do you think they are going to take this? What do you think his standing in his tribe will be now? If they find out? Did you think of that?”
She rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “What gave you—? Who thought of—? No, I don’t want to know.” She shook her head. “I cannot believe that grown men, educated men, professors, could be so foolish, so wrong-headed, so insensitive.” She shifted her gaze from Richard to Russell, then back to Richard. “You are … you are …” A strand of hair had fallen from her chignon. She pushed it back up. “Words fail me.”
“Now we know what we know,” said Russell, “and after we have taken some photographs, we can put the bones back—”
“Don’t you dare!” hissed Eleanor. She leaned forward and pointed at him with her glasses. “Don’t even think about setting foot in that burial ground again. Desecrate the site a second time? Now I know you’re beyond the pale.” She put her spectacles back on. As she did so, they could all see that her hands were shaking. “Look, this is a potential disaster.” She pointed at the tibia and femur. “Hide those bones. Wrap them up and give them to me. Go on, hurry up.”
As Russell moved to do as she said, Eleanor shook her head again and groaned. “I am beside myself with fury. Nothing like this has ever happened on one of my digs before. It’s disgraceful, barbaric. I feel sick.”
“Eleanor, come on. You’re overreacting,” said Richard. He was lounging in his chair. One leg was crossed over the other and he gripped one ankle with his hand.
“No, no. No! I am not overreacting.” Eleanor still didn’t raise her voice but her tone was vehement. She slapped the table with the flat of her hand. “What you have done is unforgivable. Sacrilegious, arrogant, and crass. If the Maasai find out about this, I hate to think what will happen. The dig might even be canceled. It was a condition of the government permit that we obtain the agreement of local tribes. How are the chiefs going to feel when they find out that their sacred burial ground has been interfered with?” She took the bundle of bones from Russell and pushed him away. “My God, I have never been so angry.”
She stood up, held her head high, so that the full length of her long neck was exposed. “You are both very foolish men,” she said. “Monumentally foolish.” She took a deep breath. “I would make sure your careers were ruined but for the fact that our only hope now is to hush this up.” She picked up a spoon and pointed it at all the others, one by one. “This information, this … crime, goes no further than this table. It is not to be mentioned again. Ever. You will not talk about it even among yourselves. You will carry on as if nothing has happened. Is that clear?” She looked from one to the other. “I said … is that clear?”
One by one they nodded, signaling their agreement.
Eleanor lowered her voice to a whisper. “The paper will not now be published until we have all left here, until we have found another modern tibia and femur with which to make the comparison, and can say so. We must put this behind us, and we must cover up.” She glared at Richard Sutton. “This is the worst example of vandalism I have ever encountered. You had better make as many discoveries as you can on this dig, Professor Sutton, because I will not have you or Professor North back again. If, that is, we are allowed to work here in the future.”
She took the towel with the bones in it and scraped back her chair. She addressed herself to Richard and to Russell. “You have both made a serious error of judgment. Wholly unacceptable. In my eyes, you can never recover from this act of gross stupidity and insensitivity. The only way you can even begin to make amends is never to mention your foolishness, your insensitivity, your sacrilege, your sheer racial arrogance again, to stay as far away from the burial ground as possible, and to make another important discovery that will take everyone’s mind off this one.”
Eleanor stood absolutely still, erect, her eyes on fire. Even her fingernails seemed to shine in the gloom.