The next morning they left for Etosha, driving east through the hard rocky hills. They saw zebra and springbok and elephant and, when he stopped to let her photograph some wild ostrich, they were attacked by an angry male who leapt in the air and kicked his massive spurs against the Landrover, before pursuing them down the road until he was satisfied he had impressed them. Sarah thought everything was terrific.
But she hadn’t seen anything yet. The next two days seemed the most delightful in her life. She had never heard a lion roar or an elephant trumpet. Now, at the Okakuya rest camp in Etosha she lived and slept amongst them. On the edge of the camp is a big waterhole, where, all day and night, the animals trooped up to drink. Their first night they sat drinking wine and grilling chops over their open fire, watching the parade of animals. Sarah was enthralled. She whispered breathlessly into her tape-recorder:
‘There is a strict code of priority. The zebra will not come too close when the wildebeest are drinking, the bad-tempered rhinoceros will share his waterhole with nobody …’
The big black rhinoceros stood up to his knees in the pool, his prehensile lip slurping, his beady eye on the other animals malevolently. A new herd of springbok appeared like yellow wraiths out of the bush beyond, then stopped when they saw the rhino. He glowered at them. McQuade pointed to where, beyond the rhino, a row of heads appeared above the treetops. ‘Giraffe.’
The heads swayed towards the hole, then they emerged but of the bush into the floodlit clearing, lanky and graceful. They also stopped when they saw the rhino. He turned his massive head to glower at them, but decided their distance was respectful enough. He doggedly buried his mouth back in the water. Everybody waited, immobile in the floodlights.
Finally the rhino raised his head. He eyed the buck and giraffe challengingly. He had had enough water, but he stuck to his rights, letting everybody know who he was. The springbok and giraffe waited understandingly. ‘Come on, you old meanie,’ Sarah whispered. Finally the old meanie lumbered out of the water, but he had not yet finished pulling his rank. He stood on the bank truculently, immobile, his prehistoric horn curving up, telling the world there would be no nonsense. The giraffes and springbok understood perfectly. Finally, when he was satisfied that he had impressed them, he turned and lumbered off into the bush, happily bad-tempered.
‘The mean old bastard!’
The giraffes unfroze and came lankily towards the waterhole. The springbok moved towards the opposite end twitching their tails. While the giraffes lined up on the edge, the springbok daintily entered the water. The giraffes planted their long spindly forelegs wide astride, and they lowered their long gentle necks to the water, their piebald rumps up in the air.
For a minute Sarah sat there, gazing at them, absolutely happy; then she marshalled her thoughts and whispered into her recorder: ‘In an attitude of complete defencelessness the lofty, kindly giraffe …’ At that moment the lofty giraffes snapped their long necks up and the springbok sprang around and started bounding out of the water. The giraffes scrambled their spread-eagled legs together and ran. They disappeared into the black bush in a loping gallop. Sarah was frantically reporting the event into her recorder. There followed an expectant silence. Not a thing moved. Then out of the blackness, into the floodlight, stalked the lions, and she gasped.
There was a big male and three tawny lionesses. They came purposefully out of the night. They sniffed the air, but disdainfully; they moved powerfully down to the water’s edge. Then they crouched, their haunches bulging, and began to lap.
‘Oh,’ she breathed, ‘I’m over the moon …’
The lions drank, ears back, tail-tips twitching, and their silent presence dominated the night. Sarah was transfixed, her recorder poised. Suddenly the lion jerked up his big head and his three lionesses did the same – and then Sarah saw the huge shapes wafting slowly through the treetops. ‘Elephants!’
There were six coming ponderously, silently out of the darkness, huge and grey and wrinkled, their massive ears slowly flapping and their gnarled trunks slopping. Then the big cow leader saw the lions. She froze, and the other five stopped simultaneously, their trunk tips up, sniffing the night. The four lions crouched, all heads facing the massive intruders, bulging muscles tensed, their tails flicking angrily. For a full minute the two sides glared at each other, then, suddenly, the silence was shattered by a short snarl. It came from the big-maned lion and it was very impressive. It was answered immediately by an angry trumpet from the big cow elephant, high-pitched and deep-chested, and she shook her great head and flapped her ears and swung her trunk sideways so dust flew. Behind her the others stood immobile, letting the boss handle the crisis.
This exchange of insults was followed by deep, hostile silence, attended by the flicking of the lions’ tails and much mutual glaring. Finally, the lion returned his head to the water and resumed his lapping, and his lionesses followed suit. But without much relish. The big cow moved her great self and began to plod slowly towards the water. Her herd followed in slow motion. She moved resolutely into the water, twenty yards away from the lions, her ears slowly flapping and her trunk restlessly slopping. She glared at the lions once more, then gave a great contemptuous sigh and immersed her trunk tip. The lions lapped hurriedly, and then the male abruptly got up. He turned and stalked away. His lionesses glared at the elephants, then rose and followed their lord, huge muscles rippling, long tails flicking, disdaining to look back, only just satisfied that they had not lost the confrontation. The big cow sighed voluminously, then curled her gnarled trunk up to her cavernous mouth, and squirted the water into it with a great swoosh.
Sarah wanted to burst into applause. ‘Oh, what a spectacular charade!’
They went to bed late and happy. She fell asleep in his arms, her mind a tumult of gangling giraffes and bounding springboks, and sulking lions and self-satisfied she-elephants squirting great gushes of water over their backs. When he woke up at three a.m. she was not beside him. She was sitting on the verandah with her tape-recorder, terrified of missing anything.
She woke him up at sunrise whispering, ‘The sun is up and the gate is open …’ She was in her tracksuit, her face made up.
‘Come back to bed,’ he complained.
‘Tonight,’ she bit his neck, ‘tonight I’ll make love till you cry out for mercy, but right now the gate is open and all my beautiful friends are out there waiting to have their photographs taken.’ She bit his ear and growled loudly into it.
‘But what am I going to do with this?’
She looked at the area in question, the white sheet thrusting upwards like an arctic encampment.
‘My, you’re a smooth-talking bastard.’ She unzipped her tracksuit top with a grinning flourish.
They left an hour later for Namatoni rest camp, a hundred and fifty kilometres away. McQuade had been through this park half a dozen times but had never seen so many animals so close. There were great herds of wildebeest in the open plains, herds of zebra, giraffe galore browsing off the treetops whilst Sarah hung out of the Landrover photographing, vast herds of springbok turning the plains golden, great lumbering elephant gazing at them thoughtfully. On a small rise, they saw a pride of three lions, sitting bolt upright like cats, watching a line of wildebeest moving. McQuade stopped. The two lionesses suddenly left their knoll in unspoken agreement, and went racing off in opposite directions, while the male remained, his ears pricked. McQuade pointed, and Sarah picked out the hapless wildebeest which the predators had selected, straggling five hundred yards behind the rest.
One lioness raced across the plain, and came to a crouching halt three hundred yards in front of the creature’s path, whilst the other halted three hundred yards behind it. Suddenly the solitary wildebeest smelt the lioness in front of it, turned and went racing away in the opposite direction, panic-stricken, and the hindmost lioness waited for it to come. The other lioness raced after the wildebeest, flashing over the veld. At the last moment the waiting lioness sprang in a tawny flash of invincible muscle and claws and jaws and she landed on the animal’s neck and clung as it bucked and kicked and reared, and the other lioness hit it in an avalanche of fury. The wildebeest collapsed, the lioness’s jaws buried into the terrified nostrils, clamping them shut while the other lioness’s jaws sank furiously into its windpipe midst gushes of blood. Within a minute the prey’s kicking stopped. All the while, the male lion sat stock-still on his knoll, watching the drama with deep military interest. Now he descended and stalked over to the kill. He swatted his females aside with his big paw, and settled down. He sank his jaws into the warm wildebeest’s belly, and started to feed. After a minute or so he let his females in to share.
Sarah’s camera was going clickety-click. She collapsed back with an anguished sigh. She felt she had seen all the wonders of the world.
The Namatoni rest camp is an old German fort. In far-off days this white rectangle, with its battlements and clanging gates, housed the Schutztruppe, the German troops sent out by Bismarck to pacify the natives. Now the barracks are bedrooms for tourists and the parade square within is a shaded garden. There is a restaurant run by the Wildlife Department but Sarah wanted a fire, the stars, Africa.
She stared into the embers, prodding the chops with a fork.
McQuade said: ‘Anything the matter?’
‘No. I’m just so happy, that’s all.’ She gave a big sigh. ‘I don’t want it to end. And tomorrow you must go back to Walvis Bay.’
With all his heart he didn’t want it to end either, he did not want her to disappear into the maelstrom of South Africa chasing newspaper stories; he desperately wanted to keep her for himself.
‘Don’t go back to South Africa yet. I’m only going back to sea for a few days. A week, maximum. Stay in Namibia a bit longer. You’re here now. There’s so much for you to write about – the politics, the history. You can borrow the Landrover and drive up to Windhoek.’ He looked at her. ‘When I come back we can drive to Ai-Ais, you must see that, and Lüderitz, where the history of this place began …’
She had a half smile on her lovely face. Then she sighed. ‘And then you must go back to sea again.’
He wanted to laugh, because when he came back from that submarine next week he was going to be a millionaire and wild horses wouldn’t get him back to sea for a long, long time. ‘Let’s cross the bridges as we come to them! At least we’ll have had the extra time together!’ He added: ‘To think.’ And, he just wanted to laugh out loud that he loved her. ‘About each other. We can’t just walk out of each other’s lives on Friday, Sarah.’
Her eyes glistened a moment.
‘No.’ She sat staring into the coals, then she sat up straight. ‘Let’s think about it.’ She turned to him with a bright smile. ‘And now shall we stop being sad about it?!’
That night, lying in each other’s arms in the old fort in the happy, exhausted hour after love, they heard a lion roar, a long deep-throated grunting sound, and she tensed in thrilled excitement; then she went limp and sighed at the ceiling. ‘Oh, how can I live in Boston after this?’
And he kissed her neck and he made up his mind. Next week he was either going to be a millionaire or he was going to have to catch more fish, but either way he was damned if he was going to let this lovely woman go out of his life! He said:
‘When I come back we’ll drive to Ai-Ais and Lüderitz. And then you’re coming to sea with me. You can write a wonderful story about the fishing grounds out there in the Benguela – an important story, about how the world is raping the seas. And you’ll get fantastic photographs.’
She slowly turned to him, with a gentle smile of hopelessness. And before she could refuse he heard himself saying, ‘I love you, Sarah.’ And he knew with absolute certainty that he meant it.
She looked at him a long moment, then gently stroked his eyebrow with a fingertip. ‘I know the feeling … But it’s not as simple as that, is it?’
McQuade wanted to laugh. ‘It is! The explosive South African situation can wait!’ She grinned at that and he repeated solemnly, with all his heart: ‘I love you, Sarah. You can’t have a chance of such happiness and not see it through!’
Her lovely face went serious. Then she pressed her fingertip to his lips.
‘I think you may be right. And I think you think you do. And yes, I think I do, too. And I think we better think about it.’
McQuade was completely happy. Because he knew that she would stay till he came back next week, a millionaire.
The next morning it was still like that, and McQuade was feeling on top of the world as they left Namatoni in the sunrise, heading back towards the faraway Skeleton Coast. They still had a whole night and almost two more days of each other, and he was convinced that Sarah was going to stay on. She was in excellent spirits too, and her eyes had a shine. She was bursting with excitement and camera-clicking again. It was mid-morning when they passed through the formalities of the Okakuya gate, and mid-afternoon when they reached Jakob’s kraal. Jakob loaded his belongings into the Landrover and bade his wife farewell. McQuade told Sarah that the old man was an old acquaintance who was coming to work for him. That night they slept on the Skeleton Coast, built a roaring fire and grilled sausages and baked potatoes. A heavy fog rolled in off the cold Atlantic, and it was cold, and the whole world was still. It was beautiful, the fairy-like mist slowly moving over them, and she felt she was in an enchanted land and the last few days seemed like a dream. They lay together deep in the big warm sleeping bag behind a hummock where Jakob could not see them. Finally she said quietly: ‘I can’t bear to leave you. And you’re right, there is plenty to write about here. So, yes, I will stay until you come back next week, please.’
He squeezed her tight.
The dense fog lay heavy along the Skeleton Coast all the next day, making the desert look like a winter landscape. Sarah sat beside him in the glow of the instrument panel. The whole world was beautiful, and even the prospect of what he had to do when he got to that submarine did not daunt him. All that mattered was here and now, with her. When they got to Swakopmund the fog was so dense the streetlights were on, and it looked like a Bavarian skiing village. And even drab, flat Walvis Bay, smelling of fish, looked pretty and cosy with its twinkling lights.
McQuade first went to his house and installed Jakob in the servants’ quarters adjoining the garage, before they drove down Oceana Road to the fishing wharf. Even the lights of the trawlers looked cosy in the fog. He pulled into the Kuiseb compound, and there was the Bonanza.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘There she is.’
She was silent and ghostly in the swirly fog, her bridge lights twinkling. She must have been in for some hours because the fish-weighing was over, the refrigerated containers gone. For the first time in three weeks McQuade felt the dread of where he was about to go with her, and was going to be very glad when this was over. ‘Want to have a look at her?’
‘I particularly want to see the captain’s cabin.’
The boat was deserted. There was a note from Elsie in an envelope. It said that everybody would return at sunrise, except the Kid whose ankle was badly sprained, and the Coloured crew who had been given one week’s paid leave. Nathan had arrived that afternoon and was installed at Railway Yard View; the ship was revictualled and ready to sail at any time.
Sarah had said that she was perfectly happy to spend the night in his house in Fifth Street, but he insisted on the Europahof Hotel in Swakopmund. He had a lot to do in the morning which he did not want her to know about, and he did not want her to come to the harbour and see them sail with a skeleton crew. Madly in love though he was, he wanted to be able to walk out easily in the morning. And they had had a lovely five days together, a magical five days, and he did not want to spoil it by having the last night in Railway Yard View, with Nathan.
After dinner, lying in his arms in their bed, she stroked his head and said:
‘Oh yes – very expensive.’
And even the prospect of that submarine did not spoil his happiness.