Night brought more clouds from the northeast, immense black dreadnoughts, and the air crackled with electricity. Although we rested for a time before plunging on again, we did not pause to sleep. Everyone appeared to be fueled by adrenaline and nervous energy. Hyenas and leopards were nocturnal hunters, after all, and our knowledge that we were attempting a migration during their biological uptime kept us alert. Five male habilines with clubs might be able to hold a pack of overgrown Pleistocene hyenas at bay, but the battle would be unpleasant.
Fortunately, cloud-spanning bolts of lightning unraveled often enough that we could monitor the transfigured landscape for predators, most of which were cowed by the incessant booming and crackling.
The storm discomfited us, too, but we triumphed over our fear with the idiot, inbred bravado of our species. In fact, I put these dreadful flashes and bombinations out of my mind by thinking about Helen.
Not too far ahead of us, maybe two hundred yards, lightning struck a solitary baobab, exploding the tree’s fibrous trunk and setting its branches ablaze like a Christmas candelabrum. To burn so splendidly it must have been rotten to the heart. It stopped us dead. The equatorial heat had dried the ground and grasses so thoroughly after the rains that fire ran down the torch of the baobab into the savannah. The breeze fanned these fires toward us from the northeast. The lightning leaping overhead had an earthly counterpart in the crimson and amber flames dancing across our line of march.
In spite of the wind, these fires burned wherever they wished. They consumed the shrubbery and tussocks slanting toward the lake and the patchy ground cover carpeting the steppe in front of us.
Equatorial East Africa was instantly an inferno.
The Minids’ bravado deserted them. Their masquerade of defiance collapsed. Alfie came pushing back through the women and children to organize a retreat. Flakes of ash clung to his beard and body hair, and his eyes coruscated like garnets. The barricades of fire radiating from the baobab had lengthened with such speed that no one resisted his command to fall back toward the danger we had escaped.
Certainly he meant for us to fall back only until we could outflank the prairie fires and so discover another route to our destination, but his panic—and that of the other Minids—suddenly alienated me from their aims. With Helen dead, I no longer wanted to subject myself to the stark imperatives directing their lives. I did not want to go back to Shangri-la or either of the two Helensburghs. My present—even my present in this prehistoric dream territory—had antecedents outside of habiline experience, and I wanted my daughter to grow up with all the twentieth-century advantages. I had to get her out.
Nicole had the Grub. She was fleeing with the others. I caught Nicole’s arm and took the child away.
The fires partitioning the savannah continued to subdivide, extruding wall after wall of madly flailing light. I was crazy not to flee with the Minids, but a different notion had taken possession of me. Dreaming of another kind of deliverance and holding my daughter against my chest, I trotted through a flame-etched corridor of darkness toward the ancient Rift Valley lake.
My plan was to find a safe passage through the burning grasslands to the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko. In fact, I wanted to return to the very spot from which I had leapt into the Pleistocene.
Was it possible that after nearly two years Kaprow’s omnibus could still be parked beside the lake, awaiting my return? Possible maybe, but not very likely. After losing transcordion contact with me, Blair and Kaprow might have reluctantly concluded that I was dead. Further, for all I knew, Somali irregulars could have overrun the lakeside protectorate or a cataclysmic world war put period to the persistent human hope for a global utopia. Either of these events, or any number of less traumatic ones, could have made White Sphinx a historical irrelevancy and me the anonymous victim of the project’s demise.
The walls of fire crisscrossing the savannah tantalized and fretted the Grub. She arched her back, waved her tiny hands, kicked her legs. It was all I could do to keep from fumbling her to the ground like a wet football.
Holding her, I trotted along in the imbecile conviction that my fate really did matter to my century, that my colleagues were faithfully waiting for me. They had to be. Otherwise the Grub and I would die, and the Grub, I felt confident, had not been born to waste her sweetness on the desert air. Even struggling in my arms, she did not cry.
Ahead of us, hypnotized by the crackling barricades of fire, three giant hyenas stood in a kraal of darkness, panting like dogs. They were directly in our path. Kneeling beside a gall acacia, I exerted my strength and uprooted the bush with one hand. Then, in a blazing tussock not far from a massive bank of flames, I ignited this bush and advanced on the hyenas. For want of any alternative route away from the lake, they had begun jogging toward the Grub and me, shambling like three emaciated bears in motley.
We were on a collision course.
One of the hyenas leapt through a break in the wall of fire and disappeared into the darkness beyond.
The other two creatures halted. In the triangular lanterns of their skulls their eyes shone eerily. The smaller of these two hyenas suddenly turned tail and loped back through the corridor of flames toward the lake.
Undeterred by these defections, the third animal vented a hysterical laugh and resumed its swaying trot. I shook my outstretched brand at it to no avail.
Even though the burning bush had begun to broil my fingers, I did not let go. I was immune to both pain and fear. After all, I had once survived the onslaught of an entire pack of these animals. On another occasion I had helped the Minids outlast a siege of giant hyenas by reciting a story and obediently shooting one of the besiegers with my besottedness to wholesale ingestion by a leopard. Why, then, should I fear this frenzied, stinking hulk of a hyena?
Running past me—away from the brand that I tried to plunge into its face—the hyena twisted its body about and took my leg into its jaws. By bracing its feet and forcibly tugging, it upended me. This, I remembered, was virtually the same tactic the hyenas at the water hole had used to drag down the rhino calf. As I fell, I tossed aside my torch and tried to shift my weight so that the Grub would receive none of the inevitable impact.
My butt struck the ground, then my head. Despite my preparations, these sudden jolts sent the Grub tumbling through a powdery coverlet of ash. Stunned, I lay where I had fallen, unable to go after my daughter or to resist the hateful savagery of the hyena.
What then occurred will strike many as an improbable deus ex machina solution to our dilemma. I cannot effectively counter this complaint. To argue that I dreamed this solution is to cast into doubt everything else that happened during my sojourn in Pleistocene East Africa. (However, it is entirely possible that I foresaw this solution in a childhood spirit-traveling episode, one that, at the time, I had believed a tainted or impure dream.) On the other hand, to insist on the absolute reality of this occurrence is to violate the self-consistent world to which the director of the White Sphinx Project posted me. Let me, therefore, justify the following strange events in the only way possible, by declaring that they conform to the reality of my subjective experience immediately after falling to the hyena’s attack. If they have any other justification, I do not intend to record it here.