Leopard Hunts in Darkness

Sally-Anne lifted a hard-back portfolio from the floor beside her and placed it on the table in front of Craig.
While Ashe adjusted the spotlight, Sally-Anne untied the ribbons that secured the folder and sat back.
Craig opened the cover and went very still. He felt the goose-bumps rise along his forearms, and the hair at the nape of his neck prickle this was his reaction to greatness, to anything perfectly beautiful. There was a Gauguin in the Metropolitan Museum on Central Park; a Polynesian madonna carrying the Christ child on her shoulder. She had made his hair prickle. There were passages of T.S. Eliot's poetry and of Lawrence Durrell's prose that made his hair prickle every time he read them.
The opening bar of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; those incredible jets leaps of Rudolph Nureyev, and the way Nicklaus and Borg struck the ball on their good days those things had made him prickle, and now this girl was doing it to him also.
It was a photograph. The finish was egg-shell grain so every detail was crisp. The colours clear and perfectly true.
It was a photograph of an elephant, an old bull. He faced the camera in the characteristic attitude of alarm, with his ears spread like dark flags. Somehow he portrayed the whole vastness and timelessness of a continent, and yet he was at bay, and one sensed that all his great strength was unavailing, that he was confused by things that were beyond his experience and the trace memories of his ancestors, that he was about to be overwhelmed by change like Africa itself.
With him in the photograph was shown the land, the rich red earth riven by wind, baked by sun, ruined by drought. Craig could almost taste the dust on his tongue.
Then, over it all, the limitless sky, containing the promise Of succour, the silver cumulonimbus piled likea snow-clad mountain range, bruised with purple and royal blue, pierced by a single beam of light from a hidden sun that fell on the old bull likea benediction.
She had captured the meaning and the mystery of his native land in the one hundredth of a second that it took the lens shutter to open and close again, while he had laboured. for long agonizing months and not come anywhere near it, and secretly recognizing his failure was afraid to try again. He took a sip of the insipid wine that had been offered to him as a rebuke for this crisis of confidence in his own ability, and now the wine had a quinine aftertaste that he had not noticed before.
"Where are you from?" he asked the girl, without looking at her.
"Denver, Colorado," she said. "But my father has been with the Embassy in London for years. I did most of my schooling in England." That accounted for the accent. "I went to Africa when I was eighteen, and fell in love with it," she completed her life tory simply.
It took a physical-effort for Craig to touch the photograph and gently turn it face down. Beneath it was another of a young woman seated on a black lava rock beside a desert waterhole. She wore the distinctive leather bunny ears headdress of the Ovahimba. tribe. Her child stood beside her and nursed from her naked breast. The woman's skin was polished with fat and ochre. Her eyes were those from a fresco in a Pharaoh's tomb, and she was beautiful.
"Denver, Colorado, forsooth!" Craig thought and was surprised at his own bitterness, at the depths of his sudden resentment. How dare a damned foreign girl-child encapsulate so unerringly the complex spirit of a people in this portrait of a young woman. He had lived all his life with them and yet never seen an African so clearly as at this moment in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village.
He turned the photograph with a suppressed violence.
Beneath it was a view into the trumpet-shaped throat of k the magnificent maroon and gold bloom of kigelia Africana, Craig's favourite wild flower. In the lustrous depths of the flower nestled a tiny beetle likea precious emerald, shiny iridescent green. It was a perfect arrangement of shape and colour, and he found he hated her for it.
There were many others. One of a grinning lout of a militia man with an AK 47 rifle on his shoulder and a necklace of cured human ears around his neck, a caricature of savagery and arrogance; another of a wrinkled witch doctor hung with horns and beads and skulls and all the grisly accoutrements of his trade, his patient stretched out on the bare, dusty earth before him in the process of being crudely cupped, her blood making shiny dark serpents across her dark skin. The patient was a woman in her prime with patterns of tattoos on her breasts and cheeks and forehead. Her teeth were filed to points like those of a shark, a relic of the days of cannibalism, and her eyes, like those of a suffering animal, seemed filled with all the stoicism and patience of Africa.
Then there was another contrasting photograph of African children in a school-room of poles and rude thatch.
They shared a single reader between three of them, but all their hands were raised eagerly to the young black teacher's questions and all their faces lit by the burning desire for knowledge it was all there, a complete record of hope and despair, of abject poverty and great riches, of savagery and tenderness, of unrelenting elements and bursting fruitfulness, of pain and gentle humour. Craig could not bring himself to look at her again and he turned the stiff glossy sheets slowly, savouring each image and delaying the moment when he must face her.
Craig stopped suddenly, struck by a particularly poignant composition, an orchard of bleached bones. She had used black and white to heighten the dramatic effect, and the bones shone in the brilliant African sunlight, acres of bones, great femur and tibia bleached like drift-wood, huge rib-cages like the frames of stranded ocean clippers, and skulls the size of beer barrels with dark caves for eye sockets. Craig thought of the legendary elephant's graveyard, the old hunters" myth of the secret place where the elephants go to die.
"Poachers," she said. "Two hundred and eighty-six carcasses," and now Craig looked up at her at last, startled by the number.
"At one time?" he asked, and she nodded.
"They drove them into one of the old minefields." Involuntarily, Craig shuddered and looked down at the photograph again. Under the table-top his right hand ran down his thigh until he felt the neat strap that held his leg, and he experienced a choking empathy for the fate of those great pachyderms. He remembered his own minefield, and felt again the slamming impact of the explosion into his foot, as though he had been hit by the full swing of a sledgehammer.