The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  The task of refueling finally done, I was pleased to see that Falit tested the quality of the fuel in both wing tanks, port and starboard. He slipped a coin to some scrawny nomad kids who wandered up in their dusk-clogged jellabiyas, to pay them to patrol the edges of the tarmac and keep the camels away. These were the meatier and more sluggish Lahaween camels, we had been told by an Eritrean. Bad for racing. But they had, whether through meat or milk, seen many families through the drought and famine earlier in the decade, and killing one would give deadly offense and incur a large debt.

  The Egyptian pilot showed us how to dispose our luggage in the bins on the fuselage and throughout the plane. He then balanced us to a T, assessing the bulky Stacey before choosing a forward seat for him. When he asked Cath to sit behind him, I kissed her and she could clearly feel my uneasiness, giving me a little punch in the side and saying, “Now, don’t be silly.” She was right in her suspicions. I hated it when pilots made too much fuss about weight. They seemed to me to be inviting catastrophe.

  Falit disposed the rest of the crew and me throughout the plane, and we made the smoothest of ascents out over the Red Sea salt pans. I looked down and saw the young boys with their sticks chasing a camel, then giving up as we disappeared from their world. We were very quickly free of the city and out over the most vivid degree of blue permitted on this planet to the human eye. We then turned and put that impossibly dense azure behind, and now everything below us seemed trackless yellow and brown, and the next great simplicity after the sea was a seamless sky arching from Ethiopia to Egypt and westwards to Chad. It looked like the earth had resisted the imagination of God or poets, I thought in exhilaration. The basic startling elements! Just one color contrast.

  The aircraft was graceful up here. I could hear the soundman and his assistant chatting. “Is Port Sudan the armpit of the universe?” Stacey asked them. “Or is it located a bit further down the spine?”

  I looked around, grinning broadly, my gaze settling on the calm pilot, his preflight sweat drying at this altitude, and, to paraphrase W. H. Auden, I felt that this was not a dark, dark day but a bloody fine day indeed.

  Thus we rode for an hour, above politics, above the checkpoints and the intimate wounds of the earth.

  Then we saw a great mound of dusty air across our way. I did not want to accept what it was. A sandstorm—at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The pilot confirmed it over our headsets. Would sand dowse engines? I wondered, reaching forward and nudging Cath’s elbow. Of course, she turned into profile and smiled and seemed sanguine. These were merely the elements of the earth ganging up on her. She could handle that. She showed it with her quick smile.

  We were fine while zooming across the wispy top of the sandstorm. I waited for the pilot to tell us on the intercom that we were going back to Port Sudan, but in the end the news was worse. “Khartoum Airport is socked in,” he said. “If we cannot find it, we must go on and try El-Obeid.”

  El-Obeid, a city in Kordofan, was nearly five hundred kilometers from Khartoum. I seemed to remember that it was so marginal that it needed its water delivered by tanker. We would be stuck there in that dry city in the midst of civic unrest. I made a face at Cath like that of a hanged man. She seemed to consider that a jape.

  We sank into the globe of brown dust. The air beyond the window suddenly looked like a gray blancmange. It grew increasingly dark as we dropped down through 7,000 feet, and the sound of dust pinging on the plane’s carapace entered the cabin. This was definitely dense enough to smother the vents of the engines.

  The pilot picked up a towel from the spare seat, and began wiping his face and neck with it and cried, “Call if you see the ground!”

  At 5,000 feet—we were all watching his altimeter now—an alarm went off, and red blips appeared on the altimeter screen. I leaned forward and read the symbols and the news. It was telling him the altimeter was off by 250 feet. I wondered if that mattered in a flat capital? It certainly mattered if you didn’t quite know which side of that reading was land. As the red symbols flashed, the pilot cried out once more, “Tell me if you see the ground.” He dragged his towel over his dome and neck and then simply switched off the altimeter alarm as one distraction too many.

  At 2,500 feet I saw between gray wraiths of dust the earth and a flat-topped building. “I see it, I see the earth!” I cried. But then it was gone, subsumed by the dust globe.

  The pilot shouted that he would go up to 4,000 feet and make a last try. Yet ascending again he toweled himself like a man who did not expect easy relief. We watched gauge-struck as the altimeter reached 4,000 feet, give or take, of course, 250 feet. Then we eked our way down, a hundred feet at a time, through the miasma. We reached 2,500, and as I called, “A bit lower,” Cath turned and smiled at me. She looked serene, indulgent, as if a little amused at the pilot’s towel-play.

  At 2,200 feet we all roared, “The ground, the ground!” We had seen an undeniable gravel solidity down there, the core of things, the sweet earth. We sank lower and the dimness persisted, but then we broke out of the cloud and saw Khartoum Airport off to the side, all its lights on for our landing. The lights seemed like a gesture of fraternity.

  The pilot dropped his towel, done with it, and let himself be wafted into line with the runway and down to the city in the permanent 11 a.m. dusk of its own storm and grim politics. And so we landed, reborn in the shriek of tires, as Cath seemed never to have doubted we would be.

  I caressed her. I felt like the elected of the gods. I considered the landing a great mercy, and I did not face the reality that if today’s weird landing hadn’t finished us, perhaps the next one would do so with enhanced statistical validation. Even that, and the days of going to the airport and standing under sun or dust cloud to wait for a plane that never arrived—until one night it did—could not dent my sense of being amongst the blessed.

  * * *

  And indeed, Jack the Dancer hasn’t convinced me yet. The persistence of believing in a plan, a lot, a destiny, a favor … what a lucky persistence is that. Doomed, as we know. What grand fortune to have a life in which the delusion of it can be sustained! The sense that because the gods have been indulgent to you, the Dancer has a struggle on his hands. As illusions go, it will go too. But in the meantime, it is a sweet one.

  Feathers

  WHEN GIRLY AND I began to live together as man and woman, I was awed by the plenty of her body and gracious accompanying spirit, so that all that happened in our exchanges, as much as I was fixed to that short moment by her body, enforced my permanent wonder at her. It was one of the rare times in my life when I considered life serene and beyond contest. And that seemed to be the way the days were set. I remember sunshine and then slanting rain on the lake with the catch of fish already in, and I remember chasing bounders with Girly, and her racing in a great flash of limbs to claim what was fallen. I believe that such events, whose full meaning I could not utter nor sing, would be somehow cut in the air and remain for all men and women to watch and thereby learn from.

  Then Girly became distracted. I remember being confused, and then one dawn she told me, “There is a man following me. He’s a man related to me.”

  This was a great difficulty. Blood laws intervened, though that did not always stop it happening.

  “But I think,” she said, “he’s magicking me. I am so irritable now. He follows me, and lets me know his eyes are on me.”

  I looked out from our hut at sundry times that day and saw the strict line of the dunes, and then, a distinctive head breaking the line. It was a cousin of Girly’s in a headband that marked him for the Parrot clan. A man close to middle years, a man with a marriage. Gone lightning-struck all at once. Stricken by enchantment and meaning to enchant his way to her. He was stalking her, visiting every site of her life, even where the women defecated. He tried to witness all her travels.

  When I promised Girly I would fight him, she lost all her calm. There was no doubt she was frightened for me because the man, whose name
I do not give, was well tried as a fighter, and a danger to take on, the leader of a hunting squad.

  And that was the end of all my early contentment. It was not that Girly welcomed his fixed gaze or his sorcery, or was flattered by it. But I had a mean intention to pretend she did. It was then that she suggested we set out on our own, willing to travel together and find and hunt our food. He was a man of cares and his absence from the Lake would, we hoped, cause note, and women would ask his wife about it if he absented himself in our direction. He had the power to make up his own mind about that, but he would need to see our departure in some way, by naked eye or vision.

  Girly wanted me to go with her into the country that I believed was the country of her heart. She wanted me to accompany her to the Morningside of the world, a wooded plain that rose amidst flat hills made by the old rivers that enfolded the earth, and made occasional wide lakes favored by waterbirds such as we had by our Lake, yet shallow enough for us to wade across if we chose. Off there, a long way off, were believed to be the hardest and most dense stones. But hunting for them was not a purpose of ours.

  The truth is that I resented taking this path not least because I believed it was the direction to the dead earth I had once occupied following my trial as a young man. Nevertheless, I let Girly lead. At every few steps I had an impulse to turn back and go to the Lake and try to kill this enchanted and enchanting older man. Better to be killed in an instant than lose Girly. She was my sky. But then with those same few steps I saw her care fall away, I saw her full youth begin to plump her features again, and she looked at me as if to say, “Here I am, your woman again, saved from alarm.” So I sullenly believed I had to keep going. She had chosen to flee with me, I told myself. She had looked to me to provide her with the simple air of my own dedication, when I knew she was under persuasion to succumb to the seducer’s song, the song that lay where love and death met each other. She was content to be my woman and I was proud of that, and in that spirit we walked on into the Morningside country.

  We traveled for three days in fine country. I saw no wasteland, and without telling Girly, I kept an eye on the country we traversed but saw no natural outline of earth broken by the crown of the man’s head. We made perfectly fine shelters from the branches of the writhe tree and within two days of continuous walking and singing—Girly was better informed on this country than me, as it happened—we reached a riverbank amongst all the shafts of deep-rooted river trees. It was a fine, broad river, the work of an ancestor giant of Girly’s who had gouged it with a digging stick to commence its life. One of Girly’s skills was throwing the nets, and she sat on the bank happily untangling the one she had brought, and took it down into the river till the water was at her thighs. She stood still then, holding the net like a child, a murmur of tune escaping her lips. Then, too fast for me to see it happen, she flung the net and soon we had strong-shouldered black and whisker fish, and biglips, in there. The sleek sides of the fish when Girly brought them up from the water sang to me with a fresh luster, as if I were seeing them for the first time. We cooked them wrapped in the wide branches of the sour tree that go so well with fish.

  This was the place to stay for days on end. As long as the seducer did not know we were here and bring his sorcery and poison to the place! And we had not seen him, though I looked when Girly did not look for him, not wanting to meet or be reacquainted with evil. But I did look, and I saw nothing.

  Each night we went to our skins in the shelter we had built on the bank. Then, one morning, I found something beyond the firestones we had assembled the day before. It was a bunch of blue and yellow feathers—I do not know if they came from his headdress, but the message lay there: “The woman I want is here, and I have been here to mark the ground.” I hid the emblem, but there was trouble as soon as I said we should be moving on, for in Girly’s mind we had just discovered a place to stay for as long as the heart chose! I could not tell her the peril had resumed, yet I could not persuade her to move on unless I did. In fact, we had a normal shouting affair, very bitter. I waved the feathers in her face and accused her of giving encouragement to the man, and wanting to show our direction so she could be caught, as in some ways the feathers showed she had been. Where was the sense in all this? There was none. That was what quarrels were for. I believed her innocent of the latest that had happened, but I was angry that the man had found us and felt bound to give a sign, as if I would not deliver Girly up to him and—above all, I hoped—she would not give herself.

  So Girly and I did move on, sullen and listless, expecting that he was trailing us. That night, when we lit the evening fire, I angrily erected a barrier of branches around us, upwind, so that our faces could not be observed, and we ate our evening food facing the barrier.

  At last Girly put down her strip of small bounder loin and said with a sudden clear head, “We have to separate from each other. If we’re separate, he can’t track both of us down.”

  I said of course that was true. “But he’ll only track you,” I said.

  “No,” she replied. “I will track him. He will not bring sorcery into my camp. I’ll bring it into his.”

  “Or you will succumb, and run away with him.”

  “What do you want?” asked Girly. “Do you want me to say I wish to be his woman? Would that make you happy? You’ve been asking me all day to say it so you can feel just in throwing stones at me. You want to kill me. Oh, you deny it, but ask yourself!”

  I would of course have loved to deny it and even felt the urge to deny it with a blow and so prove it was the truth.

  “If we both track him, it will frighten him,” said Girly. “Don’t you touch him or enter his camp. Leave it to me. I will poison his fire.”

  It was a frequent enough female boast. Even wives threatened to change their men in various ways for the better and thus “poison their fire.” Yet she weighed the words more solemnly and as if in her hand, and then said, “Judge me when you see me by the Lake again. I will be there before you, and you’ll know. I can say now that all he’s done is bring misery to me, but when you see me by the Lake, it’s then you’ll believe me.”

  When I woke the next morning she was already gone. Her footsteps could not be seen, only the sweep of the branch she’d so clearly carried behind; and then at a majestic tree, that ended. Beyond that, no further prints. When I saw that, I knew I had misjudged her. She was indeed a serious woman, and somehow in this severe time had been given the power of flight. Now I wished she were there so I could take back all my callow, mannish-boyish threats. What was clear was that she must be left to pursue her own plan, since her plan was in earnest. For the whole day I skirted the earth to the Nightside so that I would not tangle up her path by intruding on it. Except for wanting her, I was contented enough on my own track. I fully believed that as once she had been his prey, now he could very well be hers. For she was a clever woman. As long as she did not suffer any damage from him.

  On the next morning I started back on a straight line to the Lake, believing I would meet her there and that she would have achieved something. I wanted to tell her I put trust of the highest kind in her.

  * * *

  On the third morning, I came across the river and tall trees with grassland beyond, and I began to notice clumps of stone on the open ground which pointed me on a track to one of the flat-topped hills and, clearly visible as a black space, a cave in its flank. I did not doubt that the stones had been laid either by the man or by Girly, brought into small heaps by hand. I saw some tracks too, but whatever they meant I felt the necessity to follow. As I approached the cave in the side of that flat hill I saw a near-naked man lying on a fur by its door. I did not try to disguise my approach at all but went straight up. I told myself, It’s not him, this fellow. He looks too hapless. But before I could get close, he scurried up and most shamefully fled. I waited and then watched him make a half-crippled return after some time. I drew closer. It was him, or else it was a brother of his. He looked up at me and
said, “Beat me to death. I don’t care.” And then he almost wept with pain and turned on all fours and made his way out of my sight again, and from the intervening rocks between us came the comic sound of thunderous farting. Somehow Girly had encountered him and reduced him to this, this mere pipe for shit. He returned to his skin, his lips looking blue, but vanished again almost instantly.

  “You’ll get over this,” I told him. I half smiled. “Though it seems severe now.”

  “You are welcome to her,” he said. “She is a poisonous woman. She will kill you when it suits her.”

  “She is a serious woman,” I replied. “She is not to be played with.” And most of the time since I have followed that same advice myself.

  It was a joy to go on treading my way back towards the Lake.

  The Eskimo Affair

  I WAS IN MY late fifties when I shot a documentary for a wealthy man with a particular interest in the indigenes of the Bering Sea. My first film on Learned Man and my two on Eritrea had drawn the attention of this fellow, and it is apparent even to me now that I sought to have other worlds than my normal, suburban one somehow enlighten and enliven me.

  The filming was a pleasant enough task despite its slightly doleful focus: the parlous condition of the native peoples of the region. The toxin that contact with the outside world had introduced into their lives. I shot the first half at a number of locations in the Arctic during one northern summer. This second summer Cath was accompanying me to Anchorage, where I was to meet up with a California crew headed by a fellow called Angelo Rugis, who was good enough to be his own director. I’d worked with Angelo and his crew previously and had trust in them. I would shoot my own footage and combine it with theirs—using the same modus operandi Andy and I had devised, and which I’d used ever since.

  The other crew was bringing the lighting and other gear. I felt I was getting away with murder, letting others do the heavy work of formal shots and setting up. I had been lucky enough to have persuaded the world into wanting my eye.