Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“So what are you saying? That I should just ignore this? Give up the chance of a follow-through, kiss off the opportunity to rewrite history?” His voice had been rising but he lowered it again. “No way, Natalie. No fucking way.”

For a long while there was just the sound of them breathing. Neither looked at the other.

By the sound of it, other quarrels were taking place nearby, among the baboons.

Natalie wished they could just enjoy the night, listening to the sounds of the bush, as she and Dom had lain together, listening to music, not feeling the urge to talk all the time, their skin touching.

As she sat down again, Russell leaned forward. “I’m sorry, Natalie, real sorry. The last thing I want is to screw up your career, or for us to part… well, like this. I haven’t hidden my feelings for you, and they haven’t changed—if anything, they’re stronger now than ever—”

“No! Russell, stop! I don’t want any special treatment from you. We’re colleagues, that’s all. Friends, yes, I suppose, though I hardly know you and you hardly know me. But that’s all.” She wiped her lips with her tongue. “I have been trying to tell you, but you haven’t been listening. Don’t go back to America, to Berkeley, thinking there is more between us than there is.” She softened her tone: she found it hard to do what she was doing but her instincts told her she must clear the air with Russell before he left.

“You’re a clever man, and I like you, but…” She faltered, and then regained her momentum. “But when I finally come out of the shadows I’m living under, when I’m ready to move on …” She looked him hard in the eye and let out a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m happy to be your coworker, colleague, friend. But don’t leave with any other idea.”

He stood up. “I’m sorry, too, Natalie, very sorry.” He looked down at her and nodded. “And I wonder which of us, at the end of the day, is going to be sorrier.”

He turned and walked off towards his tent.

Natalie, crouched on all fours, brushed the soil-sand from a thin splinter of fossil bone poking out from between two large stones in the wall of the gorge. There were no clouds today to offer respite from the shimmering heat and she could feel her wet shirt sticking to her back. Sweat dropped down inside her collar in great globules. The French word for sweat, sueur , was much less unpleasant, she thought. Strands of her hair were plastered to her temples. This afternoon’s shower couldn’t come soon enough.

Natalie reexamined the position of the bone splinter. Sweat dripped into her eye and she removed it with her knuckle. It was time for a rest. She stood up.

Ten days had gone by since Russell’s ill-tempered departure and, during that time, the tension in the camp had risen and fallen more than once. With Russell gone, there was no longer any sense of confrontation, but then Daniel had reported that Mutevu Ndekei—now in custody in Nairobi—had refused to see him in Kiambu prison: a bad sign. Eleanor had arranged for the bones which Richard and Russell had stolen to be returned to the Maasai. These had been accepted but her request for a meeting with the elders of the tribe had been turned down, for the time being. These were not propitious days, she had been told.

Like everyone else on the dig, Natalie kept a small towel hanging half in and half out of the back pocket of her trousers. She pulled it free and wiped her neck. On the lip of the gorge right opposite where she was working, the lines of the albizia and croton trees formed a dark lacework against the sky.

She tried not to think of Russell. How he must miss just not being here.

She focused her attention again on the splinter of fossil bone that she had found. Either side of it, she now noticed, there was a large stone, about the size of a head or a melon, almost big enough to be called a boulder. Next to them were two others and she stepped back to get a better look.

A bead of sweat ran from the skin on her throat down her chest and between her breasts. That sometimes happened when she was surprised or excited.

A childhood spent making and doing jigsaws had given Natalie … not an obsession exactly, but a taste for, a fascination with patterns, with regularity and randomness. She was forever counting things—railings, paving stones, window panes, the seats and rows in theaters—to check out their regularity, their design.

Now, as she stared at the boulders in the gorge wall in front of her, she asked herself if they amounted to a pattern, if they were regular or random.

“Water?”

She turned. She hadn’t heard Christopher approaching. He was almost unrecognizable in his floppy hat and sunglasses. She took the bottle he offered. “Thanks.”

As she drank, he stood next to her, his gaze following hers as once again it swept the gorge. “You know all this used to be a huge lake, don’t you?”

“I read the basic stuff, yes, of course, but how huge?”

“About fifty square miles. Roughly the size of London.”

She handed back the bottle. “This is a better land use.”

He took off his glasses, grinning. “I agree. But it’s also why this area is so flat, and so rich in fossils. The early hominids—and all the other animals—liked to live near the lake for obvious reasons, for the fresh water. Then, about two and a half million years ago, one of those mountains over there, which is a volcano, erupted. Millions of tons of ash were deposited on the lake. People, animals, and plants were buried under about four hundred feet of hot molten lava. Imagine. Makes our problems seem trivial. Then, in the intervening years, flash floods have caused fissures and gorges. Kihara is the biggest and the most productive—from a fossil point of view, I mean.”

He put the empty bottle away in his pocket. “Look, there’s a lake about three hours’ drive from here, where you see all sorts of animals and rock art. I’m learning to fly, so one day I can take you by plane. But for now, what do you say? We could drive up one weekend, overnight in a convenient cave I know, wake up at dawn and watch the show, drive back later that Sunday.”

She looked at him.

“When I say ‘overnight,’ I simply mean … what I mean is …”

He fell silent. He had already said quite a lot for him.

Natalie decided to help him out. “I did a rock art course at Cambridge. I’d love to see some in situ.”

He smiled, in relief. “Good. Where were we?”

“See that there?” She pointed at the bone in the gorge wall. “I think it’s a femur from an extinct buffalo—” She reached out and held his shoulder. “But before you bend down for a closer look, take in those stones. Does anything suggest itself to you?”

Christopher looked sharply at her, then at the stones, then back at her. He shook his head.

“Don’t they seem regular to you? Regularly spaced, I mean. Arranged.”

He inspected the stones again, then took a step back for a better look. “What are you getting at?”

Natalie slipped the towel back into the pocket of her pants. “I’m not sure yet. They just seem too regular to be natural. It set me wondering.” She bent down again. “Anyway, look at this.”

Christopher crouched alongside her as she placed the tip of her finger at the end of the fossil bone splinter. “If this little creature is what I think it is, it’s a first—not a world-shattering first, but important.”

“Go on,” Christopher said, immediately attentive. He peered closer to the splinter. She could smell his aftershave.

“Actually, it’s not so little, is it? It’s a buffalo-type creature called Pelorovis . It went extinct about eight hundred thousand years ago, and its claim to fame is that it had turned-down tusks.”