But now he saw hulking brown-black shapes just ahead, dimly visible through the tangled green. He froze.
A huge arm reached out to a branch wider than Capo’s thigh. Muscles worked in a great mound of shoulder, and the branch was snapped in two as easily as Capo might snap off a twig to clean his teeth. Giant fingers plucked leaves from the nearby branches and pushed them steadily into immense jaws. The whole head worked as the big animal chewed, heavy muscles working the skull and jaw together.
The nearest creature was an ape, as Capo was, a male — and yet unlike Capo. The big male watched the odd, scrawny little apes without curiosity. He looked powerful, threatening. But he didn’t move. The male, and a small clan of females and infants, did nothing but sit around and feed on leaves and the wild celery that carpeted the forest floor.
This was a gorilla: a remote cousin of Capo’s. His kind had split off from the broader lineages of apes a million years ago. The split had come in a period when another forest had fragmented, isolating the populations it supported. As their habitat shrank to the mountaintops, these apes had turned to a diet of leaves, endlessly abundant even here, and became huge enough to resist the cold — yet they remained oddly graceful, able to move silently through this dense forest.
Though populations of gorillas would later adapt back to lowland conditions, learning to climb trees and subsist off fruit, in a sense their evolutionary story was already over. They had become specialized in their environments, learning to eat food that was so well-defended — covered in hooks, spikes, and stings — that no other creatures competed for it. They could eat nettles, for example, with an elaborate maneuver that involved stripping leaves from a stem, folding in the stinging leaf edges, and popping the whole packet into their mouths.
Sitting in their montane islands, lazily eating their leaves, they would survive almost unchanged until human times, when the final extinction would overtake them all.
When he was sure the gorillas were no threat, Capo crept away, leading the others onward through the forest.
At last Capo emerged from the far side of the forested ridge.
They had at last clambered out of the arid lowland basin. When he looked south across the plateau he had reached, he faced a rocky, rubble-strewn valley that scoured its way down to lower ground. But there, beyond the valley, he could see the land he had hoped to find: higher than the plain he had left behind, but well watered, glistening with lakes, coated green by grass, and studded with pockets of forest. The shadowy forms of a great herd of herbivores — proboscideans, perhaps — drifted with stately grandeur across the lush plain.
With a hoot of triumph Capo capered, vaulted over rocks, drummed on the stony ground, and shit explosively, spraying the dry boulders with his stink.
His followers responded to Capo’s display only listlessly. They were hungry and dreadfully thirsty. Capo was exhausted himself. But he displayed anyway, obeying a sound instinct that every triumph, however small, should be celebrated.
But now he had climbed so high that the remote, persistent growling from the west had grown louder. Dimly curious, Capo turned and looked that way.
From this elevated place he could see a long way. He made out a remote turbulence, a white billowing. It seemed to hover above the ground like a boiling cloud. He was actually seeing a kind of mirage, a very remote vision carried to him by refraction in the warming air. But the billowing steam clouds were real, though their suspension above the ground was not.
What he was glimpsing was the Strait of Gibraltar, where even now the mightiest waterfall in Earth’s history — with the power and volume of a thousand Niagaras — was thundering over shattered cliffs and into an empty ocean basin. Once the plain from which Capo had climbed had been covered by water two kilometers deep, for it was the floor of the Mediterranean.
Capo had been born in the basin that lay between the coast of Africa, to the south, and Spain, to the north. In fact, he was not very far from the place where a clever dinosaur called Listener, long ago, had stood at the shore of Pangaea and gazed out on the mighty Tethys Sea. Now he had climbed out of the basin to reach Africa proper. But if Listener had seen the birth of the Tethys, Capo was witnessing something like its death. As the ocean levels dropped, this last fragment of the Tethys had become dammed at Gibraltar. Landlocked, the great ocean had evaporated — until at last it emptied, leaving behind a great valley in places five kilometers deep, littered with salt pans.
But as the climate oscillated, the sea level rose again, and Atlantic waters broke through the Gibraltar barrier. Now, the ocean was refilling. But Capo had nothing to fear of giant waves cascading from the west, for even a thousand Niagaras could not refill an ocean overnight. The Gibraltar waters suffused the great basin more gradually, creating great rivers. The old seafloor turned slowly into sodden marshland, where the vegetation slowly died, before the waters rose so high they covered over the ground altogether.
But after each refilling the global ocean levels would drop again, and once again the Mediterranean would evaporate. This would happen as many as fifteen times over the million years bracketing Capo’s brief life. The Mediterranean would be left with a complex seabed geology, with layers of silt sandwiching salt pans laid down in the successive dryings.
But this trapped ocean’s dryings were having a profound effect on the area Capo lived in — and on Capo’s kind. Before the great dryings, the Sahara region had been densely forested and well watered, and home to many species of apes. But with the climatic pump of the dryings, and in the lengthening rain shadow cast by the more remote Himalayas, the Sahara was becoming increasingly arid. The old forests were breaking up. And with them the communities of apes were splintering, each fragmentary population embarking on its own journey to a new evolutionary destiny — or extinction.
But the great rumbling, the blurred vision of Gibraltar, was too remote to have any meaning for Capo. He turned away, and stumbled down onto the plain.
At last Capo moved off bare rock on to vegetation. He relished the green softness of the grass under his knuckles as he loped forward. As the others tumbled after him they rolled and sprawled, pulling up the long grass around them, relishing the delicious contrast with the hard lifeless rock.
But they weren’t home yet. A stretch of a few hundred meters of open savannah, studded with thorn bushes, separated them from the nearest forest clump — and the plain was not unoccupied.
A group of hyenas worked at a fallen carcass. Bulky, round, it might have been an infant gomphothere, perhaps felled by a chasma. The hyenas snapped and growled at each other as they worked at the scavenged meat, their heads buried in the creature’s stomach, their sleek bodies writhing industriously.
As Capo cowered in the grass, Frond and Finger came up alongside him. They hooted softly, and gave Capo’s backside a perfunctory groom, picking out bits of dust and rock. The younger males were cursorily acknowledging his authority. But Capo could tell they were impatient. Weary, thirsty, hungry, thoroughly spooked by the trek across the openness, they, like the rest of the troop, longed to reach the shelter and provision of the trees. And that was corroding Capo’s hold on them. The tension between the three males was powerful, toxic.