Blood Diamond Chapter 3

How did he survive those black hours? Daniel had no idea. The water was warmer than he first thought but still the sea winds chilled his back and made him shiver, draped across the barrel. At various times he thought he sensed great things moving nearby and under him, but he tried to put them out of his thoughts. It was the tricks of the mind he had to fear more than the creatures of the deep, he told himself. He forced himself not to think of monsters in the black leagues below – the great blowing whales, the thousand hydra-arms and teeth of the abyss. Had there been a moon he’d have been silhouetted against the silver sky like an invitation to those myriad demons, but he lay as still as he could, allowing the running current to take the barrel and him with it, trusting to his stars.

Just as dawn was breaking grey over the sea’s face, Daniel did see some sign that the monsters were not all of the imagination. Raising his head to look in all directions, in the milky early light he saw the back of something dark and grey turning in the water ahead of him. It had a fin the colour of granite, and it turned and turned again, moving closer to the barrel. Daniel bent his knees, lifting his feet and lower legs from the water, and tried to tuck his hands in closer under his chin. The beast turned and turned again, and he felt the immensity of it passing beneath the barrel, felt the slight upsurge of the water it displaced. He closed his eyes, and prayed it would soon be over.

There was jolt, and the barrel raised half from the water. For a moment it seemed that it might tip over, turning turtle with Daniel still clinging on, upside-down, forced to swim free into the steely dawn sea, but the barrel descended again in the same order with a fling of spray. Daniel clung to the sodden wood, his heart in his mouth, but whatever the bump on the barrel had meant, it appeared to satisfy the creature that here was no food, here no tender flesh. He saw it turn once more on the surface, a flick of a tail like a scythe, and he saw it no more.

The sun rose high in the whitened sky, and it burnt down on Daniel Feelding all that day. He felt the skin of his neck burn, his lips crack with the salt and the wind, and still he clung to the barrel as though it were all his life and all his faith and future. He rode that wooden horse upon the might and majesty of the running sea, and never once loosened his grip.

But Daniel did not know if he could survive another black night. The terror of the darkness and the things that hunt by night, the fear of sleep and the equal fear of the long, sleepless hours staring at an impenetrable blindness – he did not know that he could survive another. As the sun began to sink ahead of him, he considered his options. Mightn’t he just let go now? Slip from the slippery sides and into the silvered ocean and breathe deep and bring forward the inevitable end to this sudden, decisive moment? But as he was thinking, he became conscious of a roaring sound – a sound that he realised now had been with him these last hours but so low and slow and distant that it had crept upon him without his being aware of it.
With an almighty effort Daniel raised his weary head and blinked into the salty distance, almost direct at the sinking sun. He was drifting westwards – the current was bringing him to the west, and just as he saw the line of white and the haze of the distant flung spume of the breakers, he thought to himself: To the west is the continent – to the west is that great unknown land.
Daniel wriggled his way down the barrel so the full length of his legs now trailed in the cooling sea. He clung to the wooden life-raft only by his chest and the fading strength in his arms, and with teeth gritted and the sure knowledge that only death awaited failure, he started to kick out for the land.

The sun fell fast in those tropics – from dusk to darkness was the work of barely an instant, and Daniel had been kicking, kicking toward the unseen shore for nearly an hour, the sea and the sky rapidly darkening around him, when he felt the surge of the first breaker beneath him. It threw the barrel upward with nearly the force of the monster’s impact, but Daniel righted himself and thrashed harder with his legs, feeling a renewal of his fading strength.
The second breaker was a big one. It plucked the barrel and hurled it forward. Daniel’s grip slipped and his fingernails tore, but he kept a hold until the third wave struck, and then he and the barrel were thrown wholly underwater, turned and churned in a salty maelstrom, and he could hold no longer. He bobbed to the surface, gasping, and felt the white water sweep him onward, pulled underwater by irresistible hands and spat out again. Reaching for the surface, kicking to keep his head above the salt, suddenly Daniel felt beneath his feet – land!

Copyright Rannulph Moore

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Ranulph Moore describes himself as an explorer, who became a writer to purge himself of the adventures that were crowding his life. He says he has seen it all, in a life spent observing the lives of others.
He will travel anywhere – as long as he can make a decent cup of tea and launder a linen jacket. He describes Africa as one of his great loves. He has spent time in every country on the continent.
If he can’t find a good champagne, he has been known to resort to gin. He has homes in Paris, Jura and Cape Town. At present, he lives in Madagascar, where he is researching his latest book.
Read an interview with Rannulph Moore.