Everyone wailed. Every person was important.
The woman on the end let go of her staff, struck out and seized his arm. Two men splashed past me and into the sea. One of them was Peterson.
An excellent swimmer, he reached them first, pulling the man to the surface, just holding him and the woman above the water, nothing more, until other rescuers arrived and they all struggled back as a group, helping each other before collapsing, exhausted onto the sand.
The old man’s eyes were closed and it wasn’t looking good. Peterson lay face down on the wet sand, shoulders heaving.
Everyone else was crowding around the old man and he wasn’t moving.
In a bad situation, the secret is to make it worse. As far as History was concerned, we were dead men walking, anyway.
I moved a woman gently aside and went to look.
He was still alive. My relief was overwhelming. I pulled him carefully into the recovery position, feeling his birdlike bones under my hands, cleared his airway and just left him to rest. He had a pulse. He was breathing. He coughed up some seawater. And then some more.
I stepped back and looked up the beach. Everywhere, people were wading through the shallow waves. Many were collecting up bundles, staffs, everything that had been washed up with them. Nothing would be wasted.
They hadn’t all made it. I could see bodies, face down, being swirled this way and that in the current as they were pulled away from land. Some of them were very small. But a good two hundred people had pulled themselves out of the sea and taken those first steps out of Africa.
Since we’d rather blown the concealment side of the assignment, we stepped back and both sides appraised the other.
They weren’t tall, but they were upright, with the natural, graceful deportment that walking all day can bring. Nor were they skinny. They were lean and well-muscled. Men and women were similarly dressed in short hide loincloths with a kind of apron at the front. At this moment, their feet were covered in wet sand, but if their calloused hands were anything to go by, they would be covered in thick skin.
And their skin was beautiful. They were black but a black made up of many colours. I could see olive-green and purple shadows under their eyes and a glistening gold where the sun caught their cheekbones. They painted their bodies and although the sea had washed off most of them, I could see the remains of dots, squiggles, lines – complex patterns all carefully drawn in a thick, white pigment.
They adorned themselves with necklaces of shells and feathers. Nearly all the adults wore at least one strip of hide tied around their wrist. Many had several, and one, a large man, wore them nearly up to his elbow. A mark of status. Maybe he was their leader. Or the most successful hunter, with a strip of hide awarded for every kill.
Their closely curled hair was mostly dark, although many showed threads of white. They all, men and women, wore it piled up on their heads and held in place with what looked like thick mud, which even immersion in the Red Sea hadn’t been able to shift. Eat your hearts out, L’Oreal. Some even had bedraggled feathers and braids still in place.
A number of dark, watchful eyes quite openly surveyed us, taking in our strange garments and our much less stylish hair. Not a few smiles flickered in amusement. I wondered what they were making of us.
Still, no one seemed particularly hostile. Curious, yes – I suspected natural good manners prevented them from touching us, exploring our strange hair and light-coloured skin – but not hostile. We’d helped them, after all.
I was wondering what would happen next when one of the old men and some of the children we’d fished out of the sea turned up. There was a great deal of communication and not all of it was language. After a while, I noticed certain sounds accompanied certain gestures. The position of the head seemed to be important. And only those actually speaking looked at each other. Everyone else respectfully dropped their eyes.
I was quite fascinated. These were our ancestors and they were as intelligent and articulate as we were ourselves. Although switching on the TV and catching a glimpse of the antics of our political, financial, and religious leaders would almost certainly revise my opinion. And not in our favour.
As the sun started to sink below the horizon, they busied themselves gathering their possessions together, lighting fires, and searching the waterline and rocks for seafood and fish. We dined well that night.