It neared and neared, until even the watchers on the headland began to grasp something of its size and speed, and to realize the danger the rest of the tribe were in. They could see the others still, small dots in the distant bay, moving around. They began to call at the tops of their voices Big wave! Big wave! Perhaps the tribe had already heard, like underwater thunder, the sound of its approach. They were coming ashore, lining the beach, safe from the largest waves of any normal sea.
Now those on the headland could make out the shape of the wave, a black steep hill, ridged and hummocked, though the ridges and hummocks were themselves enormous waves. White foam glittered along the moving crest. And now as its roots touched land it changed and rose and the hill became an inward-curving wall, black, hard, with a white mane of foam along the hanging ridge, poised to fall but not falling because the rush of the wave itself caught it up before it could do so. In front of it, along its length, was a trench or gulf where it sucked the calm ahead back into it, and now this too broke into roaring foam as its own roots touched land.
They cried aloud and pointed. Tiny with distance, ahead of the wave in the still silky calm, dark specks appeared and vanished and came again a few heartbeats later. A pattern of dolphins was racing to escape the wave, but for all their speed they were too slow. The watchers wailed in terror as they saw the wave engulf them. But now they knew its speed, and from that its distance and from that its size, and realized that even up here on the headland they might not be safe. They ran for the ridge behind, reached it panting and turned.
By now the people in the bay had seen the wave, understood their danger and were trying to escape. Some were perched on rocks, others climbing the gully which Li had used yesterday, but it was clear to the watchers that they would be too late. The wave was almost ashore. But time had slowed and it seemed for those last few pounding heartbeats to be loitering on its way, to be climbing as it came, to be reaching up and up, and forward too, as if it was deliberately leaning to claw the watchers from their hill-top. It reached the headland opposite and they saw it tower into the sunlight in an immense and glittering white column, growing and growing as the power that had driven it landward was forced to spend its unimaginable energy in upward motion, climbing until it seemed to be reaching for the sun.
Then it struck the headland on which they stood. Huge though it was, its crest had come below these higher cliffs, so first they heard its thunder and at the same moment the blast of air expelled from between the wave-front and the cliff hammered them to the ground. They wailed, and with the instincts of sea-creatures who had learnt to survive on storm-battered coasts they limpeted themselves to the boulders which strewed the headland. Some closed their eyes, but Li was impelled to watch. Terrified, numb, certain of death, her need to know and wonder still had power.
She saw the white wall shot skyward at the headland, saw the wave pass by, rising as its mass was funnelled into the bay, surging above the cliffs where they had passed, so that it would fling itself far up the slope beyond, where the stream had run, right over the pool and on up the mountain-side, but before it did so the world around her went dark as the water of the wave’s first onslaught began to crash back down.
Land creatures would never have survived it. It fell not as foam, not as ordinary wave-strike reaching a shore, but as solid immense slabs of the black, cold inmost ocean, slamming down. There would be a moment to breathe, and then another mass of water hammered against them, swirled round them, dragged at them where they clung and roared away. Li felt the big rock to which she had anchored herself stir in its ancient bed and readied herself to loosen her hold if it rolled away, but it settled back and she was able to fasten herself to it again.
The first was worst. The higher the water had been flung the more it broke apart in the air and fell back no longer in solid slabs but first as a foaming torrent then as a downpour, half air, half water, then as rain, and at last, for a long while, as a fine salty drizzle, icy cold.
Bruised and gasping Li let go of her hold and sat up. Ma-ma was already sitting, huddled over the whimpering baby which somehow she’d managed to shelter beneath her through the onslaught. Around them the others rose, those that were left, for two had vanished, either battered from their hold or because the boulders to which they had clung had themselves been rolled down over the cliff. This must almost have happened to Goor. He came limping up the slope, shaking his head, having been knocked loose and then by a miracle found somewhere else to cling before he was washed away. Below them the sea was a cloudy turmoil heaving to and fro in an immense and shapeless swell whose hummocks were only the ripples set up by the shock of the tsunami striking the continent, but were themselves large enough to send columns of spray squirting against the cliffs far higher than any wave Li had ever seen.
Look called someone, pointing. They saw, and gasped. Behind the bay the last of the tsunami was still sheeting back from the mountains beyond, but the ground over which it fell in foam had changed. There were no cliffs there any more. The weight of the wave had smashed them down into a tumbled slope of boulders, right across the shore, right across the bay and out beyond the bar that had sheltered it. Unreachable beneath that mass of stone the tribe, and Greb, and the strangers he had brought, and the water-caves too, lay buried.
NOW: WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
VINNY WAS SCARED of what Dr Hamiska would say, and wanted to get it over, talking to him alone, so she had to wait till they all climbed the hill again. Still she didn’t get a chance, as he kept loping around, seeing what everyone was doing – like a herd bull on a wildlife programme, she thought, patrolling his territory to stop any interloping male from darting in and making love to one of his wives. His laugh, even, was like a bellow of challenge. If she hadn’t been so nervous she might have had a giggling fit.
Then he went back up to the little cliffs and started to measure and take notes. He looked round and smiled as she approached.
‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘Hold this end for me, will you? How are you bearing up?’
‘I’ve got a headache. Is it all right if you don’t photograph me with the shells?’
‘Tomorrow will do. No, Wishart will be here tomorrow. It’ll have to be Friday. Perhaps we’ll have . . .’
He had been measuring while he spoke, but now he turned his head and stared at her. His voice changed.
‘Or will you have a headache on Friday too?’ he said.
‘It’s terribly hot. I’m not . . .’
‘Sam put you up to this.’
‘No. What . . . ?’
She’d known he’d be angry, but still wasn’t ready for what happened. Not that he shouted, or even said anything for a bit. He just pushed his sun-glasses up on to his forehead and stared at her with his stony pale eyes, and it was like being hit by an invisible force, or like walking out of the shade of the awning into the African sun. He leaned slightly forward. She could see the whole round of each iris. He wanted her to flinch, to burst into tears perhaps, but it didn’t work out like that, though it easily might have. It was Mum, in a way, who came to her rescue. Vinny had never before felt so like her, so surely her daughter. Mum wasn’t afraid of anyone. She’d once got hold of the private number of the chairman of some firm which made power-stations and radar towers, as well as her washing machine, and had rung him up in the middle of a dinner party and made him listen while she told him exactly what she thought of his organization for making her wait in all day for a service engineer who didn’t come. Vinny felt just like that now. She was furious. Dr Hamiska had no right to do this to her.