Eventually, Blair, the Air Force colonel, and several other people filed onto the stage, and an official with the American Geographic Foundation—an attractive woman in a multicolored summer dress—took the lectern to introduce the Great Man, who stared at his knees or whispered with the colonel throughout her remarks. When she had concluded, the audience applauded warmly and Blair sauntered forward with outstretched arms and an engaging smile. He was in his early seventies, but still vigorous, still a glutton for adulation and work. The stage had been carefully set before his arrival, with props and portable movie screen, and he stalked back and forth along its apron as he reeled off an informal prologue to his program.
For better than twenty minutes, his bald pate shining, his mustachios sweat-dampened and bedraggled, Blair held forth on the differences between his assessments of recent African finds and the assessments of his chief on-the-scene rivals in paleoanthropological research, the Leakeys of Kenya. He and the Leakeys were good friends, he confided, but he liked to rib them for their excesses of enthusiasm. They liked to rib him, too. Blair and the Leakeys were members of one big, opinionated, and diverse family: the clan of hominid paleontologists.
“Although some of our colleagues in other fields have violently disputed the fact, hominid paleontologists are likewise members of another important family. Homo sapiens it’s called.”
This drew a laugh. Joshua laughed along with everybody else, and Blair, encouraged, moved on to the next segment of his performance. The highlight of this segment was an eloquent apostrophe to a plaster replica of the skull of a hominid that Blair, amid much controversy, had named Homo zarakalensis. He had discovered the original of this skull two years ago in his Kiboko digs, and his frequently ridiculed claim was that Homo zarakalensis, or Zarakali Man, represented a distinct form of hominid immediately ancestral to Homo erectus, the form that had mutated gradually into the first bona-fide representatives of Homo sapiens. In other words, Zarakali Man, an ancient inhabitant of Blair’s own country, was the earliest hominid deserving the unscientific description “human.” The Leakeys believed that H. zarakalensis—a term that Richard invariably placed in quotes as well as italics—actually belonged to the species already known as Homo habilis. Indeed, Richard Leakey had argued persuasively that Blair had created an entire species out of a shattered cranium, a jigger of Irish whiskey, and a dash of Zarakali chauvinism. If so, Blair was hardly the first. Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.
Now, like Hamlet in the churchyard scene, Blair was flourishing a plaster-of-Paris death’s-head and addressing it feelingly:
“Alas, poor Richard!
Thy skull has lain enearth’d
three million years,
And several trifling centuries besides.
Thou wast a fellow of finite braininess,
But sufficiently sharp to o’ershadow quite
The brilliant Leakeys’ well-beloved habilis,
Whom we now perceive to have been a jilt,
And no thoughtful precursor of ourselves,
No germ for genius, no model for Rodin—
But merely, this habilis, an upright ape
Of the australopithecine kind.”
The Great Man paused, stared into the vacant sockets of the skull, and then began to declaim again, his deep bass voice resonating in the old auditorium like the singing of the sea:
“O Richard, Richard, thou numbskull
namesake
Of my late lamented colleague’s
single-minded son,
Thou hast shaken from our shaken family tree
Not only habilines but southern apes
Of both the robust and the gracile sorts.
And though an ape by any other name
Must needs make a monkey of
our nomenclature,
I here proclaim thee, chopfallen Richard,
By which I mean this skull and not thy brother
Leakey of the Koobi Fora lava beds,
Our foremost father in the man-ape line,
Preceding H. erectus on the upswing
To our sapient selves. Alas, poor Richard!
Habilis is deposed as well as dead!
In the long-lived, bony ruins of
this cold brainbox,
Long live the successor, Zarakali Man!”
Showmanship. Even though this pseudo-Shakespearean rant could not have made perfect sense to everyone there, it inspired intermittent laughter and finally a cascade of applause.
Blair kissed the skull on its brow, replaced it tenderly on the table from which he had first picked it up, and signaled for the dousing of the auditorium’s lights. He then narrated a colorful and comprehensive slide program interspersing panoramic shots of the Lake Kiboko digs with close-ups of recent fossil discoveries, the native wildlife, and many of his assistants at the site. He confessed that much of the work at even a fruitful paleoanthropological site was downright boring, and that he was not one of those people who actively enjoyed roaming the lava beds in temperatures of 102° F. In addition, he no longer had the patience for the painstaking work of cleaning a fossil discovery still perilously in situ. Younger hands were steadier than his.
Next—something Joshua had not expected—a series of slides devoted to the paintings of a prominent Zarakali artist’s fastidious reconstructions of Pleistocene animals. Despite the heat, Joshua began to shiver. It was strange realizing that this artist, working from bone fragments and imaginative taxidermal hunch, had attempted to objectify the persistent subject matter of his dreams. How accurately had she accomplished the task? Indeed, had she accomplished it at all? Joshua was the only one on hand, not excepting Alistair Patrick Blair, who would be able to tell.
“First slide, please.”
There jumped onto the screen a fanciful genus of sheep or buffalo called Pelorovis olduvaiensis. It had enormous curling horns that measured, according to Blair, ten feet from tip to tip. Joshua had read about this animal, but he had never encountered it during his recurring thalamic jaunts into the Pleistocene and so could reach no conclusion about the accuracy of its depiction. He felt lightheaded, though, as if he had surrendered the burden of those horns to the creature in the painting.
“Next slide.”
This one was Hippopotamus gorgops, with its projecting brow ridges and periscopic eyes. Joshua recognized it from his dreams, and the artist had expertly rendered the goggle-eyed strabismus typical of this hippo’s entire clan.
More slides followed. Giraffes with headgear reminiscent of the antlers of North American moose. Giant baboons, giant warthogs, giant hyenas. Primitive elephants known as Dinotherium, with abbreviated trunks and backward-curving tusks. If the paintings of these animals fell short of total accuracy—and sometimes they did—they usually failed by misrepresenting some aspect of the skin or fur: color, texture, markings, length. Wholly understandable errors. All in all, Joshua was astonished by the artist’s clairvoyance.
“Next slide.”
Several slope-backed animals with manes and horselike snouts appeared on the screen. The artist had made the manes dark brown and the bodies that luminous tawny color peculiar to African lions. The creatures all had moderately long necks, and Blair, after executing a hammy double-take, invited everyone to tell him what these unlikely quadrupeds actually were. “Giraffes!” some people shouted. “Antelopes!” others called. “A kind of horse!” a child’s voice cried.
Blair, dimly visible beside the screen, raised his hand. “Well, they are a variety of ungulate—that’s a vegetarian mammal with hooves—as are all the animals you’ve just named. But take a closer look at these hippogriffic camelopards. No one seems to have remarked their most distinctive and perhaps oddest feature.”
“Claws,” Joshua said to himself. Someone in the rear of the auditorium emphatically shouted the word.
“Right you are.” Blair stepped into the ray of the slide projector and tapped the feet of one of the animals rippling on the screen. “V
ery good. Of course, no one has yet put a name to our . . . our camelopardian hippogriffs. What’s the matter? Doesn’t anyone out there wish to rescue these poor fellows from anonymity, if not extinction? They must have a name, you know.”
Joshua said, “They’re chalicotheres.” He pronounced the word clearly and correctly, KAL-uh-koh-THERZ. A lovely word, Joshua had always thought. His saying it took Blair by surprise.
“Ah, a full-fledged paleontologist in attendance,” the Great Man said, peering into the twilight grayness of the hall. “Or perhaps a crossword addict.”
The audience laughed.
“No, no, I don’t mean to joke. Who among you has done his homework, pray? That industrious and discerning soul deserves his own name spoken aloud. It would be fitting, I think, if he announced it for himself. Come on, then, speak up.”
Joshua said, “My name, address, and telephone number are in your pocket, sir.”
Discomfited by this intelligence and perhaps by his memory of the young man who had accosted him outside the hall, Blair was unable to find Joshua. “Sounds as if our expert handed me a bill of lading, doesn’t it?” The audience chuckled only tentatively at this riposte, and the Great Man turned back to the screen. Joshua noted that he was patting a trouser pocket, as if trying to reassure himself that he still had that address slip on his person. He seemed to fear that it had mutated into something unpleasant, like a hernia or a hand grenade.
“Chalicothere means ‘fossil beast,’ ” Blair gingerly resumed, facing the hall again. “I used to know a little ditty about the creature. ’T went, I believe, something like this:
“The chalicothere, that vulgar beast,
Applied his toes to Nature’s feast,
Et with élan but not -iquette,
So fell to Darwin’s dread brochette.
To spare yourself a like retreat,
Eat with your fork and not your feet.”
This was well received. Blair had overcome a moment of perplexity by falling back on a show-biz schtick that had undoubtedly served him well in the past. It consigned the voice of Joshua Kampa to oblivion and permitted an effortless segue into pure lecture:
“Baron Cuvier, the father of modern paleontology, held that any animal with teeth shaped like the chalicothere’s and showing wear patterns indicative of vegetarianism—well, he said that any animal of that sort must certainly have hooves. The operative word here, of course, is ‘must,’ for it ultimately betrayed the poor Baron to the profligacy and the unpredictability of Mother Nature.
“Cuvier died in 1832. The discovery, soon thereafter, of the remains of a chalicothere proved him dead—D.E.A.D.—wrong. Here was a herbivore with monstrous claws on its feet, and no one could satisfactorily explain what the creature used them for. A standard speculation is that the chalicothere dug roots and tubers out of the ground with its nails and so occupied an ecological niche quite distinct from that of most of its fellow ungulates.”
“It also ate flesh,” Joshua said quite loudly.
“Oh, my goodness,” Blair murmured. At his insistent beckoning the lights were turned back on, and, shielding his eyes, he scanned the floor for his kibitzer. “That, I’m afraid, is quite a ridiculous assumption.”
“It’s a simple statement of fact.”
Blair, having finally found Joshua, dropped his hand from his brow and addressed the young man expert to upstart. “The microwear patterns on the chalicothere teeth available to us for examination don’t support that ‘simple statement of fact.’ ”
“Then maybe you’ve got the wrong damn chalicothere teeth, sir. I’ve seen them scavenging, using their claws as a civet or a hyena might.”
“Seen them?” The Great Man was broadly incredulous.
Joshua wrapped his arms around his middle, like a patient in a straitjacket. A photographer from the News-Journal rose from one of the metal folding chairs, crept forward from the front, and exploded a flash bulb in his eyes. From other angles the man took other photographs.
“Yes, sir,” Joshua said, blinking, an audible quaver in his voice. “What I mean is —” He had erred, saying that aloud, but he did not want to back down. The crowd, he could feel, was against him. Having one of the few black faces in the hall did little to endear him to Blair’s outraged partisans, but challenging the Great Man in public was the more heinous offense. Joshua could feel their stares going through him like unmetered dosages of radiation. A crazy nigger had interrupted their soirée. “All I’m saying,” he resumed, feeling the heat, “is that the chalicothere isn’t quite what you people with your microscopes and calipers have imagined it. That’s all I’m saying. Is that such an unspeakable heresy?”
“Sit down!” a man in the middle of the auditorium shouted. “Shut your mouth and sit down!” A low murmuring of approval greeted this suggestion. When Joshua refused to budge, however, the murmurs turned into catcalls.
“No insults or abuse!” Blair roared from the stage. “Insults and abuse are to be reserved for scientists attempting to sort out the implications of conflicting theories! This young man and I are scientists, and we are quite capable of insulting and abusing each other without your impertinent assistance!”
Grudgingly the hall quieted.
“Perhaps I should note,” Blair continued, the voice of Sweet Reason, “that many East African peoples, members of several different modern tribes, have legends about a creature called the ‘Nandi bear.’ It’s not supposed to be so large as the animals depicted here,” tapping the overilluminated images on the screen, “but it has the same downward-sloping back and, according to legend, eats flesh as well as vegetation. I’ve always felt there is a connection between the Nandi bear and these prehistoric creatures. It is a fact, I’m afraid, that we’ll never know everything there is to know about animals that are extinct.”
“They’re the wrong color, too,” Joshua persisted, indicating the chalicotheres on the screen. “You never see them that corny lion color. They’re beautifully striped. Brown over beige in wavery Vs that point toward their butts.”
“Can’t we get him out of here?” another voice called, and the undercurrent of grumbling erupted into jeers and boos. Although Blair might choose to be sweet and forbearing, these people had paid three dollars apiece to listen to his lecture, not that of some no-name pygmy with delusions of paleoanthropological infallibility. Joshua did not blame them for wanting him out, but he was powerless to silence himself. These several hours in Pensacola were supposed to mark a turning point in his life, a turning point long deferred, and he was not going to surrender to their hostility.
“And another thing, Dr. Blair, Homo zarakalensis is a figment of your imagination, just as Richard Leakey says.” Joshua could see that the security guard who had been standing at the rear of the hall was now strolling down the aisle toward him. “Zarakalensis is a habiline, just like the hominids discovered by Louis Leakey’s son at Koobi Fora in Kenya. You know this yourself, sir.”
The booing intensified, and the security guard, the same imposing black man who had eyed him earlier, took him by the arm. “That’s enough,” he said quietly. “I think you’ve had your say.” His grip a remorseless shackle, the guard led Joshua out of the auditorium to the goose-stepping cadence of hand clapping.
“Not only does the young man see into the past,” Blair called out to the audience, apparently attempting to quiet it again, “he also sees into the minds of ancient monuments like myself!”
Those were the last of Blair’s words that Joshua heard that night.
Chapter Eighteen
In a Season of Drought
ONE MORNING WE AWOKE TO FIND Alfie dismantling his hut, scattering the supports and thatching to the wind. Ham and Jomo, witnessing this activity, attempted to follow suit, but Alfie prevented them. Although he was jealous of his own hut, he apparently wanted to leave a few dwellings intact as decoys. These would give both predators and other house-hunting hominids pause, suggesting to foe and friend alike that the original
builders might soon be back to occupy their dwellings. By this stratagem, Alfie seemed to imply, we would get a jump on at least some of our competitors.
It was time to follow the example of the tree mice, the zebras, the gazelles, the wildebeest, and all of Ngai’s other children. No rain had fallen here in at least four or five months, and only mongoose, hyraxes, naked mole rats, lizards, grasshoppers, and snakes were going to find this area of the veldt hospitable to their lifestyles. We had best bid New Helensburgh adieu.
We set out. I had not thought of returning to Lake Kiboko for weeks, but I had seriously considered going the whole hominid and shedding my remaining clothes. However, my bush shorts and chukkas still seemed indispensable. The pockets of the former accommodated many useful items and my scuffed boots had been on my feet so long that I had lost the calluses acquired during my survival training. Along with my shorts and shoes, I wore my .45 in its unornamented holster. My bush jacket was stretched taut across a makeshift travois, upon which I dragged my backpack, my bandolier, and a crude antelope-skin kaross of melons, tubers, nuts, and berries that Helen and I had gathered over the past several days. But because I did not want to renounce my entire past to achieve the disadvantaged innocence of our Pleistocene ancestors, I kept my pants on.
A carefully considered, but ultimately rash, decision.
We moved in good order, the men encircling the women and children. Despite her recent pair bonding with me, Helen continued to play a masculine role. Like Alfie, Jomo, and Fred, she brandished a hefty acacia stave. Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Ham carried lovingly polished antelope bones for clubs, while I, relying on my pistol and the others’ martial skills, pulled my travois as if I were a member of the women’s itinerant sorority.
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