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Western Kenya
End of May 1995
After the Rainy Season
THE SMALL PLANE, A SINGLE-ENGINE BEECH LIGHTNING 38 P, was shaking like a bucking bronco, fighting to keep a steady course. It was flying straight toward the southern spurs of the mountainous Mau escarpment.
The Mau, a clifflike fortification that rose ten thousand feet high and ran almost north-south for over two hundred miles, closed off Kenya's stretch of the Great Rift Valley, forming what looked like a natural western wall. The Mau was an astounding-looking formation. Its lower slopes were barren and eroded, covered only by stubbly, hard savanna scrub. Yet about halfway up, the Mau sprouted tree stands that got thicker and thicker until they formed a vast forest that completely covered the mountain's crests. In the southern end of the Mau, its forests descended all the way down, leaving occasional bald spurs and heels, until it reached the Dogilani savanna, a plain of tall tasseled, sun-bleached grasses, dolled every now and then by rare tree groves, and by a few water holes that shone blindingly in the sunlight.
The shores of these water holes were bustling with thirsty antelopes, duikers, and buffaloes. The grasses rippled with lions and leopards stalking their drinking prey. The skies were crisscrossed by predatory birds, eager to make off with the felines' kills.
The savanna-vast and sprinkled with blood from the constant fighting between animals of different species-looked as if it belonged to the current time. The barren and rocky spurs of the Mau were lifelessly suspended in an earlier time. Yet the most mysterious part, the lush forested crests that rose high above the savanna, was of another timealtogether.
It was around noon and the air on the Dogilani plain had been heated by the sun throughout the morning and was expanding rapidly, laterally and upward, attacking the cold air that came down from the upper slopes of the Mau. The cold air fought back, stabbing its opponent with long daggers of frigid wind. These daggers caused the wind currents on both sides, blowing in conflicting directions, to become so strong that they shook the three-ton airplane as if it were a toy.
Hendrijks, the pilot, a Cape Dutchman in his sixties who had buzzed around these plateaus and mountains all his life, was desperately fighting the crosscurrents. His face, which was usually bright red from the genes of his ancestry plus all the alcohol he drank, had taken on a yellowish shade of fear. Behind him there were two other seats, side by side. Strapped into one of them, Kenyan geologist Ngili Ngiamena clutched the armrests with his graceful Masai hands, and kept urging Hendrijks to fly on ahead. The almost perfectly vertical wall of the Mau zoomed toward them, looking as if it would meet the plane any second, flatten its fuselage, and wrap it in a giant ball of fire and smoke.
In the other seat, the American paleoanthropologist Ken Lauder was leaning to the right, his body hanging out of the plane through the missing door of the starboard hatch. His seat belt cut painfully into his stomach. Ken was aiming the lens of a camera down at the lower slopes passing under the plane. His hands, arms, shoulders, and upper torso were all tightened together, trying to keep him from being dragged out of the plane by the slipstream that rushed past him like a giant frozen breath exhaled by the approaching mountain.
The wind was so powerful it peeled back his eyelids. Ken pulled himself into the cabin and yelled at the pilot to cut the speed so he could take his pictures. But if Hendrijks slowed down, he would lose the engine power he needed to break through the conflicting currents. As it was, every time the plane hit one, it felt as if it had run into an unseen brick wall and had pierced through it by some miracle of physics.
The jumble of eroded crests and ridges below kept causing the direction of the currents to change, and the hot gusts of air pushed the plane up, while the cold ones pulled it down. The plane's fuselage groaned and creaked, close to disintegration, and Ken yelled again at the pilot. Hendrijks had circled above one barren spur too fast, and Ken had missed his shot-could Hendrijks do it again, slower?
"Can't do it any slower!" shouted the pilot. "Got to have speed, to have power to fight the currents!"
Meanwhile, the wall of the Mau, its lower half gray from erosion, its upper half shiny green with scrub and trees, seemed to lunge out at the plane.
Hendrijks yelled that he was going to turn around, giving Ken a second chance to aim his camera. Ken look a deep breath and tested his safety belt with his hand. Correctly buckled, it had not snapped yet, and maybe it wouldn't snap at all.
Hendrijks banked. A pit of cold air opened underneath the plane, catching the right wing lip, momentarily pointing it straight al the ground. Ken almost flew out of the hatch, camera and all. His left foot, jammed under Hendrijks's seal, became an anchor that kept him from bailing out of the plane completely. The other anchor was his seal belt. Hendrijks fought to rebalance the plane, feeling his way in the wind shear like a swimmer on the edge of an undertow from which he might never surface.
"Get it now, get it now, goddamn it!" he screamed. The plane straightened its course. Underneath, the eroded incline was separated into five sections by dried-up mountain streams, making it look like a giant sphinx's paw.
On the paw's middle section, as if on a giant knuckle, was the particular spot that Ken was trying to photograph.
The slipstream made Ken's eyes water-he realized that by the time he was above his target, he'd have to photograph it blind. His camera lens was coming onto the target. He clicked, desperately trying to glimpse the thing he was aiming at, but he simply couldn't see through the eyepiece.
Still, he was sure he was getting it; how could he not? The thought filled his chest with such a sense of triumph that he opened his mouth to yell with joy, and . . .
He saw that middle section, as they zoomed above it, and beyond. The midday winds had kicked up the dust of the eroded surrounding slopes, obscuring it, one wave of dust after another. Wave, then respite and visibility, then another wave. When a wave blew, the paw was wrapped in a whipped-up maelstrom of dust.
Most likely, the only thing Ken had caught in his lens was a lot of dust. The only thing he would have on film was the general pawlike formation, and the dust churning up, covering it. The plane had cost him and Ngili a thousand dollars per week, and a case of scotch for Hendrijks, and now they were going to miss the week's last and most intriguing sighting.
He pulled himself inside again. "Go back," he shouted at Hendrijks. "Go back!"
"Didn't you get it?"
"I didn't!" He bashed his fist against the cabin wall. The thin shell of aluminum boomed, like a tin drum. "Go back over it slowly one more time!"
"Are you mad?" asked Ngili from the seat beside him. "He can't go any slower than this. He needs the speed to fight the wind!"
"Go faster then, but lower!"
"Faster?" yelled Hendrijks, turning to glance al Ken. There was not a trace of the usual red in his skin, as if his pigmentation had mutated abruptly and forever. "You want me to crash into that wall? I barely had room to turn back last time, didn't you see?"
"There's a way to do it!" Ken yelled back. "Go lower. Just remember where the wind changes!"
"How can I remember? It changes all the time!"
"Then we're not paying you your thousand bucks!"
The shaking and banking of the plane, the moaning slipstream through the open hatch, and the closeness of danger made Ken feel that they had already met the odds of their death, and survived them. They had been kept from catastrophe by an enormous act of willpower on his part. He dropped the camera onto his stomach, seized Hendrijks's fleshy shoulders, and shook him, getting the clear impression that he was shaking the whole plane.
"Do it! You're the best goddamned pilot in Kenya! Do it, or we're not paying a cent!"
The Dutchman shouted back that he didn't care, he was turning the plane back, out of this windy hell. Ken begged him. One more time, go lower. The last time.
He would not get another chance. This was Ken's last chance at getting a picture of what he had spotted from the plane a half hour before.
Copyright 1996 by Popescu/Friedman, Inc
