A Bone From a Dry Sea (7 page)

The next child was born in a family not close to Li’s but still she was woken and went down to watch over the birth. The father had already found a piece of shell with a hole in it for Li to make into a neck-ornament like Ma-ma’s. Over the months this became a custom in the tribe, something they did because it felt right, as though it had always been done. The plaits tended to wear through at about the time the
babies
lost their birth-fur, which added to the feeling of rightness.

Probably Li was the only one who ever thought back to how the custom had started.

NOW: MONDAY MORNING

MRS HAMISKA WAS
a small quiet woman with a flat face and pale blue eyes. Her skin looked like soft leather. She said nothing the whole journey, but she didn’t get much chance because Dr Hamiska barely stopped talking. The landscape reeled by, grey-brown, flat, battered with heat, with hardly a tree, hardly a tussock of grass, just here and there patches of low thorny scrub which looked dead but in fact had tiny leaves like fish-scales. These were the badlands Dad had talked about, and the scrub was almost the only plant able to grow there. Again, it wasn’t the Africa you saw on TV.

Vinny sat in the back of the jeep, craning forward to listen to Dr Hamiska explaining about the badlands. This was where they had found most of their fossils. When the plain which you saw from the camp had been sea, and the hills where the camp was had been an island, this had been the channel between the island and the mainland. Then, slowly, the land had risen, and it had become a great marsh, and creatures had lived and died there leaving their bones in the marsh. Rivers had fed the marsh, bringing down silt from the hills, layer after layer after layer, covering the bones. Then the coastline had risen, cutting the
marsh
off from the sea, and slowly it had dried out, evaporated, becoming saltier and saltier as it did so. It was badlands still because of the salt. The plates of the earth had ground against each other and there had been earthquakes, tilting the edges of the plain into new young hills, where the layers of silt compacted into clay and fresh soft rock, while the buried bones became fossils within them.

Time had streamed by, hundreds of thousands of seasons, wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry, each wet softening the surface of the earth and each dry baking it hard again. Sometimes rain washed whole mountainsides away. Sometimes things barely changed at all.

‘I’ve seen sites which were explored thirty years before,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You could still see the old beer-cans. But not one new fossil had been exposed – barely a millimetre of erosion in thirty years. But then a man I know was digging out a dinosaur from the side of a gully. Tanzania, this was. A dinosaur can be a big thing – you don’t get it done in a day. He’d got it half done when there was a thunderstorm and a flash flood down the gully, and the whole dinosaur was washed away. He’d lost it completely.’

‘He must have been furious.’

‘Not at all. The flood had exposed an even better specimen below the first one. Now, look, that’s where we’re heading for.’

They had been steadily approaching the range of hills which millions of years before had been the coast of mainland Africa. From far off they’d seemed to rise sheer from the desolate flat plain, but now Vinny could see that there were foothills reaching out, brown and hummocky, below the
ragged
peaks. Dr Hamiska pointed towards a shapeless lump rising like a small island almost straight ahead, separate from the rest of the range.

‘Was it an island in the marsh?’ said Vinny.

‘It wasn’t anything. What seems to have happened was that there was a series of earthquakes which made those lower hills. They’re a real geological mess, but for some reason to do with the underlying rock-structure that outcrop was pushed up all of a piece, so that where the old strata are exposed they lie in the same order as that in which they were laid down. I’m not a professional geologist, but I know enough for my immediate purposes. If I can get a complete sequence of strata-deposition in this locality, then I may be able to match up partial sequences which I find elsewhere.’

‘Like tree-ring dating.’

‘Exactly. For instance, the skull May Anna is working on was found in association with a layer of tuff – that’s fossilized ash from a volcanic eruption. There are a whole series of tuffs in the strata, and I’m hoping that by sequencing the tuffs on this outcrop I can find out which is the one the skull belongs to, and hence get a line on the dating.’

‘Are there any fossils here?’

He laughed.

‘There
were
fossils here, Vinny. Some were brought to us from a point at the foot of the outcrop, eroded down the hill. Your father and a very experienced African did a survey, and they say there are no more to be found, but you and Jane and I are going to prove them wrong.’

He laughed again, but Vinny could hear it was
only
half a joke. Then he had to stop talking. They had been travelling so far along a sort of track, reasonably level, winding between the scrub and pits and hummocks of the plain. Now he left it, changed into low gear and edged down into what looked like a dry river-bed with soft, gritty sand in the bottom. There was no track at all on the other side. Still in low gear he took the jeep twisting and lurching along below the outcrop, so that Vinny had to clutch the back of the seats, though Mrs Hamiska sat calmly swaying, with her hands folded in her lap, as if on a church outing.

They stopped and climbed out, and now the heat of Africa smote them. Already, before they’d left the camp, Vinny had found it so hot that she’d been picking her way round through patches of shade rather than cross direct through the sunlit areas. The journey had been better with the breeze of movement blowing in under the jeep’s canvas roof. The badlands were hotter than she’d dreamed, even under the parasol, the green sun-brolly which Mrs Hamiska had lent her. (She’d thought she’d feel silly using it, but it made sense now.) Mrs Hamiska wore a sleeveless cotton frock and a straw hat, still looking as if she were on a church outing, while Dr Hamiska put on an old corduroy cap with its peak turned backwards to cover his neck. He should have looked a complete clown, but he didn’t.

‘The eroded finds were a couple of hundred yards along that way,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a look there later. But first I’d like you to come and help me measure the tuffs on that section of exposed rock. That’s where they’re clearest.’

He pointed up the slope to the left. The hill was a dark rusty brown with yellower patches, and
here
and there the dead-looking thorn-bushes. The odd boulder jutted out of the soil, but the only real difference was a section of low cliff two-thirds of the way up. He was starting to climb towards it when Mrs Hamiska bent and reached in under one of the thorn-bushes. Vinny hadn’t even noticed her looking. She rose with something in her hand.

‘Look at this, Joe,’ she said.

He turned and took the object from her, chuckling as he held it up between finger and thumb. From the ones she’d seen under the awning, Vinny recognized it as a fossil tooth.

‘Sam didn’t find everything, then,’ he said. ‘That’s about four million. Four point two. Somewhere round there.’

‘It makes my skin prickle, thinking about all that time,’ said Vinny.

‘And so it should. I tell my students that the past is an immense ocean which we can neither sail on nor dive down into. We are stuck to our shore, which is the present. Out on the surface we can see the past of the history books, the storms and the shipwrecks, but of what happened in the far past, down in the deeps of that ocean, we have nothing to go on except the shells and bones it chooses to wash up at our feet. Why do we bother, then? What does it matter? It matters because that ocean is where we come from. Those seas are in our blood.’

His voice throbbed. If he hadn’t told her, Vinny might still have guessed that this was part of a lecture.

‘I suppose you’ve got to be lucky to find the right things,’ she said.

‘Indeed you have. I know experts in my field
who’ve
never once had the excitement of picking up a hominid fossil. Others seem unable to step off an aeroplane without finding something new. That’s why I believe in luck. I seriously believe that there are some people who can call out across the ocean of time and summon it to wash its secrets to their feet. I am one, and for all I know you may be another.’

He gazed at the four-million-year-old fragment in his hand as if he were praying to it, using it for his summoning-magic, then gave it back to Mrs Hamiska.

‘See if you can spot where it came from, darling,’ he said. ‘Come on, Vinny.’

They started up the slope. It wasn’t much of a climb, but sweat streamed down Vinny’s body, making her clothes cling and pull, and she needed a rest half-way up. Looking back over the grey, roasting desert she tried to imagine it when it had been a marshy lake, steaming under this sun, with rivers running in and pigs rootling in the reed-beds, and other creatures, creatures who were almost people, perhaps, making their camp at the water’s edge . . . Mrs Hamiska was drifting along the slope half-way down, quiet as cloud-shadow, with her head bent like a nun in a cloister. Vinny climbed on and found Dr Hamiska measuring and sketching the slanting rock-layers in the cliff. He didn’t really need her to help him, only to be there so that he had someone to talk to, to teach.

‘You see this layering, how it’s tilted? This grey band? That’s tuff – remember? And here, just above it, these coarser particles, and then these finer ones and then this thin band of tuff again. So we had a minor volcanic eruption followed by
a
dry spell – not much flow in the rivers, you see – and then a wetter spell bringing heavier particles down from the hills, and then a really big eruption. That’s a very characteristic section. If it turns up elsewhere in the area I shall know where it comes in the sequence. Now I’m going to see if I can hack out some good unweathered crystals from the tuff. There’s a technique called potassium-argon dating . . .’

‘Jane’s found something.’

He swung to look. Mrs Hamiska was kneeling now, and prodding carefully at the earth with a narrow trowel.

‘You want to go and see?’ he said. ‘Come and fetch me if it’s anything worthwhile.’

Vinny found Mrs Hamiska using a painter’s brush to clear the earth she’d loosened round a shapeless small lump. She glanced up at Vinny’s approach.

‘Yes, he’d better come,’ she said.

Dr Hamiska was still watching, so Vinny simply waved and he came loping down like a schoolboy. He rushed past Vinny, knelt and took the trowel from Mrs Hamiska and prodded it vigorously into the earth around the lump, not bothering to use the brush, hoicking chunks of clay out. In a few minutes he had the thing free and was nudging the last bits of clay off with his thumbs.

‘There!’ he said, holding it triumphantly up. To Vinny it looked like a bit of twisted dead branch.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘A lower mandible. Some kind of small deer, perhaps. Look, that’s where one of the molars fitted, and another here. Not in itself very exciting, but the point is that it was buried in the original matrix, so there’s every chance we’ve now got
the
level from which the tooth Jane found was eroded down. Have you brought a cord, darling? Excellent. And a peg and a hammer. Good. Now, Vinny, go back up – oh, to about where I was working, and we’ll see if we can use the angle of strata in the cliff to get a line on how they might run down here . . .’

Vinny toiled back up the hill, trailing the line, too excited to notice the heat. Dr Hamiska strode up and down lifting the line clear of obstacles, then moved to a point where he could compare its angle to that of the rock-strata. From there he shouted instructions. When he was satisfied, Vinny hammered her peg in and tied the line taut. Using it as a guide the Hamiskas worked along inch by inch, studying every bump or nubble in the earth. Mrs Hamiska found two splinters of bone, leg probably, and Dr Hamiska found the tooth of a pigmy hippo. All three were below the cord, so Vinny had to climb and adjust the top peg. She came back to find him burrowing at the hillside like a dog, showering loose earth down the slope.

‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Here’s our tuff! It’s the same one, I’ll bet my life on it. And the finds are right on top of it. Now . . . !’

Mrs Hamiska was watching him, amused. Her way of smiling was to try not to, which made her purse her lips as if she were trying to spit out a grape-pip. He jumped to his feet, flung his arms round her and kissed her on both cheeks, lifting her clean off the ground.

‘Put me down, please, Joe,’ she said. ‘We’re not twenty any more.’

She didn’t sound disapproving. As often before, with other married people who seemed totally
different
from each other, Vinny wondered how they’d managed to stay together when Mum and Dad hadn’t. At the back of the hole Dr Hamiska had dug she saw a faint band of grey crossing the yellowish earth. Then, because her eyes knew what they were looking for, she realized she could see the same band right out on the surface, slanting down nearly parallel to the cord. It was so faint that she had to be standing directly on its line to see it, and looking back up the slope to where it should have run on till it reached a large flat-topped rock, she couldn’t see it at all. When she climbed and looked down from the rock it was there, all the way to her feet. It was something to do with the angle of the light, probably.

‘I can see your tuff, Joe,’ she called. ‘If you stand here . . .’

He rushed to join her and stare, rushed back for more pegs, marked the new line and prowled along it, snorting with excitement and effort, as if he could bully the hidden fossils out into the open, by pure will-power. Mrs Hamiska was already digging at something else. Vinny stared at the earth beside the rock but could see nothing. She knelt and moved her fingertips across the ground, closing her eyes, concentrating on the task of feeling. Ah. No, it was only a pebble. So was that. A faint ridge, like the cut end of a Sellotape reel which you can feel but not see. She picked at it with a fingernail. It was harder than clay.