I regarded my mother with astonishment. Under normal circumstances, Samantha Edlington-Porter would consider rude such a personal question of a stranger. Even our guest seemed for a brief moment to be caught off guard. Then Ral’s lips set themselves into a wry grin.
“Bit of a rough start. Drunk for a father. Put-upon mother. Four older brothers who enjoyed beating me to a pulp.”
“And how was it that you became so accomplished a man?” Mother persisted.
I saw out the corner of my eye that Father, too, was most curious about Ral Conrath. This man who seemed never to be lost for words went very still for a long moment. Clearly, he had never been asked this question before.
“To tell you the truth, it was a book that changed my life.”
“A book?” I said. “Which one?”
“The first of Donnelly’s studies.”
“Was it his treatise on Francis Bacon as the author of Shakespeare’s plays?” Mother asked. “I remember when he came to Cambridge to argue it. I found it quite fascinating.”
Ral shook his head.
“Let me guess,” said Archie. “
The Antediluvian World.
”
“That’s the one, Professor.”
“Well, you certainly weren’t alone in your interest. There was a time when everyone was talking about that book.”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” I interjected.
“These books were published before you were born,” Father told me. “An American senator…”
“Did he not run for the vice presidency of the United States?” my mother piped in.
“He did indeed … and lost,” said Father. “His name was Ignatius Donnelly and the book in question was
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.
It caused quite a sensation in its day. Some people loved it, some thought the man was a crackpot.”
“I was one who believed a lost continent existed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean…” Mother said. She went inward then, remembering, “… just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. There were colonies in Egypt and South America, too. I was very impressed with the man’s scholarship.”
“He did a hell of a lot of research,” my father said, “but Donnelly never had me convinced.”
“You were in the minority, dear,” Mother said, smiling prettily and turning back to our guest. “Please go on.”
“For me it wasn’t so much about whether the man was right or wrong. It just got a poor young boy thinking about the world outside the South Dakota dirt farm he’d grown up on. All his brothers who were taking up the plow and would probably never leave.”
Ral lifted his wineglass and took a sip before continuing. I noticed that his fingers, though clean, were rough and unmanicured.
“I decided to become an adventuring man because of that book. See the world. Meet interesting people.” He lowered his eyes and his tone grew suddenly humble. “Like all of you.”
“Well, you’re a very interesting man yourself,” Mother insisted.
Ral flashed his hostess a brilliant smile, encouraged to go on with his story.
“Of course all the action was in Egypt,” he said.
“That’s where you met Petrie?” Father said.
“Nope. Met him for the first time in Jerusalem. In 1891.”
I caught myself leaning forward in my chair, then forced myself to ease back. I would remain reserved, unlike my mother, who was acting uncharacteristically dazzled.
“Petrie was excavating at Tel-el-Amarna, and I went to work for him as a common digger. That’s where I first got my hands dirty with ancient sand. But within the year he left for London to take up the chair Mrs. Edwards created for him at the university…”
“The first ever professorship in Egyptian archaeology,” Father told me. “It was a big moment, that. Took what had been a mere pastime for enthusiastic amateurs and turned it into a respectable science.”
“What we expect will happen soon with paleoanthropology,” my mother added.
“’Course with Petrie in England,” Ral went on, “I was out of work. I tried hiring up with some of the other digs but, frankly, they were haphazard. Some of them were still using dynamite in their excavations.”
“It was Professor Petrie, wasn’t it,” I asked, “who taught that dirt should be pared away inch by inch to see all that was in it, and how an artifact lay in the surrounding earth?”
Ral nodded. “I was spoiled by the best. But I couldn’t sit around waiting, could I? So I took myself off to whatever part of the world interested me. India, Tibet, Java. Not much digging going on, but there were a few natural history museums that paid well for specimens for their collections, and lots of wealthy men who wanted trophies hanging on their library walls. I was a damn good shot—pardon my French—and I wasn’t afraid of exotic locations. So I took up big-game hunting for a bit. While I was in the Javanese jungle I heard that a pal of mine—an engineer who’d worked at Tel-el-Amarna—was digging at Trinel.”
“That’s how you came to Eugène’s site,” Father said.
“Exactly. But Dubois was in India trying to get someone to believe he’d found the missing link. So I missed the great man.” Ral paused and, quite daringly, I thought, caught and held my eye before continuing his story. “It was my good fortune that the next year Petrie was back in Egypt, digging at Luxor. I signed on, and to my delight, he remembered me.”
Ral’s expression softened, an attitude, I thought, that was most uncommon in the man.
“We had some good times, Bill and me. He didn’t mind a few whiskeys at night after Hilda went off to bed.”
My father said to me, “Hilda was Petrie’s wife. The love of his life. She went on all his digs with him. Assisted him.”
“And never grumbled about living without the comforts she was used to,” Ral added with obvious admiration. “Quite a gal, Hilda.” He paused for a breath, then added, “You know, everybody always called Bill Petrie difficult. Arrogant. Even insensible. But to me, he was just eccentric. Do you know what he told me?” Ral leaned forward as though to tell a secret. All of us Porters, entirely enthralled, leaned forward, three eager conspirators.
“Now I grant you we’d had a few, maybe one too many, but he said that when he died, he was going to have his head cut off and donated to science so they could study his brain.”
I watched as my mother’s jaw fell open, and even Father sat back hard in his chair.
“That was a
touch
arrogant, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Conrath?” I said.
“Yeah, but he was a genius,” Ral countered. “I can only hope to have a career half as fine as his.”
“I don’t doubt you’re looking at a great future ahead,” Father said, thoroughly pleased with our unusual dinner guest.
Ral glowed with the praise. “From your lips to God’s ear,” he said.
“You’d best find someone else for Archie to talk to,” said Mother. “My husband and daughter are avowed atheists.”
“As so many thinking men and women are today,” he observed, then turned. “And you, Mrs. Porter?”
“I’m an Episcopalian. Nonpracticing.”
“Good Lord, I’ve landed in a hotbed of heretics!”
“I say we drink to that!” Father cried, and the four of us clinked congenial glasses.
“Eleanor,” Mother called out in the direction of the kitchen door, “bring us more wine.” She smiled prettily. “We seem to be having a celebration.”
The talk went on uninterrupted for hours, and while the many courses were consumed, no one at the table, if asked, would have had the faintest idea of what we had been fed. Finally, before Ral and Father retired to his laboratory for cigars and an after-dinner drinks, my mother, in her most authoritative voice, put her hand on Mr. Conrath’s arm.
“You must spend the night with us,” she said.
He began to object.
“I won’t hear of you riding back to Cambridge in the dark. Besides, you and Archie haven’t even begun to discuss your business. I’ll have Maggie make up the Blue Room for you. I insist.”
“Well, how can I resist a direct order from She Who Must Be Obeyed?” Ral said with a winning smile.
The men disappeared and I was left with Mother, who seemed—if I’d had to describe the expression—a bit dreamy eyed.
“What a nice young man he is,” she said.
“Yes he is,” I agreed, but in my heart I knew that “nice” was not precisely the word I would have chosen to describe Ral Conrath.
* * *
That night my dreams were startlingly real. They involved, as they did so many times, the jungle, but there amid the greenery was a hotel all of giant bamboo, and lounging in its soaring, thatch-roofed lobby was Mr. Conrath in a damp white linen shirt and trousers that clung to the strong lines of his body. He reclined on my mother’s rose silk chaise longue, and without invitation, I went to him and sat down next to him. I saw that the thin lips were unsmiling, yet his hands came up and cupped both my breasts. I moaned with pleasure and awoke in a sweat.
The rest of the night sleep evaded me, and I was glad to see first light. I dressed and went down to our laboratory, hoping to finish my sketches of two specimens side by side—the craniums of a mountain gorilla and a human.
“Your father’s determined to find his bones in Africa.”
I startled at Mr. Conrath’s voice, just behind me.
“Most people call him obsessed.” I turned and eyed Ral directly. “Don’t you?”
“Maybe he is. But who’s to say obsession’s a bad thing? Bill Petrie had one of his own.”
“And what was that?”
“Well, he was quite the Greek scholar and had taken something written by Herodotus to heart.”
“Herodotus. The Father of History.”
“That’s him. The thing was a passage written five hundred years before the time of Christ. Herodotus said that on one of his travels to Egypt, he’d had a walk through an ‘ancient labyrinth’—
three thousand
rooms, half above-, half belowground. The officials only let him see the ones above because the kings who built the place, and some crocodile gods, were buried on the lower level. The old man said this ancient Egyptian labyrinth was bigger than the Great Pyramid. It was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d seen a lot. One of the ‘Wonders of the World,’ he called it. It was apparently a maze of interlocking courts and chambers and crypts and pillared corridors made out of white stone, ‘exactly fitted,’ engraved with spectacular figures and painted with frescoes that told the whole history of the world. Herodotus said that a person who didn’t know his way through the ancient maze could get lost in it and never see the light of day again.
“So Petrie decided that come hell or high water he was going to find the damn thing. He’d already done his triangulation survey at the Giza pyramid and his explorations at Tanis, but all that time he had his eyes peeled to find this place. He drove everybody crazy with it—‘his obsession.’ Then after that big find at the Fayum Oasis—a good-sized pyramid and sixty well-preserved coffin portraits from Roman times; you were probably still a little girl when that happened—he stumbled onto a huge heap of rubble, stone chips six feet deep. The location was right, the dimensions—bigger than Karnak and Luxor combined—were grand enough. He’d also found parts of columns and statues, and a giant plaster foundation he reckoned was the floor of the complex. Putting it all together, he concluded that this was all that was left of his great Egyptian labyrinth.”
“Not even proper ruins?”
“A pile of gravel. It looked as if the kings from later dynasties had come in and used it as a quarry for nearby temples.”
“How horrible for him.”
“He’s been haunted by it ever since. Now
there’s
an obsession with an unhappy ending.” He held my gaze. “That’s not going to happen to your father. Not if I have anything to do with it.”
I felt my eyes stinging with gratitude and turned away before he could see such naked emotion.
When Father arrived a few moments later, we showed Ral Conrath around the laboratory. Every bit of it was solidly appreciated by the man. The library, the maps and globes, the skeletons, the great drawers of fossil specimens. Even the “pantry” with its gruesome exhibits evoked oaths of awe and numerous well-conceived questions.
I found myself, rather bemusedly, caring very much what he thought of us.
Then Mr. Conrath unrolled his own map—that of Gabon, the coastal cities of Libreville and Port-Gentil, the spidery line of the Ogowe River, and the great uncharted areas that he said few whites had penetrated, no less explored. South of the river and less than two hundred miles inland he poked his finger.
“I took a hunting party down here. I found limestone caves. My employers came for the ivory and couldn’t have cared less.” Conrath fished around in his oversized pocket and removed a small wooden box. He placed it on the table between us and opened it. “Look at this.” He pushed the box toward Father, who squinted in surprise at its contents. Father held the pale, rounded, and clearly fossilized bone fragment up to the light. I, too, was riveted to the piece.
“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” Father asked.
“Please examine it more closely,” Ral graciously suggested.
But Father stood suddenly and, moving to his wall of large specimen drawers, pulled one open. Finding what he was after, he brought a long slender bone to the table and set it down next to the fragment.
“What we have here is the femur—a thighbone—of an antelope. See how long and skinny it is? For fast running. The big bump here on the base of the femur is where the muscle, a very powerful muscle, attaches it to the lower leg.” He set the fragment and the bone on the table next to each other. “The two bones are not identical but extremely similar.” He looked up at Ral Conrath and me and said with almost boyish wonder, “This species became extinct in the border period between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene epochs, three to four million years ago.”
“And where did you say you found this, Mr. Conrath?” I asked. Truly, I was mesmerized by the sight of the fossil.
“The Enduro Escarpment caves. Gabon.” Ral turned to my father. “There are no guarantees, Archie. I’d be a liar if I said so. But I’ve been to the riverside Trinel site, and I saw the place your friend found his ape-man. I’ve been to Spy as well, where the limestone gave up Neanderthal fossils. I questioned a native near the Enduro Escarpment—needed a translator, of course—but as far as I can see, the caves there are as good as anyplace on earth to find your missing link.”