There was a commotion at my feet and I looked at Helen's sleeping-bag. The seal pup was fighting to kick himself free. The little animal shot out of the mouth of the bag. He leapt on to the thwart next to me and stood with his head cocked, every muscle tense.
Someone was knocking on the bottom of the boat.
13. Thompson Island
For a moment I thought Sailhardy or Helen was striking the bottom-boards in some final convulsion of weakness.
Knock! knock! knock! -someone might have been rapping a knuckle on the underside of the boat.
Saidhardy's eyes opened and he put his ear to the gratings. I knelt down and did the same.
The islander exclaimed faintly. " It's the Tristan Knocker!" 199
" The Tristan Knocker?"
I could see his excitement, but he was so weak that he had to speak deliberately to get the words out. " It's got a scientific name in South Georgia, but on Tristan we call it the Knocker. It's a big fish, like a cod. That's the noise they make when they're courting! Look at the seal!"
The little animal had slithered across the thwart and was gazing excitedly at the sea. At any moment he would go over the side.
Upton stood over us, gaunt, wild-eyed. " What is it? What is it, you two?"
S a i l h a r d y s a t u p. " I t ' s l a n d! T h e T r i s t a n K n o c k e r spawns in shallow water. There's land-close!"
The seal pup dived over the side. It was just light enough to see in the dawn. The albatross made a point of white against the dark patch out to port which I thought to be fog. Upton's face was alive. " Land! Thompson Island!" Helen turned her face away.
" If it is the Meteor's base, I will know it," said Pirow. " You can't mistake the entrance and the headland."
Walter screwed up his eyes, but the albatross was now out of sight. " That would be the way to go, sure, but how? There' s no wind and we're too weak to row."
" Get up to the tiller, Wetherby," said Upton.
" There is no way on her…" I began.
" There will be," he replied. " I'm going to row!" Without waiting, he went forward and returned with the bag he had salvaged from the factory ship. He filled the syringe carefully. We watched, fascinated. With Walter helping, he heaved up one of the big oars into position in the thole. Gripping the oar with his right hand, he took the hypodermic in his left and thrust the point into the muscles of his right. Quickly he changed hands and repeated the strange performance.
" What the hell…?" I said.
" Caffeine," he said shortly. " Now get up to the tiller." " This is not the time to start giving yourself fancy drugs." He did not take his eyes off my face, but sat at the oar, clamping and unclamping his fingers. Then he did not seem to be able to open them any more.
He grinned. " I'm going to row this boat to Thompson Island. Caffeine paralyses the muscles. I can't take my hands off the oars. They're going to stay there until we reach Thompson Island. Steer!"
" Over there-where the albatross went?"
" Yes I "
I clambered stiffly up to the tiller seat. The boat felt lop-sided with one oar, but I brought her head round towards the dark patch. The sun came up and turned the vast amphitheatre of ice into a breathing panorama. The sea was bluegreen and calm, and my eyes could scarcely tolerate the whiteness of the barrier. We were heading away from the nearest cliffs, which rose to full view, in the direction of a belt of fog which completely blanked off the eastern and southern shores of the barrier. The seal pup sported about the boat with a Tristan Knocker in his mouth.
Pirow and Walter cooked more food, and Walter took a short trick at another oar but soon gave it up. Helen brought me some hot food and had some herself, but she looked deathly pale. Upton's stroke became weaker and weaker. Suddenly I felt a strong thrust underneath the boat. It took us quickly into the belt of fog, before I realised that the boat was in the grip of a powerful current. I felt the warmth first, and then the wetness of the fog. Upton, dragging the oar which he could not unclench, was hidden from view; the fog was so thick that Helen, only a few feet away, became a murky outline. The current swept the boat on and on. Once Helen called to me in a frightened, disembodied voice to ask where we were going. The warmth was as unexpected as the darkness. I reached down cautiously and tested the water with my ungloved hand; it too was warm, compared with the normal icy seas of the Southern Ocean.
We broke out of the fog.
Thompson Island lay before our eyes.
I identified it immediately: the low, level east point like a Blue Whale's snout was unmistakable. I had seen it with my own eyes and I had studied Captain Norris' sketches of it. The entrance sloped away abruptly and to the west was the point Norris had called Dalrymple Head. But it was upon neither of these that our eyes fixed in wonder and awe, it was upon the giant glacier which capped-to use Norris' own words the island like a nightmare caul. The strange colour made one automatically think of it as evil. It rose up two thousand feet sheer, its foot in the inner anchorage, which was still out of sight. It had none of the opaque whiteness and soft undertones of blue and green of the floating ice-continent which encircled the island and had aroused our wonder earlier: the caul was bottle-green and translucent to such a degree that one could see huge trapped boulders deep inside, its 201 heart; there was a tracery of white in a group about halfway up which looked as if it might have been the entombed skeletons of half a dozen Blue Whales. The baleful green gave it an inherent quality of malice, heightened by my realisation that the anchorage entrance of ragged basalt and pumice cliffs resembled the open jaws of a serpent. There was no sign of ice or snow on them. By contrast, the caul towered in archangelic glory and stretched away out of sight to the south. Upton, hampered by the oar, gazed speechlessly. His voice was thick when he gestured at the cliffs flanking the entrance. " Caesium! Caesium!"
Striated and grooved with white, like the stripes on a zebra's flank, were the veins of priceless ore.
I had never seen Upton so moved. The gaunt face was radiant under its patina of stubble, argyria and fatigue. " Mine!" he exclaimed. " All mine!"
The strong current swept us in towards the point like driftwood.
Pirow was smiling. The sight of Thompson Island had restored his morale. " The fleet is waiting for you, Herr Kapitan!"
I turned to look at him. The boat was swept round the headland into a long fjord.
" See!" he said.
Canted against the northern bank of the anchorage was a liner. I did not need to see her name. That Clyde-built silhouette was as familiar to me as London Bridge. For months I had studied it-the streamlined funnel set further aft than was usual during the war, and the peculiar derricks forward. The liner's picture had hung in the chartroom of H.M.S. Scott. The liner's last agonised signal, outward bound to Melbourne in 1942, was fresh in my mind:
" QQQ-QQQ-QQQ-45° South, 10° West-liner Kyle of Lochalsh-am being attacked by unknown ship."
Before my eyes, in Thompson Island's harbour, lay the Kyle of Lochalsh.
A little further down the fjord, half-beached, was the tanker Gronland. Rommel never knew that Kohler had won one of the Afrika Korp's battles in the frozen fastnesses of the Southern Ocean. The loss of fifteen thousand tons of aviation spirit and diesel oil she was carrying to the Middle East had reduced still further Britain's hold there. Gronland had vanished while under my charge. The tanker's heavy feeder hoses were still over the side. I saw now the source of Kohler's apparently unlimited supplies of fuel.