Atlantic Fury by Hammond; Innes

With Cliff it was the impersonal forces of the earth’s atmosphere, his human contacts mostly made at one remove through the tenuous medium of the ether. I wondered what he’d do if he met opposition – direct opposition, man to man, on his own ground. I thought perhaps he could be very tricky then, perhaps behave with quite astonishing violence.
    He had stopped his pacing and was standing over me, staring down at the sketch I’d drawn. ‘You work pretty fast.’
    â€˜It’s just a rough,’ I said. ‘Pencil sketch of a man who’s made his work his life.’
    He laughed. ‘Oh, I can relax. Indeed I can – if she’s pretty enough. But then there’s not much difference, is there now; women and weather, they both have their moods, they can both destroy a man. That’s why storms are given girls’ names. Do you need that sketch? I mean, if you were just drawing to pass the time …’
    I saw he really wanted it. ‘It’s your paper anyway,’ I said and I handed it to him. He stood for a moment looking down at it. Then he placed it carefully on the keyboard. ‘This trip to Laerg,’ he said. ‘Do you have to go – I mean now, tomorrow morning?’
    â€˜Of course I’m going,’ I told him. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted ever since I returned to England.’
    He nodded. ‘Well, let’s go over to the Met. Office and see what makes. But I’m telling you, man, you could have it very rough indeed.’
    â€˜No good telling me,’ I said. ‘Better tell the skipper of the landing craft.’
    He didn’t say anything, and when I glanced at him, his face was clouded, his mind concentrated on a world beyond the one in which we walked. Two big towing trucks went grinding past trundling red-painted trailers piled with stores. I don’t think he even saw them, and in the Met. Office he went straight to the teleprint file and without a word to Sykes settled down at the desk to mark up a weather map.
    Now that I knew something of the set-up, the Met. Office seemed somehow different – familiar ground like the bridge of a ship. The rain had stopped and it was lighter, the visibility much greater. To the left I could see the single hangar standing in the drifted sand like a stranded hulk. It was the only building in sight. Ahead, the wide windows looked out across the tarmac to a sea of dune grass rippling in the wind, humped and hollowed, as full of movement as the sea itself. And beyond the grass-grown dunes was the white blur of broken water, wind-blown waves moving in long regular lines towards the Sound of Harris.
    Standing there, with the instruments of meteorology all around me, it wasn’t difficult to slip into the mood of men like Cliff Morgan, to visualise the world they lived in, that great amorphous abstract world of atmosphere. I found myself thinking of Laerg, out there beyond the sea’s dim horizon. I had seen photographs of it – etchings, too, by the Swedish artist, Roland Svensson. It was the etchings I was thinking of now, for I was sure Svensson had caught the mood of the wild wet world better than any photograph. Unconsciously I found my legs straddled as though to balance myself against the movement of a ship. A few hours and I should be on my way, steaming towards those sheer rock islands that for over thirty years had existed in my mind as the physical embodiment of an old man I had greatly loved.
    Oddly, I felt no elation at the prospect; only a sense of awe. In my mind’s eye I saw the cliffs rising sheer – black and dripping moisture. But because of my surroundings, the weather instruments and the two men working at the desk, I had also a picture of that other world comprising the moving masses of the Earth’s outer skin. It was no more than the vague impression that a shipping forecast handed to the officer of the watch conjures in his mind, but it