Rift Page 17

  Ella stood up and went over to Joe. He was facing Chomlaya. To their right the helicopter hovered above the point where Matt was found. This information had been communicated moments ago on the radio. They had all looked hard at the shape of the ridge, at where it was in relation to where they stood, committing the place to memory. It was at least a mile further along.

  Now the helicopter swung towards them, and stopped again. This time it was above the site of Joe’s reappearance on the far side of the rocks; above, too, where they now stood in the gully on this side.

  Behind, on the far side of the stream, the binocular teams were spreading along, and Ella could hear the flurry of discussion and instruction floating up in a background babble that merged with the restless grumble of the helicopter.

  Joe turned, round and round and round, looking. Ella copied. She tried to follow the direction of his gaze. She felt his tension, like heat off his skin.

  Then he stopped suddenly, and went forward. A ragged thorn bush leaned from the gully wall. It was anchored in a protruding ledge of soil, though below had been gouged away by the stormwaters. Roots clawed in the air.

  Joe moved to the bush. Ella followed.

  Below it was a clutter of stones that, if you did not know, would look natural. But if you looked carefully, you could see they had been moved and placed in a rough half-circle round the roots of the bush.

  Otaka had been watching Joe. Now he looked where Joe looked. And with a sharp intake of breath, the man squatted down and beckoned Joe to his knees beside him. He motioned Joe to lift the dangling roots. Gently Otaka brushed at the soil in the side of the bank. Earth fell away easily where it had once been disturbed and returned.

  Before their eyes, a smooth, pale dome emerged. Otaka continued stroking the earth, gently, patiently, until the whole side of the skull lay revealed, one eye socket looking impassively out at them.

  Simultaneously, several things happened. With a long, yelping cry, the eagle dropped from the rock and swooped low, wingbeats whipping the air. The helicopter roared into sight, blasting a gale along the cliff. Bushes flattened. Dust and leaves gusted upwards. Véronique let out a yell, and yanked creepers away from the carpeting layer on the bank beside the gully. ‘The propellers blew it up. Look!’ she shrieked through the noise.

  Below the foliage was a ledge of rock. She pointed to a wobbly-edged oval in the surface. She lifted more leaves: another shape. With one finger she traced a trail of others to one side, and they all saw them then, outlined by the low-angled rays of the sun.

  Blankly, they stared. Then, ‘footprints?’ breathed Murothi. ‘In the rock?’ His voice was suddenly loud against the receding throb of the engine.

  ‘We saw that,’ Joe said urgently. ‘Silowa called it footprints of the God.’ He was gripping Ella’s arm so hard it hurt.

  Véronique sat back on her heels. ‘Otaka, tell about Laetoli!’ He was bending over, scanning the marks with concentration.

  ‘Prehistoric footprints,’ he responded, not looking up. His voice, like Véronique’s, was tight with excitement. ‘Thirty years ago they found them in Tanzania.’ He straightened. ‘More than three million years they lay hidden below soil, the tracks of two adults and a child, trapped in the hardened ash of a volcano. Then the soil is eroded away; there they are again, the tracks released to our eyes!’

  ‘Human-like creatures,’ Véronique emphasised. ‘Striding across an ancient landscape! Our ancestors! An extraordinary find! The Laetoli prints are flanked by animal tracks fleeing the erupting volcano –’

  A volley of shouts from the students exploded across the stream, and a crackle on the radio stung the constable into action, jumping away to listen.

  Murothi’s eyes swung to the rock. Briefly muted by wispy cloud, the sun broke free, drenching Chomlaya in hard, bright light, crevice and ledge, nobble and crack chiselled in black on the gigantic slabs.

  ‘Sir, you have seen something?’ demanded the sergeant.

  ‘Only the change in the angle of light.’

  ‘The marks . . . they’re going to the rock, they’re walking up . . . ’ Ella, mesmerised by the footprints, recovered her voice, and Murothi followed her gaze, glanced back at the marks, at the crags, at her, and then squeezed her shoulder in agreement.

  ‘Sir, it is the teacher Mr Boyd,’ the constable brandished the radio high. ‘A girl has climbed a tree down there. She tells that above, up there . . . ’ he gestured up the gully, ‘is a dark place. She thinks it is a hole . . . ’

  ‘You could move up that way,’ Tomis pointed to chunks of fallen rock providing a possible line of ascent.

  Decisively, Véronique pulled the creepers over the footprints and Otaka moved to cover the skull with soil. He dragged a loose branch on top. ‘It has waited millions of years for us to meet it, it will wait longer,’ he said. ‘It is the living who call –’

  ‘Wait,’ Joe said. Ella felt the vibration of his heart against her arm, he was hanging on like it was a lifeline. ‘It was – See, the bird –’ he remembered speeding darkness, the cry; it jarred through him again. ‘Silowa put earth on the skull like that . . . then he went up –’ he was tugging Ella towards the rocks, slithering on the loose sand of the gully where it steepened between boulders, his words lost in a spill of dislodged pebbles.

  In a few swift strides, Murothi had caught them and had his hand on Joe’s shoulder, as if terrified he would dart out of sight.

  It took only moments. The lower boulders offered easy stepping places to the higher. From on top you could see a shelf jutting from the cliff, well out of sight from below, reachable from boulders wedged against it. Scrawny bushes clung here and there, and a short distance to their right, the shelf crumbled away.

  The dark place seen by the girl in the tree was close. With the angle of the early sunlight, you could just detect the vertical shadows of its upper end, several metres high. Lower down it was curtained by scraggy branches.

  ‘Inspector . . . ’ Tomis’s voice was cautious, but he did not need to say more: the cleft breathed dank air into their faces, promised depth and distance. Tomis pushed the bushes aside. Behind, it widened enough to take the bulk of a man.

  Joe felt as if he watched across a great gap of time, a great gap of space. The fluted pinnacles leaned in, the grooves and ridges of the rock moved. Like a shifting of mood, a sense of music, piercing every nerve of his body. In two dream-haunted nights he had heard it, in chaotic half-memory; yesterday it had called to him that Matt was there, was alive.

  It called him now, into the heart of the rock.

  He bowed through the crack in the cliff, and disappeared.

  ‘Wait!’ Murothi shouted, and leapt after him, the rest of them, stooping and pushing through and finding almost at once that they could stand.

  They were in a chimney. The crack in the rock was behind them, masked again by bushes on the outside. Sheer walls on the other sides. Above, a canopy of foliage: columns of green light fell through leaves, flecked with gold, spun with spider webs, rippling on their upturned, startled faces.

  Sheer walls – except to their right. Here the rock split again into blackness. Through this, Joe had again disappeared.

  ‘Do not go on!’ Murothi struggled through.

  ‘It’s OK, I know . . . ’ Joe’s words floated back, and were lost in a tumble of echoes.

  ‘We expect caves, but there are none – I spoke too soon,’ Véronique’s voice echoed, breathy and loud, and at that moment the sergeant switched on a torch and the beam raked ahead, splashing light on Joe vanishing at the end of a long black hole into nothing.

  Ella had surged in with the others, and slid to a halt now, walls scraping her shoulder. She felt the rock pressing in, suffocating. Terror merged with a panic that threatened to cripple all other movement – Charly – anyone – in here! Joe lost again! Her breathing ricocheted off the tunnel like a wild thing stalking her in the gloom.

  Murothi and Tomis and the sergeant had forged ahead,
out of sight. She jumped as Véronique touched her shoulder. ‘It is all right, Ella,’ the woman said, ‘just breathe slowly. See, they have switched the torches on, they are all right, just beyond, there. Move to the light. Really, my dear, it is all right, it is all right.’

  A blush of colour filled the end of the tunnel.

  Wordlessly, Ella forced herself to obey. One step, another . . . hanging on to the feel of Véronique and Otaka and Constable Lesakon anchoring her behind.

  There was a rush of cold air. They were stepping out into a wave of sound, and there were Joe and Murothi and Tomis and Sergeant Kaonga. Transfixed, wordless, looking up.

  ‘It wasn’t dreaming, Ella,’ Joe whispered. ‘It was remembering, like you said.’ Above him, two vast red eland galloped on a rocky overhang. A lion paced the wall, a snake coiled from shadows, and everywhere trickles of sound made a web of sighs, lifting his voice into the darkness.

  Véronique moved past him, stretched a hand, palm out, towards the wall. Behind the shadows of her spread fingers Ella saw the matching handprints gleaming white amid red and black dots, arrow-heads, cavalcades of lizards that seemed to slither from cracks in the rock.

  She looked up. A cat-like yellow figure stretched on the ceiling. It turned its strange, horned head to look down at her.

  Recovering himself from awestruck silence, Murothi ventured, ‘These paintings are old?’

  ‘Murothi, these are prehistoric,’ Otaka answered. ‘I am not an expert, but I make a guess, more than 20,000 years. No – I will be bold – older! Yes, older, older!’ Visible excitement was already supplanting his own hushed astonishment. ‘Murothi, my friend, the bone flute comes from these caves – I mean the one Matt was holding when they rescued him yesterday. We must acknowledge now, these children have not climbed over the rock; they have passed through its heart!’

  Murothi swivelled to face Joe. ‘You saw all this? You had torches?’

  ‘I saw – but we didn’t have torches, didn’t know we were coming here . . . ’

  ‘Then how could you see?’

  ‘I . . . ’ Joe stared round, confused, ‘I . . . I just could. And there were voices – there –’

  ‘Water,’ said Véronique. ‘The sound we can hear is water rushing through other parts of the rock. And the echoes from it. And our own voices travelling back to us.’ She gestured to horizontal spaces high up, recesses probing deep into walls, corners and clefts exuding icy darkness.

  ‘No –’ Unexpectedly, Joe moved towards a wide, low opening to one side. He began to stoop into it. With a start, Tomis held him back and slipped past. ‘Careful, careful!’ Cautiously the ranger went in first. Joe followed, and one by one the rest of them too. A few paces in, they had to duck under a low lintel of rock.

  They stood up into an immense vaulted space. Torchbeams swung up. A rhinoceros trotted across the heights. Blackness fell away below. A rock-bridge stretched ahead.

  ‘Is it safe to go over?’ Murothi’s voice was huge in the cavernous gloom. He was assessing the bridge.

  ‘It is broad and solid,’ Véronique assured him. ‘We can safely pass along its centre.’

  The sergeant flicked torchlight down to one side. It revealed the deep, narrowing pit and a riot of colour: red and black and yellow, quivering in the passing beam.

  Ella absorbed only the slope into blackness, the rumble of distant sound. She had a picture of squirming holes and bottomless falls, and was clammy with dread, with the effort not to reveal her trembling.

  Murothi and Joe stepped on to the bridge. Carefully the others went with them. Lightly, Constable Lesakon touched Ella’s arm, gesturing her forward. Nerves turned her legs to lead. She felt her way forward clumsily. But she found that the bridge was indeed broad, the drop much further away than she’d thought. She began to quicken her pace to reach the others.

  They had come to a halt, though. Beyond the rock-bridge, the far wall was no wall but a bend in the cave. Out of sight, the floor undulated downwards and divided around a pillar of rock. Both routes dropped sharply away, and in the one to the left, some distance down, Tomis’s torch revealed patches of deeper gloom hinting at other openings.

  He turned to Joe. ‘Which way?’

  The hunted look came over Joe’s face, and Ella went cold, cold beyond the cold of the caves.

  ‘Joe?’ she moved towards him.

  Joe glanced at her. Then at the two possible directions. He remembered sound, like a thousand voices in the hollows. He remembered following the sound. He remembered turning and they were no longer there, there was only him, and the dark air threaded with muttering, and nothing else.

  Mute, he shook his head. He looked into her face, helplessly.

  Murothi shone the torch on his watch. Ten minutes since they’d entered the caves. An hour, now, since dawn.

  ‘Sergeant, Constable, we cannot go further without reporting to the outside. We will have search parties looking for us! If you please, go out now, radio these developments to Likon and Constable Lakuya. Get them to report everything to the helicopters and direct their search immediately above us. And we must have expert help in here. How long till the climbers arrive? Then come back quickly. We must go on, but we set up a clear route for return. We do not get ourselves lost!’

  ‘Yes, Sir, we can use the ropes,’ agreed Tomis. ‘To mark the route . . . we have six ropes here, we can get more . . . ’

  ‘I have explored caves many times, Murothi,’ Véronique put in. ‘We will lead, Tomis and I, yes? Sergeant Kaonga, I suggest you get the teacher Lawrence Sharp too – he has caving experience.’

  Sergeant and constable were already going back across the bridge, the thud of their footsteps resounding across the space.

  ‘Murothi, this is what I think,’ Véronique announced. ‘Holes on the summit of Chomlaya have eroded into these caves. Rainwater percolates down, you see. In the end the surface collapses. You understand? This is how Joe and Matt have climbed out in these far-off places –’

  Joe had crouched down, elbows on knees, chin on clenched fists, facing the tunnels burrowing into rock.

  Ella squatted beside him. He looked briefly at her again, unsmiling, and away. There was a faint glisten on his cheeks. She felt him lean towards her, warmth from his arm transmitting across the chill cave air.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t remember. All mixed up. Sorry . . . ’

  Murothi declared, ‘Joe, you have brought us here! That is good! Now we know you came to this place. We know where you and Matt came out. You have told us all this! We will find your friends. It is not your burden. It is not your fault.’

  Joe nodded. He did not look at the policeman. He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.

  Decisively, Otaka called to Véronique and they began examining the extremities of the cavern: bulges, crevices, platforms of rock, passing to and fro, their voices filling the space with murmuring. It merged with the fall of water, and it seemed to Ella suddenly as if chanting and singing impregnated the rock, as if the dark thronged with life, as if the torchlight flickering across the undulations of the floor was the flame of a kindling fire.

  But she was shivering, stiff with cold. ‘Let’s move, Joe. Let’s look too.’ She stood, and saw, etched by the shimmer of moving light, trails of marks, long, oval marks, treading into the obscurity in front of her.

  She gripped Joe’s arm. ‘What’s that?’

  Otaka, passing close by, shone his torch down, and along. He let out a sudden exclamation, knelt. He looked up at Ella. ‘Footprints, in dust. They are new! Inspector Murothi!’ He moved along, swore under his breath, knelt again, blew gently across a line of marks further away. ‘But these are not new. These are hard in the rock.’ He stabbed the torch around, ‘Different marks, different sizes – four, no five. Véronique, you must see this! The new marks overlay the old! It is a matter of great wonder!’

  Murothi came and looked, but he could not take it in. He could think of nothing but five days trapp
ed in this labyrinth. He was eyeing the animals that seemed to leap live from the veins of the rock, as if they flowed from its spirit. He could almost hear the hoofbeats of the eland, the snarl of the leopard.

  These children – lost, without light, without food, without water, down here?

  He tried to still a sudden, rising panic, to organise the facts in his head: Silowa, Anna, Joe and Matt come to this place at dawn. Together. Possibly Charly follows them in. Thirty-six hours pass, and Joe emerges, just on the other side of the rock. Alone. Another three days pass and Matt is found. In a different place – some way to the east. Now, sixteen more hours had passed . . .

  The children came in together; how did they lose each other? Why? Where, where to look now? Were they all scattered, maybe even deep below in one of these terrible plunging holes?

  This endless wait for the sergeant! He snapped his torchbeam on to his watch again. Five minutes since the sergeant and Constable Lesakon left –

  Suddenly, loudly, Joe said, ‘I don’t remember Charly here. I don’t. She wasn’t here.’

  ‘Yes!’ cried Tomis from the left-hand tunnel. ‘No! I mean, she was! See!’ He scooped something from the ground and held it up: a leather lace threaded with beads. ‘A child gave this to her just last week!’

  ‘It is hers. She wore it round her neck.’ Véronique ran forward to take it. ‘I have seen it!’

  For Ella everything fused into the mountain of rock pressing down. Like a tomb. She could think of nothing else: Charly, Anna, Silowa, in a tomb. She began to shake, unable to stop.

  Beyond the rock-bridge, there was a drumming of footsteps.

  Murothi turned to greet the flare of their torches, like a blast of warmth from the sunlit outer-world.

  Sergeant and constable burst in, slid to a halt, gasped for breath.

  ‘They are there!’ the sergeant yelled.

  ‘Between the helicopter this way and this way!’ bawled the constable.