The Voice of the Xenolith (3 page)

I think I only started to really appreciate tracking when I got older and started to look for fossils, because I remembered what that tracker had told me: you need to know what you are looking for, keep a picture in your head, before you start to look. In a way, your eyes get sharper when you know precisely what to look for, and you will see more.

This is why words are important: giving something a name, a symbol, helps you to keep in mind a picture of the thing you are searching for.

The best tracking book ever written is by Louis Liebenberg, and he says this: even if you don’t actually see the thing you are looking for, just knowing it has been there helps: your knowing helps you to think about where it would have been, what it would have looked like, and where you are most likely to find it. That kind of thinking gives you extra information that most people would not have. He says that you will be able to visualise the thing you are looking for, and – this is the bit I love best about what Liebenberg says – you will be able to create a whole story about the thing or animal you are searching for, “a story of what happened when no one was looking.”

I have already told you that I am not like other kids; that I am a xenolith. I like to be alone, to think about new ideas, to learn new things on my own, using the internet or books, and I like to go on fossil-hunting trips. But I already saw, after a day or two at the new school, that at this school being a xenolith was not going to be okay. They needed me to fit in, to be like everyone else.

It’s not like I started off at my new High School not speaking. I had changed since I was five. I now didn’t have selective mutism, and the day before the move I decided that I would need to speak a lot at the new school, to be like everyone else, otherwise everyone would be on my case, and I would be the problem child again. But to tell the truth, when I saw how busy and big and unfamiliar the place was, with not a single person there that I had ever met, I knew it would be hard to speak there. So I suppose I was a bit quieter than usual, which for a person like me, who is normally quiet, means that I was quieter than anyone in the whole class, and sure enough the form tutor called me in after about a month for a ‘chat’.

I sort of knew what was coming.

She was the English teacher as well as being my form tutor. She wasn’t cross or anything, she just said she wanted to get to know me, because I was the only new kid at the school and she already knew all the others in my class. The other kids had been at the school since the previous year, or had at least started this year all at the same time, in September. I had started late, in October, a month after everyone else, so by then all the cliques had already been formed and I was the outsider, without even wanting to be.

She asked what I was interested in. So I told her a bit about geology, and archaeology, and fossils. And I suppose I was showing off a bit, because I wanted her to know that I am not stupid even if I am quiet, so I told her that I collect words and that I like to know the origin, the etymology, of words, and that I know things about the physical and chemical properties of sand and that I have visited deserts all over the world.

She asked me if I would write a special paper for homework. It wasn’t the regular homework. The other kids had no choice; they had to write about a book we were reading in class, but she wanted me to write about myself, about what I was interested in, “So I can get to know you,” she said.

So from then on, she and I had a kind of agreement. She knew I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t lazy, and she knew I preferred not to have to talk in class, but she did expect me to write something really serious each week. She was honest with me. She said, “I can’t know if you are learning, because you don’t like to participate in class discussions. And that’s fine, I don’t mind, but you need to give me something you have written so I know for sure you are learning.”

I think this was a good agreement and I stuck to it. So this is the first piece I wrote for her, because she said I should write about what interests me.

This is the first paper I wrote for my English teacher:

Searching and discovering

By Amethyst Simons

I have three main interests:

1.  Fossils

2.  Archaeology

3.  Birds

All of my interests have one thing in common: the things I like are to do with searching for things, finding things which have been hidden from view for a long time, or finding and naming new information about things which were previously unknown to me. I suppose you could say that my interest is in discovery.

Discovery does not happen by chance; you need to start off by doing lots of reading and by building your knowledge. You find the information first, and this guides you to know where to look, what clues to look for, and how to recognise something which may look to most people like a piece of broken rubbish, but which is actually a discovery. The knowledge you use for your search can come from different sources; in my case, it is usually from history, or natural history, or science.

Experience is also important, because when you start out on a search, if you don’t have any experience, you may see something of value but not be able to recognise it.

It also helps to have the right technology to help you find things: in my case, it might be a magnifying glass, or a microscope, or binoculars. Or a camera.

Discovery gives you a feeling of excitement, of amazement even, and these feelings take over after you may have spent hours or weeks or months learning and preparing for the search. And when you do finally find a fossil, something you have been searching for, then just knowing you are retrieving something that was lost for maybe millions of years can take your breath away.

You can get the same feeling of amazement at a discovery when you look at something, say a piece of sandstone, first with your eyes, and then through a microscope. My microscope is a digital one which plugs into the USB port on my computer and when you look at different kinds of stones under the microscope you find clues to how the stones were formed and which minerals they contain.

My father, who is a geologist, showed me how he can slice a very thin section of a stone, in his laboratory, and when you look at it through his special electron microscope, you see all the crystals in the rock, glowing in different colours, as if a torch has lit them up. They remind me of stained glass windows.

If you don’t have a digital microscope, you can use a cheap disposable camera and take out the lens. You stick the lens with blue-tack over the lens of your phone camera, and it will magnify an image. I have used this adapted camera while I am on a fossil-hunting trip to take pictures of fossils I have found, and I have been able to see all kinds of details which I couldn’t see previously.

Archaeology interests me because it is about searching and discovering too. I like to watch the TV programme ‘Time Team’ because the team of archaeologists has got just one weekend to dig up a site and to find out as much as they can about who lived there, what they did and made, and what kind of buildings they lived in. Sometimes they find things like brooches or weapons or pottery kilns. They are always digging something up and it is often something amazing, that nobody really expected. Or perhaps there was something they hoped to find, based on their research, but were worried they would not find; they may search for hours and hours finding nothing, and suddenly – there it is.

You probably think that my third area of interest, birdwatching, has nothing to do with digging up treasure, but you would be wrong to think that.

Sometimes you see a bird you haven’t seen before. You take the time and effort to look at it, to scrutinise it, in every detail. You memorise what it looks like: its main colours, how the colours vary on its head and neck and flight feathers. You watch carefully how it stands: its posture, its outline, its general shape and size compared to other birds. You try to see what it does when it flies: does it flap continuously, or does it flap and then glide? All these details help you identify it, and you go back to the bird books and look it up and you learn its name. And then that name feels like a new treasure you have just discovered.

And even when you watch birds which are familiar, whose name you already know, and you watch them carefully for hours and hours, you can still discover something new about them, and that is like a new treasure that you have discovered too. You find out new things about how these birds behave, not just what they look like and their names. You might find out that this kind of bird moves around in flocks, and they always appear and leave in a group. Occasionally one is left behind on his own; he seems to notice it suddenly and flies off quickly to join the others, and you wonder if birds have personalities, and like to be different from each other sometimes, to be on their own for a while, even if they do belong to a flock.

Words are important, and the names of things are some of the most important words. By knowing that a bird has not just ‘feathers’ but flight feathers and contour feathers and down feathers, I can get to know each bird more completely: I can identify them more accurately and remember what each one looks like, because I know the name of the type of bird as well as the names of the parts of the birds.

Finding new facts about birds, by watching them for hours, is like the difference between listening to an orchestra on the radio, and going to see a live performance. When you watch a live performance, if you look carefully you can identify each instrument, when it comes in and what it sounds like, and then you have discovered something new, as new as if you discovered it in a secret cave or hidden in the clay at the bottom of a cliff.

All of these are ways to find something: to find buried treasure, to retrieve something that was lost or not known or seen before. You find it, you name it, and then you know it.

Part of the thrill in finding something lost is that once you find it and know it, it can’t be lost any more. You can find out things that happened in the past, and the past doesn’t have to be lost; it can be retrieved, recovered, and brought back to the present in some way.

I remember once, long ago, when we were on a trip to South Africa, I was sitting on the soft white beach sand at Seaforth beach, which is one of my two all-time favourite beaches in the whole world. I must have been about four because it was before I started school. I was digging idly in the soft, warm sand and suddenly there was something shiny; I had come upon four bright shiny fifty-pence coins.

I thought I had found a buried treasure. Later my parents told me it was just money that someone must have had in his pocket and which fell out while he was sitting on the beach. But for me it was my first find.

If I were asked why I have this interest, I would not be sure how to answer. It may be the search itself, and the challenge it presents me. It may be the thrill of the moment of finding something, when you suddenly see something; something that perhaps no human has ever seen. And certainly, there is a thrill in the reclaiming, the retrieving, of something that was lost.

But maybe the thrill is not in the finding, but in the knowing.

I actually enjoyed writing that paper for my form tutor. I usually like to call people by their names, just as I like to know the names of each fossil I discover and each bird that I watch, because names are important to me, but I won’t say the name of this teacher because she asked me not to put her name in anything I write.

When I asked her why I shouldn’t write her name in my paper, she said one day perhaps I will be a writer, and write a book, and she is a bit shy and she doesn’t want everybody to know everything she said to her students in class, and to point to her and say “Oh, that is Mrs X, you know, Amethyst’s teacher.”