‘No. If you choose not to be photographed then that’s your right. Do you want me to tackle him?’
‘Won’t he just blow up?’
‘Very likely. He’ll assume I put you up to it. Or at least he’ll pretend to.’
‘I’ll do it. I’ll tell him I’ve got a headache. Colin says you can’t argue with a headache.’
‘Colin hasn’t met Joe.’
THEN
THERE WERE NINE of them at the top of the cliffs, all except Goor from the group of females and young who had stood behind and watched the confrontation of the males on the beach. They waited for a while gazing down, trying to see what was happening below, longing to return to the safe, known shore, hoping perhaps that the males of the tribe would somehow realize their combined strength and unite to drive Greb away, as they’d done before. Li was still almost unable to think or move without terror, after Greb’s sudden appearance at the head of the gully. She was convinced he’d climbed the cliffs deliberately to search for her. She didn’t dare even show herself above the cliff edge, but hung back, gazing around, looking for a way of escape in case he came again.
Above the cliff the ground, stony and bare, sloped gently up to a crest, beyond which she could now see the central mountain pouring out its billowing black tumult of smoke. The rain-fed stream runnelled down a shallow dip from the top. She knelt and drank and splashed some water over herself and then climbed beside it. Her main thought was still that if Greb came back she must have somewhere to hide.
The crest was not a true crest. The hill went on up, but then levelled and dipped into a cupped valley. At her feet spread a wide, still pool, collected from the surrounding hills after the torrents of rain, and still being fed from the further slopes and so still sending its overflow out and down over the cliff. Without hesitation she waded in and sank below the surface, and as she did so her terror left her. Greb could not climb the cliff. He was busy on the shore. He hadn’t really come for her . . . The strange, unbuoyant water was like that of the fresh-water pool, the place where the tribe had always felt most itself, most sure, most peaceful. She lay, looking up through the still surface at the blue and brilliant sky, until she had to rise for breath. She sank again and rested, rising and sinking, until the sense of loneliness and separation reminded her of the others and she went to look for them.
They were by the stream, splashing themselves and each other with water. Tilted towards the east, face on to the morning sun, the slope above the cliffs was already becoming hot as noon. Before long its surface would be painful to the touch. There was no shade. Their whole instinct was to try and find a way down to the beach, but their fear of Greb prevented them, and when Li appeared further up the stream, beckoning and calling Come, they followed her back to the pool and waded gladly in.
They spent the middle of the day there, but there was no food of any kind in this transient water, so as the sun slanted west they went back down to the cliff to try and spy out what was happening below.
People were moving around, on familiar-looking activities, foraging and greeting. The sea was almost still, the air windless. Rawi cried Look and pointed not down but along the cliff to where a solitary figure stood, also looking down. A male. Li’s panic surged, then she realized that it wasn’t Greb. Now he had seen them and came hurrying towards them. He turned out to be Kerif’s younger half-brother, Kadif. His head and face were all bloody and his left eye too swollen to open. He must have managed to climb the cliff further along.
As he came he pointed to the shore, and gave the Danger call, but there was no need. Already, twice, the watchers had heard floating up through the afternoon stillness, Greb’s bellow of command, mad but triumphant. They climbed back to the pool and when night came huddled beside it, nursing their hungers.
In the dark the ground shuddered violently and they woke and heard the whole world groan and saw what they couldn’t see by day – that the central mountain was shooting columns of gold and orange up through the massive smoke-cloud, and throwing out immense golden fragments which arched aside and fell flaming on to the slopes below. The night air became colder than the water of the pool, so they moved into the shallows and waited there for the dawn.
When it came the mountain was quiet again, merely billowing smoke. Very hungry by now they went back down to the cliff. The sun rose, blazing across a waveless sea. They listened for the song that should have greeted it but instead heard only a single voice. Greb’s.
It was clear to Li now that they had to get down to the shore. If Greb was still at the water-caves, they must go elsewhere, before the sun became too hot, so that they could travel beyond his reach. She took Ma-ma by the hand, grunted Come and started off, with the others trailing behind. The ground rose steeply towards a ridge which formed the southern headland of the bay. It would have been quicker to cut straight across, but their whole instinct was to follow as closely as possible the tribe’s normal route along the shoreline below, so they continued on round.
On these higher cliffs nested colonies of sea-birds, whose clatter and screams rose louder as the travellers neared, reminding them of their hunger, and of the taste of eggs and juicy nestlings. They stopped and peered over and saw the parents wheel away from the crammed ledges below. There was food there. Their mouths watered. Desperately they searched for a way down, but there was none.
Then, looking along the cliff, Li saw a gourd-vine and remembered how they had used one yesterday to climb the final stretch in their escape. This one was bigger, its main stem half as thick as her own body, but she gave Goor a stone and showed him where to bash and set Kadif to do the same from the other side while the rest of them heaved together at the mat. In the end the stem gave, and they dragged the whole mat along and lowered it down to reach the nests, then climbed down one at a time to feed while the rest of them anchored it at the top or moved it along when a stretch of ledge had been cleared.
Li had just climbed back from her second feed when she heard a grunt of Look and turned. Hooa was pointing out to sea, with egg-yolk dribbling down her chin. The others peered and muttered surprise and puzzlement. There was a strangeness on the horizon. The sea from this height seemed a dead flat calm, as if it had been stretched taut all round its edges, but not as far as the eye could see. Far out, almost at the limits of vision, it changed, but they couldn’t yet make out how.
Now all were staring. No-one climbed down the mat. They muttered. Soon they could see that the whole line of the horizon had become like a low cliff, a far headland seen from another headland. It was strange. For a while it stayed like that, and they half lost interest and went on with their nest-raiding until they realized that the strangeness wasn’t just something that had risen from the sea, a long way out, but was coming nearer.
Now they knew what it was. There was a call used in the tribe at seasons when rollers came steadily in from the ocean but foraging was still safe provided the foragers were aware of their rhythm and could judge the come-and-go of surges. The danger was that occasionally a pair of rollers would somehow double up and produce between them a monster, so at those times watchers were set at vantage points along the shore to call a warning when they saw a wave like that coming. Big wave they muttered to each other. Yes. Big wave. Only, at first, seeing it from this distance and this unfamiliar height, they couldn’t realize how big.
A hundred miles out across what is now the Indian Ocean, below the deep sea floor, the plates that carry the continents had moved. For ages they had been still, jammed, and so the tensions between them had grown and grown, and now at last something had given. In the continents either side of the rift there had been earthquakes and eruptions, signalling the change. Then, as the plates had juddered to their new positions a whole section of the ocean floor had buckled into a line of underwater hills, and as it had done so it had set up an earthquake wave in the sea itself, the wave that is like no other wave and is called a tsunami.