‘I guess we don’t. I just … I don’t know where I belong any more. Maybe not anywhere.’ She clasped my knee and spoke with a sudden hushed urgency: ‘That’s why I have to keep going deeper in. She’s here all around us, in the water that permeates the land; she’s flowing through it. We must be getting close now …’

Yet again, as she opens to me, she has to start talking in riddles.

‘Do you mean we’re getting close to the centre …?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her hand slid from my knee. ‘Always questions …’

I noticed she was shivering. So was I.

‘We better get ourselves dry somehow,’ I said. ‘We’re going to catch our death of cold.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘There won’t be viruses here adapted to mammals.’

‘One of the benefits of not belonging?’

Her face turned glum. She stood up and studied the sky. ‘The rain’s stopping anyway.’

Shards of starscape had punctured the clouds in one part of the sky. I too stood up. I could feel the heat leaching out of my body. Without warning, Salome laid her arms round me and hugged me in a full embrace; chest to chest, thigh to thigh, texture of wet gooseflesh all over her, sand coating her back. I could feel how thin she was despite all the food. She rubbed her hands up and down my back to warm me. I winced because of the soreness there, so she stopped rubbing and we just held each other. The miracle of that. Was I forgiven at last? Yet this nude embrace felt oddly devoid of intimacy. We were too cold, for one thing; and it seemed to me that as she pressed her body against mine she held back her inner being, as though she merely wanted the solace of warmth and touch and it didn’t really matter who I was.

The rain eased, as she’d said. We could hear Curtis’s snoring in the camp. Suddenly it faltered. There was a gasping snort as, perhaps, he turned in his sleep and the weight of his body pressed on his wound. Salome instantly disengaged from me and stepped away, peering towards the camp. Let Curtis stay asleep! Because if he did we could escape from him right now. Just slip back to grab our things and then across the stream, into the forest, and up the pathway of time.

But she’d said, ‘No one gets left behind,’ and I knew she meant no one. Strange she might be, wounded inside, but she was truly a good person. That was why I loved her. She would not leave Curtis here to die alone. But if I told her the truth about her brother’s death, would she be willing to leave him then?

The thing is, even though I knew that Curtis would gladly abandon me to my doom, I wasn’t sure I could do the same to him.

The brightening moon bejewelled the raindrops dripping from the ferns and the calamites’ feathery leaves and poised like beads of quick-silver on Salome’s skin. She glanced once more towards Curtis, then picked up her knife from the sand and began to walk in the opposite direction along the stream.

‘Where are you going?’

She stopped and looked back, a lithe twisting of her body which made a crease in her flesh below the ribs. ‘To scout around, see if I can find some food.’

‘Just … as you are?’

She shrugged. ‘My duds will be soaked.’ She clocked me shivering again. ‘Best thing is to get our bodies moving. It won’t be long till sun-up.’ Briskly she vanished into the shadows.

Back in camp, Curtis was indeed still asleep. I rubbed my body dry as best I could, wrapped myself up in smelly rags, and tried to get back to sleep. Around me I heard the raindrops dripping from the primordial trees, thousands upon serried thousands of trees, receding for mile after trackless mile in every direction.

49

When I woke, it was light and the forest was steaming with mist. Stiff-winged insects thrummed above the stream. Salome was sitting by the water’s edge, still naked, sepia brown in the sun, braiding together some long fibres from a tree stem. Curtis was tearing off gobbets of raw flesh from a small tetrapod with his teeth. He too was naked, except for the strap holding the poultice on his wound.

I pulled on my wrecked shorts and went fishing. I found a colony of clams, the least unpleasant of flesh to eat raw, especially when the sun had broiled them in their shells long enough to kill them. I offered some to Salome and she thanked me and accepted them. Curtis scowled. Thank God he hadn’t seen us last night!

The cord Salome had braided became her new belt. She secured some fern leaves at the front, and one at the back, and slotted in her knife on one hip. That, plus the hair ribbon, was all she wore. Her last rags of cloth she buried in the marsh. Curtis was ready with no more than that strap round his waist. There he stood, defiantly displaying his tackle, and gripping in one hand the knife he’d nicked from me.

In their new state of undress the two of them bounced along at a faster clip than before — or so it seemed to me tramping behind in my sticky shorts and the rucksack rasping on my back. The memory of Salome in the night seemed like a dream. Perhaps it was. Her primal garb, like Eve departing from Eden, made her more alien, untouchable, and at the same time more desirable. Did she know what effect she wrought on Curtis? The man was turbocharged by the sight of that solitary tongue of fern between her bunching buttocks, by the sinuous flexing of her sweat-glossy back. Maybe it was the pressure of him behind her that made her walk so fast.

His animal nakedness made everything more edgy, that and the blade he carried in his hand all the time, ready to lash at any stem that impeded him or any prey he fancied to kill. Creatures scuttled from us through the undergrowth. Bulbous pairs of amphibian eyes dunked underwater as our shadows swept by. It seemed to me, irrationally, that it was Curtis they feared. He seemed now more like a predatory beast than a human being. When we stopped to rest, he’d sit there chomping raw flesh, his eyes tracking Salome; he’d swivel round to keep her in view, and sometimes she’d meet his gaze and there’d be a spark of something between them. Little was spoken. Decisions about stopping and starting were made without words.

Besides the insects whirring through the soupy air, other wingless ones sprang like catapult shots among the debris of dead trees, enormous myriapods rippled their endless train of legs across the wreckage, and spiders crouched beside webs glittering with moisture. Now and again we spotted a primitive reptile climbing a giant clubmoss, claws hooking the scaly bark; more commonly the wide-mouthed head of a big amphibian breaching the khaki swamp to ogle us with froggy eyes, only to submerge as we drew near. Sometimes all we saw was a long finned tail, like a gigantic tadpole’s, slicing through the scum. Perhaps it was such creatures that fed my growing sensation of being watched by unseen eyes. Perhaps it was just the claustrophobia of the steadily denser, wetter forest, in which our options were ever more curtailed by murky swamp, on one side, and close-packed groves of clubmosses; sometimes both, where stands of trees grew in deepish water.

By the end of that day the sores on my shoulders and back were much worse; Salome’s were improved by these two days without a rucksack. I discovered a horrible yellow-grey fungus had taken hold in the fabric of both my shorts and my rucksack. I threw away the shorts. Only loincloths left now.

While Curtis scouted for prey along a ridge of dry ground above our new campsite, and I gathered bracket fungi from the cordaites trunks, Salome went down to the brook to collect the bulblike roots of some plants growing at the water’s edge. She got back to find me gingerly probing the lumpy sores on my shoulders.

She looked into my eyes with her old directness. ‘Why don’t you just let that rucksack go?’

I didn’t bother trying, again, to explain the incalculable value to science of the data it contained.

She peered close at my shoulders and gave a sigh. ‘These are going to get septic if you don’t take care.’

‘You think the bacteria here can deal with me — being that I’m a mammal?’

Her mouth tightened in almost a smile — ‘I figure they might have a try’ — and I knew that last night had not been a dream. ‘Come on. I’ll clean them for you.’

We’d camped near this tiny stream because its water ran unusually quick in this country of stagnant pools and channels and so was unusually clean. I knelt on the bank while she sluiced cupped hands of water over my shoulders and down my back. Then she plucked a blade from a fern dangling over the brook and, using this like a piece of lint, cleaned right into the sores.

I yelped at the unexpectedly stinging pain. ‘You sure that leaf isn’t poisonous?’

‘It has a bitter taste so I figured it might be toxic enough to act like an antiseptic. Salt water would be best, really … What you need is fresh air on your skin all the time.’

With Curtis gone, she was more talkative than she’d been all day. I gritted my teeth as her fingertips thrust the fern leaflet into the sores. Then she bathed the whole area again, stooping and rising in a steady rhythm to scoop up water from the stream, waves of cool wetness on my shoulders and flooding down my back. My head sank forwards and for the first time in so long I enjoyed the simple pleasure of sensation. It felt more than that, though: like receiving a benediction, the water a sacrament from on high, cleansing me, sheathing me in coolness.

Though I couldn’t see her, I felt the old sparkling of connection. Maybe she felt it too. The flow of water ceased. I could hear very loud the rushing of the stream and, up the hill, the wind in the treetops and, further off still, the rarping of distant amphibians.

When I looked up from down there on my knees she seemed to tower hugely tall, superhuman. As if she’d read my mind, she knelt down beside me and became a woman again. Sweat trickled down her face and between her breasts. There was a softness in her features which reminded me of last night. I felt the whoosh of energy between us, and the inexorable effect her proximity used to have on me and hadn’t happened for so long. I saw the recognition in her eyes. There was nothing romantic about it. She had just been cleaning my sores! It was this place: the heat, the humidity, the primitiveness, the hyperactivating oxygen.

There was a bidding in the way she looked at me. I thought she wanted me to touch her, but I wasn’t sure she actually meant me to do so, for Curtis might soon be back and she could surely see the threadbare cloth steepling from my groin.

‘You could do the same for me.’

‘What …?’

‘The stream’s too small to bathe in …’ She indicated her own back and the remains of the rash there.

Long ago she’d said, ‘You could do the same for me sometime.’ The time had never been right; the moment had always gone. This time I would do something. I filled my hands in the stream, she planted her hands on the ground like a seated cat and bowed her shoulders, and I began to sluice water down them. I put my back into it, scooped up water as fast as I could. I felt a giddy glow inside. Her back arched with each impact of water so her backside lifted from her heels. The water ran off the grooves between her ribs and down her spine’s deep cleft and drenched the fern blade drooping between the muscular globes of her buttocks.

The fern reminded me how she’d cleaned my sores. Maybe I could do that for her too. I was about to reach down the bank and pluck one of the ferns there, when Curtis arrived back.

He appeared from a different direction than the one he’d gone. In one hand he gripped a stout fish by the tail, in the other the knife. Even though I’d seen him striding around naked all day, it was still shocking to be confronted with him. The triangles of white skin each side of his black bush looked designed like a mandrill’s colour-coded butt to draw the eye. His arrival was too sudden for us to react before he beheld the scene: Salome gleaming wet on her knees, me standing over her. He stared speechless at us. I was momentarily paralysed. Salome remained poised on the ground like a cat about to pounce.

The fish dropped from his grasp. In a few quick strides he reached her. Still gripping the knife in one hand, he grabbed her arm with the other and hoicked her to her feet. The arm was so slim that his fingers and thumb met. He shook her so she flapped like a rag doll.

‘You’re getting too thin again! You got to eat! You got to get the meat your body needs!’

With a sudden movement that took him by surprise she wrenched free. ‘Get your hands off of me!’

She trembled like a cornered animal, ribs working smooth and quick, lips parted, knees bent, yellow eyes burning. His cock was half risen. His limbs were taut as piano strings.

‘You can keep your damn meat!’ She leapt across the brook and ran helter-skelter into the trees.

I wanted to run after her, away with her, just go and go till we’d escaped him for good. But of course I dared not, because I knew he’d overtake me at once; because I knew I must not provoke him. And my rucksack lay up there, half unpacked; all the things I couldn’t leave behind.

He turned angrily to me. I said, ‘The sores on her back needed washing.’

‘It looked to me like they’re healing up just fine.’ Suddenly he was right in front of me, I could smell his fishy, sweaty odour and his pungent breath, and his face was thrust so close to mine that his eyes half merged into a single cyclops eye. The knife was tight in his grip just inches from my belly.

He whipped away and stalked up to recover his fish. As he butchered it, I saw it had fleshy pairs of pelvic and pectoral fins. It was some freshwater kind of lobe-finned fish, the group from which land vertebrates evolved. Curtis doubtless hadn’t noticed. He didn’t try to filet it; just skinned and gutted it, then held it by its head and tail like a giant cob of corn and tore off the raw pink meat with his teeth.

50

Salome came back, of course, as she always did, and we journeyed on. Whether we kept on going or we turned back, we had to stay together. None of us would stand a chance alone in country like this. Over the next several days the land was overwhelmed by swamp almost completely. Most of the time, we were wading in slimy water up to our knees or deeper. Salome seemed sure of the route, but that it would remain a route passable to humans became daily harder to believe.

Some places, after she’d studied the scummy surface for signs of megafauna, she’d plunge into water that came at once to her shoulders. While Curtis splashed in behind her, I’d have to stop and take off my rucksack to carry it on my head. I’d still be ploughing through the mire, arms raised high, imagining unseen beasts homing in to snap their jaws round my middle, when the others hauled out at the far side and marched on. For hours afterwards our bodies might be clogged with dirt; other times, when the water was clean, they would gleam in the sunshine flooding between the narrow trees.

Salome seemed more than ever like some elemental being. Her slender form slid through the dense clubmoss thickets and skated over the bogland’s cloying grip. When the sun shone low behind her at the start of the day’s march she seemed almost translucent, haloed with light reflected from the moisture on her skin. Near the day’s end, when the sun shone full on her back, her figure was burnished bronze — the angular rims of her shoulder blades, the dimples each side of her sacrum, the tight creases under her buttocks. Maybe in the end it was simply the sight of her body that impelled me to keep going.

It impelled Curtis too. There was nothing to hide the flag of his incipient desire. The silent force of her will held him at bay, like the forcefield inside an atom which holds the constituent particles apart and at the same time binds them together. Curtis and I were two particles of like charge, so repellent to each other that we couldn’t exchange a civil word; both of us bound to Salome, as she forged on through swamp and mire, always keen to push on another half-mile before sunset if we could, as if she thought we might nearly be there, wherever ‘there’ was: the centre of the refugium, the beginning of life, the well at the world’s end. Despite the madness of carrying on, despite Vince’s death, the breakdown of the team, the intractable terrain, our literally hand-to-mouth subsistence, nearly all our equipment lost, the truth was that I still believed we could discover the source of this avenue through time, the key that would unlock the mystery of its existence and maybe prove more important than any of the knowledge of prehistory won along the way. I believed too that somehow, against all the odds, we could return.

It was midday and we’d stopped to drink from a river and, as usual, we were hungry. A colony of clams were attached like mussels to flat rocks shelving diagonally into the water, and in shady crevices spindly crustacea lurked. Salome and I began to gather these shellfish, taking care not to venture in too deep, as some large amphibians were visible further out.

Curtis had his eye on one of them that was drifting nearer. It was at least a metre long. Hard to say what length of tail was hidden underwater. He pulled his knife — my knife — from his waist strap. But the moment he began to wade in, the creature submerged. It resurfaced way out in the river, close to the others.

‘Nervous bastard!’

He retreated to the shelving rocks and swarmed up to their highest edge, where the broken strata overhung the water a couple of metres below. Seated there, legs stretched down the rock, he watched the dark shapes of the amphibians manoeuvre in the current like a regatta of U-boats. He was poised, knife in hand, to launch himself down like a gannet if any of them strayed in range. This they seemed uninclined to do. So he watched Salome instead. Every time I glanced his way, he was watching her, as she bent down, breasts falling into points, to tug a clam free, wincing each time because she’d condemned it to death, then straightened up to scan the water before bending again. He couldn’t take his eyes from her. Slowly his phallus rose, till it was fully erect, the knotted foreskin quivering beneath the swollen purple bulb. He just let it happen, just carried on staring.

Salome was standing quite still, clams nested in her arm, and staring back. I couldn’t see her face, only her shoulders rising and falling. All she had to do was laugh and he would be ridiculous. But she didn’t laugh, she didn’t turn away; she stood there in the shallows, facing him, offering her body to his gaze.

I couldn’t bear it. I had to do something. There was a tuft of narrow leaves growing vertical in the water like a quillwort. Pretending I hadn’t noticed what was happening, I ripped up this plant and splashed in front of Salome.

‘Do you think this will be edible?’

She looked at the plant in bewilderment. She was trembling faintly, breathing too quick. No! How could she still be in thrall to him? I pushed the plant at her hands so she had to take it. The clams fell from her grip and dropped with a volley of plops into the water.

‘I’m sorry.’ I splashed about to recover them, dropping other ones I’d collected. Trying to discharge the spell.

She looked past me towards him. There was a noise of loose stones cascading into the river as he began to descend from his perch. I didn’t look at him. I just carried on pretending the situation wasn’t happening.

‘You want any of these clams, Curtis?’ I cried.

In answer he came leaping down the slab of rock. Salome started to back away into deeper water. I backed away too, but in a different direction, on to the shore. She was backing away from him and I really thought he was going to rape her and there’d be nothing to stop him except me. But it wasn’t her he came after. It was me. His eyes were fixed in my direction. The knife was in his hand. His dick was sagging. He was striding like a theropod towards me. I thought I was done for. I stumbled backwards, lost my balance, the clams juggling into the air, and I came down hard on my bottom.

Curtis swept right past me. His hunter’s gaze was locked on something beyond me. It was a stocky amphibian, olive mottled, as big as a sheep, only its legs were short and bent, its head was huge, and its long finned tail dragged along the ground as it crawled purposefully towards the river. A noise thrashed through the dense horsetails it had come from. More of its kind? Or predators in pursuit? Probably predators, the creature looked so keen to reach the water. Suddenly it detected Curtis; it veered away from him, still doggedly making for the river. He broke into a run to head it off. His speed must have astounded it: the animal halted in confusion whether to turn back or follow its instinct to the water.

Then all lines of retreat were cut off as nine men burst from the thickets around us. Human beings! In the Carboniferous! They were thin, short, and totally naked. Each was grasping a stone or a stick. They had prognathous, heavy-browed features like the man and woman we’d seen in the Pleistocene rainforest. Their eyes went wide with astonishment at the sight of us. They swarmed forwards to tighten the arc enclosing the terrified amphibian and ourselves against the riverside. Those on the wings splashed into the water to surround Salome too. Then, as one, they thrust their arms high in the air and screamed at the tops of their voices: ‘AWA’ABA!’

51

Curtis stared at the men, as astonished as I was. The amphibian seized the moment and tried to lumber past, its body flexing from side to side like a fish’s motion through water. Curtis struck at its head, but he was distracted by the men, and the broad bony snout jerked to meet the blow and knock the knife from his hand. At that instant of contact between hunter and prey the cordon of men began to shout an aggressive, rhythmic chant unmistakably urging Curtis to fight. The knife was lost in thick moss, so he grabbed a stone from the ground and — just as the creature reached the water’s edge — leapt full-length on its back. His knees clenched its sides. His left arm clamped under its throat. With a throttled croak the jaws snapped open, but they couldn’t reach any-thing to bite, and the force of Curtis’s arm against the throat stopped them closing. The chant got louder, quicker, harsher. Curtis hammered his stone at the animal’s bulbous eyes. The amphibian rarped pitifully. He’d smashed both eyes to pulp, he was cudgelling the base of its skull, but it seemed too primitive to die. The howling chant drove him on. He dropped the stone and wrapped his other arm under the straining jaws. With all the strength of both arms, his back a ramrod of force from neck to butt, he heaved back, once, twice, and on the third go there was a crack as the neck broke and the animal began to convulse like an electrocuted frog.

A cacophony of whoops and yells erupted from the naked men. As they closed in around us, some shouted again, ‘Awa’aba!’ So these were the ‘Awauba’; the word wasn’t their name for themselves but an exclamation something like ‘Who the fuck are you?!’ Makela had indeed made it all the way here, through the ‘white desert’ of the Upper Carboniferous ice age. Whether alone or in company, she’d proved the round trip this deep could be done.

Meanwhile we had the Awauba to deal with. They jabbed the shuddering carcass with their sticks and warily slapped Curtis on the back, baring yellow teeth in mirthless grins. In the struggle his hide belt had been torn from his hips. He was as naked as the bony, sinewy men jostling round him. None of us had a chance to escape. I was just able to grab my rucksack before two of them prodded me with sticks and clammy hands into the congregation around Curtis and his prey. They smelt of bog water, rotten fish, and excrement. Dirt was seamed into their skin as if they hadn’t washed for days. Close up, their faces were even more striking: jutting brow ridges, receding chin, and a stubble of wiry hair framing the prematurely wrinkled flesh around the eyes. There was a disturbing blankness in their gaze. Their foreskins were mutilated into ill-shapen knots. They were all young. Despite their wizened faces, I think not one of them was over twenty-five and some were in their teens.

They prodded our shaggy hair and beards, my loincloth, the rucksack, Salome’s cache-sexe of ferns, everything that seemed strange to them. They eyed Salome with crude candour. One man plucked the knife from her waist and pressed his finger on its blade. Another pinched a fold of flesh on her back like a trader at a slave market. Violently she recoiled from him.

‘Keep your dirty hands off of her!’ Curtis roared.

The power of his voice startled them. The knife dropped into the water. I tried to mark the spot; we had to get back those knives. The Awauba didn’t seem to have realised what they were. They smashed some stones from the river to improvise crude edges and butchered the carcass with these. From the hacked-open gut belched a blast of stinking gas. They ripped out the organs they fancied as delicacies and tore at them raw with their big yellow teeth. Curtis they gave the heart. It was dripping with gore and had barely ceased quivering. Blood smeared his face as he tugged off a chunk of rubbery meat with his teeth. They grinned at him and chomped their grisly feast, their mouths smacking open and closed and dribbling gore down their chests.

I refused the meat, and Salome wasn’t offered any. One man pulled a bung from a shell shaped like an elongate cone, which for want of any cordage he’d been carrying in his hand. It looked for all the world like the lower valve of a productid brachiopod, an ancient kind that had stood upright on the seabed. I thought of those other brachiopod shells, lingulas, I’d spotted in Makela’s earrings … The man took from the shell a small brown pod, burst it open in his fingers, releasing a cloud of copper dust, and popped it in his mouth with a handful of river water to wash it down. He dished out these sporangia to everyone. As one was smacked into my hand I recognised the smell of the spores.

Curtis sniffed his and smiled. Another man, with a nasty scar across an empty eye socket, impatiently opened the pod for him and pushed it in his mouth. Curtis choked, wheezed for breath, then scooped up some water and swallowed hard. If these guys could take it neat, then he had to prove he could do the same. Quickly I split the pod I’d been given and pretended to slap it into my mouth — in fact palming and discreetly dropping it — and then took some water to make the deception convincing. The few spores I inhaled were enough to make my head spin. Salome just threw her pod down — which elicited coarse laughter and more lecherous scrutiny. One man made a gesture of rubbing his penis to get another laugh.

Curtis pointed at the shell container. ‘Kavougu?’ He had to repeat it several times before they realised what he was saying. They nodded vigorously and repeated the word their own way, more like ‘gavaga’. The one-eyed man offered Curtis another of the sporangia.

He deftly pushed it back in the man’s hands. Already his hands were vibrating, his skin perspiring. ‘So you guys are the “Awauba”, huh? A-wau-ba?’ Jabbing his index finger at them.

With broken-toothed grimaces they shouted back, ‘Awa’aba!’ and thrust their quivering fists in the air. It was so hard to read these men. The sharing of meat and kavougu might seem like gestures of welcome, but their forceful manner didn’t feel very friendly — and was rapidly being exaggerated by the drug.

‘All right! Awa’aba the hell to you! So where you get this … gavaga? Where gavaga?’ Curtis peaked his hand above his eyes and made a pantomime of searching around.

Shouts and nods of comprehension. The man who’d supplied the kavougu tugged at Curtis’s hand as if to lead him somewhere. Others were still stuffing themselves with meat. One bold fellow peered close at Curtis’s groin. He actually lifted the penis to get a good look at the handiwork done to its foreskin, which was far more elaborate and neatly done than their own. With guttural exclamations the others crowded round. Curtis endured this awhile, towering head and shoulders above them, and then shoved the man away. The whole pack of them skittered back, grimacing, hunching their shoulders, clasping their testicles — till the one-eyed man abruptly pointed out my loincloth. Another peal of strident laughter.

A pair of them hoisted the amphibian carcass on their shoulders — such strength in their limbs! — and we were marched off with them through the undergrowth. They gave us no choice about that. When I tried to duck back to recover the two knives, they wouldn’t let me. Curtis and Salome seemed not to care about the knives. The man with the kavougu, one with remarkably thrusting chinless features, led Curtis by the hand as if they were old playmates. Others, sweaty and vibrating from the drug, jostled round Salome and me to keep us moving. I tried at first to memorise the route so we could return later for the knives, but it was a circuitous route they took us, through an archipelago of islands joined by sandbars and lozenges of marshland amidst vast acres of swamp. Soon I’d lost any sense of the way.

Our captors knew the country well and kept to solid ground more of the time than Salome had done when she was leading us. Whenever we had to wade a channel of open water, they became very agitated, nervously glancing back and forth across the murky green surface littered with dead leaves. Sometimes in such places Salome became agitated too. More than once, a pair of bulbous eyes and a slimy back breached the surface rather too close for comfort. Salome muttered that we were going the wrong way; but what could we do? The men moved with hyperactive haste despite the burden of the carcass two of them carried. They seemed to swarm through the vegetation, their limbs accelerated by the kavougu, their sense of time obliterated. Curtis and Salome kept up well. It was the burden of my rucksack that slowed me down. Men kept pushing me from behind, forcefully directing my path through the undergrowth.

To encounter humans dwelling among the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous and Jurassic was bizarre enough. Here, in the remote Carboniferous, more than three hundred million years before the time of humankind, they were so much more incongruous. But whereas Akombu’s and Kuzuolu’s people were physically identical to the Fênbé — so you might imagine they were the offspring of Fênbé who’d wandered too deep into the refugium — these men were different. Not in complexion or stature, but in the robust look of their bones and the thrusting otherness of their features. They were like one might imagine the distant ancestors of the Fênbé to have been, people dwelling in the rainforest, scores of millennia before our own time; as if some party of wanderers from that time, too, had managed to penetrate through the palaeomes all the way here, to the swamps of the Lower Carboniferous. We who live in our modern age are all one species, everywhere on earth, no question about that, but if you trace the generations of all our ancestors far enough back in time you must eventually get to people who truly are different.

It was Salome’s escalating air of alarm that really worried me. Her instinct had always been so reliable. She’d have been willing to run for it, I think, if there’d been a chance we could get away. But there were too many of them, too close around us, too quick and strong, and we’d no idea what such wild-seeming men might do if we didn’t play their game. They drove us along a well-worn path atop a narrow, winding levee, where any hope of escape was blocked both left and right by olive-scummed water where giant dragonflies hunted, swarms of smaller insects shimmered in the sunlight, and, once, a huge froggy mouth belched for breath. Other than that one sighting, amphibians seemed scarcer in this locality.

The levee abruptly ended. We had to hop across a crude causeway of bits of deadwood wedged among sandbanks and tussocks of moss, till we reached solid ground again. The path began to incline. The dry ground widened into what appeared to be an island: a twin-peaked hillock rearing out of the swamp. My nostrils were assailed by a stink of rotten fish, and excrement, and the bitter scent of kavougu. The leafy tops of cordaites trees crested into view. Above them to left and right were steep rocky bluffs. The path levelled into flat marshland and pressed through thickets of man-high clubmosses. With every step the stench got stronger. There came a noise like rocks being bashed rhythmically together. The thickets petered out and, over a rise that turned out to be a midden of bones, vegetable debris, and faeces, we reached the Awauba’s camp.

Between the high-branching cordaites the underbrush had been cleared to make a large space within the clubmoss beds. Frayed stumps and stalks poked through the mud. There was excrement all over the place, so the smell was appalling, as well as scraps of rotting fish, meat, and plant matter that hadn’t made it to the middens. A dozen or so women were pounding some rhizome cores using a flat rock and a rounded one as mortar and pestle, and butchering a large lobe-finned fish using splinters of bone. They were as naked and filthy as the men, the same troglodyte features, yet thinner and scrawnier; the eldest I guessed was no more than thirty. Some little girls worked with them. There was no sign of any fireplace. Beyond the women some whip-thin cordaites saplings had been bent into arches and overlaid with ferns to make crude shelters. Large productid shells had been driven upright into the ground, to serve perhaps as water containers. Little boys scrapped with each other and clambered on the pink granite crags rising from both sides of the camp.

One boy was defecating in public view. He ran off without wiping his bum or making any attempt to cover his dung. Then he saw us. His eyes goggled wide and he shouted in a piercing high voice. The boys stopped playing. The women stopped working. All were agog at the sight of strangers such as they’d probably never seen. Salome shrank from their blank unsmiling stares. She glanced at me in silent appeal to get us out of this frightful place.

From where they were sitting together, backs against tree trunks, three men older than the others got to their feet. One of them was by far the biggest, in weight especially, though he was also the tallest. You could tell by the way he moved that he was the alpha male: slow, self-conscious, waiting for us and our escort to come to him. Salome’s instinctive reaction was to slow down — which caused the young man behind to collide with her. He and the men each side pushed her to keep moving. The kerfuffle drew everyone’s attention upon her. The big man’s too. She ducked her head in vain to avoid the stares.

The boys’ shrill cries brought more people into the camp. The women, the children, the newcomers pressed close for a better look. They seemed tense and skittish. Ill at ease in the universe. Stoop-shouldered women dragged the amphibian carcass beside the butchered lobefin. Only the chief and his two henchmen held back and waited. Curtis responded by strutting erectly, shoulders pitching from side to side, cocksure in his nakedness, his tallness, and the impression he’d already made by slaying that amphibian with his bare hands. The young hunters scattered left and right before their chief, heads ducking, and watched trembly and intent as he and Curtis came face to face.

Though Curtis was much taller, the other man packed more muscle — and fat — than anyone in sight. There was grey in his wiry hair. The jutting belly cast a shadow over his meaty genitals. The dark recesses beneath his heavy brows seemed to stare through Curtis’s chest as one of the hunters jabbered an explanation.

The big man barked something at the young hunter, silencing him, then strode past Curtis and halted in front of Salome. Worn though she was by the rigours of travel, she yet possessed that spark that ensorcelled everyone who met her; something there was precious little sign of among the dead-eyed women of this clan. She was older than any of them, and her age alone imparted an otherworldly gravitas. Our epic journey had intensified that gravitas and tempered her physique into an athlete’s. Something like that must have been true of all of us. Maybe we, whose bodies had been formed in a less oxygen-rich atmosphere, really could outrun these people if we got the chance.

Salome tried to deflect the chief’s gaze by the force of her own. But her shining amber eyes only excited him. He rubbed his monstrous cock and grunted with pride as it immediately began to thicken. He reached out his hand to touch her. To his surprise she dodged back out of reach.

Curtis swiftly stepped between them. The chief seemed again to stare through the taller man’s chest as if he weren’t there. With a lurch of his burly shoulders he tried to thrust past him. Curtis barred his way like a wall. There was a smacking sound of rebounding flesh. The chief’s head jerked up in sudden fury. His features wrinkled into a snarl. Tendons sprang rigid from his neck. For several heartbeats they stood like that, stock-still, their faces inches apart; neither one able to give way. The rest of the clan gathered in a circle round them, like boys behind the gym, eager for the spectacle of violence, most of the men quivering with kavougu — maybe everyone was, the air was so spiced with its smell. The two alpha males searched each other’s face and physique to measure his strength of sinew and will. The chief’s body was crisscrossed with old scars. Curtis had scars too; the wound on his hip was still scabby and bruised. His skin gleamed with oily sweat. There was a dreadful stillness. I could hear water dripping somewhere, the clickety drone of insects, the stentorian breath of the tribe.

The one-eyed young man, standing just behind the chief, vented a harsh shout. Maybe it was meant to goad them into combat. But it had the opposite effect. The chief whirled round and belted the man on the head for speaking out of turn. The spell was broken. The chief turned his back on Curtis and started bawling commands. But he’d lost face. His henchmen watched in silent appraisal. Some of the young men from our escort were grinning derisively; just minutes ago they’d been submissive. The one with the kavougu pods who’d taken Curtis by the hand before now held his hand again in what looked like a gesture of allegiance. Others edgily glanced back and forth at each other, as if to weigh up where the wind was blowing. His back still turned on Curtis, the chief yelled and gesticulated at the women to send them scurrying back to their work.

‘So where’s the gavaga?’ Curtis asked his young friend. ‘Gavaga?’

‘Gavaga?’ The man gestured vaguely around him. He seemed to be indicating the whole camp. I thought for a moment they were at cross-purposes; then I realised he meant the clubmoss thickets encircling the camp. The main kind of clubmoss, growing wild here, interspersed with ferns, was the very same kind we’d seen beside the sauropod shrine, two hundred million years in the future. It was all round us, masses of it. We’d walked through it to get here. Clumps of it even sprouted from ledges in the cliffs. No wonder the smell was so strong! We must have been inhaling the spores all the time. The plants’ green ranks continued as far as I could see across the island. So this was where the kavougu came from — the ‘land of the Awauba’, quite literally. Had Makela come to this very camp? Surely these people had to keep moving on whenever they’d exhausted the local game. There might be kavougu everywhere; we’d probably walked past the plants without recognising them. Makela must have taken some rhizomes or sporangia and cultivated them in the Jurassic; maybe in later palaeomes too, since the Fênbé were sourcing it from somewhere. This might be only the beginning of what was possible. What ecological havoc would ensue if modern civilisation were to colonise deep time and start transporting other species through time to establish them in new palaeomes?

Right now Curtis hardly looked the vanguard of modern civilisation. His new disciple hustled him to inspect the kavougu groves. Everyone’s attention was on him, the stranger who’d dared stand up to their muscle-bound lord. For the moment, I was forgotten. All I wanted to do was escape. Let Curtis stay here. Let him hunt giant amphibians and intoxicate himself with kavougu and make himself king of these people. Then I needn’t carry his death on my conscience if we abandoned him. I had to talk to Salome, now, while they were distracted with Curtis, to plan our escape.

But she had already disappeared. I looked this way and that, trying not to attract attention. Two men stood guard on the path we’d come by. I feared that might be the only exit from this island, unless you braved the swamp beasts by swimming. She couldn’t have got far. In the bobbly tops of the clubmosses skirting one of the bluffs, I glimpsed a flick of yellow ribbon. The next instant it was gone.

52

I sauntered in that direction, forcing myself not to hurry, looking around vaguely at the women sweating at their pounding and butchery. Bent young women, prematurely aged. Strange sad wrinkly faces. Thin flaps of breasts slapping up and down as the women pounded with their rocks. Legs and backsides crusted with mud. One half-grown girl was heavily pregnant. On the shoulders of another a snotty-faced baby clung like a monkey. Even if the Awauba represented some earlier stage in human evolution, that wasn’t enough to explain their abased condition. The man and woman we’d seen in the Pleistocene, who’d seemed to us ‘primitive’, possessed marvellous physical grace, their bodies were supple and clean, and they seemed perfectly attuned to their jungle habitat; whereas these people, who resembled them physically, were marooned in a remote era in which they were struggling not only to survive but to hold on to any dignity. Why did their ancestors settle here in the first place? There must have been one among them gifted like Emily or Makela to lead them through time — and possessed by an impulse to penetrate as far as their insight led. Maybe this was as far as they got when the gifted one died and no one else had the talent to lead them elsewhere. Through what cosmological frame, I wondered, might that primitive band of pioneers have interpreted the pathways of deep time?

At the edge of the clubmoss thickets, I ostentatiously urinated and as I did so clocked the point where Salome’s footprints entered them. Curtis was the far side of the camp; I could distinguish him only by his height and his beard. When I was sure no one was looking, I followed the spoor into the undergrowth. I noted the disturbance of foliage where Salome had passed through, the line of weakness she would choose. In gaps of bare earth I spotted her prints. The trail worked round the side of the bluffs. She was moving fast, not as careful as she might have been. Had she finally decided to make a break for it? Did she think she could outflank the sentries on the path or find some other escape route? I pushed my way faster through the vegetation. I still had my rucksack on. Just as well if there was a chance of escape. The bitter aroma of kavougu filled my lungs. The plants brushed wet against me. Sporangia burst in my face and made me sneeze. Clouds of insects spat into the air.

Then a break in the thicket — and a glimpse of green swamp intersected by the tall straight trunks of lepidodendra. That’s the way she’d go. Scramble down the slope, through scattered clumps of ferns; head fizzing with oxygen and kavougu.

I reach the smelly mire fringing the water. It extends left and right into dense beds of horsetails. Hard to define where exactly the shoreline is. Not far out beyond the lepidodendra the water is dark, deep-looking, stretching away into a thin grey mist. Impossible to tell how far to the other side. I hear a groan, turn round, and there she is, head in hands, on a fallen trunk. I walked right past her! Her slick brown flesh is nearly the same hue as the scaly dead bark. Little ferns sprout from the bark like the ferns drooping from her waist. She seems not to notice the slow dripping on to her bowed shoulders from a giant frond rearing over her.

Something crunches under my foot. She looks up, unsurprised. Her face is shiny with tears and sweat. So fragile she seems amidst the reptilian trunks of the lepidodendra, the slime-coated swamp, the steep crags behind us, the insects hopping among the detritus.

‘I had to get away from there,’ she says. ‘It was horrible. Like some kind of cancer.’

But that squalid camp isn’t like a cancer in the way modern cities are, their roads radiating like dendrites to spawn ever more lobes of development eating up the countryside.

‘It’s this whole place,’ I say. ‘It seems to bring the worst out of all of us.’

‘No! The land is what it is. It’s us — people — that don’t belong here, so deep in. We’re so far out of balance with everything.’

‘Then we should get away. Now, while we can.’

‘They don’t want to let us.’

‘You think there’s only the one way out?’

She nods, then shrugs.

‘We can swim, can’t we? Maybe they don’t know how to swim.’

She looks out across the swamp. ‘There’s something out there.’

I dump the rucksack and sit beside her. In my mind’s eye I picture us skulking through the marsh to bypass the guards, and swimming hard past a squadron of giant salamanders, and arguing with Curtis. All those things in a single frame. It’s the kavougu I’ve inhaled affecting me.

Her shoulder bumps into sticky contact with mine.

‘Will you hold me?’

I fold my arm round her slippery back. Of course I will! She twists around, flings her arms round my neck, presses her face against my throat, her slimy breasts against my chest. I gag on the whiff of her body and her pungent fishy breath, but she’s here in my arms, the woman I love, the only person who matters to me in all this vastness of deep time. I remember those other moments when we touched, spaced out like oases in a desert; such moments I don’t want to think are lost.

‘Brendan?’ comes her voice hot in my ear. I feel the rhythmic puff of her breath. The rhythm of time that can’t be stopped. The rhythm thudding in my blood. Her body twists needy and trembling against me. My cock rises quick and hard. Her raking hand rips away the rotten cloth. She drives against me with such force that I’m pushed off the log on to the soft wet earth. Around my face a forest of baby ferns just starting to uncoil. On top of me the woman, like a theropod on its prey, twisting and clawing, her face a kaleidoscope of gold-ringed giant pupils and snorting nostrils and taut panting lips.

‘Touch me!’

I run my hands down the buckling curve of her back, to the waist cord, the lank fern leaf, the meaty swell of buttocks collaged with mud and detritus. Suddenly she rears up astraddle me; her thighs, torso, head tapering to the sky. She tugs at the cord round her waist. The cord won’t yield; her vibrating fingers can’t get purchase in the knot. She grips the cord with both hands; muscles bunch in her arms, her breasts shudder, as she yanks with all her strength, shrieks, and the cord snaps. She throws it down, fern blades spilling free, and for an instant I’m staring into the shadowed crevice between her thighs, before she throws herself back down on me and my straining organ is crushed between our bellies.

‘Touch me!’ she begs again.

So I clasp my arms round her. I want to cocoon her from all the world’s sorrows. I slide one hand to her surging buttocks. Fragments of dead leaves on her skin. Soft mud and jabbing stalks against my back. Above us the lepidodendron poles spear into blue-white sky. Her wiry hair scratches my cheek. Her face is buried against my neck. She might be any woman. I might be any man. Though my head is spinning, there’s a deadness of feeling in my heart. This is lust and nothing else. Her greasy body writhes against me like a python. She smells of sweat and swamp and kavougu. The surfeit of oxygen propels her into a frenzy. Her pubic bone hammers at my penis, forcing it to stay hard.

I didn’t want it to be like this. I wanted her to love me. I wanted it to be pure and beautiful.

‘Touch me here!’ She tugs at my hand, rams forwards one knee to lift her pelvis, scrubs her sticky cunt against my shaft. Her face jerks up, a gorgon’s face, streaked with grime, gaunt and straining. Her breath hits me in fetid gusts.

There are voices somewhere. Coarse and high. Children maybe. Are they following our tracks?

‘For God’s sake!’ she rasped. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

All I could think of now were the Awauba.

‘I’m so sorry … We’ve got to get away from —’

Her body slapped away from me as if she’d been electrocuted. She lay in a trembling heap, staring at me glassy-eyed.

‘Please … There are people coming …’ I peered over the dead trunk, and listened. Faint shouts could be heard from the camp, but nothing as near as those voices had seemed.

Salome curled up with her ankles crossed and her hands clasped across her shins, all closed up to me, all smeared with dirt, all trembling and silent, and stared into space.

‘Look, I’m sorry. I thought someone was coming. I really think we should try to get away. Right now. Surely we can get past them somehow. Let’s get away from these people and back on the right path and then we can carry on, deeper in, the two of us. Then we’ll be free to … be together … do whatever we want … We won’t have to worry about Curtis. He won’t be able to follow us. He won’t be able to get any-where, either deeper in or back out — because he can’t navigate through time without you.’

I reached out to take her hands, but she snatched them away and sprang to her feet. Suddenly she was like a Fury.

‘You’re just the same as him! Just exactly the fucking same! All you want to do is use me to satisfy your own stupid ends!’ Her voice was a ragged screech, her eyes vicious slits, and for a moment she looked so like Makela.

‘That’s not true. I respect you —’

‘Bullshit! I’ve seen how you watch me. You’re as lecherous as he is.’

‘No, it’s your happiness — as a woman, as a human being — that I want more than anything … because I love you.’

The contempt in her face. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea what a woman needs.’

The sound of thunder reverberated in my head. It was everything or nothing now. I stood up and faced her, my soul stripped as naked as my body.

‘Don’t you understand what he’s like? He doesn’t care about anyone or anything except his own power and gratification. If he can locate the nuclear reactor he thinks is out here, he’ll come back with the means and men to harness its power or mine its plutonium. He’ll harvest the kavougu and push it to a new set of junkies. He’ll bring people to hunt the animals — anyone who wants a dinosaur head to bolt on their penthouse wall. He’ll rip out whatever minerals, meat, timber he can find a market for. He’ll be the beginning of all that. Only he can’t do any of it without you to open the way. Whereas my intention is not to destroy, but to protect the palaeomes from exploitation — and prevent the outer rim being nibbled away by people who don’t even know what they’re destroying. That requires scientific understanding so the case can be made to impose the protected status.’

How false those last words rang! I thought of the vastness of the territory we’d crossed, and the access that each step of the route provided to potentially the whole planet at that snapshot in geological time. Did I mean to police all of this, the whole world, age upon age, within a single nature reserve in Central Africa?

I knew the truth of my own motives before Salome rammed it home: ‘What about your ambition, hey, Brendan? To be the great scientist whose name goes down in history, right? That’s all you really care about. You need me, you want to use me, so you can analyse and categorise everything you can before other scientists come and steal your thunder. Then the tourists will come and the developers and all the rest. It might take a bit longer, but in the end all this will be ruined just the same.’

I could not deny her accusation. Neither could I believe that everything she’d said might be true. I couldn’t bear the disgust in her eyes as we stood there dirty and naked in that slimy green parody of Eden.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that.’

‘How you going to stop it? You saw how the forest had changed when we came in the second time.’

‘That’s what I mean about “nibbling away”. It was the effect of the ZPZ clearing trees on the edge of the refugium. Curtis helped them do that.’

‘That wasn’t the whole reason. The ZPZ were “downtime” from the area that had gotten dry. It was us who’d intruded deeper in. Into the past, Brendan. You intrude into the past, you change the present. Don’t you get it?’

Only when she spelt it out like that did the scales fall from my eyes. A matrix of questions I’d half intuited unfolded in my mind. My reaction to the thought of shooting the ape that Vince had spotted in the trees above the Shogun … My unease about Curtis shooting Mesozoic mammals that might have been ancestral to primates … The same un-ease about killing synapsids, primitive tetrapods, any species that might be a step on humankind’s line of descent … None of us had winked out of existence — unless you count Vince — but what other consequences might all the killing we’d done entail down the stream of time?

Our journey had always seemed so physical a journey through geographical space. Even after I recognised the signature of the K—T and realised it was also a journey through time, the notion of a ‘refugium’ had helped me to cope with the day-to-day experience of my senses. My mind reeled from the possibilities. How resistant, or sensitive, to change was the fabric of time? Take that occasion when Curtis had taken aim at a Jurassic mammal and my impulse had been to stop him and he’d bagged a theropod instead: by killing the dinosaur and not the mammal had he helped steer the course of evolution in a way that predestined the emergence of humankind and so his very existence to be able to fire that shot? But what if the fabric of time were not so resilient? What might be the consequences, magnified by hundreds of millions of years, of Curtis’s tantrum massacre of primitive reptiles the other day and the greater destruction wreaked by the fire? What about the other people, whole clans of them, who’d penetrated deep time and made their homes here? Were their impacts on the local ecology sending continuous ripples of consequence downtime? Had human beings become part of the mechanism of evolution?

I sank down on the dead tree and looked at her. ‘If you thought that intruding in the past would change the present, why did you come here at all?’

‘I didn’t think it, to begin with. I didn’t know it was the past. And I had my reasons for coming — you know that. Then I was … persuaded … to carry on … I found new reasons. I guess those made me keep going — even when I’d started to figure it out …’

I ought to have asked her then what those new reasons were. Instead I clutched at the thought that her uncanny intelligence might somehow have decrypted the mysteries of time. ‘Have you worked it out? How our actions here and now can affect the future?’

She turned away to the inscrutable swamp. One side of her body was daubed with mud. The yellow ribbon hung faded and bedraggled from her matted hair. ‘Always questions … questions that can’t be answered …’

‘Why can’t they? When we get back to our own time, we will see how things have or have not changed.’

She looked half back so her face was in profile. ‘Maybe we too would be changed.’

There was a flighty look about her, as if she couldn’t endure any more talk; but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘The bigger some impact and the deeper back in time, the more drastic the consequences are likely to be, right? If Curtis gets together the means to come back in here and ransack whatever resources he wants, if you help him do that, then the effects downtime could be apocalyptic!’

She held her arms crossed over her body, as if she wanted to hide from me, from what I was saying, from the very fact she was standing in this place. ‘That’s one reason why I can never go back.’

Suddenly there were shouts from up the hill. I jumped to my feet to see a squad of the young men from the hunting party scrambling down towards us. Excited little boys ran alongside them, and Curtis was leading the way. His body had the flushed gleam and jerky movements of kavougu intoxication. His followers were the same, even the children. When he saw us, alone together, naked, the expression on his face chilled my blood. The men needed no command from him; instinctively they fanned out to cut off our escape.

Even before he reached us, he was yelling at Salome to come to him. ‘Whatever the hell you think you’re doing, you get away from him!’

He leapt on to the lepidodendron trunk that lay between him and us. For an instant the wound on his hip unsteadied him; then he caught his balance and stood with legs braced firmly apart, genitals displayed, arms hanging tense in the air like a wrestler’s. The extra half-metre of height made him a giant. He seemed twice the size of the Awauba. The little boys stared open-mouthed as if all the legends they’d been told had sprung to life.

‘I said come here, woman!’

You’d think she’d have the spirit to stand up to this. But the fire of her will was extinguished. I blamed myself for that. Curtis towered before her in his naked magnificence and flanked by his retinue of followers. With the flash of his kavougu-black gaze, with the searing power of his will and of his body rising like a pillar from the fallen trunk, he commanded her. He didn’t need to speak again. Her arms dropped to her sides as if to surrender him the sight of her nakedness. In spite of all that had been said, all that she surely knew, she went to him.

He jumped down, gripped her shoulders in his hands, and at last he looked at me. ‘You listening, man? You keep the fuck away from her!’

I had only one card left to play.

‘Salome, there’s something you should know. About your brother.’

53

So I told her what Vince had told me: that in the fray that night at the commune Curtis had fingered Moyedou to Pangala and signalled him to open fire. ‘He knew Moyedou didn’t trust him any more, that he’d never cooperate with him, so he made sure he was killed that night — so he could never guide anyone else into the refugium, and the only guide left would be you.’

Curtis stared at me, unblinking, rigid like a statue. Salome stared at me too. Her face had turned grey. The revelation had brought back all the pain, as I’d known it would.

‘Is this true?’ she asked him.

He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘No.’

She jerked free of his grasp, tottered momentarily, then ducked away when he tried to take hold of her again. The shock on her face was mixed with uncertainty what to believe. Could she really imagine I’d lie to her about such a thing?

‘It’s true! Vince saw it happen with his own eyes. He saw Curtis point out Moyedou and give the command.’

‘That’s bullshit and you know it!’

It was his word against mine. If only Vince were here! The look in Curtis’s eyes terrified me. I perceived there the truth of what he had done and the knowledge that I was his enemy — that inasmuch as I had any influence over Salome I stood in the way of his domination of these lands forgotten in time.

Why could she not accept the truth? Again he tried to claim her in his arms. This time she yielded. For two heartbeats she glanced back at me. One last flicker of consideration I might be telling the truth. What I glimpsed in her face then was disappointment — as if she’d never have thought I should stoop so low. Curtis lifted her like a doll over the dead tree and gestured to two of the hunters to escort her up the hill. Back to that squalid camp she’d been so desperate to get away from.

Curtis hadn’t finished with me. Big swift strides towards me. I started to back into the mire. The other men closed round me.

‘Curtis, no!’

His fist smacked like a hammer into my solar plexus. I doubled over, paralysed by pain, fighting for breath. He clouted the back of my head as I went down. The young Awauba howled their derision.

‘Get your ass out of here, you whining piece of shit! I’m warning you: I lay eyes on you again I’m going to fucking kill you.’

He stalked over to my rucksack, opened one of its pockets, and slipped out the sparking stick. That was the only thing he took. He loped up the hill after Salome. I saw her look back, her eyes go wide at the sight of me sprawling in the mud, before he caught up with her and swept her up through the ferns into the clubmoss thicket.

The little boys were torn between following him and seeing what sport would transpire from the four men still standing round me. They all laughed as I struggled to get my breath back. The men shoved me with their feet. The boys nerved themselves to do the same. The logic of the schoolyard: when the big bully takes you down you’re fair game for everyone else. The men began to point at my groin and shout, their faces wrinkling in a mixture of mirth and disgust. Because my foreskin was uncut, I guess. One jabbed his foot at me. I squirmed back just in time. More peals of diabolic laughter. Have to get on my feet! I tried to rise, but someone kicked my back to send me sprawling into the mire. Two men seized me by the shoulders and hauled me up. They were so short that my knees dragged in the mud. A third made a vigorous gesture of stabbing at my penis. Suddenly he grabbed hold of it. Christ, what are they going to do? His hand jolted back just as quick and he howled as if he’d been scorched. Peals of manic gibbering from the rest.

The fourth man had picked up my rucksack. More cause for cackling merriment. He threw it down. The boys kicked it. No one seemed to understand it was a container and had things inside. With a din of coarse yells I was dragged between the trees into the swamp. My tormentors were nervously alert as soon as we entered even very shallow water. From a mudbank some tiny amphibians skittered into the water. I was hauled across the soft mud and slung into the scummy water beyond. The man with the rucksack hurled it as hard as he could. It tumbled ungainly through the air and splashed into deep water further out. There it floated, radiating green ripples.

Having expelled me from their island, the men and their little brats lost interest and headed back to camp. Did they expect me just to shrivel up and die? I was bruised where they’d kicked me, the back of my head was tender, but I was otherwise intact. What was going to happen to me I couldn’t begin yet to contemplate. The one thing I could immediately do something about was the rucksack. I had to get that pack and the precious data it contained. It was floating maybe twenty metres away, the distance gradually increasing as a current carried it further into the swamp.

As I waded towards it the water quickly deepened and the muddy substrate got softer. My feet sank deeper with each step into its slimy embrace. The water was up to my chest when suddenly my feet would not come free. Frantic efforts to pull them out only sucked them down further. The water had reached my neck. I told myself to be calm. If I didn’t move them my feet didn’t sink any deeper. The rucksack wasn’t far away. There was no hurry. Keeping the feet still, I leant forwards, thrust my arms forwards, and hauled them back in a breaststroke action. I gulped a breath of air and let my head go under as I pulled with my arms again. My feet began to rise from the mud. As my head surfaced for another breath I saw a movement in the horsetails along the shore. I heard a splash of something enter the water. Shit! Two more strokes with my arms. My feet pulled free. I began to swim towards the rucksack. Saw the bow wave of something that was swimming towards me. Caught a glimpse of bulging eyes as they breached the scum.

Precious moments lost, treading water, while I hauled the rucksack on my back. I clocked the nearest ‘land’: a long mudbank jutting into the swamp and colonised by horsetails. The bow wave was arrowing fast towards me. I swam as hard as I could, kicking viciously with my feet. Each gulp of air gave me a zap of energy for the next stroke. The rucksack kept riding buoyantly over my head. My genitals tossed beneath me; I imagined that any moment a pair of jaws would lunge up at them.

My knees smacked into mud. I burst out of the water on to my feet, reeling under the sudden weight of my body and the waterlogged pack. I glanced back. The bow wave was just metres behind me. The crest of the animal’s spine was slicing the water. It was a monster — at least five metres long. I splashed into the horsetails. Insects catapulted around me. Shaking and dripping, I lurched along the mudbank. In the spot where I’d been an instant before, a head like a giant frog’s elongated like an alligator’s smacked on to the mud, jaws snapping. I came to a gap in the mudbank, didn’t slow down — just let my momentum carry me over the water. I heard stems crunch in the amphibian’s jaws. I thought it was still pursuing me, I ran with all my strength, but when I looked back from the boggy shore the beast had vanished into the swamp.

Dripping algal scum, I clambered up the slope till I was far enough from the water to feel safe. There were no Awauba in sight or hearing. The granite crags stood solidly between this spot and their camp. I sat down, head in hands, and caught my breath. I needed food, but that was the least of my worries.

O Salome, why wouldn’t you believe me?

I drained the water from the rucksack and pulled out the plastic bags to inspect the state of their contents. Water had penetrated more of the bags. There was mould on everything. I laid out the most sodden sketchbooks and notebooks in the sun to dry out. Water sloshed inside some of the film canisters. I emptied it out and replaced the lids. Could films survive such a soaking? Best wait till dark before I tried to dry them.

Where would I be when it got dark? I was pretty sure that when those guys threw me in the swamp the symbolic idea was that I shouldn’t come back. One way or another I had to get off this island before anyone caught me. I draped on a rock my one remaining scrap of fabric and opened what was left of the medical kit to dry that out too. At least I was alive. But how long could I stay alive alone? My mind kept lulling into a stupor — shock, I guess — and then I’d re-member again: Salome’s repudiation of me, her submission to Curtis, his savage words of warning. I tried to see a way round the reality, to make what had happened not as bad as it looked, not final, to read hope into the look on Salome’s face after Curtis struck me down … But always I was driven back to the knowledge that what I’d feared all along had now happened: the two of them had closed ranks and abandoned me. Salome didn’t love me; she’d just wanted to fuck me to satisfy her physical need. Now she had made her choice. Curtis had defeated me with his brute violence. He’d fuck her as senseless as she wanted. Once they’d extricated themselves from the Awauba, they would go deeper in and maybe they’d reach the source, the centre, even his nuclear reactor. Or maybe they wouldn’t get that far. Maybe it was so deep in the depths of time that long before you got anywhere near it the air would become unbreathable, the sky would rain sulphuric acid, the earth’s surface would melt into magma. Maybe they’d never come back.

And me? If I could navigate alone the route back through every palaeome, if I could find food and water, if I could survive the perils of predators, ice age, desert, catastrophic extinction events — if I could do all that, get home, then I’d be able to announce our great discovery. Maybe some of the photos would be intact enough to evidence my claims. Portia Penhaligan would back me up — if she’d not spilt the beans already. But photographs can be faked. Words can lie. The conclusive proof would be to take other observers into the refugium to confirm what I’d seen. Without Salome, there could be no hope of doing that. On the first expedition it had always been easier to return forwards through time than to advance deeper in, as if there were a kind of forcefield gradient inclined to propel you back towards your own time, like the valves in a vein that help blood to return to the heart. Maybe, just maybe, I could find my way home, but I’d never be able to return into deep time.

Salome’s accusation clanged in my mind. Was she right, that all I sought was my own glory, and that proving this lost world’s existence to science would herald its destruction just as surely as Curtis’s candid purpose of ransacking its resources? It was all a pretty big ‘if’ anyway; I stood slender odds indeed of making it home. And Salome was wrong when she said I cared about nothing except my own ambition. Truly I had loved her. I might have had difficulty expressing it, it might have meant little to her, but it was real in my heart, it had kept me going when I might have given up, and the thought I’d never see her again nullified all my dreams.

On the malodorous shore of that Carboniferous swamp I wept salty tears that it should all end like this. I packed up the films and notebooks and tied that last piece of cloth round my loins. Briefly I searched around in hopes of something edible. There were snails crawling in the waterlogged moss, but right now I couldn’t face raw snails. My hunger could wait. How good it would be to get back to country where I could light a fire without igniting the forest … Only I had no matches and Curtis had taken the sparking stick. That was just one of the challenges I’d have to face on the journey I was about to attempt.

First thing was to get off this island. I’d no intention of swimming again. As I didn’t know for sure whether the ‘island’ was completely ringed by water, I decided to explore the long way round its perimeter in search of some alternative escape route. If didn’t find any, I’d finish up on the opposite side of the causeway from which the guards might expect me to appear, and the opposite shore of the island from that monster amphibian should I need to enter the swamp to get past them.

Was that a good plan? I looked back along the shore; located the fallen trunk where I’d found Salome … where we’d almost made love. Was I really going to do this? To turn back and leave her in the power of Curtis and these drug-sotted hominids? To never see her again?

As I stood there, poised to go, I became conscious of a faint rhythmic noise, muffled by distance, of voices chanting: men’s bass voices, chanting a hard staccato rhythm — and maybe also the higher-pitched harmonic of women’s, though it was hard to distinguish that from the background susurration of insects and wind. What were they up to? A jolly singsong or some unspeakable rite? Whatever it was, Curtis and Salome were sure to be involved. I thought of her among those people, of them eyeballing her, touching her, and only Curtis to protect her. I remembered how she’d flinched from them, how she’d fled their camp. I remembered her last glance back at me as they led her away. She’d made a choice, I know, but it had been coerced by circumstance, by the haze of kavougu and by Curtis’s bullying will. I understood at last how much I loved her. I understood what that love required of me and how its demands overrode all my weakness and my fear.

54

The sun was shining low across the forest’s spiky battlements as I climbed up through the stubble of little clubmosses wedged in the granite. Unencumbered by a rucksack, flooded by oxygen with every breath, my bruised body felt agile and strong. My heart thudded with fear and exhilaration. With each step higher I heard the chanting more clearly — women’s and children’s voices as well as men’s — and a slow beat of slapping flesh. The plants cast long narrow shadows across the crag. The sun would soon be setting. Just the time to make my move. Whatever that move was going to be.

Near the skyline the granite was bare, crimsoned by the descending sun, and warm and hard under my skin as I crawled the last stretch on my belly. From a bevelled edge of rock I had a bird’s-eye view down into the camp. Even up here the smell of kavougu reached me, along with the stench of garbage and excrement. Except for a few children picking at the remains of the lobefin and amphibian carcasses, the people had gathered into a chanting throng, rhythmically slapping their hands against their ribs. There were less than forty souls all told. Were other groups like them scattered elsewhere in this palaeome? Or were they quite alone and thus desperately inbred? In a space enclosed by the howling, slapping bodies, Curtis and the pot-bellied chieftain faced each other, shoulders rigid, heads hunched low. Whatever they thought of each other, whatever had triggered this latest confrontation, the mob yelled for violence. Like lads in a schoolyard, like the screaming apes inside us all, they wanted its cathartic thrill. They had no drums, no flute, only the self-dissolving chant of the mob and the beating of their chests. Two big productid shells were snatched from mouth to mouth. Women as well as men grasped for the potion. Even the little children.

I spotted Salome by the darkness of her skin. She was caught in the press of other women. Children were shoving her from behind. As I watched, the rude chalice came near her and two hunching women took a swig for themselves, then grabbed her and tipped some down her throat. She didn’t try to resist. How much had they fed her al-ready? The rant-chanting people around her slapped their chests ever harder, yelled louder and louder. Kids swarmed into the trees to get a view. The two men at the centre began to circle each other — stiffly, tensely, like strutting stags. The chief’s face was twisted into a snarling mask. Gorilla arms half bent in readiness. Curtis stooped bent-kneed, centre of gravity low, so he seemed little taller. Both of them gleamed with kavougu sweat in the bloodshot light. Even high on my cragtop I felt the drug’s effect, and the chanting’s: a never-never state of being in which there’s no awareness of past cause, no fear of future consequence, when past and future are now, and cause, deed, and consequence are one.

A young man clouts the chief’s backside. With a roar of rage the big man whirls round. But it’s a feint — like a shot-putter he completes the revolution and rides the momentum to hurl at his opponent, head down like a bull. Curtis deftly sidesteps, and hooks the chief’s head as he careers past. Blood on the man’s face already! He charges again, Curtis slows him with another bare-knuckle punch, and they fall like lovers into a chest-to-chest embrace. The rhythm of the chant explodes into a cacophony of screams. Rictus bared-teeth smiles. Shouting men viciously punch the air. Women, wedged behind them, screech their excitement and strain to see.

Salome, forgotten, fell from the press of bodies; unsteady on her feet, tottering like a leaf on the wind. The last crimson bead of the sun sank into the forest. The shadows of the trees in the camp coalesced into a pall of gloom, though already the moon was rising. This was my chance!

The bluffs were too steep on that side and there was little cover. So retrace my steps a way, then contour the shoulder of hill, and clock the lopsided cordaites at whose foot I’d left the rucksack. At the last moment before I headed down into the camp I realised there was one more thing I must do so that if they saw me they might not instantly realise who I was. I stripped the cloth from my hips, my last garment, and threw it down. Naked as the rest of them, I slipped from clump to clump of vegetation down the dusk-lit slope.

In the ring of jostling bodies I saw Curtis break free of the chief’s grasp and dodge the windmill swing of his great arms. For an instant, one of Curtis’s legs gave way — but he caught his balance in time, wrong-footed his opponent, and landed a kick in his groin and, as he doubled over, two vicious punches to the head. The mob roared. Curtis screamed a yell so loud it echoed from the cliffs. He was kicking and punching with terrific speed and force. The circle of men punched and kicked the air. Their shouts converged into a quick new thrusting rhythm. The women, screaming hysterically, rammed themselves at the gaps between the men. The children in the trees were screaming too and swinging about so the branches shook. With rapid blows Curtis drove the chief down out of my sight.

The next I saw, peering between kavougu stems when I was almost down to the level of the camp, was Curtis rearing up, head and shoulders taller than everyone, blood all over his face — and on his hands too when he raised them in triumph above his head. The men’s quick chant collapsed into screams and hoots. Everyone was crazily shaking their arms; their faces pursed like apes’ as they howled. I was convinced then that the Awauba were not fully human. Maybe they were right on the cusp between Homo sapiens and the beings who came before.

Was Curtis really any different? He reared up yet taller — must have stood on the chief’s prone body — and stretched high his blood-streaked arms. I was sure then he must have killed that man. The mob cheered him with savage adulation. The women wormed through to grind their scrawny bodies at him, to shriek taunting invitations, to hold out their thin breasts in travesty of the great goddess offering life to the world. Curtis peered over their heads. He knew which woman he wanted. I saw him spot her. In the way was a wall of writhing, screeching bodies. Between Salome and me there was nothing except a few trees and a stray toddler, but I dared not move lest he saw me.

Then he bobbed down out of sight. I thought he was going to ram his way through to her. This might be my only chance. I darted from tree to tree through the deepening shadows. The smell of kavougu was overpowering. Salome’s back was to me, her bowed shoulders catching the moonlight, her head bent in existential defeat. Why hadn’t she fled while she had the chance? Surely none of them would be guarding the causeway right now.

Before I could reach her, Curtis sprang back into view. I threw myself behind the nearest tree and peeped round to see what was happening. In one hand he held a spray of foliage. The Awauba’s gibbering screams faltered. Still gripping the branch, Curtis snapped his hands sharply together. In the crepuscular light I saw the spark. In this oxygen-stewed world it only needed one. A leaf caught light at once. The flame leapt to the others. Curtis thrust the burning torch above his head. In the dusk it was a blazing beacon casting a lurid amber light on the people round him. They fell silent and, as one, dropped on their knees and pressed their faces in the mud.

So they humble themselves to you, O lordly one, O awesome American, who demonstrate your awesome magic of the sparking stick. In the vision of a few heartbeats I saw how things might be. He would dominate these people, he would be their king, he would bend them to his will — to go with him to find the reactor, and dig up its plutonium lode, and harvest kavougu, and carry these poisons on their backs through time. He would extend his rule to the other clans dwelling in the palaeomes. Lord of prehistory, he would travel downtime to contact his allies in the ZPZ, and among mercenaries and professional hunters, and in the boardrooms of mining companies and venture capitalists. They’d send in the support he needed to extract resources and distribute them into our greedy modern age. They’d colonise deep time from inside and outside. It would begin along the transect we’d navigated, then spread sideways in every palaeome worth exploiting. The forests would be levelled, the megafauna slaughtered, the land left scarred by mines and eroding into desert.

But what if Salome was right and ripples of consequence would amplify downtime from every disturbance in the past? What if, let’s say, the Awauba belonged to the very population that gave rise to modern humans? What if the true human lineage had developed not in the savannahs, where our hominid cousins dwelt, but in the wet forest, where the advantages of a naked sweating skin were optimised for a killer primate who’d learnt to run down prey on the forest floor? Could this strange warp in the weft of space and time be the very conduit within which our ancestors had evolved? Was it even possible the entire lineage of human ancestry was contained in space right here: the line up the river of time through hominids, simians, prosimians, early mammals, cynodonts, synapsids, reptiles, amphibians, lobefins? We’d seen representatives of them all. Could this be some special locus of creation which had given rise to beings with the potential to transcend their biological nature, to transcend even their emplacement in time? If something like that were true, then damage to the ecology of any palaeome really might change the course of human evolution. If Curtis got his way, if he had command of an army of minions to ransack the past, to gnaw away the foundations on which life in later times depended, then anything or everything — all that I’d thought lost in time and had discovered to yet be accessible — could be obliterated as if it had never been.

But he could do nothing without Salome. He had to crush her will beneath his, make her his queen in his nightmare kingdom, and chain her connection with the land to the service of his needs.

He was looking right at her right now. My tree was so close to his line of sight that his searchlight gaze held me pinned in check. His fiery brand burnt with sorcerous vigour. No vegetation was close enough to catch light. But the flame was eating low down the stem, so he stooped to extinguish it in the mud.

As he did so, a bleeding figure reared above him like a zombie from the grave. The chief! Not finished after all! His huge arms lifted. His fists were hammers poised to strike.

A child’s gasp alerted Curtis. His elbow whacked up into the chief’s larynx. Then a knee into the groin. The last I saw was Curtis’s head lunging like a wolf’s at the big man’s throat. The mob sprang to their feet to bay for the kill.

This was it! I sprinted out towards Salome. The screaming beast-people were deafeningly near. If anyone looked they’d see me.

The screams exploded into another screeching climax. This time there could be no doubt that someone was dead. No cover was in reach. I threw myself down in the mud — just in time as Curtis’s head craned above the scrum of people. This time the women didn’t wait. They thrust their skinny bodies at him from every side. He’d proved his strength one way by killing their king; now he had to prove it the other way. He dropped out of sight among them. There was a ribald volley of shouts and then a new rhythmic chant, from deep in the belly, everyone’s hips and heads and arms thrusting to its beat.

Up I leapt and across the skiddy mud. A sudden high shriek echoed from the rocks. I thought I’d been spotted. But no one was looking my way. Suddenly it was a free-for-all. Men leapt with bucking hips on the nearest women. The stronger men clouted the weaker out of the way. Heaving tangles of flesh seethed in the chequerboard swirl of moonlight and shadow to a cacophony of cries like tortured souls in hell. I didn’t know where Curtis was. I didn’t care. I reached Salome, gasped her name, she started to turn, but in that instant a frantic youth burst from the night. His erection was swollen fit to burst, throbbing with his pulse. He didn’t see me, only Salome stumbling from him with blank black eyes. As he dived at her, I leapt from behind and pincered my arms round his neck. His legs shot into the air as he tried to yank free. I staggered back, nearly toppled over. He was all writhing smelly sweaty muscle, elbows and feet stabbing, jaws trying to bite my arm, so sinewy strong despite his pygmy size.

Run, Salome! Run!

She was crouching there as though mesmerised. Another figure blundered near — a girl, shrieking and flailing at the shadows. With all my weight against the youth’s back, I shoved him at her. The girl grabbed his straining phallus like a door handle. He erupted instantly — a moon-white fountain pulsing over her arms — and dragged her down with him as he fell to the ground.

I pulled Salome to her feet. The kavougu on her breath was very strong.

‘We have to go. Can you do it? Can you run?’

Her eyes were bottomless black holes.

‘Do I need to carry you?’

She stared at me without seeming to know who I was. Yet she didn’t back away; some particle of her consciousness trusted me. We had to get out of here! Fireman’s lift — that’s how Vince had carried her. My shoulder under her hips, my arm round her legs, then push with my thighs to lift her. She was ductile to my will, but the weight of her was painful on my bruised shoulder. Others must have seen us. What would they see in the shadowy light but another naked man grappling a naked woman? But if Curtis should spot us — No time to think about it. No time to look back. The man was stoned with kavougu, exhausted by fighting, and no doubt buried between a woman’s thighs. There’d never be a better time to escape.

55

From one pool of shadow to another I carried her towards the causeway. The lopsided crown of my cordaites tree leaned into the sky beneath the moon. Let my instinct be right about the guards! We had to get well away before Salome was missed. No time to flounder along the edge of the swamp.

Once in the clubmoss thicket, I put her down and she crouched there silent and still while I fetched the rucksack. It sagged emptily when I lifted it. Apart from the notebooks and sketchbooks, most of its weight was impregnated mud. I had no time to seek my piece of cloth lying somewhere in the darkness. One quick glance back across the camp: half-glimpsed pairs of straining, shrieking shadows; a few small children skipping about as if it were a party; the motionless bulk of the chief and other prone forms near it. One of them must have been Curtis, but I couldn’t tell which.

I carried Salome slung like a sack of potatoes over the rucksack, her muddy thighs across my chest. She was conscious, but said nothing. Her hands gripped tight round my waist, nails biting into my skin, like an infant primate clinging to its dam. Thank God for the moonlight to guide me across the causeway — it was unguarded — and the scary little gaps of water. Even in the forest beyond, the moonlight still pierced between the narrow phallic trees.

‘Which way, Salome? Tell me which way?’

She wouldn’t speak. So I kept to the driest ground I could make out, headed for the curly-branching cordaites when I saw them. Every so often I put Salome down to rest my strength. As the grunting cries of the Awauba fell behind us, and the night deepened, the forest became unnervingly still. There was the clicketing noise of insects, a few batrachian croaks from the swamps, and the pervasive greasy trickling of water. Maybe the sound of water helped to guide me in some tacit way, but I’d little conscious sense of direction except to get as far away as possible from the Awauba camp.

We ran into a labyrinth of spiderwebs, huge ones stretched across the entire space between adjacent trees, their threads so thick and springy they didn’t yield at the first impact. Enormous spiders, big enough to grip a beach ball, came trapezing from the branches. How much harm they could do us I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. We had no knife or anything. Slashing at the webs with my left arm as though it were a machete, holding on to Salome’s legs with my right, I forced us through one stretching, fracturing web after another. They seemed to be everywhere. Sticky silk plastered our nakedness. I had to scrape it out of my eyes. The spiders followed at a wary distance. Shards of moonlight glittered from their carapaces and their gemstone eyes.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Salome moaned.

At last she spoke!

‘You tell me!’ I had to rest. I lowered her floppy weight into the moss as gently as my aching muscles let me. ‘Can you tell me which way to go …?’

She sat up dizzily, put trembling hands to her temples, closed her eyes, opened them … slowly shook her head. ‘It’s all mixed up … Times where we have going to … go been … Water everywhere, all around …’

In nearly every direction I could indeed see the glint of water. I could hear the intermittent plip and plop of bubbles of marsh gas. I was shaking with hunger and fatigue. I’d got this far on adrenalin; I needed food. I dumped the rucksack beside Salome, threw handfuls of leaf litter at the spiders to send them scurrying, and scouted a short way further. Unencumbered, it was easier to duck under the spiderwebs. I discovered we’d reached the dead end of a peninsula. Water on three sides. The calamites and clubmoss trees continued through the swamp — even there gossamer curtains of silk shimmered between the trunks — but it was hard to guess how deep the water might be. The truth was I was at the end of my tether. It would help if Salome could walk.

I remembered the spiders. Better get back to her.

I found her asleep, or dead, half buried in the deep moss. Two huge spiders were suspended just above her. A third crouched by her legs, tasting her skin with its palps. I aimed a kick at its segmented abdomen. There was a satisfying crunch, the spiders scuttled away, and Salome stirred with a start.

‘It’s okay.’ Let her sleep a little while. I tried to tug up some ferns with my bare hands. The coarse stems chafed my palms. How on earth were we going to manage without a knife? I managed to rip up two fronds and, for what it was worth, laid them over her.

I intended this to be a short stop and that I’d stay alert to keep an eye on the spiders and listen for any sign of pursuit. Salome moaned in her dreams and clawed the air, tossing off the ferns. I prayed that Curtis was so exhausted by his exploits that he too would be asleep. But soon I fell asleep myself.

I woke to the sensation of something delicately licking my neck. Not a woman, as I imagined at first, but — fuck! — a massive spider, its legs spread across my chest. It was feeding on the grime on my skin! I smacked it for six. Two more were perched on Salome’s sleeping form. I drove them violently away. The miracle was that her skin was amazingly clean from the spiders’ ministrations, and glossy with dew.

I realised then that the sky was turning pink, that my body ached and was ravenously hungry, and that I could hear jabbering voices fearfully near. We had slept so long! And close enough to the camp that they could track us! The voices had the excited ring of hunters who no longer feel the need for stealth. Had they already reached the neck of the peninsula?

I put my hand over Salome’s mouth and shook her awake. ‘We have to go! Quick!’

Her eyes flicked open. She recoiled from my touch and blinked around in bewilderment. ‘Where the hell are we?’

‘I brought you away from them. They’d drugged you with kavougu. Come on, we’ve got to go! They’re coming after us.’

‘You brought me here while I was drugged …?’ She clocked the sun in the east, then the other cardinal directions, her familiar routine.

The men’s voices were louder every second. Curtis would be with them. I hauled on my rucksack. ‘Please, Salome! There’s no time!’

She sprang to her feet. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said yesterday? I’m not your possession. You can’t just take me where you want, make me do what you want. You and Curtis … I’ve had enough of both of you.’

She faced east and sniffed the air. ‘So close …’ But our pursuers were coming from the opposite direction. She glanced at me sharply. ‘You knew to come this way?’

‘I just wanted to get away from their camp. Come on! Let’s go!’

The baying voices were yet louder. They’d definitely found our trail.

Salome tilted her face up to the sky as if to listen. Then she stooped under the dewy spiderwebs to scramble down to the swamp. Through the boggy moss she squelched into the khaki water, bent down to cup some into her mouth, spat it out, then waded into deeper water between the flooded trees.

Suddenly she sank under completely.

‘Salome!’

Her head surfaced, she swam a couple of strokes, then found her footing again and her figure gradually emerged as she ascended a submerged bank.

‘Where are you going?’

She swung to face me. ‘I’m going my own way.’ Beneath the glister of water drops her features were as merciless as a Greek god’s.

‘I really think we should keep together.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘I need you, Salome!’

‘You’ll have to make your own way now.’

Away she splashed along the hidden bank. It looked like she was walking on water. Whatever she said, whatever she expected, what could I do but follow? I plunged in, gave my rucksack a soaking in the deep bit, and splashed after her, the pack bouncing on my back like a soggy bag of old bones. Cockroaches chuntered past. Flotillas of small amphibians sluggishly mobilised. The low bright sun was in my eyes. The yells of our pursuers were very close. I prayed this gap of open water would be enough to put them off our trail.

Once on dry land she was faster, a slim brown form racing through the green undergrowth and the phalanxes of green trunks. I breathed deep the heady air, fought the dizzy ache of hunger, and ran; and around me as I ran came the timeless drone of insects, from the fallen trunks burst clouds of wingless hoppers, and small wiggling tetrapods scuttled up the trees. Through the green maze ahead my glimpses of Salome became scarcer. The cries of our pursuers fell silent. I pictured them stymied by the swamp, Curtis goading the fearful men across the water, and casting left and right for our spoor. Yet still Salome fled, from them, from me, the gap ever widening. Her strength was replenished by last night’s food; she had no rucksack tugging on her shoulders and slapping on her back. My feet rammed into the soggy moss, my thighs thrust hard into each stride, my lungs pumped the air, but I could not match her speed.

Further and further she pulled ahead, as though she really meant what she’d said, that she was going her own way. I couldn’t bear to believe it. I tried to force my body faster. My heart thudded hard and steady. My sweat cooled in the breeze whispering between the great clubmosses and shivering the threads of foliage on their scales. I saw once more a sliver of brown flit through a brake of nodding ferns. Soon enough I was there, ducking and dodging through the fronds. Beyond them the forest continued, the green trunks, the undergrowth, the shadows, the fallen logs, the bog moss bathed emerald by the sunshine, but of the woman there was no sign. I might then have paused, called her name, sought her spoor; but suddenly I heard once again, on the breeze behind me, the harsh excitable yells of men. Carried on the breeze too came the stale skanky odour of their bodies. And something else. The smell of smoke.

56

That lunatic must have started a fire! I ran like the wind. No time to consider which way. Just run where the forest opens, into pockets of shade beneath the cordaites, along mudbanks across shallow swamps, the line of least resistance through the ferns, heading always into the sun. I could hear behind me the hiss and crack and popping as the trees succumbed to the flames. I threw my shoulders into each stride, smacked the foliage out of my path with the clenched-fist rhythm of my arms. My lungs bellowsed oxygen through my blood, scouring energy from my flesh. But I caught no further sight of that flitting brown figure. She had not waited. Nothing left but to flee like a beast from the smell of smoke and the bloodcurdling shouts, getting louder and louder till they were lost in the roaring of the fire. Over my shoulder I glimpsed starbursts of exploding sporangia amidst the smoke billowing into the sky. I ran and ran, but I needed food, my strength was faltering, the rucksack on my back was an excruciating burden.

How could I outrun a wildfire? Cross a firebreak of deep water like we did before? My every stride was propelled by instinct. In the dizzy rush of movement I perceived the forest as a matrix of channels and pools, of islands, ridges, bogs, of cordaites and ferns on drier ground, giant clubmosses closer to water, and horsetails in the soggiest wetland; I perceived in each moment the next step I had to take.

Till the smoke came gusting round me and blurred this shining vision. Then came the flames. On both my left and my right they lashed from tree to tree through the supercharged air. Steam hissed from the disintegrating leaves and geysered from the mire. Bubbles of methane burst in flashes of blue flame. Cobwebs ignited into skeins of incandescence. For a time a little tetrapod scrambled along at my feet, until it dived into a pool beneath a mass of burning stems. From left and right the flames charioted past me, channelled me into an avenue of bog between two walls of fire. The way back led straight into the arms of my pursuers. I could only go forwards along this strip of green. Water splashing on my skin vaporised in the furnace heat. Steam hissed and billowed where the flames touched the bog, like steam engines roaring by on each side, as the two walls of fire raced ahead to the inevitable dead end where they would merge.

But now before me I saw the dazzle and dance of fire reflected from an expanse of water filling the corridor between the flames and congested with half-submerged trunks of fallen trees. My overwhelming impulse was to plunge my body under to escape the scorching heat. I was in as deep as my thighs when a pair of big toothy jaws snapped out of the water and I saw that what I’d thought to be logs were a congregation of long-bodied amphibians. At least a dozen of them were crowded in this pool. I backed out in haste and looked for a way past, but the flames boiled close on each side. Between the animals’ close-packed bodies were tantalising tussocks of horsetails and humps of mud.

Behind me came a gallop of splashing steps. I whirled round to see Curtis sprinting down the gauntlet of fire. He had outpaced the other men. Like a fire elemental his naked body flickered in the light of the flames. His face, chest, arms were daubed with dry blood.

In desperation I turned back to the water. The animals nearly filled the width of the pool between the walls of flames. Pairs of bulbous eyes watched from atop their broad snouts. I turned again to face Curtis. No way I could get past him. He was too strong, too fast. His eyes were narrow slits against the smoke. His lips were twisted into a rictus of hate. His beard was matted with blood. He was just metres away. He looked left and right and beyond me, and then straight into my eyes.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted above the roaring flames.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I told you to keep away from her!’

He squelched towards me, knees bent, arms hanging like an ape’s, penis swinging between his meaty thighs. No pretences now. Just him and me and nowhere left to hide.

‘We need to talk, Curtis.’

But he was past all that. He was no longer the man I’d known. Last night he’d killed a man with his own hands and teeth.

His head came down and he charged. I tried to dodge, but I was exhausted by the chase, unbalanced by my pack. He caught my arm in his right hand, like a vice, too strong for me to break free. His left hand, balled tight, drew back to aim a blow. I tried to shield my face with my free hand. His fist slammed into my belly. A sharp edge of metal grazed the skin. I gasped, unable to breath, and doubled over. He held me up like a punchbag and hit me again in the same place. My stomach muscles spasmed. I still couldn’t breathe. I was powerless to break free. He grabbed my throat, and again something sharp bashed my skin. An object slipped from his fingers. I glimpsed the grey metal of the sparking stick and its tethered blade as they dropped into the bog; then only sky and smoke as he rammed back my head. He twisted my arm behind me to brace my torso against the force with which he was pushing back my head. I could feel the stabbing strain in my neck. He was trying to break my neck and I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, could only rake my hand at his flesh, impervious as stone. He was just too strong. The grey sky above me was dissolving into a blur of tears.

As if from a great distance a woman’s voice screamed: ‘Curtis, no!’

For a moment, his grip loosened. I gasped a gulp of air and wrenched from his embrace. He grabbed a fold of my rucksack. I pulled hard away from him. One of the shoulder straps ripped from its seam and simultaneously the bag tugged free of his grasp.

Across the water, beyond the bevy of amphibians, Salome stood on a spit of mud so close to the flames that she was shielding her hair with her naked arm. She had come back! Beyond her the corridor of green marsh continued between the walls of fire.

‘Come here!’ Curtis bellowed at her.

In the midst of the inferno, she stood perfectly balanced and still. Curtis stepped towards the water, yelling at her to come, as if he couldn’t see the animals blocking the way. I staggered backwards from him, conscious of the water round my ankles, the amphibian jaws waiting behind me, the rucksack drooping from my shoulder on its remaining strap. Beyond Curtis the fire’s heat was boiling the bog water into steam and igniting the horsetails and moss to seal off the way we’d come.

Salome betrayed no reaction to his commands. There was something chill and deadly in the way she stared across the pool.

Suddenly Curtis lurched in quick strides towards me. I saw the murder in his eyes. The reflections of fire in them were like windows into hell. This time there’d be nothing Salome could do to stop him. It was then that something connected inside my heart and my mind. An ecstatic logic of letting go. I swung the rucksack off my shoulder and weighed it in my hands: the weight of all my notes, so carefully scribed, all the films and sketches by which Vince had recorded so many species lost in time; all my dreams of fame and significance. As Curtis splashed inexorably towards me I hurled the rucksack as hard as I could. It struck him in the chest. He staggered, kept his balance, caught the rucksack without meaning to and flung it aside into the greedy flames. It ignited before it even hit the ground.

In the second or two it bought me, I looked to Salome. Her amber eyes bored into me like rods of fire, calling me. In another moment Curtis would reach me. Time froze. A single heartbeat explodes into a great expanse of stillness in which I perceive the fractal interface between the water and the slime-coated mud and the bryophytes’ tiny leaves; the segmented stems of spindly horsetails sprouting through water marbled with infinitesimal gradations between the green of the marsh, the blue-grey of sky, and the glimmering gold of fire; I see the position of each muddy ridge beneath the surface, each clump of vegetation, each wallowing amphibian; the leggy insects poised on the water and the shadows cast on the bottom by the dimples they make in the surface tension; the rim of solid ground the far side of the water, the spit of mud where Salome stands, the leaping nearness of the flames. I perceive the whole route in a single gestalt and in that same instant I begin to leap — from the water’s edge, to a rock, to a slippery mudbank just cresting the water, to a horsetail tussock, to another mudbank — beside a big amphibian whose yellow eyes meet mine, and the stillness in my soul mirrors his dim calm consciousness that he’s safe in this pool — and I spring to another clump of horsetails, a submerged rock, a flat stretch of glistening mud flush with the pool and then an unexpected plunge into green-scummed water up to my balls, and God knows what’s in here near me, but I’m scrambling out the far side, I’m there, soft mud underfoot, and Salome’s arms catch me and sweep me to the terra firma beyond.

Agile and swift, Curtis came after me, leaping like me from point to point. Water sprayed up wherever his feet smashed down. His rage blinded him to the precise nuances of this place, this moment. His foot landed awkwardly on a horsetail tussock, skidded down the side of it to splash into the water. The head of the nearest amphibian lurched above the surface. The man thrust with all the strength in his thighs. His other foot reached the slippery crest of mud. He staggered, off-balanced by the wound on his hip, and skidded along the mud, his arms windmilling.

With an explosion of water the amphibian’s jaws cannoned into the air, gaping wide, and snapped round his shin. He screamed a curse, tried to kick the animal’s head with his other foot, and lost his balance completely. The jaws tugged him under. His thrashing limbs churned the pool into a maelstrom. The other amphibians punted their snouts towards him. His head and arms suddenly surged above water. He screeched — ‘Salome!’ — and then long pairs of jaws clamped on to each of his limbs and jerked him back under. Pulses of scarlet frothed through the frenzied water. The amphibian jaws violently chomped up and down. In those terrible moments I forgot what Curtis had been about to do to me. I was conscious only that he was a man, that he’d been my companion; my impulse truly was to try to save him. But there was nothing we could do. He didn’t have a chance.

Salome took a quick hard breath, then tugged my hand to propel me away. The other side of the pool the whole surface of what had been bog was now alight. Down the avenue between the flames on this side we had to flee while we still could. Though my eyes were smarting from the smoke, though my body hurt from Curtis’s blows, though I was exhausted from running and lack of food, a new wind surged through me. Freed from my fear of Curtis, freed from the burden of my rucksack, stripped of every last trapping of civilisation, I felt as light as the wind, as wild and embodied as any other creature fleeing from fire. We ran and we ran, to get away from that inferno of destruction, and the sad squalor of the Awauba, and the curse of violence that Curtis had brought everywhere we’d been, and the scientific purpose my data might have served. Naked and free as I was born, like the woman who ran fleet and lithe before me, I ran and ran and left it all behind.

57

The pool was in a backwater of a meandering stream; the water so crystal clear you could see crustacea slowly manoeuvring on the bottom, and fish sculling in circles above them, and no sign of any dangerous amphibians. At least you could before we splashed in. I closed my eyes and pulled my head under and rocked my body from side to side so the water caressed my cuts and bruises. Afterwards I sprawled in the thick moss sloping to the pool. The cuts on my belly and neck had stopped bleeding, but both areas were very tender. Lying there in the sunlight shining between slender clubmosses, I could feel my heart beating deep and strong.

Salome crouched on the bank, perfectly still, gazing into the water. So quickly it startled me, her hands stabbed down like a heron’s beak. The fish flip-flopped in her hands. She cracked its skull on a stone before I spotted the lobed fins. With the same swift determination she gutted it using a splinter of stone, hacked off the head, the limbs, the tail, cut what was left in two, and handed me the bigger half. A grisly chunk of raw fish, but it was food and I needed it. I tore at the greasy flesh with my bare teeth and gulped it down. Salome did the same. Accepting without question the need to kill to survive. Accepting without hint of self-consciousness her nakedness, and mine; as if we’d always been so, naked beasts beneath the sky. Her cheeks were drawn flat and hard to little downcurved lines at the corners of her mouth.

‘I’m glad you came back,’ I said at last.

‘I didn’t have to come far. You were pretty close behind me.’

I didn’t grasp straight away the implication of what she was saying. It was only hours since the gory showdown. I couldn’t yet believe that Curtis was dead, that he might not suddenly come swaggering through the ferns. I didn’t know what to feel. He’d been my friend once. The past does not cease to be. In spite of everything he’d done, and become, I had that reason to grieve him. Maybe this whole journey long I’d been learning to mourn the friend who’d already become someone else.

The faded, grimy ribbon was still knotted in Salome’s hair. The very last possession either of us had left. Bars of sunlight and shadows of stems striped her umber skin. Her feet dangled in the water. Her chest slowly rose and fell. She was alive, she had not deserted me, and yet I sensed the strain between us, in the distance that she’d stationed herself from me, in the way she sat half turned away.

The instant I thought that, she looked at me. ‘Was it true, what you said about Curtis … and Moyedou …?’

‘It’s what Vince said. I don’t think he imagined it. It explains why he was so edgy around Curtis ever since we set out the second time.’

For a while she was silent. Curtis had, in his way, been her lover for a time — and during an earlier period too, I think, before I came. Her mother, her brother, Vince, the commune … She had reasons enough to grieve.

‘Let me look at those cuts.’

Using liverwort leaves as a swab, dipped repeatedly in the pond, she gently cleaned my wounds. Her face peered close, her naked body leaning over me, and all I felt was that distance between us and a chilling blankness inside.

‘I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you.’

‘I’m sorry I had to say it. I knew it would upset you … how much Moyedou meant to you.’

She paused in her task. A silence. ‘I loved him.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s strange, what I felt for him, not knowing he was my brother. It felt so pure — safe, I guess — yet stronger than anything I’d felt before … I guess part of it was that he was so young.’

‘It’s a common thing, apparently, for siblings who’ve grown up apart to fall in love when they’re reunited.’

She gave a sad little smile. ‘It wasn’t like that. I’m not the kind who falls in love.’

Was she trying to tell me something? She’d fucked Curtis but not loved him. She would never love me. ‘I’m not the kind who falls in love’ — those words re-echoed in my mind as we carried on walking. We pushed ourselves on to leave far behind us the swamp forest and all that we’d experienced there. In this new terrain the trees were smaller and spindlier, hardly big enough to call trees, the undergrowth was thinner, and in the distance we glimpsed hills of bare yellow stone. The night was cooler than we were used to. Our crude nest of ferns wasn’t enough to insulate our bodies and we had to cuddle up to keep warm. There was nothing sensuous about it. I was physically and emotionally exhausted and in a deeper state of shock than I realised. We both needed to decontaminate ourselves from the past two days’ events.

As we continued southeastwards, the toil of walking became gradually more demanding. The oxygen was falling from its Carboniferous peak, which made sense if the impoverished plant life we were seeing was typical of the rest of the planet. The forest narrowed into a gallery along the stream. There was intermittent shade from one sturdy kind of tree, one of the so-called ‘progymnosperms’, with spreading branches and fernlike foliage. Stunted specimens of this species grew on the lowest slopes, but otherwise the land beyond the stream’s vicinity was too dry to support any vegetation except thin crusts of lichen on the rocks. The wide empty space out there was unnerving after the claustrophobic swamp forest. Lines of bevelled hills ranged orange, yellow, grey to the horizon. The stream’s corridor of woodland was our green lifeline through that emptiness — and the lifeline of the creatures living here: myriapods and primitive, mainly wingless, insects, all quite small, and modest-sized vertebrates that were impossible to distinguish as amphibians or fish unless you got a good look at them out of water. Even then, one kind defied categorisation; its stubby appendages were something intermediate between lobe fins and tetrapod limbs.

I told Salome we best avoid catching the lobe-finned fishes. ‘This far back, any of these amphibians or lobefins could be our ancestors.’

‘Sure.’ Her eyes gleamed golden from her sepia brown face. ‘I guess if anything we’ve killed was going to affect us we’d already know about it.’

Would we know about it, though? Were we the same people who’d started out on this expedition?

Best to be prudent. We limited our depredations to crustacea and molluscs — bashing open their shells with rocks like Homo habilis — and non-lobe-finned fish, including primitive kinds with jawless armoured heads. Very protein-heavy diet. The plant matter was fibrous and indigestible. The fern-leaved trees bore no seeds, only a dust of microscopic spores. We did try to make fire — there was no shortage of tinder, but we could find no sticks hard enough to serve as hearth or drill. Their fibrous consistency just frayed apart when you tried to twirl one against another. And we had no knife to shape them properly.

Neither of us bothered to improvise any clothing. Our nakedness seemed strangely like a kind of armour that perpetuated the feeling of distance between us. Even in the chill of night. We’d make a nest by bending and interweaving thin clubmoss saplings to form a frame and then filling in the gaps with dead fronds fallen from the trees. For bedding we gathered fresh ground ferns; we needed lots of them because their primitive fronds were as skeletal as a string vest. There were no suitable animals from which to secure skins. All we could do was cuddle up close, without apology or desire, to share each other’s warmth and try to get some sleep.

The stream got smaller and friskier till at last we stood before a spring bubbling from an exposure of grey limestone. We drank deep, then Salome led the way up the gravelly slope to a lifeless plateau extending in mile upon mile of ochre monotony beneath the sky’s blue bowl. No wind. No soil. No plants except a mottling of lichen on the stones. No creeping things. Just a deafening silence.

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘There’s no other way.’

‘There’ll be another stream?’

She pointed out a row of notches in the horizon. Impossible to guess how distant they were. Was this plateau the watershed? After another million years deeper would we come to streams flowing the opposite direction? We had to hope so.

‘We ought to take some water from the spring.’

She shrugged. ‘How would we do that?’

Without water or food, tools or clothing, we strode across that barren waste. The sunshine tingled our skin. The crisp air kept us cool. Our hardened soles calibrated the texture of the ground. The crenulated horizon seemed always the same distance away. This wasteland could have been the beginning and end of everything. We’d be walking here always, walking, walking, the primal state of being, before the origin of sin. But one thing was changing. Slowly but inexorably the oxygen thinned from the air, requiring our hearts to beat faster, our lungs to fill deeper. At intervals Salome would stop and wait, her ribs briskly rising and falling; that deep ribcage that gave her the edge. The creaking of our breath was the only sound. She watched me as she waited, naked woman watching naked man on this lifeless naked earth. She said nothing. She seemed like a machine: bone, sinew, and muscle honed and hardened into a mechanism in the shape of a woman to convert oxygen from the air into the motion of walking.

As soon as I caught up she would stride on. I understood her urgency to keep moving. For we had not escaped time. The sun slowly arced across the sky. Though it was yet high and no wisp of cloud obstructed its rays, there was a gathering edge of chill in the air. Night would return and in this wasteland there was nothing to protect us from its cold. So we kept moving as briskly as the diminishing oxygen let us. I tried to lock my step in time with Salome’s, one lanky stride to each two steps of hers, to stay close behind her, to let the motion of her body hypnotise mine, her shoulders square and steady, arms slicing the air, hips beating left and right with alternating clenches of her buttocks, her knees fluidly pedalling up and down.

But even she was slowing. The oxygen was as low as in the Jurassic and still falling. It became so cold that our skin was goose-pimpled all over and my scrotum had shrivelled like a walnut. What trauma of prehistory were we marching into? Below the Carboniferous comes the Devonian; and at the boundary between them, God help us, another mass extinction. A mass extinction in the oceans, I remembered that much, but not what caused it or what happened on the land. The sky remained blue and clear. The sun shone bright like a brilliant cool star. I kept glancing over my shoulder to track its descent. If it was as cold as this while the sun yet shone, what chance would we stand after nightfall? Salome too glanced back at the sinking sun. She tried to go faster, I tried to match her pace, but we were panting to get enough breath and my chest was aching with the quick urgent thud of my heart. Our breath condensed into puffs of cloud. A mist obscured the landmarks we’d been heading for; we couldn’t see how far there was to go.

Salome paused to squat down, close her eyes, and touch the ground to verify our course. Just a few seconds’ halt and we were shivering badly. We clung to each other and rubbed each other’s back. Her skin was like ice.

‘Got to keep moving.’

Soon we were in the mist ourselves. Tiny drops of water condensed on our skin, sapping what warmth was left in us. Soft underfoot were little patches of moss wedged among the lichen-scummed stones. The land began to slope down. The beginning of a valley? It was hard to make it out in the mist. We stumbled downhill, the line of least resistance, like tumbling water. The milky blur of the sun was perched low where the horizon would be. We heard running water, all around us in the mist, the patches of moss were coalescing to form a sward, and there were mats of little clubmosses and whorls of primitive spiky ferns. We came upon a rivulet bouncing down through the stones and greenery. We drank brisk measures of the icy water, then hurried breathless down this stream till it joined a bigger one and we emerged from the mist. Stars were showing in the east and we were blue with cold when at last, thank God, we found vegetation enough to make a night nest.

We built it as quickly as our heaving lungs would let us. In the failing light we ripped up all the moss we could find to plug every chink with thick insulation. Make it like an igloo, I thought, to trap our body heat in the confined space. By the time we’d crawled in and sealed the entrance we’d little body heat left, and these ferns and mosses were not so insulating as snow. In the frigid darkness we pulled our bedding of spindly ferns close round us and pressed our shivering bodies together, rubbing each other hard to generate the miracle of warmth. My mind was as numb as my body. My sense of who I was was subsumed with this woman in an austere purity of darkness, silence, and cold. The night was like eternity. We slept for jagged shards of time, jolting fitfully awake, gasping for breath, afraid of falling too deeply asleep lest we never woke up.

Shortly before dawn I dropped at last into a deep sleep. I woke up almost warm in a cocoon of lambent green light with Salome asleep in my arms. Her face so close was like a black-olive landscape scored with the lines of dry streams and pimpled with tiny knolls. I noticed I’d woken with an erection. I closed my eyes, drifted back to sleep, and when I woke again she had gone and there was a cold draught from the entrance.

The plants outside had the rugged wiry look of adaptation to the cold. They glimmered with dew that I presumed had been frost. Arms hunched round herself, Salome was searching the stream for food. This is going to be another ice age, I surmised. Without clothing, without anything, we’d never get through.

But as we descended the valley the air became warmer, the plants more abundant, though their form was simple and sparse. Each was essentially just some variation of a branching stem. Some of the club-mosses grew five metres high, to terminate in short curling branches like the tops of shepherds’ crooks. There were trees of a smaller kind with a stubby fibrous trunk that forked into a pair of branches like long feather dusters. Among the greenery crawled a few primitive myriapods and scorpions, but nothing much we could eat. There were no insects on the wing. The air was as silent as the barren hills, save for the faint susurration of wind in the stems.

After the frigidity of the night, the sunshine was soon hot enough to make us sweat as we walked. The sparseness of oxygen in the air matched the sparse simplicity of the vegetation. If you go back far enough in geological time, you must sooner or later come to an atmosphere that’s unbreathable. No oxygen. No plants. No life. That really would be the end of the road. In the meantime, while we could, we carried on walking. What else was there to do? And to my pleasant surprise, not only did it get warmer over the next few days, and the plant life lusher along the stream, but the air became easier to breathe again.

The hills fell behind us. The stream grew into a braided river of many channels, some dry, some flowing, spread over a wide area. We caught a fish as it tried to flop across the mud between two pools. The wind picked up, and dusted us the ochreous hue of the dry hinterland. Moist patches of ground were bedded with bryophytes and clubmosses and tufts of archaic ferns. Ahead of us the blue sky fell to so low a horizon that it felt as though we really were approaching the end of the world. Was it for that reason that Salome suddenly began to speed up? She quickstepped along a dry channel through a field of dunes embroidered with skeins of creeping stems. As I followed, the noise of the wind came louder, though we seemed to be sheltered from its force.

Where the channel curved sharply to the right to find its way between the dunes, Salome paused and looked back. ‘This way, I think!’ Her human cry was shrill and strange upon the white-noise roar of the wind.

She began to clamber up the dune straight ahead. Not the path taken by the water. Not exactly the line of least resistance. But I had a feeling she was right. She was always right. I scrambled up the trail of her footprints in the sand. The dune wasn’t very high. She was standing on the top, a slender human pinnacle piercing the sky. The droning roar I’d taken to be the wind was yet louder. There was a tangy smell too. I climbed up beside her into the pummelling breeze. Below us lay an expanse of rusty sand broken up with black-brown rocks and patches of green. Beyond this beach — stretching away turquoise and blue to the edge of the world — was the sea.

58

In the middle distance the breakers made a white line along a coral reef, which crested the water in places to form thin green motu. This, not the wind, was the source of that noise. Beyond the reef the water was deep blue to the hazy line where sea met sky.

The shallow parts of the lagoon were brilliant turquoise. The water was darker where the river channels debouched towards gaps in the reef. The lagoon was limpidly still. The sea breeze propelled only a gentle rhythm of ripples against the sand. As we walked down to the water, we passed flotsam of seaweed, coral shards, and shells of a hundred different kinds. Some of the shells were shaped as a flat spiral. I picked up one and admired its iridescent stripes and ran my fingers over its silky texture. An ammonoid. Smelly shreds of flesh still adhered inside the aperture.

There was a shriek of pleasure as Salome splashed into the water.

‘Be careful, hey!’

She launched herself right under, then burst up in a sparkling of spray.

I dipped my fingers in the water and tasted its salt. It was the sea all right. How could we have come to the sea? I waded in deeper and felt the lovely tepid water silky round my balls. Sinking down on my back, I let the water relieve me of my weight. It was as if all the cares of time had been lifted from me. The sea! We’d travelled so deep, three hundred and sixty million years to the Devonian, that the centre of Africa lay by the ocean’s edge. I started to laugh, couldn’t stop, till I got a mouthful of briny water.

I struggled spluttering to my feet. Further out in the lagoon, Salome was a languid brown shape in the translucent turquoise. Cleansed, baptised, I returned to shore and wandered towards the nearest stream glittering across the beach from a green alley between the dunes. I stared at the beauty of everything: the feathery little clubmoss stalks sprouting from stems that crisscrossed the sand; the cornucopia of shells; the wave-worn rocks harbouring pools where corals bloomed like otherworldly flowers and crustacea slowly waved their segmented antennae. There was even a lobe-limbed fish-beast dragging itself across a slab to investigate a new pool.

The exposures of crystalline bedrock were dulled by dark patinas of algae. Near the sea, where the rocks had been scrubbed by the waves, I noticed a surface unusually black and shiny. I ran my fingers along it to a rock pool where some chunks of this mineral had eroded free. The piece I picked up was heavy in my hand and smoothly lumpy on one side. I followed by eye the line of the seam a short way underwater to where it vanished in sand and weed. In my mind’s eye I extrapolated it far out to sea. The pitchblende Curtis had found eroding in a Carboniferous stream, and had found clasts of in streams further downtime — here it was again, eroding from rocks plainly far older than Devonian.

I gazed out beyond the reef to the open sea. In that direction I was looking deeper into the past, as when you look at the light of distant galaxies. Somewhere out there, perhaps, in the bedrock of the ocean, steamed the nuclear reactor Curtis had sought. Out there in the inscrutable sea lay the centre, the source, if such a place existed, where I’d imagined every mystery might be explained, where Vince had hoped to find the signature of God. How many more miles, how many millions more years, into the ocean depths? I stood on the shore of that Devonian sea and watched the distant swell, the fuzzy blue horizon, and comprehended that this was our journey’s end. More than that, I understood nothing. Water flowed from the river channels into the sea; and somehow water flowed the other way too, carrying lumps of pitchblende downtime. Two contradictory things that both were true. Sometimes the streams flowed one way, sometimes the other, reversing their courses back and forth through the layers of deep time; like Emily, Makela, ourselves, travelling up and down time; like the current of causality, the past determining the future, the future paradoxically impinging on the past, begging the existence of some larger frame of reference which transcends any distinction between them.

I spotted in the sand a small green shell whose tonguelike shape I recognised. It was a lingula like the ones in Makela’s earrings. Had that unfortunate woman really come all this way? I found also a large example of those cone-shaped productid shells the Awauba used to hold fluids. How they’d got hold of them was another untold story. This one was long dead, half filled with sand. I took it with me to the stream, at a spot near the top of the beach where the banks were thick with moss and the water was sweet and fresh. I drank to wash away the taste of salt, rinsed out the shell and filled it with water for Salome, then returned to the rock pools to harvest some clams. No shortage of food here.

When she emerged, all sparkling clean, we sat side by side on the rocks as the sun dipped behind us, casting our shadows long and brightening the surface of the lagoon. The only sounds were the ripples on the shore and the distant white roar of the reef. No seabirds calling. No flies buzzing. No wind in treetops. Both of us seemed reluctant to fracture the stillness with words. Neither had we yet eaten anything, though my stomach ached for the clams sitting in a row beside me. It was Salome’s silent will, I knew, that was holding me back.

Very lightly, she touched my arm. ‘I’m sorry. It just seems a shame to kill anything here. Even the shellfish. It’s so perfect … so untouched …’

‘You know these clams will already be dead by now?’

Her face went long. ‘Okay … I guess we can’t let them go to waste.’

So we sucked the salty clams from their shells, and washed them down with water from the productid shell I’d pushed in the sand. The temperature was mild, no risk of freezing tonight, but we’d still want some kind of shelter or bedding. To judge by the sun’s arc through the sky, we were well south of the tropics — the clime of Adelaide in the spring — and yet the sea was warm enough for a coral reef. I regarded the primitive little plants trying to colonise the sand, and the museum’s worth of prehistoric shells strewn in just a small space around us: coral, brachiopods, bivalves, snails, ammonoids, fanlike pieces of bryozoa, and long segmented stems of crinoids; so colourful and pristine because they’d so recently been alive. Even a few trilobite husks lay there, like woodlice as big as crabs, their rows of legs already disarticulating from the banded carapaces. Once upon a time I’d have been scampering around mapping the numbers of each species and collecting type specimens, carefully packing each one in cotton wool with a neat little label.

Salome’s silence pre-empted any talk about the questions already on my mind … what we were going to do, what preparations we could make for the long journey home. Silently we gazed at the sea, sitting a discreet distance apart, and enjoyed the exquisite combination of the sun’s warmth and the wind’s coolness on our skin.

Her features in profile had a feline precision: the jaw long and level, the curve of her nose reversing the curve of her forehead, the sharp chiselled cheekbones, the line of her neck slanting to the knobbly curve of her spine. In the matted hair above her nape the yellow ribbon fluttered in the breeze.

Her face turned to me. ‘What?’

‘That ribbon … it must be important to you.’

She looked sadly down.

‘I’m sorry —’

‘No, it’s okay … There was a song when I was a kid … “Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree …”’

‘“It’s been three long years …”’

‘That’s the one … It was in the charts when they told me my mom had gone. I didn’t understand the song fully, but I knew it was something about waiting for someone you love to come home. So I tied a yellow ribbon in my hair and waited for her to come …’

Her voice faltered. She gazed back at the sea.

‘Why did you carry on?’

‘What?’

‘After you’d found your father and you knew your mum was … why did you agree to come deeper in?’

‘It’s hard to explain … It’s like, when she died and they threw her ashes on the water, she became part of this world. It’s like the whole world is my mother, or at least she permeates it all, same as the water flowing through it. That’s something I’ve always known, in a way, but didn’t consciously understand because I thought she was still alive … It kept calling me deeper into the mystery of where she’s gone.’

‘Deeper into the past?’

‘If that’s what it is. But each point we get to, I know there’s always further to go.’

‘Further to go till where?’

‘I don’t know … some point of union with everything.’

‘Sounds like you’re talking about the singularity at the beginning of time from which the universe exploded.’

She shrugged. In spite of the sun she was faintly shivering. I felt an impulse then to hold her in my arms, but the cold sword of events yet stood between us.

‘Why didn’t you just come by yourself? You could have done that, couldn’t you?’

‘I was afraid to.’

‘Why should you be? You’re the one who knew how to find the route, to find water and food, to deal with dangerous animals. You didn’t really need us.’

‘Sure, maybe I could have …’ Suddenly she turned on me and shouted in my face: ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t you understand anything yet? It scares me to be alone!’

‘But … you were always wandering off —’

‘That’s not the same. I mean really alone.’ She clocked my muddled expression. ‘Brendan, I’m sorry I ran off and left you, that morning … I felt so confused …’

‘You came back for me.’

‘Like I told you, I didn’t have to come far. You found the way.’

What was she saying?

She looked at me and I saw her unwept tears. ‘Will you hold me?’

I shuffled closer and put my arm round her and she laid her head on my chest. Her skin was drum taut from the seawater. It felt as though I was someone else, and so was she.

‘Not here. I’m thirsty.’ She slipped from my arms like a will-o’-the-wisp and began to walk up to the stream.

I pulled up the empty productid shell and followed her. In the ankle-deep moss by the stream, now almost in the shadow of the dune behind, she got down on hands and knees and drank like a quadruped, gritty backside in the air. With a sigh she sank into the moss, her eyes drooping closed.

I refilled the shell and planted it in the ground. ‘You okay?’

‘I guess.’

‘Shall I hold you again?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘If you want me to.’

Your amber eyes blazed at me like suns. ‘I want you to touch me … the way you were always going to but never did.’

A tremulous weight of accusation in those words.

‘There’s no oil or anything …’

‘You’ll just have to be gentle’ — and you rolled on to your front in the moss.

I placed my hands on the blackened skin between your shoulder blades. The muscles quivered in response. I ran my fingertips lightly to your ribs, your loins, your hips, then back up your sides —

‘More slowly, huh.’

So I stroked you more slowly, finger light all the time, your skin dry and hard, and a slow undulation passed along your back, channelling the speed of my hands till they found the rhythm your body wanted. I felt oddly detached from what I was doing. I could feel the sun on my back and your flesh beneath my hands and when I looked up I could see the blue sea shimmering into silver, and yet all of it seemed like an illusion.

‘Are you there, Brendan …?’ Your voice was quiet as a dream and muffled by the moss.

‘I’m here.’

‘Go lower, will you?’

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere …’

I moved between your side and your outflung arm and rinsed the sand from your bum with cool water that made you gasp. I caressed your neck, your buttocks and thighs, the depth of your ribs right into the moss. When my fingers skimmed down the grooves between your ribs the breath whistled from you like a song of the wind and when they circled your buttocks the wave flexing through you drove your hips into the moss. Your body became a living landscape: the steep-rimmed valley along your spine, the ridge-and-trough lineation of ribs, the bony buttresses of your scapulae, the twin hills of your buttocks, the ravine between them, the sinkhole where that cleft crossed the crease beneath, and the granite ridge of hamstring along each thigh. The hardness of your muscle and hide made you seem so physically there, more real than anything around us.

Some instinct of responsiveness between your flesh and my touch caused me to circle again and again up and down the backs of your thighs, those grainy rods of muscle that had carried you so many miles. The surging of your hips subsided into erratic shudders. My hands stalled.

‘No, don’t stop.’

Over and over I stroked your quivering thighs. Tears spilled down your face. I played but the part of a catalyst of your emotions. All the longing and lust that had tormented me had been blown out of me like seeds from a dry poppy head.

Till you rolled on your back and with a stab of tear-jewelled eyes beckoned me touch this other landscape of you. The topography was less suited to long strokes, and its landmarks were charged with significance, and your slitted eyes were watching. Tentatively I traced circles on your belly and along your arms and legs.

‘Touch me properly, Brendan.’

So I let my fingertips wander where they would, twirls of knotwork from neck to temples, stroked your brow till the lines there softened, circled the bony hollows of your shoulders and the black centres of your shallow-spread breasts, dragged my fingers across your nipples and ribs and the rims of your pelvis.

‘So nice,’ you sighed as your body gently arched and sank.

You lifted floppy hands each side of your head as though to surrender. The descending sun glazed you like bronze. Your nipples swelled. Your eyes stared back at my nakedness. Sinuous waves rippled through you with the rhythm of my hands, your breath, my breath, the waves on the shore. You became so tuned to the movement of my hands that I could almost feel your pleasure. I stroked your hips and your thighs and the stipples of wiry hair on your mons. I could feel the sea breeze on my chest, the strain in my buttocks as I craned over you, the pressure of your gaze all over me. A sigh burst from your lips as my fingers reached your groin. I felt as if by sympathetic magic a fizz of pleasure in my own. Yet a cold vice was locked around my heart. My organ hung half-formed and I discovered that you were zipped dry and tight.

You lifted your knees and spread your thighs. ‘Lick me, will you?’

I bowed my head between your legs and kissed your salty slit. Your fingers closed gently round my cock and held it like a talisman as I ploughed you with my tongue and your hips surged and sank like the sea. When your nether lips opened, I licked you inside, I oiled you with my spit, and my penis swelled in your hand.

Suddenly you reared up like a waking vampire and drove me on to my back. One knee each side of me, your hips slowly heaving in the air, you took my organ in both your hands. Your thumb and finger ringed it like a noose till I was big and hard as you needed, then you pushed yourself on to me with fierce left—right twists. So tight we both grimaced with the pain. Your hands bracing on my shoulders. Your bright amber eyes like holes through your skull to an inferno.

‘Hold me, Brendan!’ — and I clawed at your salt-crisp back — ‘Why didn’t you fuck me when I needed you?’

You rammed at me violently as if to punish me. We were bolted together so tight that your thrusting and heaving tugged the roots of my cock as if you might rip it from my body. Gasping, grunting, you swept your arms high. I dug my fingers into your pulsing buttocks as your arms scythed the air, as your head shook from side to side, as your breasts whipped up and down, as faster and harder you fucked me, groaning, crying, and you were out of control, thrashing at the air, your head shaking so hard you might shake it right off, your hips pounding so fast, my organ a scorching flame as the quick rhythm of your groans merged into a scream, one long desperate scream, coming and coming in wave after wave, your face straining up as if you were screaming to God; screaming for your mother who left you, who was dead, for your brother dead too, for Curtis who abused you, for Vince who trusted you, for your father whose kindly words you couldn’t understand, for the commune destroyed, for all the animals you’d seen killed, for the earth’s lovely places wrecked by human hand.

You convulsed as if you’d been speared, your eyes rolling up to leave bare bloodshot whites, your hands clawing the air in slow motion. You came loose in a flood of spunky stickiness and collapsed into my arms. I held you tight, and you clung so close I could feel the thudding of your heart against mine, and the tears ran like rivers from your eyes.

59

The sun was sinking into the cleft between the dunes. The cool of night was crisp in the air. While Salome washed, I followed the stream a short way inland, where bigger plants grew along its banks, and gathered materials for a bivouac.

It had happened at last. How could the dunes, the water, the sky, the plants still look the same? And yet it hadn’t been quite as I’d imagined. I felt sucked dry by the force of Salome’s feelings. My heart was strangely cold. What had become of all the love I used to feel?

Soon the sun had set and coolness like an Aegean dusk was goose-pimpling our bodies. ‘Not there,’ she said of the spot by stream, so we built our crude shelter down by the strandline. Glorious unnamed constellations took shape in the sky, starlight enough to pick out the line of breakers on the reef and a shimmer of mica in the wave-lapped sand. Beneath our draughty bivouac we snuggled together to keep warm. Soon she was asleep in my arms, the rhythm of her breath alternating with the slap and drag of the waves. How many times to come might we lie together like this?

We swam in the lagoon at first light. The water was wonderfully buoyant because it was so salty. When I came out, Salome was swimming towards the reef, firm strokes left and right for a time, then relaxing into breaststroke. I tried not to fret; she knew the measure of her strength. I walked along the shore, thinking about her, wondering if and when we’d make love again, thinking about food, thinking I best improve the shelter if I wanted a better night’s sleep … wondering how many days we’d stay here. For sooner or later we would have to gird our loins for the long journey home. Not immediately. Having come so far, we deserved a holiday; and what better place than this beautiful wild beach? But eventually we’d have to face up to the challenge of finding our way, through the trials of each palaeome, each crisis of mass extinction, back to the time we belonged. And then? Would we be lovers? Would we make a life together? … What would we do about our discovery?

She swam so far out that when I looked for her I couldn’t spot her. Surely she would be okay. Beyond the reef the ocean was metallic beneath the low-angled sun … but along the crisp dawn horizon was something, a faint grey line — I had to peak my hands above my eyes to be sure — a crenellation of distant mountains along what appeared to be a chain of islands, for in gaps between them the sky lay flush to the sea.

I searched again for Salome along the silver-turquoise lagoon contained by the line of breakers and the green jewels of motu. Each speck of rock or floating weed I thought for a moment must be her. At last I spotted another black speck slowly forging closer to the reef. Three hundred and sixty million years from now it might have been a seal. Here it could only be Salome. How long could she find the strength to keep swimming? Was she conscious what dangers might be hidden in the water? The land in this age might be devoid of creatures big enough to pose any threat, but the same was not true of the seas.

My walk brought me near the debouchment of a larger channel of the river. The beach here was rockier, especially the foreshore exposed by the tide. The waves had eroded through jagged outcrops of coral limestone to expose glimpses of black shale. The limestone was too spiky to traverse on bare feet. I didn’t want to go too far anyway. We wouldn’t want to lose each other, not here in this utmost fastness of deep time.

A crystalline sparkle caught my eye in a little embayment where seawater sloshed between the rocks. Angular shapes of gold embedded in the shale. Not actually gold, I guessed, but something far more valuable. There was no way to get at it from the beach without lacerating my feet; but I wanted some of those crystals. I backtracked to a spot where I could enter the water and swam carefully round to the inlet. As I entered its confined space my hands and feet brushed sharp edges of limestone beneath the unprotected length of my body. Waves slapped against the rocks on three sides. But the shiny mineral was in reach. It was pyrite, no question. I probed for a spot where I could stand without cutting my feet. Water swilling round my thighs, I worked at the crystals with my fingers to prise some of them free. I’d no way to carry them except clenched in my fists, so I had to swim back with fists balled, using the surfaces of my arms to scull through the water.

I had pyrite! Once it had dried, all I needed was a hard stone on which to strike a spark, and some tinder, and I’d be able to make fire. The task was something to distract me from worrying about Salome. I built the fire in front of the bivouac so it would help keep us warm at night. From time to time I looked up to check on Salome. Once when I looked the whole upper half of her body stood clear of the water like a mermaid’s. She must have found a shallow shoal. Just a tiny black figure at such a distance, but the sight jolted me with a flashback of her rearing above me last night.

The shoal explained how she had the strength to stay out so long. The sun was already high by the time she began to swim back. I had a fire burning and a fish broiling. It felt good to have exercised my knowledge to harness the properties held in nature. Now we had the means to make fire, the trials of travelling home through the palaeomes seemed a mite less daunting. That, and my relief to see Salome heading back, gave me a mellow feeling of well-being in this place, where food and fresh water were plentiful, and warm air bathed my skin, and the drone of the reef was soothingly hypnotic. As I watched Salome breaststroke through the translucent jade water, I became keenly aware of the austere beauty of the sea, the land, the intricately textured rim between the two. It was like a memory, gusting through the halls of my mind, of the pleasure we’d once shared in observing nature together.

I waited at the water’s edge, the little waves running and ebbing across my feet, till you reached the shelving sand and stood up, water cascading from you, lithe and sparkling, like a goddess reborn. As you waded towards me, your chest rising and falling with your breath, I remembered you weeping in my arms last night — and all the feelings that had been locked up in me came loose, a rush of love so violent through my limbs that I could hardly stand. With the love came desire. So exhilarating to stand naked and shameless beneath the sun. You stopped just out of my reach and tantalised me with your gaze. With each rhythmic slap of the sea on your ankles my blood throbbed harder. You sprang into my arms and sank beneath me and this time you were ready; your body opened to me like moist heavy soil; your brown flesh, pressed in the wet sand, licked by the last ripple of each wave, was one with the earth. I felt the power of life in me as I thrust into you. The hot sun prickled my arching spine. Your legs folded round my back and your hands grasped the bones of my bottom to pull me deeper in with every thrust.

‘You got to let go inside.’

Your salty breath and flesh enveloped me. Your strong thighs viced me tight inside you, so I felt part of you, so that I too was one with the earth. You tugged my buttocks wide as you pulled me in, stretching the seam of flesh between them till its tightness yielded. And then I let go — I plunged and pistoned deep and quick, I groaned, yelled, screamed, and when I came I felt your body convulse under mine and every cord of tension within me exploded into stardust frothing on the ocean’s roar.

Afterwards you splashed water on my face to stop me falling asleep. Then you stepped into the shallows to rinse away the sand and spunk. It was only the sight of you dipping your fanny in the sea that made me think —

‘What’s the matter?’

‘If you got pregnant …’

You laughed. When did I last hear you laugh?

‘I’m serious.’

‘Brendan, my periods stopped ages ago.’

Of course.

‘You hadn’t noticed?’

I shrugged.

‘My body figured out that conditions ain’t quite favourable.’

‘You’re okay, though?’

‘I feel good.’

I hugged you then, standing in the sea, and you hugged me back. The love in me was so strong.

‘I was afraid you’d never come back. There could be predators —’

‘It’s so beautiful, Brendan! Underwater you can see all the lovely coral and sea lilies and everything.’

You turned in my embrace to look towards the reef. Clear jade water slopped round our thighs. Shards of sunlight were reflected from an infinity of tiny planes in the texture of the lagoon. Beyond the reef, the open sea, the horizon, the line of distant mountains was still faintly visible.

‘It goes on,’ you said. ‘Deeper in.’

‘I know … But I don’t really care any more. We’ve come as far as we can. I’m just sorry Vince didn’t make it. I’m sorry about Curtis too.’

‘They made their choices.’

‘Curtis certainly did. But Vince did nothing wrong — except trust me.’

‘He made his choices too.’

‘He may have saved your life that day.’

‘That’s what I mean.’

By then the fish on the fire was a blackened husk. So I caught another to cook for our breakfast. After many days of raw fish, a broiled one tasted delicious. Yet I could tell that Salome was torn between her relish of the food and her distaste for the presence of my fire on the beach. The rest of that day, and the next one, as I toiled to improve our shelter and gather more bedding and firewood, I was conscious how, even in this wild eden, to which we’d come without shred or splinter of human artifice, we’d begun to reconstruct the essentials of material culture: shelter, tools, fireplace, midden. We’d gone back to nature about as far as you can go, yet it was an inevitable part of our human nature to make such things.

60

Though our journey had come to a conclusive dead end, there remained a feeling of unfinished business. What could be left to accomplish except to get ourselves home, unless it were simply to enjoy being alive with each other in a place so beautiful? Days passed as we swam, fished, rested; observed the brave simplicity of the plants colonising the sand and the clunky charm of the arthropods and molluscs in the rock pools. We made love every day and every night. We slept in each other’s arms and sometimes I’d wake in the night and feel the warmth of her beside me, her head resting on my chest, one arm clasped round me like an anchor, and I’d realise she was awake and she’d move her body insistently against mine and I’d discover once again the intensity of her need, and of my own.

Each time she swam out to the reef, I felt bereft. It seemed to hold an irresistible allure for her. Once I saw her standing on one of the motu. I was reluctant to swim far beyond my depth. A glimpse of a shark — a primitive kind with two low dorsal fins — dissuaded me from going further, but nothing I said would stop Salome.

While she swam I filled my solitude by collecting shells from the beach, in the simple, unscientific way I used to collect them as a child on holidays in Scotland. I laid them out on the sand in groups of those similar in shape, I rearranged them into groups of similar colour, and then I ordered them in a long arc from smallest to largest.

‘Have you identified them yet?’ you teased as you stood over me, all dripping and gleaming from the sea, your body supple and smooth from so much swimming and seafood. I was ready to make love to you right then, but you held out a silver-blue fish you’d caught and wanted me to cook.

When we’d eaten our fill I stoked up the fire to keep us warm while we gazed at the stars reflected in the lagoon. After a time you lay back on the sand, hands linked behind your head, one knee raised, the other leg stretched out. It was a pose of such unconscious grace that I felt a heart-stopping rush of love. On a whim, I began to wind some tendrils of seaweed along your arms. You bore it with a faint ironic smile. I draped round your throat a necklace made of another length of seaweed and a brachiopod shell in which a predator had bored a hole. In your pubes I threaded tiny-leaved stems plucked from the sand, and in the fingernail depth of your navel I slotted a snail shell the colour of your eyes.

‘What are you trying to make me into?’

‘I don’t know … The goddess of the sea and shore?’

‘I’m not a goddess. Just a fucked-up woman.’

‘I know you’re a woman, and I love you as a woman, but you seem something more as well. Vince said the same … You’re so connected to the quick of things. You’re able to pierce the fabric of time. It’s like you embody in some heightened way what it means to be a human being … Isn’t that enough to call you a goddess?’

‘If I’m a goddess, then you must be a god.’

‘Don’t mock.’

‘Why should I want to make love to anyone less?’

‘For a long time you didn’t want to.’

‘Is that what you think?’

What?

You looked up at me, so gently. ‘What’s happened here could have happened a long time ago.’

‘Really?’

‘I always liked you. But you weren’t ready.’

All those flickers of disappointment I’d seen in your face, all those times you’d sat with me or touched me, all the hunger with which you’d turned to Curtis — Why had I been so blind? So much time we could have been together!

At least we were lovers now. All the future lay before us …

Not quite mindful what I was doing, I threaded some curly stems into your hair. I picked from my collection a pair of clam shells, each as broad as my palm and as smooth as porcelain. I placed one over each of your breasts. They fitted perfectly; made you into a Disney nereid. At once you jerked up, the shells went flying, and you jumped to your feet, scowling like a demon in the fire’s red glow, and smacked away all the decorations.

‘This body is what I am! I will have no shame in it! We’ve come all this way, been stripped of everything. Let us be who we really are —’

I lifted my hands in surrender. ‘And do what?’

‘I want you to dance with me.’

‘There’s no music …’

‘Of course there’s music. Listen!’

So I listened … and I heard the roar of the breakers on the reef, and, nearer, the liquid slap of the waves on the beach, and the wood crackling on the fire, and the land breeze whistling between the dunes. The surging of the ocean pulsed in your hips. Your lifted arms swayed like branches in the wind. Zigzags of fiery highlight ran along the blackness of your limbs. You held out your hand.

‘You know I’m not a dancer.’

‘Everyone’s a dancer.’ So earnest and intent; you made me feel that it was now or never, that I must not let you down.

You hooked one little finger with mine and kept it there as you danced, one delicate connection to feed the pulse of the elements through your body into mine. Your eyes met my gaze like mirrors, the gusting of your breath synchronised with my breath, and my body gently yielded to the rhythms of sea, wind, fire, and the earth of your flesh. I can dance after all. It’s as easy as sex. Our lungs drink deep. Our steps are light. Naked and free beneath the stars, no one to watch or judge us, only you close before me, your arms brushing across mine, sometimes the whole front of your body twisting against me, then dancing back, so the loveliness I felt on my skin I now see with my eyes. Step by step, we shimmy and slide inside each other’s embrace, each part of us touches every other, till there’s no distinguishing of parts any more, only the oneness of dancing flesh in the revolving hot and cold of the fire and the night, till my legs are trembling so much I cannot stand.

On the moss-matted sand you engulf me at once, so wet and ready you are. The rhythm of your hips stays the same, the slow-forging rhythm of ocean breakers that have rolled against the land’s edge for millions of years. Your moist velvet clasp joins me to that immensity of time so that I become part of it. Strong and steady your buttocks roll in my hands, fucking me tenderly, your body erect above me, twisting and swaying, tiny rubies of perspiration on your skin lit through by the fire, your swollen-tipped breasts swinging, your head sweeping through the billion stars in the blackness beyond. You’re the world tree, the axis mundi, rooted on my phallus, thrusting high into the star-sprayed heavens, depths of space as vast as the depths of time beyond the ocean’s rim. I can feel this depth of space to the stars; it’s like an all-consuming vertigo, I’m falling through space, and yet your hips hold me firm against the earth, your eyes bless me with a solemn smile, your fingers trace spirals round my nipples till they sting like corkscrews of flame.

Now you curl down over me, tuck your face into my neck, and I stroke your back over and over, and I think you’ll want to climax, but the oscillation of your hips damps almost to nothing and I’m held in the moment inside you.

‘Relax inside … Feel the stillness.’

There’s a softening in my groin and my chest and we’re hardly moving at all, suspended in the still white noise of the universe, and, as my battered heart softens, its sorry secrets leak through the cracks and you hold me as I weep and the force of my sadness spreads through me like a tide.

‘You are special,’ I whisper, ‘and precious and lovely … I can’t believe I’m here with you.’

‘You must believe. You’re here, right now, and I’m with you. And you’re special too … So is everyone if only they knew.’

You rise from my arms, sit upright, you’re going to pull away from me, and it’s my fault because I let my mind step back from the moment’s beauty, and I can’t bear it, I want this togetherness to last for ever. But you brace your weight on your hands as your knees lift, and I get the idea and push up to keep our bodies joined as you plant your toes on the ground, squatting momentarily, your inner grip tugging me, then extend your legs around me as I too sit up and we settle chest to chest in symmetry, both our bodies upright, coupled at our roots. Goose pimples from the cool night on my back, the warmth of your body on my front. I stroke your back to keep you warm. You do the same to me. The caresses soothe us again into stillness. We look into each other’s eyes. We see the stars above, the black sea below. As your fingers stroke up my spine a euphoric energy rises inside me. I touch you the same way, feel your muscles soften and tremulous, the energy rising, pushing to the sky. The place where we’re joined is the fount, the still centre of awareness, like the centre of the world, the source we’ve journeyed so far to find; the beginning of life.

Once again my mind drops out of the moment, to grieve for all the possibility of love I’ve squandered through all these millions of years. Your face suddenly wrinkles with tension. ‘Stay with me!’ You clasp my buttocks tight to pull me deeper. ‘This moment, now, you inside me … be true and alive to this —’

Your fingers skim my back and a rush of white fire floods up through me from the snug fizzing stillness of cock and cunt. Your motionless hips arrest the impulse to buck and thrust. I feel the slow contractions of your flesh around my flesh inside you, building up and up the tension of pleasure, and it’s a wonder to me that I can be alive and feel this, and the sighing of your breath, and the trembling waves that shudder through you, seeming to lift you up and up, as if you’re rising into the starry sky and I am rising with you, up and up, into the coolness of the night, cool air tingling on our spines, the slap and thunder of the waves like the pulse of blood and breath, like my love for you that fills me, that’s also my love for this beautiful earth, so big, so intricate, layered through time, always transmuting, like the beach sculpted by the waves, and when at last we come we are one with the earth and the star-studded sphere of the universe enveloping us, we are one with time concertinaed inside our aching ecstasy. Your nails bite into my back. Your cry hums through me like a harmonic of the song of the earth. You burst into tears and whether they’re tears of sadness or joy I cannot say.

61

Another day dawned full of beauty and promise. A dip in the lagoon washed away the cobwebs of sleep. Then draughts of cool water from the stream and another breakfast of broiled fish. You ate methodically, gazing out to sea, where the line of distant mountains was clearly visible at this hour. When you’d finished, I sat behind you and wrapped my arms round you and kissed your salty shoulders.

‘What are you after?’

‘I just wanted to hug you …’

‘But …?’

There was indeed something. ‘It’s all very lovely here … but … when are we going to start thinking about the journey home.’ I felt your sudden stillness. ‘We can’t stay here for ever.’

‘I know.’

‘We can stay a while longer, of course, but I want to start making preparations — like improvising some basic equipment: water containers, something to carry the fire-lighting kit, tools of various kinds … The resources on this beach are better than we’re likely to find for some time once we head inland —’

You snatched away and sprang to your feet.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘“Resources”!’ With your back turned to me you stared at the sea.

I stood up. ‘Please!’

‘You still don’t get it, do you? What I’ve told you so many times.’

‘About what?’

Still I was confronted by your inscrutable back, your wiry black hair, the faded yellow ribbon. Your shoulders began to tremble.

‘Will you tell me what I’ve done to upset you?’

You turned round and threw your arms round me and held me tight. ‘It’s nothing you’ve done …’ Your voice was cracking into sobs.

Your holding me like that and the sudden, unexpected emotion began to turn us on again. As you nuzzled against me I tasted the salt on your face and ran my hands down the steely muscles of your back.

Abruptly you pulled out of my grasp and, before I could wonder what was wrong, you caught my hand and led me into the shallows. I thought maybe you wanted to make love in the water, but you let go of me and flung yourself into the waves and began to swim. One arm tentacled out briefly and beckoned me to follow.

So I swam after you, through water turning a richer turquoise as it deepened, and so clear that even through the rippling surface I could make out the forms of corals and shellfish and the darting torpedoes of fish.

‘Where are we going?’

You were too far ahead to hear me above the splashing of our limbs and the steadily louder roar of the reef. Now and again you glanced back and waved to spur me to keep going. I’d never before swum so far out from this or any other shore. The depth of water beneath me seemed to me a frightening void, and some of the fish down there were well over a metre long. I reminded myself there were sandbanks where we could rest; and your proximity gave me courage against the wild, as it had so often before. Each sight of your sleek brown shoulders breaching the water seared me with a flame inside to keep following you.

Close enough now to the reef that the noise of the breakers was an all-consuming thunder. I could see the ledge of dead coral exposed each time the waves drew back, and then the wall of blue rushing forwards, its crest fragmenting into white at one point, quickly spreading down the line, then crashing down, and down, and down, swamping the bared stone. To the left was a gap in the reef where the current from one branch of the river met the ocean swell.

‘You must see this!’ you shrieked above the booming waves.

You arched down, your back slicing the water like a dolphin’s, and with a kick of your upended legs dived under. I gulped a deep breath and did the same. The noise of the breakers transmuted into a dull deep wall of sound. I forced my eyes open against the sting of salt — and beheld a baroque wonderland of green and violet coral rearing up beneath me and sculpted into mounds, inverted horns, branching twigs; and rooted among them huge productid brachiopods, their lids ajar from the cone-shaped lower valves, and lacy fans of bryozoa, and jointed crinoid stalks tipped with slow-squirming feathery arms, and spinneys of swaying seaweed. Swimming through this dreamscape were bony-headed placoderms, and serpentine jawless beasts like lampreys, and primitive ray-finned fish with iridescent scales, and you, Salome, moving with sinuous mammalian grace.

All this I saw in moments, before my straining lungs propelled me upwards. I clawed and kicked, for longer seconds than I expected, till my head burst into the warm air and sloshing waves and the thunder and crash of the breakers. You surfaced in the same moment and swam on, heading into the channel that pierced the reef.

‘What are you doing?’

You kept on swimming across the channel, your body rising and falling on the deep waves there, towards a section of reef that stood just above sea level — the beginning of a motu, crusted with green algae. You had to crawl hard against the current trying to drag you into the open sea. It was madness, but I followed you. I swam with all my strength, riding the swell, fighting the current, hearing the breakers roar both ahead and behind. If they caught me in their power they’d smash me into pulp in seconds. With iron will I kept my breaths and strokes steady, till at last we reached the calmer water behind the motu.

Close to the inner shore the water was brilliant jade over white coral sand. You found a spot shallow enough in which to stand. Stepping carefully between mounds of living coral, you waded on to the narrow islet, knees bent and arms spread for balance against the spray from the waves pounding its seaward edge. I climbed up beside you, trembling from exertion, goose-pimpling in the wind, my legs almost too liquid to fight gravity. A big wave crashed right in front of us, drenched us, nearly knocked us over. We grabbed each other’s arms to brace ourselves and seawater spewed across our feet.

Spaced along the reef in both directions jutted more green motu, but beyond the breakers in front of us was only the heaving blue water, the jags of whitecaps, the glitter of sunlight. Not a seabird or pterosaur, not a rock or islet, nothing at all except the sea till one’s eyes reached that distant line of peaks now dissolving in the haze. You gazed out there as if mesmerised, shielding your eyes with one hand, clutching my arm with the other. The sea wind pummelled your hair back from your brow and tugged at the yellow ribbon.

You shouted into my ear, ‘There’s more land out there.’

‘Just islands!’

‘Could be more than that.’

‘I don’t think so.’

You said something else I couldn’t make out. Another buffet of spray rained over us. You pulled my arm and we stepped back into the lagoon. Waist deep in the silky tepid water, the spray still gusting our hair, you embraced me long and deep.

‘Come with me a bit further!’

Before I could comprehend what you meant, you let go and plunged in and began to swim; and I followed you, in an arc away from the reef and into the wallowing line of the channel, then — my God! — forwards through the gap, accelerated by the current, roller-coasting on the swell — swimming into the open sea. Yet still I swam after you. The swell surged and flexed like the muscles of an immense being of unimaginable power. The water turned quickly cooler and darker as the wings of the reef fell behind us.

We swam out so far from the reef that the waves could not hurl us against it. How deep it was here I dared not think. Treading water, you waited for me. Your turned-up face, eyes slitted against the sun, rose and fell on the rolling swell. You gave me your hands and we rose and fell together. We tuned into the waves’ rhythm, let them do the work, and each time a big wave loomed we kicked at the right moment to keep our faces above water.

‘Tell me what we’re doing here!’

You let go of my hands and the sea carried you into my arms. ‘Hold me, will you!’

I clung my arms round you as you sculled your arms for both of us, as our legs kicked and thrust. It was then that the yellow ribbon came loose from your hair. You seemed not to notice. It snaked on the swell, just out of reach.

‘What are we doing here?’

‘Feel the rhythm of the sea!’

The whooshing, slooshing rhythm of the swell we rode, the sinking, surging, kick and thrust, rising, floating on the rolling, glistening water, your body close in my arms, so I feel the thumping of your heart, the bellows of your lungs, as we kick and thrust together, the rhythm of our bodies as one, the rhythm of the sea, the wind, the crash of the breakers. As we sank in a trough, you pulled on my shoulders to lift your hips. As we rose on the wave, as I kicked and thrust, you sank on to my hardness and clenched your legs round me and gasped as I drove inside you. Sea beast with two backs, we rode the swell. It was your arms that sculled, my legs that kicked … sinking, surging, kick and thrust, and rising, floating … pulsing weightless in the ocean like a medusa. We might die before we reach the end of this. We’re one flesh, one spirit, no reasoning any more, only gasping breath, sliding flesh, the wave of the sea driving the wave through our flesh, the rhythm consuming us, the water splashing over us, sensation pressing inside us, the wave seethes through us, the ocean’s all around us, the sun swings wild above us, the sky, sun, sea, wave, we’re part of it, at one with it, and a voice is calling, keening, wailing from within us, like the voice of the amniotic sea, our flesh dissolving, and the cry is a newborn child’s, it’s the agony and grief of dying, it erupts from us through the spume.

Salt water engulfs me. I’m drowning. I’m in paradise. I’m one with you enfolding me, your softness fiercely pulsing. I’m one with everything. I see the unshielding of all places and all times, like walls and mirrors unfolding like dominoes collapsing, so there’s no barrier between anything and I’m one with all the immensity of the universe and all the abyss of time. All is one and yet I am here and with you, I’m here enough to know that I love you, I love all of it, that we’re all together, all love, all beautiful.

I kicked hard to drive our heads spluttering into the air, spewing water from our mouths. Another wave was coming. We were still clinched together. Kick again and thrust. Breathe in, my darling, breathe! At last I understood you: how you experience the world around you as an extension of yourself, how you cherish it like a lover and grieve for its suffering, how you accept what can only be accepted not possessed or comprehended.

You drew back your head and smiled, a beautiful toothy smile framed by the glistening sea. You tried to smile again as our bodies disengaged, and I to smile back, to ease for each other the sting of that parting. Up and down you floated on the swell; slowly we drifted out of phase, you rising as I fell, you sinking as I rose. You swam three strokes to bring you back in phase with me on the crest of another wave, where you paused, treading water, to look back at me.

I thought then to look for the reef. In a flurry of panic I couldn’t find it, though I could hear it, till I spotted the line of spray — further off than I’d expected. We had to swim all that way against the current!

I looked back in search of you. Could not see you, till a wave lifted you into view. You’d drifted yet further away. In your face I caught an expression of sadness before you vanished behind the next wave. Suddenly I knew what that portended. I understood what you’d told me so many times and I hadn’t wanted to hear. If I swam to you now, then maybe, just maybe, I could master your will, like Curtis did, and get you back to the shore and make you travel home with me through the layers of deep time. All my desire was to do that. But if I’d learnt anything it was that I must let you choose your own way. I must not try to dominate your will. Even in this. That’s why you’d trusted me.

The swell was so deep that we glimpsed each other only for moments as powerlessly we rose and fell. When, for an instant, your eyes met mine from wave crest to wave crest, I saw the invitation to go with you. Deeper in. And I was tempted. For how could I hope to make it alone through all those hundreds of millions of years? Why should I return to a world wrecked by human thoughtlessness? I’d joined my soul so close to yours that such a world seemed as intolerable to me as it did to you. But in the deepest part of my being I knew I had to return.

You gave me one more smile and launched yourself into the next rising wave. For several seconds you were lost from view, then I saw you, a dart of bronze amidst the curving blue, swimming strongly out to sea.

I clutched at the thought I’d got it wrong, that you’d come back soon enough, like you always had. But my own strength was failing. If I wanted to live I had to get back inside the reef. It was a fight against the swell and the current, I had to swim with all my strength, but I made it back through the channel, into the placid lagoon, to the sandy back-reef shore of the young motu. When I had strength enough to stand, I climbed atop the strip of stone and, bracing myself against the spray, I scanned the open sea. The sunshine licked the heaving blue mass with sparkles countless as the stars in heaven. I searched and searched, hoping, desperately hoping, to spot Salome heading back towards the channel. Just once, a long way out, I spotted a dark speck of movement that might have been her, swimming towards the horizon.

Battered by the spray, I waited, hoping against hope she might change her mind and come back to me. At last I did see something: her ribbon floating on the swell in front of the motu. Just out of reach. Still I stood there, shivering, hunched to withstand the biggest waves when they swamped over me. I stared till my eyes were sore from salt and the strain of searching for a being so tiny in a sea so vast. I berated myself for letting her go. I stood in the mocking brightness of the Devonian sun, with tears coursing down my face, and knew that never in all my life had I been so alone.

62

A family group of sivatheres have come to the lakeshore to drink. The adults are massive, long-limbed, with two crescents of velveted bone rising in a flat plane from the skull. The young ones have just a pair of little bumps. Tom and Moyedou, standing naked in the water, keep a respectful distance as they fill their gourds to make this morning’s tea. Monkeys chatter above me and chase each other through the twisted vines. Across the water two figures climb dripping on to a jungly island where robins and warblers flit and sing. Vince waves to me, his body gleaming like polished ebony. His laughter rings out as Keliwi grabs him round the waist and wrestles him into the thicket of wild ginger. Along the near bank two women, whose faces I know from somewhere, lounge beside a black panther who rhythmically screws up his eyes as they stroke his head.

One person is missing, though. She’ll be swimming down the lake, maybe, or gathering fruit in the forest, or basking on a rock in the morning sun. While I’m thinking of her, her mother comes and sits beside me. Her amber eyes, the same as her daughter’s, look out from a face similar in its expressions but darker in complexion, fuller in the lips.

‘Does Salome love me?’ I ask.

Emily lays a warm arm round my back. ‘Don’t you understand yet?’

‘I don’t know. I have tried.’

She stands as Akombu comes down from his fern-fringed cave. They embrace, and lightly caress each other’s skin. They watch the light dancing on the water, the iridescent speeding and hover of damselflies, and the trees on the far shores shimmering in the breeze.

‘It’s a good day to be alive,’ says Akombu.

Emily kisses both his cheeks and then his lips. The air all around them seems radiant. Arm in arm they walk past the cave into the beginning of the valley, their bodies moving gracefully in step. From the raffia palms drooping over the stream another woman appears, taller, busty, elegantly lithe. She loops her hand in Akombu’s free arm and walks with them. Far beyond, where the valley widens and rises to the wooded uplands, the long necks of sauropods reach to browse the pointed crowns of podocarps.

I turn back to the water in search of Salome … and woke up to the sun newly risen from the sea. The sky was pink and duck egg blue and the sea like quicksilver. My first thought was of delight in the view, the next was of the dream … and then — Salome! — with a gut wrench of dismay I remembered. I tried to deny it was true. I looked at the squashed moss beside me where she’d slept each night. I scrambled up, took in the footprints in the sand, looked up and down the beach and out to the lagoon, hoping I was wrong, that she might have come back.

When I yelled her name the only reply was the white roar of the reef and the slithering ebb and flow of the ripples on the sand. Some of the footprints, I saw, were hers. Even as my heart prickled with hope, I knew they were from before she’d gone. I touched the curving surface of sand moulded by her instep. That did it for me. I fell on my knees and wept.

For a long time I stared out to the sea, no longer looking to see her, just remembering my last glimpses of her swimming away. The distance to those mountains faintly cresting the horizon was very great. The oxygen level in this palaeome was high, but beyond a certain point it would get inexorably thinner …

For three days I waited for her. I threw all my energy into the practical tasks of preparing for the journey. There wasn’t very much I had to take. I was a hunter-gatherer now; all I really needed was pyrite to light fires, some sharp blades of flint and placoderm bone, and a few days’ supply of sun-dried fish. To carry these things I made a pouch of leathery seaweed. For cordage I searched inland: fibres from the trunk of a feather-duster tree, woven together, made a string to tie the pouch to my waist.

I must not abandon her! I mustn’t leave her to be alone! I must wait till I’m absolutely sure she’s not coming back.

The truth was that I’d known from the moment I saw that sad look on her face before she swam away that she would never come back. The beauty of the lonely beach mocked me. I could stay no longer. I turned my back on the ocean and began my long walk back through the trackless wastes of that far remote age. I channelled my grief into single-minded concentration on the tasks of survival. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. With fire and shabby little shelters I got through the chill nights and thin oxygen marking the end of the Devonian. I put into practice all the skills I’d learnt from Salome. How to locate food and test its edibility. How to find water. How to navigate by the drainage patterns across the land, the gradient of time, the line of least resistance. As we’d found on our return from the first expedition the terrain yielded more readily to travel down-time. When I entered the habitats of more dangerous animals, I applied Salome’s wisdom of keeping a wary distance. I hunted only small prey, adequate to fill one man’s belly. In these early palaeomes of primitive fish and tetrapods, I could catch them in my hands.

Yet I thought about her all the time. In those days on the beach we became one flesh, and, for moments at least, our souls were joined too. It was as though she was with me, inside me, advising me what to do, what not to do, sharing her wisdom, even the sharpness of her senses. I heard her voice on the breeze and in the running of the streams and for little spans of time I felt I was not alone. But then I’d remember her as a woman, a person of flesh and blood separate from me; I’d see the sinuous swing of her back as she pushed through the ferns, I’d see her trembling in passion above me, and I’d long with all the fibre of my being to feel the texture of her skin, to look into her amber eyes, to tell her that I loved her and I would never leave her. I’d remember my last glimpses of her, swimming out to sea …

Beyond that I couldn’t bear to contemplate. I’d make myself think of the others instead. I remembered Curtis as he’d once been, the wisecracking young man I’d known at college, the drive and energy he’d given the expedition. I needed to have in me some of that drive, his boldness in the wild, if I was going to make it all the way home. There was something of Vince I needed too: a discipline of courage, to doggedly keep going in the face of one’s fear, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to gather wood, make a fire, heat up the water, chop up some food, construct a bivouac, to methodically do what has to be done, however grim the situation seems. Perhaps that could be called an expression of faith. But Vince’s faith was more than that — another thing, central to who he was, that I felt compelled to carry in my memory. I’d never been a believer, except in the idea that a few creatures thought to be extinct might yet have survived. I was a scientist. Yet my confidence in science’s understanding of the universe had been thrown upside down. I was no nearer an explanation of this pathway through time than when I’d first realised that was what it was. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ It was a spooky thing, and a solace, that the spirits of my companions lived on in my imagination. A burden too — or, better, an impetus to keep going.

Whereas the journey back through time had meant pushing into progressively more alien ecology in which our existence seemed ever more strained, travelling downtime revealed habitats subtly more familiar each day. Maybe an eye for that which was slightly more evolved helped guide my navigation. The skinny, simply forked plants along the streams filled out into broader-bladed foliage. The air became enriched with oxygen. The clubmosses and progymnosperms grew taller. The gallery woodland along the streams colonised the bare land beyond. The Carboniferous jungle thickened around me, moist and warm; that incredible profusion of greenery, when the plant kingdom stole a march on the animals that might eat them and the fungi that might rot them, and pumped out so much oxygen that dragonflies flew as big as herring gulls, and cockroaches as big as jackdaws. Naked I strode through forest and mire, just a beast in the jungle but for my visions of all I’d seen and my little pouch of tools. I lit no fires in that palaeome. I stuck to dry ground as best I could. Avoided the big amphibians in the swamps. Kept away from the direction my memory guessed was the Awauba’s stamping ground.

I may have been alone but I had the advantage that I always knew what was coming next. I could make preparations, take the right precautions, steel my courage to face the toughest challenges. Gradually the giant clubmosses and horsetails diminished in size and numbers, the temperature fell, and I knew that soon I’d need warm clothing to travel any further. I had a picture in my mind of the landscape around the tree where we’d hung our last furs, but no expectation of finding them. My plan was to snare or spear some tetrapod sporting the first bristly adaptation to the cold. The plan troubled me because the first animals evolving hair were likely to be ancestral to humans. Moreover, this side of the ice age there was no impetus yet for any beast to have evolved a deeply insulating pelage, so I might have to slay a whole sequence of animals to keep upgrading my clothing as evolution adapted them to the worsening cold.

Yet perhaps the structure of the time warp was channelling me along a narrow corridor through time, for one afternoon, before I’d seen the first spiky sproutings on any beast lumbering through the tree-fern and cordaites groves, I noticed something familiar in the skyline’s composition of crag and ridge. I turned round to view the scene from the perspective of someone coming the other way. Yes, a conical hill over there, a stream down here … and, to my amazement, I located the very tree — and there were the hides, half rotten, nibbled by cockroaches, but usable. Three hairy hides: one to tie round my middle, another round my shoulders, and the third I split to make some hairy boots. Two days on I recovered one more — a fan-shaped piece that had been Salome’s. It still bore her smell.

All the way through the ice age I took care to carry a supply of firewood on my back. I carried fire too, in the form of glowing embers wrapped in leaves, rather than face the struggle with numb hands to light a fire from scratch every night. When I chanced upon a good spot, like a cave or a sheltered thicket of vegetation, even if it was quite soon after midday, I halted for the night. Those freezing nights were the toughest to be alone, shivering in my furs, waiting till exhaustion plunged me into sleep, wishing Salome was there and weeping icy tears because she was gone.

Few and far between in that arctic waste were the first hairy synapsids, their coarse manes incongruous around their reptilian snouts. The ancient clubmoss flora yielded to the seed ferns. Thus, in the extremity of these periglacial conditions, were born the lineages that would dominate the next age to come. As I marched southwards, the sun on my back, the influence of the unseen ice cap rhythmically waxed and waned. By and by, the rises in temperature exceeded the drops, the seed ferns spread their verdure thick across the land, and the diversity of life of every kind exploded, as if God had pulled the stopper from the cauldron of creation. Among the bushes, along the streams, around waterholes, tetrapods large and small, scaly and bristly, munched the vegetation and stalked each other as prey. I discarded my furs, kept just the fan-shape that had been Salome’s; this I laboriously depilated and wore as sometimes a kilt, sometimes a cape, keeping it ready for the time when my survival might depend on it. Every day the sun scorched a little hotter. Sun and wind hardened my skin like leather; the hardness seemed to permeate right through my flesh, through my soul, till I felt as springy and tough as the glossopteris stems, and my heart was like wood. Desert the land might be, but a living desert, in which diverse kinds of wiry shrubs and trees had adapted to survive; and because there were plants, there were animals too and there was water if you knew where to look.

Then the temperature began to increase more rapidly, the sun to burn harsher, the air to be less enlivening to breathe. The great crisis of life stood before me, the Permian extinction, and it was up to me to get through it alone. This time I was ready for it. I reminded myself that Makela had got through, Salome had got us all through, that I had the acceleration of time on my side. I made my preparations. I bided my time. Therapsid bladders to carry water. A bundle of sticks. Bindings of hide to protect my hands, knees, and feet. I went through at night, when the sun’s violent rays couldn’t reach me, crawling to keep low, to pace my strength, and when it seemed the oxygen was gone Salome’s ghostly voice compelled me to keep breathing at a slow steady rate.

Through that appalling charnel house of death and decay I crawled. It was the next day, in the sterile red desert beyond, that I nearly died. I couldn’t get far enough towards the chance of water and shade before the sun was high. Beneath a tiny shelter contrived of the hide propped up on sticks, I curled up and waited, dehydrating fast, for the salvation of night. Only by travelling at night could I get through that desert, from which water, soil, shade had been expunged by the Great Extinction’s obliteration of the trees. Dizzily, breathlessly, I scrabbled for water in the places Salome would have sought it. With iron will I forced myself to be calm, to be present to the moment, to look, to think where the water must be, to trust in the intuition that saved me each time. Once I thought I’d found the very spot where I remembered Salome digging. That fancy caught my calloused feelings off guard; it seemed so wrong she wasn’t there.

At last the trees grew again, the therapsid herds returned. Yet the destruction had been so great, so nearly total, that recovery was very slow, still barely underway thirty-five million years later when the bolide struck in the Triassic. Burning sky, wildfire, darkness, dust, cold, and again mass extinction. In the hot desert beyond and the scrappy expanse of fern scrub, the therapsids were gone, their only descendants the tiny early mammals hiding from the sun in their burrows and pattering about at night. In these torrid conditions reptiles had the advantage. They grew larger and some rose on to their hind legs and became the first dinosaurs, speedy to hunt lizards and mammals, tall to browse high the branches of trees. As the terrain became greener and shadier, and the air slowly richer in oxygen, I resumed travelling by day. The days remained hot, the nights balmy. I discarded my last therapsid hide and walked naked again, carrying only a leather pouch I’d made for my tools. My skin burned yet darker. The soles of my feet got tough enough to tread sizzling hot stones. I took each day as it came. When the sun was blisteringly hot and dry I greased my skin with lizard fat. There was no need for hurry. No pressure to drive me on. In a strange way I enjoyed it. I revelled in my resourcefulness, in the strength I’d forged in my body and my will, in the fact that at this time in my life I was fitter than I’d ever been in my youth. I observed the vegetation’s increasing luxuriance and diversity, the ever greater intricacy of scenery, the increasing sophistication with which dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and proto-birds moved amidst it.

Though my love for Salome was undiminished, the image of her face in my memory was losing definition. My feelings for her became invested more and more in the curves of hillside and vale, the sinuous ribboning of a stream, the shimmer of foliage in the sun, the flitting of a pterosaur across the evening sky. Beneath the cycad fronds drooping over a stream I noticed one afternoon a clay bank whose colour and texture seemed the very same as her skin.

Each day’s march brought ecology that bit more familiar to my own time — so long as one attended to the leaves, cones, insects, snails, the frogs, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and not the huge sauropods and stegosaurs stamping across the landscape. I was able to extract more of my sustenance from plants and forgo the need to kill so much game. But the nearer I came to the present the more I worried what I would find. I worried that our impacts in the past might have changed the present beyond recognition, although I hadn’t yet spotted any change in the palaeomes I’d returned through. I worried that nothing would have changed and I’d walk back into the horror of civil war. Sometimes I dawdled in the same place awhile and dreamt of what I had meant to do with the evidence I brought back.

In light rain, I kept walking and let the water cleanse my body. In the heavy downpours of the Jurassic rain season I took shelter, perhaps under the long rigid fronds sprouting from a cycadeoid’s barrel trunk, and watched the sauropods ponderously pass by, as heedless of the slything rain as of the trees they were trampling or the slender coelurosaurs chasing little animals scattered from cover by the disturbance. Always I kept my distance from the megafauna, as Salome would have done. Sometimes I recognised the broad contours of the landscape — a line of hills, a lake, a rift valley — more rarely a tump or glade where I thought we might have camped, a copse of conifers where we may have gathered firewood. I followed the line of least resistance which opened so readily to me, as if the past were eager to expel me, as if some force more fundamental than space and time were funnelling me down a gravitational syncline back to my own time.

There was nothing to stop me exploring laterally from this transect through time, as Curtis’s detours had taken us. I did so a little bit, to experience the freedom of it, carefully memorising my way to make sure I could retrace my steps. I didn’t test my ability to navigate back uptime. That seemed like tempting fate. I didn’t want to know for sure that the pathway back into deep time would be for ever barred to me. I felt scared by the possibility, which Salome had implied, that it might not be; and exhilarated to think that the whole of this land mass, through the whole of time back to the Devonian, might be accessible to souls like Salome able to navigate through time. All the ages of the past in some way coexisting. When you thought about it that way, then Salome must exist somewhere, she couldn’t ever be dead; she could range through the palaeomes for ever.

I spotted the plume of steam rising from the hot springs below Kuzuolu’s camp and steered well clear. I’d no wish to see that crew again. The climate got steadily hotter. The green parkland, everywhere trashed by great saurians, bloomed with the first flowers and hummed with the first bees. The sauropods shrank in size and gained in armour-studded, sail-backed sophistication. The biggest theropods got bigger and the small ones got funkier and more feathery. As I trekked the sauropod trackway along the lakeside I recognised the dark mass of the sacred wood. From there I could triangulate the position of the hill where Akombu’s people dwelt. It was the rain season again. The air was sticky and stifling, the land lush and wet. The sauropods were dispersed to browse the coniferous savannah. Bipedal ornithopods ambled in small herds like scaly kangaroos. Birds cawed in the trees and raggy-feathered little dinobirds chased grasshoppers through the bushes.

Did I owe it to Salome to pay a call on her father? I hoped Akombu’s people had managed to dissuade their youngsters from hunting big game. It seemed to me you could live out your life well in such a place, in such a community — so long as you avoided the dangerous theropods, and the infection that had killed Emily Boann and almost done for me. I was tempted by the thought. But how would I explain to them what had become of Emily’s daughter? Maybe they’d moved on anyway; I saw not one footprint’s sign of them. The truth is that, like a wild beast, I felt shy of contact with human beings. And deep in my heart I knew that I had to come home.

So I came to the cataclysm that swept away the Indian summer of the Mesozoic. I was prepared, of course, with cumbrous raw hides, sopping wet at first, to get me past the burning sky, the wildfires, the panicked dying dinosaurs, then the frigid darkness, the acid rain, the choking dust. I timed my crossing so I emerged on the edge of twilight in the desert beyond and the heat of global warming. I threw away my dust-caked, acid-stewed hides and walked naked into the night’s hot breath. This desert was negligible after all I’d been through: just a strip of dead ground before life returned, first the ferns and then the eaves of the new forest. Whereas the Triassic bolide had struck in an arid, low-oxygen age, when the continents were all joined together and the earth was still recovering from the Great Extinction, and so the recovery of the trees was halting and reptiles had the edge over the more physiologically sensitive mammals, this time the continents were dispersed, the climate was moist, and the trees — unchecked by giant herbivores — went wild.

For the first time since the Carboniferous, more than two hundred million years before, the plant kingdom had the edge on the animals — and proliferated to form closed-canopied, multi-tiered rainforest, dark, dense, hot, more complex and diverse with every mile I walked, more interwoven with vines, more cluttered with epiphytes, more fizzing with oxygen, gradually hotter and wetter till my body streamed night and day with sweat and dripping rainwater. In these conditions it was the hot-blooded mammals and birds that thrived. Prosimian primates in the trees. Primitive ungulates shambling along the forest floor. Twice I glimpsed a giant predatory bird stalking through the saplings, beady eyes scanning for mammalian prey, a super-advanced theropod trying to recapture the top of the food chain. Crocodiles still lurked in the rivers and swamps. Some of the birds hooked the branches with primitive clawed wings. You could see the continuity of life through the Cretaceous extinction. But the mammals won through. Big proboscideans and arsinotheres appeared, wallowing in the mudholes, and long-jawed creodonts big enough to prey on them. Through the drone of insects came the chattering and hooting and shrieking of ever more kinds of birds and primates. As I advanced nearer my own time, evolution seemed to accelerate. The layering of liana, epiphyte, tree, and parasite grew more intricate. The colours of butterflies, flowers, birds became brighter. Ungulates of increasing grace and fleetness dashed across the glades, or else halted, curious, to study my unfamiliar form.

Every day I felt more in tune with the world around me, more confident I’d survive all the way to my own time … and yet in deepening trepidation what I’d find when I got there. Still the only differences I noticed could be attributed to the seasons. Yet, if our impacts on the past had caused changes downtime, perhaps I’d never know, because I too would be changed. What had Vince said about everything through the whole of time being created ‘at once’? Could the whole of the earth’s being and history change in an instant, as if created anew? Or could it be that the premise of causality, so fundamental to my understanding of evolution, was beside the point? Might the world and time just be what they were, predestined, contingent on some creator’s will. And all the suffering too? I could never believe that. There had to be the possibility of making things better.

The temperature became more equable. The forest kept changing. There were clearings where a great tree had fallen. There were marshy bais sustained by the trampling and munching of proboscideans. There were micro-habitats of fynbos, thornbush, savannah. But all were encompassed by the forest, were part of its complexity. The forest might be dark, wet, enclosing, zinging with bush-crickets and cicadas, sometimes electrified by an unseen creature’s shrieking, and stalked by un-seen peril, yet I loved it. Each new morning, each time the rain stopped, my heart lifted to see the darts of sunlight sparkle on each drop of moisture. My body was so agile that walking had become a kind of meditation. My skin was so tough that the brushing of stems and leaves was a sensual caress. I felt light and free, no excess fat on my body, no possessions to burden me, save only my tiny toolkit. With the wild mammals I felt a warm instinct of kinship. Most were so tame I could come within a few metres and they wouldn’t flee. I didn’t try to touch them and I didn’t hunt them. I got sustenance enough from fish, fruit, nuts, and snared gamebirds. The rangy climacoceratids and the antelopes and the massive palaeotragus, like a giant okapi, stared at me with a kind of naive wonderment. Even the large carnivores were baffled enough by my strangeness that I could safely ease away from them. The fact that they stopped to think made them less dangerous to me than the less sentient predators of more ancient times.

Just once, though, I faced a dinofelis — the kind of jaguar-sized cat that Vince had caught on Polaroid. From the way she eyed me up I could tell she knew something of hominids. For the first time in all these millions of years I felt vulnerable in my nakedness. I imagined Salome standing beside me, calm and still, and stared back into the cat’s amber orbs, my heartbeat thrumming through me, and saw how beautiful she was, with her streaky black and golden fur, the supple strength of her muscles, the long poised curve of tail, and the two glittering ivory canines. I felt an ecstatic thrill, as if the spirit of the forest were embodied in this animal and it would be the greatest of privileges to become her prey.

The cat tested me with one last glare and stalked away. I turned instinctively to share the moment with Salome, but of course there was nothing except the tree trunks and the russet collage of leaf litter and the sunrays bouncing through the canopy. I remembered her swimming out to sea and that I’d never see her again. It was one of those times when the whole line of dominoes went down. I thought of Vince, who’d trusted me all the way, whose pictures of the dinofelis and everything else were lost to the flames; of Curtis, my old friend, who’d turned against me; of Moyedou, who’d given his life to defend the refugium. I wished almost that the dinofelis had got me, that my consciousness could submerge for ever in the steaming, whirring unity of the forest. It was only the burden to live for those who were lost that drove me on.

In the Miocene and Pliocene the forest was wetter than I remembered. Streams that had been dry were in spate. Sometimes I could wade or swim them; other times they’d flooded their banks to make expanses of swamp I had to detour around. Late one afternoon, having forded a stream, and flicked a leech from my leg before crossing the next patch of bog, I was struck by a feeling of déjà vu. I looked up at the arching branches that vaulted the space above the bog. I’d been here before. Twice before. It was much wetter, swarming with flies, the lush foliage dripping. This was the spot where I’d found Salome dancing alone and then, the second time, weeping for her brother and what people have done to the land. She’d been upset the place had changed, was so dried out, but now you could sink up to your knees in wet moss. I wished she was there to see it.

There was an island of solid earth in the centre of the bog. I pictured her dancing there like a dryad. Time slid by and dusk fingered between the trees. No matter; it was as good a place as any to spend the night. Through a crack in the canopy the moon filled the space with pellucid grey light. And then I did something I’d never done on all this long lonely journey. I did it for Salome. I danced. I danced as she had made me dance that night on the beach, to the song of the water, the wind, the bush-crickets. I felt the pleasure of movement that pursues no purpose. I felt my body’s, my soul’s joining with the soft night air, with the moonbeams and the running of the stream and dripping of the leaves, with the creatures chirruping and squeaking and grunting in the darkness, and it was all one and I was part of it, as Salome always was.

My discovery of this location from our outward journey reassured me I was on course. By now the ecology was modern in all essentials: the ecology into which my species would be born; an ecology in which we could belong, so long as we kept our eyes open to its beauty and had the will to nurture it just as it nurtures us. This final palaeome of pristine rainforest seemed to me more glorious than any previous one: luxuriant raffia palms drooping over the streams, cool shadows beneath giant moabi and ghéombi trees, troops of mangabeys leaping from branch to branch, flights of parrots and hornbills scored by laser beams of sunlight, half-glimpsed buffalo bucketing through thickets of wild ginger.

Whether by instinct or luck, I found the Shogun. It was still there, unobliterated by any change in the course of prehistory. The fabric of time was surely more resilient than I’d feared. But I could forget any thought of recovering clothes or stores for the home straight. Its rusted hulk was half submerged in the stream, and an appalling smell of decay came from its glassless windows, as if something had died in there.

It was a shock, that encounter with an artefact of man. It brought home to me how nervous I was of the prospect of meeting my own kind. As I picked my way onwards in parallel with the bloated stream the forest was as vibrant as ever, but slowly it dawned on me that something had changed. I didn’t realise what it was till I had a sudden close encounter with a red river hog — the animal took one look at me, big nostrils flaring, then bolted. I realised that in the past couple of days the monkeys had stayed high away from me in the canopy, and I’d hardly sighted any ungulates, only heard them crashing through the undergrowth. The animals were no longer tame. The fall from innocence had come. Though I’d not yet seen any, I knew that humans had evolved.

63

The two shelters of bent-over saplings blended so seamlessly with the forest that I didn’t see them till I was right in front of them. It’s a measure too of how silently I’d learnt to walk that I got that far without being detected. The naked man who appeared could have been one of the Awauba; his sinewy physique was modern in every way but for his jutting jaws and brows. He was, I suppose, a bit younger than me. He seemed wary but not hostile. I held out open hands to signal my peaceful intent. He said something, and tentatively made the same gesture of the hands as if to humour my strange ways. A woman the same age emerged from the shelter, and then a much younger woman who must have been her daughter, and a boy, younger still.

That was the entire group — mister, missus, master, miss. Despite their resemblance to the Awauba, their way of being couldn’t have been more different. It wasn’t just that they weren’t aggressive, or that the camp was unsullied by the smell of midden or faeces. What struck me was how in tune they seemed with their rainforest home. Their bodies were clean and healthy. Their easy grace reminded me of Salome.

The two women silently studied me. The man and his son were more interested in my waist cord and tool pouch. I let the man open the pouch. He seemed unimpressed by my blades and the tiny remaining lump of pyrite. When he came to the packet of leaves folded round hot embers, I took it from him before he burnt his fingers. There was no sign of any fireplace, but when I showed them the embers and did a charade of scraping together twigs they understood at once what was needed and ran to gather wood.

I’d intersected a point in human development in which people knew about fire, used it when they got the chance, but didn’t know how to light it. I hoped it wasn’t too drastic an intervention in the course of the past when I used those hot embers to start a fire for them. They were impressed, and delighted, but not so blown away they fell on their knees and treated me like a god. Instead they gave me the best portion of a pangolin we cooked, and the juicy pulp of a large spherical oboto fruit. The women also pressed on me numbers of a fruit I didn’t know. Its pericarp was red and deeply furrowed and didn’t taste great, but they insisted I eat it and spluttered with laughter when I did. The missus inquisitively tugged my beard and palpated the muscles of my limbs. The young one just smiled her toothy smile. Who knows what thoughts passed behind her deep-socketed eyes?

After so long alone, and my dread of how it would be to return into human society, it meant a lot that the first people I met should be so welcoming. In their healthy nakedness and their ease in themselves and their environment, they seemed to me beautiful.

When daylight faded, they were quick into the shelters. Mister and missus took one and bade me into another with the youngsters. I tried to demur, to indicate I’d build another one, but it had started to rain and they were very insistent. I still hadn’t cottoned on. Only when the young woman, with a sharp slap on his rump, expelled her brother into the rain did the penny drop. I guess their kind’s population of the forest was so sparse they had to make the most of encounters with strangers. The lass was awkward, uncertain, now we were alone in the warm confined darkness. What did they want of me? Just the sowing of seed as I passed through, or that I’d stay and join the family? To the girl’s audible distress, I crept outside, retrieved my tools, and slipped away into the night.

After that I met no more people, though I saw their tracks, found a length of woven bark fibre, sometimes glimpsed a brown figure melting into the trees. Sightings of birds and especially mammals became rarer. They were still there, but fewer and shyer. It saddened me to know that with every step I was walking away from Eden.

There was water everywhere, drumming on the canopy, trickling down the leaves, squelching underfoot, everything glistening; the beetles looked freshly painted and soggy monkeys cowered under the dripping leaves. In a glade one morning I came upon a temporary pool that reflected the clouds in the sky as perfectly as a glass mirror. In that mirror I saw the wildman I’d become: sun darkened, naked, whipcord lean; hair and beard matted into lumpy knots; my skin wizened with fine lines. This man was a stranger to my memory of myself, but a true reflection of how I felt. The time had come, though, for a gesture of modesty; for I must by now be in Fênbé country. Some fern leaves tucked under my waist cord was the best I could do.

A couple of days later I noticed in the direction ahead a bubble of quietness in the soundscape of bush-crickets and cicadas. A solitary cephus monkey, with a bright blue face and white moustache, appeared on a low loop of vine, took one look at me, and swarmed into the higher branches. First monkey I’d seen that day. I noticed the brightness of the daylight shining between the trees ahead. My heart began to thud. I hurried towards the light. The undergrowth got perversely denser. I ducked and eased through … and emerged into bright sunlight in a wide space where there were no great trees, only a jungle of bushes and wild ginger, and saplings straining towards the sky. There were flowers everywhere and butterflies fluttering between them. The clearing of such a broad swathe of trees could only have been accomplished by fire. I remembered the blackened wastes where the ZPZ had torched the forest. I poked among the roots of the bushes, but could find no sign of charcoal or ashes; so profusely had the forest begun to reclaim the ground. I felt disorientated, nervous, exposed to the sky and anything or anyone that might be watching; uncertain what to expect, yet convinced I was back in my own time.

Part of me wanted to turn back into the shady solitude of the forest. But I forged south in the warm sun, along paths carved by elephants. I expected every moment to see the detritus of modernity and civil war — empty petrol drums, spent cartridges, soiled T-shirts, Coca-Cola bottles, burnt-out vehicles — but if there was anything like that it was long buried in the tangle of green bush. Soon the clouds gathered and it began to rain again. While I took shelter and watched the stair rods of rain battering the foliage, I imagined this rain striking scorched earth, scouring ash and topsoil down grooves in the laterite beneath, and marvelled at nature’s power of recuperation.

I thought I might be close enough to reach the site of the commune by the day’s end. What I would find there, I feared to think, but it seemed the inevitable place to go; the place that had been Salome’s home. The area of regenerating jungle, however, extended further than I expected. I spent another night in the forest, in my usual crude nest of sticks and leaves. The next day’s march brought the remains of little plots where vegetables had been cultivated and rows of saplings had been planted to break the wind and stabilise the soil. The forest was reclaiming these plots too, though some looked quite recently abandoned.

Shortly before dusk I reached a road. I presumed it was the road, that would lead to the commune, the ranger post, the village of Kipouki. After all my wanderings through such vastness of land and time, I was back on this strip of dirt, two metres wide, rainwater swilling along its ruts. Yet I felt disorientated, a sense that something wasn’t quite right, unless it was just that the road was sprouting grass and infant trees and was graced here and there with piles of elephant dung. Things could certainly have been a lot worse. I’d seen no armed patrols, no roadblocks, no obvious need to keep out of sight. I’d seen no people at all except the fleeting glimpses of aborigines in the forest.

As I strode along that road, between rims of forest darkening in the twilight, my worries returned about the consequences of our actions in deep time. The fabric of time seemed to be resilient. The road was there, and those abandoned vegetable plots … but I had an uneasy feeling that something about the world had changed.

64

The moon was up and a lone tree frog was calling for a mate when I came down the branching of the road to another, much smaller, area where the forest was regenerating. By the light of the moon I searched through the bushes and weeds and found at last some collapsed timbers that must once have been part of a hut. It looked as though no one had lived here for decades. At the central point between the encircling walls of intact forest, overgrown with creepers, I found a huge flanged stump. The remains of the fig tree. A flat surface had been planed across one side of the stump and hardened with creosote. Here an inscription had been carved. I pulled away the creepers and in the dim light, aided by my fingers tracing the letters, I spelt out the French words, ‘To the earth he is returned,’ and the name, ‘Tom Kugle’.

So, poor old Tom had died that night. At least this was confirmation that he and the others had existed and the fabric of time was as durable as I’d hoped. I looked around at the jungle of wild ginger and oncoba and vigorous saplings where Cassandre and her friends had lovingly constructed their ecotopian community. Apart from some bushes of manioc growing wild, all that they’d made had, like Tom, returned to the earth. It was impossible even to tell which buildings had stood where.

I heard a movement, whirled round to see a little humanoid face perched in an elaeophorbia’s crown of large spatulate leaves. For a moment I thought it was a child of some early hominid. Just as I distinguished its furry white cheeks, the creature leapt from the elaeophorbia to a spindly sapling, which bowed and swung under the weight. I glimpsed a long white-tufted tail — and a floppy white fringe flying out from the body’s black flanks. The animal crashed out of sight in the undergrowth and my ears tracked its passage to the nearest big trees. Some kind of monkey, about the size of a leaf-macaque. Not a species I recognised.

It wasn’t a good decision to spend the night in that place. It was haunted by too many ghosts: the hippies who’d tried to live the dream; the soldiers who’d done battle and died; Moyedou, who’d been cut down in the flower of his youth; the members of my expedition. All gone. In the morning, having refreshed my skimpy raiment of ferns, I headed for the ranger post, ZPZ camp, or whatever it now was. The district seemed to be in a state of peace. I just hoped I’d find someone sympathetic. It would have been comforting to have had papers to prove who I was. Or some money.

From around a bend in the road I heard human voices at last: women’s and men’s raised in argument, speaking Lugaléwa. The scene I came upon was another of those small plots, this one actually in use, where a woman and two teenage daughters, equipped with walas and dressed in bright-coloured pagnes, were in debate with two young men. One of the men wore shorts, the other a loincloth. They were holding the two ends of a length of knotted string stretched across the longest dimension of the cultivated area. This string seemed to be the focus of contention.

When they saw me, all five of them fell instantly silent and stared in astonishment.

‘Good day,’ I greeted them in French. ‘How goes it?’

‘It goes fine,’ said the man in shorts, still staring. Both he and the other man wore on their upper left arm a green armlet embroidered with an insignia.

‘How goes it at the forestry office?’

‘It goes fine there.’

‘So everyone is back at work?’

‘Ehhh! There is too much work!’

When I stepped near, his nostrils flared and he winced. My smell. I’d been rained on plenty but I hadn’t bathed properly for a while. The two girls were clutching their hands over their mouths, and their eyes were popping wide.

I backed off, thanking the man, and walked on, conscious of the hollow silence behind me.

No vestige of the ZPZ camp remained, except perhaps the absence of mature trees in the area they’d cleared around the forestry office. The office was changed beyond recognition. In place of the breeze-block buildings were thatched wooden cabins not unlike the commune’s. Amidst the rampant bushes were some plots of manioc, beans, and okra, and lots of banana and mango trees. There was no fence. No vehicles. No people in sight. All very low-tech — except that the largest cabin had solar panels and a satellite antenna on its roof. Inside I could hear the delicate tip-tap of what sounded like fingers on a keyboard.

I took a deep breath, called, ‘Good day!’ and put my head round the door. A bespectacled young woman, bare-shouldered in a bright orange pagne, was seated at a sunlit table, typing on a laptop. At the sight of me her hands flew to her face and she shrieked. The door beyond flew open and a man appeared. He was middle-aged and dressed in a T-shirt and khaki fatigue trousers, and walked with a limp.

They both gawped all the more when I stepped into the room and they could see my state of dress. The woman’s noise wrinkled. Inside this simple office, with its desk, papers, computer, shelves of files, I felt very conscious of my feral body.

‘I’m called Dr Merlie. I am an English biologist. I was in charge of an expedition —’

‘You are English?’ said the man.

‘But yes.’

‘But surely you must be African!’ He smiled so broadly that his cheeks stretched taut like a clown’s.

‘No, I am English. Unfortunately I have lost my passport, but I am a British citizen.’

‘British citizen! … I am sorry —’ The man exploded with laughter, doubling over and slapping his thighs. ‘I think that, maybe —’ He waved towards my ferns and again collapsed into laughter.

I waited till he pulled himself together. He said something to the woman in Lugaléwa and she trotted outside.

‘I’ve asked her to bring something for you to put on. There’s a shower here also if you want to …’ Suddenly his face became serious and he peered at me. ‘What was that you were saying about an expedition?’

‘I was the head of an expedition into the heart of the forest … to make a study of the ecology …’ It was an effort to speak at all, let alone in French. ‘We had to depart quite abruptly because there was combat around here at that time. I’ve been away a long time — maybe a year or two … I’ve lost sense of time …’

The man’s dark face blanched grey. He actually took a step back from me. ‘How did you say you are called?’

‘I’m called Brendan Merlie.’

‘And this expedition, it included that American — Curtis Wilder — and his friend the American woman …?’

‘Salome Boann.’

The ranger, if that’s what he was, seemed very alarmed. He probably knew that Curtis had cooperated with the ZPZ. One thing, besides the local politics, that I really didn’t want to get into right now was the fate of my team.

‘But that was many years ago! Many years! Everyone thought that you all were dead … And — voila — you are here! You have changed a little, but …’

‘You remember me?’

‘But yes. I was here. We had to flee into the forest when the guerrillas came. It was terrible. My leg was wounded …’

That limp.

‘You’re the ranger …’ what was his name? ‘… René?’

‘You remember, eh?’

I remembered the young man Moyedou had brought to the commune to get his wound treated after the gunfight in Kipouki, and who’d later been forced to show some ZPZ men how to use a chainsaw. How much time had actually gone by? … René was trying to smile, to be polite, but he looked really spooked.

The young woman returned with a faded pagne. ‘You can keep this.’ She stretched out her arm to hand it over without coming too close.

I thanked her and wrapped it round my waist, pushing out the ferns from my waist cord as I did so. The woman let out a little scream and snatched away her face. I could see it was going to take me a while to adapt.

‘So, the country is at peace now?’ I asked.

‘But yes,’ said René. ‘We had some problems at that time, but all goes well these days.’

‘Did the fighting continue a long time?’

‘Not a very long time. The foreign journalists aided us. There was one who came with you, wasn’t there? An Englishwoman? I think that she stayed in the capital for a time; I heard her speak on the radio about the Fênbé. People in other countries became concerned about the situation. They stopped the rebels receiving any money from abroad. Without money, or cooperation from anyone, the rebels were finished.’

So Portia had had a hand in the way things had panned out. What, then, had she said about the refugium? How much had she revealed? I couldn’t think of a way to ask about this without giving the game away. If Portia had told all, there wasn’t much razzmatazz around here in consequence. I sensed that René didn’t know much more about Portia’s doings than what he’d said.

‘What happened to Bikoro?’

‘He disappeared. Maybe he crossed the frontier. Many of the guerrillas came from there — and so they returned there.’

Talking had relaxed him a little, but I could see he was still freaked out. Far more so than the woman, who was simply too young, it appeared, to have known me.

‘And you then?’ he dared at last to ask. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

‘I was lost in the heart of the forest. It’s a long story.’ A story I needed to get clear in my mind very soon. I changed the subject, told him I’d been to the site of the commune and seen Tom Kugle’s grave. ‘I saw no mention there of Moyedou …’

René’s face became grave.

I clarified that I knew Moyedou had died that night, realising as I did so that this too was dangerous territory. ‘He was a very courageous man.’

‘Very courageous.’ I could see in the man’s eyes what an inspiration Moyedou had been to him.

‘Where is he interred?’

‘In the forest. That’s where he’d want to repose.’

‘For sure.’ Respectful pause. ‘And what happened to the others from the commune?’

‘They were protected by the Fênbé for a time. Afterwards most of them went home, but a few decided to stay. Madame Verne, in particular, has aided our work in the forest. We have all helped each other.’

‘Cassandre Verne is here now?’

‘But yes, at her place in the forest.’

Cassandre was still here, after all this time! However much time that exactly was. I knew I must go and see her at once. After all this long lonely journey, the chance to speak with someone who’d been Salome’s friend.

65

A tiny Fênbé boy was drafted to lead me along a path through dense secondary forest, to a boma enclosing a thatched cabin and two plots in which an intricate array of food plants had been cultivated. The boy hallooed through a shuttered window. No one home. He led me on further to another hut with neither boma nor vegetable plot. No one here either. The boy pointed deeper into the forest. He knew very little French. I nodded that I was happy to continue. Following his silent little steps, I returned into the hallowed shade of primary forest. A greater distance this time. I marvelled at the thought of this little lad toddling about alone here; he’d make a nice morsel for a dinofelis.

It began to rain a little. The boy ignored the raindrops dripping down his skin. We came to a hunting camp of half a dozen mongongo-leaf huts in a rough circle. A Fênbé youth had just brought back a big lump of wild honeycomb, which two women were wrapping in leaves to shield it from the rain and wasps. The women wore traditional bark-cloths; the young man a loincloth of printed fabric. Our arrival brought fond greetings and embraces for the boy and quizzical stares at me. I was directed along another path to a cluster of five more huts of the same kind. Sheltered in the entrance of one, a woman sat in the lotus position on a mat of leaves.

I might almost have taken her for Fênbé. She was thin and wizened brown and wore only a length of cloth tied round her loins. Her hair was trimmed short and had gone very grey. She was methodically cutting the flesh from the stones of a basketful of purple-green eveuss fruit. She seemed not only much older than I remembered, but also calmer, more centred. She regarded me blankly at first. Her hands continued their repetitive task, the knife finding where to cut without her needing to look. I saw the moment when she recognised me, the brief stalling of her breath, the connection of her gaze with mine. Her hand continued to ply blade against fruit. The rain drummed on my shoulders.

Her first words to me were in French: ‘So where is she?’

‘She … decided not to come back.’

‘What is it that you’re saying?’

‘That she’s not coming back.’

‘You mean to say that she is dead?’

Once again I pictured the slender brown dart of Salome shooting away through the waves. I remembered straining from the spray-lashed motu for one more glimpse of her. So sizzling with life she’d been that day, and the nights and days previous. I pictured her swimming on through the blue-green ocean of time. Suddenly I felt woozy, faintly nauseous. I sank to my knees in the mud and the rain and let my head sink into my hands.

‘You ought to come in from the rain.’

Cassandre shunted to one side to let me squeeze into the leafy shelter. The only furnishings were a bark-fibre mat, a pillow, water gourd, satchel, notebook and pen, a paperback book — and a rainbow-striped pagne, which she picked up and started to wrap around her body.

‘You needn’t worry about that.’

She raised a quizzical eyebrow.

I made a gesture to indicate her jungle-bare flesh, and mine. ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’

She gave me a shrewd searching look. ‘You have changed, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

Still she studied me. ‘But not as much as you should have after all this time. Not as much as I have changed.’ She shrugged her bony shoulders and finished tucking in the pagne under her armpit. ‘So perhaps it makes me feel better, eh?’ she added in English. ‘We don’t get many visitors from outside, these days.’

Up close she really did look a lot older than when I’d last seen her. I nearly asked her then what year it was, but I didn’t yet dare.

‘So you live like this now, with the Fênbé?’

‘Partly we do.’ She seemed happy to carry on speaking English. ‘It’s ongoing research: to explore the possibilities of combining in some sustainable way the hunter-gatherer way of life with certain aspects of the modern. The life of the Fênbé is good, you know, and most of it they don’t really want to change, but there are some things they do want from outside: steel blades, certain nutrients — and medicines, of course. So they have to be able to trade something, whether it’s commodities from the forest, or working for the Biosphere Reserve. But our lives — as expatriates — are part of the research also: to see how much we can adapt, what we can’t do without’ — she glanced at the paperback, George Sand’s Un Hiver à Majorque — ‘and what we don’t actually need; to suggest the kinds of lifestyle that might work for anyone who wants to inhabit the ecosystem without trashing it.’

‘What’s that about a Biosphere Reserve?’

Another cockeyed look. ‘You really don’t know?’

‘Only what I’ve seen: the forest is regenerating where it was destroyed, and human activities seem scaled down — even the forest service.’

‘The rangers have become part of the management of the Biosphere Reserve. So have we, in effect. And the Fênbé too, doing mainly what they’ve always done to conserve their exploitation of forest resources and the size of their population.’

‘So the reserve …?’

‘It came about mainly because of international interest in the Fênbé which was stirred up by your journalist friend …’

‘Portia Penhaligan?’

‘Yes, that was her name.’

‘Why was there such interest in the Fênbé?’

‘She was troubled what was happening to them in the fighting. And of course there is a — how you say? — an umbilical cord between the well-being of the Fênbé and the well-being of the forest.’

‘I see … Did Portia report anything about our expedition’s findings?’

Cassandre shrugged. ‘You have to understand I’ve been here most of the time. I get out of touch. There’s a package, though, that she sent years ago, addressed to you. I must still have it in the papers in my cabin … You know, we really didn’t think we were going to see you again …’ She leaned towards me in the hut’s green gloom and I saw how deeply the lines had furrowed her face. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’

What was I to tell her? That the expedition was a nightmare, a tragedy, and successful beyond all imagining?

‘Curtis Wilder and Vince Peters, the photographer, both died.’

‘How?’

‘Killed by animals.’

‘My God! What kind of animals?’

She was attending to me very closely. How much did she already know or suspect?

‘A venomous snake … and a crocodile.’ So the lies begin.

‘And Salome?’

‘Like I said, she wouldn’t come back …’

‘And now she’s —’

‘No, I don’t believe she’s dead … She was so alive out there. So at one with the wilderness …’ I was struggling to hold back the emotion from my voice. ‘The kind of world that civilisation has made … she didn’t want to be part of it any more.’

Cassandre sighed heavily. ‘There was always that feeling in her … I used to argue with her, that we have to do what we can to make into a reality the world that we dream.’

Silence again but for the rain pattering on the hut. Tears began to brim in Cassandre’s eyes. Then we heard voices approaching.

‘It’s the others, back from the hunt.’ She wiped her eyes and hurried out into the rain to meet them.

I recognised Carlo first, dressed in a kikoi like when I’d first seen him, lean and tanned, but his beard was streaked with grey and his smile scored his face with crow’s feet. In step with him, and like him carrying a basket of forest fruits, came a Fênbé woman a few years younger, and behind them a girl already taller than her mother though not yet quite a woman. The girl had pretty, mixed-race features, with elongate eyes that reminded me of Salome … and of someone else … I glanced back at the mother and remembered the Fênbé lass Curtis had extracted from Pangala’s camp.

They were followed by a young European I’d never met and a tall grizzled white man, dressed Fênbé style, who bore on his shoulders the carcass of a bay duiker, and two more women carrying nets filled with soil-crusted vegetables. One was young, coffee-skinned, her belly swollen with child. The other was taller, older, black, wearing shorts and a sturdy leopard-print bra. It was Val. The man with the duiker was Greg. So those two had stayed as well. I remembered there’d been signs of something going on between Val and Curtis. Perhaps I’d have to tell her about his death. Would it matter to her any more, after all the time that had gone by?

The commotion of greetings, questions, and unloading the food supplies startled something on a branch above the huts. It was the same kind of creature I’d seen the night before: a flamboyant-looking monkey with black torso, limbs, and face, and white wimple, tail bob, and fringe along its flanks. With a bouncy gait it ran along the branch, jumped to a higher one, and then to another yet higher, where it stopped and looked down at us.

‘What kind of monkey is that?’

They seemed surprised I should ask.

‘Guereza colobus, of course,’ said Cassandre. ‘I thought you were a zoologist.’

‘Guer-eza co-lo-bus?’

‘Yes, colobus.’ She was looking at me very strangely. ‘They live everywhere in the forest.’

I am a zoologist, I know a lot about mammals, and Cassandre was acting as if this species, which I’d never heard of, was common knowledge.

The monkey was still watching us.

‘Strange it seems so unafraid,’ I said. ‘Sitting there so close to the camp.’

‘The Fênbé regard them as sacred,’ said Cassandre. ‘They never hunt them.’

‘Even though they’ve no compunction about hunting other monkeys, like leaf-macaques?’

She frowned in puzzlement. ‘What’s a leaf-macaque?’

66

Dear Brendan,

If you are reading this, then obviously you have made it safely back. At the time of writing, most people have assumed the worst about the fate of your expedition. I myself have not given up hope. Having seen something of the country into which I presume you and the others departed, I can well imagine it might take some time to explore it thoroughly. So I continue to hope that you may come back before too long.

I know I made the right decision in leaving the expedition when I did. The other members of the group, even Vince, had a powerful impulse to keep exploring which I did not share and indeed found rather disturbing. As I am sure you guessed from the start, I am more comfortable working in an air-conditioned room than hiking around the jungle.

You will see from the enclosed that I have been busy since my departure from the commune. You will also see that, having waited twelve months as requested, I made my own decision about the matter we discussed that last evening before I left. I feel I owe you an apology, but I remain convinced that what I did was the best course, all things considered.

Please give my regards to Curtis, Salome, and Vince.

Best wishes,

Portia Penhaligan

Enclosed in the package was a series of cuttings of articles Portia had written, initially for the tabloid paper that had sponsored the expedition, and then for The Independent, which had plainly given her much more freedom to publicise the plight of the Fênbé at the hands of the rebel troops. It was hard to piece together the whole story from her articles, but her impassioned writing appeared to have snowballed into a campaign that drew in Survival International and other NGOs and eventually the French and British governments and the UN. Once the civil war was ended, the campaign’s momentum led to the proposal of establishing a reserve that would protect both the Fênbé’s way of life and the local ecosystem, comprising concentric zones in which different levels of infrastructure and resource use would be permitted.

In the intervening years, it seemed, this proposal had become reality. The newsprint of even the most recent cuttings had turned yellow and was mottled with mould. Some pieces, inevitably, carried a dateline. They confirmed in black and white what was already obvious: many years had gone by since our second departure into the forest; many years, yet only a drop in the ocean of years in deep time.

After this set of articles came a four-part series of spreads Portia had written about the expedition. She’d really done it. She’d told all the world. ‘Mythic Monsters in the Jungle’, headlined the first piece, with goofy-looking ‘artist’s impressions’ of Pleistocene megafauna — smilodon, mastodon, curvy-horned pelorovis, and the predatory bird titanis — none of which matched anything we’d seen and two of which are known only from America. I plunged through the text at voracious speed. My pounding anxiety soon turned into annoyance. ‘Undaunted, “Mad Merlie” is back in the rainforest in search of mythic monsters that time forgot … The next clue came from the native people and the tales passed down from grandparent to grandchild … What could it be? “From what we’ve heard so far, it sounds remarkably like the prehistoric deinotherium,” says Dr Merlie … He believes there is a chance they could have survived … In the sweltering heat, tempers were flaring among the team …’ It was exactly what previous reporters had done to me. How could she do that? She’d seen the creatures with her own eyes.

Halfway through ‘Part 2’ I realised what she’d really done. I skipped to the end of the final piece for confirmation: ‘So will we ever know for sure? Dr Merlie is convinced they could be out there somewhere. Surely it is just a romantic dream, on our ever more crowded planet, to imagine that creatures we thought gone for ever might still be roaming its secret places. But how exciting it would be if they were!’ The whole thing — its parody of my enthusiasm and procedure and our supposed investigation of Fênbé stories, and the absence of authenticated eyewitness sightings or material evidence of any prehistoric species — was carefully crafted to titillate the middlebrow reader, pre-empt any claims I might make, and ensure no self-respecting zoologist would want to be seen anywhere near here. Now I understood the apologetic note in her letter. For the sake of keeping undisturbed this corner of the rainforest, its people and wildlife, and its pathway into the palaeomes, she’d driven one more nail into the coffin of my reputation.

One final cutting rather belied the hope for our survival she expressed in the letter and perhaps tried to assuage her guilty feelings about the way she’d represented me. It was a short piece in The Independent sombrely reporting the continued absence of any sign of the expedition and noting the courage and commitment with which we’d pursued our research.

In her cabin Cassandre also dug out the photograph of Emily Boann she’d recovered from the wreckage of Salome’s quarters in the commune. ‘I kept it to give to Salome if she came back.’

Though charred round the edges, it was intact enough to elicit the sting of seeing Salome’s features in those of her mother, who looked about the same age in this picture as Salome was when I knew her. It was a strange thing, but for some reason I’d had the idea in my mind that Emily was white.

‘You can have it if you like.’

The picture’s tangibility brought back the memory of Salome as a mortal woman. Perhaps in the end I preferred to think of her as a dream who had passed, full of grace, through my life.

‘You keep it,’ I said. ‘In case she does come back.’

Before I tried on the Western clothes kindly offered by Greg, and set about the daunting task of re-entering civilisation and finding out in what other ways the world had changed in my absence, there was one more place I had to go.

The path down from the site of the commune was still there, maintained now by hogs and duikers rather than hippies. The forest on the steep slope seemed untouched since the first time I’d clumped down here in my boots. Now my bare feet trod the same path silently. Raindrops on the undergrowth brushed cool on my skin. I saw de Brazza’s monkeys, a white-crested hornbill, a pair of malimbes, and a family of those strange but lovely ‘colobus’ monkeys. No sign of any kind of leaf-macaque.

I pause at the spot where I first saw you dancing behind the falls. The volume of water is greater now, the trembling rainbow a little brighter. I gaze at the spilling water, listen to the rhythms of the forest, and wonder how to measure how much time has passed.

I continue down the path into this miniature paradise of sunlight, water, rock, and glittering greenery, and blossoms red, yellow, and white quivering with butterflies and bees. It breaks my heart that, in a world where so much that was beautiful is gone, this place is still here, I am here, and you are not. Thank God it is protected now, so long as the rule of law holds; this place and many acres of the surrounding forest, and countless other lovely places hidden within the forest, and the inward-spiralling vistas of past eras hidden deep within it.

Whether it’s in my power to return into geological time, I don’t know. Probably I shall never know. I’m back now in my own time — more or less — and I have to live my life and look to the future. I owe it to the memory of my companions to use the time left to me in some way that will make a difference, as Portia has done. The earth’s ecology is ever changing. I know this better than anyone; I’ve seen it happening. But I’ve seen, too, how long it takes life to recover from a global catastrophe. Nature is resilient. It can bounce back from the most severe damage, but it takes time to do so. Recovery from a mass extinction of species and habitats takes millions of years, a period of time that from the perspective of one person’s life might as well be infinite.

Since I was a child I’ve felt an incurable sadness about species lost from the world. I’ve learnt a lot about the natural history of many of those species. I’ve learnt it the hard way, the real way, by study, by fieldwork, and by a miracle. As I push through the ferns to the water’s edge, insects thrumming all round me, it seems to me that I would do well to devote my energies to those species which have not yet been lost. No doubt it’s the life of a place’s local people that is most crucial to the enduring of its ecology. But there’s a use too for expertise. I mean to dedicate my expertise, my knowledge, to do what I can to sustain nature’s remaining diversity and beauty, starting here in the Congo basin if they’ll have me. This is my promise to you, Salome. This is how I will express my love.

I climb on to the sculpted rocks and stand as close as I dare to the falls and feel the spray on my skin. I look up again to that slippery ledge behind the waterfall, I listen to the thunder-rushing of the water, and once again I weep. For Vince. For Moyedou. For the young man Curtis was before the world corrupted him. For the animals he and I killed. For Thayer’s leaf-macaque. For the felled forests in many other places which will not recover their glory till many human generations have lived and died. For the last golden toad waiting for a mate in the Monteverde cloud forest in May 1989. For you, my beloved Salome.

Something thin and yellowish squirms from the foaming bottom of the falls. It uncoils on the surface and the current catches it. A faded yellow ribbon. I scramble like a baboon along the rocks, my impulse to try to grab it; but it’s not going to come within reach, I’d have to jump in, and I don’t know how deep the pool is or what invisible eddies might pull me under. I glance up to the top of the waterfall, to the tunnel of jungle through which the ribbon must have been carried by the stream. When I look back down, the ribbon has already been swept out of sight. Did I only imagine it? In the dinning and rushing of the falls, in the running of the stream, in the dripping of my tears, I hear the crash of waves and the deep, slow pulse of the ocean swell.

I will have to write a report, of course. It will be a work of fiction, paying lip service to the expedition’s brief as best I can, given the hardships I’ve endured and the loss of all our data. I shall spin it to endorse the aims of the Biosphere Reserve and downplay the forest’s economic potential. Let this place be as Portia foresaw would be best: a reserve in which the Fênbé are left in peace to live their own way and guard the forest’s treasures, including ones of which even they are only dimly aware. All that I saw deeper in, all those marvels lost in the forests and savannahs, the deserts and hills and swamps of deep time — even if I wrote it all down in a book exactly as it was, no one would believe it was anything other than a fantasy.