“Yikes,” Raine said, pushing away from the tent pole and stepping closer to the Russian woman, his ice-blue eyes mischievous. “I love a girl in latex.”
Nadia’s equally cold blue eyes glanced at him for only a moment before looking down at the skeletal remains. “And I love probing around in dead bodies, Mister Raine,” she replied.
He raised a roguish eyebrow. “How about probing something a little livelier?”
She looked at him with exaggerated sadness. “I am afraid that my specialities are limited to human remains, not over-confident Americans with dinosaur-level attitudes towards womankind.”
One for the Rusky! Ben thought admiringly.
“Ooh, Nadia, you wound me,” Raine moved on, unruffled. “Is there no melting the Ice Queen?”
“Of course,” she said, examining the skeleton’s thigh bone. “Unfortunately there is nothing hot enough to thaw ice in the current vicinity.”
Strike two!
Raine simply laughed light-heartedly and moved towards the exit. “I’ll see you later Sid,” he smiled and King felt his hackles rise. “Benny,” he nodded by way of a departure, and then he was gone, leaving the three scientists alone.
“See,” Sid said under her breath. “He’s trying to be your friend.”
“I hate being called ‘Benny’!”
Sid was about to say something further when they both felt Nadia’s eyes boring into them. They turned to face her and saw that she had looked up from her work and was staring straight at them. “I work most productively whilst free from interruptions and distractions,” she said in her usual clipped tone.
Sid nodded in understanding. “Point taken, Nadia,” she said, smiling and taking King’s hand. “We have our own work to do anyway.”
King paused by the entrance and turned back to Nadia. “Can you let me know the moment you determine his race?”
“It will take some time to pinpoint the exact area of origin.”
“Yeah, but you should be able to narrow it down fairly quickly to give me a rough idea. All I need to know is that he was a black African male.”
Nadia considered this a moment. “I have to make my report to Doctor McKinney—”
“Please, Nadia,” King pleaded. “I’d consider it a personal favour.”
Nadia hesitated a moment longer and then simply nodded once. King smiled his appreciation then stepped out of the tent.
An unusually cool breeze drifted through the camp, stirring the canvas and making the hairs on the back of King’s neck stand on end. The setting sun cast the sky a deep blood red and twisted distorted shadows through the trees. For a moment, he fancied that he heard a whispery sound drifting through them.
Sari… sari…
He forced his imagination back under control and headed off after Sid.
4:
A Little Less Conversation
King stood alone in one of the camp’s five lab tents. Even out in the wilderness, the lab was the epitome of high-tech science. Touch-screen computers lined the sturdy canvass walls, powered by huge generators and they synced up to numerous handheld tablet computers which the camp’s scientists could carry with them, making notes and examining the enormous array of subject-relevant e-books stored in the system’s hard-drive. Ergonomic workstations were arranged around the perimeter of the large tent, equipped with state-of-the-art polarizing microscopes, a multitude of acid and lignin-free containers, a 3D-digitizer, osteometric boards, digital callipers, microscribe digitizers and x-ray scanners, as well as an array of precision conservation tools: scalpels and minute vacuums, brushes, air purifiers and dozens of bottles of cleaning fluids and chemicals.
Wrapped within the canvass folds of the expedition’s five labs, it was easy to believe you were back in some ultra-modern European research facility rather than the hot and sweaty remote table-mountain.
Yet, despite all the technology available to him, Ben King sat hunched over one of the work stations littered with actual books and placed the small brush and vacuum down on the table top. In his gloved hands, he reverently lifted the carefully cleaned mask to look at it in all its detail.
While similar to the descriptions of the Moon Mask of his African ancestors, on closer inspection the Sarisariñama piece was noticeably different.
There were no brightly coloured beads patterned in swirls around the face’s cheeks. Instead this mask was adorned in some sort of ochre coloured paint, now faded and flaking. Where the cave paintings of the Bouda mask indicated rectangular slits for eyes, the Sarisariñama one had wide, gaping holes. The benevolent ‘almost-smile’ of the African mask was replaced by jaws filled with corroded metal teeth, twisted into a perpetual, malevolent snarl.
Despite the differences though, the similarities were undeniable, even to Doctor McKinney and her ilk. The overall shape of the mask was identical to the depictions of the Bouda’s, derived by following the curve of a piece which was out of place.
He remembered the cave paintings his father had shown him in the Gambia and flicked now through the discoloured pages of his battered notebook to find the sketch he had made on a return visit many years later. A faded photograph had also been taped into the book and he cross-checked the two pictures.
Amidst the images of black men, women and children being herded like cattle onto a European ship was the man described by his father as the Oni or Great King. The mask he wore was depicted as a swirl of colour but, easily identifiable, was a triangular section of the forehead, painted entirely in startling red, completely out of keeping with the rest of the mask’s design.
While the rest of the mask had been designed in the fairly traditional style found throughout Africa, this triangular section, his father had told him, was one piece of the shattered Moon Mask. The rest of the mask had been fashioned around it, its shape and dimensions derived from the curve of the original forehead piece.
The Sarisariñama mask now held in his hands also had a section out-of-keeping with the overall character of it. Though it had once been coated in the same ochre paint as the rest of the mask, a roughly triangular section of it, this time its left hand jaw, tapering up to the point of the nose, was identifiable through the cracked paint. Again, it seemed obvious to King that this piece had been used as a base from which the shape and dimensions of the overall visage had been derived.
Actually holding the mask in his hands, King was now able to completely verify what he had always believed. Unable to discern further detail from the cave painting, he could see now that, in the case of the Sarisariñama mask at least, the rest of the mask had been constructed as if to accommodate the red metal of the original piece.
Feeling a swell of excitement bubbling inside, he hurried to the lab’s scanner and, ignoring the pounding thump of music and the sounds of laughter coming from the mess tent, he placed the photograph of the Gambian cave painting down on the glass. Working the controls, he enlarged the image to four times its original size and sent it to the printer.
“Hey,” Sid’s gentle voice said as she pushed through the tent flap. Beyond her, the summit of the table-mountain was bathed in silver moon light, the points of the camp’s tents silhouetted against a purple sky.
“Nate managed to squeeze a crate of beer into the helicopter’s hold. Everyone’s having a drink in the mess tent to celebrate our find. I think the man who made the find should be there.”