Levkas Man

by Innes, Hammond;

  ‘And you want us to pick him up at Corfu?’

  She nodded, her silence more pleading than words.

  4

  The white limestone cliffs of Paxos were on our starboard bow, Corfu dropping astern, when Bert relieved me at the helm. ‘Are you going outside Levkas or through the Canal?’ I asked him. ‘The wind’s north-westerly, increasing.’ It was the prevailing wind of this coast and I thought it would be force 6 by the late afternoon.

  ‘Oh, I think the Canal,’ he said, without even glancing at the chart.

  ‘It’s a dead run and a lee shore when we make the entrance.’

  He nodded. ‘But once inside we’ll be in quiet water.’ He was thinking of our passenger. He had looked tired, almost frail when we had met him at the airport the previous day, and though we had had an early meal, he had insisted on staying up until he had all the facts of the situation clear in his mind. I had given him my cabin and he had not stirred from his bunk all morning.

  ‘It’s running it a bit fine—it’ll be almost dark when we get there.’ I handed over the wheel and took another look at Chart 1609. It was divided into two sections—the canal itself and the north and south entrances, including the whole of the island of Levkas. The northern entrance was a bight formed by the island and the mainland; it had a sand spit backed by shallows running away to the north-east, and the entrance itself was a 90° turn to starboard, close in to the shallows and flanked by sandbanks. It looked singularly unattractive for a boat running under sail before a strong north-westerly breeze. ‘Well, you know what it’s like.’

  ‘Yes, I know it.’

  He had altered course to port, and though the jib was still full, the staysail was beginning to slat under the lee of the main. The boat was steady, but pitching slightly now that the sea was getting up. He asked me to boom the staysail out and up for’ard I was more conscious of the surge of the bows, could feel the weight of the wind. The sky was blue, but veiled with cirrus, the sea white with the break of wave-caps. When I’d rigged the boom and clipped it to the clew of the staysail I went aft and eased out the mainsheet. From the stern I could still see the Pindus Mountains, a white glint of snow at the far end of the Corfu Channel where the Albanian coast began.

  Down in the saloon Florrie and Sonia had finished their lunch. ‘Dr Gilmore all right?’ I asked.

  Sonia nodded. ‘He’s had a cup of Marmite and now he’s propped up in his bunk reading some abstruse paper in the American Journal of Anthropology. He said he had no idea that a small boat could be so comfortable.’ She smiled. ‘He’s really remarkably chirpy. Oh, and he asked me to give you this. He thought it might help you to understand your father.’ She reached to the shelf behind her head and handed me a wadge of typewritten sheets. ‘It’s an article written by one of his students.’ It was headed—The Tragic Life of Eugene Marais.

  ‘You mentioned that name yesterday morning.’

  She nodded. ‘Marais was also a South African. That’s why it came to my mind. And because it’s a very sad, very well-known case. A brilliant man who had his work filched by somebody else.’

  ‘And he killed himself?’ It was there in the first paragraph—‘Lawyer, journalist, poet and naturalist, patriot and drug addict, and in the end—suicide; but for all that a man so in advance of his time …’ ‘Is that what you’re afraid of?’ I asked. ‘That he’ll commit suicide?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so. I hadn’t really thought. But you read it. You’ll see then why Dr Gilmore thought it relevant.’

  Florrie came in from the galley with my lunch and I put the typescript on top of the drink locker. I was hungry. Also I was more concerned at the moment about the entrance to the Levkas Canal. I was remembering what Florrie had said about her husband’s navigation, and it would be dark by the time we got there.

  However, there is no point in anticipating a moment of crisis, and since I had nothing else to occupy my mind when I had finished my meal, I took the typescript up on deck and settled myself for’ard of the wheelhouse. I was sheltered from the wind there and the sun was warm. I’m not a great reader, not of biographies anyway, and I don’t think the piece was particularly well written. Nevertheless, it was such an extraordinary story that I forgot for a moment about the difficult entrance we would have to make, barely noticed the increase in the wind’s strength.

  It was certainly a tragic story, and as I read it, I found myself comparing it all the time with my father’s life. Communism had been at the root of his loneliness. In the case of Marais, it was patriotism. He came of an old Afrikaaner family and the outbreak of the Boer War had caught him in London still studying for the Bar, having abandoned medicine after four years. He was interned, but by the end of the war he was in Rhodesia, smuggling arms across the border to the Boers. All this I could understand; it was the sort of thing I would have done myself. But then he had cut himself off from the human race and in an isolated part of the Transvaal, the Waterberg, had lived with a troop of baboons.

  In a sense it was not unlike my father’s disappearance into the red dunes, except that while Marais had had the company of living creatures, my father had been cut off from all life, with only the dead past of human occupation for company. But only for three weeks, not three years.

  In carrying out this intensive study in the field Marais was half a century ahead of any other scientist. Nobody, until after the Second World War, had apparently considered it important to observe the behaviour of primates in their natural state, rather than in captivity. And since the violence of his patriotic fervour dictated that the only account of his observations should be published in an Afrikaans newspaper, his work went unrecognized. The articles were not translated into English until 1939, and by then he was dead. And it was the same with his later study of termite society.

  Six years after Marais’ articles on the white ant appeared in Afrikaans, a Belgian named Maeterlinck had published in a popular scientific series a little book called La Vie des Termites. Marais had sued him, but Maeterlinck was not only a man of letters who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but his books on scientific subjects were widely read. The truth was confused with sour grapes. In any case, barrister though Marais was, an international legal action of this kind against an established public figure was beyond his resources. Most of his money had gone long ago in compensation to farmers for the depredations of his baboons during those three years spent alone in the Waterberg. It was not until after his death, when his articles were translated into English and published under the title The Soul of the White Ant, that the basis for Maeterlinck’s book became apparent to the scientific world and Marais recognized for the genius he was.

  But for Marais himself, the comfort of morphine and ultimate suicide had replaced justice. He remained unrecognized throughout his life. A man who voluntarily cuts himself off from society cannot complain if that same society ignores him. This sentence, on the last page of the typescript, had been underlined and in the margin Gilmore had written—Pieter Van der Voort has done just this as far as the Western world is concerned and anything he may discover will be accorded an even more hostile reception than would Marais’ observations. The reasons for this I will explain later.

  That was it—the strange life of another South African with a chip on his shoulder. And though my father hadn’t confined his writings to Afrikaans, it had amounted to almost the same thing as far as the Western world was concerned—his two books published only in Communist countries. I sat there for a long time after I had finished reading, not feeling the sun on my face, not hearing the roar of the bow wave as we ran down-wind, only thinking of my father, comparing his story with Marais’. Would my father also have to wait half a century for recognition—presuming that he too was a genius? And I couldn’t help thinking that if some dedicated student had written an article about him, setting out his whole life story like this, and I had read it, then perhaps I would have seen him for the sort of man he was and have understood him.<
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  I looked down again at that last page, at the passage Gilmore had underlined and the comment he had written in the margin. I will explain later. What more was there to explain? I was thinking of the old man alone there in the red dunes, that strange feeling I had had of something terrible and evil, and then Bert called to me from the wheelhouse. He wanted the jib lowered.

  We were closing the land fast now, the wind force 7 in the gusts, and the sun slanting into cloud. By the time I had got the fores’l down single-handed, dusk was closing in. By six we were in the shallows and the sea a white mass of broken water with the high north-west of Levkas looming large on our starb’d side. To the east of it, the land dropped away to sea-level, and in the fading light it was quite impossible to make out the entrance to the Canal against the background of Levkas town.

  The four of us were in the wheelhouse then, watching tensely as the boat drove towards the shallows. Florrie was at the wheel. It was at this moment that Dr Gilmore emerged from the companionway, still in his pyjamas and wearing an old fawn dressing gown. He stood for a moment looking at the land. ‘Levkas?’ he asked.

  I nodded. I thought I could see the lighthouse on the western arm now, a small white tower, and behind it the ruined bulk of the citadel. Bert must have seen it, too, for he ordered a change of course to starb’d and started the engine. We began to roll then, spray spattering the windshield, and Gilmore grabbed my arm for support. ‘You read that little paper on Marais, did you?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was preoccupied, going over in my mind the handling of main and mizzen sails which would be necessary when we made the turn inside the Canal. At least there was some daylight left.

  ‘Tragic. Very tragic. A genius, and unknown, disregarded for years. But an intellectual, of course.’ He looked at me. ‘Don’t confuse him with your father. The fact that they are both South Africans is only incidental.’

  ‘Then why did you ask me to read it?’

  ‘I thought it might help you to understand the ruthlessness of the scientific world, the loneliness of pure research.’ He had found his balance now and let go my arm. ‘But don’t worry. Your father is a fighter. He is more like Dart, for instance, than Marais.’ He looked at me, smiling. ‘Sonia tells me you’ve been reading Dart’s book. I gave it to her because I think Pieter …’ He hesitated. ‘Well, maybe not as great as Dart or Broom, but when a man conceives a theory, spends all his resources—money, time and energy—to prove it, then there’s always a chance …’ He had turned and was leaning forward peering at the land ahead. For a time he seemed lost in his own thoughts. ‘But then Dart had the advantage of large areas of limestone, his specimens preserved by fossilization. Here there’s no surface limestone. We’re into volcanic country now, a continuation of the middle Mediterranean fault.’ And he added, ‘An interesting formation this, a promontory of the mainland rather than an island. I wonder if there is anything left of the old Roman canal. There was an earlier one, too, built by the Corinthians.’

  ‘Bits of the Roman canal are still visible,’ Bert said. ‘You’ll see them in the morning.’ He had taken over the wheel now and was leaning slightly forward, his eyes narrowed. He seemed quite confident, and shortly afterwards he asked me to go aft and stand by the sheets. ‘Harden the main right in as we turn the sandbank. The mizzen, too.’

  Outside the wheelhouse the noise of the sea and the boat’s movement was much louder. The lighthouse at the end of the protecting wall seemed to rush towards us out of the darkening line of the land. Bert gave it a wide berth, steering perilously close to the further shore. The piled-up yellow of a naked sandbank slid by close to starboard. The bows swung as we made the turn, the sea smoothed out under the lee, and suddenly all was quiet except for the flapping of the sails. We were inside, motoring in calm water, the boat heeling as I winched in the sheets.

  The port of Levkas is no more than a bulge in the Canal, three-quarters of a mile south-south-west of the entrance. We berthed alongside the quay, handed our transit-log to the harbour official, and having stowed the sails, went below for a drink. For an old man who had never been to sea in a small boat before Dr Gilmore seemed in remarkable good heart. ‘It’s only when I’m ill that I get a chance to spend the whole day in bed—and that’s not often.’ He was smiling, sitting there very bright and alert in his dressing gown and drinking whisky.

  It may have been the drink, or perhaps it was the excitement of the voyage, but he became very talkative. He had never been to Africa, had never met Dart or Broom, only Leakey, yet he could talk about all three of them as though they were old friends. ‘They are the three giants of modern anthropology—Broom particularly. He was almost as old as I when he turned from zoology to Dart’s collection of fossils, taking up the process of man’s evolution from small mammalian ancestors, rather like Smith did with that living sea creature of his, the coelocanth, which he called “Old Fourlegs”.’ There was a glint of laughter in his eyes. ‘We’re back fifty million years now.’ And he added, ‘It has always been my dream that a student of mine would become one of the greats. There was a moment, a long time ago now—in 1935 I think—when I thought that Pieter might …’ He shook his head. ‘A pity. A great pity. There he was, in Africa, within a stone’s throw—you might call it that in relation to the size of the continent—within a stone’s throw of the world’s greatest anthropological site …’ Again that sad shake of the head. ‘Just a youngster with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He was in too much of a hurry, too impatient. And there it was, waiting for him—the Olduvai Gorge. A stone’s throw away, that’s all. The chance of a life-time …’

  His mention of the Olduvai Gorge reminded me of that album. I asked him where the gorge was, and he said, ‘Tanganyika. I believe they call it Tanzania now.’ He shook his head. ‘So much has changed. When I was a young man we owned half Africa. All gone now.’

  He sat looking at nothing for a moment. I thought his mind was wandering back down the long vista of the years—incredible as it might seem, he would have been alive at the time of the Boer War. I told him about the album with its faded pictures of a collection of bones at the bottom of a dry dusty pit, the words that had been written beside it. He smiled and nodded, ‘Yes, yes. That’s it. Only a hundred miles from Olduvai—he wrote that, did he? A stone’s throw, just as I said.’

  ‘What was it all about?’ I asked. He had closed his eyes again and I was afraid his mind would wander off on to something else. ‘You wrote him a letter, in 1935. He kept all your letters, in a bundle in the bureau.’

  Gilmore nodded, smiling vaguely. ‘He was always writing to me, always asking my advice or for information. So he thought them worth keeping. I’m glad.’

  ‘They were typewritten,’ I said. ‘All except the one written in 1935—in it you said you couldn’t condone his behaviour, that it placed him beyond the pale and that thereafter everything he discovered would be suspect.’

  ‘You saw that letter, did you?’ He leaned back, his eyes half-closed. ‘I see. And you don’t understand it? You don’t know what it’s about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He never told you?’ And then he nodded. ‘No, no, of course not. No man likes his son to know he was caught cheating.’ He sipped his drink, staring at me. ‘You’ve read that paper on Marais. You know how a genius can be treated. And now … this is what I said I’d explain later.’ He leaned forward quickly. ‘Whether he likes it or not, you’ve a right to know, for it will be remembered against him. However sound his theory, they won’t believe him. And all because of something that happened a long time ago.’ He paused and took a cigarette from the box above the drink locker. Bert lit it for him and he leaned back, puffing at it eagerly, his eyes half closed again as though collecting his thoughts. ‘He was just a kid at the time. It was after he had got his degree and had returned to South Africa. He was in an angry mood and it took him alone into the bush in search of the “dawn man”. He had a theory, you see.’ He hesitated. ‘The theory won’t interest
you, of course, and since you obviously know nothing about his world it will be difficult to make you realize the enormity of what he tried to do.’ His hand suddenly banged at the side of the settee berth. ‘And he was right. That was the tragedy of it. Everything that has been discovered since—a great deal during the last decade or so—has proved him right.’ He sighed, leaning forward so that the bulkhead light sharpened the brittle bone formation of his face, glinted on his pale grey eyes. ‘But he tried to cut corners; he manufactured evidence. And that was unforgiveable.’

  ‘You mean the picture I saw in the album?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And the evidence he manufactured—it was the skull, I suppose; the one displayed in the glass top of the bureau in his study?’

  Gilmore nodded again, vigorously. ‘That’s it. You remember I recognized it at once, as soon as I came into the study. I had never seen it before. Photographs, yes; but he never let it out of his hands. Wouldn’t trust anybody to handle it.’ He paused for a moment, his eyes a little wide and staring as though he were still appalled at what my father had done. And then suddenly he gave a small chuckle. ‘Does the Piltdown Man mean anything to you?’ He seemed to assume my ignorance for his eyes searched the faces of the others, all listening intently, as though gathering his audience together. And then he went on, barely pausing for breath, ‘It was a hoax, the most fantastic, barefaced hoax in the history of anthropology.’ Again the sudden, amused chuckle. ‘Students love it, of course. It makes all the experts look such fools.’

  He paused there, and in the silence I could hear the wind ruffling the water against the hull. ‘Pieter was always fascinated by the Piltdown story. He argued that it fitted too neatly the post-Darwinian belief that homo sapiens was God-created, even though he did evolve from the apes.’ He leaned back, drawing reflectively at his cigarette, blowing the smoke in a long streamer from his pursed lips, his eyes bright with the thought of what he was telling me. ‘You have to remember that the Darwinian theory of evolution was a great shock to the religious beliefs of the period. Even now, we are still very reluctant to face up to the realities of man’s evolution—we tend to describe him as a tool-maker, when, in fact, his development is based mainly on his ability to produce weapons. When Darwin died in 1882 his theory of evolution was established beyond question, but most scientists clung doggedly to the idea of man created in the image of God. The Piltdown skull fitted this theory perfectly. The bits and pieces included part of a skull that indicated a brain almost as large as modern man’s, and associated with it were the bones of animal remains dating back about a million years. The size of the brain case, in association with the known date of the animal remains, indicated that man had developed through God’s gift of a large brain, not that his present large brain and capacity for thought had been part of the normal processes of evolution. Some of the more progressive scientists had reservations about the “dawn-man” as they called it, chiefly because there was half a jaw that clearly belonged to the chimpanzee family and the skull fragments could be reconstructed in various ways to give different sizes of brain.’