Hammond Innes: The Strange Land

The girl stopped trembling. She was suddenly incredibly still. And when I looked at her, she wasn’t staring at the sea any more, but at the little group that had gathered about the jeep, gesticulating and pointing towards the cliffs where the boat had disappeared. Customs officers and police piled into the jeep and it turned and came racing past us again and disappeared down the Avenue d’Espagne, the red tail-light dwindling to a pinpoint. The girl found her voice then. ‘What are the police going to do? Why have they been called?’ Her voice was scared, a little breathless.

‘The boat’s in distress,’ I reminded her.

‘That is purely a job for the coastguards, not for the police.’

I shrugged my shoulders, not understanding her concern. ‘There’s a lot of smuggling goes on in Tangier,’ I told her.

‘Smuggling?’ She repeated the word slowly as though she’d never heard it before. ‘But if they — ‘ She stopped suddenly as though biting back her words. And then she said, ‘I suppose it does not matter. So long as they get him safe ashore. Nothing else matters.’ But there was an odd reservation in her voice as though there were things worse than drowning.

The taxi arrived then and we got in and I ordered the driver to take us to the Pension de la Montagne. From the terrace there we should have a clear view right across Jews’ Bay where the oued that the Europeans call Jews’ River runs out into the sea. To go up to the kasbah meant walking and would take too long, and if we drove to the Marchan on this side of the bay, we should lose ourselves in a tangle of undergrowth and villas.

The girl sat very still as we drove up through the Place de France and out along the route de la Montagne. She didn’t talk. She had her hands clasped tightly on her lap and her face, in the flash of the street lamps, was set and tense. We crossed the Pont des Juifs, and then the headlights were cutting up through a narrow road hemmed in by steep, walled banks, where the bougain villea showed as splashes of bright purple on the walls of villas. At the bend halfway up la Montagne, we turned off on to a track, and in a moment we were in bright moonlight with a clear view of the sea below.

We left the taxi then and walked through the arched gateway of the pension and out on to the terrace. The wind caught us there, driving the breath back into our throats. The view was magnificent. On the dark slopes of the Marchan opposite, the lights of the villas shone like glow-worms, and beyond, the kasbah sprawled over its hill like a bone-white cemetery. Below us, the sea was deeply ridged and flecked with white. I shaded my eyes from the moon’s glare and stared down along the line of the cliffs beyond to Marchan.

‘Do you see it?’ the girl asked.

‘No.’

It was dark below the Marchan and all I could see was the white of the waves breaking. Then Youssef was pointing and I thought I saw the triangle of a sail. But it vanished as though it were a trick of the light. The girl saw it, too, and said, ‘We must do something. Please can you do something?’ There was a desperate urgency in her plea.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ I said. ‘We can only wait until…” And then, suddenly, I saw the boat quite clearly. It had emerged from the shadow of the Marchan and was out in the moonlight. It was edging along the coast, close in and half-smothered by the break of the waves. The wind was driving it straight into the bay. ‘They’ll beach her in the bay,’ I said. The yacht hadn’t a hope of wearing the headland below us. ‘Come on.’ I caught her arm and we ran back to the taxi.

‘Is there any hope for him?’ she asked as the taxi turned and started back down the hill.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The sea looks pretty bad down there. But if the boat comes in close…’ She was looking at me and there was a desperate pleading in her eyes, so that I felt her fear as though it were my own. ‘Why does he mean so much to you?’ I asked gently.

‘He is my husband.’ She said it so quietly, so softly, that I scarcely caught the words, only the meaning. And then in a sudden rush she added, ‘We were engaged before the war. Christmas, 1938. And then in March the Germans came and, because he was a scientist, they forced him to go to Germany. We didn’t see each other until after the war. Then he came back and we were married. We were married two years. Then the Russians came and he escaped to England. We only had those two years.’ There was no bitterness in the way she said it, only a sort of hopeless resignation.

It seemed odd her talking about him whilst the man himself was fighting for his life down there in the bay and we were careering down the hill to be there when the boat struck. ‘Why didn’t you go to him in England?’ I asked. ‘If you could get to Tangier …’ I felt the sentence unfinished, for she was staring at me, sudden fear and suspicion in her eyes.

‘Who are you? Why are you here, waiting for him?’ It was the same breathless rush of words, but difficult now, harder and more withdrawn.

‘I’m Philip Latham,’ I said. And then I began to explain about the Mission and my need of a hospital and how we had so little money that I had despaired of ever getting a doctor out from England. And before I had finished, the taxi had swung off the road on to a track that ran down through a squalid, mud-walled village and finished on the banks of the oued.

The police jeep was parked there. And beside it was a big American car, its chromium glinting in the moonlight. She gave a little gasp and clutched my arm. She was staring at the jeep. ‘Why can’t they leave him alone?’ she whispered. I stared at her, not understanding the cause of her outburst.

It was the car that puzzled me. The village was half a mile away and there was no villa near. ‘Do you know whose car this is?’ I asked Youssef.

But he shook his head. ‘There are many American cars in Tangier, m’soor. Very expensive, very nice. Per’aps I have American car one day.’ He grinned at me from beneath the hood of his djellaba. An American car was the dream of every Arab in Tangier.

We pushed past the jeep and hurried along the path that ran beside the oued. The pounding of the sea was hurled at us on the wind and soon a fine spray was drifting across our faces. Then we were out on a little bluff that was all coarse grass and sand, and there, straight ahead of us, was the yacht, its jib bellied out as it ran for the shore with the wind and sea behind it. A lone figure stood on the edge of the bluff, curiously insubstantial and ghostly in the driven spume and the moonlight. He turned as we came up. It was Kostos.

‘What are you doing here?’ I shouted to him.

His long face smiled at me. But he didn’t say anything, only turned and stared out across the surging, foaming surf to where the boat was piling in, its bows lifting to a wave and then creaming forward on the break of it.

‘Who is that man?’ the girl asked me. ‘He was there in the cafe. What does he want?’

‘His name is Kostos,’ I said. ‘I think he’s waiting for Wade.’

‘Wade?’

‘The owner of the boat.’

‘Oh, I see.’ She was staring down at the beach where a little group of officials stood at the water’s edge, watching the boat. It was in the broken water now and I wondered how the poor devils who sailed her expected to get ashore through those thundering acres of surf.

A hand gripped my elbow and I turned to find Kostos at my side. ‘Why do you come here, Lat’am?’ he shouted at me. ‘What is your interest in the boat?’

‘What’s yours?’ I demanded.

He stared at me hard and then asked about the girl.

‘She’s come here to meet Kavan,’ I told him.

‘Who?’