around her shoulders and settled herself against the wall of the shelter with the club beside her.
I should pray- and as she began, Anna seemed verY close, watching over her as she had so often before wheN
Centaine, the child, knelt beside her bed with haNDS Clasped before her.
Thank you, Almighty God, for saving me from the se and thank you for the food and drink you have provide(but- The prayer petered out, and Centaine felt recrimnations rather than gratitude pressing to her lips.
Blasphemy. She almost heard Anna's voice and shE
ended the prayer hastily.
And, oh Lord, please give me the strength to face what ever further trials you have in store for me in the dayahead, and if it please you, give me also the wisdom to see your design and purpose in heaping these tribulations upon me. That was as much of a protest as she would risk, and while she was still trying to decide on a suitable ending for the prayer, she fell asleep.
Al When she awoke, the fire had died down to embers, and she did not at first know where she was or what had woken her. Then her circumstances came back to her with a sickening rush, and she heard some large animal out in the darkness just beyond the opening of the shelter.
It sounded as though it was feeding.
Quickly she piled driftwood on the fire and blew up a flame. At the edge of the firelight she saw the lurking shape of the hyena and she realized that the package of cooked seal meat that she had so carefully wrapped in a strip of canvas the previous evening was gone from the rock beside the fire.
Sobbing with rage and frustration, she picked up a flaming brand and hurled it at the hyena.
You horrible thieving brute! she screamed, and it yelped and galloped away into the darkness.
The seal colony lay basking on the rocks below her shelter in the early morning sunlight, and already Centaine felt the first stirrings of the hunger and the thirst that the day would bring.
She armed herself with two stones, each the size of her fist, and the driftwood club, and with elaborate stealth crawled down one of the gulleys in the rocks, attempting to get within range of the nearest members of the colony.
However, the seals fled honking before she had covered half the distance and they would not emerge from the surf again while she was in sight.
Frustrated and hungry, she went back to the shelter.
There were spots of congealed white seal fat on the rock beside the hearth. She crushed a knob of charcoal from the dead fire to powder and mixed it with the fat in the palm of her hand, then she carefully blacked the tip of her nose and her cheeks, the exposed areas which had been burned by the sun the previous day.
Then she looked around the shelter. She had the knife and the scrap of flint, the club and canvas hood, all her worldly possessions, and yet she felt a dragging reluctance to leave the shelter. For a few hours it had been her home.
She had to force herself to turn and go down to the beach, and to set out southwards into that ominously monotonous seascape once again.
That night there was no cave shelter and no pile of driftwood trapped against a rocky headland. There was no food and nothing to drink and she rolled herself in the strip of canvas and lay on the hard sand under the dunes.
All night a chill little wind blew the fine sands over her so that at dawn she was coated with sparkling sugary particles. Sand had encrusted her eyelashes, and salt and sand were thick in her hair. She was so stiff with cold and bruises and over-taxed muscles that at first she hobbled like an old woman, using the club as a staff. As her muscles warmed, the stiffness abated, but she knew she was getting weaker and as the sun rose higher, so her thirst became a silent scream in the depths of her body.
Her lips swelled and cracked, her tongue bloated and furred over with thickening gluey saliva that she could not swallow.
She knelt in the edge of the surf and bathed her face, soaked the canvas shawl and her skimpy clothing, and resisted somehow the temptation to swallow a mouthful of the cool, clear sea water.
The relief was only temporary. When the sea water dried on her skin, the salt crystals stung the sun-tender spots and burned her cracked, dry lips, her skin seemed to stretch to the point of tearing like parchment, and her thirst was an obsession.
In the middle of the afternoon, far ahead of her on the smooth wet sand, she saw a cluster of black moving shapes, and she shaded her eyes hopefully. However, the specks resolved into four large seagulls, with pure white chests and black backs, squabbling and threatening each other with open yellow bills as they competed for a piece of flotsam washed ashore by the tide.
They rose on outsretched wings as Centaine staggered towards them, leaving their disputed prize, too heavy for them to carry, lying on the sand. It was a large dead fish, already badly mutilated by the gulls, and with new strength Centaine ran the last few paces and dropped on her knees. She lifted the fish with both hands and then gagged and dropped it again, wiping her hands on her canvas skirt. The fish was stinking rotten, her fingers had sunk into the soft putrefying flesh as though into cold suet.
She crawled away and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, hugging them to her breast, staring at the lump of stinking carrion and trying to subdue her thirst.
it took all her courage, but at last she crawled back to it, and with her face turned away from the stench, hacked off a fillet of the maggot-white flesh. She cut a small square of it and placed it cautiously in her mouth. Her stomach heaved at the taste of sickly sweet corruption, but she chewed it carefully, sucked out the reeking juices, spat out the pulpy flesh and then cut another lump from the fillet.
Sickened as much by her own degradation as by the rotten flesh, she kept sucking out the juices and when she reckoned that she had forced a large cupful down her throat, she rested a while.
Gradually the fluids fortified her. She felt much stronger, strong enough to go on again. She waded into the sea and tried to wash the stench of rotten fish from her hands and lips. The taste lingered in her mouth as she started once more plodding along the edge of the beach.
just before sunset a new, crippling wave of weakness came over her and she sank down on to the sand. Suddenly an icy sweat bra across her forehead and cramp, like a sword thrust through her belly, doubled her over.
She belched, and the taste of rotten fish filled her mouth and nostrils.
She heaved, and hot reeking vomit shot up her throat.
She felt despair as she saw so much of her vital fluids splash on to the sand, but she heaved again, and at the contraction she felt a spluttery explosive release of diarrhoea.
I'm poisoned. She fell and writhed on the sand as spasm after spasm gripped her and her body involuntarily purged itself of the toxic juices. It was dark by the time the attack passed, and she dragged off her soiled carniknickers and threw them aside. She crawled painfully into the sea and washed her body, splashed her face and rinsed the taste of rotten fish and vomit from her mouth, prepared to pay for the momentary relief of a clean mouth with later thirst.
Then still on her hands and knees, she crawled up above the high-water mark, and in the darkness, shaking with cold, she lay down to die.
At first Garry Courtney was so involved in the excitement of planning the rescue expedition into the Namib desert, across that dreaded littoral that was named the Skeleton Coast for very good reason, that he did not have the leisure to weigh the chances of success.
It was enough for Garry to be playing the man of action.