Annabelle paused, caught in some dream.
‘So what about these Karamojong in Lodwar?’ I prompted her.
‘Yes. Well, George asked them about possible fossil sites to the west, back the way these people had come, across the desert or in the foothills of the Loima mountains, which straddle the Ugandan border. And that’s an even wilder area, those hills. Nothing there at all, not even tracks.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, they told him there were a few likely river beds, dry wadis running out of the hills. Some of this hill country had seemed promising from the air — the stone formations: we’d looked at it once from the spotter plane. But it was camel country. You couldn’t make it anywhere in there by road. It didn’t seem possible for a fossil dig. It was too isolated. So George turned the idea down.
‘But then one of these old Karamojong men — they wanted money you see: they were destitute, starving — he said he had some real information, not about fossil sites, but something even more interesting for a white man. So George paid him some money. And the old man told him about it then, about a white child living up there, on the other side of the mountains, with a branch of the Tepeth tribe, driven far up into the hills years before, hidden in a small valley there.’
‘A white child? Clare?’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t just that she was a white child, the old man said: more than that, she was a vital symbol, an emblem for the tribe as well, because she was white and had been found alone in the wilds and couldn’t speak: a Rain Queen, the old man said, a guarantee of fertility. And it was this that took the four of us there at the end of that season’s dig. The rest of the team went back to Nairobi. Of course, we didn’t mention anything about the child, just said we were taking a week off, looking for possible fossil sites for the next season’s work.’
‘You just went off on your own like that, into the blue?’
‘Yes. But Willy and George knew all about that sort of travel. They’d been doing it for years out in east Africa after all. We took water with us. And there was something of a map, an old army map, and we had compasses, iron rations, several rifles — all the usual kit. Besides, Willy and George were fascinated by the whole thing now, obsessed by it all. A white child, some sort of Rain Queen, a fertility emblem, who didn’t speak, the old man had said. And George was pretty sure he wasn’t lying. He knew the Karamojong well. But the real point, you see, was that we hadn’t done too well that winter around Lake Rudolf. Nothing of much interest had turned up. In fact, Willy had caused a lot of trouble there that year — with some of the local Turkana near Lake Rudolf. He’d dug up one of their ancestral burial places — just a strange pattern of stones, but that’s what it was — and our backers were pretty annoyed too. So Willy and George both thought this might be a way of saving things, of getting the oil company to go on financing them: if they could find this strange child and bring her back to civilisation. Instead of a lot of old fossil bones, a white Rain Queen to a lost tribe … well, that would make better publicity back home.’
Annabelle paused. She was angry, derisive. A lock of her hair had fallen across her cheek. She brushed it away slowly. ‘Of course that was the start of the whole problem; why the tribe attacked us afterwards,’ she went on, reflecting. ‘George and Willy’s problem … they could never stop digging up and destroying things, like all the other white men in Africa. Old bones or a strange child, it was all the same to them. Africa had to be dug up, torn apart, and all just for the sake of publicity or money or professional advancement back home. Anyway, to be fair, we were all of us intrigued by the adventure to begin with. So we set off …
‘For the first two days west of Lodwar we were on a hardened camel track, quite straight, like a road, so that it should have been easy going. Except for the heat. This was the start of the really hot weather. And even though we moved mostly at night, it was killing. Flat as flat could be, just the baking red floor of the valley. And though we could just see the hills twenty or thirty miles away, shimmering in the distance ahead of us, we wondered if we’d make them …
‘Well, we did. On the fourth day. The ground rose fairly quickly then, up the old stream-beds, and the going was easier. It was a little cooler and there was some shade in the rocks. But it was just sheer chance we ran into the old Volkswagen in one of these dry wadis where it had conked out years before.’
‘A car?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Almost entirely covered in a sand drift, beneath the ledge of the wadi, just a front bumper and a wheel showing. Well, when we got the sand away we saw the end of the car had been lifted up on rocks a few feet clear of the ground, and beneath it were the two skeletons lying side by side.’
‘Skeletons?’
‘Well, they were partly mummified. Strips of flesh, then the bone. The sand and the dry heat under the ledge had preserved them side by side there, close together: a man and a woman, trying to find some shade beneath the car, obviously. The woman had a lot of hippie beads round her neck and there was a ridiculously small plastic water bottle between them. That was all. Except for the child’s stuff.’
Annabelle eased herself on the bench, sighing in the evening heat.
‘We found that inside the car: some tiny clothes, a teddy-bear I remember, a few other toys. But there was no sign of any child — of Clare, in fact. I suppose she must have been about two years old when her parents died. She’d probably had the last of the water … and she’d survived, somehow. Quite soon, higher up into the hills, a little vegetation started. There was some water, a few animals. We saw jackals. So maybe that was how she survived. And then these tribespeople found her, the Tepeth from the other side of the mountains.
‘Anyway, it was clear what had happened before they found her: those flower children, the hippie generation of the late sixties — here were two of them, and their child, out in Africa, searching for some paradise out in these empty hills. They’d taken a Volkswagen, knowing little or nothing about this sort of country, and had run out of petrol, food, water. Or all three. And that was that. They paid the price.’
‘But who were they? They must have had families somewhere back home. Someone must have been looking for them. Didn’t you let them know?’
‘No. As things turned out, we didn’t. But now we knew the old Karamojong had been telling the truth. There’d been a white child in the car, and it must have been this same child, living further on up in the mountains.’ Annabelle had become excited in the telling of this story, which she had withheld so long, her voice reflecting the excitement of the actual reality. I no longer had to threaten her. I was excited myself.
‘Well?’
‘The valley the old man had talked about was on the far side of the mountain, beyond the main peak. And it was hard going, dragging the camels up through the dry scrub. You see, we were on the wrong side of the mountains for rain. That came in on the other side, blowing from the west, from equatorial Africa, over the lakes.
‘It took us a whole day just to get round the scorching peak. And then suddenly we were down the other side and in another world. It was almost lush near the top, pale spring green slopes, with old cedar trees on the ridges way beneath us and a thick rain forest below that. But there were wild flowers up where we were. And the air was marvellous, the sky huge, pale blue, violet, with a few great puffy clouds sailing in from fifty miles away. I remember it all exactly. There were proper animals on this side, too. Mountain antelope, colobus monkeys further down, and a leopard we saw. And it was all untouched, that was the point. Just the sort of wild paradise those two flower people had been looking for.