Ryder stopped the vehicle and gestured. “She’s got a foal.” I peered into the brush behind the giraffe and noticed a tiny version, teetering on impossibly long legs as it emerged. The mother turned back with a graceful gesture of the head and gave the little thing a push of encouragement. They came closer to the truck and I saw it wasn’t tiny at all – it was frankly enormous, and Ryder eased down the road, slowly so as not to startle them.
“Why did we leave?” I demanded. “I would have liked to have watched them.”
“Second rule of the bush. Never get too close to anything that has offspring.”
“What’s the first rule?”
“Food runs. If you don’t want to be food, don’t run.”
I smiled, expecting him to laugh, but he was deadly serious. His eyes were on the road, and I took the opportunity to study him a little more closely than I had the day before. He had tidied himself up a bit, even if his clothes were disreputable. His jaw was still rough with golden stubble, but his hands and face were clean. He had strong, steady hands, and I could tell from looking at them there was little he couldn’t do. Mossy always said you could tell everything you needed to know about a man from his hands. Some hands, she told me, were leaving hands. They were the wandering sort that slipped into places they shouldn’t, and they would wander right off again because those hands just couldn’t stay still. Some hands were worthless hands, fit only to hold a drink or flick ash from a cigar, and some were punishing hands that hit hard and didn’t leave a mark and those were the ones you never stayed to see twice.
But the best hands were knowing hands, Mossy told me with a slow smile. Knowing hands were capable; they could soothe a horse or a woman. They could take things apart – including your heart – and put them back together better than before. Knowing hands were rare, but if you found them, they were worth holding, at least for a little while. I looked at Ryder’s hands. They sat easily on the wheel and gearshift, coaxing instead of forcing, and I wondered how much they knew.
They had known pain; that much was certain from the scars that laced his left arm. He had been lucky. Whatever had dug itself into his arm hadn’t wanted to let go. They were long, raking white scars, like punctuation marks, dotted here and there with a full stop of knotted white scar tissue where whatever it was had hung on hard. Some men might have covered them up, rolled down their shirtsleeves and pretended it hadn’t happened. Others would have told the story as soon as you met, flaunting those scars for any Desdemona who might be impressed. But Ryder didn’t even seem conscious of his. He wore them as he did his bracelets – souvenirs of somewhere he had been. I could have asked him, but I didn’t. I liked not knowing his stories yet. He was a stranger, an impossible and uncouth one, but a stranger nonetheless. And there is nothing more interesting than a stranger.
I decided to let him keep his stories and give me only the mundane things that didn’t matter. “So, you were born in Canada. Whereabouts?”
“Quebec.”
I lifted a brow. “Really? You don’t sound Québécois.”
“Left when I was a year old. My father and I travelled up and down the Mississippi and then west to California. Ended up in the Klondike by the time I was six.”
“That’s quite a lot of travelling for a young boy. What did your father do?”
“As little as possible,” he answered with a wry twist of the lips.
“And what did your mother have to say about this? Did she like being dragged around at his whims or was she afflicted with wanderlust as well?”
“She died before we left Quebec.” He said the words easily. They were just words to him. We might have had the loss of a parent in common, but not what we had done with the emptiness. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of Pink and how different my life would have been if he’d lived.
“Were you raised without a female influence, then?”
“There was an Algonquin woman who travelled with us. She took care of me and my father, although I’m not sure I’d exactly call her female. Her mustache was thicker than his.”
“How did you end up in Africa?”
“My father got lucky. He struck gold, and he worked it until the claim played out. By then he said the Klondike was getting too crowded and too cold. Africa was empty and hot. We landed here when I was twelve. Been here mostly ever since.”
“And what do you do here?”
He shrugged one solid shoulder. “This and that – lately quite a bit of guiding. I lead safaris. I have a little place on the coast where I grow sugarcane, and I own a few dukas.”
“Dukas?”
“Shops – each one is a general store of sorts. The closest thing you’ll find to civilisation out here. The post gets delivered there and people will come for a drink and to catch up with the neighbours.”
“God, it’s the end of the earth, isn’t it?” I asked. Africa had seemed a great adventure when I was sitting in a Paris hotel room. Now the reality of it intruded, vast and unsettled, and I felt very, very small.
He flicked me a glance, his expression unreadable. “It won’t be so bad, princess. You’ll see.”
Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, staring out the windscreen, all thoughts of exile gone. Stretching before me was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen in my life, and even those words cannot do the memory of it justice. It was the Great Rift Valley, spanning the view from left to right, slashing the surface of the earth in a crater so vast no man could see from one end of it to the other. Deep in the heart of this great continental divide the grasses waved, an immense green carpet dotted with animals the likes of which I had seen only in picture books and travelogues. A tiny herd of elephants looked infinitesimal from our lofty height, and when Ryder stilled the engine, I heard nothing but the long rush of wind up from the valley floor. It carried with it every promise of Africa, that wind. It smelled of green water and red earth and the animals that roamed it. And there was something more, something old as the rocks. It might have been the smell of the Almighty himself, and I knew there were no words for this place. It was sacred, as no place I had ever been before.
“My God,” I breathed. “How big is it?”
“Four thousand miles from the upper reaches of Syria to the depths of Mozambique. The width varies, sixty miles wide in some places, but here it narrows. Just about twenty miles across.”
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” I shoved Dodo, who roused herself to look, blinking hard.
“How high are we?” she croaked.
“About six thousand feet.”
Dodo whimpered and clutched at the seat. “Best close your eyes until we’re down,” Ryder told her kindly. She nodded and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, leaning as far back as she could. He turned to me, his expression challenging.
“What about you, princess? Man enough to watch?”
“Drive,” I told him, gritting my teeth.
He laughed and crashed the gears into second to start the descent. I missed the Hispano-Suiza’s suspension desperately as we bounced and jounced our way down the twisting slope. The smell of overheated metal filled the air, and by the time we descended, the brakes were so hot and slick they were barely catching at all. We skidded to a stop at a stream and Ryder parked the vehicle, turning off the engine to let it rest. The only sounds were the ticking of the hot metal and the rushing of the stream and Dora’s faint wheezing.
Ryder