by John Darnton
For a split second, Matt thought he saw a glint of the old humor flicker across Kellicut’s face. “Now what?” Matt asked. It was as if he were the graduate student again and Kellicut the all-knowing professor.
“Now you will go over to the fish and carefully remove its eyes and wrap it in vine leaves very carefully. Then you will go where I tell you to, climb a tree, and leave it there.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I’ve never been more serious. It’s called a death cult. Remember reading about such things? Well, now you’re going to participate in one.”
“What do I do with the eyes? I certainly hope I don’t have to eat them.”
“Not funny.” As Kellicut moved toward the fish the crowd scattered and dispersed. Their eyes met and for the first time he smiled at Matt.
17
It was time to make a plan. At first Matt and Susan had hoped that Kellicut would work with them, and they had visions of a three-way research partnership on a seminal Neanderthal work that would shake the world. But it was clear that things weren’t working out that way. Kellicut was changed; he was lost to science. He was so immersed and enraptured by the mysticism and purity of the hominids and so fixated upon acquiring their special power himself that he had lost all objectivity. He was no longer interested in observing and measuring their community, he wanted to join it. He could still be useful, even essential, in communicating with them, but he was dead set against the idea of anyone publishing anything. Sometimes he insisted the outside world could never understand such beings; at others he declared, with the melodrama of a soapbox preacher, that the outside world would destroy them.
Matt and Susan were worried about their destruction, too, but they feared the renegades who had killed Sharafidin, Rudy, and Van. They felt the pressure of time: What was to prevent an attack from the predators on the mountain—especially if they knew that humans were in the valley? The cave-in had obliterated Van. Perhaps the renegades would think that they had been killed, too. But what if they dug it out and found no bodies? Time was critical: They had to gather as much information as quickly as possible and get out while they still could.
But the research was not easy. The absence of language was beginning to tell; even facial expressions were untranslatable. They tried rudimentary signs, but it did not work. The hominids did make sounds, but these were not words; they registered basic responses but had no meaning per se. Kellicut, who seemed to know more than he let on, was not willing to help out and disparaged the whole idea of using a spoken tongue. The real communication, Matt and Susan knew, was occurring in that mysterious realm from which they were excluded.
Still, they were able to collect a wealth of data. Every night Matt recorded his observations on tape. Susan filled her notebooks. Her camera had been lost in the cave-in but she had a sketch pad crammed with drawings that captured Neanderthal life. They worked feverishly against the clock. They collected artifacts to bring back, mostly flaked stones and other tools, crude bowls and vessels. They compiled a list of areas to be covered before they left: religious practices, social structure, burial rites, gender roles. At times they felt the questions were far bigger than the answers. Susan, especially, was frustrated by her failed attempts to learn about the women. They huddled in groups that broke up and dispersed when she approached. She had seen one of them choosing leaves and then returning to a hut where a sick child was lying supine but the woman would not let her observe.
They determined to leave with whatever material they could gather quickly. Later, they could decide about coming back. To avoid the renegades they needed to find the crevice that had brought Kellicut to the valley. Somehow, they would make it down the mountain on their own.
But Kellicut was still strangely cold. At times it was almost as if he regarded them as nothing more than emissaries from the universe beyond the valley rim. He talked darkly of the Institute, and he still refused to answer the questions they put to him about what he thought it was after or why they had been sent for.
For days Matt had been pestering Kellicut for directions to the crevice but each time he had been rebuffed. For some reason, one morning Kellicut had changed his mind. Squatting on the ground, looking more than ever like an Indian holy man, he drew a rough map in the dirt. The valley was more or less circular. He traced lines for the rivers, drew some peaks as landmarks, and marked their present location with an x. The crevice was at the opposite end. Along the route he drew an ellipse and marked it in cross-hatching.
“That’s the burial ground. If I were you, I’d go around it.”
“Why?” Matt asked.
Kellicut looked at him sharply and pointed out that respect for the dead was important in any culture. He himself had been there only twice: on his first foray into the valley, when he had picked up the skull that he gave Sharafidin—which he now regretted—and on the day that he returned for good. No hominid ever went there, aside from the permanent grave tenders, whose faces and upper torsos were painted a chalky white and who were regarded as pariahs, spending all their lives in the forbidden burial zone.
“Death is the seminal event, the most feared principle around which their life is organized,” Kellicut said. “The meaning cannot be captured in words, only in symbols.”
Drawing the map had loosened his reserve, and seating himself cross-legged in the shade of a tree, his tone reverted to that of the old days: the authoritative instructor.
“Where the ethos is communal, where there is no individuality or self in our meaning of the word, the tribe is the only reality. It overrides all else, and death, which diminishes the tribe, is the only threat. Insofar as the whole tribe has shrunk, the whole tribe is affected, which is why the cult of death arises. A special caste of untouchables is set aside to wrap the dead, and they tend them in a special land where no one else ever goes. The eyes of the deceased are removed.”
“The eyes!” Susan gasped.
“Yes. Why this should be. I am not yet sure.” Kellicut said.
“But what do you think?” asked Matt.
“I don’t think. I intuit. To understand what life is like for them you must project yourself onto an entirely different plane of existence. You must acquire an additional dimension. Imagine that you are the center of the world—your world—and yet the periphery of that world consists of others. Your horizon is contiguous to the horizon of others. It is like the solar system. You are the sun but you are also the planets. You see through others as well as for yourself. This happens in some fashion that I can’t pretend to understand. I don’t know how all this information is taken in and processed, much less rendered intelligible. But it is. And then something happens. One day, one of the tribe dies. One of the planets disintegrates, and you feel it personally, not just out of some sense of empathy but because a little piece of you actually dies. Maybe it’s like losing an appendage. It’s insupportable, and so you act against it. You try to retain those organs that are the tribal consciousness, the web of your communal existence. You take out the eyes.”
“And do what with them?” asked Susan.
“You give them to the shaman.”
Susan knew whom he meant, an elderly hominid, the one who wore a string of snail shells around his neck. He frightened her.
“And what does he do with them?”
“Ah, that’s matter for a different discussion,” said Kellicut. He lapsed back into silence, like a door slowly closing and then clicking shut.
Matt stood up. “We’d better be going.” Off to one side stood three figures. They were Blue-Eyes, Leviticus, and a third with large front teeth that Susan had named Long-tooth.
“They’ll go with you—until they see where you’re headed,” Kellicut predicted.
The group set off, Matt and Susan ahead and the three trailing them at a distance, moving in their loping, muscular walk.
The sun was almost directly overhead when they stopped for a rest. The three escorts joined
them, and they ate some berries. Matt pulled out his canteen and passed it to Susan, who swigged some water and held it out to Leviticus. He took it in both hands, raised it to his mouth, and tilted it upward the way Susan had. The cool water poured over his mouth and chin, startling him. Matt laughed, but Susan approached him and touched him on the arm. He did not shrink away but touched her in return on the inside of her elbow. It tickled slightly.
They started off again. Half an hour later the ground began to rise steadily. Halfway up the incline Susan realized something was missing. Bird songs had stopped. She turned and looked back; the three hominids were nowhere to be seen. Farther up they came upon trees where the bark had been slashed and the yellow flesh of the trunks showed through. Zone markers, she guessed.
She looked at Matt, who was frowning slightly. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” she said. “Maybe we should listen to Kellicut.”
“Maybe we ought to think for ourselves,” replied Matt. “He doesn’t know everything.”
At the top of the ridge the ground leveled into a plateau. Susan had the intense feeling that they were being watched, and when she shifted her gaze she felt a peculiar sensation, as if her head were heavy. They started across the plateau and soon came upon their first corpse. It was in a tree, wrapped in vines. On one side the dried leaves had given way and they saw the bleached shape of a pelvic bone.
As they walked on, the bundles in the trees multiplied, propped up on branches like weird nests. Some of the wrappings had deteriorated, and parts of skeletons nestled in the crotches of the trees. Piles of bones littered the ground in some areas like fallen husks, and grinning skulls lay about. A vague rotting smell filled the air. Most of these remains were old, Susan realized. The burial ground was large and it took half an hour to cross it, moving as stealthily as thieves and feeling exposed and vulnerable, as if at any moment they might be struck down for their sacrilege. All around was deadly still. She did not see the grave tenders but knew they were being observed by them.
Once on the other side they soon came to the valley wall, which was almost sheer. They searched in one direction and then the other until they came to a split in the rock. Matt slipped through first, then Susan. They walked deep enough to know that they could continue on to the exterior of the mountain. Susan felt a relief she had not anticipated at the realization that a way out did exist. Retracing their steps, they came back into the valley.
They had not gone far when Susan tugged at Matt’s sleeve and pointed to the rock face. There was the gaping mouth of a cave. She was struck by the certainty—where it came from, she couldn’t say—that it led to the tunnels from which she and Matt had barely escaped with their lives only a couple of weeks ago.
They returned again across the burial ground. “I feel we shouldn’t be doing this,” said Susan. “Kellicut’s right.”
“Matt,” said Susan with a tone of self-satisfaction the following afternoon, “on balance, I think I’ve done pretty well. My theories have held up. Yours are mostly shot down.”
“Like hell.”
They were lying in a meadow, and Susan had plucked a piece of straw and was tickling Matt under the chin. “I seem to remember you backing the idea that the Neanderthal had an incomplete pharynx and couldn’t make certain sounds—a g, wasn’t that one of them?”
“How many g’s have you heard here?” he replied.
“Not many, but since they don’t talk at all it’s a little beside the point, don’t you think?”
“A minor correction. A footnote. Anyway, I never really backed that theory; I was just trying it out.”
“I see.”
Then it was Matt’s turn. “But I seem to remember you going along with a theory that the elongated pelvis bone suggested Neanderthal pregnancies lasted eleven months.” Susan reddened slightly. “The implications of that were staggering, as I recall; more time in the womb meant a more sophisticated development. I don’t see a great deal of sophistication. Or a lot of women running around with huge stomachs.”
“It was only a vague hypothesis. I abandoned it early on. Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of women, period. How do you account for that?”
“Raids,” said Matt. “By the others up on the mountain.”
“I had the same thought.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Susan plunged in again. “How about the burials?”
“What about them?”
“You were always denying that they had funeral rites. You always said that a complete skeleton is just a happy geological accident.”
“Not always. You may remember that I accepted the crouch position burial. And I acknowledged that in some cases the Neanderthal stocked graves with stone tools and joints of meat and other goods. I just didn’t go overboard like you.”
“You mean the flower burial of Shanidar, don’t you,” said Susan, referring to a site in Iraq where pollen grains in sediments around the bones were interpreted by some as a clue that the corpse had been bedecked with garlands of flowers.
“Yes, I still think that’s romantic crap. The grains got there by chance—some burrowing animal or stratigraphic shift. Just like Teshik-Tash. You think those Siberian goat horns were hammered into the ground around that child’s body to bring him back to life; I think they were put there to protect the body from scavengers.”
“So prosaic. You just can’t believe there is such a thing as the importance of ritual.”
“Susan, I admit I never anticipated wrapping your loved ones up like cocoons and stuffing them in trees. But we haven’t witnessed any burials here and we don’t know if they have rituals or not.”
“Sometimes I wonder about you. You don’t see the epic side of things: great battles, struggles for existence, one species crowding out another. All you see is sex.”
“You’ve got me there.”
“If your theory is right—if we intermingled our genes and propagated them out of existence—we should be willing to mate with them, you and I. Right?”
“Maybe not. Maybe we’ve evolved too far apart by now.”
“But we should feel some kind of attraction, something. Do you?”
“Do you?” he asked.
“I asked you first.”
“What am I supposed to say, I asked you second?”
“Well, a lot is riding on it. If I say yes, that could mean you’re right.”
“Susan, just say the truth. What you feel.”
“Well, that’s hard. In some ways no, not at all. I find the whole idea repulsive. But at other times—yes, I could conceive of it.”
“If you can conceive of it, then it’s possible: There is no barrier to reproduction, and in fact we and the Neanderthal belong to the same species. That’s assuming the biological concept of species.”
“You mean that if two different populations interbreed they’re the same species?”
“Right. And if not, if you and I can’t conceive of it, then James Shreeve is right when he suggests that the Neanderthal face, and the eyes in particular, puts them off limits sexually as far as we’re concerned. Then we really are two separate species.”
“Boy, this is some field research!”
They noticed that the hominids were not bashful about sex. Males and females coupled when the impulse took them, and there was no concept of monogamy; while some went about in regular pairs others did not. For the most part it was the males who initiated it—but not always.
One evening dozens of adults drifted out of the village and walked through the woods. Matt and Susan joined them. They detected an air of excitement in the group, a quickness in the strides and overflowing energy. Overhead was the moon hanging large and low, a giant magnolia-colored disk producing so much pale light on the ground that they cast shadows as they walked.
After fifteen minutes they came to a huge rock formation that neither had seen before. On the far side was a large triangular hole, big enough to admit them one by one. As soon as they stepped in
side they were struck by the heat and smoke. They were in a large, low cavern. A fire was burning, stoked by four hominids dripping with sweat. The flames leaped high and disappeared into a dark funnel above, a chimney to the outside. A reddish gleam reflected off the jagged walls of rock, and the heat was so suffocating that Susan thought she might faint.
They sat down beside each other. Through the smoke they could make out those seated around the fire, and for the first time Susan saw Kellicut there, along with Leviticus and others. The fire tenders tossed more wood on the blaze, which damped down and then rose higher. From the rear of the cave they heard a syncopated hollow sound, and two hominid males and two females came out of the shadows, pounding on bamboo-like tubes. The sound of the rhythmic beating echoed back off the walls and engulfed the cave, striking a chord deep inside Susan. She noticed the fire tenders were laying long green weeds upon the flames that sent out billowing waves of smoke, acrid hut not unpleasant, which filled the cave like fog.
Susan was drenched in sweat, as was Matt, and they each removed their clothes. Now the beating intensified. In a small dirt area in the center, a woman stood up and danced, gyrating wildly. The noise rose as the others began slapping their thighs in unison. The dancer spun, then stopped in front of a male and pulled him to his feet. In the flickering light of the fire Susan saw that his penis was erect, extending from his genitals like a short fat pole. The dancer pulled him to the entrance and they went outside. The slapping continued and the beating of the instruments again grew louder. The fire tenders threw more weeds on the blaze. As she inhaled deeply, Susan realized that her lungs were burning and the blood was speeding through her veins. She felt light-headed, giddy with the narcotic, and her eyes watered in the smoke.
Another dancer rose, picked a partner and left. Then another. Kellicut was staring at Susan through the smoke. Susan got up. With all eyes upon her, the pounding and slapping rolled over her in waves, pushing her out of control. She spun wildly, barely able to focus, carried away by the noise, which had become an intricate, eerie form of music. Covered in sweat, she felt the heat wrapping her up like a blanket and the noise ripping through it with a strange, icy hand. She felt deeply aroused along the insides of her thighs and the tips of her breasts. Vaguely through the haze she was able to make out Kellicut, rising and moving toward her. Next to him she saw Matt, also pushing toward her, his face wild. She stopped, and Matt stood before her, and they fled together into the night.
