Joe, Freddie and Hannah all threatened to oversleep on Tuesday. The morning bell could barely penetrate their fatigue. Hannah pulled back the curtain, encouraging the Sun to work its magic and wake her brain. She wanted to burrow back into the warmth of her dreams.
She half-opened her eyes and gazed into the garden. Basarwa was busying himself around the baobab tree, planting. She found his presence comforting, the simple and patient movement of his hands. This set her thinking about how many people there were in the periphery of your life who were essential to you feeling safe, but who never knew it.
Things were no less philosophical in the boys’ dorm.
‘Joe, what do you reckon the probability is of a sandstorm blowing up that quickly?’ Freddie asked.
‘I don’t have the data,’ Joe said. ‘I imagine it’s rare.’
‘You don’t think it might be linked to the bodies being moved from the mine?’
‘You mean that the spirits of the ancestors were angry…and they created some sort of force that made the weather extreme?’ Joe said incredulously. He knew that Freddie was susceptible to such ideas but couldn’t pretend to dignify them.
‘Something like that,’ Freddie said defensively. ‘Don’t you believe in spirits?’
‘Someone once suggested that a plane only flies because of the collective will-power of all its passengers egging it aloft,’ Joe offered. ‘Do I believe it? No. Am I fascinated by it as an idea? Yes.’
‘What is the maths of life? Of all its intersections and forces?’ Freddie asked.
‘I don’t know, but the math of breakfast is that it finishes in seven minutes.’
Jericho Andjaba was a brilliant science teacher. He brought science alive.
‘My great sadness,’ he used to say, at least once in most lessons, ‘is that there are no distinguished Namibian scientists…yet!’
Joe had once asked him why this made him so sad.
‘Because Science, Mr Kaplan, as you know as a mathematician, is everything. Great art might inspire us. Music might lift our souls. But Science enables us. Look at this country. If Namibia is ever to grow, we need to use solar energy better. We need to desalinate water and learn how to make the deserts bloom. We need to link the country better through non-polluting transport. We need to stop cybercrime. We need to find new ways to stop corruption. We need something to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus which afflicts a quarter of our population. Science is the key to all of this.’
Today was the start of the Science Project.
‘I want you to work in pairs or three’s,’ Andjaba said. ‘You need to pick a topic that needs unravelling. Think of something that needs some research but also some original thinking. This can’t just be a cut and paste from the Internet.’
Joe, Freddie and Hannah took all of ten seconds to choose the Fairy Circles. Surely Science could unlock their secrets.
Jericho Andjaba wasn’t convinced.
‘I would really prefer you to tackle something other than bare patches in grassland. Why not choose something medical? Hannah, your mother is a doctor. Surely that must interest you. Joe, what about new eco materials to build your mother’s hotels?’
‘Sir, supposing there is something about the circles that can revolutionise agriculture or irrigation, make the desert bloom as you suggested?’ Joe asked.
Joe was always adept at finding and pushing the right buttons.
Jericho looked at their pleading faces and couldn’t resist.
‘OK, but do you know where to start?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Within three weeks, they had unearthed a huge amount of knowledge, printed it and pinned it to an A1-sized board. The board was mounted like a landscape on the Science classroom wall. It was awash with charts, data, satellite photographs, local mythology, drawings, formulae, maps and newspaper articles. It was an impressive assembly of their individual skills and a declaration of their joint obsession.
Such was their excitement that they had asked Mr Andjaba if he would give them an hour after school one day. This he duly granted, delighted to find pupils who wanted to give extra time to his beloved subjects.
‘OK, you three tell me what you’ve discovered so far.’
Freddie kicked off, pointing to a map and some aerial photographs that showed Mother Earth with freckles.
‘OK, sir, so the Fairy Circles exist about a hundred miles inland and they stretch about fifteen hundred miles from here to here. They occur in an arid no-man’s land between savannah and sand dunes. They vary typically between two and fifteen metres wide, although there are reports of circles up to twenty-five metres wide. They are circular patches of barren land often encircled by a ring of grass.’
‘Have they been found anywhere else in the world?’ Andjaba asked.
Freddie moved along to another map.
‘Yes, in 2014 they were discovered here in Pilbara, Western Australia. They exist nowhere else on Earth.’
Hannah took over.
‘Professor van Rooyen undertook a long-term project in 1978, hammering metal stakes into the centre of numerous circles. He returned to the test circles twenty-two years later and found that they hadn’t moved an inch.’
‘Was this what you’d expect?’ Andjaba stabbed. He was energised by their keen, young minds but determined to make their neural pathways zing even more.
‘Probably not, because two of the theories suggest animals as the cause of the circles and animals tend to move,’ Hannah replied. ‘One idea was that the circles were formed by ostriches or zebras giving themselves dry baths in the sand. The much more common idea, though, was sand or harvest termites.’
‘OK, good we will come back to that,’ he said, peeling open a packet of mints and handing them round to help sharpen the mind and share the joy.
‘What they did discover, however, is that the circles have a life cycle,’ Freddie added.
‘Excellent,’ Andjaba cried ‘In other words they are dynamic in another way. What is the lifecycle?’
‘It differs between the smaller and larger circles, sir,’ Hannah continued, ‘but they are born, mature and die on average in forty-five to sixty years. They…’
He put up his hand to stop Hannah continuing and looked around at all three of them.
‘What occurs to you about that fact, gentlemen and lady?’
Joe piped up.
‘They have roughly the same lifespan as human-beings, sir.’
‘Exactly. Many of the Namibian tribespeople believe that each circle is the soul of an ancestor, or of someone slaughtered by foreign invaders,’ Jericho elaborated.
Joe looked at him quizzically. ‘But you don’t believe that, sir, do you? Not as a scientist.’
‘What I believe is that there may be a link. Do any of you know what I am driving at?’
Freddie raised his hand somewhat hesitantly.
‘You don’t need to raise your hand, Mr Wilde. We’re not in the classroom now. We’re in something far more precious.’
‘I think what you might be suggesting, sir,’ Freddie answered, ‘is that if the tribesmen observed that the circles grow and die with the same lifespan as humans, this might have then encouraged their view that each one is controlled by a human soul.’
‘Precisely. Myths don’t necessarily ignore facts. Sometimes they are built from them,’ Andjaba summarised.
‘Extraordinary,’ Joe muttered. No teacher had ever inspired him in this way before.
‘So, Mr Kaplan, as you seem hot to trot, what theories have been given to explain the circles, and how much credence can we give them?’ Andjaba asked.
‘Well, there are two common explanations. The first is that sand termites create the ring by consuming the vegetation and burrowing in the soil to create the ring. The barren circle allows water to percolate down through the sandy soil, keeping the soil moist and allowing grasses to grow which the termites then eat. As they progressively eat the grasses at the perimeter, the circles get wider. Radar studies have confirmed that there is this moist layer of soil just beneath the surface, in the middle of the circles.’
‘So, job done, right? You have cracked the secret of the fairy circles! It’s termites. Can I go home now?’ Andjaba said, pretending to leave.
‘No, sir,’ Joe called out.
‘No. Why?’ Andjaba was delighted with Joe’s certainty.
‘Because in Western Australia they didn’t find evidence of termites in the fairy circles,’ Joe answered. ‘Moreover, Tschinkel, a biologist from Florida, who was the man who discovered that the circles had a lifecycle, says that when he and his wife excavated a number of circles, they found no termites.’
‘And the other common theory, Miss Chiang, tell me about that.’
‘The other theory,’ Hannah responded, ‘is that the circles are a result of plants organising themselves into territories, to maximise their access to scarce resources. Plants effectively use the centre of the circles as a water and nutrient trap from which they feed themselves around the edges. They keep away from other plants doing the same with their own circles. They have organised themselves to share scant resources.’
‘How sensible. If only humans did the same, we might have fewer wars,’ Jericho observed. ‘So, we’ve cracked it again. It’s competition for resources that Nature has resolved.’
‘No, sir. Because other scientists have replaced the soil inside the circles with soil outside the circles and it didn’t cause the vegetation to grow back, suggesting that there is no lack of nutrients in the bare soil of the circles. Samples tested in Pretoria also showed no lack of nutrients.’
‘So, where do we stand, fellow scientists?’ Andjaba asked them all.
Joe piped up. ‘There is no single, or even multiple theory that yet explains why there are 1,500 miles of circles that are broadly organised in hexagonal patterns like a honeycomb.’
‘And the myths? I see you have them here.’ Andjaba signalled to a section of their board.
Freddie ran his hands over each of them in turn as he spoke.
‘Myth Number One…the rings have magical powers. Number Two…they are the footsteps of the gods. Three…they represent the grave of every bushman killed by a foreigner. Four…Mukuru, the Himba’s Supreme Being, made them. Five…they are from the poisoned breath of a dragon. Six…they are created by meteorite showers.’
‘At least the last has some link back to logic as Namibia has had frequent meteorite showers,’ Andjaba noted. ‘But of course, meteorites are a nonsense when you look at the millions of circles and their regularity of pattern. So, what do we do? We are at a familiar place for scientists. We have the available facts, the prior theories, the superstitions, but we don’t have the answers.’
They stared into the abyss of ignorance, silent and thoughtful.
‘This is the real challenge. How do we move forward?’ Andjaba asked.
Still, silence.
‘You have done an excellent job. You have collated, sifted, categorised and explained. I am very proud of you. You are standing on the threshold. Now you need the spark, the crazy thought that isn’t actually crazy.’
That night, for the first time in weeks, the Four Teenagers of the Apocalypse WhatsApp group was silent. Apart that is, from one post. It was from Selima. ‘Hi guys, is anyone there? Hello?’
An air of gloom had descended over their dorms.
A week later, Jacob Ubuntu was explaining in African Studies, how people had created a system of writing down, in symbols as well as with letters, the clicking languages.
‘The Khoisan languages are the languages we all used to speak. Some have as many as forty-eight click consonants. But there are agreed to be four main types of click. There is the dental click, represented by a vertical line that sounds at the back of your teeth, like this…’
He drew a single, vertical line on the board.
‘There is a click like the popping of a cork that is represented like this…’
He drew an exclamation mark on the board.
‘There is a lateral click like the one you make to urge on a horse…’
He drew two vertical lines.
‘And finally, there is a palatal click, like someone clicking their fingers…’
He drew a vertical line, crossed by two short horizontal lines.
‘Before we had language as we know it and before we had alphabets, we had clicks.’
A voice rose from the back.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God,’ Joe rose up from his seat. ‘Of course, that’s it, sir. That’s it.’
Jacob Ubuntu was not sure whether he should be angry or delighted that his exposition on the beginnings of language should apparently cause a Eureka moment in one of his pupils.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ve just realised something. We need to use computer modelling sir.’
‘On languages, Kaplan?’
‘No, sir, on the fairy circles. We need satellite photos and we need massive computing power. Hannah?’
Hannah, was as alarmed as anyone at Joe’s apparent madness, but nodded silently in acknowledgement of his manic gaze.
‘We need to speak to your father.’