My surprise at Feldman's querying a decision of mine shook me for a moment out of my Waratah train of thought. Never in a year at sea had he done anything but follow my orders. He did not look at me but, as if to reinforce his views, he seemed intent on examining the wind-torn sky south-westwards.
Feldman was right: the hull of the weather ship was straining and thumping in the mounting seas. It was not the elated drum of the waves one hears when a racing yacht is running at her maximum speed, or the exhilarating crunch as she planes down one roller and up the hill of the next, but the head-on slug of evenly-matched boxes, the savage soften-ing-up in-fighting to produce the final knockdown. During the past hour I had watched critically the build-up of the sea. No need now to refer to those innumerable painstaking computations. The reality before my eyes brought every fact to mind with startling clarity. My guess was that it had not reached its maximum yet, whatever the Weather Bureau might say. Nor had the wind. Where Walvis Bay was now, the Waratah had been forging ahead at thirteen knots. So, whatever Walvis Bay suffered, she must hold Waratah's speed.
Walvis Bay's course- Waratah's course-was about twelve miles offshire, and this corresponds roughly with the maximum southward flow of the Agulhas Current. This is a river of warm tropical seawater (known as the Mozambique Current north of Lourenco Marques) which touches a surface speed of five knots hereabouts, although divers have reported much higher underwater speeds. What drew my attention now-I could see by the jerky boil of the water between the ship and the land-was that a powerful counter-current was in the preliminary stages of building up, the sure herald (in my view) of a severe south-westerly buster. Despite what the official forecast said, I felt sure that this counter-current, hammering against the mighty Agulhas Current striking south, would create a maelstrom of a sea before the night was out. This was the way it had been with the Waratah. I had the Clan Macintyre's own log to back me, and this is the way it had been with her. She had been only a little way behind the Waratah, and had barely escaped disaster herself. The main instrument in the provocation of these great natural forces was the south-westerly gale, which would move up its own massed battalions of sea to reinforce the counter-current against the dominant Agulhas flow. What would transpire, only the night would show. And I intended to be in a ring-side seat with Walvis Bay to see.
I knew Feldman's devotion to officialdom.
‘It looks worse than it really is,' I jollied him. The wind hasn't reached forty knots yet. The Weather Bureau says there's nothing more than an ordinary blow to it.'
He looked relieved, although still dubious at what lay before his own eyes.
'I've just checked the wind,' I went on. 'A mere thirty-eight knots.'
What I did not say, was that I considered Smit's reading of a little while back already out of date. I guessed it at forty-five knots now — and increasing.
Alistair! My foreboding at the thought of the Viscount's course running dead as it did on my chart jerked me back to an objective assessment of the whole situation. Say the wind way gusting forty-five knots now-what was that, in Alistair's own words, to a machine capable of the speed of sound? Was I not projecting all my Waratah fears and shadows and my own experience as a sailor into a quite different medium without due justification? The night the Viscount had vanished, land stations noted a speed of fifty knots. That was enough to inconvenience, but not threaten, a machine backed by thousands of horsepower. Was I not thinking in sea, rather than air, terms? At the moment there was no way I could see of warning off Alistair, anyway.
Feldman said, after another long look at the south-west, 'I've never seen a sky quite like that. But the weather people must know. They've got all the information which we haven't. .’
By late afternoon, even Feldman's faith had evaporated. He answered in monosyllables only as the weather became wilder, until I could stand his moroseness no longer.
'I'm going up aloft to take a look round,' I said.
It was simply to get away from him; the bridge of the converted whaler was, in fact, the highest point of the ship after we had dismantled the special whaling lookout on the crow's nest at the time of her original conversion.
I made my way to the scrap of deck high up aft near the radio hut
The bridge, which was enclosed, gave only a forward sight of the sea; hanging on to a funnel stay-wire, I had an all-round view. I was taken aback at the wildness of the scene. I was aware that this type of storm developed rapidly, and that its storm centre moved equally quickly, but it was nevertheless startling to see it happening before my very eyes. To the south-west, towards East London, the sky was a curious purple-black over the land, and night-black out to sea. It was like looking from a spaceship at the dividing line between night and day on earth. The dying sun was able to create a lightness over the land, but the sea-black was relentless, ominous. Between Walvis Bay and the great blackness was a kind of no-man's-land of wind-torn sky and cloud flying at impossible speeds; these were the outriders of the main army of the storm, the light armour probing with quick thrusts the WarataWs battlefield of death. All round Walvis Bay the seas leaned to a plume of spindrift; they were not so high as steep, a sure sign that the general engagement with the Agulhas Current still lay ahead; the counter-current was still testing the enemy's defences.
Involuntarily, I looked astern. I found myself reading the situation by hindsight. Sailors of the calibre of Douglas Fairlie and Captain Ilbery were not afraid of a storm, and the Waratah was a new ship, stout, fast, well-found. In the immediate uproar after her disappearance, sailors had no difficulty in believing that Captain Ilbery would have pushed her through the storm. Both men had served in clippers whose captains rejoiced in nothing less than a full gale, men who knew how to pile on canvas to the royals and to use to the full the great westerly winds of the Roaring Forties. They were iron men who battened down their hatches because their decks would run awash for days under the press of sail; they were cruel, proud time-makers who armed their officers with pistols with orders to shoot down any terrified seaman who tried to let fly a halliard.
There was not the least anxiety in the Waratah's last messages to the Clan Macintyre. She had not even reduced speed. This evening's sea would have looked just as wild from the bridge of the Waratah, and she had been nearly twenty times the size of my game little whaler.
A short while before arriving at her present position, the Walvis Bay had passed a curious natural arch of rock known as The Hole-in-the-Wall which rises sheer out of the coast. The massive, soaring slab is pierced by an archway: the low sun broke through the gloom of the land and backdrop of great forests and for a moment the arch appeared like a bright nature-made headlight shining from the black land. One of the stories scouted after the Waratah had disappeared was that she had been sucked into a blowhole similar to The Hole-in-the-Wall and drawn down, by the strong inshore counter-current, into a vast undersea (or underland) cavern. A companion theory was that, under the extremes of gale and sea, a natural vortex had formed in the sea, and into this the liner had been sucked.
How much, I asked myself hanging there and seeing the storm forces unleashing themselves — the same question I had asked Alistair-did we really know about the ocean's secrets? I ran my mind now over my own scanty knowledge of the ocean floor beneath Walvis Bay's keel. Round the coastline of South Africa runs a narrow continental shelf known as the Agulhas Bank, oil-bearing, elusive. It drops away in successive shallow terraces into very deep water. With something of a shock, I realized that the course I was holding was roughly the line of the-final terrace of the Agulhas Bank before it fell away into abysmal depths. Meaningful? Meaningless?