The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur - Страница 71

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Then she looked around the shelter. She had the knife and the scrap of flint, the club and canvas hood, all her worldly possessions, and yet she felt a dragging reluctance to leave the shelter. For a few hours it had been her home.

She had to force herself to turn and go down to the beach, and to set out southwards into that ominously monotonous seascape once again.

That night there was no cave shelter and no pile of driftwood trapped against a rocky headland. There was no food and nothing to drink and she rolled herself in the strip of canvas and lay on the hard sand under the dunes.

All night a chill little wind blew the fine sands over her so that at dawn she was coated with sparkling sugary particles. Sand had encrusted her eyelashes, and salt and sand were thick in her hair. She was so stiff with cold and bruises and over-taxed muscles that at first she hobbled like an old woman, using the club as a staff. As her muscles warmed, the stiffness abated, but she knew she was getting weaker and as the sun rose higher, so her thirst became a silent scream in the depths of her body.

Her lips swelled and cracked, her tongue bloated and furred over with thickening gluey saliva that she could not swallow.

She knelt in the edge of the surf and bathed her face, soaked the canvas shawl and her skimpy clothing, and resisted somehow the temptation to swallow a mouthful of the cool, clear sea water.

The relief was only temporary. When the sea water dried on her skin, the salt crystals stung the sun-tender spots and burned her cracked, dry lips, her skin seemed to stretch to the point of tearing like parchment, and her thirst was an obsession.

In the middle of the afternoon, far ahead of her on the smooth wet sand, she saw a cluster of black moving shapes, and she shaded her eyes hopefully. However, the specks resolved into four large seagulls, with pure white chests and black backs, squabbling and threatening each other with open yellow bills as they competed for a piece of flotsam washed ashore by the tide.

They rose on outsretched wings as Centaine staggered towards them, leaving their disputed prize, too heavy for them to carry, lying on the sand. It was a large dead fish, already badly mutilated by the gulls, and with new strength Centaine ran the last few paces and dropped on her knees. She lifted the fish with both hands and then gagged and dropped it again, wiping her hands on her canvas skirt. The fish was stinking rotten, her fingers had sunk into the soft putrefying flesh as though into cold suet.

She crawled away and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, hugging them to her breast, staring at the lump of stinking carrion and trying to subdue her thirst.

it took all her courage, but at last she crawled back to it, and with her face turned away from the stench, hacked off a fillet of the maggot-white flesh. She cut a small square of it and placed it cautiously in her mouth. Her stomach heaved at the taste of sickly sweet corruption, but she chewed it carefully, sucked out the reeking juices, spat out the pulpy flesh and then cut another lump from the fillet.

Sickened as much by her own degradation as by the rotten flesh, she kept sucking out the juices and when she reckoned that she had forced a large cupful down her throat, she rested a while.

Gradually the fluids fortified her. She felt much stronger, strong enough to go on again. She waded into the sea and tried to wash the stench of rotten fish from her hands and lips. The taste lingered in her mouth as she started once more plodding along the edge of the beach.

just before sunset a new, crippling wave of weakness came over her and she sank down on to the sand. Suddenly an icy sweat bra across her forehead and cramp, like a sword thrust through her belly, doubled her over.

She belched, and the taste of rotten fish filled her mouth and nostrils.

She heaved, and hot reeking vomit shot up her throat.

She felt despair as she saw so much of her vital fluids splash on to the sand, but she heaved again, and at the contraction she felt a spluttery explosive release of diarrhoea.

I'm poisoned. She fell and writhed on the sand as spasm after spasm gripped her and her body involuntarily purged itself of the toxic juices. It was dark by the time the attack passed, and she dragged off her soiled carniknickers and threw them aside. She crawled painfully into the sea and washed her body, splashed her face and rinsed the taste of rotten fish and vomit from her mouth, prepared to pay for the momentary relief of a clean mouth with later thirst.

Then still on her hands and knees, she crawled up above the high-water mark, and in the darkness, shaking with cold, she lay down to die.

At first Garry Courtney was so involved in the excitement of planning the rescue expedition into the Namib desert, across that dreaded littoral that was named the Skeleton Coast for very good reason, that he did not have the leisure to weigh the chances of success.

It was enough for Garry to be playing the man of action.

Like all romantics, he had daydreamed of himself in this role on so many occasions, and now that the opportunity was thrust upon him, he seized it with a frenzy of dedicated effort.

In the long months after the war department cable had arrived, that coarse buff envelope with its laconic message, His Majesty regrets to inform you that your son Captain Michael Courtney has been reported killed in action', Garry's existence had been a dark void, without purpose or direction. Then had come the miracle of the second cable from his twin brother: Michael's widow expecting your grandson has been rendered homeless and destitute by tides of war stop I am arranging priority passage on first sailing for Cape Town stop will you meet and take into your care stop reply urgently stop letter follows Sean. A new sun had risen in his life. When that in its turn had been cruelly extinguished, plunged into the cruel green waters of the Benguela Current. Garry had realized instinctively that he could not afford to let reason and reality beat him down once again into the dark night of despair. He had to believe, he had to push aside any calculation of the probabilities and cling mindlessly to the remote possibility that Michael's wife and her unborn child had somehow survived sea and desert and were waiting only for him to find and rescue them. The only way to do this was to replace reasoned thought with feverish activity, however meaningless and futile, and when that failed, to draw upon the limitless reserve of Anna Stok's rock-solid and unwavering faith.

The two of them arrived at Windhoek, the old capital of German South West Africa which had been captured two years before, and were met at the railway station by Colonel John Wickenham, who was acting military governor of the territory. How do you do, sir. Wickenham's salute was diffident. He had received a string of cables in the last few days, amongst them one from General Jannie Smuts and another from the ailing prime minister, General Louis Botha, all of them instructing him to extend to his visitor full assistance and cooperation.

This alone did not account for the measure of his ct towards his guest. Colonel Garrick Courtney was respe the holder of the highest award for gallantry, and his book on the Anglo-Boer War, The Elusive Enemy, was required reading at the Staff College that Wickenham had attended, while the political and financial influence of the brothers Courtney was legend. I should like to offer you my condolences on your loss, Colonel Courtney, Wickenharn told him as they shook hands.

That is very decent of you. Garry felt like an imposter when addressed by his rank. He always felt the need to explain that it had been a temporary appointment with an irregular regiment in a war almost twenty years past;

to cover his uneasiness he turned to Anna, standing foursquare beside him in her solar topee and long calico skirts.

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