The Riddle of the Sands Part 14

'Of course we can,' said Davies, 'if you don't mind a bit of a tumble in the dinghy.'

I reconsidered my rash suggestion, but it was too late now to turn back, and some desperate expedient was necessary. I found myself on deck, gripping a backstay and looking giddily down and then up at the dinghy, as it bobbed like a cork in the trough of the sea alongside, while Davies settled the sculls and rowlocks.

'Jump!' he shouted, and before I could gather my wits and clutch the sides we were adrift in the night, reeling from hollow to hollow of the steep curling waves. Davies nursed our walnut-sh.e.l.l tenderly over their crests, edging her slantwise across their course. He used very little exertion, relying on the tide to carry us to our goal.

Suddenly the motion ceased. A dark slope loomed up out of the night, and the dinghy rested softly in a shallow eddy.

'The West Hohenhorn,' said Davies. We jumped out and sank into soft mud, hauled up the dinghy a foot or two, then mounted the bank and were on hard, wet sand. The wind leapt on us, and choked our voices.

'Let's find my channel,' bawled Davies. 'This way. Keep Neuerk light right astern of you.'

We set off with a long, stooping stride in the teeth of the wind, and straight towards the roar of the breakers on the farther side of the sand. A line of Matthew Arnold's, 'The naked s.h.i.+ngles of the world,'

was running in my head. 'Seven miles from land,' I thought, 'scuttling like sea-birds on a transient islet of sand, encircled by rus.h.i.+ng tides and hammered by ocean, at midnight in a rising gale--cut off even from our one dubious refuge.' It was the time, if ever, to conquer weakness. A mad gaiety surged through me as I drank the wind and pressed forward. It seemed but a minute or two and Davies clutched me.

'Look out!' he shouted. 'It's my channel.'

The ground sloped down, and a rus.h.i.+ng river glimmered before us. We struck off at a tangent and followed its course to the north, stumbling in muddy rifts, slipping on seaweed, beginning to be blinded by a fine salt spray, and deafened by the thunder of the ocean surf. The river broadened, whitened, roughened, gathered itself for the shock, was shattered, and dissolved in milky gloom. We wheeled away to the right, and splashed into yeasty froth. I turned my back to the wind, scooped the brine out of my eyes, faced back and saw that our path was barred by a welter of surf. Davies's voice was in my ear and his arm was pointing seaward.

'This--is--about where--I--b.u.mped first--worse then nor'-west wind--this--is--nothing. Let's--go--right--round.'

We galloped away with the wind behind us, skirting the line of surf.

I lost all account of time and direction. Another sea barred our road, became another river as we slanted along its sh.o.r.e. Again we were in the teeth of that intoxicating wind. Then a point of light was swaying and flickering away to the left, and now we were checking and circling. I stumbled against something sharp--the dinghy's gunwale. So we had completed the circuit of our fugitive domain, that dream-island--nightmare island as I always remember it.

'You must scull, too,' said Davies. 'It's blowing hard now. Keep her nose _up_ a little--all you know!'

We lurched along, my scull sometimes buried to the thwart, sometimes striking at the bubbles of a wave top. Davies, in the bows, said 'Pull!' or 'Steady!' at intervals. I heard the scud smacking against his oilskin back. Then a wan, yellow light glanced over the waves.

'Easy! Let her come!' and the bowsprit of the 'Dulcibella', swollen to spectral proportions, was stabbing the darkness above me. 'Back a bit! Two good strokes. s.h.i.+p your scull! Now jump!' I clawed at the tossing hull and landed in a heap. Davies followed with the painter, and the dinghy swept astern.

'She's riding beautifully now,' said he, when he had secured the painter. 'There'll be no rolling on the flood, and it's nearly low water.'

I don't think I should have cared, however much she had rolled. I was finally cured of funk.

It was well that I was, for to be pitched out of your bunk on to wet oil-cloth is a disheartening beginning to a day. This happened about eight o'clock. The yacht was pitching violently, and I crawled on all fours into the cabin, where Davies was setting out breakfast on the floor.

'I let you sleep on,' he said; 'we can't do anything till the water falls. We should never get the anchor up in this sea. Come and have a look round. It's clearing now,' he went on, when we were crouching low on deck, gripping cleats for safety. 'Wind's veered to nor'-west.

It's been blowing a full gale, and the sea is at its worst now--near high water. You'll never see worse than this.'

I was prepared for what I saw--the stormy sea for leagues around, and a chaos of breakers where our dream-island had stood--and took it quietly, even with a sort of elation. The 'Dulcibella' faced the storm as doggedly as ever, plunging her bowsprit into the sea and flinging green water over her bows. A wave of confidence and affection for her welled through me. I had been used to resent the weight and bulk of her unwieldy anchor and cable, but I saw their use now; varnish, paint, spotless decks, and snowy sails were foppish absurdities of a hateful past.

'What can we do to-day?' I asked.

'We must keep well inside the banks and be precious careful wherever there's a swell. It's rampant in here, you see, in spite of the barrier of sand. But there's plenty we can do farther back.'

We breakfasted in horrible discomfort; then smoked and talked till the roar of the breakers dwindled. At the first sign of bare sand we got under way, under mizzen and head-sails only, and I learned how to sail a reluctant anchor out of the ground. Pivoting round, we scudded east before the wind, over the ground we had traversed the evening before, while an archipelago of new banks slowly shouldered up above the fast weakening waves. We trod delicately among and around them, sounding and observing; heaving to where s.p.a.ce permitted, and sometimes using the dinghy. I began to see where the risks lay in this sort of navigation. Wherever the ocean swell penetrated, or the wind blew straight down a long deep channel, we had to be very cautious and leave good margins. 'That's the sort of place you mustn't ground on,' Davies used to say.

In the end we traversed the Steil Sand again, but by a different swatchway, and anch.o.r.ed, after an arduous day, in a notch on its eastern limit, just clear of the swell that rolled in from the turbulent estuary of the Elbe. The night was fair, and when the tide receded we lay perfectly still, the fresh wind only sending a lip-lip of ripples against our sides.

XIII. The Meaning of our Work

NOTHING happened during the next ten days to disturb us at our work.

During every hour of daylight and many of darkness, sailing or anch.o.r.ed, aground or afloat, in rain and s.h.i.+ne, wind and calm, we studied the bed of the estuaries, and practised ourselves in threading the network of channels; holding no communication with the land and rarely approaching it. It was a life of toil, exposure, and peril; a struggle against odds, too; for wild autumnal weather was the rule, with the wind backing and veering between the south-west and north-west, and only for two placid days blowing gently from the east, the safe quarter for this region. Its force and direction determined each fresh choice of ground. If it was high and northerly we explored the inner fastnesses; in moderate intervals the exterior fringe, darting when surprised into whatever lair was most convenient.

Sometimes we were tramping vast solitudes of sand, sometimes scudding across ephemeral tracts of shallow sea. Again, we were creeping gingerly round the deeper arteries that surround the Great Knecht, examining their convolutions as it were the veins of a living tissue, and the circulation of the tide throbbing through them like blood.

Again, we would be staggering through the tide-rips and overfalls that infest the open fairway of the Weser on our pa.s.sage between the Fork and the Pike. On one of our fine days I saw the scene of Davies's original adventure by daylight with the banks dry and the channels manifest. The reader has seen it on the chart, and can, up to a point, form his opinion; I can only add that I realized by ocular proof that no more fatal trap could have been devised for an innocent stranger; for approaching it from the north-west under the easiest conditions it was hard enough to verify our true course. In a period so full of new excitements it is not easy for me to say when we were hardest put to it, especially as it was a rule with Davies never to admit that we were in any danger at all. But I think that our ugliest experience was on the 10th, when, owing to some minute miscalculation, we stranded in a dangerous spot. Mere stranding, of course, was all in the day's work; the constantly recurring question being when and where to court or risk it. This time we were so situated that when the rising tide came again we were on a lee sh.o.r.e, broadside on to a gale of wind which was sending a nasty sea--with a three-mile drift to give it force--down Robin's Balje, which is one of the deeper arteries I spoke of above, and now lay dead to windward of us. The climax came about ten o'clock at night. 'We can do nothing till she floats,' said Davies; and I can see him now quietly smoking and splicing a chafed warp while he explained that her double skin of teak fitted her to stand anything in reason. She certainly had a terrific test that night, for the bottom was hard, unyielding sand, on which she rose and fell with convulsive vehemence. The last half-hour was for me one of almost intolerable tension. I spent it on deck unable to bear the suspense below. Sheets of driven sea flew bodily over the hull, and a score of times I thought she must succ.u.mb as she s.h.i.+vered to the blows of her keel on the sand. But those stout skins knit by honest labour stood the trial. One final thud and she wrenched herself bodily free, found her anchor, and rode clear.

On the whole I think we made few mistakes. Davies had a supreme apt.i.tude for the work. Every hour, sometimes every minute, brought its problem, and his resource never failed. The stiffer it was the cooler he became. He had, too, that intuition which is independent of acquired skill, and is at the root of all genius; which, to take cases a.n.a.logous to his own, is the last quality of the perfect guide or scout. I believe he could _smell_ sand where he could not see or touch it.

As for me, the sea has never been my element, and never will be; nevertheless, I hardened to the life, grew salt, tough, and tolerably alert. As a soldier learns more in a week of war than in years of parades and pipeclay, so, cut off from all distractions, moving from bivouac to precarious bivouac, and depending, to some extent, for my life on my muscles and wits, I rapidly learnt my work and gained a certain dexterity. I knew my ropes in the dark, could beat economically to windward through squalls, take bearings, and estimate the interaction of wind and tide.

We were generally in solitude, but occasionally we met galliots like the 'Johannes' tacking through the sands, and once or twice we found a fleet of such boats anch.o.r.ed in a gut, waiting for water. Their draught, loaded, was from six to seven feet, our own only four, without our centre-plate, but we took their mean draught as the standard of all our observations. That is, we set ourselves to ascertain when and how a vessel drawing six and a half feet could navigate the sands.

A word more as to our motive. It was Davies's conviction, as I have said, that the whole region would in war be an ideal hunting-ground for small free-lance marauders, and I began to know he was right; for look at the three sea-roads through the sands to Hamburg, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, and the heart of commercial Germany. They are like highways piercing a mountainous district by defiles, where a handful of desperate men can arrest an army.

Follow the parallel of a war on land. People your mountains with a daring and resourceful race, who possess an intimate knowledge of every track and bridle-path, who operate in small bands, travel light, and move rapidly. See what an immense advantage such guerillas possess over an enemy which clings to beaten tracks, moves in large bodies, slowly, and does not 'know the country'. See how they can not only inflict disasters on a foe who vastly overmatches them in strength, but can prolong a semi-pa.s.sive resistance long after all decisive battles have been fought. See, too, how the strong invader can only conquer his elusive antagonists by learning their methods, studying the country, and matching them in mobility and cunning. The parallel must not be pressed too far; but that this sort of warfare will have its counterpart on the sea is a truth which cannot be questioned.

Davies in his enthusiasm set no limits to its importance. The small boat in shallow waters played a mighty _role_ in his vision of a naval war, a part that would grow in importance as the war developed and reach its height in the final stages.

'The heavy battle fleets are all very well,' he used to say, 'but if the sides are well matched there might be nothing left of them after a few months of war. They might destroy one another mutually, leaving as nominal conqueror an admiral with scarcely a battles.h.i.+p to bless himself with. It's then that the true struggle will set in; and it's then that anything that will float will be pressed into the service, and anybody who can steer a boat, knows his waters, and doesn't care the toss of a coin for his life, will have magnificent opportunities.

It cuts both ways. What small boats can do in these waters is plain enough; but take our own case. Say we're beaten on the high seas by a coalition. There's then a risk of starvation or invasion. It's all rot what they talk about instant surrender. We can live on half rations, recuperate, and build; but we must have time. Meanwhile our coast and ports are in danger, for the millions we sink in forts and mines won't carry us far. They're fixed--pure pa.s.sive defence. What you want is _boats_--mosquitoes with stings--swarms of them--patrol-boats, scout-boats, torpedo-boats; intelligent irregulars manned by local men, with a pretty free hand to play their own game. And what a splendid game to play! There are places very like this over there--nothing half so good, but similar--the Mersey estuary, the Dee, the Severn, the Wash, and, best of all, the Thames, with all the Kent, Ess.e.x, and Suffolk banks round it. But as for defending our coasts in the way I mean--we've nothing ready--nothing whatsoever! We don't even build or use small torpedo-boats. These fast "destroyers" are no good for _this_ work--too long and unmanageable, and most of them too deep. What you want is something strong and simple, of light draught, and with only a spar-torpedo, if it came to that. Tugs, launches, small yachts--anything would do at a pinch, for success would depend on intelligence, not on brute force or complicated mechanism. They'd get wiped out often, but what matter? There'd be no lack of the right sort of men for them if the thing was _organized._ But where are the men?

'Or, suppose we have the best of it on the high seas, and have to attack or blockade a coast like this, which is sand from end to end.

You can't improvise people who are at home in such waters. The navy chaps don't learn it, though, by Jove! they're the most magnificent service in the world--in pluck, and nerve, and everything else.

They'll _try_ anything, and often do the impossible. But their boats are deep, and they get little practice in this sort of thing.'

Davies never pushed home his argument here; but I know that it was the pa.s.sionate wish of his heart, somehow and somewhere, to get a chance of turning his knowledge of this coast to practical account in the war that he felt was bound to come, to play that 'splendid game'

in this, the most fascinating field for it.

I can do no more than sketch his views. Hearing them as I did, with the very splash of the surf and the bubble of the tides in my ears, they made a profound impression on me, and gave me the very zeal for our work he, by temperament, possessed.

But as the days pa.s.sed and nothing occurred to disturb us, I felt more and more strongly that, as regards our quest, we were on the wrong tack. We found nothing suspicious, nothing that suggested a really adequate motive for Dollmann's treachery. I became impatient, and was for pus.h.i.+ng on more quickly westward. Davies still clung to his theory, but the same feeling influenced him.

'It's something to do with these channels in the sand,' he persisted, 'but I'm afraid, as you say, we haven't got at the heart of the mystery. n.o.body seems to care a rap what we do. We haven't done the estuaries as well as I should like, but we'd better push on to the islands. It's exactly the same sort of work, and just as important, I believe. We're bound to get a clue soon.'

There was also the question of time, for me at least. I was due to be back in London, unless I obtained an extension, on the 28th, and our present rate of progress was slow. But I cannot conscientiously say that I made a serious point of this. If there was any value in our enterprise at all, official duty pales beside it. The machinery of State would not suffer from my absence; excuses would have to be made, and the results braved.

All the time our st.u.r.dy little craft grew shabbier and more weather-worn, the varnish thinner, the decks greyer, the sails dingier, and the cabin roof more murky where stove-fumes stained it.

But the only beauty she ever possessed, that of perfect fitness for her functions, remained. With nothing to compare her to she became a home to me. My joints adapted themselves to her crabbed limits, my tastes and habits to her plain domestic economy.

But oil and water were running low, and the time had come for us to be forced to land and renew our stock.

XIV. The First Night in the Islands