CHAPTER 4
AN
ECOLOGY
OF
MIRAGE
Birds. Wheeling birds.
From Lake Kiboko’s western edge in the lee of the ramparts on that side of the Rift a glittering cloud of birds arose. Cormorants or kingfishers. They were too far away to identify even with my combination reduced-print Bible and field guide but I still believed they’d reacted to my presence. Their appearance above the lake legitimized my arrival. It seemed in fact as if I’d summoned these birds into being.
The past was awakening.
Long ago my first awakening to my gift as a spirit-traveler sprang from a vision of pigeons flying above the rooftops of old Seville. Birds on the wing always evoke this early memory in me just as a taste of madeleine soaked in a decoction of lime flowers always brought to Proust a recollection of his childhood village. A paradox: two million years before my birth I had recalled my infancy.
Boom! The lakescape came alive.
Not forty feet away a crocodile moments ago a small pebbly ridge beside the lake slithered into the water. Beyond the creature submerged to their nostrils a family of hippopotami took their ease in the weed-grown shallows. All members of an extinct species H. gorgops identifiable by their periscopic eyes. Ah but language plays tricks on us. How extinct could they be when they lounged there like living engines? I not this riverhorse family embodied the anachronism here.
Never one to doubt the force of future technology I took out my transcordion and texted this message: I’m home, Dr. Kaprow. This is the destination foretold for me in thousands upon thousands of spirit-traveling episodes. It’s inhabited, this place, and I’m one of its inhabitants. Wow. I waited for a response that never came and at last stuck the transcordion back in my pocket.
Well to the south a small herd of shaggy antelopes looking overdressed for the latitude neared the lake. I thumbed past Revelation to Ungulates to confirm that they were waterbucks Kobus ellipsiprymnus or their Early Pleistocene equivalents. A bull with a set of impressive ringed horns led his harem to the beach and even though I’d assumed the water too brackish to drink, the cows and some yearlings spread out along the shore to test that notion. Overhead: a flight of flamingos heading to another Rift Valley lake or another inlet of this one. Against the lightening sky they shone rose-pink, gangly but graceful. Then I was stunned by the speed with which death struck a calf at the shoreline. A crocodile maybe the one I’d seen slither off the beach lunged from submarine concealment and seized the calf by its throat. As the other waterbucks bolted, the croc’s viselike jaws dragged its prey into deeper water. Crimson began to marble the lake’s turquoise surface and although the hippos bathing west of me remained calm I paled. My survival training should have inured me to such sights but I’d never really believed that the matter-of-fact savagery of African bionomics would prevail in my objectified dream world. I was wrong of course and the rapacity of the crocodile became not only the waterbuck calf’s comeuppance but also mine.
Fear has survival value. It could keep me from falling victim to complacency my first day on the job. And what was my job? It was twofold. First, to justify further military funding of the White Sphinx Project I must satisfy Kaprow’s curiosity about the range and effectiveness of his Time Displacement Apparatus. Second, I must provide the Zarakali government in the person of its opinionated Minister of Interior proof that our species’ earliest recognizably human forebears had lived within yodeling distance of Lake Kiboko, Mount Tharaka, and environs. Alistair Patrick Blair wanted hard evidence supporting his controversial theories about human evolution and he’d promised Zarakal’s Western-educated President that White Sphinx would deliver on this point with benefits redounding to Zarakal’s scientific establishment by vindicating Blair and to its economy by encouraging tourism, grants, and more American aid. As an NCO in the United States Air Force I was the pawn of two governments.
I must search specifically for protohuman hominids, observe their lifestyles, and report my findings. The transcordion was meant to bear the brunt of this last task but I would have to commit my observations to memory until I could discharge that duty in person. Blair had suggested that my dropback occur next to Lake Kiboko hoping I could find a Homo zarakalensis welcoming committee gathered about the backstep scaffold. So much for that hope. The only two-legged creatures in the vicinity were birds and not one had made a friendly overture.
I strode along the tuff bordering the lake and hiked eastward into open savanna. The differences between this landscape and its twentieth-century version astonished me. Where Zarakal had salt flats and thornveld this terrain boasted a well-trodden grass cover, patchy forest, and networks of half-hidden arroyos feeding into Lake Kiboko from the western hills. To the southeast taller and mightier than it looks today Mount Tharaka rose like a Titan’s hunched shoulder. Evidence of volcanic activity calderas, compacted ash, glints of obsidian marked the landscape if you looked closely but on the whole the scene was pastoral, even idyllic. Just as I remembered it from my earlier spirit travels but the surprise of finding my dreams confirmed made me giddy from the drug of déjà vu.
I surveyed the plain. Everywhere my eyes went: life. I felt as earlier at the lake that I had called this procession of creatures from temporal limbo by stepping into their element. The richness of racial memory and my tapping of that richness had bidden them appear. An egocentric view of the issue but one I couldn’t shake. In addition to the waterbucks that had fled Lake Kiboko, gazelles, wildebeest, zebras, and giraffids with antlers like massive human pelvises abounded. The landscape rippled with spots and stripes, all suspended in an ecology of mirage. But this mirage existed. Although none of Kaprow’s dreamfarers had died on their dropbacks he and his assistants agreed that it could happen in the land of an objectified dream. Babington had said that I need not fear lions overmuch but lions, leopards, and the relic population of saber-toothed cats that still inhabited this terrain stayed on my mind and I was glad for my .45, even if a larger-caliber weapon would have offered more protection. You make do with what you have and the logistics of my dropback had dictated our choice of the familiar faithful Colt. It would kill a hyena or a baboon and if I braced my legs and fired successive shots into the forehead of a charging lion it would likely also serve in that situation.
Just don’t go walking in a forest of elephant legs, Blair had said, and you’ll be all right. To make myself less conspicuous I thought of following Babington’s advice and strapping foliage about my waist but refrained because none of the wildlife grazing or browsing within a hundred yards seemed much agitated by my passage. For a moment I thought I might be invisible to the beasts here but a small herd of a rare species of zebras Equus grevyi blocking my way to a fig-tree thicket dispelled this idiot notion by pricking their ears, flicking their tails, and stampeding off to the south. Because I was walking into the sun they’d seen me before I saw them.
I crept into a fig-tree glade. No lions or cobras lay in wait but I did find evidence that it had once had occupants. A midden of bones and lava-cobble flakes suggested that under one tree a group of tool-using hominids had butchered a small antelope and feasted on its carcass. Bits of fur snagged on the underbrush or ground into the sandy floor of the stream dissecting the thicket told me that the kill had taken place within the past year. I studied the stones strewn about. Clearly imported from elsewhere they included lumpy core tools and splinters fractured from them by industrious bipeds. Hunger had prodded the hominids to this labor but so easy to duplicate were these tools that they’d abandoned them upon quitting the glade. I knelt beside the broken ribcage of the antelope and knapped flakes from a polyhedral core tool.
This skill Blair and Babington had taught me during my months in the Lolitabu National Park. The resulting tools awls, scrapers, or burins weren’t so serviceable as the scissors, toothpicks, tweezers, and corkscrews concealed in the bright red handle of my Swiss Army knife, but they hadn’t cost me thirty-five bucks either. One such tool had inscribed an accidental slice in the toe of my left chukka boot.
Another transcordion text: Firm evidence of hominids a half hour’s walk from the lake, Dr. Blair. Midden with tool remnants and animal remains. Wish you were here. And I pocketed the instrument without waiting for a reply.
Although not yet noon I was sweating from my work with the lava cobbles. At the eastern edge of the fig-tree thicket I looked across the grasslands at the hills I’d espied from the lake. Beyond them wooded corridors stretched into the savanna like the spokes of an enormous shell. Although Blair had made many of his hominid-related discoveries in the fossil beds near the lake I decided that this upland region was as likely a habitat for protohumans as any other. I based my decision on my past spirit-traveling and on years of intensive reading to explicate my dreams. If Mary Leakey, Alistair Patrick Blair, and Don Johanson had made no crucial finds in the uplands the reason was not that hominids had never lived there but that erosion, predators, and volcanism had obliterated any signs of their habitation.
It would take a couple of hours of walking to reach the hills but I meant to go there. If I wanted to explore the haunts of habilines belonging to the near-human hominid species Homo habilis I must find them and demonstrate the full range of my charms and achievements. Ladies and gentlemen, I am at your service! How would they receive me in their unlikely Eden? Open arms or bared bicuspids?
Praying that a brace of shaggy archangels with fiery swords and naked backsides would not turn me away I set off across the savanna moving like a sprite in my boots and ignoring the heat. A warthog its tail an exclamation mark above its bung swerved from my path and hustled backward into its burrow. Wildebeest eyed me for part of my trek but returned to cropping grass when they saw that my destination lay elsewhere. Seeking shade in arroyos or acacia groves I often paused to rest but at length entered a tongue of gallery forest jutting from the hills onto the plain and my adventure among the denizens of Eolithic Zarakal truly began.