come out of the sea. Yes, perhaps the dolphins had brought him from the place where the sun rose, and when Ma-ma had pushed the body out of her he had slid, transparent as a shrimp, under the water and in through the mouth, to make its home in the body like a hermit-crab taking over a new shell. Perhaps.
Carrying a baby with its birth-fur still on it brought Ma-ma great prestige. She was already one of the senior females, but now for a while she became the second most respected person in the tribe, after Presh. Females, and some males, competed to hold the baby. Tong brought food and a birth-present, a shining shell. The shell had a hole in it so Li threaded some of Ma-ma’s hairs through it and tied them so that it dangled against her shoulder. The hairs soon wore through, but Li experimented and invented a form of plaiting which lasted well. The ornament was much admired and added to Ma-ma’s prestige.
The next child was born in a family not close to Li’s but still she was woken and went down to watch over the birth. The father had already found a piece of shell with a hole in it for Li to make into a neck-ornament like Ma-ma’s. Over the months this became a custom in the tribe, something they did because it felt right, as though it had always been done. The plaits tended to wear through at about the time the babies lost their birth-fur, which added to the feeling of rightness.
Probably Li was the only one who ever thought back to how the custom had started.
NOW: MONDAY MORNING
MRS HAMISKA WAS a small quiet woman with a flat face and pale blue eyes. Her skin looked like soft leather. She said nothing the whole journey, but she didn’t get much chance because Dr Hamiska barely stopped talking. The landscape reeled by, grey-brown, flat, battered with heat, with hardly a tree, hardly a tussock of grass, just here and there patches of low thorny scrub which looked dead but in fact had tiny leaves like fish-scales. These were the badlands Dad had talked about, and the scrub was almost the only plant able to grow there. Again, it wasn’t the Africa you saw on TV.
Vinny sat in the back of the jeep, craning forward to listen to Dr Hamiska explaining about the badlands. This was where they had found most of their fossils. When the plain which you saw from the camp had been sea, and the hills where the camp was had been an island, this had been the channel between the island and the mainland. Then, slowly, the land had risen, and it had become a great marsh, and creatures had lived and died there leaving their bones in the marsh. Rivers had fed the marsh, bringing down silt from the hills, layer after layer after layer, covering the bones. Then the coastline had risen, cutting the marsh off from the sea, and slowly it had dried out, evaporated, becoming saltier and saltier as it did so. It was badlands still because of the salt. The plates of the earth had ground against each other and there had been earthquakes, tilting the edges of the plain into new young hills, where the layers of silt compacted into clay and fresh soft rock, while the buried bones became fossils within them.
Time had streamed by, hundreds of thousands of seasons, wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry, each wet softening the surface of the earth and each dry baking it hard again. Sometimes rain washed whole mountainsides away. Sometimes things barely changed at all.
‘I’ve seen sites which were explored thirty years before,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You could still see the old beer-cans. But not one new fossil had been exposed – barely a millimetre of erosion in thirty years. But then a man I know was digging out a dinosaur from the side of a gully. Tanzania, this was. A dinosaur can be a big thing – you don’t get it done in a day. He’d got it half done when there was a thunderstorm and a flash flood down the gully, and the whole dinosaur was washed away. He’d lost it completely.’
‘He must have been furious.’
‘Not at all. The flood had
Carrying a baby with its birth-fur still on it brought Ma-ma great prestige. She was already one of the senior females, but now for a while she became the second most respected person in the tribe, after Presh. Females, and some males, competed to hold the baby. Tong brought food and a birth-present, a shining shell. The shell had a hole in it so Li threaded some of Ma-ma’s hairs through it and tied them so that it dangled against her shoulder. The hairs soon wore through, but Li experimented and invented a form of plaiting which lasted well. The ornament was much admired and added to Ma-ma’s prestige.
The next child was born in a family not close to Li’s but still she was woken and went down to watch over the birth. The father had already found a piece of shell with a hole in it for Li to make into a neck-ornament like Ma-ma’s. Over the months this became a custom in the tribe, something they did because it felt right, as though it had always been done. The plaits tended to wear through at about the time the babies lost their birth-fur, which added to the feeling of rightness.
Probably Li was the only one who ever thought back to how the custom had started.
NOW: MONDAY MORNING
MRS HAMISKA WAS a small quiet woman with a flat face and pale blue eyes. Her skin looked like soft leather. She said nothing the whole journey, but she didn’t get much chance because Dr Hamiska barely stopped talking. The landscape reeled by, grey-brown, flat, battered with heat, with hardly a tree, hardly a tussock of grass, just here and there patches of low thorny scrub which looked dead but in fact had tiny leaves like fish-scales. These were the badlands Dad had talked about, and the scrub was almost the only plant able to grow there. Again, it wasn’t the Africa you saw on TV.
Vinny sat in the back of the jeep, craning forward to listen to Dr Hamiska explaining about the badlands. This was where they had found most of their fossils. When the plain which you saw from the camp had been sea, and the hills where the camp was had been an island, this had been the channel between the island and the mainland. Then, slowly, the land had risen, and it had become a great marsh, and creatures had lived and died there leaving their bones in the marsh. Rivers had fed the marsh, bringing down silt from the hills, layer after layer after layer, covering the bones. Then the coastline had risen, cutting the marsh off from the sea, and slowly it had dried out, evaporated, becoming saltier and saltier as it did so. It was badlands still because of the salt. The plates of the earth had ground against each other and there had been earthquakes, tilting the edges of the plain into new young hills, where the layers of silt compacted into clay and fresh soft rock, while the buried bones became fossils within them.
Time had streamed by, hundreds of thousands of seasons, wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry, each wet softening the surface of the earth and each dry baking it hard again. Sometimes rain washed whole mountainsides away. Sometimes things barely changed at all.
‘I’ve seen sites which were explored thirty years before,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You could still see the old beer-cans. But not one new fossil had been exposed – barely a millimetre of erosion in thirty years. But then a man I know was digging out a dinosaur from the side of a gully. Tanzania, this was. A dinosaur can be a big thing – you don’t get it done in a day. He’d got it half done when there was a thunderstorm and a flash flood down the gully, and the whole dinosaur was washed away. He’d lost it completely.’
‘He must have been furious.’
‘Not at all. The flood had
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