by Joseph Hone
‘You wanted children, you and George?’
‘No. Not after George and I fell out, at least. George only ever wanted to discover things, no matter what the cost. My job is to study things as they are: to preserve them. And of course it was George who first heard about Clare, set us all off on the trail for her.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. A month or so later he’d driven back to Lodwar where we’d left stores. And he found a group of tribesmen when he got there, exhausted, on their last legs. Not Turkana, but some Karamojong from across the border in Uganda, a hundred miles to the west, driven over the mountains by Idi Amin’s army. It was all mayhem in Uganda then: the old tribes over there were all being broken up, their crops pillaged, everything destroyed. It was the beginning of the end for the Karamojong people. They were the last of the big East African tribes still intact, all their old customs, language, dress. It was all still there,’ Annabelle went on forcefully. ‘Leopard skins, assegais, warpaint, ostrich plumes, wonderful rituals, festivals, ebony-coloured warriors … They were agrarian or cattle-rearing then, but in the wilder parts, up in the Moroto mountains, there were still some nomadic, hunter-gatherers among the Tepeth tribe. The last of the old Africa …’
Annabelle paused, caught in some dream.
‘So what about these Karamojong in Lodwar?’ I prompted her.
‘Yes. Well, George asked them about possible fossil sites to the west, back the way these people had come, across the desert or in the foothills of the Loima mountains, which straddle the Ugandan border. And that’s an even wilder area, those hills. Nothing there at all, not even tracks.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, they told him there were a few likely river beds, dry wadis running out of the hills. Some of this hill country had seemed promising from the air – the stone formations: we’d looked at it once from the spotter plane. But it was camel country. You couldn’t make it anywhere in there by road. It didn’t seem possible for a fossil dig. It was too isolated. So George turned the idea down.
‘But then one of these old Karamojong men – they wanted money you see: they were destitute, starving – he said he had some real information, not about fossil sites, but something even more interesting for a white man. So George paid him some money. And the old man told him about it then, about a white child living up there, on the other side of the mountains, with a branch of the Tepeth tribe, driven far up into the hills years before, hidden in a small valley there.’
‘A white child? Clare?’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t just that she was a white child, the old man said: more than that, she was a vital symbol, an emblem for the tribe as well, because she was white and had been found alone in the wilds and couldn’t speak: a Rain Queen, the old man said, a guarantee of fertility. And it was this that took the four of us there at the end of that season’s dig. The rest of the team went back to Nairobi. Of course, we didn’t mention anything about the child, just said we were taking a week off, looking for possible fossil sites for the next season’s work.’
‘You just went off on your own like that, into the blue?’
‘Yes. But Willy and George knew all about that sort of travel. They’d been doing it for years out in east Africa after all. We took water with us. And there was something of a map, an old army map, and we had compasses, iron rations, several rifles – all the usual kit. Besides, Willy and George were fascinated by the whole thing now, obsessed by it all. A white child, some sort of Rain Queen, a fertility emblem, who didn’t speak, the old man had said. And George was pretty sure he wasn’t lying. He knew the Karamojong well. But the real point, you see, was that we hadn’t done too well that winter around Lake Rudolf. Nothing of much interest had turned up. In fact, Willy had caused a lot of trouble there that year – with some of the local Turkana near Lake Rudolf. He’d dug up one of their ancestral burial places – just a strange pattern of stones, but that’s what it was – and our backers were pretty annoyed too. So Willy and George both thought this might be a way of saving things, of getting the oil company to go on financing them: if they could find this strange child and bring her back to civilisation. Instead of a lot of old fossil bones, a white Rain Queen to a lost tribe … well, that would make better publicity back home.’
Annabelle paused. She was angry, derisive. A lock of her hair had fallen across her cheek. She brushed it away slowly. ‘Of course that was the start of the whole problem; why the tribe attacked us afterwards,’ she went on, reflecting. ‘George and Willy’s problem … they could never stop digging up and destroying things, like all the other white men in Africa. Old bones or a strange child, it was all the same to them. Africa had to be dug up, torn apart, and all just for the sake of publicity or money or professional advancement back home. Anyway, to be fair, we were all of us intrigued by the adventure to begin with. So we set off …
‘For the first two days west of Lodwar we were on a hardened camel track, quite straight, like a road, so that it should have been easy going. Except for the heat. This was the start of the really hot weather. And even though we moved mostly at night, it was killing. Flat as flat could be, just the baking red floor of the valley. And though we could just see the hills twenty or thirty miles away, shimmering in the distance ahead of us, we wondered if we’d make them …
‘Well, we did. On the fourth day. The ground rose fairly quickly then, up the old stream-beds, and the going was easier. It was a little cooler and there was some shade in the rocks. But it was just sheer chance we ran into the old Volkswagen in one of these dry wadis where it had conked out years before.’
‘A car?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Almost entirely covered in a sand drift, beneath the ledge of the wadi, just a front bumper and a wheel showing. Well, when we got the sand away we saw the end of the car had been lifted up on rocks a few feet clear of the ground, and beneath it were the two skeletons lying side by side.’
‘Skeletons?’
‘Well, they were partly mummified. Strips of flesh, then the bone. The sand and the dry heat under the ledge had preserved them side by side there, close together: a man and a woman, trying to find some shade beneath the car, obviously. The woman had a lot of hippie beads round her neck and there was a ridiculously small plastic water bottle between them. That was all. Except for the child’s stuff.’
Annabelle eased herself on the bench, sighing in the evening heat.
‘We found that inside the car: some tiny clothes, a teddy-bear I remember, a few other toys. But there was no sign of any child – of Clare, in fact. I suppose she must have been about two years old when her parents died. She’d probably had the last of the water … and she’d survived, somehow. Quite soon, higher up into the hills, a little vegetation started. There was some water, a few animals. We saw jackals. So maybe that was how she survived. And then these tribespeople found her, the Tepeth from the other side of the mountains.
‘Anyway, it was clear what had happened before they found her: those flower children, the hippie generation of the late sixties – here were two of them, and their child, out in Africa, searching for some paradise out in these empty hills. They’d taken a Volkswagen, knowing little or nothing about this sort of country, and had run out of petrol, food, water. Or all three. And that was that. They paid the price.’
‘But who were they? They must have had families somewhere back home. Someone must have been looking for them. Didn’t you let them know?’
‘No. As things turned out, we didn’t. But now we knew the old Karamojong had been telling the truth. There’d been a white child in the car, and it must have been this same child, living further on up in the mountains.’ Annabelle had become excited in the telling of this story, which she had withheld so long, her voice reflecting the excitement of the actual reality. I no longer had to threaten her. I was excited myself.
‘Well?’
‘The valley the old man had talked about was on the far side of the mountain, beyond the main peak. And it was hard g
oing, dragging the camels up through the dry scrub. You see, we were on the wrong side of the mountains for rain. That came in on the other side, blowing from the west, from equatorial Africa, over the lakes.
‘It took us a whole day just to get round the scorching peak. And then suddenly we were down the other side and in another world. It was almost lush near the top, pale spring green slopes, with old cedar trees on the ridges way beneath us and a thick rain forest below that. But there were wild flowers up where we were. And the air was marvellous, the sky huge, pale blue, violet, with a few great puffy clouds sailing in from fifty miles away. I remember it all exactly. There were proper animals on this side, too. Mountain antelope, colobus monkeys further down, and a leopard we saw. And it was all untouched, that was the point. Just the sort of wild paradise those two flower people had been looking for.
‘We were at the top of a long valley at that point, running straight down to the plain fifteen or twenty miles away, empty. And the old man had said this tribe lived in a much smaller valley, to the side, high up. So we looked around all that day. Finally there was this craggy defile we found, hidden to the south along the range, which looked a possibility. And that’s where they were. We got there just before nightfall, up on some big stones that formed a kind of dry dam before the hidden gorge dropped away beyond. We made camp there – and that’s when we first saw them, looking down over the rocks, about half a mile away, at the bottom of a small saucer-shaped valley, small fires glimmering in the half light, blue smoke, stars coming out.
‘And there was this smell in the air from the fires, the cedar wood from the ridges. And a small waterfall from the peaks to one side, and some maize and banana planted out on the flat ground in the middle outside the stockade which enclosed the dozen or so big thatched huts –’
‘A stockade?’
‘Yes. A round boma, made of stakes, thorn bushes.’
I remembered Clare’s endless circular games with the bricks and how she put all the animals from the ark inside.
‘There must have been fifty or sixty people in the settlement. We watched some of them that evening through the binoculars. They were bringing in the animals for the night – cows, goats. Then they pulled a gate of thorn bushes across the entrance and that was that. It was perfect, like a nativity scene.’
‘All untouched, up in these mountains?’
‘Well, not quite. The men were just in loincloths when we saw them; a few of the older ones in monkey skin cloaks. But I don’t think they were a virgin tribe. They’d been driven up here – years before: by Idi Amin’s men or before that by some other rival tribe. The Karamojong have always been fighting among themselves. But this lot were something different, certainly, in that they were totally isolated now, hidden, had reverted completely to a pure subsistence living. They’d gone right back into the old Africa, before the strangers came. This was how Africa worked, do you see? As it all used to before we came. And I remember, from the very start, how George and Willy were sort of … salivating over it all, as we watched from up on the rocks, like vultures.
‘Of course, the problem was, if they had this white girl hidden with them, and especially if she meant something important to them, as soon as they saw us they’d assume the worst, that we’d come to take her away. They’d put up a fight. And Laura and I, at least, assumed we didn’t want that.’
‘So what happened?’
‘We let them find us. We made a fire first thing next morning, on our side of the rocks. And they saw the smoke rising. A group of them came over the boulders half an hour later. There were half a dozen men with assegais. Fierce. Or they could have been.
‘George spoke to them. But he didn’t know much of their dialect. These were part of the Tepeth tribe, entirely mountain people, not Karamojong proper. He could barely understand them. But he managed to explain that we were only looking for fossil sites, rock samples – that we’d come from the other side of the mountains and were going back that way. Their leader was a tall, intelligent-faced middle-aged man. He had trousers and he spoke some English, so he’d obviously lived down on the plains once.
‘Well, we mentioned nothing about the child of course. But we asked if we could stay for twenty-four hours to rest before we went back. Willy offered them some money. But they wouldn’t touch it. And they weren’t at all keen on our staying. We asked if we could come into their camp for water. But they said they’d bring us some – they certainly didn’t want us in their camp. We’d hidden our rifles – and there it was: a stalemate. We could stay until the afternoon, they said. But after that they wanted us on.’
‘But you didn’t leave?’
‘No. And that’s where the trouble began. We stayed there, camped on the rocks that night. Laura and I wanted to go back. But the men were determined to stay. They thought they could do some deal with the tribe over the girl: offer them one of our guns or more money, corrupt them properly.
‘In the event, we didn’t have a chance to make any offers. They came for us, when we hadn’t left, early next morning. Laura and I were asleep, behind the hobbled camels. But the others had been taking turn about all night as look-outs. And there was a terrible fight. The warriors had crept up to attack – all round beneath us, over the rocks. But George had seen them first, and we had all the advantage of the high ground … and the two sporting Winchesters. They had only their spears and machetes. It was something of a massacre.’
‘You mean they shot them all?’
Annabelle looked at me angrily, as if I’d been responsible for the disaster.
‘Half a dozen of them, I suppose. The rest, the other half dozen, got away, back into the hills to either side of the settlement, because by that time George and Willy had moved down the gorge into the valley, getting between these stragglers and their camp. But the others meanwhile, the women and children, had barricaded themselves into the stockade, closing the great thorn gate.’
‘You got in, though?’
‘Yes. Willy simply set the stockade gate alight – set the whole thing on fire.’
‘I don’t –’
‘It’s true. He thought he’d just burn the gate down. But the flames spread at once, kept us all away – until most of the front of the boma was burnt down. Then Willy was inside, running among the huts, looking for the girl, with the women and children and old people panicking everywhere, screaming, because some of the grass huts had caught fire too. Well, Willy found the girl, in one of the huts at the back, next to the chief’s hut. She was lying on the ground, terrified, curled up like an animal, he said, in with a lot of chickens. But it was a grand hut, there were zebra skins and blankets on the floor. The chickens must have been for their witchcraft, used as a poison oracle probably.
‘Anyway, Willy picked the girl up – I was with him by then. But then this head man, this tall African suddenly came in through the doorway of the hut. He hadn’t been shot and he’d come back into camp – and of course he went for Willy, tried to spear him, missed. George jumped in. And the three of them were struggling about the floor among the chickens for a minute. But the thatch behind them had caught fire – the grass walls. Laura grabbed the child. And then the headman found himself losing against George and Willy. Finally they pushed him into the flames at the side of the hut. And that’s why –’
‘That’s why that African has scars all over the side of his face,’ I interrupted. ‘That man, the one you have living downstairs in your house, the one who killed Laura. It’s the same man, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Annabelle admitted. ‘It’s the same man. He killed Willy. He ran him down later in that car in Nairobi. But I don’t know about Laura.’
‘But it’s still really only the beginning, isn’t it?’ I said, starting to shout once more, angry again. ‘An illiterate African from some hidden tribe in the middle of Africa: how the hell does he come to be living in Oxford?’
Annabelle moved on the picnic bench, as if trying to avoid my attack, her long bronzed body
angled sharply at her waist, leaning away from me now. ‘It was only the beginning for us, too,’ she said earnestly, ‘after we’d got the girl safely back to Nairobi. We thought we’d hear no more about it, you see, because shortly afterwards the drought came to Karamoja. The rains failed that year and each year afterwards. The people starved, died. And Amin’s scavenging army did for the few that were left. They even got up into those mountains. Though most of the Tepeth people up there had been finished off already. Their crops had failed. They were in no position to complain of Willy’s depredations. What with the drought and the pillage it was the end of the Karamojong, the Tepeth, the end of all the other hill tribes.’
‘Yes, but the African?’
‘He survived. Didn’t he? Obviously. With the help of the Libyans. And George.’
‘What?’
‘Oh yes. The African was no fool. And he wasn’t illiterate. He’d lived on the plains, been at a missionary school. Anyway, a year later, just after Willy had found the “Thomas” skeleton, that four million-year-old wonder man, the African turned up in Nairobi among thousands of other refugees from Uganda. Of course he thought he had us where he wanted. And he was right. He wanted justice, compensation, all that. And he wanted the child back, too. You see, that was exactly it: Clare had been a vital emblem for that tribe. A Rain Queen. As a child, as someone who’d miraculously survived in the deserts on the other side of the mountain, she was a symbol of generation for them, a guarantee of the land’s continued fertility. It all made perfect sense. And you can see why – since of course as soon as we’d taken Clare away the rains had failed out there everywhere.’
Annabelle looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d denied something obvious, though I’d said nothing. ‘It stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ she said, almost shouting. ‘Their reason. The African knew Idi Amin wouldn’t last. So he wanted the girl back. And he wanted the legal and financial compensation he knew he’d get, too, if the whole thing came to light. He wanted to set his tribe up again. He saw a future for the old way of life in Africa – their ways, not ours. And of course he thought Willy was particularly vulnerable just at that point.’
