I saw some big rocks on my right and beyond a kind of flat plateau. Between ridges and gullies the water raced and creamed. While I kept to the ridges I might be safe. I inched forward on my hands and knees, ripping my trousers on the barnacles. I found one rock, a peardrop-shaped thing about the size of a tennis-court. Two others, each the size of a cottage, acted as bastions on my left against what I feared — the wrench and grip of the ravaging sea. The smaller of these two was at the base of the plateau. I could see a sort of inlet in this. Slipping, half-in and half-out the water, I dragged myself into it. For the first time — in hours it seemed — I was able to breathe. The hole was fashioned like a corkscrew stair, not dry, but at least sheltered. I crawled cautiously forward. It was dark, like twilight. I manoeuvred myself to the top of the rocky stair, afraid that the demented wind might pluck me away when my head emerged. It led to a platform half an acre in extent, high and safe. A blinder reef! That's what they call them on the Sperrgebiet — mostly half awash but with some shelter, they are favourites of birds and seals. This was the kind of spot on which the two educated drunks sweated it out on Hollam's Bird Island.
I eased forward. I lost my footing and slipped, heavily.
I fell on a body.
There was not one body, there were scores of them!
My cushion gave a loud grunt. Seals! Blinder reef seals! I'd fallen into a seal nursery. The big wet glossy creatures grunted, slithered and bellowed. I expected to be savaged. I made for a corner, where a bull snarled and bared his fangs. I screamed hysterical obscenities at them above the wind, but apart from grunting they remained quiet. An occasional dollop of sea found its way into the nursery. There must have been several hundred seals, but in the half-light I could not be sure. I lay where I was.
The darkness of the sky became the darkness of senselessness.
Wood crunched into bone, sickeningly. I awoke, and I smelt blood. All I could see was the stars. Then a wooden club rose in silhouette. It was all bloody, held by a naked, massive fist. It was not the sight of the club which drew my dry scream of terror so much as the grotesque grouping of piebald blotches on the skin of the upraised arm. The scream died in my throat and all I managed to get out was a strangled whisper.
'God, Koeltas, a white man!'
The club sank out of sight and with it the piebald arm and torso. The silence in the darkness was as unnerving as my rise to consciousness to find that death-dealing club poised.
Then a thin voice, harsh and authoritative, rasped, 'Johaar, hold that torchie nice and low, will you!'
The light blinded me as I raised myself on an elbow.
A third voice said, 'Cut his bladdy throat, man — it's one of Shelborne's men!'
I said, 'Do you know Shelborne? Shelborne of Mercury Island?'
There was another scarifying silence. The torch swept across me, picking out my sodden, torn clothes.
'I'm saying to you, cut his throat!' repeated one voice.
The thin, metallic voice said, 'Hold your big jaw, Kim, you stupid bloody poacher!'
I guessed at the type behind the thin voice. I had heard that note too often in my childhood in the Richtersveld to be mistaken. It was one of the savage little nomads who escaped extermination during the brutal German-Hottentot war at the turn of the century. A mixture of Hottentot, Bushman and Strandloper — that Stone Age survivor on the Sperrgebiet who stinks worse than a hyena — these little men are either outlaws or fishermen on the coast; indeed, I had two or three in my crew of the Praying Mantis. No effective control can be exercised over the isolated communities on the coast who live wandering lives between the shore and the desert. They are superb seamen who live a twilight existence poaching, stealing seals, smuggling illicit diamonds from native workers at Oranjemund to undercover spots in Angola and West Africa, and running law-breakers from civilized ports to remote hideouts on the coast. They are small-boned, short, wiry men with heads of tight curls like Bushmen; they are intelligent and authoritative and generally crew their ships with half-breed Malay and Cape Coloured fishermen. They are a dying race — tuberculosis and alcohol have an appalling annual toll.
I dropped into the Hottentot-Bushman patois of the wild mountains, a series of broken clicks like a hungry man swallowing oysters and cracking the shells in his teeth. 'If you're poachers, then come and poach something worthwhile with me, not these seals which bring you a couple of shillings a pelt!'
There was a rumble from the piebald man I associated with the name Johaar. 'Ag, God, he asks us nice and sweet, come and poach with me when he lies like a wet poop on the rocks!'
The thin voice said, 'You speak like us — how is this in a white man?'
My life depended on my reply. 'Diamonds!'
The torch swivelled and they laughed softly, sinisterly, yet impressed by my use of their patois. There were three of them.' Koeltas, a thin, spare, yellow man with a rudimentary nose and oblique eyes, to my dazed senses he looked like one of Genghis Khan's ancient Tartar riders. A yellow oilskin hung below his knees. This was a genuine Hottentot sailor-nomad, Johaar, of the naked torso, was a giant half-caste. Hand-sized splotches of piebald skin stood out like the markings of some dread disease in the faint light. The third, Kim — which I took for a shortened form of Gakim, which meant Malay blood in his mixed ancestry — was peering at me sardonically, aquiline nose thrust forward. It was he who wanted to cut my throat. Savage, dangerous, unpredictable outcasts with a wayward sense of humour which could win or lose a life in a flash. If I could make them laugh I might be safe.
'Did you ever hear a seal talk Hottentot?'
Koeltas did laugh. 'Even Kim never thought of having a love-affair with a seal.'
The three of them joined in the silent mirth.
'Who are you?'
'John Tregard. My ship was wrecked.'
A look of cunning and avidity spread across the yellow face. 'Where is she, this ship of yours? Was she carrying diamonds?'
'Any brannewyn — brandy?' Johaar followed up quickly.
Kim leaned down until his face was six inches from mine. He had an odd Semitic look about his rather handsome half-caste features. 'You lie about diamonds.'
'My ship wasn't carrying diamonds…' I began.
'You lie!' Koeltas asserted flatly. 'You lie about the ship too.'
'Cut his bloody throat!' said Kim.
My life hung in the balance. A fight would have been hopeless. I remembered the diamonds in the German Knight's Cross. Had it survived my jump and desperate crawl through the rocks? I fumbled in my pocket. Perhaps Johaar thought I was going for a gun, because he held the club poised. I breathed thankfully as my fingers closed on the medal.
I showed it to them. 'See this — diamonds! There are lots more where I am looking.'
Koeltas demanded, 'Where is the ship?'
I hung the cross by its gold chain round my neck. I tried to get to my feet, but I was too weak. 'I'll show you.'
Johaar said, 'Let's go then. I'll carry this bastard since he can't walk. A ship on the rocks is better than killing seals.'
The Tartar-like Koeltas held a knife in his left hand. These were the types Shelborne had spoken of, men who came in blacked-out ships under darkness and plundered his carefully-tended nurseries for the sake of a few score pelts and were gone again before dawn. They were as predatory and hungry-looking as the jackals along the shore.
Koeltas's laugh had no humour in it. 'Tonight you are lucky — twice. We don't use the dynamite (he pronounced it dinnameet) because we don't want the noise, unnestan'? Other nights we float in an old oil drum filled with dinnameet and a time-fuse. It kills the seals — whoof! Why aren't you Shelborne's man?'