Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

Feldman said, after another long look at the south-west, 'I've never seen a sky quite like that. But the weather people must know. They've got all the information which we haven't. .’

By late afternoon, even Feldman's faith had evaporated. He answered in monosyllables only as the weather became wilder, until I could stand his moroseness no longer.

'I'm going up aloft to take a look round,' I said.

It was simply to get away from him; the bridge of the converted whaler was, in fact, the highest point of the ship after we had dismantled the special whaling lookout on the crow's nest at the time of her original conversion.

I made my way to the scrap of deck high up aft near the radio hut

The bridge, which was enclosed, gave only a forward sight of the sea; hanging on to a funnel stay-wire, I had an all-round view. I was taken aback at the wildness of the scene. I was aware that this type of storm developed rapidly, and that its storm centre moved equally quickly, but it was nevertheless startling to see it happening before my very eyes. To the south-west, towards East London, the sky was a curious purple-black over the land, and night-black out to sea. It was like looking from a spaceship at the dividing line between night and day on earth. The dying sun was able to create a lightness over the land, but the sea-black was relentless, ominous. Between Walvis Bay and the great blackness was a kind of no-man's-land of wind-torn sky and cloud flying at impossible speeds; these were the outriders of the main army of the storm, the light armour probing with quick thrusts the WarataWs battlefield of death. All round Walvis Bay the seas leaned to a plume of spindrift; they were not so high as steep, a sure sign that the general engagement with the Agulhas Current still lay ahead; the counter-current was still testing the enemy's defences.

Involuntarily, I looked astern. I found myself reading the situation by hindsight. Sailors of the calibre of Douglas Fairlie and Captain Ilbery were not afraid of a storm, and the Waratah was a new ship, stout, fast, well-found. In the immediate uproar after her disappearance, sailors had no difficulty in believing that Captain Ilbery would have pushed her through the storm. Both men had served in clippers whose captains rejoiced in nothing less than a full gale, men who knew how to pile on canvas to the royals and to use to the full the great westerly winds of the Roaring Forties. They were iron men who battened down their hatches because their decks would run awash for days under the press of sail; they were cruel, proud time-makers who armed their officers with pistols with orders to shoot down any terrified seaman who tried to let fly a halliard.

There was not the least anxiety in the Waratah's last messages to the Clan Macintyre. She had not even reduced speed. This evening's sea would have looked just as wild from the bridge of the Waratah, and she had been nearly twenty times the size of my game little whaler.

A short while before arriving at her present position, the Walvis Bay had passed a curious natural arch of rock known as The Hole-in-the-Wall which rises sheer out of the coast. The massive, soaring slab is pierced by an archway: the low sun broke through the gloom of the land and backdrop of great forests and for a moment the arch appeared like a bright nature-made headlight shining from the black land. One of the stories scouted after the Waratah had disappeared was that she had been sucked into a blowhole similar to The Hole-in-the-Wall and drawn down, by the strong inshore counter-current, into a vast undersea (or underland) cavern. A companion theory was that, under the extremes of gale and sea, a natural vortex had formed in the sea, and into this the liner had been sucked.

How much, I asked myself hanging there and seeing the storm forces unleashing themselves — the same question I had asked Alistair-did we really know about the ocean's secrets? I ran my mind now over my own scanty knowledge of the ocean floor beneath Walvis Bay's keel. Round the coastline of South Africa runs a narrow continental shelf known as the Agulhas Bank, oil-bearing, elusive. It drops away in successive shallow terraces into very deep water. With something of a shock, I realized that the course I was holding was roughly the line of the-final terrace of the Agulhas Bank before it fell away into abysmal depths. Meaningful? Meaningless?

The oil rigs, having drilled unsuccessfully elsewhere, were now planning to move operations to the Pondoland coast. Was enough known about the area to dismiss wholly the theory of an undersea cavern, or a vortex? Why had nothing happened to the thousands of other ships which had used this same route? Would — whatever it was — lie in wait for one of the giant oil rigs and strike it down as it had struck down the Waratah. The most far-fetched speculation was no more absurd than the plain historical fact that a 10,000-ton liner, classed Al at Lloyd's, and commanded by one of the ablest sailors of the day, had vanished utterly, without trace, within sight of the land, in broad daylight, somewhere where I was now.

What had destroyed the ship had been something terrible and swift, something the skilled sailor could not calculate or foresee.

The two banks of blackness ahead of Walvis Bay began to merge; the darkness grew.

I hung on to the lifelines I had ordered earlier in the afternoon to be rigged as Walvis Bay went deep through a huge wave-not a roller, but a short, high, spume-tipped load of water. Her hull trembled, and the screw chewed air and thin water with the same kind of brash rattle that a car makes when the clutch is thrown out and the engine continues at speed. It went against all my seaman's instincts to push the game whaler like this-but I had to know, and this was Waratah weather. Walvis Bay dipped her entire starboard side under, and I ducked gratefully behind the solid bridge and forward superstructure which occupied most of her whole width of beam and was designed specifically to break the force of such as this as they swept aft.

Streaming water, I regained the bridge.

Taylor, one of the two technicians aboard whose function was to care for the scientific apparatus, had turned green.

The gyro doesn't know its arse from its elbow, with this bucking,' he said, hastily averting his eyes from a rearing oncoming sea. 'Nor do I, for that matter.'

'What's the trouble?' I asked. 'It was supposed to hold the platform steady in Southern Ocean seas.'

This isn't the Southern Ocean,' he retorted, gesturing half behind him as if the sight of the seas were too much for his stomach. 'It's different. It's this bucking and lurching that it can't take. Over-compensates. The platform rocks around like. . like. .' he motioned to the sea. 'Now she's overheating. If she burns out…'

'Switch the damn thing off, then,' I snapped.

'Can't — the rest position was designed for rest, not for. . for. . this. No one thought to have any securing bolts. If we switch it off, it'll rock itself to pieces. Can't you do something about this bucking?'

It was my turn to gesture towards the sea. I didn't say, if I'm right it will get a lot worse before the night is out. If the gyro went, the whole purpose of tracking the new satellite would go overboard. Yet here was an opportunity which in the long run might prove far more valuable in saving rigs worth millions of pounds than not taking a chance with the gyro.

I said, 'Go and have a chat with Nick Scannel. He's the engineer, maybe he can suggest some way of securing it.'

Miller, the other technician, came on to the bridge. He eyed me balefully. 'Have you told him?' he asked Taylor.

Taylor did not seem to trust himself to reply. He nodded.