by John Darnton
Dr. Susan Arnot felt the customary excitement of speaking to an audience, even if it was only to the undergraduates of Anthro 101. It was something about being at the hub of things, the focus of all those uplifted eyes. And the sense of control—she had to admit she liked that too. Is that what demagoguery is all about?
Susan Arnot’s class on prehistoric man was one of the most popular at the University of Wisconsin, even though she was known as a tough grader. There was always an extra thrill in taking a course from someone who was well known in the field, especially someone controversial, whose theories had shaken up the establishment. And of course she was something of a campus sex symbol. She cut a striking figure, long-limbed, sometimes wearing blue jeans and black leather and riding a motorcycle on her days off, her long raven hair tucked into a cherry-red crash helmet. When she walked into a room, it stirred as if molecules were heating up.
Susan’s lectures were fabled on campus, so the auditorium was crowded. Standing on a creaking wooden stage, with a beam of light projected above her from the back of the hall like a spotlight, she could see only featureless heads. One or two bits of jewelry gleamed in the semidarkness, and a pair of eyeglasses reflected back like tiny headlights.
She had softened them up with jokes: the usual fare about rare archaeological finds, comparisons between Java man and a certain eminent campus personality, and the Piltdown hoax and a professor’s research. It was cheap but it worked, and she felt gratified when they had laughed at the appropriate lines.
Abruptly she raised her right fist, flexed her thumb, and triggered a distant whirring sound. Behind her appeared a huge map, starkly drawn in thick black ink, with meandering cracks for rivers and eyelashes for hills. The students focused on it and some raised their pens, ready to scribble notes. German place-names from the Rhine valley: Oberhausen, Solingen, the Düssel River. She raised a pointer and walked over to the map, all business.
“And so we come to the main event. The year is 1856: August. It’s three years before Darwin will publish On the Origin of Species. He’s been laboring away on it some twenty years now, and he’s in no particular hurry. But soon he will hear that a rival is working on a manuscript proposing something called ‘natural selection,’ and this will send him into a frenzy of competitive production.”
She looked out at the students to make sure they were with her, and for some reason she began to feel slightly on edge, a vague, disorienting feeling that came upon her out of nowhere these days.
She raised the pointer. The red rubber tip touched the map, and she caressed the center in a slow, circular motion.
“Here in this little valley east of the Rhine, something is about to happen that’s going to turn the scientific establishment of the nineteenth century on its ear. A discovery. And like many important discoveries, chance will play an important part.”
She raised her fist. Another click, and a color photograph of meadows and glades flashed on the screen.
“It’s a tranquil little valley, filled with edelweiss and daffodils. The gorge you see was named in the seventeenth century after a headmaster from Düsseldorf, Joachim Neumann. He roamed the valley for inspiration for his poems and music—both rather dreadful, by the way. But he was a beloved figure, and after he died the village elders decided to bestow his name on the fields he adored. Joachim was a bit of a pedant. He preferred to be called by the Greek translation of his name, which meant New Man: in Greek, Neander.
“Two centuries later—in 1856—on a quiet August day, quarry workers discovered a cave, which had scores and scores of bones in it, piled up around the edges and scattered about, but mostly heaped in a mound near the center. The workers threw them away, all but a handful. For some reason the owner of the land, one Felix Beckershoff, took an interest in these old bones and managed to salvage a few: arms and thighs, part of a pelvis, a fragment of skull.”
Another slide came on the screen: bits of bone, shiny like polished gems and as dark brown as wet cardboard. Parts were identifiable— the roof of a brainpan, a familiar-looking femur a slender tibia. The tip of the pointer danced among them and drew a figure eight.
“Luckily, Beckershoff was acquainted with a J. C. Fuhlrott, the founder of the local Natural Science Society. When Fuhlrott saw those fragments, he couldn’t believe his eyes. What manner of bones were these? The low-vaulted skull with its awesome protruding ridge: how to explain that? The bowed limbs. The injured ulna of the lower arm. Whose were they? Surely from no animal, and yet from no man—or species of man—still living.”
Susan returned to the lectern. The students were writing feverishly now. She didn’t have to consult her notes; she had given the lecture a dozen times. But still she couldn’t shake the feeling of being off stride, vulnerable. Who are all those people out there listening to me? she wondered. What are they really thinking? She forced her voice into an easy, conversational tone.
“Fuhlrott brought in an anatomist from Bonn, one Professor Schaaffhausen. He became the first to theorize that the specimen was something truly unimaginable—not an ape, not a man, but some type of pre-man, perhaps an ancient being who roamed Europe long before the Romans and Celts. Try to conceive for one second what a bold leap that singular induction was.
“Then the professionals got involved. The theory of evolution was in its infancy. Its threatening cries were already echoing up and down the staid corridors of science. The establishment was split: Evolutionists seized upon this handful of bones and held them up—presto!—vindication of their revolutionary theory. The antievolutionists went on the attack. They insisted the bones were an insignificant fluke. Sides were drawn. Famous thinkers came up with explanations. Plausibility was not a prime consideration. Rudolf Virchow, the best-known German anatomist of his time, concluded that the owner of the bones was an ordinary human suffering from rickets. The unspeakable pain, he reasoned, caused him to knot his brow, which then became ossified into those bizarre heavy ridges.
“Most preeminent scientists sidestepped the controversy. Certainly Darwin did.” Susan shook her head slightly. “But we shouldn’t be too judgmental. Remember, it was an age of dark superstition, pseudo-religion, straitjacket conservatism. It was anathema to imagine a human with an apelike ancestor, not to mention a flat-headed cousin who looked as if he had been run over by a truck.
“But then providence intervened. The evidence kept piling up until it became incontrovertible.”
She raised her fist again and another map popped onto the screen, showing Europe, North Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, with black crosses scattered across it. They clustered around southern France.
“There were more fossil finds. And there were bones of huge mammals—some of them extinct, like the mammoth and the giant deer. Pretty hard to argue with that.” The tip of the pointer tapped the screen. “Bones began turning up like mushrooms after a rain: Gibraltar, Italy, Belgium, Russia, Iraq, Israel.”
She smiled. Her anxiety had lifted a bit. She backed up to the lectern, still watching the screen, as if waiting for something magical to happen, and her voice took on the clip of a narrative climax.
“And so … the evidence carried the day. Science won out. William King, an Irish anatomist, identified the fossil as a new species of humanity. Paleoanthropology was founded as a field of study. Our creature was recognized, baptized, analyzed. He was given a name. It came from the valley of the mountain flowers and our beloved headmaster with the insufferable rhymes, Joachim Neumann.
“And now, folks, here he is”—there was a touch of the carnival barker in her pitch, as she raised her fist high over her head and punched the button with her thumb—“the star of our show ... Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, colloquially known to you all as Neanderthal Man!”
The hail darkened as the giant figure usurped it. It was immense, hirsute, and ran from one end of the screen to the other. There was the too-large visage, so oddly familiar from hundreds of sketches and half-remembered dreams: the cr
ooked sloping brow; the bulging cage of the forehead, horribly ribbed; the prominent, slightly hooked nose and weak, rounded chin. It was unspeakably misshapen, ugly, close enough to a human head to be recognizable and thus render the differences even more grotesque. It was as if a giant hand had taken a waxen head and pulled it forward brutally, elongating it.
The Neanderthal dwarfed Susan, and as she walked across the stage in front of its hairy chest, oblivious to the gigantic form looming behind her, the contrast gave it an aspect of menace: King Kong peering in the window at Fay Wray.
The sketch, by the Czech illustrator Zdenek Burian, was her favorite. She liked the way it caught a distinctly human aura. Something about the lines in the mouth made them look like smile lines, and the fiercely intelligent eyes seemed to be looking off into the distance as if they were gazing at something momentous—the creature’s own extinction, perhaps. They were so sagacious, so wistfully hopeless. There was a hint of inexpressible weariness in the stoop of the shoulders. This was no beast. This was every bit man’s equal.
2
Matt didn’t put credence in portents—he was too skeptical to believe the universe could be organized, even by a malevolent force—but he was unable to shake the conviction that this plume of dust augured ill. The sensation heightened now that the car was approaching, but he swallowed it in front of the students. “Maybe it’s that pizza we ordered,” he joked, as they finished off a lunch of goat meat, warmed over from the night before and washed down with tepid Tusker beer.
He picked up his drink and walked off by himself far along the ridge, where he could sit on a boulder and survey the lower portion of the dig: the pit cut in layered trenches, the wheelbarrows topped with screens, the old trailer that served as their lab, the toolboxes lying flat on the ground like small wooden coffins. Amazing how no other place counted to him now.
He thought about all the finds over the decades: bits of bone and teeth, flint scrapers and arrowheads—all those pieces of the puzzle. Knowledge of Lower Paleolithic man had grown exponentially over the last few decades, but what was really known of his universe, his mentality and soul, the way he tried to make sense of the world before falling asleep at night or responded when he saw a sunset or a galloping fallow deer?
As Matt sat there, he imagined prehistoric man standing on this very spot. It would have been the shore of a great lake, perhaps, judging from the sedimentation deposits. Deep caves honey-combed the hills behind and opened almost at the water’s edge. Perfect for safety; that would matter above all else. Matt knew something of this creature’s habitat and beliefs, and he tried to conjure up even the dimmest glimmer of his psyche: one part warrior, another part fearful shadow quaking in the recesses of a cave. He tried, as he had many times before, to empty himself and to take on those fears, the smells of blood and lard and hair, the brain tripping over itself with a capacity for understanding that outstripped the few puny grunts given to it. It was all so unknowable. Was it possible even for a split second to feel a connection with something so primitive and so much greater, that had passed this way eons before?
With a clamor, the Land Rover rounded a bend, plunged into the center of the campsite, and stopped abruptly. The dust caught up with it and enveloped it in a cloud that drifted away as the motor was cut.
A man bounded out of the back and headed for them with a quick step. He was peculiar-looking. His hair seemed to hang in clumps. He was plump but surprisingly agile, a white man in his early forties. He wore new hiking boots, a Banana Republic safari jacket, and wraparound sunglasses.
“Dr. Mattison?” He walked directly over to Matt and amiably offered a fleshy hand.
Matt took it. The man’s grasp was stronger than he expected.
“Or should I say, ‘Dr. Mattison, I presume’? We are in Africa after all. At least I think we are. Can’t be sure—might have taken a wrong turn back there in the dust bowl.”
“And you are …”
“Van Steeds. Frederick.” A pause. “People call me Van.”
The name was familiar but Matt couldn’t quite place it. The visitor took off his dark glasses and wiped them on a shirttail. The skin around his cheeks was puffed with fat and his gray eyes darted around once his glasses were off, giving him an inquisitive but furtive air. He bent over and swatted his pants legs. A billow of dust came out. “Look at this. Don’t know how you get used to it.”
Matt saw Van looking at the table. “Want something to eat?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
The students made room while one of them foraged in the larder and returned with some cut slices of meat, bread, and another beer.
The chauffeur sat under an acacia tree and promptly fell asleep, his hands lying on the ground palms up. Van looked over at him. “Don’t know what it is with these guys. Soon as they get out of the car they fall asleep. You’d think it was in their contract or something.”
“Khat,” said one student. “He’s chewing khat.”
“No! How do you know?”
“The eyes. Dilated pupils. Everyone around here chews it.”
“Son of a gun.”
Matt tired of the small talk. “Look, Van. I appreciate your driving four hours from Djibouti in the noonday sun, but—”
“Ten, to be exact. I landed in Hargeisa, drove to Djibouti, and picked this car up there. He got lost twice. Said he knew the way.”
“Yes, but now you’re here, so perhaps you can tell us why.”
“Certainly,” said Van, and smiled inscrutably. Matt realized he was enjoying his little mystery. “Only thing is”—he looked around at the others—“I’ve got to talk to you alone.”
“Okay.”
Van finished his lunch slowly in silence and then stood up, licking the grease off his fingers. Matt led the way to his tent. As soon as they were inside, Van held out a long brown envelope without a word. As Matt tore it open, the man peered out the tent flap, lit a cigarette, and said, “I can’t answer any questions. You’re bound to have them. I wish I could, but frankly I don’t have a lot of answers.”
The letterhead was discreet and important-looking: The Institute for Prehistoric Research, 1290 Brandywine Lane, Bethesda, MD 09763
.
Dear Dr. Mattison:
I have every reason to believe that this letter will reach you at the most inopportune of times, and I apologize in advance for that unfortunate coincidence. It is, I assure you, only a matter of extreme importance, indeed urgency, that would drive me to seek you out at a time like this and to place a demand upon you that, I am confident, your magnanimity will not permit you to deny.
As you may or may not realize, we have contracted the services of Dr. Jerome Kellicut, whom I believe you know well and who has often spoken favorably of you. For that reason we feel we may confide in you. Dr. Kellicut has been abroad in Tajikistan on an exciting project that we are sponsoring. The project is of utmost importance to the scientific community and to the field of paleontology and prehistoric research in particular. He has not been heard from in several months, aside from a message that he sent to you through us and which we are holding for you. The message is in the nature of a summons, which we are convinced you will want to respond to favorably once you know the facts. I am afraid I must add that we have grounds to believe that Dr. Kellicut’s life is in danger.
For this reason I urge you to immediately depart upon receipt of this letter and to present yourself in our headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, at the above address. In anticipation of your positive reply, flight reservations and accommodations have been made for you, as have arrangements for others to take in hand your current project.
In closing I would like to emphasize the compelling nature of the request being placed upon you. I am sure you will understand the paramount need for speed and for secrecy.
There was a boldly scrawled signature and underneath the typed name and title: Harold Eagleton, Director.
Matt was dumbfounded. He had t
hought often of Kellicut, his mentor at Harvard, but he hadn’t seen him for at least five years and hadn’t heard anything about him for … what? At least two. Kellicut. No one had influenced Matt’s life the way that man had.
He ruled the powerful archaeology department like a prince, and the students were his subjects; they lived in the hope of being chosen for his digs, joining the elite. Kellicut would prowl the bars of Cambridge with them late into the night and then they would return to his apartment, where he would put on Fats Wailer or Maria Callas and cook up a mound of spiced scrambled eggs in a black iron pan that he never washed.
Matt was impressionable—he had never known his father, who died when he was two—and Kellicut bombarded him with revelations, subversive thoughts, the poetry of Blake, composers he had never heard of. Why me? Matt had always wondered, feeling pleased but unworthy. It had only been a matter of time until he succumbed to Kellicut’s fascination with “the ancients”—not the Greeks and Romans, who left behind writings and so were knowable, but the true ancients, prelapsarian beings in the process of becoming human.
On Matt’s second dig, years ago, at Combe Grenal in a tiny valley carved by the Dordogne in southern France, they unearthed over 2,000 Neanderthal bone fragments and even a partial skeleton. The whole bed of rock was lifted out by a crane, to dangle precariously while Kellicut jumped up and down, cursing and shouting in broken French. The French crane operator had tilted it so that it was about to slip out of its sling and smash against the ground when finally Kellicut himself jumped into the cab and managed to stop the rock from swaying and settle it onto a flatbed truck. Matt remembered the image still: Kellicut slapping the gears, still cursing, then laughing. Later that evening, he produced four bottles of chilled champagne from God knows where and they all got drunk. And then, always one to break the rules, Kellicut gave them each a little Neanderthal skull fragment, drilled and mounted on a silver chain. Matt had dutifully worn it around his neck for years before he took it off and carried it in his pocket. Even now, he kept it near as a talisman.
