The Darwin Conspiracy (44 page)

This confused the Chief even more, since it turned out that Philos had
neglected to mention that the original transgression involved eating that particular fruit. But it brought the story around full circle.

At this point Chief Okanicutt’s interest appeared to flag and he fell silent.

Then out of nowhere he asked: ‘What does this god look like?’ Philos
explained that no one really knew because no one had ever seen him, adding
that little children liked to think of him as a wise old man with a white
beard. When this was said, the Chief looked down at his own beard and
gave a big belly laugh. From then on he seemed to stop listening.

I was still dizzy from the effects of the drink and smoke and more than
ready to sleep when the natives passed around more of those intriguing cigars.

“Do you believe it?” said Beth, momentarily lowering the letter.

“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read.”

“Keep going,” urged Hugh.

The smoke made me feel drowsy. Indeed, I closed my eyes but I rested only
for a short spell, as I was awakened by a sudden clap of thunder so loud I
almost fell off my blessed rock.

I looked over at Chief Okanicutt. He seemed in low spirits—difficult as
that might be to spot in an aborigine like him—judging by the fact that he was
slumped in his seat, resting his head on one arm and staring off into the distance. I suppose it’s hard to be a ruler, even of a meagre group of tribesmen in
a brutish place such as this.

Mr McCormick, too, seemed to notice the change in our host’s disposition,
and he was glum, too. He was probably disappointed in the Chief ’s reaction
to his exposition on Christianity, which, for all its eloquence, had fallen on
deaf ears, as they say. But he valiantly tried to keep the conversation going.

‘Chief,’ I heard him say, pronouncing the words loudly so that they might
more easily be understood, ‘please be so kind as to share with us some of the
beliefs of your tribe. Do you—for instance—have any interesting myths? Do
you believe in a fire god and a rain god and so on? Ancestor-worship—that
sort of thing?’

The Chief motioned for the cigar to be passed. He inhaled a goodly
draught of smoke, held it in his chest for a while, then expelled it, looking
around the fire at the three of us. He appeared to be pondering whether to
oblige Mr McCormick with an answer or not. I could well understand his
reluctance, after hearing the intricacies and glories of the Anglican Church
extolled so persuasively; but he cleared his throat and sat up straight upon
his rock.

‘We do not believe in such a powerful god as you do,’ he said slowly, seeming to measure his words. ‘Our beliefs are simple. They come from our experience. As I said before, our tribe has been pushed out of our land. There we
had large fields to plant, and sunshine. Here it is cold and wet, and we can
hardly live. We must fight every day to stay alive.’

Here he hesitated and gave us a curious look. He may have been wondering, as I was, how it came to be that three Englishmen had turned up in this
dark hole at the bottom of this vast continent to hear his tale.

‘Still,’ he continued, ‘we have the memory of better days, when food was
plentiful and we could sit in the sun. So what we believe fits what we know—

that life can be good and our numbers can grow, but it can also be hard and
our numbers will shrink.’

‘Yes, plentiful on the one hand and cruel on the other!’ cried out Philos. ‘A
bounteous past—just as in the Christian faith. By Jove, that’s Eden, and
today we live in a world of corruption because man has been expelled from it;
we are on the same page in our different hymnals. Don’t you see?’

‘Perhaps,’ replied the Chief. ‘But we were not expelled from our garden by
a god. It was done by other people.’

‘Don’t you see? That was God’s plan,’ said Mr McCormick. ‘Your enemies were acting out God’s will.’

‘Why choose an explanation that you cannot see when there is one that you
can see?’ replied the Chief. ‘If a man throws a spear at me, I say that the
spear was thrown by a man.’ He paused a moment, then added: ‘We do not
believe in such a one as this God you speak of. We do not believe the world
was created in six days. That is a short time to do so much work. We believe
that the world came into being a very long time ago.’

‘But how without a god?’ put in Philos. ‘How was it created?’

‘This we do not know, and since we do not know we do not ask the question.’ The Chief bore the interruption with little patience and frowned at
Philos as if to silence him.

‘It happened, that is all that matters. Very long ago. So long it is impossible to imagine. Over time many things can happen. Seas happened. Mountains happened. Islands happened. Even this horrible place, which we call
the end of the earth, happened. Over time many grains of sand make a
beach.’

At that precise moment, Mother, there was a bolt of lightning and a clap
of thunder so close to the mountain-top that, I don’t mind telling you, I
 
almost jumped out of my skin. Part of me wondered if God was taking
umbrage at hearing such heresy. But the old Chief—he just sat there as calm
as could be.

‘We do not believe that a god made the plants and the animals. Or that he
made man and’—here he touched his rib—‘woman. In our belief, everything
began very simply. There was one single small thing and everything grew out
of it. It happened over a long time and with many changes. When time is
so long, many little changes can occur, and put together they add up to a big
change.’

I heard Mr McCormick mutter something puzzling under his breath—
‘Erasmus Darwin.’ The Chief did not seem to hear him and went on.

‘So the simple thing became many complicated things. And those things
changed and became more complicated and so on. Life is like that. At first
there were small animals such as you see in a pond. Then came bigger ones
such as you see on land. Legs happened. Eyes happened. That is why so
many animals look like so many other animals. They are all the same. We are
all the same. We all come from the same small thing.’

‘But how?’ This time it was Mr McCormick who interrupted. ‘How could
that possibly happen without God?’

The Chief turned to him and then to Philos, whose eyelids were beginning
to droop with fatigue, as if he were deciding whether or not to proceed.

‘Temaukl,’
he replied.

‘What?’

As you might imagine, the answer mystified us. There was a lot of back
and forth, as Jemmy tried to find words in English to express the conception
and we fired questions to pin it down. Maybe the Chief believed in some kind
of Supreme Being after all, I thought, but a deity that was more elementary.

The more he talked, the more it sounded like a will-o’-the-wisp.

Finally, the Chief made a sweep of his arm that took in the village, the
mountain, the threatening clouds in the night sky, and said:
‘Temaukl
is all
of this. It is everything you see around you and even what you cannot see. It
is the bird and the worm that the bird eats and the nest that the bird makes
and the branch that the nest sits upon
.’

That stumped us for a while—we all began guessing. I was beginning to
enjoy this—it was something like the parlour games we used to play back
home—until Mr McCormick, almost jumping out of his seat, yelled: ‘Nature!

That’s what he’s talking about. Nature!’

Having found a way to translate the idea, we all felt much better, as if we
had a clearer idea of what he was struggling to say. Seeing that the Chief no
longer seemed to mind interruptions Mr McCormick persisted, saying, ‘Yes,
but tell me this: how does what-do-you-call-it,
tee-mack-kill,
work?’

‘It does not work. It is what happens. Many things are born but many of
them die.
Temaukl
allows the ones that are the best to live and the ones that
are not the best to die. The ones that live have children who in turn will also
be best. It goes on and on like that over a long time.’

Looking through the darkness and the smoke, I noticed that Mr McCormick had dropped his eyes from the Chief and was staring instead at Philos
as if to read his reaction, but dear old Mr Darwin, as far as I could tell, was
all but asleep. From time to time his chin would fall to his chest, and whenever this happened, he would raise his head with a start and look around as
if in surprise to find himself in such strange surroundings. I expect he was
feeling the effects of those powerful cigars. I looked again at Mr McCormick.

Rarely have I seen a visage so fraught with emotion. I imagine that, like me,
he was more than a little shocked to hear such ramblings that sprang from
heresy.

In the distance more lightning struck and more thunder cracked.

‘Have you not heard,’ said the Chief, ‘that the sea turtle lays its eggs
upon the shore? And when the eggs hatch, hundreds of baby turtles run
for the water. Many are killed by the birds. Only the strongest make it to
safety. They are the ones who will carry on and make more turtles. That is
Temaukl.

‘Have you not heard of the giraffe whose long neck allows him to eat from
the tall tree? Or the tortoise who carries his house around with him for protection? Or the skunk whose odour keeps away other animals? That is
Temaukl.’

‘If you are correct,’ said Mr McCormick, ‘then every living thing has
grown from an earlier but lesser version of itself. And everything is related.

The zebra is related to the horse. The wolf is related to the dog. And men—
we’re related to—’

‘Apes!’ I interjected, for at this point I could keep my silence no longer.

‘Look here’, I added, ‘that’s a bit much.’

Having spoken from feeling, without having planned out what I was to
say, I looked around and my eyes happened upon a ladder leaning against a
nearby house. I pointed to it and said: ‘See that. That represents the world
as God made it. There are higher and lower species and they are forever
fixed. We are at the top. Monkeys are on a lower rung and your skunks and
your turtles and your what-nots, they’re on still lower rungs.’

The Chief smiled and I must say, I did not like the smirk upon his face. I
had already taken note of the fact that he had not directed much of his speech
towards me.

‘That ladder was made by man,’ he said. Then he pointed to the large
tree. ‘That is the world as we see it. Each leaf is an animal, each branch a
group of animals. You see how they grow one from another and how they all
come from the main trunk?’

I held my ground, insisting that each and every species had been made by
the hand of God and that they remained fixed and immutable through all
eternity. I said I did not believe that accidents could simply happen, such that
an offspring would be so very different from its parents.

Without replying directly, the Chief rose and motioned for us to follow.

Philos was roused. The ground was slippery but the Chief moved with more
agility than I expected. His staff, I observed, was nothing more than a walking stick, with animal skin to facilitate the grip.

The Chief led us to a hut—the very one whose contents had shocked Mr
McCormick on the way into the village. He held up a flaming torch, which a
boy had handed him, so that we could see what was inside. There was a pile
of bones, a whole sea of them, old and bleached and laid out in patterns I
could not fathom.

Holding up one that looked like a large femur, the Chief said that the animal it belonged to was no more. I replied that that was obvious. But he said,
no, I did not understand him—it had belonged to a creature that once walked
the earth but was gone out of existence. All of the bones, he said, were of animals that had lived long ago and disappeared.

How, he asked, could that be if, as we had maintained, all the species
were created by God and never varied?

I must say that was a difficult question to answer. My mind was still
addled by the cigar I had inhaled and I found the distant thunder and lightning very unsettling. I was beginning to regret that we had ever come to this
place.

Then the Chief did something I shall never forget all my days. He led us
to a house nearby where several women were tending babies. I imagine it was
a sort of communal nursery. We walked through to an adjoining room where 
we saw a single mother and baby, nesting upon a mat. We crowded in and all
managed to just fit inside the room.

The baby was red-faced and holding his fists tightly as if to keep from
crying. The Chief asked the mother to perform some task, which she was
clearly reluctant to do. Jemmy said he wanted her to unwrap him from the
swaddling-clothes. Still she did not move, until the Chief barked out something in a harsh tone, which I took to be a command.