In such a fog I had come ashore hours before with Shelborne, who had surprised me by coming alongside in his flatboom and offering to transport my heavy gear ashore. I had accepted, and on landing he had surprised me further by humping the heavy Hydrodist and its batteries up the rough path to the top of the cliff. The desert persisted right to the high-water mark, and towards North Head the shoreline rocks and desert merged into one vast cyst of rotten tissue. This, Shelborne told me, pointing to a curious transom of sandcliff intersected by a narrow sloping ledge about one thousand feet long from beach to summit, was the Lange Wand or Long Wall, an unstable cliff which held back the quicksands from the sea and was dreaded because of its unheralded sandslides, which a loud echo was sufficient to provoke. He himself had been terrified while climbing the narrow path, which had seemed to shift under his weight, up to the tuftless, sucking, deathly wilderness where lay the remains of the old Portuguese warship — surely the most curious death of a ship in the history of the sea. This region also was pocked with bright white patches stretching into the distance. Nearer us and away from this pitiless desolation were low hills of wind-filled rock in whose eroded defiles 'ran' rivers of sand.
Our landing-beach below Sudhuk had a backdrop of rock twisted and eroded as if eaten by some nightmare death-watch beetle. The crumbled whiteness revealed softer boulders embedded in it, rounded and smoothed, arid veining standing out grotesquely. There was a chain of pits, minor caves, grottoes, overhangs and convoluted striations. Dried seasuds and dead deflated jelly-fish lay in the cavities of this great carious pumice stone, like lather dried white by the frenetic worrying of the wind. Piles of driftwood, bleached the same general grey-white of the surroundings, were scattered in untidy profusion everywhere. In the bright sun after the fog I could scarcely bear to burn my eyes on the unreal landscape.
I checked successively the circle amplitude switch, focus and brilliance, and saw that the circle presentation was correctly positioned on the graticule assembly. The pattern selector, which is for individual pattern frequencies, brought a satisfactory response from the ship.
Shelborne, hatless, had discarded his sealskins for a khaki shirt and trousers. He came close. I had expected him to smell of birds and seals, but it wasn't that: the sweat on him had a dry, bland odour, a sort of mustiness like dry-rot. His eyes were searching, probing for something more than understanding how the Hydrodist worked.
'All your equipment in working order?' he asked.
'Yes,' I replied. 'All this calibration and checking seems a waste of time, but it really pays off in the long run.'
'Yes,' he said slowly, 'it's the same with any worthwhile project: years of preparation, maybe. Justification, agony, self-recrimination — then the ecstasy.'
'No ecstasy here,' I laughed. 'This is a job. Soon I'll have your island and your bay buttoned up.'
He smiled with that curious, searching scrutiny of his. Had it merely been a job to me, I would have been plodding my way section by section up the coast as Rhennin had wanted. Instead, I was stretching my nerves on a lot of imponderables and backing an ill-defined hunch: Mercury, Strandloper's Water, Caldwell, Shelborne, the engraved pistol, diamonds. And the sea, Mercury's sea, that was so strangely mated with the Namib. And a U-boat ace's medal — he must have been an ace to win the Knight's Cross; who was this Captain Rhennin? Not Felix Rhennin, but Dieter Rhennin. Who was he?
'Buttoned up!' Shelborne repeated. 'Buttoned up! A curious modernism and too absolute for my liking; the desert and the sea are not so easily buttoned up.'
'I'll skip the philosophizing,' I said. 'I'm working to a tight schedule. That includes some Scuba diving for visual observations of the sea-bed…'
'Scuba diving?'
'Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Skin diving.'
'You surely can't dive deep enough…?'
'Up to thirty fathoms maximum. The charts show nowhere deeper than twenty fathoms in the bay, but I'll rely on my own readings.'
'So you've given up your idea of exploring the Glory Hole?'
A slightly unusual inflexion made me turn: his eyes were resting — with a studied affection it seemed to me — on Mercury, now white-grey under a new season's varnishing of guano. It had been a relief to get away from the lee of the island, not only because of the stink Minnaar belly-ached about but the birds' farmyard din which brought us cursing from our bunks at dawn. Internecine battles started with the day, and mingled with the grunts and roars of seals and the braying of penguins.'
'Of course not,' I replied. 'I've just been trying to work out some details. Like to help, apart from lending us the flatboom, I mean?'
'I should very much like to.' Still the odd note among the resonant vowels. 'Why don't you make a… what-do-you-call-it?… Scuba dive inside the cavern?'
My own view was that Scuba diving was as risky as using a boat in the wild entrance. 'I'll discuss it with Minnaar.'
He cocked his head. Not to acknowledge my remark, but at a sound below us. A thousand tons of sand slipped sullenly, almost noiselessly, 600 feet down the cliff into the sea.
'Yes, anything can happen in this sea.' Again there was an overtone I didn't care for. Was he deliberately trying to lure me into a dangerous dive? I'd make up my own mind about the Glory Hole, I told myself angrily; I wasn't going to be jockeyed by Shelborne, but if there were diamond-bearing gravel on the sea-bed, the Glory Hole was where it would accumulate.
I changed the subject abruptly: 'You said you laid down beacons along the shore years ago. I don't see one.'
There they are!' His eyesight was superb. Look! To the right above the landing-place. There are another two directly opposite the Praying Mantis on the high-water mark. And another on the seaward edge of North Head — see?'
I followed with my binoculars. 'Do you know that every one is between thirty and forty yards from where you originally sited them?'
'According to your instrument. Ground reflection errors, maybe.' He threw my jargon at me.
'No. Minnaar and I took ten or twelve readings on successive carrier frequencies. I checked the carrier shift and Minnaar followed all the fine A-pattern readings as we went along. I concede you an error of not more than two or three inches.'
He shrugged. 'Uplift of the land relative to the sea, eh? That would also account for the way the sandbars formed and trapped the old warship. It must have been pretty quick though.'
'Volcanic upheaval,'I suggested.
'No. There's not a sign of lava…'
If Shelborne knew about what we call continental lift — land tilting and sea receding — then he knew a great deal else. He wasn't a simple old prospector, I reminded myself: he'd been with Caldwell on the Oyster Line…
I played it down. 'There's a hell of a layer of sand, maybe forty or fifty feet, and there may be anything underneath it. It would require thorough investigation.'
He smiled. 'You didn't come to Mercury to talk like Stratum.'
'There's such a thing as scientific proof…'
He was staring fixedly in the direction of the old beacons. He said abstractedly, 'We'll relocate the beacons, then, on the basis of space-age equipment.'