Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

He sat down in the other canvas chair, on the far side of the small writing table they all had. The canvas complained as it stretched under his weight. “Your secret is safe with me. It’s not a silly rule to ban booze on digs, but a late-night nip can’t do any harm.”

He pulled at the sleeve of his shirt where it had been caught up with his watch. He was wearing a khaki shirt and jeans and a pair of what she now knew Americans (and Australians who lived in America) called loafers. No socks. Red hair showed on his chest above where his shirt was unbuttoned. But his eyelashes were fair, golden almost.

He looked at her for a moment without speaking, absently rubbing a finger down his cheek.

At length he said, softly, “I came to apologize, Natalie. Dick shouldn’t have yelled at you like he did tonight. He was out of line, way out. But we are both so fired up. This find is big— big . We’ve got to get into print as soon as we possibly can. Dick and I are working on that, but he was over the top in going for you like a baboon on heat. I’m sorry. Really.”

A wind stirred. The stunted calls of bats, overhead, punctuated the silence.

“Are we forgiven?”

What did Russell mean, that Dick and he were working on how they could go into print quickly? But she was relieved he had come to apologize, even if it was really Richard who should be sitting here. So all she said was “Thank you. Of course I forgive you. It is an important find and I’m glad I was here when it happened.” She held out the cup of whiskey.

“Can you spare it?” Instinctively, he looked across to Eleanor’s tent, which was in darkness. “I’d love one.”

“Only on condition that you don’t betray me to the authorities.”

He made a mock salute. “Deal.”

She handed him the cap she was drinking from, which formed the lid of the flask that contained the whiskey.

“Ahhh,” he said softly, downing the scotch. “That hits the spot.”

They sat together in a companionable silence.

“Listen to the baboons,” he said at length, as a burst of screaming could be heard. “They’re worse than we are.” He looked about him and went on, “You can tell this is a woman’s tent.”

“What do you mean?”

“Little touches. This is your very first day here but… that photograph there, the little vase of flowers, above all the smell. Is it perfume, or talcum powder, or what?”

“The photograph is of my parents. The flowers were a gift, put there by Mgina—you know, the woman who cleans the tents. The smell, if there is a smell, can only be soap. Who would bring perfume on a dig?”

The minute she said it, she smiled. “Arnold Pryce!”

Russell grinned. “Well, no one ever puts flowers in my tent. All my tent smells of is sweat and dust. You must come visit.” He grinned again and stood up, and so did Natalie. For a brief moment, they stood very close together, so close she could smell him. He was wearing some sort of aftershave, not as strong as Arnold Pryce’s but not just sweat and dust.

He said nothing but looked down at her, breathing hard. The shadows slid over his throat as he swallowed and his Adam’s apple moved.

“Good night.” He turned, ducked under the guy ropes that held up the tent, and was gone.

Natalie hid away the whiskey flask and tidied a few things that didn’t need tidying. She was glad Russell had apologized. He was a not unattractive man. Not in the Dominic class, of course—

She checked herself. She must stop making these comparisons. Dom was gone, gone .

She moved around the tent for a few minutes, changing into her pajamas, brushing her hair and teeth, until she could be certain Russell was back in his own quarters. Then she took another cigarette and returned to the seat she had been sitting in. She lit the cigarette, breathed in slowly, then out slowly. She thought briefly of her mother in her final moments, and then a sense of well-being spread down her chest.

She looked up at the stars, feeling tired but content. Here she was, at last, at long last, on a dig in the warm night of Africa, thousands of miles from Cambridge. She turned off her hurricane lamp, and darkness—save for the stars and the crimson glow of the campfire logs—closed in around her.

Now, with any luck, she could have a few moments to herself.

“Oh yes,” said Eleanor Deacon. “That’s the two-million level all right.” She stood, legs apart, shoulders thrown back, head held erect in the morning sun, the skin on her cheeks sweating slightly. She stared down at the wall of the gorge. She was wearing a knee-length gabardine skirt, leather boots, and the same white shirt of the evening before, and her hair was covered in a large white bandana. Her eyes were ablaze with excitement.

They had all come out to the gorge early this morning, using three of the Land Rovers assigned to the dig. Christopher Deacon was already hard at it, and had been for hours, his tripod in place, an umbrella on a pole behind him, shielding him and the camera from the sun. He’d brought a guard, who stood some way off. They also had other equipment necessary for proper publication of the discovery—measuring sticks divided into meters and centimeters, to show scale, white paint to mark off the area where the bones had been found, soil bores to take samples of the earth and rock around the find spot, better fencing to keep out wild animals, and plenty of buckets in which to store the soil-sand that had been dislodged during the digging and which, in days to come, would be scrutinized and inspected and scrutinized all over again, to make sure nothing had been missed. Arnold Pryce was just beginning the painstaking task of sifting through the soil-sand for ancient pollen. He too had a big yellow beach parasol, to keep off the sun. From a distance the excavation resembled a stylish picnic.

So this was the famous Kihara Gorge, Natalie reflected, as her eyes raked the landscape. This was to be the center of her attention for the next few months—two rocky red walls, thirty yards apart, occupied by spiky thorn bushes, thin trees, deadwood, dust, and, if the smell was anything to go by, various vintages of dung. It was a long way from Jesus Lane in Cambridge.

Eleanor turned to Daniel. She swept her arm in an arc around the find spot. “I want an area thirty feet either side of the discovery, and thirty feet in front, sealed off. Build a proper fence, five feet high. Anyone going inside the fence must wear lightweight shoes, not boots. There’s a good chance that the rest of the skeleton is around here somewhere, so let’s create a little haven of safety.”

Daniel nodded. “The Maasai won’t like it. Any fence we build they might pull down.”

The Maasai were the local tribe in the area around Kihara. They lived by herding goats, sheep, and cows and regarded all land in this part of the Serengeti as theirs.

“Take them a gift, then, Daniel. A bolt of cloth maybe. We have some in the stores. Tell the elders what we are doing. Say that the fence will be temporary. Will you do that?”

Daniel nodded. He was a Luo himself, a tribe with its homeland some miles to the north and west. They were traditional enemies of the Maasai but, for the moment at least, and in recent memory, intertribal relations were good.

Eleanor spent some time showing Daniel and a few of the other local helpers where she wanted the fence built. Above them the sun rose in the sky and shade disappeared. Baboons peered over the lip of the gorge, then ran away. A few deer ventured between the wild thorn bushes on the far side, then they too disappeared.

Around one o’clock, Eleanor called a halt. It was too hot for any physical work and the light was too bright for photography. They drove back in high spirits, the Land Rovers racing one another across the flat plain of the Serengeti, churning up great red-brown dust clouds behind them. Giraffe looked on, then lolloped away.