The port of Levkas is no more than a bulge in the canal, three-quarters of a mile south-south-west of the entrance. We berthed alongside the quay, handed our transit-log to the harbour official, and having stowed the sails, went below for a drink. For an old man who had never been to sea in a small boat before Dr. Gilmore seemed in remarkably good heart. "It's only when I'm ill that I get a chance to spend the whole day in bed-and that's not often." He was smiling, sitting there very bright and alert in his dressing gown and drinking whisky.
It may have been the drink, or perhaps it was the excitement of the voyage, but he became very talkative. He had never been to Africa, had never met Dart or Broom, only Leakey, yet he could talk about all three of them as though they were old friends. "They are the three giants of modern anthropology-Broom particularly. He was almost as old as I am when he turned from zoology to Dart's collection of fos-
sils, taking up the process of man's evolution from small mammalian ancestors, rather like Smith did with that living sea creature of his, the ceolocanth, which he called 'Old Four-legs.' " There was a glint of laughter in his eyes. "We're back fifty million years now." And he added, "It has always been my dream that a student of mine would become one of the greats. There was a moment, a long time ago now-in nineteen thirty-five I think-when I thought that Pieter might. ." He shook his head. "A pity. A great pity. There he was, in Africa, within a stone's throw-you might call it that in relation to the size of the continent-within a stone's throw of the world's greatest anthropological site. ." Again that sad shake of the head. "Just a youngster with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He was in too much of a hurry, too impatient. And there it was, waiting for him-the Olduvai Gorge. A stone's throw away, that's all. The chance of a lifetime. ."
His mention of the Olduvai Gorge reminded me of that album. I asked him where the gorge was, and he said, "Tanganyika. I believe they call it Tanzania now." He shook his head. "So much has changed. When I was a young man we owned half Africa. All gone now."
He sat looking at nothing for a moment. I thought his mind was wandering back down the long vista of the years-incredible as it might seem, he would have been alive at the time of the Boer War. I told him about the album with its faded pictures of a collection of bones at the bottom of a dry dusty pit, the words that had been written beside it. He smiled and nodded, "Yes, yes. That's it. Only a hundred miles from Olduvai-he wrote that, did he? A stone's throw, just as I said."
"What was it all about?" I asked. He had closed his eyes again and I was afraid his mind would wander off on to something else. "You wrote him a letter, in nineteen thirty-five. He kept all your letters, in a bundle in the bureau."
Gilmore nodded, smiling vaguely. "He was always writing to me, always asking my advice or for information. So he thought them worth keeping. I'm glad."
"They were type^vritten," I said. "All except the one written in nineteen thirty-five-in it you said you couldn't condone his behaviour, that it placed him beyond the pale and that thereafter everything he discovered would be suspect."
"You saw that letter, did you?" He leaned back, his eyes half-closed. "I see. And you don't understand it? You don't know what it's about?" ^
"No."
"He never told you?" And then he nodded. "No, no, of course not. No man likes his son to know he was caught cheating." He sipped his drink, staring at me. "You've read that paper on Marais. You know how a genius can be treated. And now. . this is what I said I'd explain later." He leaned forward quickly. "Whether he likes it or not, you've a right to know, for it will be remembered against him. However sound his theory, they won't believe him. And all because of something that happened a long time ago." He paused and took a cigarette from the box above the drink locker. Bert lit it for him and he leaned back, puffing at it eagerly, his eyes half closed again as though collecting his thoughts. "He was just a kid at the time. It was after he had got his degree and had returned to South Africa. He was in an angry mood and it took him alone into the bush in search of the 'dawn man.' He had a theory, you see." He hesitated. "The theory won't interest you, of course, and since you obviously know nothing about his world it will be difficult to make you realize the enormity of what he tried to do." His hand suddenly banged at the side of the settee berth. "And he was right. That was the tragedv of it. Everything that has been discovered since- a great deal during the last decade or so-has proved him right." He sighed, leaning forward so that the bulkhead light sharpened the brittle bone formation of his face, glinted on his pale grey eyes. "But he tried to cut corners; he manufactured evidence. And that was unforgiveable."
"You mean the picture I saw in the album?"
He nodded.
"And the evidence he manufactured-it was the skull, I suppose; the one displayed in the glass top of the bureau in his study?"
Gilmore nodded again, vigorously. "That's it. You remember I recognized it at once, as soon as I came into the study. I had never seen it before. Photographs, yes; but he never let it out of his hands. Wouldn't trust anybody to handle it." He paused for a moment, his eyes a little wide and staring as though he were still appalled at what my father had done. And then suddenly he gave a small chuckle. "Does the Piltdown Man mean anything to you?" He seemed to assume my ignorance for his eyes searched the faces of the others, all listening intently, as though gathering his audience together. And then he went on, barely pausing for breath, "It was a hoax, the most fantastic, barefaced hoax in the history of anthropology." Again that sudden, amused chuckle. "Students love it, of course. It makes all the experts look such fools."
He paused there, and in the silence I could hear the wind ruffling the water against the hull. 'Pieter was always fascinated by the Piltdown story. He argued that it fitted too neatly the post-Darwinian belief that Homo sapiens was God-created, even though he did evolve from the apes." He leaned back, drawing reflectively at his cigarette, blowing the smoke in a long streamer from his pursed lips, his eyes bright with the thought of what he was telling me. "You have to remember that the Darwinian theory of evolution was a great shock to the religious beliefs of the period. Even now, we are still very reluctant to face up to the realities of man's evolution- we tend to describe him as a tool-maker, when, in fact, his development is based mainly on his ability to produce weapons. When Darwin died in 1882 his theory of evolution was established beyond question, but most scientists clung doggedly to the idea of man created in the image of God. The Piltdown skull fitted this theory perfectly. The bits and pieces included part of a skull that indicated a brain almost as large as modern man's, and associated with it were the bones of animal remains dating back about a million years. The size of the brain case, in association with the known date of the animal remains, indicated that man had developed through God's gift of a large brain, not that his present large brain and capacity for thought had been part of the normal processes of evolution. Some of the more progressive scientists had reservations about the 'dawn-man' as they called it, chiefly because there was half a jaw that clearly belonged to the chimpanzee family and the skull fragments could be reconstructed in various ways to give different sizes of brain."
He went on to describe its discovery by some workmen in the gravels of the Sussex Ouse in 1912, how it had been accepted as genuine for forty years, and then he was explaining the way in which the whole thing had been bust wide open by a backroom anthropologist in the basement of the British Museum. His voice, his whole manner of telling it, had a sort of boyish enthusiasm that was infectious. Like Dart on the Taung skull, he made the Piltdown mystery sound like a detective story. First, the chemical test that had shown three times as much fluorine in the skull as in the jaw bone, proving beyond doubt that the two were quite unconnected. Then Geiger counter tests, with all the animal remains recording a count of between 10 and 25, except three elephant teeth, which gave counts of 175, 203 and 355. Finally, a world-wide search that tore the whole thing to shreds by indicating Tunisia as the only source of fossil remains of elephants giving such high beta ray counts.