The Burning Shore (40 page)

just before sunset a new, crippling wave of weakness came over her and she sank down on to the sand. Suddenly an icy sweat bra across her forehead and cramp, like a sword thrust through her belly, doubled her over.

She belched, and the taste of rotten fish filled her mouth and nostrils.

She heaved, and hot reeking vomit shot up her throat.

She felt despair as she saw so much of her vital fluids splash on to the sand, but she heaved again, and at the contraction she felt a spluttery explosive release of diarrhoea.

I’m poisoned. She fell and writhed on the sand as spasm after spasm gripped her and her body involuntarily purged itself of the toxic juices. It was dark by the time the attack passed, and she dragged off her soiled carniknickers and threw them aside. She crawled painfully into the sea and washed her body, splashed her face and rinsed the taste of rotten fish and vomit from her mouth, prepared to pay for the momentary relief of a clean mouth with later thirst.

Then still on her hands and knees, she crawled up above the high-water mark, and in the darkness, shaking with cold, she lay down to die.

At first Garry Courtney was so involved in the excitement of planning the rescue expedition into the Namib desert, across that dreaded littoral that was named the Skeleton Coast for very good reason, that he did not have the leisure to weigh the chances of success.

It was enough for Garry to be playing the man of action.

Like all romantics, he had daydreamed of himself in this role on so many occasions, and now that the opportunity was thrust upon him, he seized it with a frenzy of dedicated effort.

In the long months after the war department cable had arrived, that coarse buff envelope with its laconic message, His Majesty regrets to inform you that your son Captain Michael Courtney has been reported killed in action’, Garry’s existence had been a dark void, without purpose or direction. Then had come the miracle of the second cable from his twin brother: Michael’s widow expecting your grandson has been rendered homeless and destitute by tides of war stop I am arranging priority passage on first sailing for Cape Town stop will you meet and take into your care stop reply urgently stop letter follows Sean. A new sun had risen in his life. When that in its turn had been cruelly extinguished, plunged into the cruel green waters of the Benguela Current. Garry had realized instinctively that he could not afford to let reason and reality beat him down once again into the dark night of despair. He had to believe, he had to push aside any calculation of the probabilities and cling mindlessly to the remote possibility that Michael’s wife and her unborn child had somehow survived sea and desert and were waiting only for him to find and rescue them. The only way to do this was to replace reasoned thought with feverish activity, however meaningless and futile, and when that failed, to draw upon the limitless reserve of Anna Stok’s rock-solid and unwavering faith.

The two of them arrived at Windhoek, the old capital of German South West Africa which had been captured two years before, and were met at the railway station by Colonel John Wickenham, who was acting military governor of the territory. How do you do, sir. Wickenham’s salute was diffident. He had received a string of cables in the last few days, amongst them one from General Jannie Smuts and another from the ailing prime minister, General Louis Botha, all of them instructing him to extend to his visitor full assistance and cooperation.

This alone did not account for the measure of his ct towards his guest. Colonel Garrick Courtney was respe the holder of the highest award for gallantry, and his book on the Anglo-Boer War, The Elusive Enemy, was required reading at the Staff College that Wickenham had attended, while the political and financial influence of the brothers Courtney was legend. I should like to offer you my condolences on your loss, Colonel Courtney, Wickenharn told him as they shook hands.

That is very decent of you. Garry felt like an imposter when addressed by his rank. He always felt the need to explain that it had been a temporary appointment with an irregular regiment in a war almost twenty years past;

to cover his uneasiness he turned to Anna, standing foursquare beside him in her solar topee and long calico skirts.

I would like to introduce Mevrou Stok, Garry switched to Afrikaans for her benefit, and Wickenharn followed him quickly.

Aangename kennis, a pleasant meeting, Mevrou.”Mevrou Stok was a passenger on the Protea Castle, and one of the survivors picked up by the Inflexible. Wickenharn gave a little whistle of sympathy. A most unpleasant experience. He turned back to Garry. Let me assure you, Colonel Courtney, that it will be my pleasure to offer you any possible assistance. Anna replied for him. We will need motor-cars, many motor-cars, and men to help us. We will need them quick, very quickly! For the command car they had a new T model Ford, repainted from factory black to a pale sand colour. Despite its frail appearance, it was to prove a formidable vehicle in the desert conditions. The light vanadium steel body and slow-revving engine carried it over soft sand that would have sucked down heavier machines. Its only weakness was a tendency to over-heat and send a jet of precious water streaming high in the air to scald driver and passengers in the open body.

As supply vehicles, Wickenham provided them with four Austin lorries, each capable of carrying half a ton of cargo, and a fifth vehicle which had been modified in the railway workshops by army engineers and fitted with a cylindrical steel tank with a capacity of five hundred gallons of water. Each of the vehicles was assigned a corporal driver with an assistant.

With Anna firmly crushing any tendency of Garry’s to procrastinate, and riding roughly over the practical objections of engineers and mechanics and military experts, the convoy was ready to leave from the capital thirty-six hours after her arrival. It was fourteen days since the German torpedoes had struck the Protea Castle.

They clattered out of the sleeping town at four in the morning, the trucks piled high with equipment and fuel stores and the passengers bundled against the cold highland night airs.

They took the wagon road that ran beside the narrow-gauge railway line down to the coastal town at Swakopmund, over two hundred miles away.

Steel-shod wagon wheels had cut ruts so deep that the rubber tyres of the vehicles were trapped in them and could not be steered out except at the rocky sections where the double ruts became boulder-strewn gulleys more like the bed of a dry mountain stream than a road.

Laboriously they climbed down those rugged passes, crashing and jolting over the heavy going, forced to stop unexpectedly to repair a punctured tyre or replace a broken spring leaf, descending four thousand feet in fourteen hours of bone-cracking, neck-wrenching travel.

They came out on the flat, scrub-covered coastal plains at last, and raced across them at an exhilarating twenty-five miles per hour, dragging behind them a long rolling pall of dun-coloured dust like the smoke from a runaway bush fire.

The town of Swakopmund was a startling touch of Bavaria transported to the southern African desert, complete with quaint Black Forest architecture and a long pier stretching out into the green sea.

it was Sunday noon when their dusty cavalcade trundled down the paved main street. There was a German oom-pa-pa band playing in the gardens of the residency, the band members dressed in green Lederhosen and alpine hats. They lost the beat and trailed into silence as Garry’s convoy pulled up outside the hotel across the road. Their trepidation was understandable, for the walls of the building were still pitted with shrapnel from the last British invasion.

After the dust and heat of the desert crossing, the local Pilsner, product of a master brewer from Munich, tasted like resurrection in Valhalla.

Set them up again, harman, Garry ordered, revelling in the masculine camaraderie, in the after-glow of the achievement of having brought his command safely down from the mountains. His men bellied up to the long teak bar with a will, and when they raised their tankards and grinned at him, their masks of packed dust cracked and powdered into their beer.

Mijnheer! Anna had performed her perfunctory ablutions and appeared in the doorway of the saloon. She stood with her thickly muscled arms akimbo, and her face, already inflamed by sun and wind, was slowly becoming truly fiery with outrage. Mijnheer, you are wasting time! Garry rounded on his men swiftly. Come on, you fellows, there is work to do. Let’s get on with it. By this time none of them had any doubts as to who was in ultimate command of the expedition, and they gulped their beers and trooped out into the sunlight, shamefacedly wiping the froth from their lips and unable to meet Anna’s eye as they sidled past her.

While his men refuelled, filled the water tanks, repacked the loads that had come loose on the journey, and carried out maintenance and running repairs on the vehicles, Garry went off to make inquiries at the police station.

The police sergeant had been warned of Garry’s arrival. I’m very sorry, Colonel, we weren’t expecting you for three or four days. If only I had known, He was eager to be of assistance. Nobody knows much about that country up there, as he glanced from the window of the charge office towards the north, the sergeant shivered involuntarily, but I have a man who can act as a guide for you. He took down his key-ring from the hook on the wall behind the desk and led Garry through to the cells.

Hey, you swart dander, you black thunder! he growled as he unlocked one of the cells, and Garry blinked as his chosen guide shuffled out sullenly and glowered about him.

He was a villainous-looking Bondelswart Hottentot with a single malevolent eye; the other was covered by a leather eye-patch, and he smelled like a wild goat.

He knows that land out there, he should do, the sergeant grinned.

That’s where he poached the rhinoceros horn and ivory that is going to send him to the clanger for five years, isn’t that right, Kali PietV Kali Piet opened his leather jerkin and searched his chest hair reflectively.

If he works well for you, and you are pleased with him, he might get off with only two or three years breaking stones, the sergeant explained, and Kali Piet found something amongst his body hair and cracked it between his

fingernails.

And if I am not pleased with him? Garry asked uncertainly. Kali was the Swahili word for bad or wicked, and it inspired no great confidence.

Oh, the sergeant said airily, then don’t bother to bring him back. just bury him where nobody will find him. Kali Piet’s attitude changed miraculously.

Good master, he whined in Afrikaans, I know every tree, every rock, every grain of sand. I will be your dog. Anna was waiting for Garry, already seated in the rear seat of the T model.

What took you so long? she demanded. My baby has been out there in the wilderness alone for sixteen days now! Corporal, Garry handed Kali Piet into the care and keeping of the senior NCO. If he tries to escape, Garry tried unconvincingly to look jeeringly sadistic, shoot him! As the last whitewashed red-tiled buildings fell away behind them, Garry’s driver belched softly and retasted the beer with a dreamy smile.

Enjoy it, Garry warned him, it will be a long trek to the next tankard.

The track ran along the edge of the beach, while at their left hand the green surf tipped with ostrich feathers of spume pounded the smooth yellow sands, and before them stretched that dismal featureless littoral, shrouded in a haze of sea fret.

The track was used by kelp gatherers who collected the cast-up seaweed for fertilizer, but as they followed it northwards, so it became progressively less defined until it petered out altogether.

What is ahead? Garry demanded of Kali Piet, who had been led forward from the rear vehicle.

Nothing, said Kali Piet, and never had Garry sensed in a common-place word such menace.

We will make our own road from here on, Garry told them with a confidence he did not feel, and the next forty miles took four days to cover.

There were ancient water courses, dry for a hundred years perhaps, but with steep sides and their bottoms strewn with boulders like cannon balls. There were treacherous flats on which the vehicles sank unexpectedly to their axles in soft sand and had to be manhandled through. There was broken ground where one of the lorries toppled over on its side and another broke a rear axle and had to be abandoned, together with a pile of luggage which they had discovered was superfluous, tents and camp chairs, tables and an enamel bath, boxes of trade goods to bribe savage chieftains, cases of tea and tinned butter and all the other equipment which had seemed essential when they were shopping in Windhoek.

The abbreviated and lightened convoy struggled northwards.

In the noonday heat the water boiled in the radiators, and they drove with plumes of white steam spurting from the safety valves, and they were forced to halt every half hour to allow the engines to cool. in other places there were fields of black stone, sharp as obsidian knives, which slashed through the thin casing of their tyres. In one day Garry counted fifteen halts to change wheels, and at night the stink of rubber solution hung over the bivouac as exhausted men sat up until midnight repairing the ruined inner tubes by the light of hurricane lanterns.

On the fifth day they camped with the seared bare peak of the Brandberg, the Burned Mountain, rising out of the purple evening mist ahead of them, and in the morning Kali Piet was gone.

He had taken a rifle and fifty rounds of ammunition, a blanket and five water-bottles, and as a final touch, the gold hunter watch and the coin case with twenty gold sovereigns in it that Garry had placed carefully beside his blanket roll the previous evening.

Furiously, threatening to shoot him on sight, Garry led a punitive expedition after him in the T model. However, Kali Piet had chosen his moment, and less than a mile beyond the camp he had entered an area of broken hills and sheer valleys where no vehicle could follow him.

Let him go, Anna ordered. We are safer without him, and it’s twenty days since my darling, she broke off. We must go forward, Miinheer, nothing must stand in our way. Nothing. Each day now the going became more difficult, and their progress slower, more frustrating.