Voices carried to him from the houses of the village. Elias and Halil would be here before long, and Palmer, probably accompanied by Patricia. Soon afterward the workpeople would begin to arrive. Once more he strained to see. There was nothing; the earth was a uniform brownish yellow, marked only by the outcrops of rock. He hesitated a moment longer, then began again to descend. As he did so he saw Elliott and three others come into view, mounted on horseback. They were heading, he knew, toward the fields of bitumen that lay some miles in a northerly direction, invisible from here, not yet touched by the sun. He watched them until they disappeared into the haze of morning.
10.
Each morning, armed with rifle and revolver, accompanied by his interpreter and two men from the village, also armed, Elliott set off on horseback for the fields of bitumen that glittered a somber welcome to him as he drew near. For a time that could not be measured, before there existed beings able to measure time, this seeping had continued: the slide of oil from below the sealing rock, the spreading acreage of swamp.
The source might be far away from the borders of the pitch; oil could migrate many miles before flanking the belt of shale or clay that held it trapped. He had to find clues to the direction of the flow, the whereabouts and porosity and depth of the underlying reservoir rock. Color was some indication of this, though far from entirely trustworthy; the fresher, more recent flow would be paler, sometimes yellowish against the darkly weathered older pitch.
He was proposing, with the help of his escort, who would lay aside their rifles to take up picks and shovels, to dig exploration wells and so obtain a cross section of the surface rock. Digging was not drilling; it was in keeping with his role of archaeologist. But for the time being, in these early days, he contented himself with the study of hand specimens and some scraping of the sedimentary limestone just below the surface. He kept a lookout for fault lines in the beds of sealing rock where oil or water might have gathered; over the millions of years since its formation, under the stress of pressure and heat, the rock would have buckled in places, crumpled into deep folds where oil or gas or a combination of the two might have accumulated.
He returned from these explorations with the eager anticipation of talking about them to Edith Somerville. He left for his fieldwork early in the morning, as soon as it was light, timing his return, as far as he possibly could, to arrive well before Somerville and Palmer were back from the excavation, which was generally well after sundown. Patricia nowadays almost always accompanied them, partly because she had become increasingly interested in the discoveries being made, mainly because she wanted to be where Palmer was. So usually—and it was a source of obscure disappointment to Edith and distinct vexation to Elliott if it proved otherwise—he would find her alone, and they would have an hour or so together.
It was remarkable, and might have been demonstrated on a graph, the rise in the frequency of their encounters, which both, however, still chose to regard as accidental, and in the amount of time these occupied. On one occasion he remained at the house for part of the morning to study the rock specimens he had brought back with him and make notes on them, and she brought coffee to him and they talked together while he drank it. Sometimes after dinner they would find themselves alone for a short while, though without conscious contrivance, on Edith’s part at least—time for a smile to be exchanged and a few words to be spoken. But the regular time of their meeting was in the late afternoon; they would have tea together, just as on the day of Elliott’s arrival. Quite soon this taking of tea together took on the quality of a ritual, with Elliott mainly talking and Edith mainly listening.
The preponderance was natural; he was by far the more loquacious. But he asked her questions about herself, and these she was usually reluctant to answer. Concerning her married life she said practically nothing at all, and he construed this restraint as a mark of discontent, though without really understanding it; she did not express energy of feeling through eager words or vivacity of manner like the American women he had known, but through a sort of charged reticence, which was new to him and full of erotic challenge. It was curious, it was intriguing, that she should seem less than happy without betraying the fact by any sort of remark save the most indirect. It was as if she were waiting with an assumption of nonchalance—and this could harden into hauteur if she was pressed too closely—for something, someone, to compel her to frankness, force an admission from her, make her expose herself to damage by declaring it.
About the years before, her girlhood, when she still lived with her parents, she would talk more, particularly about her father, the QC, his defense of the underdog, how much he had been admired and respected for his generosity and his passion for justice, how he never undertook a defense unless he firmly believed his client was innocent of the charge against him, how he would accept lower fees or even waive his fee altogether if he thought it was a deserving case.
He had got rich all the same, Elliott thought, with a skepticism that came mixed with immediate dislike for this phony philanthropist. Defending the underprivileged had paid off. She had been born to money; it was written all over her. She had never felt the ache of poverty and deprivation—not like himself, ragged-trousered and sometimes hungry, son of a settler on a homestead in Oregon. Naturally he gave no expression to these thoughts, even contriving nods of the head and looks of admiration. Concealment had always come naturally to him. He wanted her, and this gave him a tact that he might otherwise not have summoned, a tact indistinguishable in his mind from considerations of strategy, similar to the feeling that made him avoid glancing too frequently at the line of her bosom or the reclination of her limbs as she sat opposite him.
Her eyes shone when she spoke of her father and her life at home. Her mouth, which was wide but delicately molded, softened with tenderness, and she held her head up and looked to Elliott altogether beautiful and regal. Her father was a great storyteller in addition to everything else; he had told her a lot of stories when she was a little girl, he made them up as he went along, he could make anything into a story. There was one she remembered about a wolf called Cuthbert, who had a bad name, quite undeservedly.
“Well,” Elliott said, “I guess wolves are much maligned.” He had shot wolves as a boy, in winter, to keep them off the hogs, but he said nothing of this. He wondered whether she had sat in the QC’s lap for these stories and how old she had been when they were discontinued. But these were not questions anyone could ask; and in any case she did not want those days, that paradise of an indulged childhood, from which he suspected she had never really emerged, subjected to questions; it was inviolable. Instead he talked to her about his activities of the day, though taking care to give nothing much away.
He began this way at least; but Edith had only a limited interest in source rock analysis, and the limits soon showed in a certain vacancy of expression that would descend on her. It was stories she liked—just as much as ever it seemed; it was the marvels of geology that made her face light up, and for this reward Elliott was more than ready to supply them. In North America, beneath the Great Plains, fossil remains of marine creatures had been found. Just imagine, five thousand miles from the sea, at altitudes of four thousand feet, they had found fossils of sea creatures, among them the giant reptile Mosasaurus. Had she heard tell of this unfriendly fellow? You can look today at the rock print of a monster that has been extinct for millions of years, that lived and feasted when these rocks were being formed on the floor of the sea. Imagine the power that tumbled these rocks from the seabed and thrust them up so high. At Los Angeles, where oil seeped to the surface and its volatile elements evaporated, a vast lake of pitch was formed and sheets of water gathered above it and the ancestors of Cuthbert the Wolf came to drink there and died there, trapped in the swamp of pitch. No one could tell how long this oil had been leaking. Among the skeletons they found while extracting the pitch were some belonging to Smilodon, the saber-toothed tiger, another ugly customer. Smilodon had ceased to inhabit the earth fifty thousand years ago…