The Clouds Beneath the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

was too hot for any physical work and the light was too bright for photography. They drove back in high spirits, the Land Rovers racing one another across the flat plain of the Serengeti, churning up great red-brown dust clouds behind them. Giraffe looked on, then lolloped away.
    Back at the camp, most of them took a shower. It was always dusty in the gorge and, with water limited, a shower at this time of day was much more useful than first thing or in the early evening.
    Mgina, the slender Maasai woman Natalie had told Russell North about, brought her shower water in two galvanized iron buckets. Although she was uneducated, Mgina had picked up a stilted English in the few years she had been working at the camp, and, despite her cheeks being stippled by tribal cut marks, she was pretty, Natalie thought, and had a natural, slow-moving, languid grace. She was slight but still wiry enough to carry the water with which she filled the canvas shower cistern. Natalie had established that Mgina came from a village about five hours’ walk from the camp, where she had numerous sisters and brothers.
    While Natalie took a shower, letting the hot water chase the sand and grit out of her eyelids and ears and sluice down the back of her neck, while she lathered her arms and thighs and let the smell of the soap, which she had brought with her from Gainsborough, remind her of the rainy Lincolnshire fens, Mgina collected up her used shirt and trousers and underwear, and set out fresh ones on the bed.
    When she had used all the available hot water, Natalie half dried herself, so she didn’t drip water everywhere, but then she let the remains of the water evaporate on her skin as she sat on her towel on the chair of her dressing table, combing her hair. Evaporation was deliciously cooling.
    She had always had a thing about her hair, ever since she was a girl. She never felt properly dressed unless her hair was brushed and brushed and brushed again. Her fellow undergraduates at Cambridge had teased her about it but she hadn’t minded. And they had given up in the end, and accepted her for what she was. In the gorge, she realized, brushing her hair was even more important: with water strictly rationed, brushing kept the dust to a minimum and she needed to feel that her hair was as clean as could be.
    Mgina watched as Natalie did this, as fascinated by her straight hair as Natalie was with Mgina’s close-cropped curls.
    “What is your comb made of, Miss Natalie?”
    “Tortoiseshell.”
    “It is very beautiful.”
    Natalie nodded her head. “Yes, it was my mother’s—she gave it to me.”
    “Does she have hair like you?”
    “She did. She’s dead now. She was killed, an accident.”
    “I am sorry for you. They go fast, these cars.”
    “They do, yes.” Natalie put down the comb. “And your family, Mgina? How are they, they are well?”
    Mgina made a face. “Not the little one, Odnate. He has the flu, I think, but also spots under his tongue.”
    “Oh,” said Natalie, quietly. “Oh dear.” She frowned and stopped brushing her hair. “When did this flu start, Mgina?”
    “The day before yesterday. There was a feast the day before that and it was the first time Odnate had been old enough to attend. The next day he was ill—it was too much for him.”
    Natalie had stood up and was toweling herself dry. “What did you eat at this feast?”
    “Corn, berries, meat of course. Fruit. What is it, Miss Natalie?”
    Natalie had thrown the towel on the bed. “Just wait there, Mgina, while I get dressed.”
    In front of the other woman, Natalie stepped into her underwear, put on her fresh set of trousers and shirt, laced her boots. She fastened the cuffs of her shirt at her wrists, so her arms were protected from the sun.
    Then she said, “Come with me. Leave the laundry on the bed. Quickly now.”
    Frowning herself, Mgina did as she was told.
    Natalie led the way along the row of tents to where she knew Jonas Jefferson was