Geoffrey Jenkins: The River of Diamonds

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.

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?