Levkas Man (13 page)

‘A word with you please.' It was Kotiadis, and he took me aside, along the path through the olive trees that led back to the village. ‘I have sent the corporal for your valítsa. Also I have told him you are free to come and go as you please.'

‘You're leaving?'

‘Yes. I do not wish to eat here. I prefer Greek food.'

‘And I'm to stay?'

‘It's what you want, eh?'

‘Yes. Yes, of course.'

He nodded, smiling and holding out his hand. ‘I will be back in two, perhaps three days.'

‘And I can go where I like?'

‘Of course. You can go to Preveza, meet your friends, leave Greece—if that is what you want. You are free and you have your passport.'

I shook his hand and he walked off through the olive grove, still smiling quietly to himself. Shortly afterwards the corporal arrived with my suitcase.

2

It was hot that afternoon and I was alone. The three of them had gone up to the dig. Lunch had been a hurried meal, eaten largely in silence. No doubt I was responsible for that, but I got the impression that the midday meal was always hurried. The hours of daylight were precious and Cartwright seemed driven, as though he had a deadline to meet. ‘If you want to sleep here,' he said, ‘then you'd better use Dr Van der Voort's tent. Everything's still there, including his sleeping bag. We'll be back at dusk.' I had expected Sonia to stay in the camp, but she went with them.

I sat for a while on the gnarled trunk of a fallen olive tree, listening to the strident sound of the cicadas, the distant tinkling of sheep bells. The breeze had died and it was very still, very peaceful. An idyllic spot, except for the picture in my mind—moonlight and the old man going for Cartwright without any reason. It didn't make sense—and yet … I wondered why Hans hadn't liked him when his sister so obviously did.

In the end I got up and prowled around the camp site. Something—something had happened that night to drive the old man to violence. He'd been for a walk, Cartwright had said. But you don't go berserk walking on your own. Unless it had been building up inside him for a long time …

My gaze switched to the tents. His was next to the mess tent. I went across to it and pulled back the flap. His things had all been neatly stacked—a rucksack, a battered suitcase, bed roll and sleeping bag. No camp bed, everything very spartan, and the whole interior suffused with a weird orange light, the sun shining through the gaily-coloured Terylene.

I went in and opened up the suitcase. But all it contained was clothes—no notes, not even any books. Whatever he had learned on the way down through Macedonia was locked away in his head.

I went down to the river then and lay for a while in the warm sun, listening to the sound of the water. It was a relief to be on my own in the quiet of the Greek countryside instead of cooped up in that car with the smell of Kotiadis's cigarettes and his explosive talk. I took my clothes off and waded into the water. It was almost knee-deep, running fast over flat, worn stones, and at the deepest part I plunged myself into it, clinging to the bottom and letting it wash over me. It was clear, sparkling water, very cold, and I came out refreshed to lie on the grass again and dry out in the sun. The bathe had relaxed me and my mind felt clearer. If I had known enough about anthropology to understand what was in the old man's mind, what this cave-shelter meant to him … I closed my eyes, soaking up the warmth of the sun, thinking of Cartwright and Hans. There was the girl, too. She had been here four days, and she knew the old man better than any of us. In four days she must have discovered something. Kotiadis was probably right. If I stayed here a day or two, living with them in the camp, perhaps working with them on the dig, sooner or later I would discover what had really happened.

After a while I put on my clothes again and went back to the camp. I would have gone up to the dig then, but I needed a sweater and the corporal had put my case outside the mess tent. The flap of the tent was open and in the blue interior of it was a folding table with two canvas chairs. There was a pressure lamp on the table, and amongst a litter of books and papers, I saw a pocket mirror, comb, hairbrush and powder compact. Sonia had been using it as a dressing table and her sleeping bag was laid out on the grass at the back.

I ducked my head and went in. The papers were notes—notes on the books she had been reading. Two of them were open—a little British Museum booklet called
Man the Tool-Maker
and a much bigger volume,
Hundert Jahre Neanderthaler
. The other books, four of them, were also anthropological. One in particular caught my eye:
Adventures with the Missing Link
by Raymond Dart. There was also a typewritten article by E. S. Higgs dealing with A Middle Palaeolithic Industry in Greece. I skimmed this through and then intrigued by the title, I took
Adventures with the Missing Link
and one of the canvas chairs out into the sunshine and began to read.

It was just curiosity, no more—an excuse to sit in the sun and do nothing except enjoy the stillness and the emptiness of the olive grove. It never occurred to me that I should enjoy it, that I should lose all sense of time. But this told of the first discoveries that proved man had originated in Africa. It was a fascinating story, written in a language I could understand, and though the setting was much further south than Kenya, it brought back something of my own childhood.

In 1924 Raymond Dart had been shown the fossilized skull of a baboon. He was an Australian who had recently taken the chair of Anatomy at the little-known University of Witwatersrand. The skull, brought to him by a young girl student, had come from limeworks at a village called Buxton on the edge of the Kalahari desert, and it was the first of a whole series of discoveries that led him ultimately to the conclusion that the evolution of man from primate ancestors had begun, not in Asia, as was then generally thought, but in Africa. This first discovery was followed almost immediately by a consignment of fossil-laden rocks, two of which were complementary. From these two Dart pieced together the skull of a six-year-old primate with a small ape-sized brain and a facial appearance that was almost human. This became known as the Taung skull, after the railway station nearest to the point where it had been blasted out of the limestone.

The man-ape child had lived in the early Pleistocene period, about a million years ago, and the form of the skull made it clear that it was a true biped and had walked upright. Moreover, the teeth, which were like human teeth, proved beyond doubt, to Dart at any rate, that it had been a carnivore. In other words, about a million years ago, in Africa, environment had developed a breed of killer apes that had branched off from their arboreal ancestors; they had taken to the ground, standing erect, and had used bone weapons instead of teeth for hunting.

A slip of paper had been inserted as a marker at chapter two and somebody, presumably Sonia, had underlined the opening paragraph:
For many years after the news of my find was presented to the world, I was to be accused of being too hasty in arriving at the definite conclusions I had formed after studying the skull, teeth and endocranial cast for a matter of only four months
.

The major part of the book concerned Dart's work on limestone breccia from the Makapansgat Valley in Northern Transvaal. In fourteen years 95 tons of bone-bearing breccia were recovered from thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone dumped by the quarries, and each of those 95 tons had yielded an average of 5,000 fossil bones. From these he had reconstructed, not only the appearance, but the whole way of life of the early man-ape, proving that his development had been associated throughout with the use of weapons.

It read like a detective story, the bones, so carefully chipped from their limestone matrix, acting as the clues, for these man-apes accumulated only those remains of their prey that were useful to them as weapons or tools. They had even inserted teeth or sharp slivers of bone into the larger bones they used as clubs to give an edge to them, and they were already essentially right-handed.

The sun had dropped below the hills and it was getting chilly when I reached the chapter entitled—
The Antiquity of Murder
. It showed the man-ape as a killer and an eater of his own, as well as other, species, and I was just considering this in relation to what Gilmore had told me about the old man's Journal when I became conscious that somebody was standing behind me. I turned. It was Sonia.

‘That's mine,' she said possessively.

‘I thought it probably was.'

‘It never occurred to me …'

‘What?'

‘That you read—books, I mean.'

‘Only the lighter ones.' I closed the book and held it up so that she could see the title. ‘This man Dart—he's like a sort of anthropological private eye.'

‘Raymond Dart,' she said coldly, ‘is probably the most outstanding anthropologist since Darwin.'

‘Well, anyway, he makes it interesting.'

‘Really—to you?' She smiled. ‘That's probably because it was written in collaboration.'

‘Then it's a pity more anthropologists don't collaborate with somebody. Here he is, rattling his old fossil-bones, making deductions nobody believes in—'

‘I suppose you mean the Taung skull—
Australopithecus africanus.'

I stared at her and then burst out laughing. ‘Is that meant to encourage me? Why the hell can't you call it a man-ape child like he does? Then we know what we're talking about.' I opened the book at the marker paper, pointing to the first paragraph of chapter two. ‘Did you underline that?'

‘No.' She was leaning down over my shoulder. ‘It was like that when he gave it to me.'

‘Who—the old man?'

‘Dr Gilmore.'

‘He'd marked it, had he?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Why did he give it to you?'

She hesitated, frowning. ‘I don't quite know. He bought it for me especially at a bookshop in Amsterdam. I knew all about Dart, of course. But I hadn't read this book. He said it might interest me. That was all. I don't know why.'

‘You've read it, have you?'

‘Yes, of course. I read it straight away. And then again in the plane coming over.'

‘And you still don't know why?'

‘No.'

‘This chapter on the antiquity of murder,' I said. ‘I was just reading it when you arrived. How far back do our instincts go? I mean how deep are they?'

She didn't answer that, and when I looked up at her, she seemed to have stiffened as though she were holding her breath.

‘What this man seems to be saying is that as soon as the man-ape came down from the trees he was a killer. In fact, that that was the reason he was able to leave the trees. When he found he could stand upright, then he could see above the tall grass and had his hands free to use weapons to assist him in killing much larger animals than himself. He became a flesh-eater. Why does Dart use the word murder?'

‘To emphasize his point—that's all.'

‘About man being a killer?'

‘Yes.'

‘And that's a million years ago—a long time.'

I think she knew very well what I was driving at. ‘There isn't much known about man's deep-buried, instinctive urges. They've only just started a proper study of the brain.'

‘And the instincts may not be in the brain. They may be in our nerves, our tissues, our blood cells. Is that what my father was after in his Journal?'

‘I haven't read it,' she said quickly.

‘No, but Dr Gilmore has. Didn't he say anything to you about it?'

‘A little. Not much.' She turned away. ‘I can't stay talking. The others will be here soon and there's a meal to be got ready.' She went over to the stone fireplace, leaning down and blowing on the embers. Then she put on some more wood. ‘Will you get some water, please? I'll need water for the tea.' She gave me a blackened iron kettle and I took it down to the river. I was feeling disturbed, confused. Dart's categorical statement, my own satisfaction at seeing that man fall back over the edge of the oil terminal pier, the old man's attack on Cartwright—it all seemed to add up, and it worried me.

Dusk was falling fast, and by the time I got back she had lit a pressure lamp and flames were leaping between the stones of the fireplace. ‘I should have come down earlier,' she said. ‘I had to use paraffin. But it's exciting up there. Sifting each shovelful of soil, wondering what you're going to turn up. I've never been on a dig before.' She went to get something from the mess tent and then Cartwright and her brother came into camp. Hans went down to the river immediately, stripped to the waist, his towel over his shoulder. Cartwright busied himself lighting the second pressure lamp.

The meal did not take long to prepare—tinned stew, followed by tinned pears. Only the bread and a rather acid sheep cheese was local. We washed it down with a lot of dark, sweet tea. Hans had found a coin that afternoon. It was of no value, an Augustan bronze coin, but it proved that the cave-shelter had been occupied, or at least visited, by somebody in the first century
A.D
.—a shepherd probably who had taken his sheep to the market in Nikopolis. They were speculating as to why he had dropped it there, and I sat listening, not asking any questions. I thought if I let them get used to my presence in the camp … ‘Care to see it?' Hans asked. He dredged in the pocket of his shorts and flipped the coin across to me. ‘I was widening the trench and that was just over a metre down—112 centimetres to be exact. So that's the amount of dirt and turd dropping that have accumulated there during two thousand years.'

It was the only thing they had found that could be given an exact dating. The rest had been animal bones and broken pieces of pottery—sherds of simple country work. At the lowest point they had reached Cartwright reckoned they were only back to the Homeric period. ‘We've a lot of digging to do before we get down to a depth that's of any interest to us. And it's all so slow—the soil to be sifted, everything catalogued so that we have a complete picture of man's occupation century by century.' He spoke slowly, staring at me all the time, the firelight reflected in his glasses, as though he were explaining something to a child. But he sounded depressed all the same, and when I asked why they didn't drive a pilot trench straight down to the depth that did interest them, he answered me quite sharply: ‘That's not the way we do things. We might miss something vital. And anyway, without a steady build-up of the picture, we can't be sure what depth we are interested in. We need a complete stratified picture, all the layers of occupation. It wouldn't make sense otherwise.'