Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

Jubela turned to leap forward to cut away some of the trailing wreckage.

He stopped and froze. He pointed ahead with the axe.

He turned and screamed at me, his face stunned with shock.

I could not hear the words, but his meaning was clear from the frame of his lips. ‘A ship!'

The wind eased momentarily. The air-pocket drop stopped.

The death-dealing pyramids of water held back from giving their final coup-de-grace to the floundering yacht.

Touleier pivoted back on to an even keel. Hundreds of tons of water cascaded free. Rigging trailed overboard from the truncated mast.

Tafline. too. saw Jubela's shock. She scrambled on to the cabin roof towards him. She and Jubela could see. I could not, from the low level of the cockpit and the trough of the sea.

She turned and called. My astonishment at hearing her vied with my amazement at what she said.

‘A sailing ship! Dead ahead!’

I yelled to Jubela to cut away the overside clutter before it pierced the hull. He paid no attention. He stood transfixed, staring.

Again I shouted at him. He did not carry out my orders. Instead, he slid aft to me at the wheel. His face was grey with fear.

‘I. . have never. . seen … a ship.. like it! ‘ he jerked out. 'Umdhlebe!' Umdhlebe! — something strange. The smell of death about it!

I shoved the helm into his shaking hand. I freed my lifeline and jumped up alongside Tafline. She pointed.

There was no mistaking Phillips' description: there was the high bow, pointing into the eye of the gale, and the squat, square stern. But she had no masts. Water creamed and broke over the bow. Between bow and stern the hull was rounded, disproportionately long, like a whale's back.

A burst of spray hid the caravel.

'It's impossible!' I got out. 'I've never seen a ship like that except on a picture..'

She gripped my arm and said unsteadily. There is a ship. A whole ship. A big ship. It's nothing to do with that old-fashioned bow and stern. It's lying caught between them …'

'Dear God! What sort of a nightmare is this!'

'It's not a nightmare, and it's not a caravel,' she jerked out. 'It's an island! It's an island shaped like a caravel, Ian! And it's got a ship on it — upside down1'

Touleier rose to the next crest. We could hear each other. Here was that merciful, unnatural lull Clan Macintyre had known, the lull which had saved Walvis Bay.

I made a shambling run to the stump of the mast, grabbed it, and gave her a hand to me.

Touleier lifted.

'Look, Ian! The bow and stern don't rise to the sea! They're steady! They're — rocks!'

Across the welter of sea, a few cables away, I saw what Phillips had seen, what I had seen under Walvis Bay's bows.

A smooth hill of rock, one end shaped like the bow of a medieval ship and the other in perfect imitation of the stern, reared itself above the confused, grey sea. Between the extremities, it fell almost to water level, and seen from a distance, in the confusion of a gale and impending darkness, it presented the perfect silhouette of a caravel. Phillips had sighted it between himself and the land, against the backdrop of a dim sunset. It must have been a mere silhouette, and distant. What, I asked myself hastily, had caused Phillips to add that he had seen masts? Had it been some trick of the light, or had his overwrought, tired brain simply added them as a natural adjunct to the hull? Or, more simply still, was it that, against the shore skyline, where the great forests hang on cliffs above the sea, the trio of the huge, white, sparlike umzimbeet trees had provided the puzzling addendum?

In front of my very eyes now was the exposed rock into which Walvis Bay had nearly crashed headlong. In a flash I saw why the sea had not struck down the weather ship after her hideous downward drop, or Touleier a few minutes before: the ship-shaped island provided a perfect lee, a powerful natural bulwark, against the force of the gale and the run of the sea.

We stared unbelievingly at the rock, an island unmarked on any chart.

But it was not upon the rock that our eyes were riveted. She gave a half-sob and buried her face against my shoulder. It was the ship.

The barnacle-fouled hull was mortised so deftly between the 'bow' and 'stern' of the rock that it seemed part of it; indeed, its regular line enhanced the resemblance to a deck between the two projections. Its roundness, curved inward and upward, added to the man-made appearance. At the 'stern' the deception ended with brutal plainness.

Two huge screws projected into the air.

The ship was upside down.

A steamer, keel and screws in the air, lay sandwiched between the two rock eminences some hundreds of feet apart. The island seemed scarcely wider than the steamer's beam.

When I spoke, I did not recognize my own voice. 'We'll get a jury stay rigged on to the mast and go closer and look.'

She bit her lips fearfully and looked at the hulk.

'How. .?'

I turned to go aft. I stopped dead. There had been nothing for me but that fatal little caravel-shaped island ahead. Until now. Then I saw.

Behind the yacht towered a grey incline of sea. It was high enough for me to have to look up and see the waves bursting and racing. Touleier, sheltered from gale and sea, was in comparative calm.

I held her, frozen, round the shoulders.

'A valley — a valley in the sea! We've toppled down a valley. .' I pointed to a sort of shallow valley formed in the sea itself.

The stunning simplicity of it was incredible. The violence of the sea created a sort of hollow in its surface. The gale brought with it a massive run of the sea in the opposite direction to the Agulhas Current, and the two opposing streams banked up and formed a hollow. Something in the undersea topography must have helped, this being over such a limited area. This 'seamount' was a needle-like pinnacle which reared up from the ocean floor, and only an exceptional gale uncovered it, sixty feet deep, not high! Normally it was no danger to ships, but a Waratah gale bared it, and it turned into the Flying Dutchman ! Then when the gale eased, the Agulhas Current became master again, the valley and the seamount disappeared, and so did the Flying Dutchman. .'

'Quick! We must be quick, Ian, before it disappears! We must see that hulk!'

Jubela and I hastily lashed up a jury stay from the mast stump to take a rag of canvas. Tafline brought my camera from below.

Touleier edged closer to the hulk on the seamount. It gave us a lee which became progressively smoother, the closer we approached.

The high promenade deck which had caused so much controversy lay crushed and concertina-ed under the 10,000 tons deadweight. Somewhere, too, under the telescoped superstructure, on which the whole weight of the ship rested, was the ruin of the single high funnel with its once-proud insignia.

The camera's electric flash cut across to below the eighteen-foot double screws, sea-fouled and trailing seaweed.

She called out the name, upside down, emblazoned on the stern.

'Waratah:

‘The gale's holding steady,' I replied. ‘So long as it does, the water should stay where it is. We must be quick. Every minute counts. It's now or never, to see the Waratah. Watch out especially when we get to the keel, the wind could blow us off our feet.'

Leaving the yacht in Jubela's care — he seemed to want to concentrate on physical tasks to avoid looking at the dead monster towering above us — we made for the stern. It looked easier to climb than any other part of the hull. We had a rope to lash ourselves fast to the decaying screws against the sea.