Human Traces

  Thomas stood up. ‘What I believe consciousness to be,’ he said, ‘is the ability to tell a story to ourselves. To begin with, it enables us to see time – not as it really is, because we cannot do that – but in representation, at least, as a straight line. You cannot conceive of time in any other way – but the straight line is only a useful metaphor, or representation, not the reality. But once you have a grasp of time – even if it is essentially a misrepresentation – you can start to plan and visualise a past and future, and therefore causality. Likewise, consciousness enables us to make conjectures in which someone called “I” can be seen in a hypothetical situation or a story; and from that flows the ability to make judgments, plans, decisions. In short, consciousness takes the vastness of the physical world, whose co-ordinates of time or space we cannot really grasp, and gives us a model, a working version – a simplified, toy version if you prefer – in which we can more usefully and successfully operate.’

  ‘That is a fine story, Thomas. Though it seems to me that in some ways we might have been better off without this human consciousness.’

  Thomas smiled. ‘It is a problem, certainly. We are much more developed than we need to be. I think consciousness is like an extra sense – the equivalent of sight, perhaps. It gives us a way of reading the world. Sight uses light waves, hearing uses sound waves, consciousness used language to help us construct a reduced model of the universe, in which we can picture ourselves as actors in a simplified version of time. But just as our eye does not give us all the light waves, so our consciousness gives only a sample of reality. It is our sixth sense and it is unique to humans, but it is no more complete or transcendent than a dog’s sense of smell or a hawk’s eyesight: it is good of its kind, but it is limited; it is just a sense. I would no more base a philosophical reading of reality on the evidence of my consciousness than on the evidence of a hound’s nose. Furthermore, because it is the only “sense” that deals in ideas, it is the only one to give us an idea of its restricted powers; it is consciousness itself that makes us aware of its own limitations. In reality, there are probably more than the three dimensions that our optic nerve can perceive, but only seeing three, we do not fret over what more is there. With consciousness, it is otherwise. We are frustrated by the limits of our capacity to answer what we think of as the big or important questions. But we should not be. The failure is not in the answers, but in the questions. We can only wonder at the tiny mysteries thrown up by this blindly evolved faculty. But these are not real mysteries; these have as much and as little to do with reality as the questions that remain unanswered by the limited range of the hawk’s eye.’

  Hannes smiled. ‘And one day we will know the answers.’

  ‘Or perhaps one day,’ said Thomas, ‘we may know the questions.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When another faculty, as great as consciousness, has also evolved in us. This is how the great mysteries are solved, not by answers, but because the changes in the way we apprehend the world make the questions irrelevant.’

  ‘So there will be a seventh sense?’

  ‘Indeed. Though it, too, will of course be limited.’

  ‘But it will be a step.’

  ‘Steps are all there can be, Hannes. That is how life evolves.’

  ‘Good night, dear doctor. I shall think about what you have told me. I shall think, too, about those footprints in the ash.’

  Hannes heaved himself up stiffly from the ground and straightened his knees; he laid his hand onThomas’s shoulder then moved off awkwardly.

  Thomas went and lay down in his tent and listened to the night. He thought of the creature who had walked through the dust with his female and their child; he pictured his face, bewildered by the natural disasters all about him. He thought of his own girls asleep at home, Charlotte with the triangle of tiny moles beneath her left ear that he kissed each night; Martha with the small birthmark on her forearm, like the passport stamp from a previous world; he thought of modern men and politics, Vienna, motor cars, the clamour of literature and science. He trained his ear back again to the darkness, to the depth of it. What he felt, when his mind had slowed sufficiently for him to find the words, was the grandeur of human insignificance.

  In the morning, Hannes set about cutting a footprint to take home. A trench was dug around the end of the trail and its side wall consolidated with burlap soaked in plaster; then the chosen print was cut round with a trenching tool while pieces of wood were inserted on either side in further plaster mixture. Hannes covered the print surface itself with newspaper, then with burlap and more plaster; when all had set firm, he knocked smartly at the base with a pick, and a six-inch-deep slab came free, with the carrying timbers firmly embedded in it.

  The return to the Crater was accomplished without difficulty, and the following day, when the entire party was reassembled, they prepared to separate for the last time: Regensburger, Lukas and the bulk of the porters were to go west across the Serengeti, along the line of the projected railway to Speke Gulf at the foot of Lake Victoria, while Thomas was to head north towards Simba and take the train to the coast, before embarking atTanga for the return passage. At the last minute, Crocker, initially bound for the interior, decided that he would accompany Thomas, as he wanted to make a fast return on the cattle he had acquired. Thomas was daunted at the thought of days, perhaps weeks, of Crocker’s conversation, but a little pleased, as well, to have the other man’s guns and confidence.

  ‘You are a good man. You are a brave man and I thank you for coming with me,’ said Hannes, embracing Thomas at the Crater. ‘I shall be back within a year and I expect a proper welcome.’

  ‘You shall have it, I promise you.’

  Thomas gave Hannes his Kodak camera and all the plates and films connected to the map work; the Underwood and the rest of the photographs he packed to take with him back to Carinthia. He was also entrusted with the excavated footprint in its careful wrappings.

  With a smaller retinue and without the need to stop for cartography, Thomas and Crocker were able to make fast progress. The first night, they stopped at a Masai village where the headman welcomed them with warm milk from his cows, mixed with blood taken from the beast’s artery. He was fond of his cattle, and was familiar with them, squeezing the testes of a bull, and rubbing his hand in the cleft beneath a cow’s tail. In return for cloth and trinkets, he offered them fresh water and a place to sleep, though before the deal was done, he produced a document for them to read.

  It was a twenty-year-old copy of Frankfurter Zeitung, much folded and yellowed by use. Thomas ran his eyes down its columns and opened its pages with the air of someone examining a legal document. At length, he nodded sagely, indicated all was well, refolded the paper and handed it back to his host, who appeared well satisfied. With the interpretative help of a Masai guide, the chief told them of a great famine in the Serengeti, of many of his people wandering the plains in desperate search of food; his was among the last well-stocked villages, he said, and further north it would be difficult. He also told them stories of his many wives and of his great prowess as a lover when he had been a young man. When he discovered that Thomas was a doctor, he took him to see one of his younger children, a woman in her twenties, who had been deaf since birth.

  ‘He wants to know if you will cure her,’ said Crocker.

  ‘Please tell him I cannot.’

  ‘He says, “Why not? Surely if you are a doctor you can make her well?”’

  ‘Please explain to him that medicine is not like that.’

  The chief looked bemused, and before they went to bed Thomas gave him an old toy of Daniel’s he had brought for such a moment: it was a clockwork soldier with a drum on which he played a slow roll with stiff arms; at the end of it, a surprisingly loud bell rang inside his head. Thomas showed the chief how to wind it up, and the old man did so with rapturous enjoyment, then invited all the village in to see the toy. Each time the bell rang, they burst into delighted applause. The dru
mmer boy was rewound time and time again, and each bell-ring appeared to take the audience entirely by surprise.

  Thomas and Crocker left them to it, and were escorted to a grass-roofed hut by one of the headman’s wives. All night long, the bell rang at one-minute intervals, followed by sounds of delighted amazement. In the morning, the villagers were full of joy, but the white men were haggard with fatigue. ‘Fucking drummer-boy,’ muttered Crocker, as he loaded his donkey.

  The next day they travelled twenty miles, which took them to the edge of Wanderobo territory. A calculation was done of the likely distances and times, though since the natives could count no higher than seven, Crocker found this hard to follow. He was becoming an increasingly difficult companion, Thomas noticed: disease was causing his collection of cattle to dwindle by the day and he was desperate to bring them to a town where they could be sold; they had also lost two donkeys, which had died after being bitten in the anus by the ndorobo fly, and by the end of the third day morale among the bearers had noticeably fallen.

  They passed through the foothills of some mountains and into thickly wooded country; the temperature began to rise and the supply of fresh water became precarious. Thomas tried to make the bearers ration what they drank, but with little success, as they guzzled it like children; and for the first time since stepping into Africa, he began to feel afraid.

  XIX

  KITTY READ THOMAS’S letter from Tanga with a widening smile. A cautious, chastened Thomas, grieving for the loss of Olivier and doubtful about his new home, was no use to anyone, as she had told him with the candour that always marked their conversations. He had to be impulsive – reckless at times – because it was only in those moments, even when he failed or overreached himself, that he had his moments of inspiration. There was always blood and disappointment, but without them there was no gain; that was the nature of the man, and from his letter it seemed, to Kitty’s relief and despite the misgivings she had had about his safety, that the African adventure was going to give him back his self-belief. She read parts of it to Charlotte and Martha, then showed it to Daisy, who, in her opinion, understood Thomas as well as anyone.

  Flattered by Kitty’s confidence, Daisy pored over the letter and was thrilled by the talk of porters, guns, gin cocktails, wild animals and the ‘Interior’. She worried a good deal for the doctor’s safety, but since her admiration of him was almost limitless, she knew he would triumph in the end.

  Daisy had undergone a course in the administration of electrical treatments. One of Jacques’s early heroes, Moritz Benedikt, had been an enthusiast and Jacques had retained some faith in the treatment for that reason; Thomas viewed it as old-fashioned but harmless. His lukewarm attitude did nothing to diminish Daisy’s pride in the ‘electrical room’ that had been handed over to her in the back of the main building. At the Schloss Seeblick they had had a galvanic machine that produced a powerful and continuous current, but they had given it to the public hospital in favour of two new faradic machines, which mildly stimulated all parts of the nervous system and whose electrodes did not have to be placed directly on a nerve or motor point. One was a machine which had been popular through the sanatoria of Europe for more than a decade, but Daisy’s treasure was a mighty American continuous-coil apparatus, which bore the words ‘Dr Jerome Kidder. Inventor. New York’ on a smart brass plate.

  The patient, stripped to the waist and bare-footed, sat in a chair with her feet on a copper pedal. After Daisy had switched on the machine and made sure the current was at the correct setting, she attached her own right hand to a damp sponge electrode wired to the front of the machine, and took in her left hand the brass ball electrode and applied it to the patient’s bare back. With the circuit complete, the patient reported a tingling sensation, not unpleasant, which could be intensified by an increase in amperage.

  Most of them were happy to chat with their therapist as the treatment continued, though Daisy was careful not to instigate the conversations, seeing her role as the listener and questioner only. Silence was equally acceptable to her because she was delighted simply to have such modern equipment entrusted to her.

  Mary was intrigued by Daisy’s new responsibility and acted as a guinea-pig when she was learning how to use the Kidder machine.

  ‘It’s like having lots of little spiders running all over you,’ she said. ‘It’s nice really.’

  Her own simple art of massage was not subject to changes of fashion and, after more than twelve years, Mary’s skill was such that many new patients asked for her by name. She took on a full-time and a part-time assistant as the numbers grew.

  In the summer, Mary was the first to be told that Daisy and Hans were to marry. She was to keep it a secret, however, until Thomas returned because Daisy wanted him to be the first to know. She also planned to ask him to give her away in church.

  Kitty:—

  We left the last government rest house two days ago. They told us there that there was cattle disease in all the towns and Crocker was frantic to take another path through the wilds that would avoid contact with infection. Our guide said he could manage this, but I thought it unwise, since he is one of those men who always agrees to what you ask rather than risk displeasing you.

  Our water supply is already uncomfortably low, and in this wild uninhabited country we are entirely dependent on the memory of two guides. Three of our original porters deserted the party at the rest house, and if any more go it will be quite impossible to drive Crocker’s eighty head of cattle through the thick bush.

  Yesterday afternoon, I went on a small scouting mission to climb a hill with one of the guides. I found pandemonium on my return. One of the porters had been shot through the chest, and was dying. Crocker told me that the fellow had been threatening to desert and take half a dozen others with him. He had meant to shoot above his head to frighten him, but had somehow misfired and caught him in the chest. I did what I could for the poor man with morphia and bandages, but it was not much, and he died soon after nightfall. I then had to sit up all night talking to the men, begging them to stay. I offered them the last of the rupees and paid them double wages of cloth; I also gave them some of the trinkets we had been reserving – a small mirror, a harmonica, one of Martha’s old rag dolls – and by dawn had just about quelled the rebellion. The natives not engaged in negotiation with me howled all night for the departed. Crocker slept throughout.

  The next day was taken up with the obsequies, with the dead man wound in a piece of cloth and carried slung on a pole, as though in a hammock. It was noisy and prolonged; it cost us a whole day and a great deal of water.

  The following day we pressed on through dense scrub and growing heat. We made about twelve miles, but spirits are low.

  Two days later:–

  In the afternoon, we came to a feverish river, stagnant and hung about with old creepers hanging from dead trees. Mud-coloured crocodiles basked by its edge, and at dusk I saw a giraffe come down to drink, slowly spreading out its legs one by one, like a tent being lowered at each corner, so that its neck could be brought down low enough to sip the brown water, as it looked round all the time for predators. This scene may not have changed for several million years. In any normal world, all these peculiar animals would long ago have been extinct – these freaks of nature. But here in Africa, time stopped and nothing changed.

  There was a rope-and-wood bridge across the river, which Crocker urged his cattle over, before any of us could question him. He is quite fanatical about these wretched animals (which now number fewer than sixty). In my view, the bridge was not well made in the first place and was very much weakened by the passage of the cattle; I undertook the crossing with extreme trepidation. Sure enough, I found some of the wooden planks broken or missing; but mercifully I made it over, and so did our guide. The donkeys were not all so fortunate.

  Two of them fell twenty feet into the river, and within seconds one saw little but churning hooves and bulging eyes as the brown water turned red to the sou
nd of their terrified cries. The indolent crocodiles moved with appalling haste. I am very sorry to say that we lost one of the porters in the same way.

  Loaded onto one of the donkeys were several calabashes of water and onto the other were all my photographic plates, films and my old Underwood – everything photographic not related to the map-making, including every single record of the trail of footprints. I am afraid that the footprint itself, safely wrapped and preserved as it was, went down too, and will remain on that prehistoric riverbed for the remainder of time.

  It was growing dark, and we were forced to pitch camp not far from this evil place. A hippopotamus sniffed round my tent during the night, but Crocker assured me that the hippo is a harmless vegetarian and would only attack if I got into the river. I said that in the circumstances that was an unlikely move on my part. I was beginning to hate this man.

  The next day Thomas found he had contracted a fever. There were so many flies and sources of infection that it was surprising only that he had been well for so long. He wanted to lie in the shade and do nothing. He had never known lassitude like it; it was as though he had smoked ten pipes of opium. However, the mood of the party was for moving on as fast as possible, so as soon as the funeral rites of the dead porter had been observed (more quickly this time, since the body could not be retrieved from the river), he was helped up on to a mule and strapped into the saddle.

  The heat intensified in the closed scrub through which they were travelling. Towards noon, they saw a group of Masai, who had wandered many miles from the Serengeti in search of food; they were dying off each day, and a flock of vultures followed them, barely waiting for the corpse to stop moving. Thomas found it difficult to stay upright in the saddle, and was tormented by a desire to drink, but knew that he could not take more than his share of water.

  ‘You are fortunate to be on the move,’ said Crocker. ‘There is nothing worse for fever than to be stuck in one place.’