full damage assessment in half an hour,' Rhennin said to the chief engineer. He turned to Sheriff. 'See what clues you can find — bodies, flotsam of any sort. Slap it about, will you, Bob: we'll talk about the other part of it later.'

Sheriff glowered under his tan. 'I have yet to have a radar warning from those so-and-so's on Sinclair — I can't see in the dark.'

Rhennin went on, 'They won't risk a second attack — you can use your spotlight.'

'Aye, aye.'

Koeltas called to me. Rhennin waited until his rapid-fire request was done» 'Who is that, John?'

'Skipper Koeltas. He wants to go out to sea. There's a ship from which the boat came, he says — he smells it.'

'No,' he replied. 'It's been a costly enough night's work without endangering Bob again. Any survivors from our other boat?'

'All safe,' replied Sheriff. 'I pulled them out of the water. Walker, the engineer, is shot up — the burst caught her in the engine room. Went up like a ruddy Roman candle.'

Venter came to tell Rhennin that drinks and dry clothes were in his cabin. He shepherded us below like a couple of children. Mary went to change after a stiff pull of the cook's brew. I stripped in the cabin and drank more coffee while Rhennin prowled up and down. The telephone told us that the Mazy Zed had suffered less damage than most of us thought; it was the crew's morale that had suffered, and some of them were talking of returning to Cape Town.

In ten minutes Mary was back in black slacks and a black-and-white poncho top, with heelless black casuals. Rhennin waited without comment while we gave him a full account of the attack.

Then he said sharply to me, 'So you reckon Shelborne did it?'

'I'm sure he didn't make the attack.' -

'What do you mean?'

'If we could get to Mercury tonight on a magic carpet, we'd find Shelborne asleep in his bed. Or on Sudhuk, if the bells are…' I fumbled for the word.

'Ringing?'

They don't ring. It's a curious reverberating noise, like down-horizon gunfire, but throatier.'

Rhennin picked his words. 'See here, John. Assume that Shelborne had the resources to launch tonight's attack, why would he do it? Again, assume that he knows the whereabouts of the diamond fountainhead, why not cash in on that? He could name his price — it could be worth a million to him, even if there are big technical difficulties. His knowledge of what those problems are would in itself be worth a fortune.'

I shook my head. 'No, Felix, it's much deeper than that with Shelborne. It is some obscure and involved question of redemption — to make up for his killing of Caldwell, maybe. Redemption. Maybe that's Shelborne's aim, a wager with fate for his friend's bad deal, if you like.'

Mary said, 'The way you put it, it's just as if he had taken over- my father's personality.'

'And his luck,' I replied.

'What of my brother's luck?' asked Rhennin.

'The one meshes in with the other,' I started to say, but Mary interrupted: 'No, John, not the way I see it. The fate of Korvettenkapitan Rhennin might be a lead to the other, but it would be of subordinate importance at all times in Shelborne's mind if what you think about him is true. Say Shelborne knew the whereabouts of the Goering hoard. Why not simply unearth it and live in luxury for the rest of his life?'

'Because,' I said quietly, 'something guards both the cache and the parent rock, something pretty hideous. A killer on whom five U-boats could make no impression…'

'This is fanciful,' rejoined Rhennin angrily.

It was Mary who took the acerbity out of the conversation. 'A skeleton in the Glory Hole, let's say.'

We all laughed. Rhennin picked up the phone. 'Mac,' he said crisply, 'we sail before dawn. I want a rough patch over the hole for a three-day tow…'

The instrument crackled like the Koeltas vernacular.

'Well, so what?' asked Rhennin. 'Shore up the inner bulkhead, and I'll tow her stern-on to Mercury. With the Mazy Zed, it doesn't make much odds whether it's stern or bow.'

The instrument crackled again. 'Those are orders,' he snapped. 'Orders. It may be wet, but we won't sink.' He slapped the receiver down.

Mary and I looked at one another and at him. 'Aren't you taking a big risk, Felix?'

He got to his feet with the decisiveness which had taken him to the top in the Germany Navy. 'We sail — now. They'll expect us to stay and patch the Mazy Zed. They'll be back tomorrow and won't make the same mistake a second time. If we clear out, they won't know where to look.'

He pressed an intercom. 'Du Plooy! Get Captain Anderson on the shortwave. No long-distance stuff, see? I don't want this overheard. The tug will be alongside, ready to tow, at 0400 hours — clear?' He flicked another switch. 'Captain Longstaff: the Mazy Zed sails at 0400. The tug will be ready at that time. Start getting in the anchors-now.'

There was an indignant crackle over the phone and Mary and I smiled.

'Where to?' asked Rhennin. 'Mercury Island. Where is that? In Spencer Bay. Mr Tregard will brief you. Okay then. The safety of the ship is my concern too. Escort? Sheriff and the schooner will be convoy guards…' There was another outburst at the other end and he looked up at us and grinned. 'If you don't like it, Captain, by all means stay at Angras Juntas. The next ship may be along in six months.'

He put down the instrument. He was excited, tense. 'If Shelborne signalled the People's Atlantic Fleet to make tonight's visitation, then he's got another big think coming when we show up at Mercury; Sookin Sin to him!'

Mary suddenly looked grave. 'Sookin Sin! But John how could I have been able to read it if it was written in Russian?'

Rhennin stopped short in his rapid-fire orders. 'By God! How? It must have been faked — a Russian word in English writing?'

'Something else that stinks around Mercury,' I said.

11

The Glory Hole

'Don't tread on me!'

Shelborne's houseflag with its yellow rattlesnake emblem stood out against the hard white of Mercury and pointed a threatening finger at our approaching convoy. The sea was gentle, with a slight swell from the weather quarter, a calm as unexpected as a pink karakul pelt. To keep the element of surprise as long as possible, we had decided to bring the Mazy Zed to the graveyard side of Mercury, from the north. Our landfall was the wreck of an old gun-runner of the Hottentot war. I had been on the bridge of the Mazy Zed with Rhennin and Mary since dawn. Navigation was hellish and we had two men aloft watching for concealed reefs and broken water.

Bob Sheriff's patrol boat sheep-dogged the convoy like a destroyer. Coming close, I could see his salt-caked, stubbly face. He had driven himself hard since the attack three days previously. Sheriff had found a couple of seaboots and some planks from the sunken boat, but nothing which would serve to identify her. The Mazy Zed had sneaked out of Angras Juntas, seeing nothing. Now she was wallowing at the end of the heavy tow as the ex-harbour tug Walvis Bay dug her broad shoulders deep. Once the Mazy Zed was in position, the tug was to return to Angras Juntas for the radar men and their equipment, which could not be dismantled in time for our flying departure. The Malgas stood out to windward, holding station with a precision which seemed more like power than sail.

There was no sign of any humans at the hutments.

I gestured at the flag. That's his flag, but I don't see a soul.'

Rhennin, in a duffel coat and balaclava against the winter chill, stared at the icing-white island. 'So that's Mercury! It looks…'

'As if coiled to strike,' I finished. 'Like the flag.' I tensed up at the sight of the island again, and felt clammy under my windbreaker.

'I wonder if my father ever saw it?' asked Mary. She looked ridiculously young in a gay Fair Isle sweater and pompom cap.

That's pretty certain,' I replied. 'Look, there are the quicksands — the whole shoreline is rotten…'

'What are those odd T-shaped patches of white?'

'I never had time to find out. They puzzled me too. You can't see it from here, but from the top of Sudhuk there's a line of them into the desert.'

I told them also about the old Portuguese warship trapped in the quicksands.

'And Strandloper's Water?' she asked in a low voice.

I shrugged. 'East of the sea… ask Shelborne.'

Rhennin picked up the loudhailer microphone. 'Bob!' he called. 'Go and take a look-see — we can't see anyone.'

'Good-oh!' came back the metallic, cheerful voice. 'Guns deep a-dipping, and all that?'

I took the instrument from Rhennin. 'Be careful, Bob — very careful. He's a foxy one. We'll hold hard here until you come back. Tell the tug.'

'Roger!' The swift craft rose on its hydrofoils joyfully, like an albatross stretching its wings for a thousand-mile flight. There was no sound but the creak of the ungainly barge and the crunch of the sea over her low freeboard. Mary kept her glasses on the shore; we had been three days together now, and the way she had of calming our nerves and knitting together all the diverse elements in the crew had won our hearts. For myself, I had taken a strange, strong liking to her.

Now her binoculars crescent-cased the bay, resting on the old coasters and coming back to the quicksands.

' "Something hid behind the ranges,"' she said softly.

'He's been there, so he knows,' I said.

Rhennin said, 'By heavens, I mean to find out.'

She kept the glasses to her eyes. 'Perhaps you're right, John, and the diamond fountainhead isn't his true objective…'

'"Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, across that angry or that glimmering sea"?'

She dropped the binoculars and looked at me. 'Have you thought, John, it was Shelborne who did all those things, not the great Caldwell? It was Shelborne who crossed the roof of the world, your last blue mountain barred with snow; it was Shelborne who dared the Atacama. My father went only a few miles inland into the Namib…'

I stared at her. 'You're saying…?'

Rhennin interrupted. 'You two can continue your lofty discussion some other time. We're after diamonds, diamonds. John, will you get aboard the Malgas and keep a weather eye on Koeltas in case Shelborne shows up?'

'Okay,' I nodded.

'Remember to write!' Mary smiled as she said it, turning her thoughtful eyes away from the shore.

Remember to write! The trite phrase emphasized the sense of distance, of age — not so much the physical gap — between the grim isle and the rotten shoreline. I had heard of a guano man on Mercury who had never made the mile-journey from the island to the mainland. It was, he had said, a million miles.

The Malgas came alongside after I had called Koeltas on the loudhailer. I jumped on to the low deck. Koeltas called out something derisive about the Mazy Zed; the sails filled and the schooner swept on.

'Shelborne comes?' There was anxiety, almost fear, in Koeltas's voice.

I pointed to the racing patrol boat. 'Commander Sheriff has gone to see where everyone is.'

The eyes seemed to slant more in the Tartar face. 'I keep out of the bay until I see, too.' He shouted orders and brought the Malgas round on a broad reach to starboard.

Then it reached out like fingers of sound across the sea: the Bells of St Mary's.

I saw the fear on the faces of the crew. Kim didn't wait for Koeltas's high-pitched yell for everything the schooner would carry. Forrad, they ran out a whisker boom to give her jib extra pull. Malgas fled to the southwest past Dolphin Head like a panic-stricken puppy — blindly, anything to get out of range of that long rolling vibration. Koeltas stood holding the starboard shrouds, as if to get himself as far — a deck's width even — from the Bells as possible.

I grabbed the thin, oilskinned shoulder. 'Don't be a bloody fool, man! There's nothing to worry about…'

He shook me free with a stutter of oaths. Kim's upturned eyes, concentrating on getting every ounce of draw out of the tower of sail, looked as if in prayer. Johaar cast anxious glances landwards.

Koeltas got out. 'We are dead men! The Bells…!'

'For Pete's sake!' I snapped. 'Put her aback and wait till they send a boat for me — I don't intend running away.'

I am sure that he didn't mean to try and kill me and that the knife-draw was a fear reflex. He lunged, the blade in one hand, holding on with the other.

I, too, jerked forward. The knife went over my shoulder. His elbow jarred the bone. I crashed into him like a Rugby fend-off, knocking his head, with its tight peppercorn-curled hair, between the shrouds. The stink of his oilskin and his sweat of fear were acrid — like a spitting polecat. I felt the knife go up to plunge into my back. Cupping my right hand, the palm upwards and the back bent back almost horizontal, I smashed it home under the right side of his throat with something between a short hook to the jaw and a rabbit-punch. The knife ripped my reefer jacket and I felt a thin graze-burn of pain. Continuing my upward thrust-blow, I kept his head back, forcing it between the ratlines. When he struck again, I side-stepped to my right and twisted the rope round his throat until his yellow skin became blotched with the purple of strangulation.

Johaar roared with laughter. Kim, at the wheel, was grinning, too. The crew ran aft to the fight, forgetting in the thrill of blood-letting their sail-stations and the dreaded Bells. Koeltas writhed and bucked as his senses ran out and his face became more convulsed.

The piebald giant slapped me on the shoulder like a referee at a fight. 'Man, you've strung that bladdy Hotnot up like a fat-tailed sheep to a slaughter-pole!'

Kim called out. Take his knife, you stupid bastard, and cut this throat! The rope won't do it!'

The weapon fell from Koeltas's hand. I remembered the.38 revolver. I snicked it from his belt and fell back.

'Don't spoil it with a gun, man!' roared Johaar. 'By Jesus, that's the smartest piece of dirt I've seen for years!'

Koeltas shook his head free of the rope. The eyes were bloodshot, half insensible. The knotted veins in his temples receded as he gulped air. He spat, and there was blood on the deck. He shook his head again and hitched his oilskin. The wrinkled face split into a wide grin of genuine amusement.

'By God, mister, I like you!' He came close, oblivious, it seemed, of the pistol. 'Some day we finish this fight and we both die happy, eh?' He took the revolver with childlike insouciance from my hand and picked up the knife. 'Put her aback!' he shouted at the crew. 'Go on, you bloody strandlopers! This is a man, and we take him where he wants to go!' He turned to me, cocking his head at the sound of the Bells. 'I send the boat — for you, mister, unnerstand? No one else. I'm scared, but still I wait.' He made an odd gesture with his hand, half of fear, half of admiration.

The sails went aback and Johaar slid the dinghy overside. He took the oars in his huge paws. He had pulled only a few cable-lengths when he shipped them and swore.

'Look!'

Koeltas's fear of the Bells was greater than his fear of me or his loyalty to Johaar. The Malgas was heading out to sea under every rag they could hoist.

Rhennin growled, as I came aboard the Mazy Zed, 'Blast Koeltas and his Bells! I want every bit of local knowledge to anchor off Mercury.'

'Johaar,' I suggested.

'He may be all right,' he said grudgingly, 'but Koeltas is the man I really want.'

I shouted to Johaar, who was standing looking lost, the crew gaping at his massive physique and piebald skin. He came to the bridge, wearing only a pair of washed-out khaki pants, a sheath-knife stuck in his belt.

This calm no good,' he said. 'Hot wind afterwards, make you sick.' He glanced round the ungainly bulk of the Mazy Zed. 'For a real ship, no good. But for this…' He shrugged expressively.

Rhennin exploded. 'I didn't ask for your opinions about my ship. I asked you where to anchor.'

The slow, reverberating echo struck across the water.

It was difficult to pinpoint. As before, though, the source seemed to be Mercury.

Johaar shuddered. 'You give me a doppie of brandy, eh?' His fear seemed to communicate itself to the silent bridge.

Rhennin was on edge. There's some quite normal explanation — probably an undersea volcano, or something like that.'

Mary said, 'Shelborne says he has known it for more than thirty years…'

'If it were an undersea volcano fissure there'd be a smell of sulphur and dead fish lying about,' I said. 'It simply can't be a volcano, Felix. I thought of that when I was on the island with Shelborne. It's like something rocking a boat.'

'Or someone,' added Mary.

'Don't be fanciful,' snapped Rhennin. 'I know what happened to U-boat captains and crews who let their imaginations run away with them — we didn't know where to drop a wreath for them.'

I refused to bring into the open what was at the, back of my mind, even to Mary. I must take a look at the seabed first, to see that. 'It's not a vibration and it's not a tremor,' I said. A low echo came towards us. 'Listen! I'd like to measure that sound in decibels — it must carry for miles and miles.'

'We hear it one day off Saddle Hill when the wind is in the north,' Johaar contributed gloomily. Rhennin had rung for brandy and the bottle was firmly clutched in his hand.

'Saddle Hill — that's the best part of eleven miles,' I said.

The hydrofoil shot out from behind Mercury and Sheriff came within hailing distance. 'Not a merry soul! Place absolutely deserted. The flatboom's gone, too.'

'Did you go ashore?' Rhennin asked.

Too true!' replied the metallic voice. 'Went up to the huts and rang the bell, nice and polite. Watson equally on. his best behaviour with the guns — just in case. Nothing there at all, old boy' — my eyes and Mary's looked — 'felt as if I were full of pots, every bloody thing snaking. No wonder the so-and-so's cleared out. So would I…'

Rhennin cut in. 'No danger of any sort, Bob?'

'Hell, no. Just deserted and creepy, that's all.'

'What do you mean, creepy?'

'Don't rightly know, old boy. Just gave me the willies. Feeling of being watched.'

'You saw no one? You are sure?'

'Not a damn' thing. Had a gander at the seaward side as we came round the point. Nothing there either but some strange oblong white rocks.'

Sheriff didn't know about the above-ground coffins, or Gruppe Eisbar.

Rhennin said, 'Tell the tug to take up the tow and to be as careful as hell, Bob. You keep close, will you. We'll anchor off that seal colony. John says it's pretty steep, too. We might even get a hawser ashore as well as the anchors.'

Sheriff replied, 'I'll make a quick recce.'

'Watch your step at the entrance to the cavern, Bob,' warned Rhennin. 'We don't know what's there. There may be a strong set into it, or — hell, I don't know, but just keep your eyes skinned, will you?'

The voice came back light-heartedly. 'If I see a U-boat, I'll send you a signal pronto.'

Rhennin looked at me and then at Mary. His voice was expressionless. 'You do that, Bob.'

The tow flickered silver. The Mazy Zed grumbled and bumbled, yawed and protested, pitched unnecessarily in the calm sea.

I picked up the bridge phone. 'Get me Piet Pieterse.'

Rhennin said, 'Piet's a good man — when do you dive?'

Mary stared at me, wide-eyed. 'You're going down?'

'Today,' I replied. 'The weather's a godsend, whatever it might portend for later. I could wait months otherwise. Felix, as soon as you can spare the hydrofoil from the business of bringing this load of iron to rest, I want her for the dive.'

Piet Pieterse, a tow-haired South African with a strong accent, joined us. He looked like a poster lifesaver, except for a long scar from cheekbone to ear, half of which was missing. He'd fought it out underwater with a killer-barracuda when helping the military to recover bodies from a crashed sea-search plane. The knife-edged fangs of the brute were set in the butt of his speargun as a memento of the occasion.

Mary said, 'Let me come! I can help…'

Piet smiled. 'Lady, this is a job for men. But maybe you can have some hot coffee waiting for us when we come up.'

'John,' she begged me, 'don't go — not today, anyway. Go rather with Bob and take a look-see at the lie of the land off the Glory Hole first. You don't know what is there; no one does. Don't rush into this thing. Felix…'

Rhennin said, 'John must make up his own mind, Mary. He doesn't have to dive. He's a freelance.'

'Mary,' I said gently, 'Shelborne himself says that a calm day is a rarity. A calm day with the tide right is rarer still.'

'You don't know the tide is right.'

'It's ebbing now,' replied Rhennin. 'That means it will be low by the time you get organized.'

There is still a risk…' Mary persisted.

'You can't be over-certain of the tides on this coast,' said Piet. 'No, man, if it's falling let's dive.'

'That's what I feel,' I replied. I avoided Mary's hurt eyes. 'Listen, Piet, we'll do this thing the safest way.'

'What depth?'

'Nine fathoms, I reckon,' I said. 'Although it's pretty steep-to off the mouth.'

He screwed up his eyes. 'Forty minutes under, then. That's safe.'

I was aware of Mary close to me. 'Make it thirty-five. We'll use the open-circuit Scuba with full face masks — we want to be able to see everything we can.'

'Wet or dry suit?'

'Dry — yes, dry. It'll be pretty cold down deep, Piet, particularly once we get inside the cavern.

He nodded agreement. 'Any underwater surge, chief?'

'Listen, Piet, I think you should know: this isn't any ordinary dive — rather, it could turn out not to be.'

His eyes gleamed. 'Hell, man, this is what I like to hear. Are there sting-rays or something like that inside?'

Rhennin's eyes were watchful when I replied. 'We'll take along the full armament — knife, hand spear, spear-gun, the works. We'll wear life-jackets too — the inflatable yellow, with carbon dioxide cartridges.'

Piet was elated. 'This looks bloomin' good to me, chief.'

I went on, 'We'll operate from Sheriff's boat with a portable decompression chamber, although the actual dive will be from the rubber dinghy. I want fifty fathoms of nylon rope for additional air points at three and seven fathoms.'

Piet was excited in his slow way. 'Two air points, eh? Signals? Special emergency ones?'

'Yes. Standard: two tugs, are you all right? Three, stop. Four, am pulling you up. Emergency — a series of sharp ones?'

Piet considered. That's okay for a dive in open water, but what if we run into trouble inside? — say I get tangled up with a sting-ray: he'll jerk the rope and you'll think it's me.'

'What do you mean, you'll run into trouble?'

'I am going first, of course. You can play safety man on the first run.'

'Listen, Piet, this is my party. There may be risks…'

That's the way I like it, John. If you're playing it as safe as all this, then you'll agree that the more experienced man should go first — and I've a lot more experience than you.'

What he said was true. I wanted to be the first to see the inside of the Glory Hole, though.

He was adamant. 'We'll use a yellow smoke candle for an emergency.'

'A smoke candle won't float out from the cavern,' I argued.

'Fair enough,' he replied. 'I know: before I enter the Glory Hole, I'll let go a smoke cartridge so that the surface chaps know it's okay. I signal with five pulls at the same time. You come down from air station number two. You can see what I'm doing and keep tabs on me while I go in.'

'Roger. Mary,' I said, 'will you check the first-aid kit with Piet? He knows what is wanted — all the usual bandages and compresses, but I also need some anti-histamine tablets and ointment.'

'What's that for?' she asked in a small voice.

'Burns, stings, things like that. I had some special cortisone ointment, but I think it went down with the Praying Mantis.'

Mary was strained. 'Anything else?'

I laughed, trying to ease her anxiety. 'Ask the cook for some baking soda. It's also good for burns and stings. Oh, yes — something like a pencil to use to screw up a tourniquet if necessary.'

It was mid-afternoon before Sheriff's boat was ready. The diver's red flag with white stripes flapped on the dinghy's tiny mast: there was scarcely enough wind to make it stand out. Four separate openings, like a quadruple black muzzle, pointed at us as the tide fell from the Glory Hole. Piet and I had established our two air stations along the nylon rope into the depths; I could just distinguish the black-and-white quarterings on the grey cylinders at three fathoms. Piet and I were ready in our rubber suits, waiting to don masks for the descent. Despite the short time, Piet had done a painstaking check of the Scuba gear: pressure, at 3000 lb. per square inch; the regulators, cylinder valves, hoses, mouthpieces and masks; the quick-release buckles to ensure that every one was snapping open at a flick.

We synchronized the decompression meters strapped to our wrists and snuggled into the face masks. I gave the thumbs-up sign. Head and hands down, Piet nodded to me and Rhennin, gave a smooth kick with his flippers, and vanished beneath the calm surface. I turned to Sheriff's boat, a little way from the dinghy. Mary stood taut, unsmiling. I gave her the thumbs-up sign, too, and went over the side. Using the conventional scissors kick, I eased down slowly to the first air station at three fathoms. Piet was there, hanging on and grinning. The water was not clear and there seemed to be a greenish reflection from the bottom, which puzzled me.

Piet waited five minutes, signalled, and went farther down. The signal line went slack.

Two pulls: are you all right?

Two return pulls: I am all right.

I could see him vaguely but the water seemed full of particles of sand. The line tautened: Piet had started his run-in to the Glory Hole. I waited. There were no fish, which was strange. The line tautened again and then slackened. No point in becoming anxious. Piet was as sound as they come. I wouldn't fluster him with unnecessary signals.

I glanced at my wrist meter. I was nervous, which isn't a good thing under water. I fiddled uneasily with the line, wondering whether I should try Piet for a simply okay. I discarded the idea. I'd rather go down to the next air station at seven fathoms than hang around here close to the surface. We'd have to change over deep, anyway, and five minutes wouldn't make much difference. It was bad Scuba not to stick to schedule. Perhaps the dinghy would wonder what was going on.

I frog-kicked gently, holding the nylon rope as I planed down. The water became greener, murkier. I kept glancing to my left to see whether I could not spot the entrance. A darker patch showed the loom of the island proper.

The signals line gave a savage jerk which almost tore it out of my hand — and then went slack.

Emergency!

I resisted the temptation to strike out for the bottom. Piet wouldn't appreciate a panic, although that tug meant trouble. I waited agonizingly for the series of quick pulls which meant a crisis.

They never came.

Instead, Piet's body- legs, head and arms jack-knifing, convulsing, jerking- floated past me, borne surface-wards by his life-jacket. I caught one glimpse of the face behind the mask: it was a ghastly, death-like travesty of Piet's placid, stolid features. I grabbed, but the rubber-encased body kicked free. God! His rate of ascent alone was enough to kill him! It didn't look like the bends, oxygen starvation, or any of the usual symptoms of a Scuba fault — sting-ray? octopus? scorpion fish? sea snake? catfish? What ever it was, it had been hellish quick. The smoke candle was still at Piet's belt and so was his knife, but the speargun with its buoyant butt was missing.

Piet and I surfaced simultaneously, nausea filling me after the dangerous rate of ascent. He jerked over and over in the water, splashing, thrashing.

I tore off my mask. 'Felix! Bob! Help here!'

The dinghy was a dozen yards away and Sheriff's hydrofoil thirty. I glimpsed Mary's white face. A lifebelt splashed down, out of arm's reach. I ducked under Piet's flailing arms, but his knee mule-kicked me in the chest. His mask was white inside with foam, his own foam. I dived, locking my arms under his shoulders. He gave two or three frightful spasms and then went limp. Holding his head high, I kicked out on my back for Sheriff's boat.

'Get him into the decompression chamber — quick!' I snapped.

'What on earth…?' began Mary.

'Later! Piet is bad…'

Rhennin, who had shot over in the dinghy, said quietly, 'Not bad, John — he's dead.'

I looked over at the lithe, still figure. I couldn't believe it. 'Nonsense!' I tore off the foam-splashed mask and ripped the hood full back behind the ears. I knelt down and listened. There was no breathing. Where his neck joined his shoulder, it was mottled and blotched. I turned him over to apply artificial respiration.

'That man Shelborne…' I cursed softly as I began the rhythmic movements of resuscitation.

Rhennin said, 'Look, John, those blotches mean decompression sickness. He did something down deep he should not have done. He was adventurous…'

'He wasn't a fool,' I panted. 'Piet wouldn't have taken a risk if it was stupid. There's something horrible down there, Felix.'

He looked at me oddly. 'You suffering from diving hallucinations? Seeing things which aren't?'

I paused. Piet remained still, lifeless. 'I wasn't deeper than sixty feet at any stage, and most of the time I was at forty,' I said sharply. 'You're a pretty poor diver if you can't take a hundred, let alone sixty.'

Rhennin repeated. 'Don't go on, John — it's useless. He's dead.' There was a dreadful blue tinge round his mouth.

'Get him over to the Mazy Zed,' I ordered Bob. 'We'll have relays work on him. Warmth, blankets, hot-water bottles…'

Silent, fearful hands helped bring the still figure aboard the mining barge. I was still fresh enough for the first relay! Blankets under him, we stripped him down to trunks. I eased rhythmically up and down, my eyes unable to take themselves from the hideous blotches near his neck. What had done that? I asked myself as many times as I rose and fell. Then I rested, tired, and my eyes lifted for the first time from Piet into the distance beyond Mercury.

I must be drunk from lack of oxygen I told myself — it produces the same effects as alcohol.

The north-eastern side of the bay, between the shore and the neck in the lows hills backing it, was moving, marching.

The desert was marching into the quicksands by the old Portuguese warship. A great, endless dun legion was streaming towards and around the T-shaped white scars.

I dropped my eyes to Piet's blotches. They weren't blurred: I was seeing straight. The Mazy Zed group stood statue-like, staring at my face. I lifted my eyes and gestured with my head.

The tidal wave ashore was white on top, brown underneath. It was not desert. The wave creamed and broke like foam as it hit the water.

A host of springbok, innumerable as the sands of the Namib, threw itself into the sea.

12

Suicide of a Legion

The Bells of St Mary's tolled.

Awe-struck, we watched the host of springbok advancing from the desert to the sea, from life to death. They were countless — one might as well have tried to describe a Namib dune in terms of its individual grains. The desert seemed to be powdered with snow shaken from their silver-white manes; their fawn flanks merged with the dunes' own colour. Here and there a scintilla of light sparked where a buck bounded high into the air. This army of living things was changed to a sodden picture of death as the animals threw themselves into the waves. The buck made a peculiar noise, which matched that of the Bells, half a whistle, half a snort, in their final impetus to the beach. This uncanny shout of death rolled across the water, backed by the thunderous diapason of the Bells. Behind the hills the dust hung like fog as the squadrons wheeled, in obedience to some mysterious magnet of self-destruction, and headed for the sea.

Captain Morrell's hills of dead seals! Before our eyes, another great host was destroying itself. Had the same death-dealing force — Shelborne's secret — brushed aside Piet's life, a murder which now seemed paltry by comparison with this demonstration of irresistible power? Would five U-boats also shatter to splinters against the breastplate of this unknown thing?

Mary knelt by me, an arm round my shoulders. 'What was down there under the water, John? Can it be the same killer?' She indicated the buck.

I straightened up. 'There was nothing, nothing but murky green water. Piet is dead.'

'You're not going to…'

'Yes, I am — I must dive again. I've got to find out.'

The steel sides of the Mazy Zed were a giant sounding-board for another eruption of the Bells.

Johaar was ashen. 'Soon I am a dead man… the Bells…'

Mary said, 'Look, the buck are not going far into the sea, John. Then they bend down and drink.'

'Salt water doesn't kill and it doesn't kill that quickly, I replied.

I outlined to them Shelborne's account of the mass suicide of the seals, half a million of them. There seemed as many buck.

Mary's hands shook on her binoculars. 'It's horrible They're throwing themselves into the quicksands, too They're kicking and rolling and being sucked down!'

Rhennin said in a hard voice. 'I don't believe in some Shelborne bogy, John. There's a perfectly natural explanation for this somewhere.'

'Yes, but where?'

He called to Sheriff in his boat. 'Bob, is this your quickfirer in order?'

'Aye, aye.'

'Take your boat, will you, and have Watson fire a couple of big bursts into them and stop the stampede.'

'Into them?'

'Yes. They're panicking. Something back there in the desert — maybe a big dust storm we can't see. It doesn't matter how many you kill — they'll die anyway.'

'I wonder,' I said, 'if Korvettenkapitan Rhennin made a similar order?'

Rehnning wheeled on me. 'Yes, he would, if the situation were the same.'

You might as well open up against the dunes themselves, for all the impression it will make.' Dieter knew how to look after himself. It was war. To open fire against the enemy was quite normal.' 'Against a normal enemy, yes, but I found his Knight's Cross in the graveyard.'

Bob!' snapped Rhennin. 'Get going! Give them the works and stop this damned nonsense!'

'Aye, aye.'

Rhennin turned back to me. 'I intend going ashore as soon as this firing picnic is over — to the graveyard. Are you coming?'

'John! You've risked your life once today.' Mary was.growing quite angry.

'I'm coming all right,' I replied. 'Gruppe Eisbar may not have been lost entirely without trace.'

Rhennin said, 'The war is a long time ago now. Dieter may or may not have picked up the Goering cache. It is more important that we find a way into the Glory Hole — it is the Mazy Zed's, own Schwerpunkt. Shelborne…'

'Shelborne, Shelborne!' Mary exclaimed. 'You talk as if he were some sort of Mephistopheles who controls supernatural powers…' She pointed to the springbok, now stumbling and climbing over mounds of their dead companions to get to the water. The roar of Bob Sheriff's engine drowned her words. The boat tore away at full throttle from the Mazy Zed, rising on her hydrofoils as she streaked towards the shore. Watson, the gunner, grinned and swung the twin muzzles in anticipation.

Rhennin spoke to the ship's medical orderly — there was no doctor — who had tried to help me with Piet. 'Get him below, will you?'

'He was dead when you brought him aboard,' the orderly said with an irritating presumption of medical ominscience. 'Anoxia, that is what he died from.' He rolled the term round his tongue, 'That caused the blotches and mottling. Classic symptoms.'

'Oh, bull!' I retorted. My nerves were shot to hell. 'You're no doctor…'

Rhennin interrupted. 'Everything points to its being a simple drowning.'

'There are other things which have the same symptoms.'

'Such as what, John?'

'It wasn't a deep dive and a good diver like Piet simply doesn't drown. It's the foam in the mask that bothers me.'

Rhennin shrugged. 'If you want a post-mortem you won't get it at Mercury. I intend to log his death as accidental drowning.'

It was useless to argue. 'I'll dive and see tomorrow if the weather holds. We must watch our step on the island — I think Shelborne is holed up somewhere where we can't spot turn.'

'Let me come too,' Mary insisted, but we refused. 'John! you remember what I said about express trains… You won't crash head-on if I am there.'

I shrugged off the idea of Shelborne's fatal attraction for me. 'I intend to find out a lot of things — a lot of things.'

Above the death-cry of the springbok came the savage rattle of Watson's gun firing into the horde advancing towards the quicksands. Glasses to our eyes, we saw the bullets cut a swathe. Others advanced, ignoring and submerging the dead. The patrol boat tore past the shallows, firing in short professional bursts. Sheriff made a big circle and slowed down.

'He's trying for a steady platform,' said Rhennin.

'For all the good he's doing, he might as well have stayed,'I said.

The boat cruised slowly past the carcass-choked beach. The continuous rattle broke, chattered, broke again.

'What the hell…?' snapped Rhennin.

My glasses were on the boat. One short burst.

Mary exclaimed incredulously. 'He's firing into the air!'

The twin machine-guns pointed skywards. Two single shots. Five. One. Silence. The guns aimed heavenwards. The boat cruised slowly on.

'What in the name of all that's holy is he doing!' burst out Rhennin. 'Keep course, man, or else you'll be ashore next to the old coaster!'

In slow motion, that describes exactly what happened. The hydrofoils, guns raked skywards, drove erratically towards the base of Sudhuk and crashed ashore on the rocks to the right of the landing-beach.

'Is Sheriff drunk?' rapped out Rhennin. 'God! I lose one boat through his men being asleep, and the second…'

'Because they are dead.'

He dropped the glasses. 'I… I… why do you say that, John?'

I indicated the hydrofoil. The boat runs ashore. Not a man shows. No one tries even to fend her off. That crew is dead.'

Rhennin lifted his powerful Zeiss glasses to his eyes again. His voice was shot with uneasiness. 'Watson is lying at the foot of the gun. I can't see properly… the helm is unattended… we must go and see…'

'No, Felix,' I said. 'Something hellish is afoot. If Sheriff is alive, he'll come back. If he's dead, there's no point in exposing ourselves to the same unknown danger. He had the fastest and best-armed boat between here and Simonstown. He was as well prepared as…'

'… as Gruppe Eisbar,' supplemented Mary.

Rhennin's voice was harsh. 'Yes, by heavens! — as prepared as Gruppe Eisbar, and as unprepared as the Mazy Zed.' The crew watching were muttering among themselves. 'Mercury… John! Get dressed and come to my cabin.' He went below.

The Bells tolled. Mary stood close to me, silent. The macabre scene held me. Like thistledown, airy, fawn-and-white, the graceful buck trotted down through the nek in the sandhills to the beach of death. The nearby quicksand was a rearing, plunging mass of dead and half-dead beasts. Rhennin was right: somewhere there was a perfectly everyday explanation. What? Food. Were the animals the victims of mass starvation? These were certainly not thin-ribbed creatures at the end of their tether. Water? Richtersveld lore said springbok could go for as long as ten years without flowing water, — succulents and naras, the water-packed melon of the Namib, provided all they needed.

Richtersveld! Richtersveld! — something was flickering at the back of my mind, but it would not ignite. Could the springbok be emulating those blind migrations of the arctic lemming? I knew that this small Norwegian rodent has been known to drown itself in hundreds of thousands in the freezing waters of the north.

Richtersveld! — like a drug which revives in the neurotic's mind whole forgotten passages of music, only once heard, there arose in my mind a grey image of a granite range, sea on one side, desert on the other. The image swelled, grew, vanished — and I found my eyes again registering Mercury's mass suicide.

Richtersveld! — an oyster dawn; a sun red as the burning sand; towards the east a valley of rose-and-white quartz; among the stones… I fought for the mental key… whatever it was, it would, I knew, give me the clue to the springbok suicide.

Richtersveld! — I saw every stapelia, every minute stoneplant, every withdrawn succulent, covered in pellucid dew: sea-dew, water. And the grey granite clothed in young green shoots, all glistening and white — food for the young, water, life.

I knew then what I was seeing at Mercury: the ancient migration of animals to traditional water. Such migrations have gone on since time immemorial. The Namib was timeless, but the ancient place to which they came had changed. It must have been a river, and it must have been here! The line of strange T-shaped whitenesses among the dunes was the line of an age-old barrier, at the foot of which had flowed a prehistoric river to which the animals were driven by a compulsion buried deep in their race-life.

A prehistoric river! Stratton had told the court, and it was held by Oranjemund experts, that diamonds had been carried to the coast by rivers whose courses had vanished 500,000 years ago, but which had spread them out to sea, where they were redistributed by ocean currents into the Sperrgebiet's marine terraces.

The mouth of that ancient river — where was it? The fountainhead of all diamonds, the parent rock! Shelborne knew where the mouth was. Nothing would move him from Mercury, because he knew. That is why he had killed Caldwell at Strandloper's Water. Had the whole coastline changed because of what we surveyors call continental uplift? Certainly the beacons had moved inland — the soggy quagmire of quicksands might well be the remnants of an old river mouth. Or had the river's course been halted by the coast lifting and broken off — at Strandloper's Water? I must trek inland to Strandloper's Water; and I must find Shelborne.

I dropped the binoculars on their lanyard.

There was something in my face which made Mary draw back. 'John! Dear God, John! What is it?'

'I'm going ashore to Mercury to open a few coffins.'

'No! No! That is not what you were thinking of!' 'No,' I replied harshly. 'I think I know now why Shelborne killed your father.' 'I'll never believe that,' she said. 'I'm going to Strandloper's Water to find out.' 'No! — please not, John! What is past is past — no more deaths…'

'Not unless Shelborne chooses.' She came close to me. 'John, listen: there seems to be a fate which hangs like an aura about those who deal in diamonds. Caldwell. Shelborne. Now you. You felt it yourself that first day in court — that strange, forceful, wonderful man in his faded clothes. He is not evil. Power, yes. You sense it, but it is power he has learned to be humble about. I believe it came to him in the Namib, some lonely coming to grips with himself. He understands it, he lives with it, but he doesn't deploy it for evil ends.'

I gestured towards the shore. 'He deploys it.' She said desperately, 'Don't believe it! Shelborne may live in the presence of power, of force, of death.'

'"Primal mysteries," he called them to me.'

'Yes! But they're passive for him. They lie quiet under his hand because he knows what terrible forces the Namib unleashes. It is old, it is savage, its capacity for cruelty on the grand scale is unbounded, just in the same way that prehistoric things are blatantly, unashamedly, uncomplicatedly cruel. It was born so long ago.'

The third day of the Creation, he told the court.' 'Shelborne has his hand upon whatever this grim, elemental thing is. It's tame under his hand, like Mercury. But it becomes more dangerous than a hydrogen bomb when the catalyst comes along.' 'You're saying the catalyst is me.'

'No, John, not you, not Rhennin. Diamonds — diamonds as symbolized by the Mazy Zed.'

'You're not Caldwell's daughter for nothing.'

She went on urgently. 'Forget this crazy business of breaking into Shelborne's graveyard to find Korvettenkapitan Rhennin. What if he is there? What does it tell you? Nothing! The war has been over a long time — Felix says so himself — and who has heard of Gruppe Eisbar anyway? Dieter Rhennin didn't sink the Queen Mary convoy; he may have found the cache. He's dead, whatever way you look at it.'

'Yes, but Goering's cache…'

'Diamonds' Diamonds again!' she burst out bitterly.

I looked deep into her eyes. 'It is not simple for Shelborne. It is almost — you said it yourself — as if he had assumed Caldwell's own character: "Something hid behind the ranges, go and look behind the ranges." To give the world Caldwell's diamond fountainhead, the parent rock, would, as he sees it, pay back fate for what he did to your father. He doesn't want Goering's hoard, He doesn't even want the riches of the fountainhead. It's a sidestake with fate. He doesn't give a damn for the size of it, except in so far as the more fabulous it is, the greater the redemption of Caldwell. The game's the thing.'

'And you mean to beat him at the game.'

'Yes.'

'He has the lead on you.'

'Yes. He knows what guards the fountainhead — I don't. He knows where it is — I don't. Whatever it is, it is too big for him, or else he would have come forward with it long ago. I guess the Mazy Zed has the edge on him there. As I stood watching those buck dying just now, a lot of things explained themselves in my own mind. I have to tell Felix.'

'May I come with you?'

'Yes, of course. This is going to be a rough party Mary.'

She said obliquely. 'The Bells haven't sounded all the time we've been talking. I wonder if it was Shelborne who christened them the Bells of St Mary's — and why?'

Rhennin was loading shells into the magazine of a Luger. A beautiful long barrelled Colt.45 lay on the desk among boxes of cartridges, a finely-chased.7.65 mm. Browning, also with a long barrel, and a stubby Bernadelli.

He smiled grimly. The pick of weapons is yours.'

Mary shivered.

'Normally I'd go for the Colt,' I said, 'but I don't reckon any of them will be much use against what we have to face.'

He clicked the magazine of the Luger into place with a slap of his palm and poised it expertly on its centre of gravity. I, too, have always liked the Luger for its balance. 'Are you thinking of what happened to Bob Sheriff?'

'Maybe,' I replied. 'But the Schweipunkt isn't here, it's at Strandloper's Water.' I explained the springbok migration, as I saw it, to the ancient river, its mouth and the diamond fountainhead. We must, I insisted, trek to Strandloper's Water.

'By all that's holy!' exclaimed Rhennin.

Mary said, 'It blows Shelborne into a sort of gigantic ogre, finger on the trigger of some hidden power of destruction…'

Rhennin spun the Luger. 'If Shelborne gets hurt along the way, that's just too bad.'

'I've a hunch Shelborne is on the island, watching everything we do,' I said. 'On second thoughts, maybe we had better try Mercury first, and investigate that graveyard of his. I'm sure the landing-place is covered, so I'll take the Colt after all, Felix. If Bob Sheriff were here to give us cover, I'd risk it, but I think as things stand, we should slip ashore in the dinghy tonight.'

Rhennin nodded agreement. 'We'll land at the seal platform — it slopes down to the water.'

'We'll want knives and an iron bar to prise open the coffins.'

The diving suits will be ideal with warm clothing underneath,' said Rhennin.

'We may as well blacken our faces too,' I said.

'Put me ashore and let me talk to Shelborne!' Mary pleaded. 'I won't come to any harm…'

Rhennin was gentle with her. 'We've got to find these things out, Mary. Shelborne will not come to any harm either, unless…'

'Unless! Unless!' she exclaimed. 'Unless you don't draw first, I won't shoot you down! John, don't go!'

I broke open the heavy Colt, slipping in six shells. I put the rest of the packet in my pocket. I was acutely aware of Mary's magnetism, and of a curious contrary conviction that I should go my own way. I didn't want to stay for her sake. The realization made my voice harsh. 'Forget it! This is a man's job. I'm going to rest up for an hour or two, Felix. I want to be fresh for a night out among the coffins.'

I saw the tears well into Mary's eyes at my brusqueness.

'What time?' he asked.

'Seven. It'll be dark then, and not too cold. Bring a nip of brandy — we may need it when we see what's inside the coffins.'

'Well, it won't be the first dead man I've seen.'

I fought for sleep, torn between the look on Mary's face and Shelborne's unknown menace. I jerked out of an uneasy rest and we met in Rhennin's cabin — black rubber diving suits, blackened faces, knives and pistols at our belts.

Mary said brokenly, 'Come back, both of you, won't you? Let me know — I'll be awake.'

Rhennin went over the side.

'Shove off,' I whispered, slipping the painter securing the dinghy. I felt Rhennin's strong paddle-thrust and for a moment the upperworks and gantry stood out against the freezing stars. We headed for Mercury. The Bells were silent. I set a rough course by the Southern Cross.

I lifted my paddle and tapped Rhennin's shoulder. 'Feel anything?'

'Slight surge,' he whispered back. 'Must be off the Glory Hole.'

I could not see the four grim muzzles. 'It doesn't feel very strong.'

'No. There's a little more sea though.'

'No Bells, thank God, all afternoon.'

'Johaar's recovering fast without them.'

'Give way!'

Our paddles dipped. The dinghy edged landwards. A strangled gargle broke the blackness. My reflexes beat my reason, and in a flash the heavy Colt was in my hand. The gargle ended in a plaintive chuffering.

'Easy!' whispered Rhennin. 'Seal-pup.'

Using cautious half-strokes, we stole in towards the ramp. The sea washed against rock.

'They'll lie just above the high-water mark,' I warned softly. 'Crawl for God's sake, or you'll rouse the island.'

I admired Rhennin's cool nerves. 'Here,' he said, 'tie this round your waist. We'll stay roped together. If the seals perform, two pulls on the rope means lie flat. Three — proceed, crawling. No talking.'

'Roger.'

His paddle clunked on rock. The dinghy rocked as he crept into the icy water. My rope tugged three times. I went over into a foot of water and the unforgettable stench of a seal nursery. I shouldered the rubber craft and followed the rope. A little above the water-level I came up to him. He guided my hand to a big rock to weigh down the dinghy. Then I edged into the lead, as we had arranged. My shoulder bumped a seal. He must have been a bachelor or a rogue bull to be on the fringe. I shouldered him out of the way like a Rugby forward; he grunted and went on snoring. I signalled and we moved onwards, seeking the defined gangways which always exist in seal colonies, where neutrality is respected. Inch by inch I manoeuvred forward with muted grunting on every side. A pup yelped softly in his sleep as my searching hand touched him. Half a dozen times I found our way blocked and half a dozen times, by the most painstaking search among the grunting bodies, I regained a neutral corridor.

Then ahead was a rock face. Seals were packed against it — a coveted residential area. Risking everything, I stood up to explore the face, which was about five feet high, with a deserted ledge above — the boundary of the colony! We eased ourselves silently above the sleeping herd. The wicked drop from graveyard to sea was our main obstacle now. I was glad I couldn't see, remembering the way it had looked from above. One slip would take us both to destruction.

Two hours later, exhausted, muscles kicking, hands as raw as jailhouse blues, faces cut, we hauled ourselves over the graveyard wall. I had led, seeking hand and footholds in the smooth rock by the intermittent light of display of sea phosphorescence. Rhennin, following, would feel his way by my heels — from one precarious fingernail-hold, from one toe-hold to the next — and so we made our way to the top. Three-quarters of the way up Rhennin gave a frantic jerk and slip; above our racing gasps for breath we had heard the jemmy ring on the rocks far below. We threw ourselves down against the inner wall.

It must have been ten minutes before Rhennin spoke. 'John, if the coffin lids are blown off in a storm like Shelborne says, they can't be screwed down.'

I hadn't thought of that. Metal screws wouldn't last in the corrosive sea fogs. 'Maybe there are wooden pegs, or dowels.'

'We can use our knives in that case. Where is it?'

'I found the Knight's Cross on the other side. There's a sort of stile.'

The ordered rows of coffins stood out hideously white under the rising moon.

'Anything to distinguish which one?'

'No. All guano-coated.'

His voice was steady. 'When we've got one open, I'll shine the torch below the level of the lid so that it won't show.'

'Felix…' I said, fumbling. I looked round the small enclosure. The climb had set back our schedule. 'What if…?'

'If I have to open every bloody one, I will — whatever sights we may see inside.'

We picked our Way through the nesting birds, who uttered little more than a few angry quacks. We selected a guano-coated oblong near where I had found the medal. We ran our knives along the overlap of the lid, scraping away a seal of stinking excrement. I took one side and Rhennin the other. I thrust in my knife. The wood was softer than I had anticipated. Rhennin's face was grim, withdrawn. He nodded and gave the thumbs-up sign. We threw our weight on our knives. It did not budge. Again we thrust our knives into the seams.

'My iron bar — that's what we need,' said Rhennin.

I ran my frozen fingers along the wood. Something protruded — not wood, but rope. It ran round the coffin, into the cement base. I showed Rhennin. Towards the feet we discovered another. The coffin had been wrapped around with two-inch manila, which had become iron-hard as the guano had permeated it.

Rhennin said, 'That's the sort of thing Shelborne would do if he wanted to hide the body. We need a couple of crow-bars.'

'Try cutting it.'

The heavy blade made almost no impression. He shook his head. 'Is there nothing we can use?'

We looked around. On the seaward side was the small building I had noticed with Shelborne. We picked our way to it through the birds.

'Might be a toolshed, or store of sorts.'

'A chapel, perhaps,' I suggested.

Rhennin laughed cynically. 'Not on your bloody life! Can you imagine Shelborne…'

'Yes, I can. He'd use the service for burial at sea. He'd do it superbly — prayer-book in hand, sonorous phrases, wind blowing, a group of cowed guano-workers…'

'Build-up of the image that terrifies Koeltas and Co.'

I parodied him, irreligiously, with the words I had heard used many times at sea: '"Such as sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, being fast bound in misery and iron…"'

Rhennin raised a foot to kick open the rough door. I stood back, the Colt raised. He picked up my words: '"We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead…"'

He kicked it open, hard.

Korvettenkapitan Rhennin sat at the head of the table. The other four U-boat captains were grouped around. Each man held a hand of cards; by him was a handful of uncut diamonds. In the middle was a kitty of diamonds which they had staked on the poker game. They all had red hair. -And they were all dead.

'Fauler Zauber,' said a voice.

I saw the glint of the blue-black muzzle of the Schmeisser machine-pistol almost before I made out the black sealskin figure.

'Fauler Zauber,' Shelborne repeated. 'A silly humbug, not so?'

13

The Five Red-headed Captains

'You! It was you who sent that message! Fauler Zauber! Headquarters thought…' Rhennin was as white as the coffins.

Shelborne said harshly, 'Don't shine that torch in my eyes, Rhennin! I am a man of peace, but…'

I laughed. I didn't recognize my own voice. 'Peace! Yet you carry a Schmeisser! Five men you've killed sitting there…!'

'Drop that pistol!'

'You killed Caldwell too!'

'If either of you makes a move, I swear before God that it will be the last you ever make.'

I could see, in the half-light, the dune of flesh which banked up above his right cheekbone when he was agitated. The gullies in his face were deeper, the eyes wide and luminous.

Rhennin burst out: 'But the message — how…?'

Shelborne nodded to a figure in seaman's clothes lying sprawled inside the doorway. 'He sent "fauler Zauber": I overheard it. The radio is behind the door there. It was the one bit of sense I could make out in what he sent, "silly humbug". The game, the diamonds — a silly farce, you must agree.'

Rhennin burst out. 'He didn't mean it that way… The operation… you shot them down as they played; they weren't ready.'

'Look — do you see bullet-marks?'

'You double-talking bastard…!'

Shelborne raised the Schmeisser. One burst would cut a man in half. 'Throw down your guns — here, at my feet. You first, Tregard. If Koeltas is to be believed, you're the more dangerous of the two.'

I surrendered the Colt. 'So you've got Koeltas? He ran out to sea when the Bells sounded.'

'I picked him up on Hollam's Bird Island.' His voice was grim. 'He thought I was out of the way. He couldn't resist the temptation of a little poaching.'

The cutter?'

'Of course — she'd outrun the Malgas any time. Koeltas is back at the hut now. Unfortunately Kim…'

'Man of peace!' I sneered. My respect for the man grew: I would not have dared to fight it out single-handed with Koeltas's cut-throat crew.

The Luger too!'

Rhennin threw the pistol.

'Now the torch!'

Rhennin rolled it towards Shelborne. As he bent down to retrieve it, that would be the time to jump him. The same thought must have crossed his mind, for he sank unwaveringly, warily, on his haunches, the Schmeisser aimed.

'Get inside the hut!'

The torch beam reflected from the dead eyes of the U-boat ace at the top of the table and dully from the piles of uncut stones. The five captains were dressed in heavy off-white rolltop sweaters under black reefer jackets. Their caps were on the table. The insignia was the same, their clothes were alike, but it was the realization of one item of dreadful uniformity which sent a thrill of horror down my spine — their matching red hair. It was all exactly the same shade. No two men could have been born like that, let alone five.

Rhennin's swift step over the sentry's body and his words stopped mine. 'Immelmann! Werner! Hessler! Schmidt!'

His agonized roll-call was the first since Seekriegsleitung had searched the ether, day after day, for Gruppe Eisbar. They were not to know that SKL, the brilliant fighting machine, had itself gone to its death before they could answer. Korvettenkapitan Rhennin's face was vigorous, young, alert, a younger edition of Felix. Ironical to die here on land at the hand of a diamond-struck prospector 600 miles from the Western Approaches, away from the destroyers' depth-charges, the Asdic, the minefields.

'Dieter!'

The sightless eyes stared. Rhennin tore open the reefer jacket to look for bullet-holes so that the cards spilled out of the dead man's hand. But there were no wounds.

Rhennin lost control of himself. 'You swine! You bloody swine! He never had red hair! They've all got red hair! All red hair! You monster! — you dyed their hair!' He plucked unseeingly at Dieter's jacket.

Shelborne rapped out: 'Stand out of my line of fire!'

I yelled helplessly. 'He doesn't know what he's saying or doing…!' The Schmeisser gave a metallic, pre-death clunk as Shelborne switched the lever over to rapid fire. 'Stop! Stop…!'

Rhennin staggered towards the entrance, cannoning into the man opposite Dieter. The body crashed sideways to the floor. Shelborne's torch sought his eyes, blinding him.

'Gruppe Eisbar!' he mouthed. 'Here are Goering's diamonds, Dieter! Here they are! You never made off with them! How did he destroy the whole Rudel, Dieter? One man! You swine, you bloody swine!'

Shelborne was rock-steady. 'Pull yourself together, man! His hair is red because of the guano. The ammonia in the guano — it turns all their hair red! They're all like that, every corpse in the graveyard! It mummifies them too!'

It was the only thing that would have stopped him except a bullet. He stood swaying over the body of the sentry. Then he took a great grip of himself. His voice was shaky. 'What did you do with the U-boats, Shelborne?'

His voice was cool, soothing almost. 'All this took place a.long time ago, Rhennin. I'm sorry about your brother. I didn't realize you had any inkling he was on Mercury.'

I told him about the Knight's Cross.

'I didn't steal it — I haven't moved them,' he said. He was watchful but persuasive, sympathetic. Spontaneously, the comparison sprang into my mind — his manner was like Mary's. The thought sickened me. What else had he taken from Caldwell in addition to his life?

Shelborne said, 'We'll go to the huts. The path is very slippery — you'd better rope yourselves. I'll follow — with the Schmeisser.'

Rhennin asked, in a strangled voice, 'The crews of Crupper Eisbar — they are all dead?'

'Yes.'

'May I see them too?'

'They are in their ships. They are not preserved like the captains by the guano. They won't be a pretty sight.'

'The wolf-pack — you know where it is, then?'

'I have it safe also.'

I said, 'In the Glory Hole, of course.'

'Of course — where else?'

'Is that why you killed Piet Pieterse?'

'You are here to answer questions, not me.'

Rhennin said, indicating the heaps of uncut diamonds, 'What…?'

'They thought it was rather fun to play for stakes — diamond stakes — like that. There must be Ј50,000 lying on the table.'

'They wouldn't have stolen it.'

'I didn't say they did. They were relaxing, waiting for a radio signal from U-boat headquarters. There are plenty more diamonds in the cache…' I said, 'In the Glory Hole, too, of course.'

'Of course.'

'Another of your secrets.'

'I didn't know about the hoard until Gruppe Eisbar came.'

'Is it still there?'

'Yes. And the U-boats.'

I moved closer so that I could read his eyes. 'Shelborne, you've been here more than twenty years. That whole time would have been worth waiting for the one day when the wind, the tide and the air explosions would have been right so that you could bring out the cache. There must have been such days — but no. What is it that can kill a U-boat pack, five captains, a heavily-armed patrol boat, thousands of buck — and yet cannot induce you to enter the Glory Hole and bring out a fortune?'

He said softly, 'The Bells of St Mary's.'

I laughed, but it came out wrong. 'Or Caldwell's ghost.'

He was so withdrawn that he didn't notice how the muzzle of the Schmeisser had fallen. The black clothing gave the illusion that there was nothing of him but the bald head and abstracted face.

His reply was strange, forced, and he reminded me of our time together on Sudhuk. He meant to kill me then, and I felt sure he intended to now. 'You might rightly say the ghost of the Namib. If ghost means a survival of something which was and now is not, or only in some other form…'

So I had been right: he was speaking of the ancient prehistoric river barrier and its complementary diamond fountainhead.

He ignored me and swung back into the present, addressing Rhennin. 'Are you satisfied now that I didn't kill your brother and the others?'

Rhennin shook his head like a drunk. 'Not with bullets — there's not a mark on him. But he died, and you killed him: that I know.'

He said incisively, 'Tregard, you first — you know the route roughly. But don't be foolish enough to make a run for it, you'll only fall and break your neck. My graveyard is getting a bit full, as you see.'

The island's new patina of guano made the path hazardous in the bitter cold, and I was glad when we sighted the huts, which were lighted. On the stoep, the tongue of the old bell swung gently, as it had at sea; Mercury never slept.

'Open it!' ordered Shelborne at the door.

It wasn't a room. My eyes rested for a moment only on the bound figure of Koeltas before travelling round in astonishment. It was a ship's cabin — but it was also the proclamation of a lonely man. A loom and a rope jack for making fancy rope-and-canvas thrum mats for the floor told of patient hours of a craft which has passed with the sailing ship. Next to its ratchet-wheel was a wooden fid and belaying-pin as well as a number of coils of Portsmouth blue yarn, Devonport red and Chatham yellow. There were no pictures, but strange, surrealist designs had been superimposed on the walls with a type of bright steel rope. I recognized it as the special flexible electro-plated rope which British warships use for ammunition hoists. Centre-piece of the room was a brass signal cannon, polished and bright as an old ship's lantern, on a bracket near the galley door. The main light, however, came from a five-foot pillar light buoy, like a little latticed lighthouse with a cone topmark, in the left-hand corner. It had once been fixed to a reef and the steel was deeply scored by rust and weather. Behind it a canvas. hammock was permanently slung, with a mercury barometer, an anemometer, a modern aircraft-type sextant and a chart-rack on the wall. The near corner was cluttered with a pile of sails and running gear for the Gquma.

Shelborne's curtness disappeared and he spoke in the companionable way he had used on occasion before. Again I felt the curious ambivalence of my attitude towards this man. 'What do you think of my new suit of sails for the Gquma? — I've been sewing them for months, to use on a special occasion.'

I almost forgot the Schmeisser. 'Blue — that's an unusual colour for sails, isn't it?'

He nodded. 'Yes, but they're pretty special. Look at that nylon spanker — what a picture she'll be with that set in a fresh south-wester…'

I rejected what he was saying when I saw what was against the far wall — an old portable trommel, or diamon sieving jig, burnished bright. A prospector's hammer, battered with use, hung above it.

I strode across and swung them round. 'Like the Borchardt — these were Caldwell's!'

Had Shelborne parted from Caldwell the way he claimed at Strandloper's Water, Caldwell would never have left behind him the tools of his trade, the trommel and the hammer. It would have been pointless to go without them to look for diamonds.

Shelborne backed to the door with the machine-pistol ready, his tone changed, harsh. His reply left no doubt in my mind that he intended to shoot us. 'Who else's?' He motioned towards Koeltas. 'Take off his gag.'

I did so. There was a rapid-fire of Hottentot profanity. Shelborne smiled without humour and let him finish.

Rhennin said, 'I must know about Dieter.'

Shelborne was relaxed, watchful. 'Let me see, in…'

'May-June 1942,' supplemented Rhennin.

'Yes. The birds were away. I was alone, except for the cook. A U-boat surfaced off the jetty one afternoon. The crew had manned the gun before the water had drained off the casing…'

'Dieter's crew was one of the smartest in the service,' said Rhennin.

'Half a dozen of them came ashore with an officer. He spoke German, which of course I do too. He said any resistance would be crushed. They clumped up to the hut here. Ouboet, the cook, yelled at them. They shot him right outside this door. The officer said I'd get the same if I didn't co-operate. When I went outside again the bay seemed full of U-boats…'

'There were five in Gruppe Eisbar.'

They took me to U-68, to your brother. He asked me for details about the Glory Hole. I thought they intended to use it as a sort of undersea base for raids against shipping — you remember, Walvis Bay was a mustering point for long-distance convoys.'

'No — he was after the Queen Mary convoy in Cape Town.'

Shelborne was thoughtful. 'So that was it — he kept referring to his mission.'

'Goering's cache was the other part of it.'

Shelborne smiled a little. 'So it seemed. Your brother was quite open about it. He intended to unearth the cache and then shoot me, he said. I told him I had never been inside the Glory Hole…'

'… which remains a lie,' said Rhennin.

Shelborne looked across at me. 'What do you think, Tregard?'

I fumbled for a reply; he was closer to my thought processes than I cared for.

Still looking at me, Shelborne went on. 'Korvettenkapitan Rhennin talked tough. He thought I was concealing something. He told me he would dive with the whole Rudel into the cavern — he knew it was big and deep. A spy had given him information about the cache the day before at Angras Juntas. The man…'

'Yes, yes,' exclaimed Rhennin impatiently. 'I know all this. I was at SKL headquarters. We got Dieter's sighting signal. But what happened here — at Mercury?'

Shelborne shrugged. 'While they dived, they put me ashore. It was fairly calm. From the summit of the island I watched them submerge. Next thing, a couple of rubber dinghies landed on the graveyard side. I went down. The five captains were in great spirits. Your brother had a small flourbag half-filled with diamonds. He told me the U-boats had surfaced inside the Glory Hole and had moored themselves to a natural rock shelf. Goering's diamonds, he said, were in a tin-lined box on the shelf with a notice in German stencilled on the outside. The pick-up could not have been simpler. They had a radio with them; they said they couldn't signal from inside the cavern. One of them was uneasy, however.'

'That would be Immelmann,' said Rhennin.

'Say it was Immelmann, then. Korvettenkapitan Rhennin wanted to go over to my quarters and signal from there, but Immelmann prevailed on them to stay on the seaward side of the island where, he said, reception would be better. The six men — there was the radio operator too — went to the toolshed where I keep cement for the coffins. I hung around; they didn't seem to mind. They were gay, carefree. They said they'd play poker to pass the time, using the diamonds for stakes. They'd have to wait for a fixed time, your brother said — he didn't say when.'

'That is correct. Their signal was due at 1700 hours; SKL would reply in about three hours afterwards.'

Shelborne went on, 'They closed the door. I stood back when the signalling started. Morse, but it was a jumble — code, I suppose. Then came the little bit — fauler Zauber — in plain German. I was surprised not to hear them talking. I came away before it was dark and cold. Next day I went back. There they were, as you saw them — dead, with the cards in their hands, although their hair was its natural colour then. I never saw the U-boats come out…'

Rhennin's face was livid. 'You lie, Shelborne! You lie! It is impossible! You have left something out…'

'Yes, I have. The Bells of St Mary's started late that afternoon.'

Koeltas cursed fluently. 'I say, too, he lies! He never stays when the Bells start… He knows the Bells kill…'

Rhennin continued rapidly. 'Gruppe Eisbar was at the ready. They were fighting men. They were on enemy soil. Only death in a form they did not know could have struck them down. There is not a mark on them! They died so quickly the cards did not fall from their hands!'

Shelborne asked, 'Why did he transmit fauler Zauber — silly humbug?'

'What he sent was rubbish,' replied Rhennin harshly. 'HQ never received it. It was monitored by one of our surface raiders. What you thought was code was a mix-up — there was no sense to it.'

'Or,' I interjected, 'a man who was losing his senses and trying desperately to say something before they ran out.'

Shelborne was silent.

'Why did they choose the toolshed?' I demanded.

Shelborne's eyes were blank. I knew he was lying — somehow he had coerced them to their deaths there. With what lightning weapon had he been able to strike down the light-hearted U-boats captains? It must have been an agent as fleet in its strike as that weird night plant of the Namib which rushes into overpowering and nauseating bloom for a mere seven hours once in a year and dies before dawn.

Shelborne watched me keenly. 'For no other reason than that the hut was situated where they thought radio reception would be best; they made it their own mausoleum and I left them there as they sat because I knew the guano would mummify them in time. It was as good a tomb as Mercury could provide.'

'Why call it the Bells?' I hurried on. 'Why, of all things, the Bells of St Mary's — you named them that, I presume?'

He smiled. 'Yes, it was I. You know the song, the bells from over the sea…'

I shuddered at this mind which could give a lyrical name to a killer.

Rhennin interrupted. 'Listen, Shelborne, we have had a bellyful of strange things tonight. How Dieter died, maybe I shall never know: but it doesn't affect the major issue.'

'And that is?'

'Diamonds. Diamonds from the sea.' Shelborne gave a quick intake of breath. 'I know — we both know — that you're on to something big, something too big for you. Admit that. Stop this nonsense about the Bells. Forget about Dieter and Gruppe Eisbar.' He was pleading, persuasive. Tregard has hammered you about Caldwell. What if Caldwell did come to a sticky end and you don't want it dug up again? Fair enough — it's history, just as Dieter is history. We can wipe the slate clean. Your knowledge for a share in the Mazy Zed project.'

Shelborne seemed not to hear. 'For eighteen months after Gruppe, Eisbar there was only myself on Mercury — war, no relief ships. The food ran out. I hadn't the cutter then. I went back into the Namib.' He edged past us and gave the trommel handle a flick. 'Caldwell went out to meet his fate in the Namib. I lived a whole year there in sun which is death by day and cold which is death by night: loneliness and tireless emptiness do not corrupt the soul there because they are refined by the presence of death. Not to know at dawn whether you will see the sunset, not to know at sunset whether you will see the dawn. You must come to terms with the Namib.' He paused and when he went on his voice was exalted. 'Against this one's own violence is puny; that is why I abhor violence. You go on because the way back holds equal tortures. Beyond the summit of the next dune and truths — still you go on. The Unubersehbares Dunenmeer — the horizonless dunes, the Germans used to call them. There is a horizon, though, and there is a journey — into fear, into death, into yourself. Perhaps one never returns.'

I said, 'Caldwell in the flesh and you in the spirit.'

He brushed it aside. 'You come to worship all forms of life — I showed you the beetles, Tregard — and also the mechanics of life itself: you saw that leg which had specially equipped itself and that hygroscopic layer on the beetle's back. That meant water, and water is life.'

He looked round the cabin, as if he were seeing it for the first time — or the last.

Rhennin asked more sharply, 'Well, are you coming in with the Mazy Zed?.'

That appraisal of his room told me a great deal. 'You have a court order. Very well. Go ahead. Enforce it. Against what? Against whom? I haven't done anything except threaten you with a gun. No one has tried to stop you prospecting the sea-bed. No one has attempted to prevent you entering the Glory Hole.'

'Is that your answer then?'

'It is.' A thrill of cold fear ran through me as his eyes moved from Rhennin to me, and back to Rhennin. He spoke softly, but there was a quiescent power about the way he said it, a sly menace, like that of a missile head without its rocket. 'If you attempt to mine diamonds from the sea round Mercury, every man of your crew will die. You with them. As certainly as a burst from this loathsome weapon.'

There was no penetrating the zareba of his secret, no way into the fastness of his desert-tempered mind. Mary had been right about him. Mary…!

I said, 'And Mary with us?'

For the first time I had got through his guard. He was horrified. 'Mary,' Mary is here? You brought her from Angras Juntas…'

'Yes, of course. She's got a job to do.'

'But after the torpedoing…!'

He was reeling against the ropes. I wanted him down for the full count. 'We were standing on the deck, Mary and I, only a few feet from where your friends' torpedo exploded.'

He said in a strangled voice, 'She wasn't… hurt?'

'No. Pretty shocked. We were both thrown into the water. Johaar rescued us.'

Rhennin saw his opportunity, too. 'Why are you so concerned about this girl, Shelborne? Is she part of your conscience about Caldwell?'

He didn't seem to hear. 'Mary — my God!'

I went on. 'First Caldwell, and then a near miss at killing his daughter!'

His eyes were alive with pain. 'You don't… you can't understand.'

Rhennin said, 'The days of the one-man, one-fortune strike are done. It needs money, science, a pool of brains, a capital of millions. Given enough of each or all, I'd break open the Namib into the bargain.'

Shelborne said thinly, 'It is a paradox, isn't it, that the Sperrgebiet was the first part of the earth's crust to cool out of chaos, and it still remains the last to be conquered. That is my answer.'

Koeltas said savagely, 'There's only one thing for this smooth-talking bastard — shoot him stone-dead!'

Shelborne's eyes had their heart-green diamond tinge. 'Mary must be out of this, do you hear?' He raised the Schmeisser and Koeltas cringed away at the look on his face. 'You will agree to this — I am not offering you terms. You will go free tonight and take the U-boat captains' diamonds for yourselves. I will guarantee proper burial for them. You will take the Mazy Zed away from Mercury. You will give me your solemn word that there will be no mining. Mary will come with me in the Gqama to Walvis Bay. When I return — in about a week if the wind is right — you will be gone. You will never return.'

I laughed. '"Don't tread on me!"' Rhennin asked, 'And what if we don't?' 'I will take you outside and shoot all three of you.' He wasn't bluffing. His sincerity was the measure of just how big his secret was. But, if we could show one strong pointer or fact to a major discovery, Shelborne would be beaten. A one-man stand, an island Hampden gun in hand, would not prevail once the big guns of the diamond business got going — he would be swept out of the way like a flawed stone on a sorter's table. In the week he planned to be away at Walvis, we could make a quick prospect — for our strong pointer which we still lacked.

Rhennin caught the look in my eyes. 'We want to discuss this — alone.'

'I'll take Mary, whether you agree or not.' 'Having murdered her father, as you plan to murder us.'

He laughed easily. 'Quite.'

'You won't get away with it, you know, if we refuse.' 'No? You slipped ashore on a dangerous shore on a dark night in a small rubber boat. The dinghy is found; you are not. You were drowned. Koeltas here — no one will miss him.'

The wiry Hottentot said, 'I see him kill Kim. He will kill us. He does not mind.'

They were four against one — Kim got what he deserved.' He held up one hand, scored by a long seam. 'Koeltas had his shot in too.'

'Are you going to give us the opportunity…?'

'Yes. I intend to handcuff you first, though. I have a couple of pairs for guano workers when Mercury gets them down.'

He pulled them from a canvas bag, made us snap them on each other's wrists and closed the door.

'What?' asked Rhennin.

'Listen,' I whispered urgently. 'Agree. Let him take Mary. I'll dive into the Glory Hole — right away, if the weather holds. Then — Strandloper's Water. We'll also toothcomb Mercury while he's away and debunk this nonsense of the Bells.'

'He asked for our solemn word.'

'Forced under duress, at gunpoint? The aces are all ours, Felix.'

'Why doesn't he simply bring Mary ashore here out of harm's way — why Walvis?'

'Because,' I replied, 'he knows himself that at times Mercury kills. The quicker we get off, the better.'

'I say that, too,' added Koeltas. 'I still kill Shelborne — myself.'

'If we can return to the Cape with a first-class sea-bed assay, the authorities will back us up. It's no good telling them at this stage that Shelborne is obstructing us. He'll come up with some cock-and-bull yarn about disturbing the birds and the seals — you know just how sensitive they were about that before we set out…'

'I'll rub his nose in guano before we're through,' said Rhennin savagely., 'Dieter and Gruppe Eisbar… It makes my blood run cold. But how…?'

I interrupted. 'We know now that the rest of the Goering cache is in the Glory Hole. I'll bring it out. The dive is first priority. I have got to see, Felix.'

Rhennin smiled for the first time that evening. 'It will be the biggest single day's haul of diamonds on record — better than the Oyster Line!'

'I get diamant also?' asked Koeltas. 'I kill Shelborne for some more, eh?'

I said roughly, 'Yes, Skipper. You go and fetch them out of a graveyard from under the noses of five dead men sitting there, and you'll get your share.'

The skin was tight on his Tartar cheekbones. 'Shelborne kills them too?'

'Yes.'

He whistled through his hemp-stained teeth. 'Next time I bring the FN automatic.'

I called to Shelborne that we had agreed. He still took no chances. He locked us in the guano workers' deserted quarters for the night. There was no point in trying to escape, as others on Mercury had found, simply because there was nowhere to escape to. I lay awake long after the others, thinking of Shelborne's dedicated search for grace in the Namib and the fate which had dealt him a diamond hand and the joker in the shape of the terrible guardian which had struck down Gruppe Eisbar, the captains, the springbok, the patrol boat — and my fellow-diver.

14

Toll for the Bells

The diver's red flag with diagonal white stripes fluttered from the dinghy's tiny mast. I made final adjustments to my hood and mask, Rhennin helping. There was only a slight swell and the air was muggy — not sharp as on Mercury the previous night — which I attributed to the late withdrawal of the fog seaward.

I was diving alone. Pieterse's stand-in refused point-blank to accompany me. He was as near mutiny as the rest of the Mazy Zed's crew. The dead diver's body aboard and the proximity of the grim island, the chevrons of coffins showing white on the graveyard slope like the teeth of a crocodile basking in the sun, they got them down. Some said also that it was the presence of a woman aboard which had brought all our misfortunes. The sight of Shelborne, black-clad, grim, with Rhennin, myself and Koeltas, all in a dishevelled state, had done nothing to improve their mood. Although he had hidden it at hand under a strip of canvas as we neared the barge, Shelborne's Schmeisser may have been seen when a lead from a sheet winch slackened off and snatched aside the covering.

Shelborne had lain a cable's length from the Mazy Zed while I gave a shout for Mary to come over in the rubber dinghy — alone — and join us. Shelborne did the talking. With her, his grimness disappeared. He was gentle, but his voice became hard when he told her of his ultimatum. The large green eyes in the gaunt face rested on her unwaveringly as he described how he had found us in the graveyard. He made it clear that the choice was hers and simply swept aside our protests. Underneath his words lay a peculiar implication — Mary did not miss it any more than I did, although I was not to know its meaning until later — that between himself and Mary lay bigger things than the shooting of Rhennin, Koeltas and myself, or the Mazy Zed. Mary had looked appealingly at me, but she seemed drawn to Shelborne's suggestion in some inexplicable way which, I felt, both included and excluded me. The terms of the ultimatum seemed of academic importance, almost, compared to the purport of the subtler interchange. She agreed without any serious demur, although I could tell from the way she looked at me that there were a lot of unanswered,questions in her mind, and went back alone in the dinghy to fetch her things.

When she returned, he had stood off the Mazy Zed a little farther before putting Rhennin, Koeltas and myself into the dinghy. Mary's preoccupation and almost unquestioning acceptance of Shelborne left me moody and depressed. Johaar alone on board the Mazy Zed seemed cheerful — the Bells were silent. He had wanted to be my diver-buddy, but I couldn't risk taking a greenhorn. Mary's departure and the uneasy bargain — and our proposed double-cross — left me mentally unprepared for the dive, and fear isn't a good thing to take below the sea. I had waited until the Gquma had disappeared into a fogdog on the horizon, a luminous spot low down in the north-west, before I began my preparations.

'Handsomely, now,' said Rhennin as I slid into the water.

The words at Strandloper's Water were on my lips before I could check them. '"Good luck to you, Shelley, perhaps my luck will change now!"'

Rhennin's eyes widened, the black muzzles of the Glory Hole gaped at me, and I slid into the depths.

Using my favourite dolphin kick, I planed down to the first air station. Pausing, I rolled on my back and readjusted my mouthpiece. If it was torn away — I suspected that Pieterse's might have been — I wanted to be ready to cope quickly with an emergency. Above, I could see the dinghy's bottom and below the water was as green as a treesnake. I swung carefully through 360 degrees, alert, expectant. There was nothing. The absence of marine life of any sort again surprised me. My plan was to dive a couple more fathoms — it was nine at the mouth itself — and then turn away seawards. If, I reasoned, Pieterse had been killed by something at the Glory Hole, I would not give it the chance to spot me descending, but I would come in at ground level and reconnoitre.

Seven fathoms. I glided out to sea, steering by my wrist compass. The water was green, turgid almost, and as lonely as the Namib. Nothing stirred except myself. This absence of life made me apprehensive; I had never known it before.

Eight fathoms. The safety rope to Rhennin was free in my hands.

Eight and a half fathoms. My mind was on the ghastly weals on Pieterse's neck. I continued seawards, parallel with the bottom. In a moment I would give a kick on my flippers and touch it. Would it be diamond-bearing?

There was no need. The slimy green belly of the sea reached up at me. The flatulent, unhealthy thing heaved a full half-fathom. I saw its tissue of mud blended with myriads of fine shells, stippled with green-white bones of seals and fish, as if I had been looking through a low-powered microscope. I shouted in fear behind my mask as it surged at me and I kicked wildly upwards. I shot up twenty feet before I got a hold of my nerves and forced my trembling limbs to be still. Another spurt to the surface like that and I would kill myself. I rested on the rope. There was a soft murmur below me. I sweated with fear.- What malignant creature…? I put these Koeltas-like imaginings out of my mind. I must look in order to know. I took the long-bladed knife from my belt with shaking fingers. I had deliberately not brought a speargun to leave me as mobile as possible.

Repeat the measured count: seven fathoms, eight fathoms, eight and a half. Murk. The discoloured water was green with thousands of particles. Mud, I told myself rationally, nothing but the mud of the ocean-bed. From the Glory Hole direction came the murmur I had heard previously, a sigh almost. I forced myself to within three feet of the sea-bed. Then two. One foot. I reached out. My fingers touched cold, slimy green mud. I recoiled and jerked up a few feet. I forced myself down again. I closed my fingers on it. There was no tissue, no skin, no life — nothing but slimy green mud. There was no second heaving-reach. Bubbles from my Scuba poppled surfacewards. I dug the knife to its hilt in the green film. It neither rose nor reacted. I glanced at my compass and turned due east — for the mouth of the Glory Hole.

I inched along the sea-bed. It remained smooth, like skin. Light filtered from above, muted as by a blind drawn against the sun. The floor sloped slightly upwards. There was no rip or, surge as I had expected near the mouth. I glanced left and right. Nothing.

I faced ahead. My limbs seized. A cupola had risen swiftly on the ocean floor, bulging, apparently sensate. It undulated, igloo-high, towards me. My limbs wouldn't kick me clear. My right hip banged against it. Soundlessly it vanished. Floating free, the size of a radio-sonde balloon, a bubble rose slowly past me.

Gas!

I pulled up my legs and sat down, shaking with reaction. There was, as Rhennin had asserted, a simple and rational explanation for the whole thing: here now before my eyes. The blood-red sunsets, the lavish displays of phosphorescence, the warm mugginess of the day, the lack of marine life, the green mud, the Bells — all fell into place. What a fool I had been! I was in the presence of that rarest of sea phenomena, what scientists call an azoic area — a sea without oxygen and therefore without fish. The sea is robbed of its life-giving oxygen by a sulphate-reducing type of bacteria which changes harmless sulphates normally present in sea water into an evil-smelling gas. Millions of decaying organisms are the primary cause of the gas: the sea round Mercury must be filled with untold numbers of them. Relief sharpened my mind as I was able to explain it in rational terms: the green mud was, in fact, a layer of billions of these dead daitoms, or common microscopic sea plants. The textured mud I had fled from was composed of countless skeletons of these invisible creatures." When cold currents swept the sea-bottom, bacteria-producing pockets of gas accumulated in the green mud. When a warm counter-current flowed — brought about by the north-west wind instead of the prevailing south-wester — the pockets of sea-bed gas burst, bubbling up and destroying all fish life.

It seemed to explain the Bells: simply a low heavy rumbling as the pockets of sea-bed gas escaped. It also explained why the Bells occurred only at irregular and intermittent intervals. As for the gas itself — my mind raced in relief at the natural explanation which robbed Mercury of its terror — it was sulphuretted hydrogen which, although smelling repulsive, was quite harmless to humans, although fatal to fish…

I stared in surprise, at the thin extra signal line which dangled overhead. Odd, that Rhennin should have sent down another. Odder still, it was floating loose, with no weight attached. My own rope was still fast to my wrist. My decompression meter told me I had another quarter of an hour below. I decided to ignore the drifting white nylon cord and concentrate on making a quick prospect of the sea-bed. If there were diamond gravel it would lie under the layer of mud, which I hoped was not more than a few inches thick. I scooped and scratched a patch about three feet square. It was soft and easy to work. In a few minutes I felt the rough thrill of gravel beneath. Diamond gravel! I used my knife and filled a small canvas bag at my belt. As assay of so small an area was not a fair assessment but the fact that within minutes I had found diamond-bearing gravel was encouraging. The Mazy Zed's pumps would make light work of the mud.

The new signal line drifted down almost into my prospecting hole, wandering and waving. I reached out to give Rhennin a reassuring tug; I stopped short. If it were not weighted, how did it stay down? Rope does not have negative buoyancy! The weals on Pieterse's neck! It was wavering tentatively towards my shoulder. Irrationally, blindly, I kicked out of reach. I had gone only a few yards when I pulled myself together. My nerves would be shot to hell if I accelerated like a ramjet at anything unusual… the white line drifted upwards. It was too thin for an octopus tentacle, and seemed to be uniformly so for its whole length. I followed the undulating thing. I glanced at my compass. My first suspicion hardened when I saw the line did not reach towards the surface higher than the seven-fathom mark. It turned eastwards, almost horizontal. Eastwards — to the mouth of the Glory Hole!

I switched off my powerful waterproof torch so as not to reveal my position to whatever lay ahead. It was difficult to pick out the line by the water-filtered light, so I turned over on my back, following its course. Then the light brightened from refractions inside the cavern, as in the Blue Grotto at Capri. I edged a little deeper. If there was anything there, I wanted to see it first, before it saw me. The white line was below me. I had left it above! I glanced upwards. There wasn't one, there were half a dozen lines, all floating parallel, quartering the sea. They seemed without life, without function.

I planed eastwards.

Then I saw: the lines ended. They came from an opaque, gelatinous screen through which the light, reflected from the cavern, shone with pearl-like iridescence tinged with translucent blue. I edged closer, my heart racing. The white lines trailed and twisted.

I knew what had killed Pieterse.

The curtain in the water ahead was a living creature.

It was a composite of thousands of jelly-fish. The white trailers were not rope but deadly thread-cells or cnidocils, loaded with a fatal chemico-toxic sting allied to a stunning electrical discharge. It was a rarity any marine scientist would have given his left hand to see.

I edged still closer: it looked like a screen in a pub made of empty bottles fused together. A huge colony of the individual jelly-fish or Portuguese men-o'war which float by the acre off the Sperrgebiet. They are known as siphonophora. Being such a lowly form of life, they would not be affected by the gas as fish were. Each jellyfish is a perfect individual, complete with mouth, stomach, sexual organs, propulsion apparatus and a sting powerful enough to kill small hard-shelled creatures and produce intense burns in humans. The Sperrgebiet jellyfish has the unique capacity of being able to undergo what scientists call symbiosis: by this process individuals link together into a colony and in doing so they surrender individual functions to the composite creature. One group of thousands forms a complicated apparatus for propelling the new body; another forms its sexual organs; another the stomach and digestive tract; another the liver; and yet another the killer-sting. In pooling themselves, the individuals lose all but the function they dedicate themselves to in the new animal. It becomes a complete new organism. And in the gross example before my eyes the sting had developed rope-like proportions whose touch was immediate death. Pieterse had brushed one. Sensitized, it had found a tiny crack where the hood joins the suit, hence the weals on his neck. I knew now why Shelborne had never been able to dive into the Glory Hole. It must have taken years for the colony to grow and develop to such bizarre proportions.

I glanced at my decompression meter. Only eight more minutes! I dived deep, away from the screen, down to the green mud. I peered through the shimmering, distorting, filtered light at shapes I could see vaguely looming there. There was no mistaking the outline of the lean hulls — Gruppe Eisbar,' Three were moored alongside one another and farther inwards a blur could have been the other two. The screws and hydroplanes of the nearer boats were fuzzy but distinguishable. Goering's cache was as safe as in Fort Knox. I checked again on my meter: I should already have been on my way to the surface. I swam away from the stings and gave four signal tugs — pull me up!

Rhennin didn't ask questions when he saw my face. 'Let's get back to the Mazy Zed,' was all he said.

In his cabin, boiling hot coffee laced with brandy brought some feeling back into my frozen, lethargic limbs. I felt good inside a fisherman's heavy sweater and thick corduroy trousers. My gravel sample was being rushed for a snap assay.

Rhennin confessed that he'd done the waiting by steeling himself as he had during those war-time vigils in a U-boat operations headquarters, sitting gnawing the nail of worry…

'Symbiosis!' he repeated. 'It's just a bunch of Portuguese men-o'-war which have linked up, isn't it?'

I took a big mouthful of coffee. 'No, Felix. They actually surrender functions to become a new creature. It is, in fact, a new animal — and in this extreme case, a highly dangerous one.'

'You say it's like a curtain across the entrance?'

'Yes. It has attached itself to both sides and completely blocks it.'

That would account for Pieterse.'

'Yes.'

'Then how the hell did Dieter break his way in? The hulls — was there any sign of damage?'

I was surprised. 'No, of course not. The screen couldn't harm a U-boat, Felix.'

'But the deadly electrical discharges…?'

'They're fatal to a man, but a U-boat would carve through them and not notice.'

'Then what the devil are you blethering about?' he rapped out.

'Listen,' I said, trying to soothe him, 'for a person to break into the Glory Hole is impossible. On the surface there's the wind, the sea and the blasts of compressed air. Underneath is the jelly-fish curtain. It certainly doesn't account for Gruppe Eisbar… even if it was there over twenty years ago. Nor does it account for the fact that Dieter and the others were apparently unharmed at the graveyard — if we are to believe Shelborne.'

He thumped his fists on the table. 'In God's name, John, what did Shelborne kill them all with? You've accounted for the Bells…'

'It must be the Bells, Felix. It's a bloody clever bit of showmanship taken from nature, but although it's uncanny and noisy, it's harmless. That gas is plain sulphuretted hydrogen — rotten cabbage. It stinks, but it couldn't harm a fly.'

I brushed aside my underwater nightmare. 'Anyway, our Glory Hole monster is easy to dispose of — a load of Koeltas's dynamite drums would destroy it. It's another remarkable thing about the composite jelly-fish that if you rip it apart by force, it reverts to individuals again. All the normal functions reappear in the individual, as if he had never surrendered them at all.'

'We'll do that, then.'

I shook my head. 'Felix, those U-boat crews died of something horrible. They and Dieter died because Shelborne meant them to die. He knows, Felix, he knows!' I looked out at the grim, guano-splashed island. 'The Glory Hole is the diamond fountainhead; it is the parent rock of the Sperrgebiet. Caldwell discovered it. Shelborne killed him for it. He also found out what guards it — that is why he could afford to go away for those ten years, knowing it was safe.'

'Why waste his time becoming a master mariner?'

'It was a long-term plan. The islands are run as sailing ships. To be headman, he had to be a sailing skipper. He came back…'

The telephone rang. Rhennin answered, but his eyes stayed on my face. 'Yes,' he said evenly. 'Yes. I expected it might be, from something I have just heard. Send them to me at once,'will you?'

'The assay?' I asked.

'Yes.'

'How much…'

'Rate of one carat to four tons of gravel.'

'Five times as rich as Oranjemund.'

'Gem quality. Pure blue-whites.'

'From close to the fountainhead.'

'It will be better inside.'

He watched me, silent, while I rummaged around and found what I was looking for, the only stripmap of the Sperrgebiet from Angras Juntas to Hollam's Bird Island. Mercury was marked Merkur, in German fashion. For 100 miles inland, 70 to the south and 130 to the north, the sheet was blank. It was, 'unsurveyed, shifting sand dunes'. Thirty miles to the north-east of Mercury was outlined a mountain with a complex of hills.

I said, 'I'm also going to use Caldwell's strategy — outflank the Glory Hole.'

'Take it from the rear, you mean?'

I nodded. 'See those mountains? It's my bet, just as it was Caldwell's mission, that the ancient river rises there. He got only as far as Strandloper's Water, Maybe the blocked-up mouth is at Strandloper's Water — I don't know. I may have to go only a few miles…'

'It's thirty to the mountains,' he replied sombrely. 'Not far on a map, but eternity in the Namib. Shall I come?'

'No. This is my party, Felix. Besides, you'll have to keep an eye on the crew in the state they are in.'

'We'll start the diamond pumps within the hour,' he said decisively. 'It'll snap those miseries out of them if they're busy. Once the buzz gets round that the assay was rich, it may also help. This Glory Hole creature of yours…'

I laughed. I felt easy now that I was going — to the Namib, to Shelborne's Strandloper's Water. 'Finish him off by sucking him up the Mazy Zed's pumps!'

'Won't it foul them…?'

'No,' I grinned. 'They're soft. Put the main hoses down right outside the mouth, Felix. It should be richer the farther we go inside.'

He didn't catch my mood. 'You remember Shelborne's threat, John? — if we started mining, he would kill the crew?'

I shrugged. 'We've called his bluff over the Bells. We've called it with the guardian of the cavern. I'm still cautious, though — that's why the journey.'

As if in reply to me, the reverberation of the Bells rang against the steel sounding-board of the Mazy Zed.

Rhennin looked uneasy. 'It gives you the bloody creeps.'

'No wonder we couldn't pinpoint it,' I said confidently. 'It originates anywhere round the island on the sea-bed.' I went on, 'Look, before I go off, let's search Shelborne's quarters, you and I, this afternoon. We may find the key to the whole mystery. It mayn't even be necessary for me to go.'

'Excellent,' he said, more cheerfully. 'But you don't intend going alone…?'

'I'll take Koeltas and Johaar,' I replied. Neither will mind leaving the Bells behind.'

'You couldn't have a better bodyguard than those two toughs.'

'I wish Koeltas hadn't had to leave the FN automatic in the Malgas.'

'You can have my Remington repeater. Are our pistols still in the graveyard. I don't remember Shelborne picking them up.'

'He didn't. I'll recover them.'

'Bob Sheriff's boat has weapons…'

'No, Felix. I'm keeping clear. I'll start from the Sudhuk side, which I know is safe.'

He grinned slightly. 'Like the wind — always from the south-west.'

He telephoned a quickfire of orders to bring the Mazy Zed nearer to the Glory Hole by winching her on her anchor cables. Using the run of the sea, the diamond hoses would be dropped to float inside the cavern itself. Two hours later the Mazy Zed was secured as Rhennin, Koeltas, Johaar and I rounded the seal platform in the dinghy and the strong pulse of the pumps began to vie with the Bells.

There was no clue in Shelborne's hut, which we ransacked thoroughly, although we put everything back in place again. Rhennin gave Koeltas the Remington to keep up his morale as the island trembled. Neither he nor Johaar would go for the pistols.

It was already half-dark when there was an oath from Shelborne's quarterdeck and a metallic rattle as Koeltas fed shells into the Remington's magazine.

'He comes!' he exclaimed in patois.

Rhennin and I craned into the darkness. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear the motor.

'Shelborne hasn't got an outboard,' I said.

Koeltas's fear infected us. 'It's someone from the Mazy Zed,' snapped Rhennin. 'I expressly gave orders that no one was to come…'

The red ball of a Very light rose above the jetty.

'Let's get down there!' I didn't care for searching Shelborne's papers, although there was an almost complete lack of anything personal, not a letter even, to associate the man with the place he had occupied for more than twenty years. Once the trommel's handle swung during a severe tremor. In the twilight I thought fancifully of Caldwell's ghost.

At the landing-stage I cupped my hands: 'Ahoy, there! Who is it?'

The flaming danger-signal burned out in the cold sea. The boat was too far away for me to catch the answer. Instead, another Very light flared, tattooing Johaar's skin with blood and birthmarks.

Again the hail. Koeltas heard; Rhennin swore while he waited for me to translate.

'It's Captain Longstaff. He says, come quickly, for God's sake, come quickly!'

Rhennin yelled. 'Longstaff! Stop firing those bloody lights! Come close, damn you, come close!'

The outboard circled aimlessly, like a ship with a torpedo in her rudder.

Koeltas clicked off the Remington's safety catch.

Johaar said, 'He asks, is it safe?'

These broken, high-pitched and hysterical incoherencies from the normally staid master of the Mazy Zed sounded unreal.

'Come close, blast you!' roared Rhennin.

'Felix, Koeltas says Longstaff says the 'tween-decks men are all dead — sorters, engineers, galley staff. The deck crew seems all right, but there's been a hell of a panic. Some of them have taken to the boats — one overturned and sank. A couple of men have been drowned. The others are up the rigging, on top of the gantry, on the roof of the living quarters…'

'Longstaff! Longstaff! Come here!'

His reply was another Very light. I spotted the captain at the tiller, staring straight ahead of him, like one of those dead figures in lifeboats during the war. Then he wrenched his arm over, as if he had come to a decision, and the outboard headed out to sea. We never saw Captain Longstaff again.

We held a hurried conference. Nothing would persuade Koeltas and Johaar to return with us to the Mazy Zed. The attempt at sea-bed mining off Mercury was over. Rhennin had shrugged angrily when I had called it Shelborne's victory. He decided to signal the tug and tow the Mazy Zed back to Luderitz — a day or two's run if the south-wester wasn't too strong. He seemed to take it for granted that I would go along too. He was startled when I told him that I had no intention of doing so. I still intended to break Shelborne's secret wide open. I was a freelance and not bound to the Mazy Zed, I went on. If I cared to throw my life away on a wild-goose chase in the Namib, that was my affair. At my vehemence, he smiled and shook me strongly by the hand. He was back on my side. The hell with Shelborne! He'd send the tug back after she had towed the Mazy Zed to Luderitz to pick me up in good time before Shelborne returned. I could have anything I wanted from the Mazy Zed for the journey. Koeltas and Johaar, torn between staying on Mercury and the unknown terror of the Bells, decided to come with me, although they refused to venture near the Mazy Zed. Half her crew dead! And every man of my own crew gone. In our mood, we had no hesitation in agreeing to Koeltas's request to keep the Remington in case Shelborne should return unexpectedly.

Rhennin and I set off for the Mazy Zed, lost in thought. It was clear to me that the deadly guardian of the fountainhead centred on the Glory Hole. The seabed gas I had found and the jellyfish screen — these had served only to mask the darker secret killer. Whatever it was, it was clear that Shelborne did not wield it — he could not, being away now — although he knew what it was. It was also intermittent in its lethal strikes. Did Shelborne know at what intervals it would attack, and is that why he left us so confidently to go to Walvis Bay with Mary, knowing we would be dead when he returned? Outflank — the word burned in my mind. I would outflank the Glory Hole and find the secret where I was now convinced he, too, had discovered it — at Strandloper's Water. I could not wait to set off.

The Mazy Zed's strong pulse was dead when we rounded the seal promontory. A corpse floated past, face upwards. Except for the oil-burning riding lights, the Mazy Zed was in darkness. Rhennin took command and signalled the tug, which was about sixty miles away. We battened down every opening and hatchway with the help of some of the braver members of the crew we enticed away from their positions aloft. Superficially, there was nothing to show that the million-dollar Mazy Zed had become a floating coffin.

I had hoped to stock our march from the Mazy Zed's supplies, but there was woefully little that was not below in the 'tween-decks morgue, where it would have been death to venture.

At first light next day Johaar, Koeltas and I went ashore from Mercury to the mainland, carefully skirting Bob Sheriff's wreck. Unaccountably, there was no fog and the sun was bright as we climbed in single file, myself leading, the low hills which backed the bay.

Ahead lay the Namib, white as the venom of a mamba.

15

Strandloper's Water

Ancient land barrier!

Sand and sky merged at a distant line of stark, saw-edged peaks, pale cobalt in a vast cyclorama, a line robbed of all decisiveness by the white glare of the sky. Deeply keeled, serried lines of enormous dunes, some of them a thousand feet high, ran north-eastwards in an eccentric, rock-ribbed agglomeration. Barrier it was, for the north was different terrain from the south. The dunes went no farther than the demarcation; on the other side stretched a vast, gravelly plain shot through with razor-edged outcrops — broken, corroded, ripped. Under the vertical eye-glare of the sun the enclaves and divides of the dunes were indistinguishable from their doppelganger shadows, eaten away as canker devours the pearly-white mouth of the puff-adder. I stood incredulous at this nakedness bankrupt of all life, with a lineal pedigree of two hundred million years without the bastardy of one flower, one fully-grown tree, or the crudest prototype of man, a quite unmitigated infinitude of sand. It was absolute, like space; primal as man's killer-instinct; an inexorable as a countdown.

I pointed to the line of mushroom-lipped blowholes, which climbed out of the quicksands into firmer country beyond. That is our route.'

'Jesus!' exclaimed Koeltas. 'I never leave the sea again!'

Johaar kicked a bare foot into the ankle-deep sand. 'Five miles a day, maybe, through this stuff. We want plenty water.'

I carried two of Shelborne's canteens. Johaar had roped to his belt a half-gallon wine jar I had found on the Mazy Zed's deck and Koeltas had two empty brandy bottles in the pockets of his faithful oilskin. The water from Shelborne's room condensers was insipid but there was none available from the Mazy Zed as the tanks were in the sealed-off living quarters. Koeltas carried the Remington and I the short Bernadelli VB automatic as well as Rhennin's superlative Hensoldt Diasport binoculars, pocket-sized and amazingly powerful. Looking at the emptiness before me, I felt a fellow-feeling with Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who had carried the same make of glasses into space. I had commandeered haversacks and some tinned food from Shelborne's larder. The dead buck which covered the beach would have stocked an army, but we dared not venture near.

Koeltas and I had cut out the toes of our veldskoens in 'sandtrapper' tradition to get rid of the sand. Ordinary boots are useless, since the abrasive action of the sand strips the stitching in days. Koeltas wore his greasy skipper's cap and I a big sombrero from Shelbome's slop-chest: Johaar was in a guano-worker's hat.

I had plotted our route beforehand to the Uri-Hauchab mountains, the complex vaguely shown on the map, and now I checked my bearings with a small boat's compass. I had also set the time limit as four days: a little over a pint of water each per day. My first objective, if I could find nothing at the coast to solve the problem of ingress to the Glory Hole, was Strandloper's Water. The immediate interior seemed to offer nothing but signs of death. Farther inland — well, I told myself, Shelborne had lived for a year in it, and there must be water.

'Trap! — March!' I ordered.

We set course into the dunes — for Strandloper's Water.

Four, six, eight, ten steps. The steep incline of the dune and the clinging sand bends our ankles back so that the foot trails like a polio victim's. The toe seeks its hold, penetrates the surface with a curious dry rustle — and finds no firmness. A downward traverse, an uncertain fulcrum at mid-point of the arch, a slow compacting under the ball and toes, a ripple of tautness along the instep muscles, the bones spreadeagled, heel unsupported. Sand pours in the cut-open toe, cold inside, hot on the surface. The foot slides downwards, the knee wrenches, leg muscles cry out.

Four, six, eight, ten steps.

Vapour-trail arabesques smoke at the crests under the rising wind and sand probes through every cavity of shirt, trousers, vest, coating the skin with a white emery abrasive, a goad to straining muscles and a corrosive to the temper.

Four, six, eight, ten steps.

Shelborne had sought expiation and mortification in the dunes: the sun was now a fiery magnifying-glass and the desert its burning-point. Caldwell and Shelborne could not have brought a mule-wagon through this. I looked back. The sand quagmire, the old warship, Mercury — they were as close as they had been two hours before. There was a bloom of smoke seawards — the tug would soon be with the Mazy Zed. My rucksack weighed like a ton of coal on my shoulders. The Bernadelli in a canvas holster on my left hip was balanced against a pocketful of shells on my right; I realized that before long I might have to jettison both. Maybe the binoculars, too. My heavy polo-necked sweater was tied round my waist. The desert would be icy at night and after dark the tightly rolled sleeping-bag above each man's pack would as vital as water.

I drank about two eggcups full of water. It was neutral, unsatisfying, and served only to clog the dried sand and mucus in my mouth. I wiped clean three cartridges for us to suck. The others sat sullen, silent under the threat of the Namib, although we could easily have turned back at this stage and we had plenty of food and water ahead it was impossible to distinguish individual peaks and hills any more for the soft cobalt had now abandoned them to brutal shades of red and orange. Nearby were the skeletons of a group of strange succulents the Hottentots call 'half-mens — half-human,' a man-sized mock-up whose head inclines away to the north. They leaned away from us like a tragic classical Greek chorus foreboding evil for our journey.

We struck towards the ancient river line.

Hours later — blinded, gasping, crying out for water we dared not drink — we stumbled down a wadi. The heat contained in the red-hot defile was appalling. Its sand base absorbed the sound of our footfalls and voices, which fell dead, as in the presence of the dead; we gave up speaking. The open desert had narrowed into a chain of wildly jumbled broken defiles leading to the old watercourse. Koeltas called them gramadullas. The grim flanking cliffs, pitted by heat, flamed every hot colour, red, orange, scarlet, brick. They had a bloom, too, like grapes where the surface of the rock fell in rotten powder. Masses of house-sized rock lay everywhere. We skirted them, pressing onwards — towards what?

We shuffled on, my muscles rebelling at the unnatural sandtrapper gait. The wadi was as tortuous in direction as it was treacherous above. A hundred tons of rock detached itself and fell, noiseless. Dust billowed, but otherwise the rocks' agony was mute. In five minutes we would have been marching across the spot. Johaar, leading, turned and gestured expressively. Yet another bend: we paused in astonishment, even in that region of unlikely colours. The overhang expanded funnel-wise above, but instead of flaming scarlet it was burnished jet-black. It was hornblende, stippled here and there with emerald-green boulders of pure copper. The heat became almost intolerable as the black drank up the sun; two feathery cascades, not of water, but of white sand, ran over the shoulders of the dark cliffs.

Then the gramadullas opened and the terrain became flat — the ancient watercourse!

We threw our packs in the shadow of the banks and lay down exhausted. But even here the late afternoon sun would not leave us alone. The shadow disappeared and there was nothing for it but to return to the stifling defile and the black cliff. The Bernadelli bullets tasted better than the water. I fell asleep sucking raw brass and lead; I was awakened by bitter cold and dark. It was barely eight o'clock and the temperature must have fallen over fifty degrees. There was no fire because there was nothing to burn. We ate an unpalatable meal of bully-beef and dried fruit, washed down with a little water. We decided to trek with the moon and lie up during the heat of the day. The river-bed seemed an impenetrable wash of sand, without a white pock-mark or a dead buck to guide our search for Strandloper's Water.

I shivered in my sleeping-bag and sleep was fitful. I must have fallen into a deeper sleep towards midnight, for I started awake as Koeltas shook me. The muted light caught the yellow bronze of his skin; his eyes were two slits of shadow. In his long oilskin, his Tartar face was as unreal in that goblin-land as a goblin itself. What he said was as strange.

'Put on the shoe of Mantis.'

The bullet rattled awkwardly against my teeth. 'For Christ's sake, what are you talking about?'

He turned away so that his silhouette was lost against the black cliff and he said softly, in his thin, harsh voice. The Bushmen say, the moon is the shoe of Mantis. Let us put it on and get the hell out of this spook-land.'

I kept the compass but jettisoned the Bernadelli, the shells and the binoculars — a holster of dried fruit was worth more than a gun. Koeltas, however, kept the Remington. Johaar and I marched with our sleeping-bag? doubled round our waists; Koeltas's was bundled up neatly on his rucksack. In the heat of the previous day he had been least affected. He drank less water than Johaar or myself.

We trekked. We kept no account of time. The river sand was deep, but level. The sandshuffler gait paid off here without the muscle-cracking strain of endless ascent and descent. The cold was formidable. Sockless, open-toed, I soon lost all feeling in my feet and the numbness worked its way up mid-calf like Socrates's hemlock. The stars were radium needles above the serried lines of endless wadis flowing into the main stream. Of water, of life,there was no sign. The Glory Hole, the diamond fountainhead itself, became unimportant beside the need to lift one unfeeling foot in front of the next. The bullet I sucked felt like a drop of warm water in my palm.

I led. I didn't see the dawn, although my face was towards it. My brain was numb, unresponsive: my eyes were conditioned to the next muscle-sapping step. Nor did I notice that the river-bed was widening — flattening into a sort of sand delta. It was colour that pulled my head up. A mile or two away, a slender monolith of rock stood up one hundred feet from the sandy bed. It was not black, or red, or any of yesterday's colours. It was crushed strawberry. For a moment I imagined it to be the coming flush of light, but it was not the magic of sunrise — the rock itself was that colour. The sun brought no warmth but, momentarily, greater cold. We paused in mid-river within sight of the strawberry rock: if I could have rejoiced then in the thought of diamonds I would have done so at the sight of a striated bank: it was bright blue, like the tailings of the Kimberley diamond mines. This began where the river narrowed the way we had come, but farther on as it fanned out the blue gave way to an astonishing display of reds, yellows, pinks and lighter blues, shot through with a white purer even than the sand. I guessed this to be kaolin, and the others not diamond gravel but clays of various kinds.

This array of colours was remarkable enough. But the column of rose quartz marked the site of something that was of far more interest to us. Under a shimmer of mist to the right lay an outline of palest turquoise, sheening like a lake. Instinctively I looked for the two landmarks which would confirm what leapt to my tired brain. There they were — hard on the right, two enormous dunes! Sand encircled, muted and lovely it lay before our seared eyes — Strandloper's Water!

But there was no water.

The lake-like sheen was as much a delusion as the name. Perhaps in Caldwell and Shelborne's time it might have earned it, for there was solidified mud in the pan. The contorted corpse of a moringa tree, squat, silver-barked, stood near it, and a moringa stores water and lives on it for years. But it, too, had died of thirst. There was no sign of Shelborne's mule wagon. I knew that he must have lied about it, for no vehicle could possibly have traversed the dunes. The other side of the ancient watercourse was as impassable to the wheel as to the foot — mile upon mile of endless file of razor-edged outcrops of rock.

I searched Strandloper's Water for Caldwell's. grave. There was nothing except a fireplace of blackened stones near the moringa tree skeleton. The place was as featureless as a mirror. Had Shelborne's year in the desert been fiction too? I began to wonder: water there was none, nor animal life, vegetation, insect or shade. The pitiless glare forced us back into the sundial shadow of the isolated monolith. We slept, oblivious, in its shadow until the sun moved and woke us. We cursed and shifted; slept and were woken by the sun; cursed and shifted yet once again. At sunset the stunning chill struck at us.

We decided to return to the coast.

The Uri-Hauchab mountains, fine and near on the map, took no account of the Namib. We were without much food and our precious water supply was dwindling. Our bodies were beaten, lame, exhausted. The fountainhead recurred again and again to my mind, but what I most wanted was water, shade, shelter from the desert's pitilessness. We decided to rest the next day and make for Mercury the following night.

That was, until I heard the Bells that night; until Johaar saw the moving helio in the dunes; until the water demijohn burst.

The Bells brought me out of sleep. Through the insulating sand came the familiar long reverberation. The river-bed trembled under me, but its tremor was slight compared to the heave of Mercury. I was awake in a flash, but Koeltas was before me, sitting up in his sleeping-bag, rifle in hand, his eyes wide with terror.

'Shelborne!' he — said thickly. 'Shelborne brings the Bells… We die…'

'Shelborne is at sea on his way to Waivis Bay,' I snapped.

Johaar was muttering to himself.

'Let's march,' said Koeltas.

The hell with that — at this time and the state we're in,' I replied roughly. I lay down again, my thoughts racing. My sealed gas pockets on the sea-bed would obviously not be audible at this distance and through the intervening land mass. They could not explain the Bells, then. Koeltas sat and smoked his rank tobacco endlessly. The dunes were black and white under the hard moon, like some unreal zebra's flank. The Bells, the ancient river line… What, I asked myself if we were lying on the dome roof of a gigantic underground cavern, not only stretching under Mercury in the form of the Glory Hole, but under the desert itself? Could the mushroom-shaped blowholes be vents from it? With the uplift of the coast, had the river been forced underground, now flowing beneath its original bed? Had Strandloper's Water run dry for the same reason? If we were on top of the diamond fountainhead, the diamonds must be under an overburden of sand which would make even the Oranjemund experts with their tournadozers and tournascrapers blanch. Yet, I believed, Caldwell had found some way in… It was impossible to prospect: I had no trommel and even if I had, you need water to wash gravel. Water was life, and our store was scanty enough.

It was scantier in the morning.

I was aroused by an urgent, hysterical note in Johaar's voice.

The half-gallon jar was cracked, frozen from the bitter night. There were chunks of ice left, but most of it had been lost. We gathered the precious pieces together and thawed them in empty cans, carefully pouring the food-tainted liquid into my two canteens. Koeltas had one bottle left. During our wretched, silent breakfast the Bells sounded softly. Koeltas's eyes were staring. A day lying around under the scourge of the sun would send them both round the bend.

'Kulunga!' muttered Johaar. 'Kulunga comes!'

'Pull yourself together!' I said sharply. 'Who the hell is Kulunga anyway?'

'He walks among us, but you don't see him,' he replied, as if glad to get it off his chest. 'Man-god. He has two baskets. One has the good things, the other death. Kulunga comes here.'

'Rubbish!'I replied.

'No,' he went on seriously. 'Kulunga kills, or I kill Kulunga.' He took out his big knife and looked round 'Maybe Shelborne is Kulunga.'

There was no use trying to rationalize his primitive fear. 'Listen,' I told him and Koeltas. 'We can make out for two days more with the water we have. It will take us every bit of that to reach the sea. We trek — now!'

The bolt snapped shut and he pointed the Remington at me from where he sat, cross-legged, not six feet away. 'We go on,' he snarled. 'If we go back, the Bells will kill us. Maybe ahead we find water. Maybe not. We die anyway. But better die away from the Bells.'

I looked at the hard, closed slits of eyes and at the rifle. Two days! That would take us, going hard, to Uri-Hauchab. Or almost. If I was right about the ancient river and the lift of the land, its underlying bedrock might have been cupped at the mountains into a lake or a dam… Shelborne had lived for a year in the desert — among the wild peaks of Uri-Hauchab he might have found water and game…

I replied, 'It suits me to go on. But I don't like doing things at gunpoint, see. I don't want a couple of lily-livered yellow bastards hanging like a stone round my neck in a tough spot like this.'

Koeltas was dispassionate. 'Mister, if I shoot you, Johaar and I have more water. No one will know. No one will find you. No one come to look for you.' Shelborne might have used the same logic about Caldwell.

'Rhennin will send a helicopter to bring me out,' I bluffed. Shoot me, and they'll take you back and hang you.'

He didn't smile, but the muscles jerked along the line of his cruel lips and high cheekbones. He went on grudgingly, 'I'd like to shoot you for the water, mister. But you're as tough and as slim as a Richtersveld goat and maybe you bring us alive out of this, huh?

'I haven't any intention of dying,' I said tersely. 'Right, let's trek then. Beyond Strandloper's Water we'll pick up the course of the river…'

Johaar was on his feet. 'Kulunga!' he mouthed. 'Kulunga!' He pointed to the dunes high above.

I swung round in time to catch the helio flash. It was gone in a split second. The dunes were empty.

'Kulunga comes!' he raved. 'I go and kill Kulunga!'

I grabbed him by the shoulder, but he brushed me aside. Knife in hand, he started across the river-bed.

'Johaar!' I yelled, following him. 'Come back, you bloody fool! There's nothing there! A bit of bright quartz, that's all…'

I stumbled and fell. Koeltas was beside me. Johaar was on his way to the nearest defile.

'He sees spooks,' said Koeltas casually. 'Let him go — more water for us.'

'He's crazy! He'll die in a couple of hours out there…'

'Look how the spook gives him strength,' said Koeltas nonchalantly. Johaar moved at speed across the last patches of river-bed before entering the wadi. 'First it burns him up and then it kills him! Let him go!'

'I won't leave a man to die,' I replied. 'Fair enough, let him chase things in his own mind. He'll drop soon — I'll go and bring him in.'

He looked at me with a curious sadness, as if I were a child. Then he shrugged. 'We wait today, drink no water. Tonight we follow his tracks.'

Johaar was dead when we found him after moonrise, maybe a mile and a half away. His tracks were clear. He hadn't died of thirst or sunstroke.

His own knife stood out between his shoulder-blades.

Koeltas rolled him over and pointed to the gaping mouth. The lips were ringed with scum. 'He fight — look! They fight here.' The sand was stamped and disturbed. He said something in patois which I didn't understand. It might have been a prayer or an epitaph. But there was fear in his eyes. 'Johaar was very strong. To kill Johaar, a man must be stronger.' He spat. 'That bastard Shelborne!'

His fear was infectious. My recollection of the resonant, educated voice made the killing at my feet more hideous.

'We trek,' I said harshly.

Fatalism was mixed with the little Hottentot's terror. 'He watches us. Maybe we see him.' He lifted the rifle expressively. A man could be behind the next dune and we would not see him.

We saw the helio of light, the sharp flash of reflected sun, from a dune-top next morning after a hard night's march. We must have put nearly ten miles between ourselves and Strandloper's Water. The terrain became more broken. Sand-blasted, wind-eroded hills began to show among the dunes. What was Shelborne — for now I was sure it was Shelborne — carrying which reflected the sun? He wasn't careless or unwise enough to advertize his position.

'Not a gun,' said Koeltas decisively. Too much light.'

There was no sign of water. When we drank sparsely and ate some of our unpalatable food, I realized that we had travelled beyond the point of no return. Our water would never bring us back to Mercury. Our best — and only — hope was to continue. By noon we were unable to stumble on. There was no shade; the banks were too low for it. We pulled the sleeping-bags loose over our heads for protection. Soon, the sand was damp with my sweat and my temples were throbbing. All afternoon the sun sapped our strength, striking through the fabric. When it sank and the first of the night's frightening chill struck, I pulled on my thick sweater, climbed into the bag, and fell into a sleep of utter exhaustion.

I woke after midnight, frozen, hungry, uneasy. I reached out my hand for my water-bottle. It wasn't there. Panic gripped me. I started upright, but Koeltas hadn't made off — his head was jutting out of his bag. Between us lay a battered water-bottle, its rough brown cloth covering almost worn off, the aluminium showing through dully. A trickle of icy fear ran through me. Someone had stolen our water! I reached out for the old bottle. It was heavy, full. A scrap of paper was stuck through the chafed strap. By matchlight I read: John, follow my tracks. I must speak to you alone. Johaar came for me and I had to kill him. So leave Koeltas and the gun when you come. Fred Shelborne.

John! I smiled grimly. A nice familiar approach when you were trying to lure someone away from the protection of a rifle! I weighed the water-bottle in my hand. The most precious bribe added — water. I drew the cork with my teeth. It tasted good, a little sandy. It wasn't Mercury water. I wasn't fool enough to fall for that sort of blandishment. If Shelborne had anything to say, let him come to us. Koeltas and I would stick together, close together, from now on.

Before dawn we trekked.

16

The Long Wall

It was common Gestapo torture to take a man out of boiling water, and plunge him in ice up to his neck. But our next three days were every bit as excruciating. The blaze of the sun was too much for our ebbing strength and our treks were made at night. The nightmare became more substantial as the light waned insubstantial; there were times when I wavered between a detached, somnambulistic stumble through the red-hot grieshoch of sand and an uncaring delirium. I threw away the compass, steering only at the twin spitskoppe peaks of Uri-Hauchab, bullet-shaped, scored like a dumdum bullet. They would fade to invisibility in the blackness before moon-rise, — when they did become visible I was unsure whether their wavering, uncertain outline was not a mirage. On two occasions we jerked from our stunned sleep to find our water-bottles full and a row of tracks running into the dunes, but there were no more notes from Shelborne. Koeltas saw his plan clearly, too, but we had no strength to stand sentry. He fired once at the unaccountable helio of light, but Shelborne was out of range and the clap of the shot fell sick against the sound-absorbing sand.

I woke. The sun stabbed my eyelids. The hills were absurd. Some were upside down and their sides leaned over impossible overhangs. The twin spitskoppe of Uri-Hauchab, at whose foot we had camped in exhausted triumph the night before, hung suspended from the sky like the teats of a monster cow. The flanking ridges, chopped into light and shadow waves by last night's moon, this morning were built up of globes and plates alternately: here and there others rose like inverted mushrooms. The edges were shimmering, ill-defined, and the lines which the moon had carved so firmly were evanescent, fragmentary. My weak laugh was lost, — I knew that I was at the end of the line. I raised my fist and screamed an obscenity towards the dunes. Shelborne! He had prolonged our agony with his canteens of water. Shelborne! Christ! How he must have enjoyed killing Caldwell! Now, thirty and more years after, he'd pulled the same killer-gag on the next person to try to find his secret! I rose to my knees. The whole sky and landscape reeled, turned upside down, stood out clear. Not death, but a mirage. A few hundred yards ahead was a rough cairn of stones. The Namib, in all its wild contortions, hadn't invented that. It was man-made. Those stones had been placed in position.

I shook Koeltas to make sure I was not imagining it. He stirred, but lay still. With some frenetic last reserve of strength, I hauled him up so that he faced it.

His eyes went wide. 'Hadje Aibeep!' he click-clacked. 'On my mother's grave, Hadje Aibeep!'

Then the whole scene spun, altered, reversed — the mirage spun its wild patterns again before our eyes.

'What is it?' My lips were rubbery, congealed. 'What is Hadje Aibeep, for God's sake?'

He shook himself like a dog. 'I never thought to see it. The cave of Hadje Aibeep — the little wild men of the desert throw their dead into it. Each puts a stone above for a dead man. The cave is deep. They say there is a lake at Hadje Aibeep, under the desert. Let us look.'

We stumbled to the cairn. Next to it a deep shaft went down into the bowels of the earth. The hole was circular, about twenty feet across. Its lips, for about ten feet all round, were smooth, polished, of a substance I could not identify — not volcanic lava but some strange sort of solidified mud from the depths below.

We could smell water. I dropped a stone, and from far below came an answering splash.

This was the ancient river; this was the bearer of diamonds!

We had to get to the water, but we had neither rope nor strength. Somehow we would have to negotiate the smooth incline, up which the air came pure and sweet. I took a rock to the geyser-like mud. If we couldn't cut steps, we might as well be out in the parched dunes. I hacked at it; my crude tool sank easily: it was as soft as soapstone.

'I want something sharp,' I told Koeltas. 'I'll cut the first lot of steps and you the next — in turns.'

He held up the water-bottle. 'We drink all this first, eh?'

'Yes.' If we couldn't reach the water below, we'd die anyway. We finished it. I went to the cairn for a sharp stone.

'No!' said Koeltas. 'Not those stones — bad luck. Each stone is a dead man.'

At the base, half-covered by sand, were the remains of Bushmen arrows — the shafts had gone but the flint-heads remained — thongs of bows, primitive stone-head axes and crumbled wooden shafts. Bushmen buried weapons with the dead. I found one axe with about a foot of shaft, and the thongs lashing it to the head looked fair.

The first few steps were the worst. Once I could fashion a grip for my hands, however, the work went quickly. It was mercifully cool and the smell of water was tantalizing. Although it grew darker, there was some suffused light deeper down. After I had chipped foot- and hand-holds for about fifty feet, I sent Koeltas down for his stint. I lay in the shadow of the cairn.

Among the savage gramadullas I thought I saw a helio of light. Shelborne was watching us.

I cut the final steps. Down, down, down. Then I saw: below me was water — swift, flowing, with chocolate reflections as from polished steel. The shaft was through the roof of an immense cavern. A beach of pure white sand would cushion my drop of the last twenty feet. I shouted to Koeltas to come, then let go and fell.

I lay still, spellbound by the muted loveliness of the scene after the torture of the dunes. We were in a huge cavern to whose dim roof soared enormous pillars of limestone, intercalated with hundreds of pure white stalactites. We lay and cupped the water to our mouths. I estimated the river to be half a mile wide; it may have been more. The white beach was littered with Bushmen bones and skulls, and ran along the water's edge into the distance.

Koeltas anticipated my thoughts. 'It flows to the sea! To Mercury!'

My hunch had been correct: here was the old river which had once flowed in the bed, now dry above, and had been forced into this subterranean channel by the uplift of the coastline. Here was the diamond-carrying river, the distributor of the fountainhead's riches! The fountainhead itself must lie between Hadje Aibeep and Mercury. There was nothing ancient, however, in the strong young flow of the river. The brown told me, this is floodwater. Was it on its way to burst through to the sea like the Orange at Oranjemund? There was no mouth in Spencer Bay; the outlet must also hold the secret of the fountainhead. We must follow the river, here where we could see.

Our march was cool and easy after the aridity of the dunes. The sand fringe was pebbly and comforted our blistered feet. We rejoiced in the smell of water. The shaft of Hadje Aibeep illuminated the first part of our way. Then Koeltas grew uneasy about the dark, but it seemed obvious that the line of what I had thought to be blowholes must be vents similar to Hadje Aibeep, though smaller. I had not expected them earlier than Strandloper's Water, but there were some at irregular intervals. Above, they must lie among the wasteland of rocky outcrops we had avoided, which would account for our not having seen them.

By nightfall — the cavern became pitch-back as the sun sank — I estimated that we must be half-way back to the coast. Before rolling in my sleeping-bag, I went to the water's edge. The water had ceased its rapid flow and was sullen, turgid, scarcely moving. What mammoth obstruction lay ahead to dam it up? It also seemed the the cavern's roof was lower — was the water-level rising towards the ceiling? The quantity pouring in would trap us if there were no exit, and the occasional vent was far out of our reach. To climb the stalactites would be as impossible as to scale a skyscraper. Was Shelborne's killer in front? Or behind?

By mid-morning next day we passed, according to ray dead-reckoning, directly under Strandloper's Water. The roof was lower and the water, so friendly the previous day, was menacing. The river beach had disappeared about Strandloper's Water and now we picked our way cautiously along water-smooth rock within a couple of feet of the river itself. Ahead — maybe half a mile — I saw a shaft of sunlight. I made up my mind.

'Koeltas,' I said, 'if that next blowhole is close enough to our heads, let's get out of here.'

He shuddered and nodded. As the ceiling had crept nearer our head, he had become more strained. From time to time he looked back, holding the rifle.

We were in the sunshaft of the blowhole. I hauled Koeltas on to my shoulder, but it was still out of reach. The smooth rock offered no hand-holds. We would have to go on. What had killed the springbok at these blowholes?

The going worsened and we found ourselves clinging in places to the wall and splashing in the water. Ahead, another shaft cut into the blackness. I edged forward. My head touched the roof. A thrill of panic ran through me, blind, unreasoning fear. Where in God's name were we? We were trapped like rats in a sewer. Now was the time for Shelborne to make his kill. The water was deep, marginless, on my right. What if we emerged in the quicksands? We would simply be exchanging one form of dying for another. We must get out!

The thunder of the crash stunned me — heavy, sudden, like a broadside from ahead, an ear-deadening, diaphragm-ripping bolt of sound.

The Bells of St Mary's!

Cringing on the rocky shelf, there was no barrier of sea or Mercury or rockroof to cushion us: we were in the combustion chamber of the Bells.

I grabbed wildly. My grip went into Koeltas's thin shoulder. His slitted eyes were wide with terror, I opened my mouth, but I could not hear my voice. We must get out, get out quick, if we wanted to live.

I gestured forward to the blowhole. We tore, scrabbled, fought our way, ripping our clothes, bruising our knees and palms, tearing our fingernails. Half-way to it the water rose, rose, rose. I abandoned the rock and swam, striking out desperately. My knuckles struck the rock-roof as I flailed. My kick grated against the steel of the Remington — Koeltas swam with it slung. Half a dozen strokes to go. Then I saw.

The turgid chocolate surface, mocking a surfacing U-boat, swelled like the sea-bed off Mercury.

Gas!

My brain registered while my body fought — in slow-motion it seemed — for the opening.

Diamonds… blowholes… gas!

I lived again, in mental photoplay, a scene years before: the same dark tunnel, the black roof, the vent. Jagersfontein, one of the big old diamond mines not far from Kimberley. There had been a fissure in the rock — but it had burned. And it had burned for thirty years, they told me.

Burning gas was methane gas — killer-gas!

Methane gas — not the harmless rotten cabbage gas whose bubbles I had seen on the sea-bed — was bursting through the swollen river. The oxygenless sea was quite a separate phenomenon from that in front of me now. The solution to the whole complex problem fell into place. There were, in fact, two gases: one which I had found on the sea-bed which was fatal to fish and harmless to humans, and the second which was fatal to everything. Methane had killed the great herd of springbok, forcing its way through blowholes and smaller fissures where they scented the underground water. The harmless gas was found only at sea, but the killer-gas was present on the land and on Mercury. That was the Bells! — methane, alias the Bells! The Bells were not regular but intermittent since it required a build-up of pressure for the gas to burst out. Another great piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place.

Instead of a barrier of sandbars, like Oranjemund, I knew now that the ancient river now in flood was held back from the sea not by sandbars but by pressure of methane gas. The whole coastline and bay under Mercury must be a gigantic cupola-shaped underground cavern, of which the Glory Hole was a small exit. The cupola, shaped like an inverted steel helmet, was filled with methane gas. The river flooded and debouched, into the domed undersea cavern — the diamond fountain-head itself! Enormous pressure built up as millions of gallons of water compressed millions of cubic yards of methane gas. More water poured in; more gas was accumulated. Pressure built up and up. The rockroof under Mercury took a strain like a hydrogen balloon in the stratosphere, hundreds of pounds to the square inch. The roof trembled under the great pressure — and Mercury shook. It took years for the Orange River floods to work up sufficient pressure to break the sand barrier; it would take this underground river as many years to do the same to Mercury. When the Oranjemund sandbars burst, they said, you could hear the noise for more than a hundred miles out to sea. A British warship during the war had cleared for action, thinking the Orange's breakthrough was gunfire.

The mystery of Gruppe Eisbar's end became clear in my mind now. The wolf-pack had dived into the Glory Hole at a time when the gas was still building up. Therefore the air inside the Glory Hole was pure when the captains rowed themselves ashore to the graveyard in their rubber dinghies. Shelborne must have known there was a methane fissure under the graveyard toolshed and with brilliant opportunism had induced the captains to stay there and close the door. Then pressure had built up, the gas flooding into the Glory Hole beneath and the toolshed above, destroying Gruppe Eisbar and the captains. 'The 'fauler Zauber' must have been, as I had surmised, the incoherencies of the dying radio operator.

The key, I realized, was the intermittent nature of the Bells — the balance between gas and flood build-up. Shelborne had learned the secret and knew when to get out — for example, the night we had seen him from the Malgas fleeing to Sudhuk. The Glory Hole faced into the prevailing wind and Mercury was relatively safe while the south-western ventilated it; the island could become fatal when it was calm. My dive and discovery of the oxygenless sea and harmless gas had merely bedevilled the whole thing.

What a fool I had been over the Mazy Zed's last mining operation, confusing the real killer and the innocent sea-bed gas! It was at my suggestion that the pumps had been laid right into the death-mouth of the Glory Hole, and they had filled the 'tween-decks with the swift, near-odourless killer before the men knew what was happening. I remembered how I had heard the Bells strongly before we went ashore. Out in the open, the deck hands had escaped, as indeed we had on the island where the wind blew the gas away. Shelborne had made his threat to annihilate the crew in the knowledge that the Mazy Zed's powerful pumps would suck up the methane. And Bob Sheriff had died by running into a big pocket as he went past the open-grained quicksands in his boat.

I felt myself being lifted into the vent. If the methane pocket under me beat me to it… I'd rise out of the cavern all right — I'd rise as a dead man. The quicker I got out, the more chance Koeltas would have. My fingers clutched frantically at the water-worn rock. I found a hold, fought, slipped, swung myself clear of the water. It didn't seem more than about a dozen feet to the surface, and it was three across. Higher, it was too smooth for holds. I had the only one. Koeltas splashed in terror. The rifle! I reached past his fear-struck face and wrenched it free, jamming its butt to one wall, barrel to the other. He snatched the sling and hung on, half-in, half-out the water. There as only one way of getting up. I threw my body backward, smashing with a bone-jarring jolt, into the back wall. Feet clamped against the opposite wall, I levered and jerked myself upwards in a skin-ripping series of convulsions. Koeltas followed. I reached ground level and shot out backwards, like a fish out of a seine net, on to the soft sand. Within seconds, Koeltas was there, still clutching his rifle. I jumped to my feet, half-blind in the searing sun, and ran from the death at our heels. Fifty, one hundred yards. Then I was up to my waist.

The blowhole was on the fringe of the quicksands.

My eyes, adapted bat-like to the darkness of the cavern, began to focus properly in the bright light.

I shouted to Koeltas blundering towards me. 'The rifle — pull me out with the strap!'

We had emerged on the high north-eastern shoulder of the Long Wall, next to the quicksands. If the Bells started in earnest, it would be fatal to stay — the pocket from which we had fled was small and must have dissipated itself harmlessly in the open. The soft sand trembled under me. The quicksands, the river-bed and the shoreline would soon be a death-trap. Our only route was down the Long Wall.

I grabbed the gunstrap and Koeltas eased me out of the sand's lethal hold.

The Long Wall! A narrow ledge, about three feet wide, followed the loose contour of the cliff. Koeltas and I edged towards it, fearful to start a landslide which would hurl us on to the rocks hundreds of feet below. A helio of light came from the far side of the quicksands, it was Shelborne! There was no mistaking the tall figure. He seemed to have a large pack on his back. It wasn't the pack I was interested in, however — in his hand was a heavy revolver which was not the Borchardt. Well, if he wanted to shoot it out, he'd get more than he bargained for.

'Give me the gun!' I ordered Koeltas.

'No — I shoot the bastard.'

My anger ignited against the hurrying figure. How many dead lay at his door! The methane had beaten him, so he had chosen to sit on the fountainhead, the richest poor man in the world, unable to do a thing about it himself and passionately refusing to let anyone else.

'Give me the gun!'

I took the weapon and worked the bolt to see it was running free. With infinite care, our bodies and faces clamped against the sand incline, we inched down towards the path. We had reached within feet of it when a bullet dug into the sand within a foot of my arm. The report was simultaneous. I glanced up: Shelborne lay peering at us, fiddling with the revolver for the next shot — perhaps it was jammed with sand. I could not unstrap the Remington to fire. It was a poor shot to miss me at that range. He seemed to be doing something to the barrel. Already he had had time to pick me off with a couple of snapshots before I reached the path and the safety of its overhang.

I let go and slid blindly. My tattered veldskoens bit on the harder path. For a moment I thought the weight of the rifle would overbalance me to certain death far below. I teetered, regained balance, and slipped to safety, unslinging the rifle to cover Koeltas. The Tartar-faced. skipper was right behind me, however. We ran crouched along the ledge until we had put the shoulder of the Long Wall between ourselves and Shelborne. We paused, gasping. The whole pathway seemed to sway nauseatingly.

'Jesus!' exclaimed Koeltas. 'Even here, the bladdy country shakes!'

The Long Wall gave vertiginously. It may not have been more than an inch or two, but it seemed like a malign force trying to shake us off. Talk softly! A loud sound would bring down the blancmange-like cliff on top of us.

'Come!' I whispered.

We eased along the ledge until it began to curve sharply inwards.

Koeltas held up a hand. 'He follows!'

Shelborne knew the Long Wall and it would be easy for him, once we had turned the shoulder facing Sudhuk, to pick us off on the one-thousand-foot incline to the beach. I wasn't going to give him the chance. Ahead was a buttress: I'd wait for Shelborne there — with the Remington.

We slipped round the corner: here the ledge widened into a shallow embankment about ten feet wide and fifty long. I lay down and set my sights at maximum depression. I worked the bolt and reloaded. There would be no mistake. I cuddled the butt against my shoulder.

Shelborne's speed caught me. I had expected a stealthy approach with a snapshot, but he whipped round the corner at a half-run, crouching low. He swung in under my sights. Before I could drop them I felt the heavy slug burn into my shoulder, close against the neck. As I half-rose in agony, I could not help admiring his superb shooting. His momentum had carried him round the corner, but he was already starting to back away to safety as I lifted the gun. The needle of the foresight rested in the middle of his chest, hard and clear against the black sealskin.

Koeltas was at my side. 'Skiet — shoot!' he sobbed. 'You've got the bastard — skiet!'

My eyes blurred and my finger would not come hard against the trigger. Take it easy, I told myself, you've got time and he's a perfect target. My left shoulder and neck were red-hot agony. I blinked my eyes to clear them. The elbow of my left arm, steadying the gun, felt weak. The muscle slackened. My mind was stunned, yawing with the pain. I could feel the blood running down inside my shirt. Why in God's name doesn't he shoot again? The thought drummed through my mind. He knows, blast him, he knows it was a killing shot and he won't have to waste another; I won't have the strength before I die to pull the trigger. He stood, the heavy black pistol hanging loosely by his side, smiling, upright, unafraid.

Slowly, my teeth clamped against my torn lips, I yanked the barrel up until the sights lay again on his chest. My eyelids were as heavy as the rifle. My thumb was numb against the butt but I fought for leverage with it — and my index finger responded. They tautened for the shot.

'Don't shoot! Don't shoot!'

Mary half-stumbled, half-fell across my back, knocking me forwards from my kneeling position. The rifle flew out of my hands. I heard Koeltas's savage oath and the roar of the shot and Mary's stifled scream. Shelborne spun round, cannoning into the wall. My senses were fading.

Shelborne's two shots were so quick that they sounded like one. I heard the ugly thud of the bullets into Koeltas and his thin scream of pain. He came upright and tripped over me, fell. His body jerked to the path-edge. The sand, as if extending a courtesy, fell back and he slid slowly over.

I lost consciousness.

It wasn't the land that was rocking so sickeningly, but the sea. I recognized the folding table first and then I knew where I was — in one of the Gquma's bunks. The blood-stained bandages everywhere must come from my wound. Or so I thought until I looked across at the opposite bunk. Shelborne's strong face was like lead and there was a tell-tale mound of bandages on his right side. Mary came in, took a handkerchief and wiped the ominous pink froth from his lips. His wheeze told me the rest of the story: Koeltas's bullet was in his lung.

Remembering what happened on the Long Wall brought me upright. 'Mary! What…!'

Her face was taut with worry. 'I'm glad you've come to. How do you feel?'

My mouth was dry and my head throbbed like a hangover. My hand went to my shoulder, close to the neck. There were no bandages, nothing except a small square of sticking-plaster. It was a little numb round about. I'd been shot with deadly accuracy in a fatal spot and all I had to show for it was an insignificant wound and a small ache. 'I… I…'

I was still in my Namib clothes. She hadn't even taken off the shirt. It was clear that the star patient was in the other bunk.

'What the hell goes on?' I asked harshly.

She came over so that her face was level with mine. 'Do you think you can sail this boat, John? The wind's right and we could be at Walvis Bay in three days. We've got to get him to hospital. He needs specialist attention. I've done what I can to stop the bleeding.'

'Sail to Walvis Bay?' I echoed. 'Look, Mary, my mind's still muzzy, but I do know that I was shot and that I passed out. The man who murdered your father tried to murder me. If ever anyone has blood on his hands, it's him. I…'

She smiled, and all the warmth I associated with her came flooding back to me. 'He didn't try to kill you, John.' She went to the table and picked a small sharp nylon dart-like thing out of a white surgical dish. She handed it to me. That's what he shot you with.'

I balanced it in my hand and laughed shakily. 'An anaesthetic dart?'

She nodded. 'Yes. The sort you shoot small game with to drug them for capture.'

I tossed up the tiny dart, speechless. Shelborne had deliberately aimed wide the first time — using a proper bullet — as I slid down towards the Long Wall. His delay over the second shot, which enable me to get away, was to load the dart. Clear, too, why he had stood, a wide-open target, while I battled to get my sights on him; he knew the drug would get me before I could fire. The two bullets he had fired at Koeltas were not darts, though. His superb marksmanship and guts had won that deadly exchange.

'Besides,' she said, and her eyes welled with tears, 'no man shoots his own son.'

I must be imagining her words in my drug-induced torpor, I told myself. But my head felt clearer as I swung out of the bunk. I took her by the shoulders. She sobbed quietly.

'My father! How can he be…? You mean that man is not Shelborne but Fred Tregard?'

'No,' she replied gently. 'That man in the bunk is the legend: Frederick William Caldwell.'

The tiny cabin swam around me. I held on to the table. 'You said my father. You mean… your father.'

'My father — and yours.'

'He shot me.'

'And with a bullet in his lung… I didn't know he was so bad… he half-carried you down the Long Wall to the beach and — collapsed there. I rowed you both here…'

'But Shelborne killed Caldwell.'

'He didn't, for the simple reason there was never any Shelborne. Shelborne did not exist, any more than the Hottentots' Paradise.'

'I'm not with you… He told you this…?'

She said, firmly, 'Yes, he did — on our way to Walvis. That's why he turned back after you, not to kill you as you thought, but to tell you who he was, who you are. I am his daughter and you are his son — we're half-brother and sister. He knew I was his daughter — Caldwell's daughter — in court. You saw how it took him then. He was forced — he called it his luck again — to bid against his own daughter for the sea-bed right.'

'What about the deed of cession.'

'It was a fake. He deliberately changed his handwriting to that fine italic style so it wouldn't be recognized. There was never any Shelborne. Dad was as much of a loner as you are. He invented the whole thing. He wanted the world to believe that the great Caldwell was dead.'

'And your mother too?'

'I didn't know until he told me, and she never said: before Kleinzee she had told him that if he went off on what she described as another of his hare-brained expeditions, she was through with him. She never understood his "behind the ranges" side. She wanted security, a husband with a steady job, a suburban home. Caldwell, the legend, the diamond genius — and his fate — weren't for her. She told him so. He tried to sugar the pill by saying he was off to the Hottentots' Paradise but in fact he had a hunch — like you — that Mercury was the fountainhead of the Sperrgebiet, its original and sole source of diamonds. He explored the coast and the desert. There's an enormous underground cavern…'

'I know,' I roughed in the picture of the methane gas barrier, the ancient river, and the Bells of St Mary's.

She nodded.. 'He prospected the coastline until he knew practically every rock of it. He suspected the diamonds were there. If he went back with his fountain-head theory unsubstantiated and with no diamonds to prove it, you realize what they would have said: Caldwell missed all the big ones and now he's back with one of those cock-and-bull yarns about an inaccessible treasure trove. He had to prove it. He returned to tell my mother…'

He returned?'

'Yes. She didn't believe a word of his story. She thought he'd gone off on another wild-goose chase and was soft-soaping her. He'd gone, despite her ultimatum. As far as she was concerned, he could go off for good on his wild schemes. She told him so.'

That was what sent him to the Takla Makan and the Atacama?'

'Yes. He became a sailor in order to get back to Mercury…'

'I thought that was it. The Shelborne impersonation came later?'

'It was easy. Even my mother scarcely recognized him after his blackwater fever at Strandloper's Water. He was bald — as he told the court — and he'd changed in himself too. He'd got asthma and that's what worries me now about his lung.' She said gently. 'You think he's tough, but it's his conquest of himself that makes him so…'

'All this doesn't make Caldwell my father.'

She said softly, 'You remember the cairn on the Oyster Line, John. The little boy? It was probably a gang of the Hottentot refugees and riff-raff which used to terrorize those parts in the early days who took him. Dad didn't know your story until I told him on the way to Walvis bay. Dates, times, age — everything tallies. Tregard the missionary was your foster-father, you know that, but what about where you really came from. You were the little boy. Your mother was murdered.' She made a curious, heart-warming gesture towards the other bunk. 'He's suffered greatly, John. He discovered the Oyster Line and he came back to… well, to that cairn of stones. The diamond fountainhead is his — it's his dream, his life, — and then the bitterness of finding it hopelessly inaccessible, beyond his power to break open. He has sat his life away on Mercury, watching, waiting, hoping…' There was a long silence. The only sound was the creak of the cutter's anchor cables. 'When he heard about you, he turned the Gquma round then and there. You were in grave danger, he said, something big was about to happen. He risked his life to fetch you.'

He must have known that the gas barrier was due to burst.

'Why didn't you ask him…?' I began.

The voice from the bunk, though weak, was resonant. 'Why don't you ask him yourself?'

Mary went over and took his arm from under the blanket. She crooked it in hers and at the same time drew me over, linking her free arm in mine. Caldwell tried to smile, but it turned into a grimace of pain and a fit of coughing. Mary wiped away the pinky foam.

I said awkwardly, 'We could have saved all this… The Mazy Zed offer…'

He replied, with a flash of his old self, 'You've got to get out of this bay quick, boy.'

'You'll be fine, once we get a doctor to you…'

He shook his head. 'It wasn't that I was thinking of… maybe I will, or maybe not. But there's a barrier of methane gas…'

'It's going to burst.'

'Yes,' he answered. 'I thought you must have worked it out, the way you set off inland. Yes, John, it's going to burst. I've waited a lifetime for it to happen. Once or twice it was pretty close, but it didn't come off, and the long wait began all over again. It's not a thing a man can do anything about. The old underground river floods when the rains are heavy on the mountains behind the desert. For it to be as it is now there must have been once-in-a-lifetime floods. When it breaks, it will sweep the diamonds out to sea — Oranjemund won't be in it…'

The Bells reverberated against the Gquma's hull.

'The whole bay is shaking like hell,' I said. 'Mercury is the centre…?'

'Yes,' he replied weakly. 'Mercury is the fountainhead of the Sperrgebiet.'

I couldn't forget the dead men. 'You tried to scare off the Mazy Zed rather than share it.'

Mary darted an angry glance at me, but Shelborne said, 'No, John, it wasn't that way. Strangely enough, I wanted to save lives. Yours, Rhennin's, those on the Mazy Zed. When the barrier goes, it will take everything with it — maybe Mercury too. Hundreds of thousands of tons of gravel and millions of gallons of water will be unleashed. In prehistoric times before the continent lifted, the flushing process was easy because the floods had freeway to the sea. If the Mazy Zed had been operating,' she would have been swept away like a twig in a maelstrom. So I used scare tactics, but they got out of hand — the Bells, the gas, the rest of it. Somehow in my life every good motive of mine has boomeranged and turned out wrong.' He smiled, but it was edged with bitterness. 'Caldwell's luck, you know. Mary has told you, of course?'

'Yes. What about the Praying Mantis?'.'

'I intended to wreck her and to rescue you all with the flatboom. I didn't bargain for a storm like that. I reckoned that once the survey vessel was out of the way, you'd stick to other places and not come back. I wasn't to know you were on to the fountainhead idea.'

'And the attack at Angras Juntas?'

He tried to shrug and his face went white with pain. Mary intervened, but he waved her aside. 'It wasn't the People's Second Atlantic Group, or whatever they call themselves, but a more private enterprise — a Polish fishing outfit based on Conakry, near Freetown. They run the occasional parcel of stones into West Africa for me, for a consideration, to keep my prospecting efforts going. They were only too pleased to have a crack at the opposition, but there again things misfired. They promised me they would do no more than inflict superficial damage and create enough rumpus to keep you away from Mercury. By the time you were able — or wanted — to get here I hoped the barrier would have exploded and the thing would have solved itself. But they took it as an opportunity to try to sink the Mazy Zed…'

'And Sookin Sin?' He hadn't heard about it. It was, we agreed, a clumsy attempt to try and shift the blame on to the Russian trawler fleets of the coast.

He was very weak, but I had to find out why he had helio-ed along the river march and where his water had come from.

'It wasn't a helio, John, but my water-maker. I learned it in the Takla Makan; it's a wooden-frame, covered with glass, with little gutters on the inside. You saw its reflection. In clean-blown sand like the Namib it is simple to find water, if you know how. Water will sink only a certain distance in dry sand. I've known places in the desert where some scanty rain has lain as a moist layer for years a couple of feet below the surface. Here on the coast with our heavy fog-dew the water lies close to the ground-level, but if you dug, all you'd get would be slight dampness. My sunbox draws it up, it condenses on the glass, and I tap off pure water via the little gutters. It gives, about a brandy bottle full a day — I lived like that for a year in completely waterless areas.'

He coughed and closed his eyes. Caldwell the legend had beaten the desert at its own game!

I didn't like the sound of his coughing. 'I'll get the sails on her,' I said.

'I'll help,' said Mary. There's not much I can do here.'

Shelborne had not exaggerated the handling qualities of the Gquma. The sun was low and the wind fresh from the south-west. We set all plain sail and she snored out of the bay with the starboard rail awash. At this rate, we'd make Walvis Bay in two days. Mary sat by me at the long-handled tiller for an hour or more until Mercury was out of sight behind the northern arm of the bay.

I turned to look at the wake to estimate our speed.

'Dear God!' exclaimed Mary.

The double doors of the coach-house in front of us flew open. Shelborne stood, a great crimson blotch across the white bandages.

His voice was strong, excited. 'John! Mary! Did you hear it!'

We exchanged glances. There had been no sound but the wind; we had left he Bells behind after clearing the bay.

He steadied himself on one of the bad-weather grab-handles, gazing hard out astern — towards Mercury. He cocked his head. 'It's come, John! It's come, Mary! Look! What a sight! The whole shoreline is being swept out to sea! There's never been a flood like it!' He lifted his hand and Mary stopped on her way to him. 'Listen! Hear that! — Mercury gone! Poor Mercury! — it was home to me for so long…' There was no sound except the creak of the boat and the thin whine of the wind in the rigging; the shore was invisible. 'The Mazy Zed will take diamonds for twenty miles out now, John! No need to worry about the methane problem any more.' He turned towards the tiller, but he didn't see me: his eyes were blind with agony. 'My special suit of sails — this is the occasion I made them for. Bring her round so that the wind is more aft, John… we'll get them up…'

His grip relaxed and he fell dead in the bottom of the boat.

It was five minutes before I could bring the Gquma to a halt. She lay pitching in the long swell. Mary knelt by him.

Then we heard it for the first time — the long shattering thunder of the break-through. Caldwell had waited a lifetime, but he lay lifeless before the sound could have reached us.

We stared at one another.

Mary said, 'He was given to hear it — before.'

We broke out the new suit of sails.

Content

Geoffrey Jenkins
The River of Diamonds

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