“Look!” I pointed.
Both Jubal and the fisherman followed the line of my out-stretched arm. J-Casta continued to bend over his metal box.
Even as I pointed, the cliff shuddered. The other Mvule went down. Like an envelope being torn, the rock split horizontally and a tongue of water burst from it. The split widened, the water became a wall, pouring out and down.
The sound of the splitting came clear and hard to our startled ears. Then came the roar of the water, bursting down the hill-side. It washed everything before it. I saw trees, bushes and boulders hurried down in it. I saw the original fissure lengthen and lengthen like a cruel smile, cutting through the ground as fast as fire. Other cracks started, running uphill and across: every one of them began to spout water.
The fishermen stood up, shouting as their homes were swept away by the first fury of the flood.
And then the entire lower mountainside began to slip. With a cumulative roar, mud, water and rock rolled down into the lake. Where they had been, a solid torrent cascaded out, one mighty wall of angry water. The escaping ‘flow from Lake Victoria had found its outlet!
Next moment, our calm surface was a furious sea. Jubal slipped and fell on to one knee. I grabbed him, and almost went overboard myself. A series of giant waves plunged out-wards from the shore. “The first one rocked us, the second one overturned our flimsy craft completely.
I came to the surface coughing and snorting. J-Casta rose at my side. We were just in time to see the float slip completely under; it sank in no time, carrying the pilot with it. I had not even seen his face, poor fellow.
Jubal came up by the fisherman, who had also overturned.
But dugouts do not sink. We owed our lives to those hollowed tree trunks. They were righted, and Jubal and his henchman climbed into one, while I climbed into the other. The waves were still fierce, but had attained a sort of regularity which allowed us to cope with them.
The breakthrough was now a quarter of a mile long. Water poured from it with unabated force, a mighty waterfall where land had been before. We skirted it painfully, making a land-ing as near to it as we dared.
The rest of that day, under its blinding arch of sky, passed in various stages of confusion and fear.
It was two and a half hours before we were taken off the strip of shore. We were not idle in that time, although every few minutes Jubal paused to curse the fact that he was strand-ed and powerless. Miraculous as it seems, there were some survivors from the obliterated village, women mostly; we helped to get them ashore and built fires for them.
Meanwhile, Dam Authority planes began to circle the area. We managed to attract the attention of one, which landed by our party. Jubal’s manner changed at once; now that he had a machine and men who, unlike the villagers, were in his command, he worked with a silent purpose allowing of no question.
Over the vision, he ordered the rest of the floats to attend to the villagers’ needs. We sped back to Mokulgu.
On the way, Jubal spoke to Owenstown. They took his news almost without comment. They reported that Victoria was still sinking, although the rate had now steadied. A twenty-four-hour a day airlift was about to go into operation, dropping solid blocks of marble on to the lake bed. “There, a fault about three miles square had been located; four frogmen had been lost, drowned.
“It’s like tossing pennies into the ocean,” Jubal said.
I was thinking of the frogmen, sucked irresistibly down the fault. They would be swept through underground waterways, battered and pulped, to be spat out eventually into our lake.
Vision from Mokulgu, coming on just before we landed there, reported a breach in the lake banks, some twenty miles north of the town. At a word from Jubal, we switched plans and veered north at once to see just how extensive the damage was.
The break was at a tiny cluster of huts, dignified by the name of Ulatuama, growing like a wart on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. Several men, the crew of a Dam Authority patrol boat, were working furiously at a widening gap. The damage had been caused by the very waves which had swamped us, and I learnt that a small, disused lock had stood here, relic of an earlier irrigation scheme; so the weakness had been of man’s making. Beyond the lock had been a dried-up chan-nel some twenty yards wide; this was now a swollen, plung-ing river.