We slipped into the water, coyly paddling around in decreasing circles. Most of me remained a gentleman even as we converged and embraced. After emerging from the pool, I toweled her dry in the shadows.
She watched me as I lingeringly patted here and there, and she curled her toes as a bird would on a wire. Her lips parted but she said nothing. My mind raced, as did the blood in my body. I lost control.
She was young and looked as innocent as a fawn. I suggested we go to my apartment. She nodded gently yes.
What happened next was like peeling a banana; once you start, what is the point of stopping? “You will be my third man,” she said. Odd information, I thought. “The other two were of no consequence,” she added.
“No problem.”
I saw Margret two or three times after that over the next two weeks. We walked and talked as young people do. In the evenings, after I’d left the university, I’d pick her up at eleven o’clock or so from her job in central Cape Town. She told me she worked in real estate, and late-evening appointments with clients were the norm. Sometimes she came out of her building red-faced, as though she had just taken a sauna. I eventually figured out she actually had—that she worked in a massage parlor. The real estate story was untrue, “a little white lie,” she called it.
Dear God, what a jolt. It left me confused for days. I didn’t know about such things; I’d never been inside that kind of place and had enough problems of my own to deal with. I missed Catina and decided not to see Margret again, though I had to admit she sure as hell got my mind off Afrikaner Joost for a bit. I began to wonder things like if I’d be punished from above for that, and if Joost’s dissertation would be considered a little mistake also.
Back at the university, I retreated to my office to sulk in confusion. I decided to continue keeping quiet about my contradictory geology findings. Margret made me realize I was naive. What did I know? Maybe I was wrong.
Anyway, it was soon time to return to the field. There were large areas I hadn’t yet sampled, like the stretch I called the Canyon. I’d driven through it several times on the way to the coast and elsewhere. It had been carved out by a river that predated the currently dry Buffels River that now bisected it. It was an interesting enigma in the dominating flat, open lands.
A week or so after returning to my field area, I arrived at the Canyon early one morning. Its jutting, steep, irregular walls were made of light-colored granite-gneiss Precambrian rock. Were there darker metabasite rocks or metapelites here? If there were, according to Afrikaner Joost they would be in one of his zones where, during their formation, the temperature and pressure were lower than farther inland—or anywhere else, for that matter.
The cool blackness hung around me as the sun first peered over the lofty canyon rim. Like a scythe of golden light, it swung forward, chasing the retreating dark enemy. Erosion-sculpted rocks changed into brilliant yellow, gold, and then orange-brown as the night scurried away, helpless and insubstantial as a cloud. I felt a sense of awakening.
The flat-topped and thorn-laden acacia trees were broken into twisted, gnarled, and stunted symbols of defiance and eccentric beauty by ravaging canyon winds that had blasted them endlessly with storms of sand. Like tattered green umbrellas, they offered only spotty shelter from the relentless sun.
Closer to the ground was gray-brown straggling, stunted mimosa scrub with tiny featherlike leaves and robust thorns, inches long with fire-hardened spikes, growing at whatever intervals they could suck enough nourishment from the shriveled, parched, sandy soil.
I parked my Land Rover near the narrow canyon entrance and began walking down the indistinct, snaking sand track directly adjacent to the dry river. Sometimes it wound across the river. It was not a trail intentionally constructed but rather the product of larger animals, like cats, prowling in and around boulders and thorn trees as they foraged for food on their way through the canyon.
Several hours after dawn, a second transformation occurred. Shimmering veils of heat steamed upward from the warm sand. With each degree increase in temperature, the extraordinary landscape turned into a mystical world of ever-dancing shapes. It seemed that lofty music should accompany this transformation. Instead, an immense calmness prevailed. A soft breeze ruffled the parched scrubs. It was all like magic and left me marveling how ingenious nature could be as I walked around boulders in the sandy riverbed, searching for rocks.
During the annual torrential rain, when the calm African sky was driven mad with raven-black storm clouds, the river filled and flowed, sweeping away portions of the path along with any uneaten bones and flesh that scavenging jackals and hyenas left behind. The night after the purging water subsided, the animals would make a new path in virtually the same favored and logical place. When humans came to the canyon, they simply followed the path and eventually broadened it into a thin ribbon of dirt, sand, and rock.
The larger animals were now gone, preferring more remote places to those touched by travelers and farmers. At least I thought the large predators were gone.
Shifting my backpack for balance, I climbed up and down boulder-laden slopes, hammering fist-size samples of rock off the most interesting outcrops. I couldn’t find metabasites or metapelites but sampled most every rock type I mapped as I went along. It was tricky when the slopes were especially precipitous.
As usual I numbered each sample and recorded its location on an aerial photograph with a pinprick. On the reverse (blank side) of the photograph, I labeled the tiny hole with the specimen’s number.
Removing the increasingly heavy pack was like dropping an anchor from a boat. To put it on, I had to sit on the ground and work my arms into the straps, bend forward, and then struggle to stand. It would be easy to lose my balance and break my leg.
To counter the increasing heat, I wet my bandana handkerchief with canteen water every hour or so and wrapped it around my neck. I worked steadily all day, stopping only to rest and eat dried strips of biltong, fruit, and peanuts.
Then I saw a metabasite rock, a fine specimen about the size of a small bathtub, engulfed by white granite-gneiss rock, kind of like a head surrounded by a soft pillow. I hit it with my sledgehammer. It rang like a bell.
Oh dear God, I thought. Another unexpected hard-ringing high temperature and pressure—from black rock that’s not supposed to be here, but here it is. I looked at it closely. It was more evidence contradicting Afrikaner Joost’s findings. I took off my nearly dry bandana and wiped my face. Well, here it was, and I had to deal with it. I broke off a large piece.
With less than half an hour before darkness, I decided to call it a day. Picking my way down the canyon slope, I left my burden next to the sand road. I planned to walk the half mile or so back along the riverbed to where I’d left my Land Rover and drive back later for the specimens. I carried my sledgehammer as usual, in case I decided to take another sample. The moon was full; it would illuminate the course of the flat sand-colored river when the sun set. Stretching from the freedom of the pack, I looked forward to a nice walk in the moonlight.
That was not to happen.
It began with a cough—a guttural, rasping yowl. I stopped. The odd sound stood out from the normal quiet of the evening. Minutes passed. An impatient and dramatic expulsion of air punctuated the calmness. What the hell? Moving slightly, I scanned each boulder and ledge as best as I could. No longer lulled by the pleasantness of the valley, I sensed change.
Suddenly, some two hundred feet away, I saw eyes: a pair of yellow-jeweled, patient eyes staring at me . . . the eyes of a creature used to the solitude of Africa . . . a leopard. I froze. The safety of my Land Rover was still at least half a mile away, and I would be following a twisted path. Not good . . . Then again, perhaps the leopard wasn’t interested in me?
Don’t be naive.
Partially hidden on a ledge in the direction I was walking, the leopard stood immobile like a solider, watching me. Damn! Where had he come from? A den between boulders surrounded by skeletal b
rushes? A nocturnal and solitary animal, he had probably descended from the heights in search of food.
Was I somehow in his territory?
Hadn’t all the cats wandered to the far north long before, as farmers and hunters moved in and chased them away? Something had made him come here. Perhaps he was lame or too old to hunt wild game and was now after sheep and goats or whatever weak prey he could find. Cats get addicted to the taste of such animals. Shit, that category could soon include me, although normally they didn’t attack humans—did they? Frightened, I tightened my hold on the sledgehammer riding on my shoulder.
Abruptly his tawny shape vanished. As I blinked, he disappeared into the boulder labyrinth like a shadow before the sun. All was silent except for the beating of my heart.
I looked around. No farmhouses were anywhere near. I had no choice but to continue walking. I fought the immense desire to run. That would probably only entice him. Never run, I told myself.
Some fifteen scary minutes passed. He could be behind every boulder. A rock rolled as a paw jarred it. He reappeared a hundred and fifty feet away. His back radiated sunset gold—a magnificently made animal capable of ripping me to shreds. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. In another moment, he disappeared.
It became profoundly silent around me. The silence of a grave charged with menacing suspense. Even the cicadas had stopped chirping. The cat was hunting.
Now the canyon looked different, like a great jagged rip in the plateau, a breached portion of the earth’s body, exposing a shriveled vein of a river surrounded by organ-like boulders. All reflected the red of the setting sun.
The air was cooler now, but I felt drops of sweat on my back. The sun touched the canyon rim, and it looked like a molten tangerine cannonball about to be dropped in black ink. Long fingerlike shadows grew around me. Then, in an instant, light and weird shadows disappeared. The African sun departed like that, especially from inside a canyon. As expected, in a moment the white-green light of the high moon appeared and cast odd phantom shadows in the riverbed. It would take about twenty minutes for my full night vision to settle in, but I sure couldn’t sit and wait for it. The cat was following me and would not depart; hungry or curious, he would come closer and closer. There was no place for me to hide; this was his canyon now.
I looked up and saw clouds, clouds that might black out the frugal light I depended on. The dark of an obscured moon was favored by leopards; a leopard’s moon, some called it.
The wispy sounds of the dying evening had indeed disappeared, except for those made by a southern evening wind as it tortured the dehydrated acacia tree leaves, making them twist and turn. It had become a nightmare place.
I continued to walk fast but not so fast as to show panic. A cloud passed in front of the moon and the river sands went shadowy black. The emptiness became eerie. My eyes tried to adjust, taking in just a bit more light. I could vaguely see silhouettes of spindly trees and bushes and kept up my controlled pace. Would he smell my sweat and sense my fear? Would he prefer the blackness?
I couldn’t stop thinking about him ripping at me. Who could? Before a lion attacks, he gives warning. A leopard is not so cordial. He just attacks.
Suddenly I felt the drag of a thorny branch across my jeans. In the silence, it sounded like a branch ripping off a tree. My heart leaped. I jumped back and jerked up the hammer, ready to swing. My body was flooded with adrenalin; it was as if I couldn’t breathe.
Nothing, no sound. I took a ragged breath, and gradually my heart rate slowed. I realized that I had strayed too close to the needle-sharp mimosa scrub, diabolically designed to dig into flesh. It had torn my arm, and blood oozed down. As I looked at it I heard, much closer now, a gruff haugh-haugh cough. Had he smelled my blood and sensed my fear? I kept walking.
The clouds shifted partially away from the moon, and I was able to see the riverbed more clearly. I searched for tawny things behind each scrub . . . and I saw his pugmarks where he had passed. I was really sweating; I felt perspiration running down my back between my shoulder blades.
Fewer than a hundred and fifty feet in front of me the perfectly designed carnivore slowly crossed the riverbed where there were more boulders. The DNA in his genes was ten thousand years old—he was driven by an unforgiving force. He walked like a conqueror. His body was so sleek, I wondered if he was actually thin, hungry. I held my breath. His breathing was loud, alien, rasping, and powerful.
The vertical pupils in his glowing, unblinking eyes locked with mine for a brief moment as he weighed his prey. Did his tail twitch? I visualized myself swinging the hammer—with little effect except to make him more ferocious. His unshakable eyes would blaze like hot coals while his filthy fangs and scimitar claws raked me. I would scream. What was left, bleached bones and ragged clothing caught on thorn trees, would be swept away when the river rose again.
Just then the moon broke completely free of the clouds, illuminating the river sands. The leopard did not move. Leopards are cautious animals. Was there too much moonlight? Did its eerie brightness in the dark confuse him?
He veered off toward a cascade of boulders and leaped up them a half-dozen feet at a time, like an uncoiled spring. Resolve was carved into every piston thrust of his powerful legs. He didn’t look old or lame then. Hell no . . .
The sharp acid taste of fear hung in my mouth. A soft breeze rustled the bone-dry, spidery undergrowth. I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself, but my heart was pumping. He remained between me and my vehicle. Did he sense I was going there?
I looked around again, no rock cavity to crawl into to protect myself. I had to reach the Land Rover before something happened. My mind was fixed on the Rover: Once I got inside, he couldn’t hurt me. I forced myself to walk steadily and not too fast. Everything I did now was essential to survival. I saw the silhouetted canyon entrance some three hundred feet away.
Closer . . . I was near where the cat had jumped up the boulders—the last place I saw him. I had to be brave. The thin dirt track snaked ever nearer to the riverbed. The wind strengthened as it was funneled through the canyon’s mouth.
This was the moment.
Would he pounce?
Focusing on the white metal patch in the near distance, I realized the canyon was getting darker . . . another cloud! Step by step I walked—my Via Dolorosa. A hundred feet to go.
Then I heard the cough.
I lost control and sprinted toward the vehicle.
Did I lock its doors? Oh God!
I darted forward, knowing I was no match for the cat. Leaping over small boulders and skirting large ones, I ran. Only when I was very close, a few feet away, did I hear a sound behind me, the shifting of a loose rock as he struck it. Was it him? Was it my imagination? Was it my fear?
Shit! I whirled the hammer behind me without looking and slammed into the Rover, grabbing the door handle, feeling that at any second he would sink his claws into me and drag me backward. My heart was exploding.
I yanked the door open, dived in, grasped at the gears, anything to pull myself forward and hold on to while I kicked my feet viciously, thinking he was behind me. My eyes were wide and unfocused as I yanked myself farther inside and jerked my legs in after me. At the same instant I twisted around and yanked at the door.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” I yelled as I slumped over the seat and steering wheel, gasping. My heart was beating like someone hitting a drum.
Finally, I stared out the front, then the side windows, trying to calm down. The thump of a pouncing cat at the Rover hadn’t occurred. I was safe inside; it was as if some frantic panic had suddenly been released. Perhaps the leopard had only been playing a game of cat and mouse. If he had wanted me, he could have taken me right then. He wouldn’t have let me get away.
I found my key but it took several tries before I could slide it into the ignition slot. Then I pulled the headlight switch on to high beams.
The lights stared down the canyon. The cat was gone. I lowered the window an inch or two
and listened. Nothing.
I drove back to my trailer, delighted to sleep inside that night. In the morning I returned for my pack. It stank of urine.
Chapter 10
It Could Be Worse
Certain things in life are what they are; you just have to deal with them. That doesn’t mean you can accept or forget them, however. Sometimes they stay with you forever.
Sitting next to my campfire one thoughtful night, I realized I’d become increasingly anxious about the looming confrontation with Afrikaner Joost. I had to face the reality that it would happen, and I needed to prepare myself. For example, it was important to be as lucid as I could and that I presented my facts logically. Were there things I didn’t know? I slowly reviewed the geology of my field area step-by-step.
The billion-year-old rocks I studied originated deep below the surface of the earth, somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen miles. Over those billion years, the rocks eventually rose to the surface by the natural processes of uplift in conjunction with erosion, causing the removal of the existing overhead surface rocks. Due to their depth within the earth, where movement and deformation always occurred, and powered by heat from the earth’s core, I’d calculated from my mineral chemistry that these rocks had been subjected to uniform temperatures (T) of about 830 degrees Celsius (C) and pressures (P) of about 8 kilobars (kb).
According to Afrikaner Joost, the T and P conditions under which the rocks in my fifty-mile strip of land initially formed changed gradually, forming zones. At the far inland end was the higher T and P zone, and at the coastal end were far lower conditions—a difference of some 700 degrees C from end to end.
Joost also believed they were formed during only one deformational event. By taking the strike and dip along forty-five miles of the fifty-mile strip, I’d found it to be consistent from east to west, with a 90-degree C dip—meaning only one deformation had occurred. However, over the last five miles in the coastal region, the strike, over the distance of a dozen feet, changed to north-south, which meant a second, but much later, deformational event had overprinted the east-west strike; and the associated rocks had all been weathered into crumbling condition.
A Rock and a Hard Place Page 9
