The Strode Venturer (22 page)

“You’re sure this is the same island?” Reece’s question expressed the doubt in all our minds. If one island had emerged from the depths, there could be others.

“Quite sure.”

“But it’s changed.”

“Yes, it’s changed.” Peter put the glasses down and swung away from the window, facing Reece, his voice harsh: “What the hell did you expect after yesterday? It’s larger, that’s all. There’s more of it. You should be pleased,” he almost snarled. “You’ll get a bigger ship, bigger cargoes.” They faced each other across the wheelhouse, the atmosphere electric, the rift between them wide open. “If you don’t like it—if you’re scared …” But he stopped himself in time and suddenly he was smiling, all the tension wiped from his face. It was a conscious, controlled relaxation of every muscle of
his body. “Let’s go and have breakfast. We’re at anchor and there’s nothing to worry about.”

It was sausages and bacon and fried onions, not the most suitable meal for a blistering morning on the equator, but I remember I had two helpings and so did most of the others. We were all damned hungry. I must have had four or five cups of coffee, all of us sitting there smoking, as though by lingering in the familiar surroundings of the saloon we could obliterate the island from our minds. I think perhaps we succeeded for those few minutes, but as soon as we went on deck there it lay, black and sinister-looking against the sun’s glare, separated from us by no more than a mile of flat calm shoaling water.

Work had already started. The cargo booms were being rigged, the barge alongside and the lashings being cleared from the deck cargo. The little runabout we had stowed on the after end of the boat deck was manhandled to davits and lowered into the water. The winches clattered, the first of the landing craft was lifted clear of No. 4 hatch and swung over the side. The ship seethed with activity and a message was wirelessed to Gan for onward transmission to Strode House to say we were anchored off the island and were proceeding to offload stores and equipment for the establishment of the shore base. Whimbrill, at any rate, would be glad to know, and so would Ida. No reference was made in the message to the fact that the island had increased in size or that we had seen evidence of submarine volcanic disturbance.

By eleven o’clock Peter and I were in the runabout and headed for the shore. We took Ford with us and also Amjad Ali, the Pakistani foreman. Reece stayed on board. He wasn’t interested in the island. All that concerned him was the safety of the ship. He had made that perfectly clear to us and he wanted to get away from the place just as soon as he could. A light breeze blew spray in our faces and the wavelets glittered in the burning sun, blinding us with reflected light. But as we approached the first shoal we came under the lee of the island. The water was smooth
then and we could see the bottom dark with weed growth.

Ahead of us were patches of emerald-coloured water and after skirting the dark back of the second shoal, the bottom changed to sand of a coarse grey texture. The water here was so clear and still that our shadow followed us, gliding across the flat sands four fathoms deep. We were in a small bay then, its shores a dark sweep of sediment, grey slopes streaked with black and metallic glints of cuprous green. Smooth rock outcropped on the southern shore and at the extremities of the bay’s two arms, which were about half a mile apart, the breaking swell had sucked away the overlying sediment, leaving the nodules exposed in black shingle banks of naked ore. “It was about here we anchored in the
Strode Venturer
,” Peter said.

His statement came as a shock for I knew the
Strode Venturer
had anchored in ten fathoms. In the short space of two months the earth’s crust had been lifted almost forty feet.

We landed on the north side of the bay, where beaches of coarse-grained sand ran up like ramps to merge with the caked debris of sun-dried slime and weed. All this shore was ideal for beaching landing craft. But for the barge, which would be ferrying the heavy equipment in on its hatch covers, we needed some sort of a natural quay so that it could be brought alongside. Then when the tide fell and it took the ground the big stuff could be driven straight ashore. We needed a camp site, too, and all this had to be considered in relation to what looked like being the most promising area for open cast working of the ore deposits.

Back of the beach there was a shallow ridge. It was easy walking, the sediment baked hard by the sun, the weed all dead. There were no birds, no sign of any living thing. But shells crunched under our feet and the smell of the dried weed was very strong. The ridge was about thirty feet high and from the top of it we had the beginnings of a view across the island. It was fairly narrow, shaped like the inverted shell of a mussel, the high point towards the south,
and it was dark and bare—a lunar landscape. But not hostile; only the neutrality of a dead place.

It was a relief then to turn and face the sea. The
Strode Trader
looked very small at that distance and only the runabout lying beached below to link this barren island with the cosy familiarity of my cabin on board. I tried to analyse my feelings about the place as I followed Peter along the top of the ridge. I’d seen the bed of the sea before, for I had done a lot of underwater fishing. But it had been alive then, a wet, live world where fish swam and sea grasses grew and there were shells that moved with the purposiveness of living creatures. Here nothing moved. All was dead. No life, no growing thing, nothing—only the skeletal shells of things that had died in the sun and the smell of their death and decay still hanging in the air.

A sudden almost vertical drop and we were on sand, the grain smaller, but sand that was caked and salt-crusted, filmed in places with a filthy livid green as though the whole pan of it was diseased. And then up again, climbing a little higher now, above the tide mark of the last upheaval, clear of the decayed weed growth. We were on the old island then, the place where Peter had landed two months earlier, and here the receding ocean had left the sediment in great banks with exposed ore lying between them in drifts of black cobbles. Wind and rain had carved the sedimental dunes into fantastic shapes and the sun had baked them hard so that they looked like crumbling castles of grey sandstone. Black and grey, this moon-mad landscape lay tumbled about us. All the weed that had once covered it was burned to dust. It was naked now and hot to the touch in the shadeless sun. Here and there streaks of chemical greens and yellows showed the trace of copper and sulphur and in small pockets there were pans of sea salt shining white. From this height we had a view over many hundreds of acres of newly-emerged land, a desert island shimmering in the heat.

“I’ll show you something,” Peter said, and for ten minutes we scrambled inland towards the centre of the island. Suddenly a leaf stirred, the soft live green of chlorophyll
bright in the sun. We clawed our way up a fine drift of dark grit and at the top we were looking down into a hollow about fifty yards across. Three palm seedlings grew there, close together and about five feet high. Three coconut palms. And under them a matted growth of lesser vegetation, the soil there dark with moisture. “A natural rain trap——” Peter stopped and picked up a handful of the wind-blown sediment on which we stood. “It’s like the desert, this stuff,” he said, sifting it through his fingers. “In the high dunes of the Empty Quarter—you’d think nothing could live—and then you come on a Bedou encampment and the sudden green of vegetation.” He trailed the last of the grit through his fingers, watching it fall. “It’s incredible what water can do. The most barren place on earth transformed almost overnight by a single rain storm.” He lifted his head, his eyes on the coconut palms. “And here, on the equator with the sea all round, there is more rain, much more rain—eighty, perhaps ninety inches a year. When I was here last I saw about half a dozen pockets of vegetation like this, but as the surface weathers and the roots of trees get a grip on it, the pockets will spread. A few years and much of the island will be covered by a lush tropical growth.” He was looking around him now, seeing it as it would be then. “With the right seeds introduced at this early stage, it will be like Addu Atoll, it will be capable of supporting human life.”

He was a visionary, standing there, his dark hair blowing in the breeze, his eyes bright in the sun’s harsh glare, seeing the island as he wanted it to be, a dream place, a sort of Promised Land, an equatorial Garden of Eden for the people he had made his own. I thought of Strode House then, how remote this was from the City of London, how utterly different his outlook from that of Henry and George Strode. No wonder they hadn’t understood him. I barely did myself, for this little pocket of green was an oasis in a brutal, hostile landscape and the picture he had conjured seemed born of wishful thinking. “What happens,” I said, “if it sinks below the surface of the sea again?”

He looked at me, a little surprised. “You think it will?”

“It’s happened before with newly-emerged islands.” And I quoted the classic case of Graham’s Reef, a shallow bank in the Malta Channel south of Sicily.

“Quite different,” he said. “This is part of a much bigger, much more prolonged process of re-adjustment. I talked to several vulcanologists in London. They were all agreed—if an island emerged in this area, then it would continue to grow, or at least it would remain above the surface of the sea. The movement here is a slow one. Nothing dramatic.” He gave a little shrug. “Anyway, danger has never deterred the human race. Man has established himself on the slopes of half the volcanoes of the world, attracted by the fertility of the ash. Here there is not only fertility, but natural resources that can be marketed and exchanged for the products of the outside world.” He had turned and was starting back towards the bay where Ford and Amjad Ali were waiting for us.

“Do you really imagine they can survive in this desolation?” He didn’t answer and I was angry then, for it seemed to me he was sentencing them to a living hell to fulfil a dream that was quite unreal. “You must be mad,” I said. “To encourage such helpless people——”

“They’re not helpless.” He turned on me furiously, his eyes glittering in the sun so that for a moment he really did look mad. And then in an even tone he said, “They’re an intelligent, highly civilized people, an island race that understands the sea. And they’re tough.”

“They’ll need to be,” I told him. “Even if they can survive, what do you imagine the effect on them will be?” It seemed to me he was ignoring the psychological impact of such desolation. “It isn’t only that it’s bleak. It has an atmosphere, a soul-destroying sense of deadness.”

“To you maybe. Not to them.” And he added, “You wouldn’t have said that if you’d seen Don Mansoor. He stood looking down into that little oasis of green, muttering to himself, his eyes alight. And then he picked up a handful of that coarse gritty soil, putting it to his mouth to taste,
smelling it, crooning over it. Finally he stood there, a little of it tightly gripped in his brown hand, gazing about him as excited as a child … no, more like Cortes. If you’d seen him you’d know that I didn’t need to encourage him. In fact, when we got back to Addu Atoll I had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to wait until I had had time to get the ore samples analysed.”

“When are they coming?” I asked.

“God knows. I managed to get a message to him through a Sergeant-Tech on Gan who’s a ham radio operator. But when they’ll actually sail——” He shrugged. “It depends on Canning, on the President of their Republic—on the vedis and the wind. I don’t know when they’ll get here. But whenever it is, they’ll now find proof that I haven’t let them down. They’ll find a camp, stores and equipment—the beginnings of the miracle they’ve been praying for.”

He was the visionary again, standing there, his eyes shining, with the ship behind him to prove he had kept faith. He had given me a picture of Don Mansoor, the hero of his people, the Discoverer. It was also a picture of himself, for he had identified himself with the Adduan, had seen the same vision and had dedicated his life to its fulfilment. And as I followed him down to the bay to choose a site for the shore camp I knew that nothing—only death—would deflect him from his purpose.

I
T
took three days to get the equipment and all the stores ashore, and whilst we were doing that, Haines drilled a series of test bore-holes, using a small portable drill. They were all shallow bore-holes and two of them, drilled a mile apart, inland from the northern arm of the bay, came up against solid rock at less than 100 feet. But farther south, near the high point of the island, the drill probed over 250 feet and it was all manganese. We established our field of
operations in this area, on a flat shelf not unlike a raised beach. Here the nodules outcropped on to the surface and the shelf itself provided a good working platform with the slope of the island running gently towards the southern arm of the bay so that roading presented no problems. Moreover, the rock outcrop on this arm made a satisfactory loading quay. It was basalt, very smooth, and steep-to on the seaward side so that it was like a natural dock. Some blasting was necessary, but when that was done there was a
solid
base for our road terminal and the barge was able to lie alongside in water deep enough for it to remain afloat at low tide, protected from the swell by the off-lying shoals. The camp was sited about half a mile back up the line of the road. Here there was another shelf backed by a high dune of sediment that would shelter it from the south-east wind. It faced the bay and was about forty feet above sea level which gave some margin of safety in the event of a subsidence.

My diary covering this period is incomplete, of course. That I still have it is due to the fact that once the base hut was up I left it there with Peter’s papers. The last entry, that for 8th June, reads: ‘Road completed during night and at 1038 this morning tumble-bug dumped first load of ore on the loading quay. Six Pakistanis feeding the conveyor belt with shovels got this first load into the barge in 1 hr. 35 mins. Sun very intense, no wind. Rate of delivery by tumble-bug approximately one load every fifty minutes. Bunk and cookhouse huts completed midday. Electric generator working. From loading terminal right up to mine-working whole area beginning to look like invasion beach—vehicles, oil drums, crates, bits and pieces of mechanical equipment, all the paraphernalia of a seaborne landing. First barge load away shortly after 1500. Both landing craft brought in to quay. Reece came ashore. His crew are man-handling stores, loading them into our two trucks for transportation to camp. He drives them very hard. Obviously anxious to get loaded and away as soon as possible. Glad when sun went down. A hard day. Good to be back on board and have a shower. After evening meal had a few beers with Evans in
the wireless room. Discovered Reece had signalled George Strode our DR position. He gave it as Lat.: 08° 54′ S; Long.: 88° 08′ E. But do not think his dead reckoning can be very accurate. Air very humid to-night and just before turning in there was a tropical storm—strong wind and torrential rain. Lasted about quarter of an hour, the sound of it all over the ship like a waterfall as it hammered at the plating and streamed like a cataract down the sides. At least it laid the dust. Now we are loading everything is becoming filmed with the black grit from the island. The bloody place gets more pervasive every day!”