The Mazy Zed was now anchored off Angras Juntas under the shadow of the guano island of Sinclair where, among millions of birds, seals and penguins, the guano workers scraped away a zombie existence in rags and isolation. The guano islands — run under government supervision — are divided into small groups, each under a headman, and the workers are shifted from island to island by him to gather in the 'white gold'. Having seen Angras Juntas's guano men — crude, moronic, bitter as the ammoniacal stink of the rocks — I wondered about Shelborne's remark that Mercury had a bad name in the islands. If Mercury were bad after Sinclair…
Angras Juntas had been no more than a reconnaissance. My real mission was at hand: I was off the Sperrgebiet in my own ship, bound for the place where instinct and inclination guided me — Mercury Island.
'Rockets to port! Red, green, blue!'
Minnaar, the burly South African mate, was out on the port wing of the Praying Mantis's bridge. He had tried to bluff me that he couldn't sleep because of the unnatural clamminess of the night, but in fact he felt as uneasy as I did about the grim Sperrgebiet coastline abeam. The only other white man aboard was Sven, the Swedish engineer. The others were Coloured and Malay fishermen, recruited down the coast.
The rockets burst out to sea. I grabbed my Japanese night-glasses and in a moment I was at Minnaar's side.
He pointed. 'Bloody Russian trawlers!'
There was nothing except the nightly bank of sea fog rolling in, no boat or ship in distress. I strained into the blackness. This was the second strange phenomenon within hours. A magnificent sunset had flared the great landmark Saddle Hill into a red-hot slag heap, dying to a clear cold indigo in a cinnamon-and-green sea-sky.
'There!'
Through the gauze sputtered a brilliant pyrotechnic change and interchange, linked up with whorls, discs and rays.
'Christ!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'Looks like the whole goddamned Second Soviet Atlantic Group!'
'We'll investigate — steer west by south by a quarter south,' I told the man at the wheel. Fishermen, they steered by time-honoured commands. Two hundred and fifty-six degrees would have meant little to them.
The wheel went down and our wake turned molten gold. Forrad, another radial of flares soared behind the fog. I laughed shakily when I realized what it was: 'Phosphorescence!'
Minnaar was incredulous. 'I've been south in the ice, but I've never seen anything like this, not even the Aurora.'
I turned to the helmsman. 'Belay there. Course, speed, as before.'
'Aye, aye, sir.'
The superb display bickered round the old whaler, transforming her hastily red-leaded plates into squares or glory; the foremast's tracery of rigging shed its workaday Cinderella black for princess green and electric blue; the long racing seas from the south-west glanced with ethereal light until I wished the wind itself would become substantial and take colour. A reef, half-awash, was a diadem and a lonely bird-voyager — it could have been an albatross — flashed incandescent radiance in losing altitude to follow the sullen cliffs.
'I don't like it,' said Minnaar gloomily. 'It means trouble.'
'Trouble?'
'Ag, man, fancy sunsets and this sort of thing at night' — he waved at the evanescent colours — 'and the way I feel, it all means trouble.'
'What do you mean, how you feel?'
He said rather apologetically. 'My cabin's sticky and warm. It's winter, it's cold, and the cabin should be chilly, especially with that fog coming up. Also, my nose tickles — inside.'
I laughed. 'You've got nothing more than a head cold coming.'
'No man.' He was uneasy. 'It's this Sperrgebiet and those colours. I'm not sick.'
'Why don't you turn in?' I asked. He was voicing fears which I preferred to leave undefined.
He went on. 'We lost the Cape Cross near Mercury on a night just like this, and that's why it gives me the willies too — a bit fresh, but hot, sort of. There was also one hell of a sunset the night before.'
'But no phosphorescence?'
'No — I would have remembered.'
I played it down. 'Everyone in Luderitz says old Captain Walker was as drunk as a fiddler's bitch the night he put the Cape Cross ashore.'
'I wouldn't know how drunk he was.' retorted Minnaar. 'But he was a fine sailor, even when he was full of pots. He'd already got busy and slipped the cable by the time I got on deck and started organizing things.'
'I'd guess by that time you were almost ashore.'
'You'll see where,' he replied grimly. 'Right at the foot of the cliff. We all but got clear.'
'I'll make the wreck our landfall, then,' I said more cheerfully than I felt. Captain Walker had been drowned and Minnaar, one of eight men to escape, was lucky to be alive. He had tramped along the wild coast towards Luderitz for help; a party of Boy Scouts had found him just in time on a dune outside the town, raving. There were only two miles to go, but he had been too exhausted to make it.
At first light, our nerves frayed and stretched from searching for landmarks, I spotted Minnaar's old ship at the entrance to Spencer Bay, lying at the base of a 600-foot cliff which rose sheer out of the sea. It was Sudhuk, the notorious Little Gibraltar of the Sperrgebiet, although the Mediterranean could not have produced the desolate loom of shoreline or heavy swell which left markers of white menace across reefs and half-submerged rocks. The fog cleared momentarily under a gust of wind. The forlorn wreck was close — closer than I had thought.
'North by east.'
I rang for half-speed ahead from slow: I'd need extra knots with the run of the sea bucking under the stern.
'There's all sorts of ruddy sets and currents hereabouts,' growled Minnaar, unshaven, still uneasy. 'For Christ's sake don't put this bastard ashore!'
It was Mercury, not Sudhuk, I wanted to see. I knew it lay less than a mile to the north. The butterflies in my stomach weren't all because of the job of entering the bay through the vicious southern channel. I had warned Minnaar that Shelborne might cause trouble.
The wind gusted. The fog fell back. The bay was clear.
Mercury!
A sharp, rocky pyramid, with a base about a quarter of a mile long, lay like a discoloured, off-white fang in the bleak grey gums of the bay. The notorious Namib, desert of diamonds and death, reached right down to the water's edge. The sunlight, following the fog, was as harsh and unremitting as the naked bulb of the condemned cell. Shadows cowered under eroded scraps like grief etched by death in the face of a corpse. The bay was an over-exposed photograph having an amateurish bleach of ill-defined light to the north-east so that my eyes could not distinguish between the surf of the shore and the sand-smoke of the dunes.
There was no doubt, however, about the puff of white smoke which burst from the island.
'By Jesus!' exclaimed Minnaar. 'He's firing on us!'
The grey-white puff blew downwind like an amorphous tumbleweed.
'East by north, a quarter north! Slow ahead!' I corrected the Praying Mantis's swing on entering the channel, the torque of the single screw competing with the unaccountable sets and rebounds of current off Sudhuk.
My binoculars were on the puff. I saw the gun all right. A second cotton-wool puff billowed, soundless, as the wind carried it away. A flag broke out yellow from a jackstaff. The hoist and the gun were too neatly timed. At a busy port they would have been a matter for congratulation; here, on this gloomy and uninhabited coast, they were sinister. They meant the whaler was being watched into the bay.