The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  Tesfai was a different kind of persuader than Ted. He exercised a measured and even monotone mode of persuasion and captured the ear of certain influential politicians. Throughout the early eighties, Tesfai was able to finesse the transport of Australian surplus wheat and canned tuna and high-protein biscuits to Eritrea. “Wastage” was an accepted part of all relief efforts, yet operating from a depot in Port Sudan into rebel Eritrea they had the lowest wastage of any relief organization in the world.

  But what Tesfai offered Ted Castwell was, in the rebel quarters of Eritrea, a harvest of eyes with no eye doctor, and a field for his plan to train Eritrean medical groups to go out and treat cataract blindness in the furthest settlements. The Eritrean rebels offered Ted not only a republic of eyes but one within which disabling niceties would not restrain the good work, the initiation of eye teams going about their business in drought and flood, and in war and hoped-for peace.

  So Ted, now the spouse of splendid Danny, settled in a large house near Centennial Park and paterfamilias of a young family, decided he must find time within his professorial, clinical, and surgical regime to travel to Eritrea, which was so innocent of ophthalmologists.

  When I asked him how he was going to get there, he said it was all set up—Cairo, Khartoum in the Republic of the Sudan, and thereafter, well … trucks would be involved. The Eritreans would get him into the rebel areas, and that’s where he would begin operating on every corneal grief and cataract blindness. He intended to take a supply of intraocular lenses and go there by truck to assess things, and be back out within a month with enough data to base a program on.

  This proposition on its own was astonishing. He was a professor of ophthalmology to begin with. He had students to deal with. He had people awaiting operations. He would attend to them and then be off. Travel in Eritrea was unpredictable, and yet he was determined to go.

  He would come back from his journey and reconnaissance an Eritrean partisan, and fervent with plans for a decisive attack on eye disease in the Horn of Africa and nothing less than the world.

  The Vile Eye

  STARK AND I needed normally to make no report to any old men. They usually took it as undoubted that we had found our quarry and inserted the bone. But the old man Dart came, bowlegged, down to my hut and stood in the sweet morning smoke and seemed to be looking to me for reassurance now. For he was the uncle of the girl who had drowned herself in the Lake.

  “Yes,” I assured him. And, once more, “Yes.”

  “Yes?” he wanted to know again.

  “Certainly. Yes.” All had been restored.

  “Then what sorcery is this amongst us?”

  “What sorcery do you mean?”

  “The despair of women?” he said.

  “I can’t account for that,” I confessed, not quite knowing what he was talking about.

  He proposed a further meeting at the men’s law ground at a time he would tell me. I could sense his alarm, which was unusual for him, as if for once he expected no result to be reached.

  That day we watched a hunting party returning with a bounder haunch and a fat lizard. Women brought cod, threaded on twine, up from the Lake even though the girl had sullied it with her death. On the weaving ground my daughter worked with the older weavers. The reeds were best here, in the country of lakes, and when we went out there on the Nightside to trade for ocher, and off to the Morningside for flint, our nets were seen by the women of these distant places as far preferable to anything they made in their own country.

  So the earth was still pretending its bounty. But I was the one who saw a fog of uselessness falling over these lovely endeavors. So did Dart. He waddled off but seemed to leave behind the shadow of his confused authority. I went to praise the day’s hunting party, but Baldy reached me before I had a chance, and he too had the same air of concern.

  “I must tell you about my journey,” he told me. “I have not till now had the chance.”

  I agreed that was to be regretted.

  “Let’s go along the shore,” he suggested, looking round like a man who believes even his thoughts might be visible to others.

  We walked barefooted on the cold crust of the morning shore. The earth was a warm body beneath our feet. That was still true: sun and earth. Baldy told me that while on his journey he’d encountered the first Upper Waters mountain people, who had been amiable, and that his party had participated in the binding ceremonies with these serious-minded people. Thus both people confessed what dominated and united them. Some of the people spoke our language just as Baldy spoke Mountainside. Some of us had known their language since the beginning—not all of us, but the learners like Baldy—it was why he had been given the leadership of the journeying party.

  So he had gone, and soon after the first contact with a hunting party, some of the Upper Waters people had offered Baldy’s party two worked stones with intricate markings for use in our own ritual regarding the venerated spotted slicer, the most feared of presences and the most just; one very common in their mountains, less common to the Lake people, but, of course, one intimate to me. The slicer whose meat not one clan ate! Whose meat, that is, in the entire world was forbidden.

  It had been normal trade after the ceremonies. Our yellow ocher and nets. Baldy also offered our emblems of Short-Faced Bounder to ease the Upper Waters people’s way into our Hero’s presence, which they knew they needed to reach. By means of similar stones given to us, we had always enlarged our own dream travels.

  One of the members of Baldy’s far-ranging party had, however, beaten one of the Upper Waters boys in a fight over a claim to so humble a thing as a burrow hopper. Both men had claimed the right to the tasty little creature, our man on the grounds that his stick had killed it, the other man on the grounds that it was on mountain land. The business had ended in blows, the fight favoring our man excessively. Baldy had made the appropriate extra gifts for that, more of the famous net bags wrought by my daughter and the other women. These bags were precious to them because they were raging river people and had no association with the calmness of lakes and the way their banks favored weaving grounds. The Upper Waters elders easily accepted all this. Their seers saw no ill will in Baldy and his party. It was all pleasant, the brotherly feasting.

  But, being in other people’s country, Baldy knew he must travel beyond that half-known and scarcely understood land and its people and be guided towards the lesser-known picture of the region, of the kind owned by the older men. He hoped to be given insight into their chief rites and on such a basis trade our own stone and wood emblems of holiness for theirs, in full brotherly understanding. These Upper Waters people were also, half of them, associated with the great Dome Nose, and they had over time shared some of the outer secrets of their rituals with us. There were beautiful hills where they lived, notable mountains of dense stone, and we had always cherished their dense stone emblems as helping our entry into regions amongst stars. It was by such trades between people located at a distance from each other that the world of mysteries was kept in balance. It was a sort of divine wrestling.

  But there, at the foot of blue mountains, Baldy had spent time in the settlement of the Dome Nose half of the Upper Waters people, and disturbing news was brought to him by their eldest holy man very soon after he arrived, while he was still tired. The holy man was a little wisp of a fellow named Cawl. Baldy told me he was one of those men who gave you the wonderful impression that he had never done a thoughtless or ill-chosen thing in his life.

  Cawl said to Baldy, “I’ve been waiting for you. I saw you coming in a dream. I saw you and the others hunting a red bounder. I can tell your features from that dream.”

  Baldy did not doubt any of this. Such a small sliver of a man but with huge authority. As he sat down by a fire with Baldy, many of the Dome Nose people watched on. Whatever they knew about what Cawl was telling Baldy, they seemed to know it was of moment for them.

  “You will have my young wife for warmth tonight,” Cawl announc
ed, “but you must not touch her because your body will not count. Instead, you’ll meet our ancestor tonight in your dream self. He’s been waiting to see you. But you must understand that as you traveled you were under a cloud of your own ancestors. Now you’re under him. He’s the great cloud above you now.”

  All this, the promise of a dream journey, sounded reasonable to Baldy though he would have preferred a normal night, one of profound sleep after, of course, accepting the graciousness of the young wife. But as so often, urgent business was involved.

  When Cawl had finished speaking, Baldy was given a meal. A particular grain cake the Dome Nose women made impressed him. Cawl’s young wife came and sat by him. Unlike her elderly husband, she lacked much grasp of our Lake people’s language.

  “You’ve been to the Rainside,” Baldy asked her in her language. “Over the tops of mountains?”

  “I’ve been to the Rainside, yes,” she told him distinctly, trying to make it easy for him and giving him the briefest but most jolly smile.

  “What did you see there?” he asked her carefully.

  She put a hand on his wrist and gave a smile as if it was in consolation for what she was about to tell him. But then all she said was, “There were great ferns there. As big as the dome nose.”

  Unlike us, the Upper Waters people never hunted the dome nose, nor did they eat it, though it was a giant of a plant-eater with vast meat on its bones. It was easy to corner but dangerous to hunt, chiefly because of its power to charge and, above all, to fall on one of the party. Baldy was quite taken with the girl, and discovered that her name in her language was a word to do with the predawn. But he knew that for now her limits were those of keeping him warm. Pleasure would distract and was almost too trivial an accompaniment to his coming audience with Dome Nose Man. Baldy drank from a calabash of water mixed with the bitter honey gathered from the larger and more ferocious bees, with thorngum mixed in. Quite a drink. But he could not let it ease him too much. Then he opened his cloak and the young wife sat on his thigh, and they shared the warmth of their blood. But she knew too that providing Baldy with warmth was the limit of what would be happening that night. He was drowsy when she went ahead to their hut. A man of high integrity, he did not indulge in any further advances to the young woman. He turned his back on her and slept.

  Baldy would later believe that during his sleep with the young wife some manipulation of his head and neck had taken place, some procedure carried out by eminent men of the group he had found himself amongst. Their presence, not the presence of the young wife, preoccupied his dream self. In that dream he said to them, “I would not have objected had you told me it was going to happen.” But then, the old man had told him something was to happen, and so it was apparent to him that some adjustment of the spirit-self must occur which Baldy, being a man of another country and other emblems, would not understand. Even while half-awake, he was appropriately humble as they shaped him for his spirit journey.

  And then, falling asleep, he had the experience of speeding along a skein of light to the serious-minded world in the sky. He walked in thickets of stars as did I when taken up. He bounced off their great bulbs of light. He walked humbly, without any resistance of the muscles, and in that spirit accepted the forces that operated on him, his body just a wand, buffeted in the strange air of the Allplace.

  But even then it was these Upper Waters people’s Allplace, not the one he had sometimes already penetrated while rising up the sinews of light to our own high places. Here there were different gods. And so he found the Dome Nose Man, a man not his own Hero but divine just the same, sitting cross-legged by a fire like any ordinary fellow. His massive upper body had an undeniable realness. He had very friendly eyes, Baldy remembered. Manly and companionable.

  “Ah,” Dome Nose Man said to Baldy, “you have come at the right time.”

  Baldy could not understand why it was the right time, but the meaning of it would become clearer, he was sure, so he said nothing. He sat.

  Dome Nose Man said, “Your ancestors agreed with me that we would share the curses of the earth between our children. So we have borne a curse on our women, which we have endured in the normal way, with mourning and suspicion on the part of the ignorant. But it is time it passed us by now. It is your people’s turn to endure it, and I must pass it to you so that you carry it back to your country …”

  Baldy said, “Forgive me, Father, but you want me to take a curse back to the Lake people with me?”

  “Yes, that’s the way it has to happen,” Dome Nose Man replied. “You can deal with it, and ease it through your people by the right behavior and the obedient rituals. Some of your women and girl children will die. There may be times, my dear traveler, when you come to believe that all the women bearing girl children will perish. But you must trust in your own prayers and rites,” Dome Nose Man continued. “You will come through this, and one day a man, a traveler to your country as you have been a traveler here, will come to you and you will pass it on to him. And he will take it to his people. If this curse were not shared around, there would be no women. There would be no girl children anywhere. We would perish, people after people after people. Do you understand that?”

  Baldy felt he could be a questioner with this kind-eyed God in the face of such a hard offer. “You want me to take back to my people a stone that will kill women in childbirth?”

  “Yes. Do you want the people here in my country to die out, and then the curse would still be on the earth and would travel to you in any case, and travel on and on? The girl who was at your side now … She was brought to you so that you would see her face and share warmth with her. Do you not want to take the curse away from her?”

  How accurate the elder and the God had been in limiting Baldy’s choices, and in showing him that superb woman, who in a good world would be abundant and live long. And the Hero did not lie. How warmly Baldy wished the Great Creature was lying, as men lied in discourse with each other. But the nature of this sky journey itself proved what must be done.

  “But why do I of all men get burdened with this news, this curse that traveled the earth?” Baldy asked in a breathless manner. How could he willingly take such a broad curse back to his people?

  He understood though, and it now made sense to him, that in the workings of the earth there was always a measure of grief inflicted by alien sorcerers and alien presences, the whole weight of which could not be permitted to fall on one people. That could not be argued with. He realized now that the overriding curses of the world would need to be shared for fear that they would do away with all living beings. And then who would there be to honor the ancestors, the makers and Heroes? Who would there be to keep the earth in order? Who would there be to sing the songs of creation, to reenact and empower the renewing of things, to keep the water flowing at the base of the rock?

  “I will bring you it.” Dome Nose Man sighed and rose from the fire amongst the stars, leaving Baldy by its blaze. The departed Hero thudded his way amongst the forests of heaven, and cracking branches could be heard as he traveled, just as an earthly dome nose might.

  Taut with dread, Baldy could not suppress a childish hope that he would take a long time to return with the embodiment of the curse, in whatever visible form it might possess. But it was not long before the Dome Nose Man could be heard on his way back to his fire.

  Baldy rose as the Hero, the Earthmaker, approached and took a handful of some material from beneath the amplitude of skins around his massive upper body. He offered his clenched hand to Baldy, who could not help but extend his palm to receive whatever dreadful thing it was. It was a stone the size of a waterfowl’s egg which weighed on Baldy’s hand because of its density—he believed he had to take special care not to drop it—and it emitted a low malign whine.

  “Look at it,” the Ancient Dome Nose hero of the Upper Waters people urged Baldy.

  Baldy resisted but knew he had to obey. And when he looked, Baldy did not like what he saw. It was a
cold spectacle and it caused a sensation of ice in his blood.

  “You will not like it either,” Baldy promised me after he’d recounted his first meeting with it. It was like a great dense eye, but clouded, like the eye of a blind madman, denied sight but stricken with color. For it also flashed with boastful, thick color. “You’ll see,” he promised me.

  Listening to him, I felt reluctant to meet it. Baldy admitted that on his first day of return he had hidden the stone amongst us, its weight and its color wrapped in furs to protect us from some of its harm, as Dome Nose Man had suggested he should do. Baldy said that when he got home from his journey, he did not take notice of the wrestling or the feast or of his wife. He knew he must place the stone amongst the holiest emblems at the Short-Faced Bounder clan. They would combat it or cramp its ill will, and might smother its influence in the end.

  Baldy was tormented by this stone and its wish to spread damage amongst us, and the sad business of a Hero and a God commanding us to take a turn of its evil.

  “Why must I see the thing?” I asked, though gently because I did not want to make little of Baldy’s anguish.

  “Because he told me, the Hero, it would be too much for me to bear. That I must share it with a wise man. Otherwise I would be crushed by its single weight. The weight of what it would do.”

  At first I thought, Don’t pick me. There’s plenty of wisdom around the Lakes.

  But he had selected me and that was it.

  “I will rouse you and take you to it tonight,” Baldy told me. “Then we’ll both know the way it looks. We can uplift each other until a messenger comes to take the thing off us.”

  And so, of course, I agreed.

  Girly asked no questions when I painted my flesh and face in slits of white to enable me to flit through shadows and be as invisible in darkness to spirits as the white-barked trees. Nor did she address herself to me when she walked to rest in our hut and amongst the furs. Until recently we had thought we might at some time create a boy child to replace our Son Unnameable, who in one beastly stroke had been robbed of his proper organs. But there would be none of the sportiveness of reviving and remaking ghosts tonight. Girly knew without being told, and we lay separate until Baldy chirped outside my hut and I was awake with instant dread of facing that curse embedded in stone.