Sunshine! she cried. Het remand Sunshine gesien?
Has anybody seen Sunshine? and there was a stir of interest and concern.
Sunshine? Is she with you,' The query was passed swiftly about the cluster of tossing lifeboats.
I saw her on the deck, just before the ship went down. She had a lifeJacket. She isn't here? No, she isn't here. I saw her jump, but I lost her after that. She isn't here, not in any of the boats. Anna sagged down again. Her baby was gone. She felt despair overwhelm and begin to suffocate her. She looked over the side of the lifeboat at the dead men hanging in their lifejackets, and imagined Centaine killed by the green waters, dead of the cold and the infant in her womb dead also, and she groaned aloud.
No, she whispered, God cannot be that cruel. I don't believe it. I'll never believe it. The denial gave her strength and the will to endure. There were other lifeboats, Centaine is alive somewhere out there, she looked to the wind- smeared horizon, she's alive, and I will find her. If it takes my whole life, I will find her again. The small incident of the search for the missing girl had broken the torpor of cold and shock that had gripped them all during the night, and now the leaders emerged to rally them, to adjust the loading and the trim of the lifeboats, to count and take charge of the fresh-water containers and the emergency rations, to see to the injured, to cut loose the dead men and let them float away and to allocate duties to the rowers, and finally to set a course for the mainland a hundred miles and more out there in the east.
With teams of rowers alternating at the long oars, they began to inch across the wild sea, nearly every small gain wasted by the following wave that dashed into their bows and drove them back.
That's it, lads, the first officer exhorted from stern. Keep it up- any activity would stave off despondency, their ultimate enemy -let's sing, shall we? Who'll give us a tune? What about Tipperary? Come along, then.
''It's a long way to Tipperary, It's a long way to go-' But the wind and the sea grew stronger, and flung them about so that the oars would not bite, and one after the other the rowers gave up and slumped glumly, and the song died away and they sat and waited. After a while the sense of waiting for something to happen passed, and they merely sat. Long after midday, the sun broke through the low scudding cloud for a few minutes and they lifted their faces to it, but then the cloud obscured it again and their heads drooped like wild Namaqua daisies at sunset.
Then from the lifeboat alongside where Anna sat a voice spoke in a dull, almost disinterested tone. Look, isn't that a ship? For a while there was silence, as though it took time to understand such an unlikely proposition, and then another voice, sharper and more alive. It is, it's a ship! Where?
Where is it? A babble of excited voices now. There, just below that dark patch of cloud. Low down, just the top-'It's a ship!
A ship! Men were trying to stand, some of them had stripped off their jackets and were waving frantically and shouting as though their lungs might burst.
Anna blinked her eyes and stared in the direction they were all pointing in. After a moment she saw a tiny triangular shape, darker grey against the dreary grey of the horizon.
The first officer was busy in the stern, and abruptly there was a fierce whooshing sound and a trail of smoke shot up into the sky and burst in a cluster of bright red stars as he fired one of the signal rockets from the steRN locker. She has seen us! Look! Look, she's altering course! It's a warship, three funnels. Look at the tripod director tower, she's one of the 'I class cruisers- By God, it's the Inflexible! I saw her at Scopa Flow last year- God bless her, whoever she is. She's seen us! Oh, thank God, she's seen us! Anna found herself laughing and sobbing, and clutching the carpet bag that was her only link with Centaine.
It will be all right now, my baby, she promised. Anna will find you now. You don't have to worry any more, Anna is coming to get you. And the deadly grey shape of the warship raced down upon them, shouldering and breaking the waters aside with her tall, axe-sharp bows.
Anna stood at the rail of HMS Inflexible in a group of the survivors from the lifeboats and watched that immense flat-topped mountain rise out of the southern ocean.
From this distance the proportions of the mountain were so perfect, the tableland at its summit so precisely cut and the steep slopes so artfully fashioned that it might have been sculptured by a divine Michelangelo. The men around her were excited and voluble, hanging on the rail and pointing out the familiar features of the land as their swift approach made each apparent. This was a homecoming of which most of them had many times despaired, and their relief and joy were pathetically childlike.
Anna shared none of it with them. The sight of land induced in her only a corrosive impatience that she knew she could not long abide. The drive of the great ship under her was too puny, too snail-like for her antici potion every minute spent out here upon the ocean was wasted, for it delayed the moment when she could set out on the quest which had in a few short days become the central driving force of her existence.
She fretted while the drama of sea and elements unfolded before her, while the wind which had crossed the wide sweep of the Atlantic free and unfettered, met the sudden constraint of the great mountain, and like a wild horse feeling the bit for the first time, reared and struggled in monstrous pique.
Before Anna's eyes a dense white cloud blossomed upon the broad flat summit of the mountain and began to boil over the sheer lip in a slow, gelatinous tide down the stark cliffs, and when the men around her exclaimed with wonder, she had only an insufferable desire to feel the land beneath her feet, and to turn those feet back into the north to begin the search.
Now the angry wind racing down the cliffs came again to the sea and ripped the placid sweet blue first to sombre gunmetal and then to foam-flecked fury. As the Inflexible came out of the lee of the mountain into the narrow roadway between Table Harbour and Roben Island, the southeaster struck her like a mallet, and even she was forced to make obeisance and heel to the power of the wind.
In the days of sail, many great ships had come this close to the mountain only to be blown out again with rigging in disarray, not to sight land again for days or even weeks, but Inflexible, once she had acknowledged its force, drove in through the concrete breakwater, and surrendered only to the attentions of the fussy little steam tugs which bustled out to meet her. Like a lover she kissed the wharf, and the crowd that lined it waved up at the decks, the women struggling with rebellious skirts and the men clutching their hats to their heads, the strains of the Marine band on the cruiser's foredeck rising and falling as the wind squalls gave Rule Britannia an unusual cadence.
As soon as the gangways were lowered, a group of figures hurried up them, harbour officials and naval officers in tropical whites and gold braid, together with a few obviously important civilians.
Now, despite herself, Anna felt a slight prickle of interest as she studied the white buildings of the town that
