The Shortest Way to Hades

Well, Leonidas still maintains that he kept on a heading of 295 degrees, as Camilla had told him to; but from what happened afterwards it seems that he can’t have done. I wondered at first if it might be Camilla who had made a mistake, by not making the right adjustment for compass error. The rest of them, however, had all sailed often enough on the Sycorax to know pretty well by heart what adjustment would be needed on any particular heading, and they all agreed that 295 degrees would have been right for the course that Camilla meant to take. There seems no doubt, therefore, that Leonidas must somehow have misread the compass — perhaps by mistaking north-west for west-north-west. Whatever the reason, he was about fifteen degrees off course.

The wind rose steadily during the first hour of his watch, until it approached gale force. He realized that he was carrying far too much sail, but he also knew he could not reduce sail single-handed, and he was reluctant to rouse Camilla so soon after she had gone off watch. I think that his judgment may also have been affected by the absolute darkness all round him, which can be unsettling. The darkness of a night at sea with no moon and no stars isn’t like being in a room with the light shut out: the sea is black and the sky is black, so that there is no horizon, and the darkness has no limits to it. With the sea running high and the boat heeling over at an angle which brought her deck within inches of the water, he had the sense to reach for a line and lash himself to the stern rail. He did not, however, call out for anyone to help him, but stayed alone at the tiller while the Sycorax went careering through the night at a speed he had never sailed at before — God knows how none of the rigging snapped — with the black waves towering over her and the gale screaming into her canvas. It was like sailing, he said, “from nowhere into Hades.”

“It must have been very frightening,” I said.

“Oh no,” said Leonidas. “No, it was marvelous.”

One can see, of course, that it would have been.

The thing that at last made him call out to Camilla was seeing lights on the starboard bow — the first sign he had that the boat was not on her intended course. He had expected that eventually he would see the lights of Paxos on the port bow, but lights to starboard were inexplicable — he could think only that he had somehow sailed straight past Paxos without seeing the lights there and was now running up the west coast of Corfu.

“Actually,” said Camilla, “I was awake already, or I don’t think I’d have heard him over the racket the wind was making. But I’d woken up and noticed we were moving a bit smartly for a 32-footer in nil visibility, and I’d just decided to go up on deck to find out what was doing. So when I heard Leon calling out I nipped straight up through the forehatch. Well, it was pretty obvious we were carrying too much sail, so I yelled out to Leon to put her into the wind so I could get the genoa down. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me, so I was getting ready to yell again when put her into the wind he duly did. The rigging screamed like all the devils in hell and the Sycorax lurched like a drunken chorus girl and over I went. I was just thinking what a good thing it was I’d remembered to clip on my safety-harness as I climbed out of the forehatch when the damned shackle snapped. So I just had to swim for it.”

A conversation followed, of a sort common in sailing circles, about the relative merits of different kinds of safety-harness. Camilla, it seems, has always favored the sort which incorporates a life-jacket. The others all think this too cumbersome, but in spite of the defect in her particular harness she looks on the night’s events as confirming her view. She would never have taken the time, she said, to put on a separate life-jacket, and without one she would certainly have drowned.

“Even with it,” I said, “you must have had a fairly rough time.”

“Well,” said Camilla, “the swim itself wasn’t too bad — I could see lights, so I knew I was heading for land, though I hadn’t an earthly what it was or how far. The worst part was coming ashore — I thought I was going to get smashed to bits on the rocks. But eventually I managed it, and got collected up by a passing fisherman — all frightfully embarrassing, of course, what with having lost the bottom half of my pajamas. Anyway, he took me home to his mother and about six aunts — I bet they didn’t tell you that in Parga — and they put me straight to bed. When I came round again I found there’d been a tremendous tizzwozz and messages were flying about all over the place saying I’d been drowned. Actually, it sounds as if life was a jolly sight more dangerous back on board the poor old Sycorax.”

It took Leonidas two or three minutes to realize that his cousin had gone overboard: the lights of the boat were not enough for him to see clearly from the cockpit what was happening on the fore-deck, and he was struggling to regain control of the steering. When it became clear to him that Camilla was no longer on board, he shouted to his brother and sister for help, though with not much hope of waking them. He couldn’t reach the starting-handle of the engine; but he tried to go about under sail to return to the place where Camilla had last called out to him. This proved to be a mistake: struck amidships by the full force of the gale, the Sycorax was simply knocked flat; her mast-top dipped under the water and her cockpit was entirely submerged. After what seemed to Leonidas a very long time the boat righted herself, and rewarded his foresight in lashing himself to the rail by putting him back at the tiller only three-quarters drowned.

“The effect of this interesting maneuver,” said Lucian, “was to remove Cindy and myself from our comfortable bunks and to throw us against the ceiling of the main cabin. That was how I broke my arm. At the same time, various objects lying about in the main cabin suddenly got all spiteful and began to attack us — there was a bottle, I remember, which had formerly contained Nuits St. Georges and which definitely seemed to have something personal against Cindy.”

“And there was a lot of wetness about,” said his sister. “One expects things to get fairly damp on a sailing- boat, but three inches of water in the main cabin is a bit much. So we thought we’d better go upstairs and help chuck some of it back where it came from.”

Their first thought, on learning that Camilla was missing, was to start the engine, with the object of returning under power to the place where she had gone overboard. The engine behaved as any true sailing man would expect a first-class engine, properly maintained, to behave in an emergency — it refused to start.

Recognizing the futility of looking for Camilla on their own, they decided to send up a distress flare, in the hope that there might be some more powerful vessel in the area which would assist them. It was little more than a pious gesture: the chances were minimal of the flare being seen, and almost non-existent of anyone finding Camilla — by this time, after all, she had been missing for seven or eight minutes.

“I did my best to look on the bright side,” said Lucian, “by reminding myself that if I’d lost a cousin I’d gained several thousand acres of agricultural land in an area ripe for development — if Millie snuffs it before Grandmama, you know, I’m next in line for Grandfather’s estate. But even so—”

“Honestly, Lucian,” said Camilla, not seeming at all put out by this remark, “you really are the most frightful rotter.”

“—even so, this didn’t comfort me as much as you might expect, not only because I’m quite fond of Millie but because I started thinking the prospects for the rest of us weren’t too healthy, either. The Sycorax was still bucketing along at about twice the speed intended by the designer and shipping so much water we didn’t dare stop baling long enough to reduce sail. Mind you, we probably couldn’t have got any of the sails down anyway — conditions on the foredeck were fairly rumbustious, and we wouldn’t have wanted any more of us going overboard.”

“Another thing that was a pity,” said Lucinda, “was not knowing where we were. Leon said we must be somewhere off the west coast of Corfu, but he couldn’t think how we’d got there.”

“Still,” said Lucian, “we were quite pleased at the idea that that was where we were. We thought that with any luck, as long as the Sycorax didn’t simply fall to bits, we could just keep running north until the gale blew itself out — there’d have been quite a long way to go before we bumped into any land.”

“Which was sound thinking,” said Lucinda, “while there were only lights on the starboard side.”

“Yes, absolutely sound. But then we saw that there were lights ahead of us — ahead and to the left. The lights of Parga, as it turned out. And that’s when we started feeling a bit despondent.”

Under the heading “What to do when running on to a lee shore without power in a gale” the advice given by the better sailing manuals is “Do not allow such a situation to occur.” Bearing in mind the savagery of the Parga coastline, one would have described the Sycorax as being at this juncture on a very direct course for Hades.

“And then this lovely fishing-boat turned up,” said Lucian.

“With this lovely fisherman on board,” said Lucinda.

Their account of the rescue was substantially the same as that I had heard at Mourtos. They spoke of the