A Bone From a Dry Sea

NOW: MONDAY MORNING

MRS HAMISKA WAS a small quiet woman with a flat face and pale blue eyes. Her skin looked like soft leather. She said nothing the whole journey, but she didn’t get much chance because Dr Hamiska barely stopped talking. The landscape reeled by, grey-brown, flat, battered with heat, with hardly a tree, hardly a tussock of grass, just here and there patches of low thorny scrub which looked dead but in fact had tiny leaves like fish-scales. These were the badlands Dad had talked about, and the scrub was almost the only plant able to grow there. Again, it wasn’t the Africa you saw on TV.

Vinny sat in the back of the jeep, craning forward to listen to Dr Hamiska explaining about the badlands. This was where they had found most of their fossils. When the plain which you saw from the camp had been sea, and the hills where the camp was had been an island, this had been the channel between the island and the mainland. Then, slowly, the land had risen, and it had become a great marsh, and creatures had lived and died there leaving their bones in the marsh. Rivers had fed the marsh, bringing down silt from the hills, layer after layer after layer, covering the bones. Then the coastline had risen, cutting the marsh off from the sea, and slowly it had dried out, evaporated, becoming saltier and saltier as it did so. It was badlands still because of the salt. The plates of the earth had ground against each other and there had been earthquakes, tilting the edges of the plain into new young hills, where the layers of silt compacted into clay and fresh soft rock, while the buried bones became fossils within them.

Time had streamed by, hundreds of thousands of seasons, wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry, each wet softening the surface of the earth and each dry baking it hard again. Sometimes rain washed whole mountainsides away. Sometimes things barely changed at all.

‘I’ve seen sites which were explored thirty years before,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You could still see the old beer-cans. But not one new fossil had been exposed – barely a millimetre of erosion in thirty years. But then a man I know was digging out a dinosaur from the side of a gully. Tanzania, this was. A dinosaur can be a big thing – you don’t get it done in a day. He’d got it half done when there was a thunderstorm and a flash flood down the gully, and the whole dinosaur was washed away. He’d lost it completely.’

‘He must have been furious.’

‘Not at all. The flood had exposed an even better specimen below the first one. Now, look, that’s where we’re heading for.’

They had been steadily approaching the range of hills which millions of years before had been the coast of mainland Africa. From far off they’d seemed to rise sheer from the desolate flat plain, but now Vinny could see that there were foothills reaching out, brown and hummocky, below the ragged peaks. Dr Hamiska pointed towards a shapeless lump rising like a small island almost straight ahead, separate from the rest of the range.

‘Was it an island in the marsh?’ said Vinny.

‘It wasn’t anything. What seems to have happened was that there was a series of earthquakes which made those lower hills. They’re a real geological mess, but for some reason to do with the underlying rock-structure that outcrop was pushed up all of a piece, so that where the old strata are exposed they lie in the same order as that in which they were laid down. I’m not a professional geologist, but I know enough for my immediate purposes. If I can get a complete sequence of strata-deposition in this locality, then I may be able to match up partial sequences which I find elsewhere.’

‘Like tree-ring dating.’

‘Exactly. For instance, the skull May Anna is working on was found in association with a layer of tuff – that’s fossilized ash from a volcanic eruption. There are a whole series of tuffs in the strata, and I’m hoping that by sequencing the tuffs on this outcrop I can find out which is the one the skull belongs to, and hence get a line on the dating.’

‘Are there any fossils here?’

He laughed.

‘There were fossils here, Vinny. Some were brought to us from a point at the foot of the outcrop, eroded down the hill. Your father and a very experienced African did a survey, and they say there are no more to be found, but you and Jane and I are going to prove them wrong.’

He laughed again, but Vinny could hear it was only half a joke. Then he had to stop talking. They had been travelling so far along a sort of track, reasonably level, winding between the scrub and pits and hummocks of the plain. Now he left it, changed into low gear and edged down into what looked like a dry river-bed with soft, gritty sand in the bottom. There was no track at all on the other side. Still in low gear he took the jeep twisting and lurching along below the outcrop, so that Vinny had to clutch the back of the seats, though Mrs Hamiska sat calmly swaying, with her hands folded in her lap, as if on a church outing.

They stopped and climbed out, and now the heat of Africa smote them. Already, before they’d left the camp, Vinny had found it so hot that she’d been picking her way round through patches of shade rather than cross direct through the sunlit areas. The journey had been better with the breeze of movement blowing in under the jeep’s canvas roof. The badlands were hotter than she’d dreamed, even under the parasol, the green sun-brolly which Mrs Hamiska had lent her. (She’d thought she’d feel silly using it, but it made sense now.) Mrs Hamiska wore a sleeveless cotton frock and a straw hat, still looking as if she were on a church outing, while Dr Hamiska put on an old corduroy cap with its peak turned backwards to cover his neck. He should have looked a complete clown, but he didn’t.

‘The eroded finds were a couple of hundred yards along that way,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a look there later. But first I’d like you to come and help me measure the tuffs on that section of exposed rock. That’s where they’re clearest.’

He pointed up the slope to the left. The hill was a dark rusty brown with yellower patches, and here and there the dead-looking thorn-bushes. The odd boulder jutted out of the soil, but the only real difference was a section of low cliff two-thirds of the way up. He was starting to climb towards it when Mrs Hamiska bent and reached in under one of the thorn-bushes. Vinny hadn’t even noticed her looking. She rose with something in her hand.

‘Look at this, Joe,’ she said.

He turned and took the object from her, chuckling as he held it up between finger and thumb. From the ones she’d seen under the awning, Vinny recognized it as a fossil tooth.

‘Sam didn’t find everything, then,’ he said. ‘That’s about four million. Four point two. Somewhere round there.’

‘It makes my skin prickle, thinking about all that time,’ said Vinny.

‘And so it should. I tell my students that the past is an immense ocean which we can neither sail on nor dive down into. We are stuck to our shore, which is the present. Out on the surface we can see the past of the history books, the storms and the shipwrecks, but of what happened in the far past, down in the deeps of that ocean, we have nothing to go on except the shells and bones it chooses to wash up at our feet. Why do we bother, then? What does it matter? It matters because that ocean is where we come from. Those seas are in our blood.’

His voice throbbed. If he hadn’t told her, Vinny might still have guessed that this was part of a lecture.

‘I suppose you’ve got to be lucky to find the right things,’ she said.

‘Indeed you have. I know experts in my field who’ve never once had the excitement of picking up a hominid fossil. Others seem unable to step off an aeroplane without finding something new. That’s why I believe in luck. I seriously believe that there are some people who can call out across the ocean of time and summon it to wash its secrets to their feet. I am one, and for all I know you may be another.’

He gazed at the four-million-year-old fragment in his hand as if he were praying to it, using it for his summoning-magic, then gave it back to Mrs Hamiska.

‘See if you can spot where it came from, darling,’ he said. ‘Come on, Vinny.’

They started up the slope. It wasn’t much of a climb, but sweat streamed down Vinny’s body, making her clothes cling and pull, and she needed a rest half-way up. Looking back over the grey, roasting desert she tried to imagine it when it had been a marshy lake, steaming under this sun, with rivers running in and pigs rootling in the reed-beds, and other creatures, creatures who were almost people, perhaps, making their camp at the water’s edge . . . Mrs Hamiska was drifting along the slope half-way down, quiet as cloud-shadow, with her head bent like a nun in a cloister. Vinny climbed on and found Dr Hamiska measuring and sketching the slanting rock-layers in the cliff. He didn’t really need her to help him, only to be there so that he had someone to talk to, to teach.

‘You see this layering, how it’s tilted? This grey band? That’s tuff – remember? And here, just above it, these coarser particles, and then these finer ones and then this thin band of tuff again. So we had a minor volcanic eruption followed by a dry spell – not much flow in the rivers, you see – and then a wetter spell bringing heavier particles down from the hills, and then a really big eruption. That’s a very characteristic section. If it turns up elsewhere in the area I shall know where it comes in the sequence. Now I’m going to see if I can hack out some good unweathered crystals from the tuff. There’s a technique called potassium-argon dating . . .’

‘Jane’s found something.’

He swung to look. Mrs Hamiska was kneeling now, and prodding carefully at the earth with a narrow trowel.

‘You want to go and see?’ he said. ‘Come and fetch me if it’s anything worthwhile.’

Vinny found Mrs Hamiska using a painter’s brush to clear the earth she’d loosened round a shapeless small lump. She glanced up at Vinny’s approach.

‘Yes, he’d better come,’ she said.

Dr Hamiska was still watching, so Vinny simply waved and he came loping down like a schoolboy. He rushed past Vinny, knelt and took the trowel from Mrs Hamiska and prodded it vigorously into the earth around the lump, not bothering to use the brush, hoicking chunks of clay out. In a few minutes he had the thing free and was nudging the last bits of clay off with his thumbs.

‘There!’ he said, holding it triumphantly up. To Vinny it looked like a bit of twisted dead branch.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘A lower mandible. Some kind of small deer, perhaps. Look, that’s where one of the molars fitted, and another here. Not in itself very exciting, but the point is that it was buried in the original matrix, so there’s every chance we’ve now got the level from which the tooth Jane found was eroded down. Have you brought a cord, darling? Excellent. And a peg and a hammer. Good. Now, Vinny, go back up – oh, to about where I was working, and we’ll see if we can use the angle of strata in the cliff to get a line on how they might run down here . . .’

Vinny toiled back up the hill, trailing the line, too excited to notice the heat. Dr Hamiska strode up and down lifting the line clear of obstacles, then moved to a point where he could compare its angle to that of the rock-strata. From there he shouted instructions. When he was satisfied, Vinny hammered her peg in and tied the line taut. Using it as a guide the Hamiskas worked along inch by inch, studying every bump or nubble in the earth. Mrs Hamiska found two splinters of bone, leg probably, and Dr Hamiska found the tooth of a pigmy hippo. All three were below the cord, so Vinny had to climb and adjust the top peg. She came back to find him burrowing at the hillside like a dog, showering loose earth down the slope.

‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Here’s our tuff! It’s the same one, I’ll bet my life on it. And the finds are right on top of it. Now . . . !’

Mrs Hamiska was watching him, amused. Her way of smiling was to try not to, which made her purse her lips as if she were trying to spit out a grape-pip. He jumped to his feet, flung his arms round her and kissed her on both cheeks, lifting her clean off the ground.

‘Put me down, please, Joe,’ she said. ‘We’re not twenty any more.’

She didn’t sound disapproving. As often before, with other married people who seemed totally different from each other, Vinny wondered how they’d managed to stay together when Mum and Dad hadn’t. At the back of the hole Dr Hamiska had dug she saw a faint band of grey crossing the yellowish earth. Then, because her eyes knew what they were looking for, she realized she could see the same band right out on the surface, slanting down nearly parallel to the cord. It was so faint that she had to be standing directly on its line to see it, and looking back up the slope to where it should have run on till it reached a large flat-topped rock, she couldn’t see it at all. When she climbed and looked down from the rock it was there, all the way to her feet. It was something to do with the angle of the light, probably.

‘I can see your tuff, Joe,’ she called. ‘If you stand here . . .’

He rushed to join her and stare, rushed back for more pegs, marked the new line and prowled along it, snorting with excitement and effort, as if he could bully the hidden fossils out into the open, by pure will-power. Mrs Hamiska was already digging at something else. Vinny stared at the earth beside the rock but could see nothing. She knelt and moved her fingertips across the ground, closing her eyes, concentrating on the task of feeling. Ah. No, it was only a pebble. So was that. A faint ridge, like the cut end of a Sellotape reel which you can feel but not see. She picked at it with a fingernail. It was harder than clay.

‘Please, is this something?’ she called, keeping her finger on the spot, fearful of losing it.

Mrs Hamiska stopped working to come and look and feel.

‘Yes, that’s probably a fossil,’ she said. ‘Broken, I think.’

‘What is it?’

‘Oh, I can’t tell you yet. Do you want to dig it out yourself?’

‘Is that all right? I’d love to.’

‘I brought a trowel and brush for you. Be patient. Don’t lever against the fossil – they can be very fragile.’

‘Oh, thank you! Isn’t this exciting!’

Mrs Hamiska smiled her mysterious smile. Her eyes were invisible behind her sun-glasses, so Vinny couldn’t tell if she was smiling at her or with her. She helped Vinny prop her parasol on the rock to cast a useful patch of shade and returned to her own work.

Gently, Vinny eased the trowel-tip into the soil and levered the first crumb of clay free. There’d been no need to tell her to be patient. This was the sort of job she did best, with its bit-at-a-time delicacy, and the way her hands learnt the nature of what they were working with, so that they seemed to know almost at once how far to push the trowel in, and how to twist and lever so that another fragment came cleanly away from the ancient bone. Her world narrowed to a square foot of hillside. She forgot heat and thirst and the ache of crouching. Her whole being became the slave of the bone.

It seemed to be thin and flat and to lie almost level in the hill so that its left edge actually broke through the sloping line of tuff. The outer edge had been snapped off where it reached the surface, and the right corner, about half a square inch, was cracked and loose from the main bit. She was working not down but sideways into the hill, digging out a hollow like a miniature quarry with the bone as its floor. Dr Hamiska’s boots crunched on the rock above her. She rose to let him see what she’d been doing.

‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to employ you full time.’

‘What is it? Do you know?’

‘A fragment of scapula, I think. Shoulder-blade to you, Vinny. Some fair-sized beast. Don’t try and lever it out or you’ll break it – you’ll have to undercut it first. Look how the sequence runs at the back there – that’s beautiful.’

‘Do you think it was killed in the eruption?’

‘Could be, could be. Your father’s here to answer questions like that. The ash would have been soft, mind you, so the creature could have died after the eruption and then the bones partly embedded themselves. Lend me your trowel, will you? I could get a column of the sequence out there – something to show them on Thursday. Blind them with science, eh?’

Still chuckling he forced the blade vertically down at the back of Vinny’s quarry, as if he was cutting the first slice out of a birthday-cake. The slice broke in two when he eased it out but he fitted the pieces together and laid them carefully out on the slope.

‘Now if you’ll ask Jane for a bag and a label,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll . . . hold it! Hold everything!’

He pushed his sun-glasses on to his forehead and stared into the slice-shaped cut he had made. His breath hissed between closed teeth. With Vinny’s brush he swept the loose bits from a pale lump which had been exposed on one side of the cut, just above the tuff. He took a magnifying glass from his shirt pocket and gazed intently through it.

‘Jane,’ he called. ‘Come here a moment.’

He’d changed. A moment before he’d been the friendly old professor showing off to the visitor. Now he’d forgotten she was there. Mrs Hamiska came and crouched beside him. Every line of their bodies expressed enthralled excitement. Two terriers at the same rabbit-hole.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Hamiska. ‘I think so. I really do think so.’

‘Whoopee!’ bellowed Dr Hamiska, standing and flinging his cap into the air. It landed half-way down the hillside.

‘Let me have a go,’ said Mrs Hamiska. ‘You’re a bit too excited.’

Without waiting for an answer she started to chip the clay away from the other side of the cut. Vinny fetched Dr Hamiska’s cap, and then helped him measure and peg out an area round the find. Standing on the rock he began to draw a sketch-map. By now Mrs Hamiska had opened the cut enough for Vinny to see that the fossil was a stubby cylindrical bone with a bulge at each end.

‘Is it part of someone’s hand?’ she said.

‘Their foot, Vinny, their foot!’ crowed Dr Hamiska. ‘It’s a distal phalanx – a toe-bone to you, Vinny. You are looking at the left big toe of a creature that walked on its hind legs five million years ago! It’s going to be datable by the tuff! And either my name’s not Joseph Seton Hamiska or the rest of the skeleton is all there, right under our feet! The oldest fossil hominid yet found! I knew it! I knew it! I knew the moment I woke up that this was my day, and this was going to be the place! Whoopee!’

You could have heard his shouts a mile across the plain. Mrs Hamiska straightened and watched him, like Mum watching Colin and the boys let the sea run into the moat of their sandcastle, yelling with triumph as it swirled around their ramparts.

‘I think you’d better get Sam out here, darling,’ she said.

‘Yes, yes, of course. And Fred and the others – as many witnesses as we can. We don’t want any nonsense this time. I’ll call them up.’

He charged down the hill towards the jeep, where he’d left the two-way radio, but half-way down he stopped and turned.

‘Vinny!’ he shouted. ‘Didn’t I tell you, the moment I set eyes on you, you were going to bring us luck!’