The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  With skin cloaks on our shoulders but our chests bare, Baldy and I loped off under a sliver of moon and a sky of looming, spinning stars. Though elders, we were both still young enough to make distance easy going. We got to the rocks that sheltered the Short-Faced Spring, the spring lying safe beneath the soil and the base of the standing stones, its fullness protected from being diminished by the avid sun. We were not so very far from where Stark and I had secreted the feather shoes and implements of punishment.

  Baldy let me get my breath. We both needed breath for this. “Oh, why did they give us this shit?” Baldy asked hoarsely. He began groaning out a chant invoking someone with heavenly power to stand between us and the evil stone, between us and the vile eye.

  He circled in on the Morningside rocks of the spring, and went around the site three times, closer and closer in, and turning the last time, he knew he could not delay too long. So he reached down amongst the rocks with the face of a man whose duty it is to extract a plump adder, coming up with a lump of something wrapped in bounder felt. “I have put the most powerful tokens with it,” said Baldy.

  As he unwrapped the things, I saw the ancient embodiment of spirits compacted into wood by powers beyond us, but left with us for our protection. These wooden and stone pieces that were as long as a man’s arm. He knelt down by me as he unwrapped the felt, and paused and retrieved one of the amulets, and paused again and then continued.

  “This is the poison,” he told me. “Look at it for yourself, my friend.”

  I too knelt down amongst the tokens and saw the baleful rainbow of the stone, death in the yellow, a curse in the thick, clotted blue. It could not be doubted that this intense stone was lethal.

  “Does our Bounder Hero know of this?” I asked him.

  Breathing noisily and unhappily, Baldy said, “It is as if our ancestor has broken the line to earth. I can’t reach him. I have no hope of reaching him while I have this stone weighing on my memory and under my care.”

  I could sense that I was the one Baldy hoped would reach the ancestor, that I was the one suited best to be given the burden of this lump of malign color.

  “Have you told the other old men, then?” I asked.

  More breathing, then Baldy replied, “I wondered if they might want the bearer of such a stone punished? And I would be pleased to be punished to avoid what is coming. But it won’t do any good. In all, my friend, I don’t know what to do. I am hoping that you can tell me, or else find a way to save us.”

  This stone had a way with time—it dazed a person, and brought all the past forward and made the present far off.

  Ted and Fram

  WHEN TED CASTWELL invited me to travel with him to Eritrea to make a film on his eye project there, he seemed, as ever, like a man in a hurry. In fact, though I did not know it, he was suffering from renal cancer. His only protection, a friend would later say, was that like most gods he did not believe in his own death. But of course he did, and he brought with him huger plans and hopes than I had ever expected.

  We traveled in from Khartoum by way of Port Sudan and the oasis of Kubaraka with a young Eritrean doctor Ted had trained in Sydney and who had received his letters as an ophthalmologist from the Australian and New Zealand College. His name was Freselam, though Ted called him Fram. The three of us occupied a vehicle in one of Tesfai’s food convoys of green trucks, and thus crossed the dry river that marked the border, embarking on twelve dark hours of mad jolting. I would later wonder, when we knew Ted had been sicker than he looked, at the vigor of the ailing man who let himself be hurled about in the hard-edged interior when he could have been at home at the side of Danny with his children—as a more timid sufferer might.

  One thing Ted had made clear to me was that, amongst other things, he wanted to assess what was called a laminar flow sterilization plant the Eritreans had built in the side of a mountain in Orotta, the place we were making for. In the plant they made their own surgical fluids for intravenous use, but, Ted said, since they had built the plant, they could manufacture eye lenses there too.

  “Bloody astounding,” he said of this and other instances of Eritrean cleverness.

  I knew he had been talking to eye doctors the world over, from East London in South Africa to Nepal to Ho Chi Minh City, seeking allies willing to implement his anti-blindness program, though still in the spirit of not being a “bloody missionary,” of letting the locals take over and adapt the plan. He had plans to build lens factories to be run by Indians in India, and southern Africans in South Africa, and by Vietnamese and Nepalese and East Africans in their respective countries. Thus he could defeat cataract blindness in the entire world.

  The Eritreans had not won the war yet, and Asmara, the mountain capital and site of the envisioned lens factory, had not yet been captured. But Ted was never daunted by that sort of consideration.

  * * *

  The thunderous impact of the stony road up into the Eritrean Highlands allowed Ted and me little time for conversation, and I saw how he closed his eyes and made his face neutral, in classic meditation mode, and breathed his way tranquilly through it all. “People say I’m a bloody Marxist,” he had complained to me on one of the legs of our journey here, the long one from Singapore to Cairo. “But if they knew anything, they’d know I’m an anarcho-syndicalist. But let me tell you, the flame of anarcho-syndicalism burns bloody faint in Australia.”

  I was tempted to say that anarcho-syndicalism burned pretty faint everywhere, with most people hard put to define what it was. In a period in my early twenties when I’d briefly desired a young leftist university tutor, I had found it exciting to hang around the Socialist pubs, where people loved or hated each other on the basis of being Trotskyists or Stalinists. I was fascinated that both these camps shared a special aversion for anarcho-syndicalists, who were apparently dubious about all states and even a supposed “workers’ state” like Russia. Why the factions bothered turning up in the same pubs as each other is a question I still can’t understand, but I did hear men and women described with viperous hatred as “syndicalist bastards!”

  Over time, though, I began to see that an anarchist skepticism about the orthodox state and its officials drew Ted to this rebel movement in the Horn of Africa, a rebel movement which had the marks of cooperativeness to it, the possibility of a new form of state, and generals whose victories were frequent but rarely celebrated in the noxious manner of the West, which we had learned, to our peril, from the Romans. This nascent state, insofar as the rebel movement was one, omitted the marks of triumphalism and self-importance. The operations of Eritrean Relief, compared to the competitiveness and sometimes the shiftiness of other aid organizations, appealed to Ted for the same reason. They seemed innocent of arrogant governance and driven by results achieved without bureaucratic clutter. So the laminar flow sterilization plant dug into the sides of mountains at Orotta beckoned Ted as a sort of syndicalist moral wonderland. And he was motivated to collaborate with the Eritrean rebels to break the nexus by which powerful Western states and their corporations supplied what was necessary for continued life at the price they chose. The Eritreans would, he hoped, change the balance of the world by making lenses for their fellow Africans. The man with me on the violent plains and inclines of Eritrea harbored a potent plan to puncture the tires of established order. And now, just when he’d found a place worth leaving the side of Danny for, here was Jack the bloody Dancer to put a limit to things. This increased the energy with which he pursued the plans.

  Because I did not understand all this at the time, our conversations remained superficial. He told me significant things I did not have the equipment to hear. Yet, at least in the film I made, Ted the ideologue is more than visible. I filmed him operating in the caves of Orotta, and then greeting in the morning those whose sight he had restored. He would take off the dressings from their eyes and savor their immediate smiles. “Aren’t you lucky to have a handsome bugger like me to look at, first up?” If you wanted quick customer
satisfaction, ophthalmology was the answer, for it could vanquish so much blindness so promptly.

  * * *

  We reached Orotta in the first mauve light of day and went into the camouflaged stone guesthouse, half-dug into the hillside and of the same texture as it, and drank lots of black tea. Ted looked fine, of good color, ready to work, full of conversation with Freselam, discussing the meetings they had planned for the afternoon with those who administered the hospital which lay indiscernible at the bottom of the slope, on the valley floor.

  After a breakfast of bitter injera and canned tuna was carried in by our guides, I suggested to Ted, “I could shoot a conversation between yourself and Dr. Freselam discussing what you mean to raise with the Eritreans this afternoon.”

  Without a trace of exhaustion in his face, Ted winked at Freselam and said, “We’re in Hollywood now, Fram.”

  “The purpose of the journey is threefold,” he said functionally when I set up the conversation. “Or maybe fourfold if you count my selfishness. This place, and these people, are like a new home to me, but that’s a narcissistic purpose.” He cocked his head to assess this statement. “But the three main purposes are …”

  And then he showed his credentials as a university teacher by laying them out. “Firstly, it’s a chance to operate here in Orotta with Dr. Freselam, who is a recently qualified ophthalmologist. I think he is a very important man for the future of this country, where eye disease and eye trauma are pervasive. Secondly, as I’m always saying, we’re not bloody missionaries and the occasional visit by a great white father of eye medicine barely makes a dent in the blindness figures of African countries, and doesn’t do enough to guarantee what I consider a human right—the right to see. So Fram and I want to discuss with our hosts the idea of setting up teams of nurses and aides who can work in the villages that still exist and combat cataract blindness wherever they find people in the bush. The operation is straightforward in its way—it has to be done properly, but intelligent squads can do it under Fram’s administration.”

  I swung the lens towards Fram’s lustrous, perfect eyes.

  “And the question then arises,” Ted continued, “where do they get the intraocular lenses from? These teams in the field? Well, of course we have to donate them for now. And that brings me to the third purpose. Fram … Dr. Freselam … and I want to propose that we establish our lens factory here in Eritrea—even in Orotta, if necessary. These people have the spirit of innovation in them, and they have a laminar flow sterilization plant right here in Orotta. We could put the lens manufacturing phase on the front of that, and the Eritreans themselves could run the whole shebang. The time could come when they are exporting lenses throughout Africa and Asia that cost a fraction of what the rip-off lenses in the West cost.”

  He paused, his eyes on the middle distance as if his grand plan were visible in the air. “I’m glad I saw this place. I always knew it had to exist,” he said.

  * * *

  Too rattled about by the long truck journey to sleep well, I was awake again in a few hours and went out into the dappled shade of the stone veranda. Here, within a little while, I saw something remarkable in the form of an Antonov bomber appearing at the clear apex of the sky. Someone had told us that they flew high now, not wanting to be killed in a losing war. And as if to show why that was so, the entire desolate valley sent forth anti-aircraft shells from guns, and the sky beneath the bomber’s wings was filled with intense, broad black smudges. The bomber arched its way into a bank and hauled off southwards again, having seen as much as it deserved to of Orotta.

  From where I stood, just a little way southeast, in the direction of the Red Sea, was the Rift Valley. During a recent call Peter Jorgensen had excitedly reiterated to me the fact that the mother of us all had lived there, the newly discovered and named Mitochondrial Eve, whose bean-shaped mitochondria apparently lay at the core of all our cells, including Ted’s, Freselam’s, mine, the gunners’ cells, and those of the edgy Ethiopian aircrew. It was Eve who had initiated in her own womb the string of daughters, all women now alive, Cath, Danny, Margaret Thatcher, Audrey Hepburn, et al. And now that so many of her daughters strode the earth, the reign of her human chemistry was assured, even though that of other women she had lived amongst sometime between 100,000 and 200,000 years before had died out. What were those women like—kinder, more rational, or crueler, less succoring? That her home valley was now the scene of a war between her children … well, however banally, seemed cruel. All mothers want their issue to get along. All mothers have a uterine yearning for peace. But their children are quickly sundered from each other by mere concepts such as nation, ideology, culture. Indeed, you could not think of these ordinary contradictions without suffering a kind of vertigo.

  Learned Man is her Australian son. As am I.

  The meeting that afternoon had been held in the guesthouse with the male head doctor of Orotta and a sturdy middle-aged woman director of nursing. The head doctor was a calm man. He did not come to the party with the ramified awareness of codes and budgetary inhibitions and regulations which marked the Western bureaucrat’s confrontations with Ted. The proposition for a mobile cataract team had obviously been received well in advance in this doctor’s head, and he presented Ted and Fram with a map indicating the area of operation of each proposed group. It became apparent from the man’s enthusiasm that he saw the plan not only as a medical tour de force but as a means of attracting people in the Ethiopian occupied zone around Asmara and Massawa to join their comrades in the north and enjoy the benefits of assured vision.

  That night—with injera, spaghetti, and tea to speed us—we descended amongst the rocks and the thorn trees to the hospital. Ted and Fram were robed and gloved for the theater as I did my best to wipe down my camera with disinfectant swabs and robed up like them, filming the surgery from 6 p.m. until after midnight. Dozens of Eritreans had come to Orotta on the strength of the news of Ted and Fram’s presence. The two surgeons operated on twin theater tables, chiefly on cataracts. Some of the operations that Ted performed and I filmed involved traumatic injuries of the eye caused by shrapnel and other shell fragments, in civilians who had been bombed or in soldiers shelled far down the escarpment, while pressing against the ports of the Red Sea coast.

  In the ensuing days, Ted and Fram addressed the teams the Eritreans had chosen for the surgical cataract tasks. They provided instruction in the classrooms of the Orotta schools, after which Ted astonished me by operating each night without apparent exhaustion. At last, Orotta cataract surgery was performed by the nurses of the squad, supervised by Ted and Fram, and everyone seemed happy with the results.

  One night after surgery Ted and I sat drinking tea in mutual languor on the terrace of the guesthouse. I heard him sigh. Out of nowhere he was into a recitation—I presumed Keats.

  Here are the craggy stones beneath my feet,—

  Thus much I know that, a poor witless elf,

  I tread on them,—that all my eye doth meet

  Is mist and crag, not only on this height,

  But in the world of thought and mental might!

  “Well done,” I said, because it was, and its ambiguities reflected those of the hour.

  “Do you happen to have heard of this thing, the human revolution?” he asked.

  “1917,” I replied hopefully.

  “No, that’s not it. It’s fifty, sixty thousand years back.” He leaned closer and fixed me with his exhausted eyes. “They say some random burst of DNA in the brains of humans took place. And out of it came language and culture. And religion and ideology. And Keats.” And Learned Man. Language and culture. The coating of ocher and the funeral plaints they sang for him.

  “I’ve heard of it,” I told him. “Peter Jorgensen said something …”

  “Yes, a grand moment. Eh, Sonny Jim?”

  “The best,” I told him.

  “But it could happen again. Anytime. In fact, it will happen, for sure, if we survive. A burst of DNA, and
we would wake up wiser, finer, less contradictory. More unified in our humanity. Less tribal. Less warlike.”

  I agreed with him that this would be a fine development.

  “Well,” he said, “don’t think me bloody mad. But it could be happening here. A calm wisdom. No one will settle this war, but the Eritreans are fighters, not haters. They have religion, a lot of them, but it doesn’t divide them. They have bugger-all resources, but they make their own IV fluids and antibiotics, and they built that sterilization plant out of nothing. They’re against female circumcision. They run the least corrupt aid system.” He yawned. “Now, I know you think I’m bloody mad.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fascinated.”

  “We’ll never know for sure. Not in our lifetime. But maybe your film will be evidence of it, Shel! And by the time our kids are our age, if the splendor has lasted … they’ll bloody know it and it’ll happen to them too. If I was a Catholic like Danny, that’s what I’d pray for.”

  At dusk a few days later, we left Orotta in two trucks for a place out in the west, towards the Sudanese border. There were Ted and Fram and me and two cataract teams. At one in the morning we arrived at the appointed place, a dry riverbed. Here, in withering heat, we shook out our air mattresses and bedrolls in the darkness. Mosquitoes descended and bit us with abandon, and though I tried to wear a hat with mosquito netting, I found that it was far too suffocating. As we settled down, we were aware of others asleep in the dark river, on the cooled sand of the watercourse. I was awakened at first light by the sound of pounding. Around us the nomads had already risen and were pulverizing coffee beans in the wooden mortars that seemed to be part of the personal gear of every inhabitant of the Horn.