Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“That’s the gorge there,” said Mutevu, pointing.

Natalie lifted her drowsy head and nodded. A great red-brown quartzite gash slashed through the plain ahead of them, and off to their right. She’d heard so much about Kihara Gorge and the great discoveries about early mankind that had been found there. Soon, she would be part of this landscape herself.

She yawned again, returning to her thoughts, unable to stop herself, despite the sheer grandeur of the surroundings. Many of the women she had met at Cambridge when she arrived there as an undergraduate had been more sophisticated than she, but before too much of that rubbed off on her she had fallen for Dominic. She knew she was physically attractive to men, but when she arrived in Cambridge she was totally inexperienced. However, because of her father’s involvement with church music, as the organist at Gainsborough Cathedral in Lincolnshire, and because her mother taught music as well as French and still sang in the choir there, Natalie had been much more knowledgeable than her undergraduate contemporaries about composers, opera, and musical theory. That, as much as her looks, had set her apart at the lunch where Dominic had been the guest of honor. Someone had fallen ill and withdrawn from the dinner being given for him after his cello recital in King’s College Chapel a day later, and he had himself invited her to make up the numbers.

All her upbringing had warned her against becoming involved with a married man—a fact Dominic had made no attempt to conceal. But—she could admit it now, when she was all alone, many months afterwards, and thousands of miles away in Africa—she had been just a little bored with herself as a Lincolnshire provincial, and had thought that a risqué affair with a man who was becoming famous would complete her Cambridge education. She had secretly envied some of the more sophisticated women she had met at university, who were much more casual in their liaisons than she was, who lived with men without marrying them, a growing trend that disconcerted Natalie and shocked her parents, women who seemed to know all manner of clever and fascinating older souls in London, in the theater, in journalism, or the new world of television.

To begin with, several of these women had surprised her, telling her she was “mad” to fall for “someone like Dominic,” whatever that meant. But, as time went by, and the affair had lasted more than a term, she had become the object of envy on the part of these very women, who, it turned out, were not as enamored with their own lifestyles as it had appeared.

Mutevu slowed the Land Rover as they came to the lip of the gorge, and changed gears as the vehicle began to slither down the slope. There seemed to be thorn bushes everywhere and Natalie pulled her elbows away from the window to stop her skin being scored.

Dominic had been impressed when Natalie got a first and, when she had stayed on in Cambridge to work for her doctorate, while most of her undergraduate friends disappeared to London, her relationship with him had been a source of nourishment in what was for her, for a year or so, a more solitary existence. Her parents, pleased by her exam results, and by the fact that she was staying on in Cambridge to complete her Ph.D., had probed gently about any “relationships” she might have. But it had taken her nearly two years to admit to her affair with Dominic, and the revelation that he was married had devastated her mother, who hadn’t really adjusted by the time she died.

The Land Rover crested the lip of the gorge on the south side and the camp came into view, a constellation of tents in various shades of dark green, surrounded by a huge fence of spiky thorns.

Mutevu drove in through an opening in the fence and reversed the vehicle into a space reserved for it between two large, flat-topped acacia trees. He killed the engine again.

“No one will be back from the gorge for another hour or so—lunch is late here, about two. You’ve been allocated that tent there, at the far end of the row. I’ll help you with your—”

Suddenly he let out a loud gasp and shouted, “Leopards! Not again! That’s the second time this month. They come for the goats when everybody else is in the gorge, working.”

He blared the horn, but, seeing and smelling the Land Rover, the leopards—there were two of them—began to slink away, edging along the row of tents, and scampered out of the entrance.

Mutevu watched them go. “Leopards are rare, Miss Natalie. I bet you haven’t seen one that close before—eh?”

Getting no reply, he looked across to the passenger seat and smiled.

She had seen nothing, nothing at all. She was fast asleep.

Shadows cast by the hurricane lamps played across the refectory table. The tang from the flames hung in everyone’s nostrils. The refectory tent was open on one side, where it gave on to the nearby campfire, around which chairs were arranged in a rough circle. After dinner, some of the team liked to sit chatting and at night temperatures cooled in the bush.

Mutevu Ndekei, now back in his chief role as the camp cook, shuffled around the table, holding a large serving plate with strips of roast kudu, or local deer. He was a strapping man, muscular, with large hands and hardly any body hair. His white T-shirt stretched tight across his massive chest, and he shuffled only because he was wearing a pair of green rubber Wellington boots given to him by a British archaeologist years before. Mutevu was very proud of them, and was never seen without them—he cooked better with his boots on, he said; but they were slightly too big for him. He leaned forward so that Natalie Nelson could take her share of meat. As she helped herself, she listened to Eleanor Deacon. As did everyone else.

A white Kenyan by birth, Eleanor Deacon was probably the most well-known paleontologist in the world. She had been excavating in and around Kihara Gorge for nearly forty years, first with her husband, Jock, and then, since his death six years ago, leading the digs herself, though her sons Christopher and Jack were following in their parents’ footsteps. Eleanor Deacon was thin, tall, and bony, and her silver—almost white—hair, brushed back as always in a chignon, gave her a remarkably sophisticated air, especially stuck out here in the bush, as they were in Kihara. But she was formidable too, and ran her excavations with an iron rod. She wore no jewelry, but tonight she was dressed in a crisp white shirt above khaki trousers, with a bright yellow scarf tied around her throat. A pair of gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles glittered on her nose. Natalie thought the director looked more French than Kenyan.

Eleanor sat at the end of the long table, where she was always served last. She took a few strips of kudu, then leaned back, so that Mutevu could withdraw the serving plate. Leaning forward again, she picked up her knife and tapped her champagne glass with it. The chatter around the table died.

She smiled at all the others, one by one, and held up some envelopes. “Post,” she announced. “Russell, there’s one for you, one for Kees, and three for Richard.” She handed them around. “Nothing for you, Arnold, I’m afraid.”

“None of my wives missing me? Oh dear.” He made a face, before grinning.

Because he was sitting next to Natalie, she had already learned from Arnold Pryce, a botanist, that he had been married four times. And as often divorced. Though small and round he was, in his way, a bit of a dandy. Tonight he was wearing a cravat at his throat with a college design on it, shields and unicorns. She was also aware of some pungent aftershave.

Beyond him was Kees van Schelde, a Dutch geologist, probably in his twenties, and Jonas Jefferson, a specialist in human anatomy and the camp doctor. So far as Natalie could see, he was more or less Eleanor’s age.