Rift

by Beverley Birch

  There was silence; she could see Samuel was thinking. She filled another bottle.

  Finally he said, ‘There are some who think that if young people have to look for firewood and carry water when it is not their accustomed life, like magic they will have great knowledge of things beyond them! These people do not see that to understand somebody, you must go with them on a journey!’ He sniffed, disparaging.

  Ella hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant. As if reading her mind, Samuel went on, ‘But this is what I say to you. Your sister is not so foolish. Charly has respect for Chomlaya. This will keep her safe. Daylight always follows a dark night – there will be this dawn. They will return: Chomlaya will return them.’

  Ella could not answer. Other possibilities, terrible possibilities, submerged her. She concentrated very hard on filling the last bottle, screwing on the cap, hanging the ladle back on its twig.

  He watched her, and then came over, turning her to face him, his hands solid and warm on her shoulders. ‘Listen to me, little sister of Charly. Your sister is a person with great curiosity. We have many talks, many times – she is a listener, your sister. She hears. She is interested that I work for the field camps of the archaeology expeditions, she asks to know about the places I go and the people I feed! She knows that the stomach makes good friends! Yes,’ he laughed lightly, ‘we speak many times. I know this sister of yours. She will be back, you see, to ask more questions!’ He nodded. ‘She will.’ He bent down and began to gather the bottles for her.

  At that moment, from behind the store tent, a man appeared, striding purposefully towards Samuel. In her letter, Charly had talked of the sinewy height and strength of the herders – honed by vast distances roamed with their livestock. This man was one of them, Ella saw at once. He was different again from the people she’d seen in the hospital: hair braided into a gleaming crest across his scalp; long wood plugs heavy in his ears; red blanket cloak tied at the shoulder. He carried a leather pouch and a heavy stick, sharpened to a lethal point, which he swung on to his shoulder and rested there.

  He greeted Samuel, giving Ella a long, considering look. He and Samuel spoke rapidly and Samuel turned to her. ‘This is Mungai, the cousin of the boy Silowa, who is lost. Mungai has been passing many days to the north with the cattle, and has only just heard of Silowa’s trouble. I have told him of your sister. He is telling you of his sympathy. He has no English.’

  Ella said, ‘I’m sorry about Silowa too . . . ’

  ‘Offer your hand as you say this,’ said Samuel. ‘He will approve of your courtesy.’

  Ella did so. Mungai shook it, listening carefully while Samuel translated her words.

  ‘He is upset that Silowa has run from his family to the archaeology place at Burukanda,’ Samuel explained, waving his hand towards the plains. ‘He thinks it is a foolish thing, and that this trouble of Silowa’s has come from it.’

  In a rush, Ella said, ‘Say the inspector is sure we’ll find them. We’re going out now to help Joe remember where they went,’ and at once Samuel translated for her.

  At this, Mungai reached out and took both her hands, holding them firmly, answering with enthusiasm.

  ‘He is wishing you and your sister very well,’ Samuel told her, ‘and he says –’

  ‘Ella!’ Miss Strutton’s unmistakable voice rang across the clearing. ‘I would appreciate it if you would remember that I have rules about random outsiders wandering about my camp.’

  Her meaning, her rudeness hit Ella with the punch of a physical blow. ‘It’s Silowa’s cousin!’ she retorted. She could feel Samuel’s anger like a palpable heat off his skin, how he drew himself to his full bear-like height.

  Mungai made some remark to Samuel, offered his hand again to them both. Without so much as a glance towards the teacher marching across the clearing, he turned his back on her and walked away.

  ‘He will talk to the policemen,’ Samuel informed Ella. ‘You should make sure Inspector Murothi and Sergeant Kaonga know that he is here.’

  Ella could feel Miss Strutton looking from one to the other, expecting them to speak to her. But Samuel just handed Ella the water bottles and turned away to poke the fire, and Ella checked all the caps were tight, gathered the straps together and heaved them over her shoulder.

  ‘Ella! There you are,’ cried the sergeant, emerging from between the nearest tents with the inspector and Joe. ‘And Samuel! Inspector Murothi, this is my good friend Samuel Lekitumu, as I have told you.’

  Miss Strutton’s face took on a look of pinched fury. She stalked her way to the students washing up by the stream, gave some order that sent two of them running off and reduced the others to silence, looking down.

  Samuel shook the inspector’s hand and sucked air through his teeth, clicking his tongue. ‘She watches the pot all the time,’ he said, ‘but she never makes the stew, that one. But you can be sure she will always eat it.’ He looked meaningfully at the inspector, peered into the pots on the fire, and stirred one.

  ‘Samuel has a picture for everything,’ remarked Sergeant Kaonga. ‘You must leave a day for every conversation. And another day to work out what he means.’

  ‘An old goat does not sneeze for nothing,’ retorted Samuel. He adjusted the straps of the water bottles more comfortably on Ella’s shoulder.

  ‘Hoi, we will be back to hear more.’ The sergeant clapped him on the arm and began to usher the group towards the path along the stream.

  ‘Remember,’ answered Samuel, ‘when the crocodile smiles, be extra careful.’ He was watching Miss Strutton, who had stopped within view.

  She was talking to Sean. And Ella noticed that she was laughing.

  8 a.m

  The narrow track through tall grasses hugged the stream along the snaking curves of the ridge to the west. The column moved in single file, Sergeant Kaonga leading, then the inspector, Joe, Ella, and lastly Tomis, the ranger falling into step behind her in an easy, loose-limbed stroll and giving Ella a welcome feeling of protection.

  But the walk was unnerving her. Joe kept looking round, as if expecting something to appear on the path. And pausing, as if listening. The inspector and the sergeant seemed to note every glance and pause, but they asked no questions. Talking to Samuel, Ella had built this expedition in her mind into the key that would unlock something for Joe; somewhere along here, he would reveal everything and they could all go racing to the rescue.

  Instead they moved steadily further from the camp and away from the rumble of helicopters beyond the cliffs. And still Joe said nothing; a kind of silence fell on them all in the wake of his silence. No one dared to break it.

  Tiny beaches of soft sand cut across their route. Low bushes rattled to the scuttle of small animals. They wound through reeds, zigzagged between boulders, skirted wide round dark copses of trees and curtaining creepers, and emerged a half-mile along, on to a plateau of rock – large slabs sloping in smooth, flat steps down from the base of the cliff. Here the stream pooled below the blue shimmer of dragonflies, and shrill screams of alarm rang from a horde of frantic brown shapes skittering away from Ella’s feet.

  Tomis caught her, steadying. ‘Rock hyrax. They will not harm. They will watch us up there and be angry that we invade their place!’ He pointed and Ella looked, but could see nothing against the dark bulk of Chomlaya, only massed shadows and leaning summits, and above it all, the high white gleam of sky.

  Now the path crossed the water towards the cliff. It took them on to rock greened and slippery with lichens and mosses; then over higher slabs, where they picked their way through fresh animal spoor scattered on the pocked, ridged surfaces. The droppings were still hot, reeking and steaming in the warmth. ‘A very small antelope,’ Tomis informed her softly. ‘A klipspringer. It likes the rocks. It is now hiding above us, close by, and peeping at us.’ And a few steps further on he tapped her arm to alert her to other presences in the thinner woodland spreading to their left towards the plain: buffalo ambling among the trees, silhouette
s against the paler grasses beyond; the telltale twitching of antelope flicking their tails. ‘Gazelle, impala, a few waterbuck, too.’

  His whispers interrupted her increasingly anxious scrutiny of foliage and rocks, and she was grateful. It had all been searched before, and then searched again and again. But she couldn’t help hoping that her eye would catch an out-of-place colour or jerk of movement.

  Beyond the rocky plateau, the path split into two tracks. One held close to the base of Chomlaya onward into a marshy stretch of giant rushes bordered by yellow-trunked fever trees. The other track folded back in the direction they had come from, and rose steeply to a broad ledge against the cliffs. At the lower levels it was thickly canopied by stunted trees, so that the path seemed to enter a luminous green tunnel. Above, jagged rock stabbed upwards, thronged with big, dark, raucous birds swirling away from the crags like storm clouds boiling against the sky.

  Sergeant Kaonga had stopped where the tracks divided. All except Tomis were panting with the intensifying heat and the exertion of climbing. Ella lifted the water bottle on its strap round her neck, and drank deeply. Tomis took hold of Joe’s, unscrewed the cap, handed it to him, instructing him to drink in short, frequent sips.

  ‘This is as far as anyone from the camp may go in that direction.’ The sergeant indicated the lower path straight on through the rushes. ‘That leads on to the drinking place where many, many big animals are gathering. We do not go closer! That way,’ indicating the path curling upward through the leafy tunnel, ‘goes high on the rocks. I am told people from the camp were allowed to go up there if they stayed in groups of at least four. When you get along a little way, you can see the camp from above –’

  The inspector put a hand on his arm, silencing him: Joe was moving up this track. Instantly, they fell into step behind.

  The path, bound by gnarled tree roots eroding out of the stony soil, was broad and easy to walk. But the drop to Ella’s right, glimpsed now and then through the mesh of twisted tree trunks, was increasingly sheer, and the thick foliage arching above her head quivered with the unseen antics of monkeys. Hearing their chittering, chattering commentary, she was suddenly afraid. Joe was now moving fast, and she had the terrifying premonition that he had remembered something, that the monkeys knew it and were leading them there, that beyond this green tunnel, something would be waiting for them. Her heart raced and her mind filled with a blanking panic; she jumped involuntarily at a swinging tail whipping past her head and a small, bright-eyed face, poised, peering curiously, and then as suddenly gone.

  But the track simply left the tunnelled gloom of the trees, and the camp tents were in view, far below, coming and going through the feathery acacia branches of the lower woods. There was nothing else to see; she was being stupid. Joe had halted and was just looking down at the camp.

  She stood beside him. At once she recognised the view. ‘Charly’s map! She was here when she did it, wasn’t she?’ She pulled the letter from her pocket, showed him. He took it and nodded; he looked right and left along the ridge, watched the speck of a helicopter against the flare of the sun.

  ‘The clearest view is from here.’ Sergeant Kaonga was standing where the stony track broadened into a round platform of rock. ‘There – you see all the camp. This path goes on a little more, but stops just there –’

  ‘No, it doesn’t stop. Just looks like it,’ broke in Joe. Since that waking moment in the hospital, this scene endlessly replayed in his head. Anna, Matt, Silowa, himself, climbing . . . ‘We went up there – right up,’ he said.

  Gigantic boulders crowned the crags in precarious knobbly formations. In one place the lip of the cliff had split, toppling boulders into a narrow cleft in the otherwise unbroken line of the heights. From this angle they could see how the cleft deepened and broadened into a plunging ravine flanked by walls of reddish rock seamed in multicoloured streaks – like ribs rippled by the play of birds across them.

  ‘Up top, it’s Silowa’s lookout place,’ Joe said. ‘There was this time Silowa got sent back from here . . . ’ he trailed off, looking around him.

  ‘And?’ Ella urged him.

  For a moment he gazed at her, as if not seeing her, as if he was thinking hard. Then he turned to Tomis. ‘That time – remember?’

  Tomis frowned. Squatting on his heels at the edge of the rock he had been scrutinising the slopes below them. Then his face cleared. ‘It is true! In all these times and all these places we go to, I forget. Yes, it is in the first days here. Everyone climbs to this place. But then – trouble, trouble, trouble!’ He clucked his tongue. ‘The expedition begins late – already it is too hot. But the teachers, they think about other things, they do not check properly. We tell them, but they do not check! Some students – no water. We must share bottles and send people back to refill from the stream. Some – no hats. Some – blisters. One, very, very bad blisters – bleeding. Everyone bad-tempered from the heat. Some get sick. One boy is stung –’

  ‘And Anna was talking to Silowa,’ Joe interrupted, ‘and Miss Strutton said they were slowing us down, trailing at the back, Silowa shouldn’t be hanging around us, you know the way she says! She told him to go, she told Anna to go back to camp. You said no, and then Mr Boyd came –’

  ‘No one should walk this path alone,’ emphatically Tomis agreed. ‘Always there is risk of snakes and animals. But Miss Strutton of course is in charge! This time, Ian argues with her, but Silowa – oh! He is very upset. He runs away! Anna wishes to fetch him, but Ian insists she must stay with the group. The mood is bad, very bad! But everyone continues to where the path stops. It is –’ he made a chopping movement with his hand, ‘steep there. Filled up with fallen rocks and trees. Only a monkey can pass that way.’

  ‘No, like I said, it looks like the path stops,’ Joe insisted vehemently, ‘but you go under. There’s bushes all over so you don’t notice. You can crawl right through the rocks and then you get on to the top. Silowa was going to show everyone, but instead he just brought Anna and me and Matt back. Later . . . ’

  He sees it; as if they’re with him again. Silowa’s bare feet padding between boulders; dust puffs from his heels. He looks back, beckons, and Anna races past him, Hey, Joe, up here! Here! Oh, wow! I could stay here forever. I could build a house and live here forever! Silowa, your place is the best, best in the world!

  Tip-toe on a turret of rock, Silowa’s laughing – hand on Joe’s shoulder, hand on Anna’s, balanced between them. It is ours, now, yes? I show it to you, and we share it! Matt, Matt! I come too, he yells at Matt clambering higher, slithering back, finally triumphant, poised like a piper with an invisible pipe, drawing the eagle up from the ravine, dark wings soaring through glowing air. My friend Ndigi will make you a pipe, Matt! I will ask him. I will bring it to you, yes? My friend will be happy to do this! He is a musician, like you, he plays as he wanders . . . sweeping his arm wide . . . we see to the beginning of time! and Joe remembers how even the giraffe far below in their undulating walk against the blood-red sky look like primeval creatures stalking the setting sun.

  He remembers wanting to trap the moment forever. Even just with a photo –

  But Miss had my camera, he thought savagely.

  He saw the inspector watching him carefully. ‘Is this where you came with your friends?’ he heard his voice. ‘Should we search again here?’

  ‘No, I mean, we came here plenty of times at first,’ said Joe. ‘But other places, too, after. I’d have photos, but Miss Strutton took my camera –’

  ‘Your camera? Why does she do this?’ The inspector’s voice was sharp, alert, and Ella, who had been gazing down at the camp as she listened, looked up quickly, as if expecting something important.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Joe explained hurriedly, ‘really, it’s nothing, I mean, I was just taking pictures in the camp and she was having this argument with Mr Boyd, wasn’t she? Yelling – really mad! She thought I’d taken a picture, why would I want a picture of her? So she confiscated the
camera. That’s the way she is. Won’t listen.’

  There was a pause, and this time the inspector broke it softly. ‘And now that you recall this place, Joe, is there more you can remember?’

  ‘This isn’t stuff I forgot – it’s all before.’

  ‘Before what?’

  A longer silence. Ella held her breath.

  ‘Before what I already told you,’ Joe said. ‘In Charly’s tent –’

  ‘And do you remember now why you went to Charly’s tent?’

  The inspector’s voice blurred. Joe couldn’t draw breath, his tongue thickening. He swallowed hard, tried to fight it off, looked away, helpless.

  Ella saw Joe snapping back into himself, and the barely masked frustration flare on the inspector’s face. Her own throat suddenly rasped with thirst; a persistent drumming filled her head.

  By her watch it was only forty minutes since they’d left the camp. She pulled her hat lower against the intensifying glare. The rays of the climbing sun had just tipped across the eastern rim of Chomlaya, and second by second, light poured down the crags above them like an advancing tide carrying despair with it. They had climbed because Joe remembered this climb. But it was a false hope. It wasn’t telling them where Charly or Matt or Anna or Silowa were; the distant moan of the helicopters sent an unrelenting reminder. Now and then they rose into view, making steep banking turns as if something new was happening. But it wasn’t.

  ‘So, we will visit this path of Silowa’s: Tomis and I,’ Sergeant Kaonga announced briskly, and the two of them moved off.

  At his voice, Joe gave a start and turned to follow. Swiftly the inspector intervened, ‘No, no, I think we will sit, Joe. You too, Ella. We will drink some more, and tired Murothi will have a rest.’

  Tomis and the sergeant were nearing the rim of the ravine. Ella saw them stop, and turn, and survey the vast slabs of rock rising sheer from the path. Then both men stepped closer and pulled bushes and creepers aside. Sergeant Kaonga bent double. He appeared to melt into the rocks, Tomis too, and suddenly their voices could be heard, floating from somewhere beyond view.