‘Now I don’t want to bore the good folks out there, but the idea is this. As you know, there’s quite a current flowing in the ocean off Mau. It’s the southern end of the Guinea current and it runs south along the coast here, down towards the Congo. The flow is fast, it doesn’t vary much, and it comes right in along the coast. And, most especially, it comes across the mouth of Mawanga harbour.
‘Now, if you’re careful and make allowances, you can get a ship in and out easily, and we reckon the same will be true of the iceberg. We’ll wedge the whole thing in the harbour and be ready to pump out any salt water it displaces. The berg is so big that to begin with, it will block the entrance itself, like a great frozen cork. What will happen next of course is that the iceberg will begin to melt. I’m speculating here, but what we think will occur under these circumstances is this: as the clear water flows back along the anchorage, filling it with a lake of fresh water, it will come up against what is effectively a wall of salt water flowing south. The temperatures and specific gravities will be very different. The two sorts of water won’t mix too readily, and we reckon that, as long as we control the level of the meltwater in the anchorage carefully, the good old Guinea current will keep most of it bottled up for us. And, just in case there’s any miscalculation here, we’ll have our biggest pumps positioned up that end to pump the fresh water free.’
‘In fact,’ enlarged Emily Karanga later that night, ‘we’re hoping that most of the pure water will be transported over the ridge of rock at the mouth of the River Mau. The ridge that keeps the sea water from flowing further up into the dry valley. In fact, it is the first of a series of ridges which has created a sequence of dried-up lakes along the course of the river itself. If we can use the fresh water to fill these lakes, we will have the equivalent of a series of small dams, each holding back a self-contained reservoir of more than a million tonnes of water and refilling the irrigation system my father put in place shortly before his assassination. And we can continue to refill each reservoir as it goes dry until all the ice has gone. Even to melt it all into water will take some time! And I mean, while the ice is hard, we can cut it up and carry it up there in trucks! Think of it!
‘Political ambitions? Oh no. I couldn’t say. Yes, I know my father is remembered… revered,… But, well, let’s just get the water back into the land and the first seed corn planted. Let’s just get every refugee back to his own home farm. Let’s just get all these poor, sick people strong and well again. Then it will be time to talk about politics!’
Ann Cable spent most of that evening standing at her hospital window staring away to the west. The iceberg was still below the horizon but even so, it was making its presence felt in the western sky. The sun bled down behind it, sinking through shades of ruby and garnet to burnt red, magenta and damask. But, just as it settled out of her sight, the sun seemed to rise again, its light flooding up in a dazzling display across the undersides of those high clouds. Bands of burning brightness seemed to come rolling in towards the land as though some Biblical curse was being worked out. After she recovered from her first shiver of unreasoning dread, she stood entranced, watching the searchlight beams of crimson light leaping up from behind the horizon as though some huge volcano were active there and the western waves were all afire, not freezing under the influence of the island of ice which was causing the beautiful show.
It had begun abruptly, but it faded slowly Ann watched every second of it, her face running with tears for the first time since Emily found her. It was as though she found some kind of healing catharsis in the extravagant, overwhelming beauty she was witnessing. As though she found strength in the knowledge that the cause of all this beauty was coming here to heal this broken land.
She did not remember sleeping at all that night. The light show seemed to carry on almost to midnight, when it was augmented by a real firework display from the President’s residence. Perhaps she slept but she did not remember even sitting down. She was back at that window watching when the first light of dawn began to glimmer like the ash of pink roses on the air. There was hardly any light at all, just that exquisite, almost mauve mist and shadows pointing out to sea. And, out to sea, there the iceberg was. The long light ran like water down Mau’s dry valley; it spilled across the anchorage and ran away into the distance until it thundered silently up against a cliff of utter, absolute, heartstopping whiteness.
Ann caught her breath and stood until she was faint with want of breath, simply stunned by the beauty.
‘I have to get this down on paper,’ she said aloud. She ran her hands down her face and they came away wet with tears. ‘Then I’ve got to find my camera bag and get those photographs processed. There’s some kind of prize somewhere in this, Ann, old girl…’
During the next thirty-six hours as the iceberg was painstakingly pulled in across the south-running Guinea current and bedded infinitely carefully into the waiting arms of the anchorage, Ann Cable saw more than anyone else involved. With the kind of energy granted to very few people, she managed to put herself in every location where something important was going on. She had money, contacts, influence. She had a clear view of where she wanted to be and what — whom — she wanted to see. She had the drive of a door-to-door Bible salesman. She had the timing of a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi. She had the sort of luck Napoleon required in his generals. She was simply unstoppable.
It was Ann who was in the reception camps as day broke properly, discussing with the dying what this solid water meant; exploring with villagers who had never in all their lives seen ice outside a freezer what one billion metric tonnes of the stuff would mean to them. It was Ann who rode with Emily to pick up Indira and who interviewed her in the bouncing jeep as they went out to the airport to await the Secretary General’s plane. It was she who took the opportunity of a slight delay to interview the acting President in a waiting room, both of them caught between relief and surprise to discover that the rest of the press corps were out at the mouth of the anchorage looking at the sight which Ann, hundreds of feet higher, had seen a couple of hours earlier. Of all the things she learned in the interview with the urbane, charming, acting President M’Diid, the most important of all was how irreplaceable was the view from her sickroom window.
But, inevitably, as the Secretary General’s plane at last arrived, the rest of the pack arrived too and Ann swapped places with them. She stepped out onto the furthest point of the northern arm of die anchorage and discussed with Warren Cord the manner in which the lead tankers would sail along the outside of the harbour until they could hand down their unbreakable lines. How these would then be attached to whole series of the largest earthbound vehicles Ann had ever seen, and how these incredible earth movers would grind down the roads, replacing the power of the supertankers as best they could. Titan, she knew, would remain at the harbour mouth, acting as go-between for the drivers of the massive vehicles and the captains of the three ships nearly a hundred kilometres away, whose ships by that time would be working in full reverse, trying to slow the stately progress of the massive inertia of one billion tonnes of ice as it was grudgingly ameliorated from two knots to dead stop in the seventy-five kilometres of the anchorage itself.