Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  They were kept awake that night by lions roaring. Crocker sat up by the fire with his rifle to keep them off his cattle, four more of which had perished by day.

  The next evening, just after they had pitched camp, the guide came to see Crocker and Thomas. He began to weep as he explained why he had come. Crocker struck him in the face, and he wept more bitterly.

  ‘What is going on?’ said Thomas.

  ‘He says he is lost.’

  ‘But I thought he knew the way.’

  ‘He said he has made the journey before, but only once. When he was a child.’

  Thomas estimated that the man was now about fifty. ‘But we are in a plain,’ he said. ‘Once we get out of this bush, then surely we will see landmarks by which we can navigate. Anyway, we have a compass.’

  ‘He said there is only one path through the wilderness, and he cannot remember it.’

  Thomas did some calculations, though his fever rendered them approximate. The distance from the Crater to the railway – the length of the entire journey – was not more than 200 miles. In the early days they had made 20 miles a day and they had left the Crater roughly 18 days ago. Even if their average had fallen to only ten miles a day – quite possible with the deaths and the river-crossing – they must be almost there. He was able to see the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, and took a bearing north-east from it.

  He turned to Crocker. ‘Tell the guide that we will travel by night when our thirst will be less tormenting. Meanwhile, we are going to kill one of your cows and drink its blood.’

  ‘You can’t do that, you—’

  ‘Yes, we can. If you had not shot one of the natives we would be a day closer to our destination. And the damage your wretched cattle did to that bridge has cost us another death and another day.’ He did not mention the photographs or the footprint.

  ‘That is quite untrue. Without me, you—’

  ‘From now on, you will do as I tell you.’ In a fever of irritation, Thomas ripped the spectacles from Crocker’s face, threw them to the ground and stamped on them.

  ‘Look what you have—’

  ‘Listen to me, Crocker. I did not come to this beautiful country to die like a pathetic animal. I came here to discover and to understand – then take my knowledge home to my family and my colleagues. Tell the natives we will strike camp in half an hour and walk till dawn.’

  Crocker moved off, grumbling, and unsure where to place his feet. Some of the bearers came up to Thomas, grinning, to congratulate him; one offered him a handful of grass as a mark of his respect.

  They had three calabashes of water left between twelve humans and all the animals. Early the next morning, they saw a large number of rhino tracks, which the guide thought might lead to water. They found a place where once there might have been a pool, but the rhino had rolled in it and reduced it to mud. The men got down and licked the puddles, or picked up handfuls of mud and squeezed the moisture onto their tongues.

  By afternoon they had no water left at all, and one of the natives looked close to death. Thomas bathed his forehead with the damp mud and offered him some whisky, which he sucked at greedily; he knew the alcohol would dehydrate him further, but the short-term relief improved the man’s morale. They found some shade and rested until the evening, but Thomas felt they were now all so depleted that it was better to continue, however slowly, than to stay still.

  ‘Crocker, tell them that the white man’s compass said that we are very nearly at the railway line and that they must not despair. Have you got that? No despair.’

  They were prevented from moving off in the cool of the evening by the death of one of the Masai bearers. His body was taken, in accordance with tribal custom, to an open place where it was left for the hyenas and the vultures; but the other porters, from the Wanderobo and Wachagga tribes, would not continue until a respectful time had passed.

  Now that his fever had left him, Thomas felt elated and quite clear in his thinking. There was no longer any reason to be angry with Crocker; in fact, he felt sorry for a man who, for all his bombast, was a trader of pathetically small ambition, trying to scratch a living in a hard place.

  Late that night, over the remains of the fire, he apologised to him. ‘I was not myself. I was feverish, and I am sorry for what I did. I think I was also upset by the death of the bearer.’

  ‘When you have spent as long as I have in the dark continent, Doctor, you will learn that the loss of a native life is not a cause for great concern, even to the family. Look what they have done with the corpse – thrown it to the jackals.’

  ‘I meant what I said, though, about not wanting to die. I have a scientific purpose. When I think of the dead warrior over there, behind the trees, I am thinking of his mind, and what it looks like. Have you ever seen a human brain?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I sense that you are curious.’

  ‘I am a little tired. To put it mildly.’

  ‘I see no disrespect in a post-mortem,’ said Thomas. ‘His tribe has finished with him. It is us or the vultures.’

  ‘No disrespect, perhaps,’ said Crocker, ‘but what would be the point?’

  ‘I am here to learn and to make notes. That is the curse of scientific curiosity. It never leaves you. But there is an aesthetic pleasure also. The brain is a beautiful organ.’

  ‘Do you suppose the Masai brain is different from ours?’

  ‘On the contrary, everything I have learned and everything I believe is predicated on its being identical, because we are one species. However, I cannot deny that I am curious to see. Indulge me, Crocker. We may die tomorrow. I should like to think that my last act on earth was an effort to understand or educate. I have humoured you and your cows for long enough. Just keep me company for half an hour.’

  ‘I don’t know where you find the strength.’ Crocker looked doubtful, but as though he felt obliged to do what was asked of him.

  ‘The fever has left me light-headed,’ said Thomas. ‘I feel oddly vigorous. Bring that little saw you had in the Crater.’

  Thomas took two torches from the fire, handed one to Crocker and led him away from the camp, across a clearing and over to the edge of the plain, where they had left the body of the Masai porter. It was certainly an eccentric venture, but in the African night, thought Thomas, the normal conventions did not apply. A vulture flew away as they approached the dead man, its huge wings battering the darkness.

  ‘Not too bad,’ said Thomas, kneeling over the body. ‘They have had his nose and one eye, but what remains will be adequate for our purposes. Hold the torch. Pass me your hunting knife.’

  Thomas propped the corpse’s head up on the side of a small mound in the grass so that it looked as though it was on a stiff pillow. He made an incision with Crocker’s knife behind the left ear, cut down to the skull, then ran the knife up over the crown of the head, through the black shaved hair, down to the other ear.

  ‘Sit on his chest,’ he said. ‘Keep him steady.’

  As Crocker did what he was told, Thomas pulled the front flap of the scalp forwards and down over the man’s face, grunting with exertion; the rear flap, which he pulled backwards, down over the nape of the neck, came away more easily. The top of the skull was fully exposed; the warrior looked halfway between life and death.

  ‘Now hold the torch steady and pass me the saw. Place your hand on his skull. Think of Yorick. Does that name mean anything to you? This is a good saw.’

  ‘I carry a whetstone.’

  ‘The trick is to cut right through the bone of the skull but not to damage the soft tissue of the brain beneath. I would prefer a stronger light. We take a line through the equator of the skull, roughly through the centre of the forehead. Hold him steady now.’

  The saw grated through the bone, which made a sound like hard wood yielding, though Thomas could feel when he had cut deep enough. It was tougher work than he remembered, and he felt the drops of sweat running off his face and splashing onto the exposed whiteness of t
he bone beneath. He hoped to find . . . He could not say exactly what this man’s brain would tell him that the others he had seen had not; but in some way he hoped to see, in flesh, a vindication of the theory he had outlined to Hannes.

  ‘When I have completed the round,’ he gasped, ‘you can pull the top off. It is like pulling apart the two halves of a coconut. There, I have completed the circle. I may have damaged the brain a little, but the bone is fully cut through. Now lift off the top. Go on.’

  As Thomas held up the flaming torch, Crocker leaned forward and took the top of the skull in both hands.

  ‘Just lift it. Go on.’

  ‘It’s no good. It won’t come off.’

  ‘Of course it will. Go on. Try again. Pull harder.’

  As Crocker placed his knee on the man’s shoulder and pulled again, they heard the first sound of suction being released. A long hissing noise gathered into a plop that sounded like a horse’s hoof on a hollow cobble; and at that moment the top half of the skull came away in Crocker’s hands. He fell back on his haunches, clasping the almost-empty calvarium in his palms.

  Thomas looked inside it. ‘Good,’ he said.’ You have the meninges. The brain is now ready to be lifted out.’

  He straightened up the dead warrior and took Crocker’s hunting knife. The brain was exposed and vulnerable; it had two small cuts from the saw, but in other respects was so flawlessly intact that it was almost as though its last thoughts might still be lingering.

  ‘Now all I have to do is cut the spinal cord. I am going to leave as much brainstem as I can. I think it will be instructive to you. There. I have cut through the entire nervous system of this man. Millions of years to evolve, a moment to sever. Now I need to cut through these little bits – hold the light up, yes, that’s better . . . These are called dural reflections. And that is all there is to it. It is now ready to be lifted free. I am going to take it out, and then I shall instruct you on the greatest organ in existence.’

  Sliding his fingers between the edges of the grey matter and the bone of the lower skull, Thomas was able to lift the brain out whole, intact, with a stub of brainstem attached.

  ‘Would you mind holding it for me? Hold it very carefully. It is soft and you might damage it. It feels like a rather firm blancmange, doesn’t it? Normally we would fix it in formalin before examining it, to make it more robust and easy to cut.’

  Crocker’s cupped hands held the dripping brain at arm’s length. The torchlight flickered up from the dry grassland.

  ‘So that is it. In your hands. All human life, its mystery, its thoughts. There is nothing more than what you hold, Mr Crocker. That is what you are, that is what I am. This is a moment to be humble and to know yourself. Know yourself. That is what the Oracle commanded. And this, my dear Crocker, is the self that you must know.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s rather dark.’ Crocker had adopted a casual manner, as though he had decided not to be impressed.

  ‘This place here is called Broca’s area.’ Thomas gestured with the tip of the knife. ‘If I were to damage it, the man could not speak. A little further back and lower down is Wernicke’s area, also responsible to some extent for speech. And the curious thing is that there appear to be no equivalents of them on this, the right-hand side. Does that strike you as odd?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, look at it. What is the first thing you notice about the shape?’

  ‘It is in two halves.’

  ‘Exactly. And do the halves look different or similar?’

  ‘Similar. They look symmetrical.’

  ‘The very word. You are a better student than I expected. And if I told you that each part of the brain had a corresponding part on the other side, you would not be surprised?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And so it does, at least in mass and appearance. Only one part is not replicated – the pineal gland – but that is another matter. But for the rest, symmetry is the rule. And yet, and yet . . .’

  ‘Yet what? When can I put this bloody thing down?’

  ‘And yet,’ said Thomas, ‘there is no symmetry of function. This left half forms words and deals with information, it talks to us and organises our intellects. And this half, the right side,’ he said, touching the temporal lobe with the tip of the knife, ‘is more brutish, yet sees larger pictures, feelings, meanings, poetry and who knows what else. Now, do you think that apes are arranged like that?’

  ‘Very similar, I would guess.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a left-handed chimpanzee?’

  ‘Not lately, Doctor.’

  ‘But this is the core of our lesson, Crocker. The ability to use the different halves of the brain for different functions may well be what enables humans to be superior. So my colleague Franz Bernthaler has convinced me, at any rate.’

  Blood and fluid were running from the brain stem down Crocker’s upheld arms, mixing with the hairs on his wrists, going down to the rolled sleeve of his shirt. ‘Something else must strike you,’ said Thomas. ‘If you wanted to create a brain, is this what you would make? The cerebral cortex – this upper bit, the beautiful indentations of gyrus and sulcus, the huge intellectual power – yes, perhaps you would fashion that. But not this stuff. See here. These bits. The lower brain. The cerebellum. And in here, the limbic system. Remnants of our past, from when we walked on all fours or crawled in slime, yet still – after all these millions of years – faithfully reproduced each time according to the instructions that our bodies pass to one another when we mate.’

  He took the knife and poked it up beneath the middle of the brain. ‘This is the limbic area,’ he said. ‘This is what we had as mammals. Here are your appetites, your base emotions, mammal urges – perhaps deep memories lie here as well. Down here is the brainstem itself which probably developed when we were something more like fish, and does what you would need to lead a reptile life – it regulates your heart beat and the pressure of your blood. And here, the cerebellum. Let me cut a section. Now. What does that remind you of? It is like the most beautiful fern, worthy of Kew Gardens. They call it the arbor vitae, the tree of life, and once it was the best that we had for a brain. What do you think of that?’

  ‘It is certainly an intricate pattern. I can see what you mean.’

  ‘Thank you. But what do you think of the whole arrangement? All these different bits of our past still here? I mean, we don’t still have tails from our monkey past, or gills, do we, from our days as fish? The truth is that for all the beauty of the cerebellum, the brain as a whole is a bit of a mess. If you were to design a man, you would not start with this. To put it more scientifically, it is an aggregate of chance and extremely bizarre mutations.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It is as peculiar as a giraffe. If you wanted to make an intelligent creature you would not design this. It is like a rift valley. You can see the strata of all the long eras of geological time that preceded Homo sapiens. The Homo bit is just the top – the cortex, the grey matter. And as to the sapiens part – the tiny thing that makes us human – you cannot see that at all. It consists in the invisible.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What made the species was the ability of this hemisphere to perform differently from this one. It is the asymmetry of function, and when you do not have it, or you have it insufficiently developed, you may be mad. Or to be more precise, you get functions working simultaneously from different times in our evolutionary history.’

  Thomas sank the tip of the knife into the upper cortex. ‘Do you remember what this bit was called?’

  ‘Something German.’

  ‘Wernicke’s area. Before the brain skewed, allowing us to develop into Homo sapiens, perhaps it had its symmetrical equivalent over here. Perhaps this is where early men generated the sound of voices that passed through here, the anterior commissure, which is like a basement passage – a safe conduct of primitive emotion.’

  ‘I am losing you, Doctor. And I can’t see without my glasses.’
>
  ‘The lesson is nearly over. Turn the brain upside down now. Hold it as far away as you can. I am going to cut it in half. Now, if I hold the torch you should be able to see the corpus callosum, this white band here that separates the hemispheres, but also joins them. It is through this intricate connection that they communicate. The work of this is not just to facilitate communication, but to edit it. Imagine a million, million signals each second firing through this meat.’

  ‘Do you mind? I am fed up with holding this thing.’

  Crocker handed the brain to Thomas and set off over the dusty ground until he came to the edge of the camp, where he paused and looked back. Thomas was silhouetted by the light of the torches, holding his brain, still talking in the endless African night.

  Some of the words were audible to Crocker as he stepped carefully over a sleeping bearer. ‘. . . like a brand new locomotive, coupled to ancient rolling stock and running on prehistoric track . . .’

  When Crocker lay down to sleep, he could still hear snatches of what Thomas was saying. ‘Problems of compatibility. You would surely expect breakdown . . . Unable to deal with the improper message, processes it not as a thought but as a voice . . . Connections for so doing lie deep, disused, but not quite extinct – dormant, ever ready to be reactivated . . .’

  An hour or so later, when he had finally explained things to his own satisfaction, Thomas knelt down over the dead warrior and pushed the part-dissected brain back into the base of his skull.

  Back at the camp, he lay down beneath a tree, took one sip of tea from his bottle and fell into a profound sleep.

  Out on the plain, a jackal came up to the unburied corpse and, nosing round, detached the calvarium, exposing the manhandled cortex in the skull. Later, vultures descended and fed on the partly dissected brain, rising up into the night with bloodied beaks, carrying the dead man’s memories away.

  The following day, Thomas awoke feeling refreshed. He drank what remained of his tea, with a little whisky, while he urged the men to move off in what he still believed to be the right direction. The sun seemed to grow hotter as they plodded on. The animals, who had been denied water longest, suffered most, and several of Crocker’s cows perished before night. The natives grumbled and made rebellious noises, but, as Thomas explained to them, it was their fault that they had drunk down their supplies too quickly and their only remaining hope was to keep going.