I smiled. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘Some other time, perhaps.’
He darted away and I looked back to see him walking at a fast pace towards his tent, the night sky above us lit up with a fraction of moon and a dense scatter of stars.
We started at dawn, driving west in a pair of jeeps with a tiny pink sun at our backs. I noticed our guard was wearing something of a uniform this morning, a half-sleeved shirt and a pair of light khaki trousers. The gun tucked into his belt was visible when he turned his back and adjusted his turban against the wind. The hills were jagged, softened occasionally by plumes of wild shrubs. Against the horizon we could see a thin scattering of acacia trees. The Suleiman range appeared to retreat into the distance, though we were actually approaching it – a trick of the savannah – and finally we stopped at a site about two hundred yards across, marked off by Jimmy and Bart as they had prepared the location.
Jimmy was a sedimentologist – he would examine the bed of the Tethys for the environmental context of Ambulocetus and try to re-create the landscape from which the shale had been formed. The hired men would use sledgehammers to bring down large chunks of red rock and then Zamzam, Bart, and I would sift through each one, examining the broken stone with bits of bone and teeth scattered within it like flecks of white confetti. From the first moment the physical exertion was soothing in its simplicity. We baked in the heat, fierce even at this early hour, and, though it seemed there was no movement in the air, soon our skins were dusted red with the powder of the dried sea. That first morning went by very quickly, and we returned to camp for a late lunch, remaining inside as the afternoon blazed, cleaning, sorting, and setting up a rudimentary system of cataloguing what we had found.
I lasted a week. On the second Monday, Bart found me leaning against a rock with my head between my knees and ordered me off site. I was dehydrated, and the sunburn behind my neck had blistered. One of the guards offered to drive me, and I sat next to him in the front as he raced the jeep back to camp, speaking to me only once, to ask if I needed a ride to the hospital in Multan. I said no and spent the afternoon on top of my sleeping bag, angry at myself for succumbing to the environment. I had a lot to prove – not just to the others, because I was the only woman there, but also to myself, to my sheltered childhood, to my parents and even to you, Elijah.
I had decided that my week with you was the start of a new me. I would use it to turn myself into the sort of person who knew exactly what to expect from the world. I would no longer be the pampered only child of two doting parents. When I died the invitation to my funeral would say ‘Palaeontologist. Adventurer. Rock-Slayer. Amphibian. Ninja’. I would be difficult to surprise, intractable. Even funny. Yes: I would develop a sense of humour, a dry, intimidating one. I kept repeating the word ‘Ninja’ to myself, smiling until my lips cracked.
I turned on my phone and of course there was no signal. The battery was almost dead, but I scrolled through my song list and chose the Nina Simone version of ‘Here Comes the Sun’. I felt a strong desire to hear your voice, to tell you about this place, the searing pain at the base of my neck where the desert had pierced my skin, the aniseed scent that followed Zamzam around everywhere as he chewed on stalks of wild fennel, and the packed crimson rock that held its secrets so close. You realise, don’t you, Elijah, that this is the way you worked your way into my heart? Not just in those days together in Cambridge, but in the aftermath, when I couldn’t stop talking to you, when every turn of my story included a footnote of conversation as I pictured how you might respond, the way the desert light would catch your hair, the effect of the parched, history-heavy air on your voice. What would you have made of all of this, the green flags of our tents on the lunar surface of this ancient place, our little argument with time? That is, I know now, how people fall in love – in the words they recite to each other, the images they weld out of their abbreviated encounters, narrating themselves into the sort of connection that they will later refer to as fated.
In the evening, Zamzam and Jimmy brought me dinner and some sachets of oral rehydration salts. Zamzam put a sachet on the ground next to my sleeping bag, and I thought I heard his footsteps retreating, but he was rummaging around in my backpack, looking for water. He tore the sachet open and poured the contents into my flask.
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Only the murmurings of ghosts,’ Zamzam said.
I opened my eyes and noticed that his face was leavened by pale-green eyes. ‘I’ll be back on site tomorrow,’ I said.
Jimmy said, ‘When I was in Afghanistan, I passed out at least a dozen times. This kind of dry heat can kill you.’
Zamzam finished making up my saline water and dropped the flask beside my sleeping bag.
I was eager for them to go, but they seemed to want to stay until I’d finished eating. I took a bite of bread and felt it turning back into dough in my mouth. ‘What was it like out there, in the war?’ I asked.
‘Paid off my loans,’ Jimmy said.
‘My dad was in the army once,’ I offered.
‘Was he a Mukti Bahini?’ Zamzam asked.
I nodded, surprised he knew the Bengali word for ‘freedom fighter’. ‘Bangladesh used to be a part of Pakistan,’ I explained to Jimmy. ‘My father was in the war of independence.’
‘Fighting for a cause.’ Jimmy said. ‘Wish I knew what that was like.’
I put the plate down and took a large gulp of saline, its sweet saltiness reminding me of the time I had contracted food poisoning from eating a stick of roadside sugar cane. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel better.’
Zamzam put his hand to his forehead in a gesture of farewell. I recognised something – a mournful yet euphoric expression I often caught on my parents’ faces, the look of a person who believed they could remake the world. I sometimes thought, when I looked at Zamzam, that he was trying to tell me something. But I was tired and a little light-headed, and as soon as he left I closed my eyes and stopped thinking about him.
The next morning Bart announced we’d be spending the day at camp. No, it wasn’t on account of my heatstroke – we were having a few guests for lunch. When I emerged from my tent, I saw a seating arrangement had been made around the middle of the campsite, with plastic sheets and tablecloths covering a shady patch near the cooking area. The bolsters had been brought out from Bart’s tent, and there were even table settings, tin mugs and plates arranged in a semicircle. Bart rolled a cigarette, smoked it, wrapped a betel, chewed it, swallowed, and started all over again with the tobacco, all the while shouting orders to the workers to clear up the site and hurry up with the cooking. The smell of singed meat and baking bread spiralled around us.
Bart said it would be better if I wore the burkha and the face veil again, so I did, and then he said something to me about keeping a low profile, which I gathered meant that I should either stay in my tent or not talk to anyone. I was going to ask Jimmy who exactly we were expecting, but I hadn’t seen him since breakfast.
A convoy of jeeps arrived just after noon. The men, about a dozen, greeted Bart warmly, embracing him, then holding their palms to their chests. Jimmy and Zamzam approached, and, as they made their introductions, Zamzam fell to the ground and touched a man’s feet. The man put his hand on Zamzam’s head, and when Zamzam stood up they hugged. Someone came around and served stone bread and roasted goat. From inside my veil, I observed how the men were expert at positioning themselves so they didn’t have to remove the guns slung across their chests even as they ate. Bart spoke to them in Balochi. Occasionally, someone told a joke and everyone laughed. Zamzam didn’t say a word; neither did Jimmy. Tea was passed around, then tobacco. The man who had touched Zamzam’s head stood up first. His face, lined as if with a fountain pen, was beautiful in a ruined sort of way. He made a speech, and then, his shoes heavy on the plastic sheet, he paused and waited again for Zamzam to come over and touch his feet. Then he led the others into their trucks and they drove away, copper dust trailing behind them like breaths from a dragon.
‘What