They pulled us aboard.
I found a bottle of rum and two mugs in the wardroom. The cold of the Antarctic sea seemed to paralyse our throats.
Jubela stopped me as I raised my mug to his. His joking light-heartedness was back. A Tonga loves to make fun of himself, more than of anyone else. His seaboots still hung round his neck.
'I knew you would come back to find me,' he laughed. 'I knew it would take too much for you to explain to the government why the seaboots were gone. So I just tied them round my neck and swam. I was right. You came, Kosaan.'
I grasped the mug with both hands to stop the rum slopping. I knew the rules of Jubela's game of banter.
'There was no other reason,' I grinned back. ‘It would have meant too much paper work for me if you had been lost. The boots are worth far more than the man.'
‘I will hang these boots in my hut when I am old, Kosaan.'
Then what will I say in my report, Jubela? One pair of seaboots lost — as souvenirs?'
He put his mug down and took my hand and arm again in that strange double handshake. His hands were colder than mine, but still he did not drink the warming rum. The Spanish grin was gone.
'There is a tree of ours which commands respect,’ he said. 'It commands respect, and this is due to you, Kosaan, the captain. It is different from all other trees, with strange big grey leaves, like the claws of an ostrich. It is a strange tree, because it weeps big drops like a woman's tears; it is lonely, because men avoid it, for they say it has the smell of death about it. The name is Umdhlebe.'
He picked up his mug of rum and drank it off without stopping.
‘I thank you, Umdhlebe.’
The Cape Point light started to drop astern. Jubela at the wheel balanced himself as Walvis Bay gave a quick little duck-tail shake. At Cape Point the long levels of the Atlantic fall into step with the quick strides of the Indian Ocean, and Walvis Bay fell into step too, like the little thoroughbred she was.
Strange. Alone. Weeps. The smell of death about it. She had underlined the loneliness of the weatherwatch patrol, but had not derided it, or held out the joys of the land to me. I had replied, 'it suits me,' and she had accepted that, but it still wasn't the answer. I had said I did. not grieve for the Waratah grandfather I had never met; I knew the hazards of a pilot as I knew the hazards of the sea, and my father had survived more than his fair share of flak, bullets and war. Why should I weep inwardly, she had asked herself, why should I grieve? Why should Jubela have said, the smell of death? He could not read and the pictures of the Waratah and Gemsbok meant nothing to him-I doubt whether he had been more than once or twice in my cabin anyway. Was it possible to detect through me on an extra-sensory level the deaths of 211 people in the ship and forty-seven in the airliner? The moment had passed ever to question Jubela; I knew that if I did he would laugh and deny that he had said anything of the kind. Yet tonight, when she had been the agent in provoking this tumult of introspection, he had called me Umdhlebe.
A gust of wind — they call it a willy-waw — broke from behind Cape Point and slapped Walvis Bay astern; the squall and the rain obscured the last light.
The darkness of the night was my answer.
Two days later, I held Walvis Bay twelve miles offshore going north to Durban. It was a beautiful day and the great forests of the Transkei were clear to see on the cliffs and hills rising up from the coastline. A soft north-easterly breeze had no winter chill in it, and a quiet sea made no test of the weather ship's strong flared bow.
It had come to me, that night off Cape Point, that it would be a golden opportunity to pass up the coastline to Durban near East London on a course as near as I could steer to Waratah's own, and perhaps form some sort of reconstruction of the disaster. Why? The only answer I could have given then, before the chain of events unfolded itself, was — her. Perhaps on my protracted return to Cape Town I would be able to tell her something first-hand about the area which had swallowed up a ship and an airliner without trace, and take up, so to speak, where we had left off. I had sailed the route before the Gemsbok crash and knew the coast reasonably well. Was I merely building another facade by retracing Waratah's course, like the one she had penetrated in order to see what lay behind? Or was I trying to create an easy excuse for seeing her again?
I plotted my course on the new chart she had brought me: here, under my keel now, somewhere between East London and the mouth of the Bashee River, more than 250 people had gone to a mysterious death sixty years apart in two vastly different craft. Could the two calamities be equated? More to keep myself occupied with the enigma than hoping for any real clue from it, I checked and rechecked the position of every headland, each river mouth up the coast — Nahoon Point, Gonubie Point, Kwelegha, Cintsa, Kefani, Haga Haga, Great Kei, Qolora, Kobonqaba, Nxaxo, Qora, Shixini — every one to the Bashee Mouth, until I felt repelled by the crop of outlandish names. Every position was right, every description faultless. The area was well frequented — Walvis Bay passed five ships going and three coming, including two big tankers. Through my binoculars I examined the shoreline and investigated every splendid headland. The bland sea smiled back with Oriental impenetrability. At length, off the Bashee Mouth itself where Waratah was last sighted, I could find no excitement. It was a calm, uncomplicated, beautiful day. It held no mysteries, no deaths. It was a passageway of ships on their lawful business, and ashore the holidaymakers and fishermen went about their holiday occasions.
Off Port St John's, where Waratah exchanged her last signals with Clan Macintyre, the ship which will always be associated with her name, it was the same. It was warmer there under the faint north-easter, and a friendly ski-boat from the shore circled Walvis Bay. I closed to the exact position where the ships had been off the magnificent Gates of Port St John's, but it was so prosaic that I found my attention wandering from what I had set out to do at the sight of the splendid 1200-foot cliffs topped by forests.
It was a day to offset the wild nights of the Southern Ocean.
Or did the very loneliness of the day, in its beguilement, shut fast the tragedy which lurked beneath its.easy waters? Accused, or witness, the sea? It smiled back now, bland and beautiful.
CHAPTER THREE
'Waratah!’
Alistair shied his empty beer can in a shallow trajectory towards the bulkhead. It made an adroit cannon off the steel beam immediately below the photograph and clattered unerringly into my wastepaper-basket to the one side. He must have seen my face darken at his clowning — he was not to know that she had stood just there, treading gently and wonderingly into a mystery which had been woven into the fabric of a man she had just met-for he leapt off his chair with schoolboyish zest, made an aeroplane shape of his hands, and zoomed them over the receptacle where the can still vibrated.
His light-heartedness was irresistible. That's where the Buck boys' training begins-in the stern classroom of the mess,' he went on. 'If you can hit a thing with a beer can, you can hit it with a bomb, says teacher. So..'