Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

She shook her head. “I’m not looking and I’m not thinking. My mind is numb. Say we never find Kees’s body … how are we going to deal with that? I mean, there’ll be no end, always a doubt—not just as to whether he is, actually, dead but as to how, exactly, he died, if he did die. It’s all so … so cold . If my father were here, he would pray for Kees. I can’t do that but not being able to do anything … it’s worse.”

“How well did you know Kees?”

She shook her head again. “Not well, not well at all. He talked to me about his beloved hand axes and the stone they were made of, that’s about it. You?”

“Some. He was interested in flying, mainly because it helped him see rock formations from above. He was one of the most interesting passengers I ever gave a lift to, explaining what we were overflying all the time.” Jack shifted in his seat. He let a few moments go by. “I can see you are upset, Natalie. Why don’t you let me take you to Lamu for Christmas—just a couple of days. It will take our minds off things. It’s only about three hours by plane.”

Natalie didn’t seem to hear him. Then, “What’s at Lamu?”

“It’s on the coast, an old Swahili village that used to be a center of the slave trade. Totally different from here. There’s also a very nice reef, we could go snorkeling, work on our tans.”

She looked across and gave him a sad smile. “I don’t know, Jack. I don’t think … I’m not ready to have a good time, while we don’t know what’s happened to Kees. It doesn’t seem right.”

Eleanor stopped buttering her toast and tapped her enamel breakfast mug with her knife. “Now, it’s going to be a difficult day today, and there’s no point in hiding it. We have got to try and get back to a normal routine, doing what we came here to do. We’ll go through where we are on the press conference before dinner tonight, but as for the gorge we need to keep sieving and digging; we have a few days yet and we may still come across more bones of our man, or woman, which may enlarge on what we already know.”

She drank some tea. “But … and I know this is bolting the stable door after the horse has escaped, but , from now on, we only dig in pairs; outside the camp, we only do everything in pairs. I don’t want anyone else straying like Kees did. I shouldn’t need to say this but … do I make myself absolutely clear?”

“Don’t worry, Mother,” breathed Christopher. “There’s no need to rub it in.”

She nodded. “Good, good. So, how shall we pair off—?”

Suddenly a Land Rover drove into the camp at high speed and sounded its horn. The horn sounded again and again. A black driver got down. “We’ve found him! We’ve found him! Doctor Jonas, come quickly, he’s very weak! By the Nimanu Road.”

Jonas was running to his tent, to fetch his bag.

Jack was on his feet, pulling Christopher with him. He stopped for a moment and shouted, “Remove the back seats from the plane and put in a mattress. I may have to fly him to a hospital. Hurry!”

Christopher had started the Land Rover’s engine and Jack jumped in alongside him. Jonas got in the back and the two vehicles accelerated away through the camp gate.

They returned in just over an hour. “He was six miles away,” said Christopher, getting down. “He’s conscious, but delirious—and he’s lost a lot of weight, a lot . Dehydration.”

Natalie looked in the back of the Land Rover. She shuddered in shock. She couldn’t help it. She had seen Kees barely five days before, but he was now just skin and bone; he must have lost thirty pounds, more. His facial skin was stretched tight over his jawbone, the stubble of his beard dark against the rust red of his cheeks. His eyes, deep in their sockets, like tiny craters, raked this way and that, unfocused, fearful, and bewildered at the same time. But Kees was alive.

“Where are we going to put him?” said Arnold.

“We’re not,” said Christopher. “We’re going straight to Jack’s plane. We only came back here so Jack could pick up his keys and Jonas could get some medicines from the refrigerator. Did you take out the seats as we asked?”

“Yes,” said Natalie. “The plane is ready. I also filled it with Avgas.”

Jack, who had arrived back from his own tent, heard this. He stretched his arm around her and squeezed. “Thank God for Dr. Nelson. You’ve saved us fifteen precious minutes. If Kees makes it, you may have saved his life.” He turned to Jonas. “Ready?”

Jonas nodded.

As they got into the Land Rover, Jack shouted to his mother, “I’ll radio in from Nairobi.”

Christopher and Natalie followed them in another Land Rover as they sped out to the strip. Christopher helped Jonas lift Kees into the back of the plane to save time as Jack did his preflight checks. Then they watched as first one engine, then the other, cranked into life. Jack taxied to the far end of the strip and took off, waving briefly as he banked eastward.

The waves of human voices built on each other, like giant rollers thudding on to a beach, each one more powerful than the others. The third movement of Brahms’s German Requiem . How different male voices were from female ones, Natalie thought. Not just a different sound but different moods. Female choirs soared, male voices consoled.

Dinner this evening had been close to a riot. In view of the fact that Kees had been found alive, and after Jack had radioed in to say they had reached the hospital in Nairobi safely, Eleanor had allowed a bottle of champagne to be brought from the fridge. As usual, there hadn’t been enough for more than one glass per person, but even so tongues had been loosened, now that the cloud hanging over them had been lifted.

There had been much laughter at dinner, as if, not being allowed expression for days, it was now pouring out of everyone. And, with Jack away, they were playing as many of his records as they could, one after the other, jazz alternating with classical in random order.

Natalie sat next to Christopher. “Tell me, where exactly was Kees found? How was he found?”

Christopher edged his chair closer to hers. “He was between two large boulders, in the shade. But he was near a track and he had pulled a log across it, forcing anyone who came by to stop, to move it out of the way. As far as we could make out, he had wandered in the sun for the first day, because the kind of rock formation he was looking for didn’t support much vegetation. He didn’t realize he had been in the sun for so long until it was too late, when he felt sick and had to rest. He fell asleep and woke in the middle of the night. His sunstroke was bad the next day and as the sun moved round, during the afternoon, his shade disappeared. He tried to move, fell, hit his head, and passed out, in full sunlight. Again, when he woke it was dark.

“It was amazing no predators found him, but since he wasn’t near any trees, that helped. By the third day, he was severely dehydrated, and though he heard the planes looking for him, he was too weak to stand or wave. The only thing he could do, had done, was use a log to block the track he was near. But that track is hardly used at all these days, and Iku Liguru only drove that way this morning because he had fought with his daughter and wanted to make it up to her by picking some rare wildflowers which grow in that area.”

Christopher stopped speaking as the music fell silent. Then he said, “I’m sorry if I frightened you—the other day, I mean, in the plane. I suppose I panicked.”

Arnold Pryce, in charge of the gramophone tonight, put on some jazz—loud, fast, and, to Natalie’s ears, crude.