Keeton could hear the thunder of the seas and he could feel the ship trembling as they struck. He did not believe their troubles were over.
‘What kind of land? A rock? How long before the ship breaks up?’
The hope faded from Bristow’s eyes. ‘You think it’s like that? Just a rock?’
Keeton answered sharply, impatient with Bristow: ‘I don’t know. How could I? Help me carry the Old Man back to his bed. Then we’ll go and look.’
When they went out on deck the wind flicked rain in their faces and a monster with a white head reared up in front of them.
Keeton yelled a warning. ‘Look out! Hang on!’
The spout of water crashed with a sound of thunder on the deck, drenching them. It ran away in gurgling torrents and they made their way to the side. There they clung to the rails and looked at what appeared to be a white carpet visible in the darkness, a shifting, twisting carpet full of queer spiral patterns constantly changing.
Keeton put his mouth close to Bristow’s ear and shouted to make himself heard above the racket of the storm.
‘It’s a reef. A coral reef.’
They clawed across to the other side, and there too was the ghostly glimmer of the surf, a pale hand stretching out into the night. They could hear the wind piling the sea against the ship, making it leap up in great fountains of water, and they could hear the ship groaning.
‘Where do we go from here?’ Keeton said.
Chapter Six
Morning
The reef lay under the sun, white as a bone. It lay with the water rippling over it like a man dozing in a warm bath. Beyond the reef the sea stretched away, blue and placid, apparently with no memory of the storm of yesterday; all that was past and forgotten. Now the wind had fallen, the water was calm, and out of a cloudless sky the glaring disc of the sun poured down its heat like molten metal tipped from a crucible.
Keeton and Bristow stood on the boat-deck of the Valparaiso and gazed around them. Keeton had a pair of binoculars that he had taken from the captain’s cabin; with them he swept all that wide expanse of water lying between the ship and the horizon. It was empty.
‘No neighbours‚’ he said.
Bristow took a wad of cotton waste from the pocket of his shorts and wiped sweat from his forehead. ‘Not even a proper island.’ There was disgust in his voice. ‘Not even a bit of sand and a couple of palm trees. We might have expected better than this.’
‘Last night you were expecting worse. We’ve been lucky. The ship hasn’t sunk.’
‘But how long will it be before she does? Get more bad weather and she may go to pieces.’
Keeton looked over the side. The water was so limpid that he could see the corral touching the ship’s hull. The Valparaiso appeared to have slid into a kind of groove in the reef; she was wedged there, almost on an even keel, as though she had been put into a dry dock for repairs.
‘She could last a long time. The reef has got a good hold on her.’
Bristow seemed determined to look on the dark side of things. ‘Wait till the sea starts pounding her. If you ask me, we’re going to have trouble before long.’
‘At least we’ll be no worse off than we were. We may be able to do something about repairing that boat.’
‘Are you a boat-builder?’
‘A man can do most things if the need is strong enough.’
Bristow walked over to the damaged lifeboat. ‘So you really think you can patch this up good enough to keep the water out?’
‘It’d do no harm to try.’ Keeton fingered the splintered edges of the broken boards. ‘I think it could be done. Let’s swing the boat inboard. We can have a better look at it then.’
‘It’ll be hard work.’
‘A bit of hard work won’t kill you.’
They released the gripes and lowered the griping spar against which the boat had been resting. The davits were operated by handles that turned a worm and cog and swung the boat inboard. It was sweating work in the hot sun, but Keeton drove Bristow to it and finally they had the boat resting on its crutches on the deck.
‘You see‚’ Keeton said. ‘It didn’t kill you.’
Bristow looked at the palms of his hands. ‘It’s given me blisters.’
‘You shouldn’t be so soft. I don’t get blisters.’
He climbed over the gunwale of the boat and examined it from the inside. There were some chunks of metal embedded in the timber and the blades of two of the oars had been shattered. Fortunately, the compass appeared to be undamaged.
Bristow peered over the gunwale. ‘Well, boat-builder? What’s the expert verdict?’
‘We could maybe clamp some wood over that big hole and put in some more here where the upper boards have been splintered. The rest of the damage doesn’t amount to much.’
‘I wouldn’t like to trust myself in a patched-up boat.’
‘You may not have to. It’d be a last resort. Maybe we’ll be picked up. But you can’t count on it.’
He climbed out of the lifeboat and made his way down to the poop. Bristow followed him, as though fearful of being left alone, and they went into the gunners’ quarters. There was water in the washplace and the bulkheads dripped with moisture. After the blaze of heat on deck the air felt almost chilly.
They paddled through the water and stepped over the high sill through the doorway into the sleeping quarters and mess-room. On the table were still some plates and a few dirty knives and forks and spoons which the high fiddle round the edge had prevented from sliding off, and on the floor lay an enamel teapot in company with a slab of cheese, a tin of butter and half a loaf of bread.
The bunks were just as they had been left when the gunners had leapt to action; one could imagine that at any moment the men might come clattering back down the ladder to resume the normal routine. It was hard to realize that for them the last stand-down had been given, that for them there would never again be any call to action. For all of them the game was played out.
Bristow said with his nervous laugh: ‘This place gives me the creeps. Look at all that kit and nobody to claim it. And there’s Lofty’s girl.’ He pointed at a photograph of a blonde pinned above one of the bunks. ‘He’ll never marry her now. Sweet little face and all.’
‘Brainless‚’ Keeton said. ‘You can see that.’
‘She’d have suited Lofty. You could have spread all his brains on a sixpence without covering the date.’
There was a sheet of paper lying on the bunk. Keeton picked it up and saw that it was covered with Lofty’s scrawling, unformed handwriting.
‘My darling Shirley‚’ he read. ‘I am thinking of you always. Maybe it won’t be so long now. When I come home for good ….’
Keeton folded the paper and tore it into small pieces. He let the pieces flutter down to join the debris on the deck. Then he picked up his own kit and moved towards the door.
‘I’m shifting my quarters. I’m getting myself a cabin amidships.
Captain Peterson lay on his bed and his breathing was so slight it would hardly have stirred a cobweb. Keeton had the odd feeling that, though Peterson was looking at him, he was in fact seeing something altogether different; perhaps a picture in his own mind. But it was impossible to tell; one could talk to Peterson, and perhaps the words would reach his brain, but there was no way of being certain that they did, for the old man gave no sign.
‘I wish you could talk‚’ Keeton said. ‘Hell, I wish you could tell me things. There’s so much I need to know.’
This old, old sea-dog could have helped him so greatly; could, out of the vast store of his accumulated knowledge, have given so much valuable advice. There was a world of knowledge locked away in his brain and no way of getting at it. Keeton felt frustrated, as a starving man might feel when peering through a plate glass window at food beyond his reach.