Hammond Innes: The Strange Land

‘It is kind of you. No.’ She turned quickly and her heels click-clacked across the wooden floor to her table by the window.

I called to Jose for another coffee. It came in a cracked cup. A violent gust of wind shook the building. It went tearing and screaming round the walls, tugging at the tin roof. The door burst open and sand blew in along the floor in little, sifting runnels, bringing with it the wild sound of the sea along the beach. The girl shivered. I caught a glimpse of a big, bright moon sailing swiftly amongst torn fragments of cloud, and then Jose had shut the door again.

‘A bad night, senor.’ Jose crossed himself and I remembered that he’d been a fisherman in his youth.

Kostos hadn’t left with Big Harry and his crowd. He was still standing at the bar, his long, thin nose dipping every now and then to the little glass of liqueur he held in his hand.

There was a conscious stillness about the half-empty bar. It was a silent watchful stillness, as though the whole place were waiting for something to happen. The girl glanced nervously at her watch and then stared resolutely out of the window. Moonlight filtered through on to her face, making it pale like a mask instead of living flesh and blood.

She was waiting for the boat, Kostos was waiting for it, too. All three of us were waiting for the boat, and I wondered what it was like out there in the wind and the waves. Tomorrow it would be hot again with that blazing North African sun heat that bleaches the houses of the kasbah whiter than bone. But right now it was gusting fifty or sixty knots and Big Harry had said the boat was being sailed single-handed. Suppose he were right? Suppose Kavan … I felt the need for prayer, but I couldn’t, for I was thinking of my plans, not of the man. I didn’t know the man. What I did know was that I’d never get another doctor for my Mission on my own terms the way I’d got Kavan. There was something odd about the man, of course. There had to be for him to come a thousand miles to a remote hill village for next to no money. But he had written — / have the need to lose myself in work that is quite remote from everything that I have been striving for over many years. That part of my life is finished. Now I wish to make use of the art of healing I learned as a young man. It is better so and all I ask is that the work shall absorb me utterly…

That section of his letter I knew by heart, for when you live a lonely life, cut off from the world among an alien people, and you plan to share that life with another man, a man you do not know, then you search urgently for any scrap that may give you some clue to the sort of person he is.

I was still wondering about him when the door opened and Youssef burst in. ‘Come quick, m’soor,’ he called, flapping urgently across to me, his hooked nose moist and blue with the wind. ‘Quick. Is finish, the boat. Is to be a tragedy.’ He caught hold of my arm. ‘Quick. I show you.’ The words spilled out of him in breathless puffs. The whole cafe was silent, listening.

I pulled him down into the chair beside me. ‘Just tell me quietly what happened.’

He caught his breath. ‘Is the wind — a terrible blow of wind. It take the roof from one of the warehouses and there is a little house down near the — ‘

‘The boat,’ I said, shaking him. ‘Tell me about the boat.’

‘Oui, m’soor. I tell you. Is finish — no good — kaput.’

‘You mean it’s sunk?’

‘Now, non. Not sink. Is finish.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Youssef — what’s happened?’

‘Is the wind, m’soor. Is coming into Tangier, the boat, and I am watching it and there is terrible blow of wind and — pouff.’ He blew out his lips and shrugged his shoulders. ‘The big sail is finish and the boat is blown away.’

‘Where? Where is it now?’

‘Below the kasbah, m’soor. Per’aps he obtain the Baie des Juifs. I do not know.’

‘What are they doing about it — the port authorities?’

‘Nothing. They can do nothing. They have telephone to the police.’ He shrugged his shoulders again. ‘Is to be a tragedy.’ He seemed to like the word. ‘You come quick now. You see. I do not lie.’

I followed him out of the cafe then. The girl was standing, wide-eyed and shaken, by the door as I opened it. ‘You’d better come, too,’ I suggested.

Outside, the wind and the sea still roared along the beach, but the sky was clear now, a blue-black sky, studded with stars and dominated by the white orb of the moon which flung a glittering pathway across wind-white waters. Youssef clutched my arm and pointed. Beyond the roof of the Customs House, against the black blur of the sea, a patch of white showed, a rag hung momentarily above the waves and then lost in spray. It emerged again and, shielding my eyes from the wind, I saw vaguely the shape of a boat with heads’ls set and drawing. And then it was gone again, like a phantom boat, as the spray smothered it.

‘Oh, God!’ the girl whispered, and when I looked at her I saw her eyes were closed and her lips were moving silently.

I told Youssef to phone for a taxi and then I took her arm. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I had half turned her back towards the bar and, as Youssef opened the door, I saw Kostos momentarily outlined against the rectangle of light. He was staring along the line of the cliffs, watching the death struggles of the boat, and his hands were clasped together, the ringers pressed against the knuckles as though by mere physical effort of thrusting at his hands he could pull the boat through.

‘Come on,’ I said to the girl. ‘A drink will do you good.’

But she remained quite still, resisting the pressure of my hand. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I do not want a drink.’

She was trembling. I could feel her body shaking. ‘Who do you know on the boat?’ I asked her. She wasn’t English. It had to be Kavan. ‘Is it Dr Kavan?’

She nodded dumbly.

‘You’re a Czech then?’ I said.

‘My mother was Irish,’ she answered as though that made some sort of difference.

I stared out across the docks to the moonlit fury of the sea. It was a wild, terrifying sight. The cliffs were black in shadow and the sea was white with driven spray and the backlash of the tide running around Cape Spartel. I was thinking about Kavan and how little I knew about him — just that he was a Czech and was thirty-eight years old and that he had been trained in his youth as a doctor. The Mission authorities in London had not been involved. This was a purely personal arrangement and the only information I had on him was what he had given me in those two letters — the first applying for the post in answer to my advertisement and the second informing me that he was sailing with a man called Wade in the fifteen-ton ketch Gay Juliet. I hadn’t dared ask questions, for his had been the only application I had received. ‘How did you know he was on the boat?’ I asked the girl.

I thought for a moment that she hadn’t heard my question and I glanced at her face. It was very pale in the moonlight and there were lines of strain at the corners of eyes and mouth. ‘He told me,’ she whispered. ‘We still have means of communicating.’ And her mouth was shut in a tight, hard line and I felt her body shake again, though she wasn’t crying.

Youssef came back to us out of the bar. ‘The taxi is coming, m’soor.’

The girl didn’t move, didn’t look at him. She was staring at the point where we’d last seen the boat. I wanted to ask her about Kavan, but it would have to wait. This wasn’t the moment. She was racked with fear and there was a sort of desperate bitterness about her face. I looked round for Kostos, but he’d gone. And then a police jeep drove past and went through the dock gates and stopped at the Customs House.