The spell was broken by a noisy barrage of questions, excitement and congratulations. Nadine stood up and passed the figure, still partly hidden in a lump of earth to Dr Drummond. With a loud exclamation he took it from her while the others crowded around. Nadine still stood waist-deep in the trench: I went to her and offered a hand to pull her up. I then saw what was in her eyes. It was only for a few seconds that we stood so, her foot braced for the jump, our hands and eyes locked. I hauled her up — a little too vigorously perhaps -
for at the top she was slightly off balance and lurched against me. She steadied herself after a longer pause than was necessary. She _stared at me curiously, searchingly, the sea-green of the fine eyes still hazed from their mute communion with the unknown. She then joined Dr Drummond, who was pouring out excited, expert praise. I stood back from the group.
Dr Drummond declared she must have found some place of ritualistic worship. Work was called off for the day to clean up and examine Nadine's find. We gathered in high anticipation in the big marquee which served as a mess room and the professor prepared to extract the statuette from its matrix, as the envelope of earth is called. The late afternoon brought no relief from the heat. It came in waves through the shimmering canvas. My ears started to ring and I felt nauseated. Nadine helped Dr Drummond deftly with drills, probes and brushes. As the figure became progressively exposed Dr Drummond became more excited. It was a female figure, carved from a material which resembled ivory. The head was revealed first, showing clear, fine features, a rather prominent nose and high forehead. The breasts were capped with gold leaf of afer thinness. Dr Drummond exclaimed that the metal was as thin and apparently as pure as any modern process could achieve. More earth was cleared and we saw the navel similarly capped in gold. As the matrix was brushed off further to expose the waist, however, no more of the precious metal came to light. Then the last concealing fragment of earth fell away, showing buttocks which had none of the gross enlargement called steatopygia which is the sign of a primitive race. It was a slim body fashioned in perfect physiological detail. A hush fell upon the onlookers and Dr Drummond handed the figure to Nadine. He began drawing some comparison with emphasis on sex worship among the Hamitic peoples of the Mediterranean coastline. In the heat haze the, group seemed far away, as if I were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. The oppressiveness bore down upon me; the buzzing in my ears grew. I did not know that malaria was at work. I was able to focus only by screwing up my eyes. I swayed on my feet, waves of hot and cold sweat sweeping across me. The nearest thing to it I had known was air-sickness.
I remember trying to concentrate on Nadine's face when she started to speak. Her words were drowned by a roar in my I clawed at the trestle table to save myself, but my hands seemed to have no power. I slid to the ground.
They told me at the hospital that my delirium lasted five days while the fever ran its course. Each time I rose to semiconsciousness I fought to catch Nadine's words. My fogged brain conjured her up clothed in gold, a priestess sacrificing before an altar shaped like The Hill; I saw her kneeling and begged her to lift her eyes to mine but she would not; I saw her drop the priestess's robe and stand naked except for golden points like the statuette's at her breasts and navel. She came towards me..
I broke through to consciousness in a torrent of sweat. Nadine was sitting by my bed in the white ward.
It is easy to fall in love after a war which has torn apart the lives of half the world and one comes ydung and new to the task of remaking it. The Hill and its age-old mystery lay close to both our hearts. My own work — the study of the art of a people who left to posterity their genius in the form of beautifully engraved boulders with wild animal designs?as related.
We fell in love.
We both sensed rather than felt the first tug of the tide that day in the little hospital at Messina. She told me how my sudden collapse had caused consternation among the expedition. It had been impossible to consider driving me through the bush tracks in the dark. Next morning, still delirious, I'd been taken by two of the party by Land-Rover to the hospital. Nadine sat by the bed and eyed me thoughtfully.
'That was the moment when all our troubles began.'
My brain felt as agile as a hipped dinosaur. I hadn't begun to consider how she herself came to be at the town instead of The Hill. I experienced a sense of warm elation that she was there, and it was enough at that stage.
She smiled. 'You've been missing from the world for nearly a week. It didn't stop because of that, you know.'
I did not want to be lumped into the general category of troubles. Moreover, I was limp and edgy._ 'One can't help contracting malaria either.'
'Well, we can be sure that it wasn't visited upon you.'
'What on earth do you mean?'
Her eyes were very clear and a little puzzled.
'All our other problems — well, we weren't so sure about them.'
I was not responding properly. My soggy brain took in the fact that she wasn't wearing bush clothes, which meant she must have stayed in town overnight and changed specially to come to visit me. The cool white cotton dress enhanced her dark hair.
'Guy, do you believe what they say about The Hill?' she went on before I could answer.
My fever days had been too blanked with superheated images to want any more gropings now that I was conscious again. It was good to see her next to me, warm and real. Other things didn't seem important.
The taboo, I suppose?'
'Ye. . es. When you live, eat and sleep right next to The Hill-no, I can't really explain what I mean. It's more a feeling than anything else. It's not simply an ordinary hill. I'm sorry I'm putting it badly but … but there's something there. Something.'
'When I made the preliminary reconnaissance ahead of the expedition itself I couldn't raise help within thirty miles once the natives heard we were bound for The I replied. 'As far as I am concerned there's nothing to it. You get these extraordinary psychological upsurges of the primitive all over Africa. For instance, there's a tribe living near this very town which claims you can rid yourself of a headache merely by walking along a path the witch doctor indicates and rubbing it off on the bushes.'
She blurted out unexpectedly as if she could not keep back the news any longer. 'We've abandoned the expedition.'
'What!'
I felt acutely let down in a double sense. Oddly, the more telling reason was that I had imagined all along that she had taken the trouble to make the rough trip from The Hill specially to see me. Her real motive seemed much more matter-of-fact.
'Don't tell me your statuette is an image of the powers of darkness and that it's brought down a curse on the expedition like that of Tutankhamen!'
She flushed slightly. 'Let me tell you. When the fuss of getting you away safely to hospital was over we set to work again. But we found we couldn't. All the survey pegs marking the trenches had been uprooted and scattered about.'