Geoffrey Jenkins - A bridge of Magpies

I was caught in a double hammerlock quandary: if I allowed him to jettison the oil where he was he'd destroy the islands; if I permitted him to make for the open sea and dump there, he'd do the same thing for the fish life which thrives so abundantly round the great Benguela current. The Benguela flows to the Sperrgebiet all the way from the Antarctic. It is one of the world's major currents and transports vast quantities of plankton, the fishes' food. There was a third reason for my decision to destroy not only the tanker but also her oil: the sea was in the grip of what is known scientifically as an upwell cell. Once every winter a very powerful, special wind is generated on the Sperrgebiet. It lasts only a few days. It is hot and blows from the desert out to sea, I'd seen sand columns, hundreds of 36 feet high, miles offshore. This wind is so strong that it pushes the surface water bodily out to sea. In turn it is replaced by other water from deep down and far out-icy Benguela water. It's like some gigantic ball-valve mechanism going into operation. It is called an upwell cell because the sea does just that: it wells up on the coast. It hits maximum strength at a spot a little north of where the tanker struck, and consequently produces a strong current which flows up the Sperrgebiet. There was really only one solution. I took the decision off my own bat. Fast, too, because of the danger: I removed the Walewska's crew and fixed delayedaction demolition charges in her holds so that we could get well clear before she blew up. It was a good thing I did. Ships sixty miles away felt that explosion.

I looked now for the Walewska's stern section, which had been brought back by the current, and spotted it lying on the rocks which flanked the north-western entrance to the bay, white water tooting high up the side of its rusty hulk. The Walewska had become something super-heated inside my brain; I cursed the ugly bitch of a thing with a sailor's oath and felt better. The long light made a savage magic out of the desert, the coastal pans and low-rise sandhills. Experts say it hasn't changed a feature in a million years. Captain Murray, a dour Scots-Afrikaner, anchored for the night inside the bay, keeping the coaster's head to the boisterous wind and strong in-shore current. The seas became steep and vicious as they hit the shallow water round Panther Head. It was as comfortable as sleeping on a pogo stick. The fog came down; the bay was full of unidentifiable noises. After an uneasy stay we set off next morning and picked our way past the Walewska's hulk, unnaturally large and ghostlike in the thinning fog, en route for the first group of Godforsaken islands, as individual as their names-Little Roastbeef, Sparrowhawk, Sinclair, Black Sophie and Plumpudding. It took most of the day to thump our way up the coast, calling in for brief intervals to take off an odd man here and there, until we reached Possession in the late afternoon. Captain Murray spat nicotine and phlegm over the side of the bridge. 'Possession. Which being interpreted is, shit'

It was quite a speech, for him. There'd been little more than grunts out of him the whole way up from the Cape.

'Shut up in that hole, I'd start to talk to the penguins.

Maybe you will before you're through.'

Perhaps Ill quit by the end of the winter. I don't know. Depends.'

'On what?'

'I durum. Depends.'

'You're a bit fancy for a headman,'

'It takes all types.'

'You ain't brought along any dop-en-dum, I sew'

'No alcohol allowed.'

'Headman, yes. The rest, no.'

Well, I didn't.'

`So that's it, eh?'

'What's what?'

'That's what you're running away from*

'I'm not running away from anything.'

'Weddell… Somewhere I know that name • • Can't think where.'

I didn't enlighten him. I was busy watching a boat putting off from the island. Buffel had come the safe way through the channel's southern entrance to fetch up at the anchorage opposite a group of prefab huts ashore. Possession is about two miles long, a half broad, and seventy feet above the sea at its highest point and shaped rather like a stretched-out version of a human foetus, a bit at the south resembling a head and neck. Submerged continuations of the island's northern extremity form the Kreuz shoals lying between it and the mainland at Elizabeth Bay, about four miles distant The shoals make the northern channel very dicey unless the weather is dead calm-which is almost never.

Captain Murray seemed nervous. I reckoned he was talking in order to hear the sound of his own voice. Possession was as inviting as a seal rookery-and as smelly,

Weddell,. it'll come back.'

`Let me know when it does,'

'My next call is in three months' time. Maybe by then you'll be like that poor bugger coming off now in the boat. Started smoking grass. Grew the stuff with tender, loving care in a potty in his cottage, they tell me. If he'd tried outside, the wind would have finished the plants off in a day He's on to mainline stuff now.'

'Where does he get it from, here?'

'Where do any of them get it from?'

'Look at his eyes when he arrives. What made you take this job?'

Interest:

'Jesus! '

He slipped the pipe from his mouth and gestured with the stem at the coastline.

The channel was about two miles wide on a west-east axis and slightly longer from south to north. Then, about another four miles from Possession's northern tip, the mainland changed direction sharply and jutted westwards into the ocean, abruptly terminating the channel's south-north direction. A promontory called Elizabeth Point completed the U-shaped loop of the shoreline. Near it was a cluster of ruins, the site of an abandoned diamond ghost town.

The setting sun that still came over the shoulder of the island picked out the landmarks ashore, through a haze of spray. One dominated all the rest-a gigantic arch of rock opposite Possession, nearly two hundred feet high, whose centre had been completely carried away by the sea, leaving only about twenty feet remaining at either end. One leg of the arch was on land, the other in the breakers. The rock, glinting as though polished, looked like a black rainbow, fantastically plucked out of the sky and dumped on the coast-the Bridge of Magpies.

The shoreline round about it was composed of slabs of dark and variegated rock which had kept their surprising geometrical square shapes despite the continual scouring of the wind and waves. Doodenstadt. The Town of the Dead. Behind Doodenstadt the desert began again in a series of low, light grey-brown sandhills which rose steeply from the sea, but nowhere reached a height of more than three hundred feet. The Bridge of Magpies was the eye-catcher, but almost rivalling it in the field of the fantastic was the object perched on top of Doodenstadt. Like a great wounded animal, a big two-stack liner sat upright on the rocks, outwardly apparently undamaged. Captain Mu ray's pipe-stem fixed on it. 'The City of Baroda. Torpedoed in the war and beached. She's out of reach of the waves, else she'd have disappeared long ago.'

He clamped his teeth back on to his pipe and exclaimed, Why can't that bloody boat hurry up from the island? That 39 wreck gives me the willies. It shows what can happen around here.'

'Aren't you staying tonight?'

'Nooit nie! – never! I'm pulling out as soon as you're on your way ashore. That dump also gives me the creeps. I see they've got the ghost light going already and the sun's not even down.'

A point of light showed in one of the panes of a prefab. It resembled a chance reflection of the sunset.

'It burns all night, every night. No gamat would stay otherwise.'

Gamet is an affectionate term for the fine half-caste Malay fishermen of the Cape and South East Africa. Their Far Eastern origin-the first were brought as slaves in the seventeenth century-endows their rites and religion with a touch of the supernatural. Like all other sailors, they are deeply superstitious.