The Clouds Beneath the Sun (4 page)

She moved around the tent for a few minutes, changing into her pajamas, brushing her hair and teeth, until she could be certain Russell was back in his own quarters. Then she took another cigarette and returned to the seat she had been sitting in. She lit the cigarette, breathed in slowly, then out slowly. She thought briefly of her mother in her final moments, and then a sense of well-being spread down her chest.

She looked up at the stars, feeling tired but content. Here she was, at last, at long last, on a dig in the warm night of Africa, thousands of miles from Cambridge. She turned off her hurricane lamp, and darkness—save for the stars and the crimson glow of the campfire logs—closed in around her.

Now, with any luck, she could have a few moments to herself.

•   •   •

“Oh yes,” said Eleanor Deacon. “That’s the two-million level all right.” She stood, legs apart, shoulders thrown back, head held erect in the morning sun, the skin on her cheeks sweating slightly. She stared down at the wall of the gorge. She was wearing a knee-length gabardine skirt, leather boots, and the same white shirt of the evening before, and her hair was covered in a large white bandana. Her eyes were ablaze with excitement.

They had all come out to the gorge early this morning, using three of the Land Rovers assigned to the dig. Christopher Deacon was already hard at it, and had been for hours, his tripod in place, an umbrella on a pole behind him, shielding him and the camera from the sun. He’d brought a guard, who stood some way off. They also had other equipment necessary for proper publication of the discovery—measuring sticks divided into meters and centimeters, to show scale, white paint to mark off the area where the bones had been found, soil bores to take samples of the earth and rock around the find spot, better fencing to keep out wild animals, and plenty of buckets in which to store the soil-sand that had been dislodged during the digging and which, in days to come, would be scrutinized and inspected and scrutinized all over again, to make sure nothing had been missed. Arnold Pryce was just beginning the painstaking task of sifting through the soil-sand for ancient pollen. He too had a big yellow beach parasol, to keep off the sun. From a distance the excavation resembled a stylish picnic.

So this was the famous Kihara Gorge, Natalie reflected, as her eyes raked the landscape. This was to be the center of her attention for the next few months—two rocky red walls, thirty yards apart, occupied by spiky thorn bushes, thin trees, deadwood, dust, and, if the smell was anything to go by, various vintages of dung. It was a long way from Jesus Lane in Cambridge.

Eleanor turned to Daniel. She swept her arm in an arc around the find spot. “I want an area thirty feet either side of the discovery, and thirty feet in front, sealed off. Build a proper fence, five feet high. Anyone going inside the fence must wear lightweight shoes, not boots. There’s a good chance that the rest of the skeleton is around here somewhere, so let’s create a little haven of safety.”

Daniel nodded. “The Maasai won’t like it. Any fence we build they might pull down.”

The Maasai were the local tribe in the area around Kihara. They lived by herding goats, sheep, and cows and regarded all land in this part of the Serengeti as theirs.

“Take them a gift, then, Daniel. A bolt of cloth maybe. We have some in the stores. Tell the elders what we are doing. Say that the fence will be temporary. Will you do that?”

Daniel nodded. He was a Luo himself, a tribe with its homeland some miles to the north and west. They were traditional enemies of the Maasai but, for the moment at least, and in recent memory, intertribal relations were good.

Eleanor spent some time showing Daniel and a few of the other local helpers where she wanted the fence built. Above them the sun rose in the sky and shade disappeared. Baboons peered over the lip of the gorge, then ran away. A few deer ventured between the wild thorn bushes on the far side, then they too disappeared.

Around one o’clock, Eleanor called a halt. It was too hot for any physical work and the light was too bright for photography. They drove back in high spirits, the Land Rovers racing one another across the flat plain of the Serengeti, churning up great red-brown dust clouds behind them. Giraffe looked on, then lolloped away.

Back at the camp, most of them took a shower. It was always dusty in the gorge and, with water limited, a shower at this time of day was much more useful than first thing or in the early evening.

Mgina, the slender Maasai woman Natalie had told Russell North about, brought her shower water in two galvanized iron buckets. Although she was uneducated, Mgina had picked up a stilted English in the few years she had been working at the camp, and, despite her cheeks being stippled by tribal cut marks, she was pretty, Natalie thought, and had a natural, slow-moving, languid grace. She was slight but still wiry enough to carry the water with which she filled the canvas shower cistern. Natalie had established that Mgina came from a village about five hours’ walk from the camp, where she had numerous sisters and brothers.

While Natalie took a shower, letting the hot water chase the sand and grit out of her eyelids and ears and sluice down the back of her neck, while she lathered her arms and thighs and let the smell of the soap, which she had brought with her from Gainsborough, remind her of the rainy Lincolnshire fens, Mgina collected up her used shirt and trousers and underwear, and set out fresh ones on the bed.

When she had used all the available hot water, Natalie half dried herself, so she didn’t drip water everywhere, but then she let the remains of the water evaporate on her skin as she sat on her towel on the chair of her dressing table, combing her hair. Evaporation was deliciously cooling.

She had always had a thing about her hair, ever since she was a girl. She never felt properly dressed unless her hair was brushed and brushed and brushed again. Her fellow undergraduates at Cambridge had teased her about it but she hadn’t minded. And they had given up in the end, and accepted her for what she was. In the gorge, she realized, brushing her hair was even more important: with water strictly rationed, brushing kept the dust to a minimum and she needed to feel that her hair was as clean as could be.

Mgina watched as Natalie did this, as fascinated by her straight hair as Natalie was with Mgina’s close-cropped curls.

“What is your comb made of, Miss Natalie?”

“Tortoiseshell.”

“It is very beautiful.”

Natalie nodded her head. “Yes, it was my mother’s—she gave it to me.”

“Does she have hair like you?”

“She did. She’s dead now. She was killed, an accident.”

“I am sorry for you. They go fast, these cars.”

“They do, yes.” Natalie put down the comb. “And your family, Mgina? How are they, they are well?”

Mgina made a face. “Not the little one, Odnate. He has the flu, I think, but also spots under his tongue.”

“Oh,” said Natalie, quietly. “Oh dear.” She frowned and stopped brushing her hair. “When did this flu start, Mgina?”

“The day before yesterday. There was a feast the day before that and it was the first time Odnate had been old enough to attend. The next day he was ill—it was too much for him.”

Natalie had stood up and was toweling herself dry. “What did you eat at this feast?”

“Corn, berries, meat of course. Fruit. What is it, Miss Natalie?”

Natalie had thrown the towel on the bed. “Just wait there, Mgina, while I get dressed.”

In front of the other woman, Natalie stepped into her underwear, put on her fresh set of trousers and shirt, laced her boots. She fastened the cuffs of her shirt at her wrists, so her arms were protected from the sun.

Then she said, “Come with me. Leave the laundry on the bed. Quickly now.”

Frowning herself, Mgina did as she was told.

Natalie led the way along the row of tents to where she knew Jonas Jefferson was billeted.

“Jonas!” she half shouted when they reached his tent. “Are you there?”

A short pause, then the flap was pulled back. “Yes—what is it?”

Natalie turned to Mgina, then back to Jonas.

“Mgina’s brother has ‘flu,’ she thinks. But he also has spots under his tongue.”

Jonas looked from Natalie to Mgina and back again. “Anthrax?”

“He woke up with it the day before yesterday, after a big feast. The meat could have been contaminated.”

Jonas nodded. “You could be right. How do you know about anthrax?”

“I saw it on a dig in Israel two years ago. Do we have any penicillin?”

“Yes, of course, but it’s precious. Where does Mgina’s family live?”

“The village doesn’t have a name, but it’s five hours’ walk away—ten to twelve miles.”

“Okay. I’ll get the antibiotics; meet me at the Land Rovers in ten minutes.”

•   •   •

“Anthrax?” said Eleanor, helping herself to water from the jug, as Mutevu Ndekei began serving dinner—lamb chops. “That can be serious, right?”

“Oh, yes,” said Jonas. “If you don’t catch it in the first couple of days, the patient can be dead inside a week.”

“Nasty,” said Eleanor with a shudder. “And how do you catch such a disease?”

“It varies. Through an open wound, from someone else who has it … in this case by eating contaminated meat.”

“And penicillin cures it?”

Jefferson nodded. “I’ll be driving over to see the boy again tomorrow.” He looked across to Natalie and smiled.

“You saved the boy’s life,” said Eleanor, addressing Natalie. “How do you know so much about disease?”

Natalie was helping herself to chops. “As I told Jonas, I was on a dig in Israel, with Ira Ben-Osman, two years ago. There was an outbreak among the local Palestinians. Three died but we managed to save another fifteen. They had all eaten contaminated meat.”

The business with Mgina and Mgina’s brother had been quite an episode. Natalie didn’t feel as though she had saved someone’s life, but the boy—when they had reached him—obviously didn’t have flu. He was vomiting blood and had severe abdominal pains and a fever. It was right that they had gone when they had. Mgina’s family had clearly been worried—their traditional herbal remedies were not working. Of course, the penicillin hadn’t produced any immediate effect, so the family had still been anxious when Jonas and Natalie had left. They had done their best to reassure Odnate’s parents but had not wholly succeeded. Hopefully, tomorrow would bring better news.

The lamb had reached Eleanor. She inspected it doubtfully. “How can you tell if meat is contaminated?”

“It’s not easy,” said Jonas. “Animals that have anthrax collapse, so they mustn’t be used for food, which is probably what happened in this case. If the spores are dense enough, you can see them with the naked eye—they are gray-white and resemble ground glass.”

Eleanor picked up the chop in her fingers and turned it over. “Hmmm. Did anyone else in the village contract the disease?”

“Not so far as I could see,” replied Jonas. “Odnate was the youngest at the feast, with the least resistance. If the animal they were eating was not badly infected, and well roasted … he was unlucky.”

Eleanor nodded. “So is the boy out of the woods?”

“Not necessarily. His family must be disciplined and give him the full course of antibiotics.”

“Is that going to leave us short? You know, in case we have an accident here?”

Jonas shook his head. “We’re fine, unless we have our own epidemic. But next time anyone goes to Nairobi, they should top up our supplies.”

Eleanor nodded again. “If I talk to Jack, I’ll mention it. I’m not sure when he’s planning to come. He’s on some political committee in Nairobi.”

She sat up and her gaze took in Natalie and Jonas. “Well, I’m glad you two could help. Anything that brings blacks and whites closer is important right now. I’m told there’s been more oath-taking up north in Nakura, where a thousand Kikuyu were gathered in the bush for a bloodletting ceremony. And it’s the third time in the past two months. A curfew has been imposed and two newspapers closed for publishing coded notices telling people where the oath-taking would take place. It’s going to be like this in the runup to the independence conference in London in February, I am afraid.”

There was a brief gloomy silence, until she suddenly turned in her seat. “Mutevu, what’s the matter? There’s something different about you tonight—I can’t put my finger on it?”

He held his massive frame erect but grinned sheepishly. “Some monkeys got into the camp, ma’am. They stole one of my boots—”

“That’s it!” cried Eleanor. “Of
course!
You’re not shuffling.” She peered round the edge of the table and inspected his footwear. “So your beloved Wellingtons have gone missing, eh? You’re reduced to plimsolls, I see.”

“Just one boot was taken, Miss Eleanor.”

“We can fix that, I’m sure. Don’t worry. I’ll have Jack buy some in Nairobi.” She smiled.

“Thank you, Miss Eleanor, but the old ones were a gift from Sir Philip Sisley. He signed them. Don’t bother Mr. Jack, he’s busy, I’m sure.”

And Mutevu was gone.

Eleanor smiled as he left the room. “I should have guessed the boots had sentimental value … because they don’t
fit.”
Her grin took in the whole table. “Now, where was I? Yes, well done, Natalie, that was quick thinking, about the anthrax, I mean. But if this episode looks like it has a happy ending, we can get back to—”

“Yes, yes, this paper on the knee joint needn’t be very long, isn’t that so?” interrupted Richard Sutton somewhat awkwardly. “And if you insist we need modern bones for a comparison, maybe I should go to Nairobi, or New York, find some bones, in a hospital or a morgue, and then come back.” He swigged his Coke from the bottle.

“Don’t be silly, Richard.” Eleanor pushed her shirt more firmly into the top of her gabardine skirt. “No one wastes digging time like that. Just because you’ve made one discovery doesn’t mean you, or Russell here, or Christopher, or any of us, will not find something even more important in the days ahead.” She took off her spectacles and waved them at him. “Don’t be so impatient. No one’s going to ‘scoop’ you on a thing like this.”