He pressed his left hand into his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, but when he looked again, the hill was a black absence against the brighter sky. The night, once more cool and quiet. The skin of his arms and neck rose in a shiver, but he leant back against the wall and brought the stub of his cigarette to his lips, drawing deeply, his eyes not leaving the hillside.
January 1902, Goshen Camp, Orange River Colony
Dearest Wolf,
We heard a good story. A trader came into camp and brought the news that Christmas day was a triumph for General De Wet at Groenkop. He overran a Khaki camp and captured over two hundred men! Were you there? So close as the crow flies, just a wagon ride away. Did you feast from the captured wagons and drink to your success? Did you think of us at all?
Life in the camp carries on, such as it is. People continue to arrive. Some have been forced by their circumstances simply to walk in. Their homes have been demolished, their crops and livestock looted or destroyed. Their last hope of survival is to work in the camp for food. I look at them with such judgement. I know what the Lord says about judging others, but, Wolf, what I wouldn’t give to walk out of here! I swear I would scrape a life for myself in a cave in the mountains if I could. I’ve had enough of the death and the work and the months of being hungry. The feeling that I’m walking circles in a desert, getting nowhere and achieving nothing. Oh, to have space. To wash myself clean with no one watching. I would indeed turn my eyes to the hills. Relish the solitude, the distance from other people’s grief. It has become too much for me.
The cemetery is full. There is no more space on the flat ground, and people have begun to disinter the old graves, burying the first body deeper so that there’s room above it. It is done quietly; the British are terrified of disease and would no doubt halt the practice immediately. But what is to be done? There is no more room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The students began arriving in the week after Christmas, most in small cars loaded with sleeping bags and pillows. Sarah soon realised that her anxiety about their accommodation was in vain. That they had a roof over their heads was a luxury for them. They were full of praise for her arrangements. Alistair gave the group the use of a spare farm pickup and two quad bikes so they could get from the homestead to the site. It wasn’t long before a routine emerged. Joseph held a meeting every morning, and ran through the work that needed to be done, getting feedback from the day before and setting the students to new tasks.
They spent the morning on site, coming back down for lunch. Alistair had to get used to seeing bodies on mattresses, fast asleep in the shade of the farmyard oaks. They were back on site for the afternoon, working until the light dimmed. The strum of a guitar and floating laughter carried across to the main house in the evenings. The farm felt alive, like it hadn’t been in years. And yet he was in turmoil. The dig would come to an end. Joseph would wrap up his investigation and go back to Cambridge. What would be left to keep Hannah in Leliehoek? Would she leave? He had said he would cope if their relationship did not work out, but he felt that he was already in too deep. The thought of going back to empty days spent at his desk, with only his dogs for company, was too awful to contemplate.
Alistair found himself venturing out if he saw Joseph’s car to sit and drink a beer with him, talking or simply sitting, listening to the joking, teasing banter that emanated from the shed.
It was clear that with a group of students mixed together over a couple of weeks came politics. Alistair saw the interest that more than one girl had in Joseph. Despite the opportunities, Joseph showed nothing but professional interest in the students. He was friendly, but kept himself apart, preferring to hang out with Alistair in the evenings, perhaps in the hope that Suzanne might join them.
‘Are you still driving across to Hannah’s to sleep?’ said Alistair on one such evening.
‘Ja,’ Joseph said, leaning his head back into Alistair’s couch. ‘Let’s just say it would complicate things if I started sleeping in the shed. I don’t feel like fending off’ – and he used his fingers to punctuate – ‘“sleep walkers” in the middle of the night.’
Alistair grinned. ‘So you’ve noticed the attention?’
‘You’d have to be dead not to notice! Those girls have the subtlety of a jack hammer.’
‘I’ve got two spare rooms here if you want one,’ said Alistair, leaning forwards to mute the sound of the TV as the rugby game came to halftime and an advert segment began.
Joseph turned his head to Alistair. ‘Hey, thanks. I’ll take you up on that. I still want to be at Hannah’s every now and then, but it’ll make getting to the site so much easier.’
‘No problem. Tina, my housekeeper, will be delighted to fuss over someone.’
‘Being fussed over sounds awesome. I certainly don’t get that at Hannah’s.’
The camp investigation moved slowly forwards, helped by the student labour force. Alistair had managed to source aerial photographs going back a few decades, and Joseph brought Hannah to the farm one afternoon to talk through their progress.
Joseph spread the photographs over the kitchen table. ‘You can see in these, even over thirty years, that the basic look hasn’t changed as much as one might expect, even after fires have been through. Can you see these areas?’ He pointed to patches on the photographs. ‘These areas are clearer and the vegetation is sparser, growing lower than say here,’ he said, gesturing to other places, ‘which looks like compacted ground.’
‘Couldn’t it be naturally shallow, maybe stone just below the surface?’ said Alistair.
Joseph shook his head. ‘And be this regularly spaced? I doubt it.’
‘What would have compacted it?’ said Hannah, holding her hair to one side as she pored over the photographs.
‘If you had to set up a tent or a shelter on open stony ground, what would you do first?’
‘Clear the stones,’ said Alistair.
‘And that’s what these people would have done. Nobody’s going to sleep for two years with stones under their bedding. Also, just the act of living in a space, the foot traffic, the weight of bodies and possessions, would compact the ground over time. Then, when the camp is dissolved, the tents gone, and the veld regrows, the vegetation growing on those compacted spots will be more stunted than in other places.’
‘It’s fascinating, Josey.’ Hannah looked up at him with a smile.
He grinned back at her. ‘There’s something else you can see on these pictures. Look here.’ His finger marked a number of spots. Hannah and Alistair both stared at the picture, then looked at him blankly. ‘Make that, something only I can see,’ Joseph said with a wink. ‘I think this area may have been a cemetery. I can count at least twelve obvious places which look like low, long cairns of rock. But these are too even in size simply to be random piles of stones. I reckon that if we examine this place’ – he circled a wide area on the photo – ‘we’re going to find graves.’