It was certainly a tragic story, and as I read it, I found myself comparing it all the time with my father's life. Communism had been at the root of his loneliness. In the case of Marais, it was patriotism. He came of an old Afrikaaner family and the outbreak of the Boer War had caught him in London still studying for the bar, having abandoned medicine after four years. He was interned, but by the end of the war he was in Rhodesia, smuggling arms across the border to the Boers. All this I could understand; it was the sort of thing I would have done myself. But then he had cut himself off from
the human race and in an isolated part of the Transvaal, the Waterberg, had lived with a troop of baboons.
In a sense it was not unlike my father's disappearance into the red dunes, except that while Marais had had the company of living creatures, my father had been cut off from all life, with only the dead past of human occupation for company. But only for three weeks, not three years.
In carrying out this intensive study in the field Marais was half a century ahead of any other scientist. Nobody, until after the Second World War, had apparently considered it important to observe the behaviour of primates in their natural state, rather than in captivity. And since the violence of his patriotic fervour dictated that the only account of his observations should be published in an Afrikaans newspaper, his work went unrecognized. The articles were not translated into English until 1939, and by then he was dead. And it was the same with his later study of termite society.
Six years after Marais's articles on the white ant appeared in Afrikaans, a Belgian named Maeterlinck had published in a popular scientific series a little book called La Vie des Termites. Marais had sued him, but Maeterlinck was not only a man of letters who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but his books on scientific subjects were widely read. The truth was confused with sour grapes. In any case, barrister though Marais was, an international legal action of this kind against an established public figure was beyond his resources. Most of his money had gone long ago in compensation to farmers for the depredations of his baboons during those three years spent alone in the Waterberg. It was not until after his death, when his articles were translated into English and published under the title The Soul of the White Ant, that the basis for Maeterlinck's book became apparent to the scientific world and Marais recognized for the genius he was.
But for Marais himself, the comfort of morphine and ultimate suicide had replaced justice. He remained unrecognized throughout his life. A man who voluntarily cuts himself off from society cannot complain if that same society ignores him. This sentence, on the last page of the typescript, had been underlined and in the margin Gilmore had written-Pieter Van der Voort has done just this as far as the Western world is concerned and anything he may discover will be accorded an even more hostile reception than would Marais' observations. The reasons for this I will explain later.
That was it-the strange life of another South African with a chip on his shoulder. And though my father hadn't confined his writings to Afrikaans, it had amounted to almost the same thing as far as the Western world was concerned- his two books published only in Communist countries. I sat there for a long time after I had finished reading, not feeling the sun on my face, not hearing the roar of the bow wave as we ran downwind, only thinking of my father, comparing his story with Marais's. Would my father also have to wait half a century for recognition-presuming that he too was a genius? And I couldn't help thinking that if some dedicated student had written an article about him, setting out his whole life story like this, and I had read it, then perhaps I would have seen him for the sort of man he was and have understood him.
I looked down again at that last page, at the passage Gil-more had underlined and the comment he had written in the margin. / will explain later. What more was there to explain? I was thinking of the old man alone there in the red dunes, that strange feeling I had had of something terrible and evil, and then Bert called to me from the wheelhouse. He wanted the jib lowered.
We were closing the land fast now, the wind force 7 in the gusts, and the sun slanting into cloud. By the time I had got the fores'l down single-handed, dusk was closing in. By six we were in the shallows and the sea a white mass of broken water with the high north-west of Levkas looming large on our starb'd side. To the east of it, the land dropped away to sea-level, and in the fading light, it was quite impossible to make out the entrance to the canal against the background of Levkas town.
The four of us were in the wheelhouse then, watching tensely as the boat drove towards the shallows. Florrie was at the wheel. It was at this moment that Dr. Gilmore emerged from the companionway, still in his pyjamas and wearing an old fawn dressing gown. He stood for a moment looking at the land. "Levkas?" he asked.
I nodded. I thought I could see the lighthouse on the western arm now, a small white tower, and behind it the ruined bulk of the citadel. Bert must have seen it, too, for he ordered a change of course to starb'd and started the engine. We began to roll then, spray spattering the windshield, and Gilmore grabbed my arm for support. "You read that little paper on Marais, did you?"
"Yes." I was preoccupied, going over in my mind the handling of main and mizzen sails which would be necessary when we made the turn inside the canal. At least there was some daylight left.
"Tragic. Very tragic. A genius, and unknown, disregarded for years. But an intellectual, of course." He looked at me. "Don't confuse him with your father. The fact that they are both South Africans is only incidental."
"Then why did you ask me to read it?"
"I thought it might help you to understand the ruthless-ness of the scientific world, the loneliness of pure research." He had found his balance now and let go my arm. "But don't worry. Your father is a fighter. He is more like Dart, for instance, than Marais." He looked at me, smiling. "Sonia tells me you've been reading Dart's book. I gave it to her because I think Pieter. ." He hesitated. "Well, maybe not as great as Dart or Broom, but when a man conceives a theory, spends all his resources-money, time and energy-to prove it, then there's always a chance. ." He had turned and was leaning forward, peering at the land ahead. For a time he seemed lost in his own thoughts. "But then Dart had the advantage of large areas of limestone, his specimens preserved by fossiliza-tion. Here there's no surface limestone. We're into volcanic country now, a continuation of the middle Mediterranean fault." And he added, "An interesting formation this, a promontory of the mainland rather than an island. I wonder if there is anything left of the old Roman canal. There was an earlier one, too, built by the Corinthians."
"Bits of the Roman canal are still visible," Bert said. "You'll see them in the morning." He had taken over the wheel now and was leaning slightly forward, his eyes narrowed. He seemed quite confident, and shortly afterwards he asked me to go aft and stand by the sheets. "Harden the main right in as we turn the sandbank. The mizzen, too."
Outside the wheelhouse the noise of the sea and the boat's movement was much louder. The lighthouse at the end of the protecting wall seemed to rush towards us out of the darkening line of the land. Bert gave it a wide berth, steering perilously close to the further shore. The piled-up yellow of a naked sandbank slid by close to starboard. The bows swung as we made the turn, the sea smoothed out under the lee, and suddenly all was quiet except for the flapping of the sails. We were inside, motoring in calm water, the boat heeling as I winched in the sheets.