Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

My eyes went automatically to Touleier, so safe-for the moment-in the lee of this rock-and-metal hill of death and enigma. My sailor's heart skipped a beat at the sight of the seas which boiled behind her, and on either side of the seamount. We were held in a tight, ephemeral cell of safety. We could not see a defined line where the sea-valley began or ended. We were protected, where we stood, from the blowing spray and lash of wind, but I feared that when we got higher further exploration might be impossible because of it.

How long could, or would, the phenomenon last? Precious minutes were racing by. We had to see the top of the hull!

I bent to help Tafline. In doing so, my line of vision was through the gap between rudder and hull. ‘What is it, Ian?'

I stopped transfixed. She could not see from where she was.

A fuselage, one wing attached and the other piled upright against the side of the hull, lay in a crumpled, untidy heap on the far side of the wreck. The tail-section had snapped half off and the airliner lay broken-backed across a rock, as if a giant had begun to break it across his knee and then grown tired of the game and cast it from him.

My hands were shaking as I hauled her up. I pointed.

'Four engines!' she exclaimed.

I found my voice. 'Airscrews! Alistair's was a jet!'

Some of the propeller blades were broken off and others were wrapped round each other and the turbine casings.

'Gemsbok’ she exclaimed. 'Gemsbok and the Waratah — crashed together!'

I craned forward to try and see more. 'Those experts were right about her going in at' full power-look! They said she first touched something and then slewed round. Dad must have been sitting on this side, nearest to us, and the wing on his side came off in the final moments of the crash and landed up against the hull of the ship.'

'How could he have come alive out of that?' she exclaimed. 'Ian, he must have had some time to have cut loose that panel!'

'He crashed at night, remember. Maybe that would account for the peculiar writing.'

'Do you see anyone, in the immediate shock of a crash, calmly setting about chopping off a piece of the aircraft? And then, of all things, deciding to make a testament out of it? He must have seen the name Waratah, and that would need daylight. That means the seamount must stay above water for a good few hours..

I agreed. We felt safer to go on.

She took a firm grip of my hand and leant out to see as far beyond the hull as she could.

‘Ian! Ian-there are two tails! There's another against the side of the ship!'

Cautiously, fearfully, I eased her back to safety on the slippery shelf to enable me to see. One slip would have been fatal; our precarious perch was twenty-five feet above the rocks.

I extended my range of vision by using the boathook. I, too, peered out round the bulge of the stern. That high tail was unmistakable. The Buccaneer!

It projected from the hull slightly forwards of where I judged the bridge must be and almost on a level with where we were standing. Only the tail was visible. There was no sign of the rest of the machine.

I edged myself back on to our narrow place of safety.

'It's Alistair's plane,' I said numbly. The tail sticks out of the hull up for'ard. The jet must have gone right through this rotten old hull like a bullet. Only twenty feet higher, and he'd have missed it!'

We stood silent, shaken. The gale roared past and the sea probed at the base of the hulk. The earlier radiance in her face was gone. I was filled with a sick hatred for the wreck.

'Let's go back, Ian! Haven't we come far enough to know all we want to know? Remember what Alistair himself said — what if you do find the Waratah! All there'll be is a lot of skeletons! Among those skeletons are your father and your brother. .'

I poised myself uncertainly on the slippery foothold. At that moment I held her life in my hand. I did not know it

What made me go on?

I could not answer that any more than what brought her that day to the dockside and Walvis Bay. In retrospect, however, I think it was that the blank, rotting hull provided no way into the Waratah mystery, not so much even as an open port. It was a shape, a thing, a hulk, and even in the moment of discovery, it shut itself fast.

To the top-only,' I replied. 'From there we can see along the whole length of the keel. It won't take a couple of minutes.'

The massive struts from the stern to the propeller shaft tunnels, which bulged unnaturally big once one was against them (normally they would be deep under water and not seen) gave us an easy passage to the keel. We were careful when we lifted our heads above the level of the hull and exposed ourselves to the gale. Another albatross appeared magically out of the spindrift and coasted down to settle near the remnants of the Viscount. This time she did not admire but shuddered — had the birds once feasted on human flesh as well as on the delicacies the seamount brought from the deeps?

The long level of the keel stretched away; the salt and wind stung our eyes. Tafline pointed at what appeared to be a larger accretion of deep-sea things round a rusted stump of metal. It was the only projection along the ship's bottom.

I pulled her down close to speak into her ears.

'Engine-room ash chute. Burnt coal from her furnaces was dumped through it into the sea. It goes right through the ship, clean through the watertight compartments and into the engine-room itself.'

‘What is that supposed to be, then?' She indicated the metal stump.

'It's a loosely-hinged metal cover to the chute. The mechanism is simple. When the weight of the ash discharged from her furnaces was greater than the sea pressure thirty feet below the waterline, the chute opened automatically. Experts thought it might have stuck open and allowed the sea to flood the ship from the engine-room.'

She screwed up her eyes and looked along the spume-swept hull. 'Then why don't we open the hatch and look inside?'

We had found entry to Waratah. It was as simple as the device itself.

We inched along the keel at a crawl to the outlet, which faced sternwards to form a final outcurve of the interior passageway. This 'lip' of metal, now heavily encrusted and black with rust and immersion, was about two-and-a-half feet high, roughly curved with a kind of primitive streamline like a ship's ventilator. Where it met the hull there was a metal hatch cover, about three feet wide and four feet long, hinged at the forward end. The small half-cupola of the lip also acted as a brake to prevent the hatch cover from swinging open too wide. It would come to rest at an angle of about sixty degrees when fully extended, the speed of the ship providing a natural motion to sweep the spent ash clear. It was simple and ingenious.

I reached with the boathook and got a grip on the 'lip'. The crawl along the flat broad bottom had been more difficult than dangerous; I remembered how the wind had plucked away Jubela's shirt.

We crouched behind the little cupola.

The hatch rectangle and surrounding jamb appeared much more rusted than the metal of the hull itself, caused no doubt by white-hot coals and cold water. There was a continuous discharge down the chute.

Also heavily rusted was a big eye-bolt set into the hatch cover, to which was attached a broken length of cable. I could not locate the aperture where this cable entered the hull because of the growths and corrosion, but it was clear that the trap could be pulled open at will from the inside, if there was need to get rid of the ash quicker than by the automatic way.

She crouched, simply looking at the hatchway. Her eyes met mine, and they were full of unspoken questions.