I opened it.
A man and woman were making love on the big bunk.
I was too dumbfounded to speak. I gestured to Anne. She squeezed past me and looked. She didn't draw back or make a sound. She just stood looking and, without turning round, drew me in by the arm.
The two lovers, naked, were dead.
He lay on top and slightly on her right side. Her face looked up into his. Her lips were slightly parted, a little lopsidedly to the right, and I could see the line of her white teeth. The hair, dark as passion, lay back across the pillow, filmed with sand. The eye sockets were full of sand. In the erect nipple of her left breast the sand had gathered in the runnels of flesh. Her other breast was somewhere under him. Propped on his left elbow, he looked down — as he had done for five centuries — into her eyes. His hair was dark and the hollow of his back was filled with sand. Below the waist, their two bodies were fused — for ever.
Anne was crying. She took me by the arm.
"Come," she said.
She led me back over the side and we dropped down into the soft sand near the stern. The sun was falling behind the mountain barrier.
She let a handful of sand run through her fingers.
"That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," she said. "That is how I would wish to die. I'd like to be buried near them."
I took her in my arms. I never knew her more than in that moment. The right eyelid was quite smooth.
A last shaft of light blazed into the big locked stern windows above us. Their stained glass bore the arms of Aragon and Castile.
XIV
The Secret of Curva dos Dunas
I thought it only a gigantic black shadow against the rock — until it moved. The face, cased in black hair to the end of its square, blunt nose, peered at us in concentrated animosity.
Johann raised the Remington, but Stein spoke swiftly in German. It was a long shot, and upwards as well into the long ledge which ran along the left side of the gorge.
"What is it?" Anne asked me in a whisper of fear.
"Back a little," said Stein.
The four of us withdrew from the gloom of the narrow defile towards the brighter light where the sand of the river still caught, whitely, the sun from overhead, despite the tree-lined banks. It was about ten the next day and we had marched since eight. Stein had had nothing to say when we returned to camp the previous evening from the old ship. I had lain awake long with my own thoughts, and now and then I had heard Anne turning restlessly, too.
For the two hours of the morning's march the river bed had gained altitude considerably, and the gorge narrowed sharply. Now, at a point which I estimated to be half-way between the previous night's camping-spot and our turn-off point down the Nangolo valley flats, a huge spur of the Ongeamaberge threw itself, as if in despair to link up with peaks on the Portuguese side, right into the course of the river, leaving a passage so narrow that in flood time the water must have shot through with the velocity of an open faucet.
We had come upon the narrow gap after rounding a steep bend.
Now we fell back towards some huge trees a couple of cables' lengths from the gap.
Stein turned to me venomously.
"You never mentioned this," he said furiously. "Is there still another cataract? What is that — that animal?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Let's go and have a look," I said ironically. "Give me the gun."
Johann burst into a cackle.
"If there's any shooting to be done, we'll do it," he snapped. "What is that animal — is it dangerous? Can we get past without its tackling us?"
"How should I know?" I retorted.
"You soon will," he said. He spoke to Johann in his own language again. Reluctantly the U-boat sailor passed him the Remington. Stein carried all the arms now. But he wasn't going to take any chances. He took the Luger in his right hand and swung the rifle under his left.
"Forwards," he said to me. "You and the girl wait here, Johann. If there's any shooting, come after us."
I led. We rounded the bend again, gloomy and overhanging. The giant shadow moved. He was standing sentry.
I looked up the gorge and my heart froze. The river bed had narrowed until it had cut its way through solid rock. There must have been another sharp bend a little higher up, for the water had swathed away the rock on our left until it looked for all the world like the last lap of the Cresta run, smooth, polished rock instead of snow, with a shallow runnel above extending for maybe three hundred yards. If a toboggan can touch ninety miles an hour on the Cresta, my guess was that the Cunene in flood came round this bed with the speed of Nautilus. Above the gigantic furrow of rock was a ledge running the whole length of the bed. I thought it was in black shadow.
The shadows were gigantic black lions.
Stein drew back in amazement and fear.
"A lion!" he exclaimed. "But it cannot be! There is no living lion as big as that!"
The sentry beast got to its feet from a crouching position and looked over at us, measuring the distance. For the first time I saw the tawny coat as well as the enormous black mane which enveloped not only its head and shoulders, but its back and chest. It was the size of an ox, though not as tall.
"Not one lion, Stein," I said. "Look, the whole ledge is crawling with them!"
I laughed in his face.
"Now find the ace," I sneered at him. "Remember what I said — ' famous last words.' You'll have to go back. Stein."
"Never!" he shouted. "I'll shoot every one… "
"Don't be a bloody fool," I said. "How many do you think you'd get before they'd get you? Look at that, man!"
There were stirrings on the ledge and a whole troop of eyes swivelled on to us. The great brute at the mouth of the rock tunnel opened his mouth and purred softly. It was the most frightening noise I have ever heard. The great black heads, majestic, contemptuous, watched lazily, vigilantly, every muscle at the ready.
"It's the Cape lion!" screamed Stein. A quiver ran through the beast when he heard the noise of the human voice. "My God! It's been extinct for over a century. The old Cape hunters said it was the most dangerous animal in Africa! They shot it out on the plains. Now — the Skeleton Coast is its last retreat."
I gazed in fascinated awe at the huge beast poised on the ledge. Stein's was the only explanation. I was looking at history, looking at antiquity. Deadly, hellishly dangerous antiquity! The Skeleton Coast guarded its gateway with the world's oldest and deadliest animal! I felt weak at the knees. I also knew that Stein and his crazy expedition was at an end.
I said so.
"This is the point of no return, Stein," I said roughly. "You couldn't get past that lot, even with a tommy-gun. I doubt whether a high velocity two-two would even halt one of those brutes."
Stein rounded on me so savagely that I thought he would use the Luger.
"You capitulate, Captain Peace, but I don't! We go on, even if we have to go round the mountains."
"What is it you're so keen to find there in the Otjihipo mountains?" I said bluntly. "Not some piddling beetle. Is it a cache of diamonds?"
He looked surprised. He wasn't lying.
"No, Captain Peace, not a cache of diamonds. Something much more valuable. The Onymacris beetle. Found only in the Gobi Desert and North Borneo once. No longer."
He must be mad, I decided.
"Let us go back and talk this over with the others," he said, and there was nothing irrational in the way he said it. "But understand, we are going on — at whatever cost."
We retreated cautiously again, with a careful eye on the huge black-covered face.
We were starting to emerge when I heard the noise at our backs.