Rift (17 page)

‘Yes, Sir, we can use the ropes,’ agreed Tomis. ‘To mark the
route . . . we have six ropes here, we can get more . . . ’

‘I have explored caves many times, Murothi,’ Véronique put in. ‘We will lead, Tomis and I, yes? Sergeant Kaonga, I suggest you get the teacher Lawrence Sharp too – he has caving experience.’

Sergeant and constable were already going back across the bridge, the thud of their footsteps resounding across the space.

‘Murothi, this is what I think,’ Véronique announced. ‘Holes on the summit of Chomlaya have eroded into these caves. Rainwater percolates down, you see. In the end the surface collapses. You understand?
This
is how Joe and Matt have climbed out in these far-off places –’

Joe had crouched down, elbows on knees, chin on clenched fists, facing the tunnels burrowing into rock.

Ella squatted beside him. He looked briefly at her again, unsmiling, and away. There was a faint glisten on his cheeks. She felt him lean towards her, warmth from his arm transmitting across the chill cave air.

‘Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t remember. All mixed up. Sorry . . . ’

Murothi declared, ‘Joe, you have brought us here! That is good! Now we know you came to this place. We know where you and Matt came out. You have told us all this! We will find
your friends. It is not your burden. It is not your
fault.
’

Joe nodded. He did not look at the policeman. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.

Decisively, Otaka called to Véronique and they began examining the extremities of the cavern: bulges, crevices, platforms of rock, passing to and fro, their voices filling the space with murmuring. It merged with the fall of water, and it seemed to Ella suddenly as if chanting and singing impregnated the rock, as if the dark thronged with life, as if the torchlight flickering across the undulations of the floor was the flame of a kindling fire.

But she was shivering, stiff with cold. ‘Let’s move, Joe. Let’s look too.’ She stood, and saw, etched by the shimmer of moving light, trails of marks, long, oval marks, treading into the obscurity in front of her.

She gripped Joe’s arm. ‘What’s that?’

Otaka, passing close by, shone his torch down, and along. He let out a sudden exclamation, knelt. He looked up at Ella. ‘Footprints, in dust. They are new! Inspector Murothi!’ He moved along, swore under his breath, knelt again, blew gently across a line of marks further away. ‘But these are not new. These are hard in the rock.’ He stabbed the torch around, ‘Different marks, different sizes – four, no five. Véronique, you
must see this! The new marks overlay the old! It is a matter of great wonder!’

Murothi came and looked, but he could not take it in. He could think of nothing but five days trapped in this labyrinth. He was eyeing the animals that seemed to leap live from the veins of the rock, as if they flowed from its spirit. He could almost hear the hoofbeats of the eland, the snarl of the leopard.

These children –
lost
, without light, without food, without water, down here?

He tried to still a sudden, rising panic, to organise the facts in his head:
Silowa, Anna, Joe and Matt come to this place at dawn. Together. Possibly Charly follows them in. Thirty-six hours pass, and Joe emerges, just on the other side of the rock. Alone. Another three days pass and Matt is found. In a different place – some way to the east. Now, sixteen more hours had passed
. . .

The children came in together; how did they lose each other? Why? Where, where
to look now?
Were they all scattered, maybe even deep below in one of these terrible plunging holes?

This endless wait for the sergeant! He snapped his torchbeam on to his watch again. Five minutes since the sergeant and Constable Lesakon left –

Suddenly, loudly, Joe said, ‘I don’t remember Charly here. I
don’t.
She
wasn’t
here.’

‘Yes!’ cried Tomis from the left-hand tunnel. ‘No! I mean, she
was
! See!’ He scooped something from the ground and held it up: a leather lace threaded with beads. ‘A child gave
this
to her just last week!’

‘It
is
hers. She wore it round her neck.’ Véronique ran forward to take it. ‘I have seen it!’

For Ella everything fused into the mountain of rock pressing down. Like a tomb. She could think of nothing else: Charly, Anna, Silowa, in a tomb. She began to shake, unable to stop.

Beyond the rock-bridge, there was a drumming of footsteps.

Murothi turned to greet the flare of their torches, like a blast of warmth from the sunlit outer-world.

Sergeant and constable burst in, slid to a halt, gasped for breath.

‘They are there!’ the sergeant yelled.

‘Between the helicopter this way and this way!’ bawled the constable.

‘What are you saying, man?’ Murothi roared, knowing, yet not daring to believe.

‘Hoi, Sir,’ shrieked the sergeant. ‘We send the helicopters down. Suddenly they are there!’

‘
Anna and Silowa?
‘

‘And Charly! Anna, Silowa, Charly.
All!
‘

‘Poof!’ a triumphant constable flung his arms up high. ‘They have risen from the stomach of earth! Alive!’

Joe and Ella and Murothi emerged from the rift in the cliff, and paused on the ledge. The sun bore down directly, and Ella was assailed by the scorch of the rock at her back, the peppery brush of leaves against her legs, the lichen patterns below her hand as she braced herself. As if warmth and light and life fought to erase for all time the cold terror of the caves.

Across the stream below them, a heady victory chant began, a mad pounding about, slapping hands:
alive, alive, alive, alive.
Birds fled the trees in disgust. Joe stepped from the ledge on to the broad, flat top of the boulders. And then, as if triggered from his state of shock by the tumult, he suddenly whooped and whirled Ella round, and she clung to him, yelling, and Murothi found himself with his arms round both of them, feeling for all the world like a proud father.

Likon and Constable Lakuya, climbing up, met Véronique and Sergeant Kaonga and Tomis and Constable Lesakon scrambling down the gully, and there was a great deal more shoulder-clapping and hand-shaking and guffaws of laughter.

‘Out of the gully!’ ordered Otaka sternly. ‘With your great
fat boots you will destroy the treasure of millions of years!’ But he sat high on the boulders, smiling down on them like a benign spirit of the rock. ‘Truly,’ he remarked to no one in particular, ‘this is the place of life.’

‘The nurse said that! Pirian,’ Ella shrieked. ‘In the hospital –’

‘Well, your Pirian knows Chomlaya,’ returned Otaka. ‘The place of birth, the place of life; the place of death and life,’ he went on, enjoying himself. ‘This is what Chomlaya tells us, eh? We are given the young ones back.
Their
time has not yet come.’

As if in confirmation, the helicopter shot upwards from the summit of the rocks, swung in a wide circle, and flew away towards Nanzakoto and the hospital.

‘We will go now to Nanzakoto!’ declared Murothi. ‘To meet your sister. And Silowa, Anna, Matt. In Nanzakoto,’ he said again. ‘I will meet them all! Every one!’

Had he ever had such a feeling of contentment in all his life?

Ella and Joe scrambled down into the ferment of excitement, buffeted by the storm of explanation from the students.

‘Janey saw the cave! She climbed the tree!’ shouted
Tamara, dragging Ella to admire the smooth, unclimbable trunk of the baobab. The first branches spread high, out of reach except to a giant. ‘Ant and Zak lifted her up on their shoulders!’

‘The tree of Africa,’ announced Ian Boyd. ‘Probably the oldest living thing in the world. Maybe 25,000 years old. Maybe it was here when those paintings were done! Maybe the artists walked right under this tree.’ No one was listening.

‘You see, Janey was
meant
to see the caves!’ declared Hilary. ‘It was
destiny.
’ Hilary was into fate and star signs. Janey rolled her eyes in mock despair.

To Ella it didn’t sound so mad an idea, now.

‘Well,
Inspector
Murothi, success!’ Véronique called. Gingerly, he was making his way across the gritty sands of the gully. He had a picture of walking on uncountable treasures underfoot.

He grinned at Véronique. He felt light – light and joyful, and ridiculously carefree. ‘A team effort!’ he called back. ‘Even the disapproving Miss Strutton could be proud of us!’

The air was free of the incessant mutter of engines. Moments ago, this had dawned on him. The rock basked in the returning hum of insects. White clouds of butterflies rose from the reeds, and even wading birds had ventured out on to the mud by the stream.

Murothi stood with Véronique, watching Otaka. The man worked carefully with delicate strokes of a small brush, clearing the soil round the skull. He’d already spotted other fossils embedded in the bank nearby, and marked these with small sticks pushed into the soil.

With her head on one side, Véronique regarded Murothi.

‘You see! He will be oblivious to all, Murothi. He will bring Silowa back here. For months these two will dig, dig, dig in this place, to discover its secrets. There is happy work here for years!’ She took Murothi’s arm. ‘But you are a digger too! To find these little marks on these little maps and to know what they told us . . . ’ she flapped her hand, signifying something beyond her. ‘In another life, Murothi, you would be digging the sands of time, like us, I think?’

Murothi was wondering about the creeper-covered bank and its cargo of footprints, still hidden. Who had walked there? When? What had brought them here? And the skull – was it man or woman? Was this the person who had walked on the volcanic ash that hardened to rock – or were the prints from others still sleeping below the land here? And who had left the ancient footprints Ella spied inside the caves?

Such
detective
work – to see their stories in the marks and layers and language of the land!

‘It would be a good life,’ he said.

‘What’s happening?’ Tamara wanted to know. Everyone was gathering expectantly on the rim of the camp.

‘We’re going to Nanzakoto – Inspector Murothi and Joe and me,’ Ella told her gleefully. ‘Any minute the helicopter’s coming for us.’

‘Matt’s conscious,’ added Joe. ‘Just when Anna and Silowa and Charly got to the hospital, he woke up!’

‘Tell them hi from us,’ Janey said.

‘Yeah, and –’ Zak didn’t finish, shrugged, charged off on another tack. ‘So, you remember, Joe? Why you went off, all secret?’

‘Hey, don’t!’ Janey’s elbow dug Zak in the ribs, and she frowned meaningfully.

Joe laughed. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Yeah, it’s OK.’ He did remember it. But he couldn’t put anything in words. After the snakes, in Charly’s tent: Matt sick with stumbling into the sad shreds of them, with being afraid to go out and rinse off the bloody bits.
They’ll just find us here, you know they will, Anna. Joe, won’t they just do something else? We’ve got to tell
– And Anna, vehement,
Who? Tell who, Matt? Charly’s the only one who listens, and she’s not here. No, we’ll
show
them. Joe? Silowa’s
going to win that competition, right? Silowa? We’ll go and dig out that skull you’ve seen, and we’ll stay out there till Charly gets back, and we’ll tell no one, not one single person except Charly
–

‘You coming back, Ella?’ Tamara was asking. ‘With Charly?’

Ella looked round at the rock, the tents, the arid, yellowing plain stretching away. How strange, the speed of everything! Nothing coloured by terror any more. Even Sean’s violence was a distant memory. His friends seemed caught up in the elation along with everyone else, though Sean was nowhere to be seen. As if he had no place.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘When Charly’s OK, we’ll come back –’

‘And this I told you!’ Samuel’s voice boomed happily in her ear. ‘Your sister will return to ask more questions. Have I not said this? And was I not right?’

‘The walls of the house do not tell what is going on inside,’ Samuel said dourly to Murothi. He was looking at Miss Strutton. ‘When the newspapers come, she will be in charge! So that when people ask who has done this rescue, she can scoop from the pot!’

‘Who cares!’ Ian Boyd retorted lightly. ‘May she enjoy her own little competition without us. The rest of us will go to Kasinga tomorrow to help build that schoolroom – get
on with something
useful.
’

‘Murothi, we expect to see you back,’ shouted Véronique, arm in arm with Otaka.

In response, Murothi raised a hand, and to Likon and Tomis, standing with them.

Constable Lesakon and Constable Lakuya had pushed their caps back to a daring angle. The sergeant walked with a spring in his step.

‘DC Meshami will meet you, Sir,’ he declared. ‘He is very happy. Mungai is very happy too. I have given orders to take him to Nanzakoto hospital straightaway to see his cousin. You will see him there. And I am to tell you that the families from England will reach Nanzakoto tonight. A good job, Sir! The
Minister
will be very pleased.’ He put his sunglasses on; they flashed merrily.

‘A very good job, Sergeant Kaonga. We make a good team, all, eh?’ Murothi shook the sergeant’s hand energetically, then the constables’. In mock solemnity, they stood briskly to attention, saluting. Murothi laughed.

The pilot swung the helicopter along the full sinuous length of Chomlaya. Ella had asked if they could, and Murothi wanted to say goodbye. He was thinking about his first sight of the rock,
how he’d felt its unchanging watchful presence. How he’d wondered about its stories.

He knew the answer now. He had encountered some of its secrets. But what of others, as unfathomable as the caves and tunnels of the rock themselves? Joe still could not tell him why they’d left the skull and climbed to the caves, could not say how they’d known those caves were there. And for all Murothi’s policeman’s instinct, it was not a question he wanted to probe too deeply. He’d
felt
it himself – that precision of light, that resonance of sound. Had he not felt his own gaze drawn to the rock moments before the cleft was seen?