“You must be crazy.” She pushed her dark glasses up on top of her head to look at me.
“By now you should be a good judge of that.” I grinned at her, and she grinned back.
“I am an expert already,” she boasted. The sun had darkened the freckles on her nose and cheeks and given her skin a glow. She had one of those rare skins that do not redden and become angry when exposed to sunlight. Instead it was the kind that quickly turned a golden honey brown.
It was high tide when we rounded the northern tip of the island into a protected cove and Chubby ran the whaleboat on to the sand only twenty yards from the first line of palm trees.
We off-loaded the cargo, carrying it up amongst the palms well above-the high-water mark and once again covered it with tarpaulins to protect it from the ubiquitous sea salt.
It was late by the time we had finished. The heat had gone out of the sun, and the long shadows of the palms barred the earth as we trudged inland, carrying only our personal gear and a fivegallon container of fresh water. In the back of the most northerly peak, generations of visiting fishermen had scratched out a series of shallow caves in the steep slope.
I selected a large cave to act as our equipment store, and a smaller one as living quarters for Sherry and me. Chubby and Angelo chose another for themselves, about a hundred yards along the slope and screened from us by a patch of scrub.
I left Sherry to sweep out our new quarters with a brush improvised from a palm frond, and to lay out our sleeping bags on the inflatable mattress while I took my cast net and went back to the cove.
It was dark when I returned with a string of a dozen big striped mullet. Angelo had the fire burning and the kettle bubbling. We ate in contented silence, and afterwards Sherry and I lay together in our cave and listened to the big fiddler crabs clicking and scratching amongst the palms.
“It’s primeval,” Sherry whispered, “as though we are the first man and woman in the world.”
“Me Tarzan, you Jane,” I agreed, and she chuckled and drew closer to me.
In the dawn Chubby set off alone in the whaleboat on the long return journey to St. Mary’s. He would return next day with a full load of petrol and fresh water in jerrycans. Sufficient to last us for two weeks or so.
While we waited for him to return, Angelo and I took on the wearying task of carrying all the equipment and stores up to the caves. I set up the compressor, charged the empty air bottles and checked the diving gear, and Sherry arranged hanging space for our clothes and generally made our quarters comfortable.
The next day, she and I roamed the island, climbing the peaks and exploring the valleys and beaches between. I had hoped to find water, a spring or well overlooked by the other visitors - but naturally there was none. Those canny old fishermen overlooked nothing.
The south end of the island, farthest from our camp, was impenetrable with salt marsh between the peak and the sea. We skirted the acres of evilsmelling mud and thick swamp grass. The air was rank and heavy with rotted vegetation and dead fish.
Colonies of red and purple crabs had covered the mudflats with their holes from which they peered stalk-eyed as we passed. In the mangroves, the herons were breeding, perched long4egged upon their huge shaggy nests, and once I heard a splash and saw the swirl of something in one of the swamp pools that could only have been a crocodile. We left the fever swamps and we climbed to the higher ground, then we picked our way through the thickets of shrub growth towards the southerrunost peak.
Sherry decided we must climb this one also. I tried to dissuade her for it was the tallest and steepest. My protests went completely unnoticed, and even after we had made our way on to a narrow ledge below the southern cliff of the peak, she pressed on detqminedly.
“If the mate of the Dawn Ught found a way to the top then I’m going up there too,” she announced.
“You’ll get the same view from there as from the other peaks,” I pointed out.
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point, then?” I asked, and she gave me the pitying took usually reserved for small children and half-wits, refused to dignify the question with an answer, and continued her cautious sideways shuffle along the edge.
There was a drop of at least two hundred feet below us, and if there is one deficiency in my formidable arsenal of talent and courage, it is that I have no head for heights. However, I would rather have balanced on one leg atop St. Paul’s Cathedral than admit this to Miss. North, and so with great reluctance I followed her.
Fortunately it was only a few paces farther that she uttered a cry of triumph and turned off the ledge into a narrow vertical crack that split the cliffface. The fracturing of the rock had formed a stepped and readily climbable chimney to the summit, into which I followed her with relief. Almost immediately Sherry cried out again.
“Oh dear God, Harry, look!” and she pointed to a protected area of the wall, in the back of the dark recess. Somebody long ago had patiently chipped an inscription into the flat stone surface.
A. BARLOW. WRECKED ON THIS PLACE 14th OCT. 1858.
As we stared at it, I felt her hand grope for mine and squeeze for comfort. No longer the intrepid mountaineer, her expression was half fearful as she studied the writing.
“It’s creepy,” she whispered. “It looks as though it was written yesterday - not all those years ago.”
Indeed, the letters had been protected from weathering so that they seemed fresh cut and I glanced around almost as though I expected to see the old seaman watching us.
When at last we climbed the steep chitnney to the summit we were still subdued by that message from the remote past. We sat there for almost two hours watching the surf break in long white lines upon Gunfire Reef. The gap in the reef and the great dark pool of the Break showed very clearly from our vantage point, while it was just possible to make out the course of the narrow channel through the coral. From here Andrew Barlow had watched the Dawn light in her death throes, watched her broken up by the high surf.
“Time is running against us now, Sherry,” I told her, as the holiday mood of the last few days evaporated. “It’s fourteen days since Manny Resnick sailed in the Mandrake. He will not be far from Cape Town by now. We will know when he reaches there.”
“How?”
“I have an old friend who lives there. He is a member of the Yacht Club - and he will watch the traffic and cable me the moment Mandrake docks.”
I looked down the back slope of the peak, and for the first time noticed the blue haze of smoke spreading through the tops of the palms from Angelo’s cooking fire.
“I have been a little halfarsed on this trip,” I muttered, we have been behaving like a group of school kids on a picnic. From now on we will have to tighten up the security - just across the channel there is my old friend Suleiman Dada, and Mandrake will be in these waters sooner than I’d like. We will have to keep a nice low silhouette from now on
“How long will we need, do you think?” Sherry asked.
“I don’t know, my sweeting - but be sure that it will be longer than we think possible. We are shackled by the need to ferry all our water and petrol from St. Mary’s - we will only be able to work in the pool during a few hours of each tide when the condition and the height of the water will let us. Who knows what we are going to find in there once we start, and finally we may discover that the Colonel’s parcels were stowed in the rear hold of the Dawn Light that part of the ship that was carried out into the open water. If it was, then you can kiss it all goodbye.”
“We’ve been over that part of it before, you dreadful old pessimist,” Sherry rebuked me. “Think happy thoughts.”
So we thought happy thoughts and did happy things until at last I made out the tiny dark speck, like a water beetle on the brazen surface of the sea, as Chubby returned from St. Mary’s in the whaleboat.
We climbed down the peak and hurried back through the palm groves to meet him. He was just rounding the point and entering the cove as we came out on the beach. The whaleboat was low in the water under her heavy cargo of fuel and drinking water. And Chubby stood in the stern as big and solid and as eternal as a great rock. When we waved and shouted he inclined his head gravely in acknowledgement.
Mrs. Chubby had sent a banana cake for me and for Sherry a large sunhat of woven palm fronds. Chubby had obviously reported Sherry’s behaviour, and his expression was more than normally lugubrious when he saw that the damage was already being done. Sherry was toasted to an edible medium rare.
t was after dark by the time we had carried fifty jerrycans up to the cave. Then we gathered about the fire I where Angelo was cooking an island chowder of clams - he had gathered from the lagoon that afternoon. It was time to tell my crew the true reason for our expedition. Chubby I could trust to say nothing, even under torture but I
