Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

“I’m sorry to be a wet blanket,” she said, setting down her glass. “But I think you would be unwise to publish until you can check the tibia and femur you have found against a set of modern bones. If your dating is right, they’re two million years old, but you can’t be certain they prove bipedalism without a close comparison and … well, you have probably thought of it, but if you get such a simple thing wrong … it could be embarrassing.”

“No!” breathed Sutton. “No—I won’t have that!” He slapped the table and looked hard at Eleanor. “How many digs has Natalie been on, how many hominid bones has Dr. Nelson seen close up, in the field?” He paused. “Very few, very few if any, that’s my bet. This is her first day here, for pity’s sake. What does she know? This creature was bipedal. It’s a straightforward piece of anatomy. I feel it! I’ve been excavating in Africa for ten years. Nature , here we come!” He thrust his chin forward and glared hard at Natalie, staring her down, his lower lip stuck out beyond his upper lip, daring her to contradict him.

Natalie colored. As he had reminded everyone, she was the least experienced of those present. But she still thought he was being méchant , as the French said, cruel.

Eleanor came to her defense. “Don’t be such a bully, Richard. Natalie is right. We have to be careful.”

“But that means delay,” complained North, putting his knife and fork together. “Dick and I are here only until Christmas. After that, we disperse, back to the States, to teach. It will take much longer to write this paper when Richard is back in New York, I’m in California, and you are still here in Kenya, Eleanor.”

“I agree, Russell.” Eleanor smiled. She paused as a great barking of baboons broke out nearby. But it quietened down as quickly as it had started. She laid her hands on the table, palms down. “But we are scientists, not journalists with a deadline to meet. Of course we need modern bones, to make the comparison Natalie suggests. I don’t know why none of us thought of it—perhaps the champagne has gone to our heads, clouding our minds. Natalie, coming from the outside world, has brought us some fresh air.”

She sat back and transferred her gaze from Natalie to Richard, to Russell. “I understand your sense of urgency—both of you—but you must curb it. Richard, what would your father think if you published prematurely, and then got egg on your face—egg that might be plastered all over the New York Times?”

Sutton said nothing but he worried at the watch strap on his wrist. Eleanor’s barb had hit home.

Mutevu Ndekei came round again, clearing the dinner plates.

Richard and Russell exchanged glances.

“Look,” said Eleanor, modifying her tone. “We’ll assume that the bones tell us what we think they tell us. We’ll write up the paper, here, now, in camp, while we’re all together, as if the comparison with modern bones has been done, so that we are all ready to go into print as soon as the comparison has actually been made. That way the delay will be minimized.” She looked around the table. “Don’t worry. No one else is going to find bones like this—Arnold here is more likely to find another wife.” She grinned and the others laughed. “You can afford to wait a few weeks—what Natalie suggests is a very simple piece of science craft, Richard. Very simple, but vital. And you know it in your heart.” She smiled at Natalie and then looked back to Richard. “Think how convincing a photograph of your bones would be alongside some modern bones.” She rested her elbows on the table. “You should thank our new arrival, Richard, not abuse her.”

She raised her glass. “Now, enjoy what’s left of your champagne. Who knows when We’ll taste the next bottle?”

Natalie sat in the canvas chair outside her tent and looked out at the night. Everyone had their own quarters on Eleanor Deacon’s digs, each tent big enough to stand up in, and Natalie was grateful for that. All tents, she had discovered, had their own bucket shower and latrine, too—another real luxury—and were spaced far enough apart from the other tents for true privacy. No doubt because she had been the last to arrive, Natalie’s was in fact at the end of the line. The tents were laid out in a large T shape and hers was at the foot of the central line, so she was doubly fortunate. This was the first excavation she had been on since she was a student, and the first where she had full responsibility for one particular aspect of affairs. She was already finding the experience very intense: everyone else was so much more experienced than she was, and all were extremely motivated, as the exchanges at dinner that night had shown, and they took their responsibilities so very seriously. She didn’t mind. That’s how she liked it, in fact, but she was grateful, for tonight at least, that people hadn’t lingered over the dinner table, so she could return to her tent, sit outside, wind down, smoke a cigarette, and, her guilty secret, sip a late whiskey. The flask was on the table in front of her now. She knew alcohol was banned but she wasn’t an alcoholic—far from it. She liked one whiskey a day, late at night, when the busyness was all over and she was by herself. She was ready for bed—more than ready—but one nip settled her; it did no harm.

She listened to the night. Barks from the baboons, shrieks from the chimpanzees. What did they find to shout about so much? There was also the odd roar from the lions, who always seemed so much closer than they actually were. Or so she hoped.

Sitting with her back to her tent, she could see across the camp to where three of the men were still sitting talking. They had moved from the refectory table to near the campfire: Richard, Russell, and Christopher. Eleanor had already turned in for the night, as had the others. The kitchen tent and storeroom were also dark and silent: Ndekei was in bed too.

Natalie smelled the whiskey she had poured into the small silver cap from her flask, and sipped the liquid. She had acquired the taste from her father, long before he had gone off into that private world he now inhabited alone, since Violette had died. Not surprisingly, being a choirmaster, Owen Nelson was a deeply religious man whose twin passions were the music of Bach—the greatest sacred composer in his view—and the single malts of the Scottish highlands, Scotland’s great gift to the world, as he liked to say. In Natalie’s early teens, immediately after the war, Owen had driven his wife and daughter, in his brand-new Hillman, on annual excursions to Scotland in search of distilleries he had never heard of. It was in the course of those holidays that Natalie had first encountered Loch Ness, and looked out of the car window in vain for the fabled, long-necked monster. The very next day, at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, she had stood underneath the never-ending skeleton of a diplodocus suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s main gallery, and to her young mind it had seemed all too obvious that the dinosaur and the mysterious creature in Loch Ness were pretty much the same beast. The museum had sold a jigsaw of the dinosaur, which Natalie’s mother hadn’t been able to resist, and the girl’s interest in extinct forms of life was kindled.

She smelled the whiskey again and rolled another drop around her tongue, felt the liquid slip down her throat as she swallowed. Curious that no one ever remarked on how sensuous whiskey was. She looked across the camp to where the men were talking. Christopher had gone, but Richard and Russell sat close together. The campfire was almost dead.

Although this was still her very first day in Kihara, she was aware of the effect she had produced in the camp. More than one of the younger men had looked at her in the way men looked at women they felt attracted to. She pulled on her cigarette. Even that carried a history, reminding her of the way her mother had met her end. Even so, a sense of well-being spread down through Natalie’s shoulders and chest, the nicotine plus the alcohol working their magic. She was dimly aware of some new studies that had linked tobacco smoking with lung cancer, but from what she knew about the design of the experiments, the evidence was far from conclusive. And, like her whiskey, she so enjoyed a smoke at the end of the day. What harm could one cigarette do?