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.
Back at the camp, most of them took a shower. It was always dusty in the gorge and, with water limited, a shower at this time of day was much more useful than first thing or in the early evening.
Mgina, the slender Maasai woman Natalie had told Russell North about, brought