Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  Reluctantly, Thomas set off with Crocker and about half the party with their donkeys. The porters were given a choice of resting at the top, while Hannes and Lukas did their map work, or of going hunting with Crocker and Thomas. Some were anxious about encountering the Masai, who grazed their cattle on the crater floor, but the extra pay persuaded them.

  Thomas took his notebook and camera. He had promised Jacques that he would try to keep a full account of the flora, even though his own interests were much more for the animals and humans. At the previous rest station, they had acquired a Masai guide – essential for interpretation, George told them, and for smoothing the way, as they would in due course have a long march across Masai country to the site of the fossilised footprints that Hannes had been told about by Baumann.

  ‘African teak,’ Thomas wrote dutifully in his notebook. ‘Is this the same as euphorbia?’The commonest tree was the shortish, scrubby acacia; many had long trailing creepers hanging off them and thick lichen which were testament to the purity of the air. Their descent was slow, there being no clear paths down to the crater floor, and the donkeys were refractory on the steep incline, stepping awkwardly through the volcanic boulders that lay where they had been thrown out on the rusty soil. Thomas felt the heat through his tropical clothes, and his hands were scratched as he pushed through aspelia and morning glory. How was he ever going to remember all these plants for Jacques? He took as many photographs as he could, but did not want to lag behind the group.

  On the crater floor, the hunting was easy. Zebra roamed in trusting herds that gave an easy shot to his and Crocker’s rifles; wildebeest were profuse, and advertised their presence with odd nasal grunts, like old clubmen snoozing after lunch. Eventually, Crocker called a halt to the slaughter and said that from now on they would go only after rhino; such of the remaining kill as they could carry up they would eat or trade for grain; the rest they would leave for the Masai. The bearers pitched camp in a small forest whose broken trees showed evidence of recent elephant passage; when they had all eaten as much meat as they could, they lay down to rest.

  Thomas fell asleep and dreamed of Dr Faverill’s Matilda and her pet gnu. He was awoken by a commotion in the small camp, where bearers were running back and forth and shouting. Half a dozen had just arrived back from the grassland where there had been some frightening incident; George was among those absent, so Thomas had no way of knowing what had happened until an hour later, when Crocker returned with a satisfied expression, flung himself down in the shade of a tree and demanded water.

  ‘White rhino,’ he said. ‘I stalked him for a half an hour up wind. He was a huge beast. I hit him in the chest, but it didn’t stop him. Confounded animal charged me. I could feel the whole crater shaking. Natives all ran away, shrieking, of course, leaving me on my own. I managed to step to one side at the last minute and got him through the head before he could gore me. He fell to his knees and rolled over. Fine animal. But your expedition was very nearly one man down.’

  ‘What will you do with the carcase?’

  ‘Leave it for the Masai. And the vultures. And all the rest of them. I took its horns with my trusty little saw. They should pay for my expedition.’

  When they arrived back at the main camp on the crater rim the next evening, Thomas told Hannes the story of Crocker’s rhinoceros, but he was not as impressed as Thomas had expected.

  ‘You do know, my dear Thomas, that the beast is almost blind? A half-step to one side when it charges is enough to disorientate it completely, and while it is looking round for you, like a short-sighted governess looking for her thimble, you have time to amble up and shoot it through the head.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Which is more than you can say for the poor rhino. Anyway, Lukas and I are well ahead with our maps, so tomorrow we leave for the site of the footprints. We now have four Masai among the guides. It is apparently two days’ journey, so I suggest we take half a dozen other men. Then, when we reassemble here, we can push on with a full complement towards the Serengeti. You take two Masai and the Wanderobo guides and head north towards the railway – and back to your madhouse.’

  Kitty:—

  We rose soon after dawn so that we could make good progress before the heat of the day. Hannes and I took a dozen of the best porters, including George, half a dozen donkeys and two mules. We had plenty of water from the streams near the Crater, guns and ammunition, medical supplies and – most important – two Masai, one of whom went with Baumann ten years ago.

  By the time the sun was high, we were up on a plateau, still heading west, and we had our first sight of giraffe gliding over the deep green ground, like great tall-masted ships in the production of whose forward motion little effort is visible. They are extreme examples of Mr Darwin’s theories of natural selection – ‘adapted’ to the point of grotesquerie – yet they do have a sort of elegance, and such beauty in that long-lashed eye that, were you so inclined, you might yet imagine a Creator.

  There was rain later in the day, but we made our objective, and well was it worth the long day’s travel. The plain on which we had been walking ended suddenly. At our feet was an enormous cleft in the earth, as though part of the plateau had slipped and fallen. The obvious result of this collapsed valley is that many layers of earth and rock are revealed, each belonging to a different geological period; between them, they constitute a mine – almost literally – of information waiting to be excavated.

  Hannes was very excited by the ‘rift valley’, by the sparkling blue lake within and the mountains rising on the far shores to form the Serengeti plateau. It is the landscape of dream, of something indescribably ancient; you sense the sound of the first human footfall, of a fish pulled from that lake by the first being who learned to bait a hook. Even the natives, who have lived their lives hereabouts, seemed not to know quite what to say. They smiled a little and shifted from foot to foot; they looked at us questioningly, as though we might explain it all to them. We looked back into their eyes, equally children, all of us, in the fading summer light, in the great mystery of our existence.

  I do not think, dearest Kitty, that I have explained to you what a capital fellow Regensburger is. He is, as I suspected from the first, in pain for much of the time (from arthritis), but he makes no complaint. Occasionally he asks if I can help, and I administer such limited medicines as I have. He is a man of science, who is capable of looking the discoveries of the last century in the eye without flinching; yet there is no triumphalism in his manner. He does not exult in the absence of a Creator; I think he regrets it, but he does what he can to lead a life of dignity notwithstanding. The natives all respect him and he has no need of beating or bullying, which is what they expect from the white man.

  ‘All I seek to do,’ he told me, ‘is to understand, as best I can, what is in the world – and to pass my understanding on, entire and without compromise, to those who follow. If I am reduced to mere mapping, so be it.’

  We rose early, as ever, and with a feeling of great excitement. Hannes was pacing up and down the camp, drinking tea, urging the bearers to saddle up quickly.

  It was a cool morning, and we made good progress. There were no roads, no tracks, not even any paths, but the Masai guide led us from the front with calmness and certainty. It was often easy to orientate ourselves from the disposition of the old volcanoes, but then we might find ourselves in a declivity in the plain, and I soon lost all sense of direction. We crossed numerous cracked and rock-hard riverbeds, and the going became more difficult. At first there were numerous cattle tracks, but these soon died out. I do not know if disease had killed the cattle or if even the Masai themselves never penetrated this far into the endless plain.

  By noon, it was very hot and some of the porters were fractious, demanding rest and more water, but George, taking instructions from the Masai guide, pacified them. We did stop briefly in some shade, ate some meat and bananas, which had gone brown and soft, then pressed on. I had some of the weak tea
which has served me so well.

  Hannes was determined to match the nimble Masai stride for stride, though I know how much his joints were aching. I walked with them, disdaining the mule, which was anyway uncomfortable. George walked beside me. The four of us left our dusty footprints on the plain for just a moment till they were turned over by the donkeys and the bearers. To walk with three such men made me feel alive in a strangely elated way.

  It was late afternoon, we were exhausted, and I had long since lost all sense of direction or of time. My darling Kitty, we were in a wilderness . . . We had reached the end of the world.

  As we came over a low grass ridge, the Masai pointed to a spot in the dale a hundred yards or so away. He instructed the natives to rest under George’s supervision and gestured to me and Hannes to descend with him to the place.

  What did we find? Among the short brown grasses was a grey layer that looked almost powdery, but was quite hard. It was a wide, flat expanse, covered with patches of grey soil and tufts of yellow and white grasses. In it we could see numerous fossilised imprints, both plant and animal. By far the most notable of these was a trail of what appeared at first sight to be human footprints. The Masai pointed to the volcano in the east, indicating the probable source of the ash in which the feet had left their mark, then withdrew and allowed Hannes and me to get down on our knees and inspect our find.

  It took a day of patient toil: stripping off the soil, sweeping loose material gently from the surface with soft brushes, marking out the area with squares of string. I set up my camera on a tripod to record the resulting ‘map’ of our find.

  ‘This is Baumann’s trail,’ said Hannes eventually. ‘It is exactly as he described it to me. These creatures were walking through the volcanic dust after an eruption. It was probably softened by rain, and that is why the footprints sank in so clearly. The sodium carbonate in the ash then formed a cement with the rain. Layers of further ash concealed them. Then, over millions of years, the covering was eroded by wind and rain and a section of this little journey was laid bare to our modern eyes.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Now you tell me, Doctor,’ said Hannes, his voice a little shaky, ‘are these the footprints of human beings?’

  I inspected the trail. There appeared to have been two, or maybe three creatures – human, humanoid or ‘proto-human’, whatever one might wish to call them. I will call them ‘people’, because although they may not yet have been Homo sapiens, their feet were – in all respects that I could see – human. The big toe was in line with the rest of the foot, not at an angle like an ape’s. The foot itself was clearly arched – a uniquely human feature. Everything in my instincts and my heart was telling me that this was not only a human trail, but that of a family: mother, father, child. I was feeling so overpowered by my emotions that I decided I must be scientific and talk to Hannes of anatomy. I took out a measuring tape.

  ‘The medial margin here has a short pronounced convex shape which reflects the size and shape of the metatarsophalangeal joint. The toes have gripped the ash for support and have driven back against the front of the ball of the foot. The ridge they made – here – has retained the shape and contours of the anterior margin of the ball of the foot. The toes have human alignment with respect to relative length. The big toe is roughly twice the mass of the next, which is typically human.’

  We walked carefully along the length of the trail, keeping to the side. There were some puzzling elements. For instance, the smallest set of prints, presumably the child’s, was irregular in its pacing. A small-hoofed animal had crossed the track, its prints impinging on those of the child. Hannes discovered the imprint of a leaf, which he was easily able to show me was that of a thorn bush, it being identical to one that he plucked from a bush about ten paces away. So while the fauna had evolved, the vegetation had not changed in this incalculable time. Beneath his magnifying glass he discovered something else. He handed me the glass, and his eyes were shining.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  I knelt down and looked very closely. It was a raindrop.

  ‘Tell me more about the creatures who left these prints,’ he said.

  I struggled to remember my anatomy lessons in ‘Meaters’, the awful dissecting shed in Cambridge. Had there not been a ratio of footprint to height? I recalled a figure of 15 per cent, by which calculation I reckoned, after some measuring, that the smallest creature was 46 inches tall, and the largest maybe five feet nine inches – exactly the same height as Hannes himself.

  I carried on reporting what I found, like a pathologist dictating to a student. ‘The big toe, as I remarked, is non-divergent. The medial ball pad is under the first and second metatarsophalangeal articulations with the lateral part of the ball pad formed by the third, fourth and fifth joints. The lateral pad gives stability and the medial pad gives propulsion. This is characteristically human. The rear edge of the heel strikes first and takes the full body weight, which is then shifted through the heel centre to the side of the arch, then to the ball and across to the big toe. You can see the round impression where the big toe pad was planted and pushed the ash back against the front edge of the ball. The centre of gravity is indistinguishable from that of a human and I believe that the foot structure is morphologically and skeletally human in all but name.’

  ‘So?’ said Hannes, and his eyes scraped my face.

  ‘These people walked like you and me, Hannes.’

  Yet the other fossils in the exposed layer, according to Hannes, long predated Homo sapiens; they were comparable to those found in Europe, in Spain and Italy, that had been confidently assigned by geologists at home to the Pleistocene epoch. Hannes was rather proud of his homework.

  ‘We must take samples back with us,’ he said. ‘Not only of the rock, but of these animal prints, which I believe to come from some extinct creature whose dates may be known. Then we must cut out one of the human prints as well.’

  I was surprised at the casual way he spoke, with no sense of desecration of the site, but I suppose that is how science progresses. Alfred Russel Wallace did not merely observe the orang-utans in the jungles of Borneo; he shot them and brought home the bodies to be studied properly.

  I persuaded Hannes to let me finish my examination first, and we began by inspecting the rhythm and pacing of the trail. As I explained, there were probably three beings, whom we might call man, woman and child, though of course one could not be sure. The child’s track was clear and separate; it remained at a fixed distance from that of the smaller adult, presumably the female. Yet each trail had inconsistencies. After an hour or so, I felt that I had found a solution to the puzzle they posed.

  I believed that the man, or male ‘humanoid’, walked first through the hot ash. The smaller adult, presumably the female, had deliberately placed her feet in his – perhaps to protect herself from the heat, though her placement was not always accurate. Most of the adult footprints were thus blurred or overlapping, though there were about a dozen quite distinct.

  The most puzzling thing about the trail of small prints – the child’s, as we assumed – was that the paces were of varied lengths. For a long time I puzzled over why there should be this irregularity; and then it came to me: the child was skipping.

  Perhaps the child’s skips helped him keep in step; they coincided with a heavier press from the ‘mother’s’ trail where she had slowed or waited. I thought of Sonia and Daniel crossing the main courtyard. I felt the holy bond of mother and child, and as I knelt beneath the African sun, I had the terrifying feeling of the gulf of past time opening up in front of me. I was almost scared to look back at what was there beneath my eyes.

  Hannes had gone off to inspect the surrounding earth and rock to see what further it could tell him of the age of our find. I called him back and explained to him my theory, and he nodded, agreeing that it fitted the shape of the trail.

  ‘But why, Thomas, is the child at such a fixed lateral distance from the one we are calling the mother?’


  ‘I have thought about that too, long and hard, Hannes. I have looked at the track from both ends and tried to imagine the circumstances in which these beings walked, in the aftermath of eruption, in rain, among animals. And it seems to me that the only conclusion one can draw from the evidence here is that he was holding her hand.’

  Hannes blinked and looked away towards the distant mountains. I felt that he probably did not wish to speak for fear of betraying some unscientific feeling.

  When we had thoroughly photographed the footprints, Hannes withdrew, with some rock samples he had taken, to join the rest of the party, leaving me alone. It was by now about five o’clock, and the sun had already started to weaken.

  I sat down on the ground and lowered my head into my hands. A crested bird flew away from the end of the trail. From the corner of my eye I could see our bearers waiting patiently on the ridge. I heard what must have been an elephant snorting and – very faintly – the sound of a far distant Masai cowbell. There was a gentle breeze from the east that was coming through the whistling acacias and thorn bushes.

  Oh, Katharina. I was sitting at the end of the trail, as though waiting for the three to come and meet me. I picked a tiny white flower with a purple centre which withered almost at once in my hand.

  I thought of you, my love, and I thought of our children and what we have become. I thought of the demented wretches in the stinking wards of my old asylum. I remembered poor Olivier and his torments. I thought, too, of the sleepy voice that all my youth would speak to me . . . then slipped away. I thought of the terrible briefness of all our breathing lives.

  And in the cool of the evening sun, I lay down and I placed my hand in the child’s full and perfect footprint. And it was warm. Not hot – because the sun was fading fast, but it was warm with the stored heat of the day: it was, in fact, blood-heat.

  And I am not ashamed to tell you that I lowered my face into the earth and howled.

  That night, they pitched camp a short way from the site of the footprints. After they had eaten and the porters had gone to rest, Thomas and Hannes sat together over the remains of the fire, drinking whisky from their tin cups.