For the first day or so as a castaway, he had brandished his childlike faith as one would hold a cross to a vampire. Manuel had always been a devoutly religious man. Manuel could hear the bones crunching in the oversize jaws, and he spent the nights shivering in a hollow at the base of a small dune, trying to drown out the slaughter by repeating prayers and psalms over and over, aloud, until his voice cracked or he shivered himself asleep. At dusk, the jackals and hyenas would begin skulking out to the sea colony on the headland, and he would hear the horrifying cries of the seal pups being dragged away from their mothers, followed by the grunts and snuffling of the dogs as they set upon their prey. The beach was littered with seal skulls and mangled bits of pelt. The only water came from the morning fog each night once the daily sandstorms died. The coast unspooled for hundreds of miles either way a brutal empire of sand dunes and drifting fog, unrelieved by even the slightest trace of vegetation. Not that there was any hope of being saved. The realization struck him that even if by some miracle he was saved immediately, he would lose his arm, and the thought of being less than a whole man withered his resolve. His arm had been lacerated on barnacles during the struggle ashore and now, days later, was streaked with angry, suppurating sores. Manuel dug and thought how it was odd what finally made man give up hope. As the Portuguese began pushing their barques south of the Horn of Africa in the mid-15th century, they ran into a welter of fog, wind and currents that seemed to work in malevolent collusion to strip timber from keels and flesh from bone. Strength to dig.Ī lone castaway after his ship had torn its bottom to shreds on some fog-shrouded offshore reef, Manuel was just another of the growing ranks of doomed sailors cast up on the alien shores of southwestern Africa. But it was enough to keep his throat from fusing shut and a little strength seeped into his limbs. A pitiful few drops of brackish water, soaked up instantly by a bloodstream thick and sluggish after five days of unbearable thirst. Manuel drank off the fog by wringing the dampened square of canvas into his mouth. Finally, toward sunrise, the fog coasted in from the southwest and muffled their mournful retreat back into the hinterland behind the towering sand dunes. The jackals seemed closer then, their wails amplified by the empty ringing stillness. The sandstorm had ended with an eerie suddenness late in the night, almost arbitrarily, as if a vengeful god had grown tired of that particular torture and was casting about for a new method. Manuel spent his last dawn digging his own grave. Check back regularly for stories worth reading. Dave Parmenter’s piece below, which originally appeared in a ’94 SURFER magazine, was the first look at a zone that has become more accessible and popular over the years. Stokelore is a monthly series, which features some of the best writers in the sport celebrating and analyzing various aspects of surf culture, history and travel.
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