I snapped out of my gruesome stream of consciousness on the way to The Cradle of Humankind. We came upon a street littered with souvenir shops with wonderful wooden sculptures.
“This is the shopping district,” Victor explained. “Would you like to shop for a souvenir?”
“No place to put a souvenir,”
because I’m essentially homeless and I doubt I’ll have room in my urn.
I had a momentary vision of myself in my coffee can with one of the lovely sculpted giraffes to keep me company.
“But I could probably use some clothes for the safari. Think you could help me find something safari-like?”
Victor shrugged, “If that’s what you’d like.”
He pointed me in the direction of a clothing store and I picked out a red T-shirt.
“Red is the color of fresh meat to a hungry lion. Other bright colors alert the animals to your presence, making them stay away.”
I quickly hung the shirt back and grabbed a white one instead.
“Nice, but it won’t stay white for long. The roads are very dusty. Think earth tones. You want to blend into the environment.”
I grabbed a camouflage shirt. Finally, I had made the right choice…I thought.
“You do not want to look like you are part of a rebel force either,” Victor laughed.
“Okay, so dirt colored it is.”
Everything Victor said made sense. This wasn’t about fashion; it was about practicality, so I headed over to another rack and selected a couple of drab, tan shirts, and two pairs of loose-fitting, dirt-colored cargo pants. Evan would have been aghast at the whole ensemble. He wanted me never to wear brown because I am brown, and anything that isn’t skin tight “isn’t flattering.” I figured the baggy pants would be more comfortable around my now mushy middle. Gone was my svelte, work-out-five-times-a-week bod. Either I had eaten entirely too much Italian food or I was starting to get a little ascites—a collection of fluid in the abdomen. My mother
had the same condition treated several times before she finally died.
“Don’t worry about buying a lot of clothes,” Victor said as I rummaged through more T-shirts. “Wilbur’s tour provides laundry service.”
I liked Victor. He smiled no matter what he was saying, although most of what he said while he was smiling implied that I was an idiot. In Africa, I
was
an idiot—clueless and totally uninformed. I wasn’t just in a different country; I might as well have been in a different galaxy. I knew nothing of where I was.
The laundry service, I
would later learn, consisted of some young African girl running my clothes up and down a Little House on the Prairie-type washboard, then hanging my clothes to dry, which may or may not have worked, depending on the weather.
We got back into the Jeep, and as he drove, Victor gave me a brief education on the things I was seeing. It was all so fascinating—the history, the culture, the struggle—that I couldn’t believe it when I
was suddenly jolted awake from having inexplicably passed out.
“It must have been a long flight,” Victor said with a chuckle. “You slept through the African massage!”
He added a rolling belly laugh for good measure. I later learned that this was a common African joke referring to any bumpy ride.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes as I followed Victor out of the car to some strange building that looked like something out of
Land of the Lost.
There were still no animals in sight, but I half expected to stumble upon a Sleestack as we entered the stone, moss-covered, mound-shaped building.
“This is Maropeng Visitor Centre. Maropeng means, ‘returning to the place of origin.’ You are in a forty-seven-thousand-hectare World Heritage Site called The Cradle of Humankind. One third of all the fossils of early man have been discovered in the caves that cover this area—over a thousand hominid species, spanning several million years of evolution. This building represents a tumulus, or a large burial mound.”
“It’s really interesting,” I said, deciding to hold back on my Land of the Lost reference, though that’s really what the place looked to be.
It was fascinating. Just inside the tumulus, a staircase descended into an underground museum that featured a boat ride. The attraction was meant to make the rider feel as though he were going back in time to when
the Earth was a ball of fiery molten rock emerging from a black hole. I experienced the four elemental forces of nature: earth, wind, fire, and water, then emerged on the other end of the ride back in time to a one-thousand-piece display of the fossils of early man, discovered in South Africa.
As we left, I couldn’t help but think of how this place was slowly tearing apart what minimal faith I had in God and the afterlife.
“We will make one more stop before I take you to your hotel,” Victor announced.
I was still not completely rejuvenated, but
I remained silent due to my fear of missing out on anything in life, and in particular, something that Wilbur had thought I should see. After a short drive through The Cradle, we came upon the Sterkfontein Caves.
“Two major discoveries have been made here,” Victor began as we crossed the parking area. “The first one, Mrs. Ples, a 2.3-million-year-old fossil, is the most complete
Australopithecus africanus
skull ever discovered. The second is the Little Foot skeleton; it was discovered in 1994 and is still being excavated. The foot, which is very small, was discovered first. It wasn’t until later that it was realized that there was a fairly complete skeleton behind it.”
There was a small museum on the way to entrance of the caves. Inside, there were several skulls of “Apemen,” all of which had been discovered in The Cradle.
Then I came face to face with Mrs. Ples. She seemed to mock me as I stared into the sockets that once contained her eyes. Mrs. Ples and everything in the Cradle, were proof to me that the God that Sister Constance said would save my soul, did not exist. Or at the very least, the Theory of Creation was seriously flawed. With no tangible foundation, the theory rests on the faith of its believers. But Mrs. Ples, with her vacuous eye sockets, told me another story: that man was not created in his present form. All around the place, still undiscovered in the dark caves, was the proof that when we die, the best “eternal life” we can hope for is to be put on display so that two million years down the road, some fool can gawk at us—just as I gawked at the small, tarnished skull of Mrs. Ples.
“You look angry with her,” Victor laughed, yanking me out of my philosophical reverie.
I hadn’t realized it was so obvious.
“The tour is starting. This way
,” he said as he handed me a bottle of water. “You’ll want this.”
A group had gathered outside the doors that lead down to the caves. A small African woman in her thirties began to speak in English.
“I am Kagiso. I will guide you through the caves. The passage is very narrow. There is a point where you will have to stoop down; some of you may actually have to crawl. Is there anyone who thinks this will possibly be too much for them?”
No one replied.
“All right, let’s go down,” Kagiso said.
She possessed the same smiling demeanor as Victor.
The group of fifteen or so instantly emitted a Babylonian din of languages when Kagiso stopped speaking. Dutch, French, possibly even Afrikaans were being spoken all around me. I had never learned more than a few words of a second language. My mother had never taught me a single word of the Upland Yuman dialect of “our people.” I was amazed by how everyone I had met in Italy seamlessly switched gears between languages. I realized that if I were to have my reincarnation time machine take me back to Renaissance Italy, I would only be able to ask Botticelli for directions to the bathroom. I digressed, once again, into taking an opportunity and twisting a situation into the perspective of my personal failure. I made a choice then to learn Italian even if I were never given the chance to use it.
As a group, we proceeded to make the sixty-meter descent down the wet, slippery stairs into the caves. A middle-aged woman in front of me sank down to the ground and stopped. I thought that, perhaps, she had fallen.
She shook her head as she turned to me and said,
“Je ne peux rien faire.”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“I can’t do it,” she moaned with a heavy French accent. “I can’t go down there.”
Victor and I helped her to her feet, and he escorted her back up to the entrance. Victor returned shaking his head
.
“Claustrophobia. It happens every time.”
The rest of us proceeded single file to the excavation site of Little Foot,
which was concealed behind a metal gate. The 3.5-million-year-old skeleton is still younger, Kagiso explained, than many of the fossils found in Northern Africa. The mob began to mumble amongst themselves. I imagined the disappointment of traveling from however far they had come and finding only an iron gate holding prisoner the one thing they had wanted to see. I envisioned myself traveling to Florence to see my beloved
Birth of Venus
, and feeling the anguish of learning that Botticelli’s masterpiece was right there, but I would be unable to see it.
“
There is an exact replica of Little Foot back in the museum,” Kagiso said in response to the group’s palpable disappointment before continuing. “All of the remains that have been discovered in the caves were from whatever primeval hominids or mammals were unfortunate enough to fall into the abyss back in the day. Nothing actually dwelled in these caves amongst the saturated limestone.”
We reached the point where we were forced to stoop. The gentleman that was now in front of me was tall enough that he had to crawl. He
rapidly began to wheeze and puff as though he might keel over. Selfishly, I tried to work out how I was going to be able to step over his body if need be. I tapped him on the shoulder, and as he turned around, I could see that his face was purple and his jugular veins were bulging.
I asked the obligatory, yet stupidly obvious question, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he gurgled in between exertive breaths in what sounded to be a Dutch accent.
He was quite clearly not all right.
“I think you should sit down for a minute,” I urged.
He attempted to ignore me, but his wife intervened, grabbing his arm and scolding him in Dutch.
He shoved her hand from his bicep and snapped, “I’m all right!” continuing to stagger through the low, narrow tunnel.
Soon, the narrow space
gave way to a large cavern, at the center of which was an underground lake. The Dutch man, still wheezing loudly, collapsed to his knees next to the dark, dismal body of water. I envisioned my mother just then, kneeling down before the blue-green waters beneath Havasu Falls. But this creepy scene stood in stark contrast to that tranquil, beautiful environment.
I sat down next to the Dutch man and said as gently as possible, “I’m a nurse…or, I was one. Do you have congestive heart failure?”
“I just wanted to make it here, to this lake. My…our son…drowned here while diving in this lake. He was part of the excavation team.”
“I’m so sorry
,” I said, suddenly understanding his dogged determination.
“I just wanted to see it. It’s so
dark and cold here,” he muttered in a heartbreakingly anguished voice as he began to cry.
The rest of the tour group turned their
attention from the lake to the two of us. I stood up and walked over to Victor.
“Can we stay with this couple for a minute while the rest of the tour goes on?”
Victor proceeded over to Kagiso and spoke to her for a moment in their native language. He returned with the same warm smile he had worn since I first met him.
“They normally would not allow it, but because I have taken this tour hundreds of times, she said I could lead you out.”
I gave my thanks to Victor, then turned to the wheezing Dutchman.
“My name is Stacia. May I listen to your lungs?”
He nodded, seemingly unable to speak through his short, wet breaths. He’d become more agreeable since he had reached his destination. His wife stood silently by, focused on the dark waters of the languid underground lake.
I didn’t have anything resembling a stethoscope, so I put my ear to his back and listened. As he took a deep breath I could hear rales: the telltale wet crackling sounds indicative of congestive heart failure.
“Are you on a diuretic?” I asked.
He looked at me blankly. What could the Dutch word for diuretic possibly be?
“Do you take medicine that makes you urinate?” I tried again.
“Ah, yes, but I forgot to take it to
day. I was so focused on coming here.”
“Do you have it with you?”
He barked something in Dutch to his wife, who quickly pulled a bottle from her purse and handed it to me. The label read “Furosemide 20 mg.” I could regurgitate drug indications, doses, and uses verbatim at one time, but I hadn’t given a pill to an adult since nursing school, so it took me a moment to recall that Furosemide is the generic of Lasix.