The Lost Forest

by John Francis Kinsella

  Chapter 6

  RETURN TO PARIS

  The return to Paris was filled with all of the matters that needed his personal attention after a three week absence. As usual Ennis had maintained daily contact with Marie-Helene Springer by phone or satellite link, even during their expedition in the forest. However, there had been nothing that could not be directly handled in Paris and she never bothered him with unnecessary details, he had total confidence in her ability to handle the business. Once back in Paris it was nevertheless his responsibility to go over all the decisions that had been taken during his absence, bills that had been paid, taxes declarations and all the usual French administrative paperwork, before turning his attention to all the calls to be returned and appointments fixed for him over the next weeks.

  He instructed Marie-Helene on the pressing need to get one of their experts out to Kuching, where an inventory had to be made on the contents of Kwoks godown, expertising and photographing items of value, assisting their agents with export licences and customs formalities, a tricky business, finally instructing the shipping company in Kuching on the packing specifications and insurance arrangements for the different objects that were to be air-freighted to Paris.

  In the Paris gallery the small and highly professional team of staff had been fully occupied with the preparations for the annual Antiques Fair held every year in the Grand Palais off the Champs Elysee. Then plans were to be made to handle increased activity in the North American market where there were unexpected signs of activity with the spurt in the so called new economy and the growing spending power of its nouveaux riches.

  It was almost a week before he had time to get around to the skullcap that he had carefully placed in a drawer in his apartment office. It was an article in a cultural events magazine on an exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme dedicated to the evolution of man that had jogged his memory.

  He tidied his papers and left walking to the nearby metro station, Saint Paul, and took the direction to Etoile and then changing for Trocadero, after having impulsively decided to make a quick visit to the museum.

  The exhibition was spread out through a series of dimly light rooms where show cases displayed bones and stones. The walls were covered with maps, graphs and tables that showed man’s evolutionary path up to the present. Here and there were photographs of anthropologists and their finds.

  It was a Tuesday morning, it was quiet, he imagined that it was like that on working days, it was also possible that the exhibition had run out of steam, it was already well into its second month. The dimly lit rooms design to give a dramatic effect gave to the contrary a dreary impression, only a gaggle of school children much too young to understand or appreciate the exhibition disturbed the silence, whilst their the two teachers struggled to make their voices heard, pointing out the skeletons in a reconstituted cave and wasting their breath with words like Palaeolithic and Neanderthal.

  The exhibition was small and he quickly located the section dedicated to Homo erectus, where authentic looking plaster casts of skulls were displayed. Java Man’s skull stood in a plexiglass case, lit by a single spot. He took the skullcap from his brief case and unwrapped the tissue towelling and aligned it as best he could.

  A shiver ran down his spine, apart from the colour, the skull caps were not quite identical but were nevertheless very similar in form. He turned his skullcap in all directions and at all angles; there was little doubt about the similarity to those in the plexiglass display. He sat down on a bench and tried to comprehend. How could a recent skull bone resemble that of the fossil of a million year old extinct ancestor?

  After some minutes of thought he turned to the French West Indian museum security attendant sitting in a dimly lit corner and who wore an expression of infinite boredom on his face. He asked where he could find the scientific staff and was pointed to a pair of doors where a lift could take him to the third floor.

  Behind the fine sober Neoclassical facade of the museum situated in the Palais de Chaillot, built in 1937 for the Paris Universal Exhibition, he found the dreary old fashioned offices where the museum staff went about their daily work. The corridor was lined with old grey coloured metal filing cabinets, which seemed to date back to the fifties and the bookshelves filled with dusty superannuated volumes of reference works and bound scientific papers.

  He ventured down the corridor glancing into the offices where he saw two or three grey haired, bespectacled, women. It was almost a caricature of a museum’s offices, there was little apparent activity, a nice place to hide for the bored academic waiting for retirement.

  He then spied a much younger woman; he knocked gently on the door and entered as she looked up from her desk in surprise.

  ‘I wonder if somebody can help me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied with an air of bored indifference as she looked at the intruder.

  ‘Well I’d like to speak to an anthropologist.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said a little taken by the question.

  ‘Are you one?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied now sitting upright and looking authoritative.

  ‘Well are you specialised in physical anthropology.’

  ‘I am!’

  Ennis sighed and held out his hand: ‘My name is John Ennis.’

  ‘How can I help you then,’ she said inspecting his hand for a moment before shaking it limply.

  ‘I have something that might be interesting.’

  He unwrapped the skullcap and placed it on her desk.

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  She carefully took the skullcap, removed her glasses and placed them on the desk, then slowly turned the fragment between her two slim hands in a careful professional manner. She then opened the top left hand drawer of the desk and took out a large magnifying glass, then closely examined the surface of the bone.

  ‘May I ask you where you found this?’

  ‘Yes, but unfortunately I will not reply for the moment.’

  ‘I see,’ she said dryly continuing her examination.

  After a long moment Ennis asked: ‘What do you think.’

  ‘Well I’ll need another opinion, but I can say it’s very strange indeed.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘It’s not that old, maybe a few hundred years or more, it’s difficult to be precise without tests. But it doesn’t appear to be a specimen of Homo sapiens and it’s not one of the great apes.’

  She closely scrutinised the sutures, where the segments of the skullcap bones were joined together, with the magnifying glass.

  ‘It’s very very strange….’

  She stood up: ‘I’m Carol Lundy, my father is the Professor Henri Lundy.’

  ‘Lundy?’ Ennis said taken back, ‘are you related to Kate Lundy at the Musée Guimet?’

  ‘She’s a relative, do you know her?’

  ‘Very well, she’s a good friend of mine,’ Ennis said wondering why Kate had never mentioned her family connections, maybe she had, there were a lot of academics in her large family, in any case it had never registered. Prehistory and bones were not usually his thing.

  He had of course heard of Professor Henri Lundy, a lesser known public figure, who was sometimes called upon for television news commentaries on fossil finds in Africa, and science programmes on human evolution. Lundy was in fact the very respected director of the Musée de l’Homme, a renowned anthropologist, and who had been responsible for directing work on many prehistoric sites in France, and leading expeditions to Africa and the Middle East. Ennis vaguely remembered having read in the past one of his popular works aimed at a broad public and found in the better bookshops.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

  This time Carol Lundy smiled looking much more friendly and less bookish.

  ‘Well can you tell me what you think?’

  ‘Not exactly because this does not correspond to anything that I know, that is too say of this age. At a glance there is some strange resemblance to Homo erect
us or Archaic Homo sapiens, but that’’s impossible.’

  Ennis felt a peculiar surge of emotion; he knew he had found something that was unique. What it was remained to be seen.

  ‘I very sorry I didn’’t catch your name?’ she asked now a little embarrassed.

  ‘John Ennis.’

  ‘Well Monsieur Ennis, could you leave this with me?’

  ‘No,’ he said leaving no room for doubt.

  ‘I see, the problem is that my father is not here today. He’s in Spain, at Atapuerca, near Burgos. Could you possibly come back on Thursday?’

  ‘Yes I think I can do that.’

  ‘Do you have a card?’

  Ennis gave her a card with his name from the Gallery adding stiffly, “Like Kate I’m a specialist in Asian art.”

  ‘Okay, let me call you on the phone then.’

  The next morning Carol Lundy called Ennis to confirm the meeting for Thursday morning, asking him to remember to bring along the skullcap. Ennis had not stopped thinking about it since he had left the museum. He had the instinctive feeling of a collector that he had discovered something exceptional and could not get the idea out of his mind of quickly returning to the site to gather more information. How he could do that discretely was another matter.

  He arrived at the museum as agreed and went directly to the third floor where he found Carol Lundy speaking on the phone. She made him a sign to enter and take a seat. He looked at her desk, which was not unlike that of any office desk, papers, letters, faxes and files. The only exception being what appeared to be a resin cast of a primitive skull that acted like a paper weight in a plastic filing tray.

  On the shelves behind her were books intermingled with various stone hand axes and what looked like a human tibia. The walls were hung with photos that appeared to be of various archaeological expeditions.

  After a few moments she replaced the phone: ‘Hello, so nice of you to come. Let’s go to my father’s office.’

  They took the lift to the fifth floor and then a corridor that led to Professor Lundy’s office. It was in quite another style in comparison to the rest of the museum’s offices, it was broad, the full width of the building that lay at right angles to the Seine, a panoramic window looking out at the River Seine and the Eiffel tower, without doubt the one of the finest views of all Paris with the Esplanade of the Trocadero and its fountains and the gardens directly below. The walls were lined with stylish bookcases in dark polished wood. The furniture was of the Louis Philippe period, to one end was a splendid bureau and to the other a large table surrounded by comfortable chairs. In the middle facing the view were a set of four leather armchairs and a low table.

  Lundy was sitting at his desk as they entered. He promptly stood up, smiled, and beckoned them in, pointing to the armchairs. He was a man in his early sixties of medium height and silver grey hair.

  ‘Do come in, how are you my dear,’ he said kissing his daughter lightly on the cheek and then turning to Ennis. ‘Mr Ennis, I know your gallery, I’ve passed it many times, a splendid collection. Please sit down.’

  They settled down.

  ‘Coffee?’

  He asked his secretary to bring in three coffees whilst they made small talk.

  ‘So Mr Ennis, Carol tells me that you have something unusual?’

  ‘Well I’m not the expert,’ Ennis said smiling. He took out the skullcap, unwrapped it and handed it to Lundy.

  He took it and handled it with great respect, turning it carefully in all directions.

  ‘An extraordinary calvarium, quite extraordinary,” he said placing it with great care and attention on the table. “It is quite astonishing, where did you find it?’

  ‘A calvarium?’

  ‘Yes, a calvarium, that’s a skull without the bones of the face or lower jaw. A calotte is just the top of the skull.’

  ‘I am really sorry Professor but I cannot disclose it’s origin for the moment. Can you tell me what your impression is?’

  ‘It’s really quite extraordinary, I mean the state of preservation, I can sincerely tell you I’m a little staggered. There is little doubt, from a simple visual inspection, that this calvarium is from a member of the species Homo erectus, or a something between Homo erectus and Archaic Homo sapiens, but what is most extraordinary is its condition, I mean it’s not in the least fossilised.’

  ‘Not fossilised?’

  ‘No, it’s from a member of a species that disappeared from the face of the earth almost one hundred or more thousand years ago and it’s not fossilised. Perhaps just a patina of calcium carbonate, it looks as though it’s no more than a couple or so thousand years old…,” he paused, then added softly, “which is quite absurd.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Normally fossilisation takes several thousand of years, but I suppose it could have been preserved under some very unusual conditions, but I wonder….’

  ‘Conditions such as?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he paused, “if I knew the site?’

  ‘I’m sorry but I can’t divulge that for the moment.’

  ‘Yes, Carol mentioned that,’ he hesitated then continued, ‘Look Mr Ennis, if you are concerned about confidentiality we can arrange that, you are no doubt familiar with archaeological and prehistoric sites, and I, as the director of Musée de l’Homme, a venerable state institution, can sign a confidentiality agreement with you.’ He said smiling as he gently explained the obligations of his scientific and professional discretion to Ennis.

  Ennis knew only too well the kind of jealousy and secrecy that surrounded major finds. He also knew of the professional rivalry that reigned between scientists. Lundy looked a kind and sincere man and Ennis had admired the style of his books leading the reader through the scientific complexities of anthropology and its related disciplines.

  ‘Fine, let us sign a document,’ Ennis said taking a decision, ‘I’ll get my lawyer to look at a model if you have one available and then we can get down to serious discussions.’

  Lundy’s secretary was instructed to fax a draft to Ennis and his lawyer that morning and he agreed to meet Lundy the next day for lunch.

  Back in his office Ennis realised that the presence of a renowned scientist would be essential if tests were to be carried out and if he was to return to the site for more investigations.

  Early the next morning he called his agent in Singapore pretexting the need of a meeting on the shipping arrangement and customs formalities for the first consignment of Martabans, earthen ware jars and other Chinese items that were soon to be shipped from Kwoks Kuching godown. He confirmed that he would arrive the following week to check on the progress of work at Kuching.

  Lunch was in a Chinese restaurant on rue de Longchamp, ten minutes by foot from the museum. It was in a district of the 16th arrondissement, one of the most exclusive and expensive residential areas of Paris, and also the home to a number of foreign embassies. That morning his lawyer had approved the ‘Confidentiality Agreement’ with a couple of minor modifications. It stated that the skullcap was the property of John Ennis and was on loan to the Musée de l’Homme for a period of two months for scientific tests, notably carbon dating and a search for DNA, all rights for publication would shared by the two parties subject to approbation by John Ennis, and a secrecy clause forbid the release of any information relating to the skullcap and the site of its discovery without his prior written approval.

  The restaurant was discrete with booths and lacquered screens that hid its patrons from prying eyes; well known politicians and celebrities, who frequently lunched or dined there. Without more ado they signed the papers between bowls of rice and chopsticks and exchanged copies.

  ‘A mere formality John, may I can call you John?’

  Ennis nodded.

  ‘You know we scientists like informality.’

  Ennis knew that first names would be a one way arrangement, the Professor would always be addressed as Professor - it was okay by him.

>   ‘Have you thought any more about our specimen?’

  ‘A great deal, it’s a real puzzle and only tests will tell what its connections and history are, it will take time.’

  They paused whilst the waiter filled their glasses.

  ‘So let us drink to our association,’ Lundy said lifting his glass.

  It was evident to Ennis that Lundy’s interest was very great, after all he figured a scientist of his standing did not go overboard after a simple glance at a piece of bone unless there was some real and deep interest.

  ‘Well John, where did you find it?’ Lundy asked as he fiddled a little impatiently with his chopsticks.

  Ennis paused, in spite of the agreement that he had just signed he knew that once he divulged the location of the site he was committed and there was no turning back. Doubts still lingered, he knew only too well the perfidy that existed when interests went beyond those of simple individuals, after all the agreement was effectively with a French institution. The only way forward was to place his trust in the agreement he had just signed and above all Lundy.

  ‘Sarawak, on the border between Malaysia and Indonesia.’

  Lundy’s mouth fell open, one or two grains of rice fell onto his napkin, he turned and looked at his daughter who was lost for words.

  ‘In a cave that I discovered by accident.’

  Lundy gulped down a glass of rosé. His eyes watered and it took him a few moments to recover his faculty of speech.

  ‘Java Man, well I’ll be dammed!’

  ‘But Papa how is that possible?’ asked Carol.

  ‘God knows!’

  ‘Are you sure Professor about your identification?’

  ‘As sure as I will ever be John. It is of the Homo erectus species, what we could call a gracile type, that is to say one of the most evolved in the line. That is unless it’s an extraordinarily elaborate hoax.’

  ‘I can be sure that it is not Professor.’

  ‘You know contrary to popular belief it is not often that bones are found in caves, old bones that is. Old fossils are more often found under the ground around us.’

  ‘What about the press?’

  ‘We have to respect the greatest secrecy, if news of this leaked out it would cause all kinds of problems for us in our narrow world of palaeoanthropology and especially with the media…not to speak of local political problems. Any news concerning the origins of man has become sensational press over the last few years.’

  They returned to the museum and Ennis formally handed over the skullcap to Lundy against an official receipt from the museum. Lundy would personally supervise, in the utmost confidentiality, all tests that were to be carried out. It would take them at least two weeks with top priority in the national laboratories of the CNRS, at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology in the 5th District of Paris, on the opposite bank of the Seine, a couple of kilometres to the east.