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  August 28

  It has happened. I suppose it was inevitable really. Shasta is powerfully seductive and I am a young man with normal appetites. I had some hope of being able to withdraw in time but her arms were tight around my back and her legs wrapped around my hips. It makes no major difference to me. Nothing can delay my departure and if my good luck holds, any baby she conceived last night will miscarry, or die young. As with most primitive peoples the infant mortality here is fairly high. If it survives I hope it won’t be too white. I don’t want the child to be uncomfortable, of course; but more than anything else I don’t want some callow young researcher with no idea what it is like to be out in the field for a whole year to come along and see a half-caste child and start the kind of gossip that would ruin my professional reputation.

  I know that they have knowledge of plants that can cause abortions. I patted Shasta’s flat belly and asked her to make sure there was no baby. She laughed delightedly and said, ‘ralende’, ‘it is ordained’, so I suppose that’s that. It’s her decision, so she will have to carry the can. There is certainly nothing I can do. The marriage and the child has been quite beyond my control and no-one could expect me to sacrifice my chance of success and wealth in New York for a voodoo marriage and a half-caste baby.

  She has painted her belly with a spiral concentric pattern in a deep orange dye. She looks breathtaking. The ceremony of the rains is obviously one which absorbs her to the exclusion of everything else. She still sleeps in my bed and services my every need but she has an inner restraint which I sense. Can it be that although she refuses to understand the concept of the future she does in fact know that I am going away? Very soon actually. Only another month.

  September 23

  I have some plastic bags for my precious research papers and this diary and I have packed all but this book and pen carefully away. Shasta sealed them with sap from a tree rather like a rubber tree. She assures me it is waterproof. She is helping me prepare for my departure. She’s in a cheerful optimistic mood. I was dreading this stage, thinking she would be clinging and demanding, so I suppose I should be pleased that she sets about finding my old rucksack and packing my few clothes and souvenirs with such contentment. Actually, I can’t help feeling a bit peeved.

  They have set up a large oblong table on a huge wooden trestle for the ceremony of the rains and draped it with flowers and leaves. Shasta, who is now painted from her dark upswinging eyebrows to the very soles of her feet, often walks around the table, humming softly to herself, for all the world like a suburban housewife checking the place mats. I ran up the little ramp to the high table and slapped her warm butt the other day and she led me away and said, ‘Dourane’, ‘Not yet’, very sweetly. Since then I have treated it as the holy of holies and stayed well away.

  Shasta’s serenity and quiet joy seems to be reflected in everyone else. Everywhere I go I am greeted with smiles and often little gifts of flowers or fruit. I don’t doubt that I’m being wished bon voyage, and I have taken a thousand photographs of everyone before sealing up my camera and films in waterproof packaging for the long journey downriver. They have no objection to photographs now – though I had to insist when I first arrived. But everything seems to be permitted to me now. I caught myself caressing the smooth thighs of Tharin, Shasta’s younger sister: a girl just deliciously at the brink of womanhood. She smiled and let me touch her and I had the sudden heady sense of being able to do anything in the world that I want here. I took her by the hand and led her down towards the river. If she had hesitated for a moment I swear I would have stopped, but she followed me smiling, trusting like the little girl she is; a little dappled doe in the flickering shadows. I am ashamed to say that I had her, and she was a virgin. I tried to make her promise to say nothing; but she was in pain and bleeding a little and she just waved me away. I only hope that there will not be two Caucasian-Nlokoese babies born to the tribe next year. I shan’t go with her again. It’s too risky.

  My only major regret, as I pack, is not being able to record the ceremony of the rains. But to be honest, I can’t bear to miss the launch. It would be another four months wasted for the benefit of recording a drunken all-week hen-party conducted in a language I can only just understand and for a religion which is incomprehensible to the western mind. I suppose if I were a better scientist I would make the sacrifice and stay. As it is, I cannot bring myself to delay. The bright lights are calling me! I could drink a lake of beer! And I really want a woman of my own colour. Shasta’s love and her passion and tenderness have been a great gift. I won’t forget them. I’ll probably dedicate the book to her. But right now (and this is not for publication!) I want a long-legged girl to talk dirty!

  September 26

  Something very strange and disturbing has happened. I was working at my little table in the doorway of the hut when I dropped my pen top and bent down to pick it up. I then saw, at the foot of the king-pole of the hut, a piece of cloth poking out through the tamped-down earth. I took my penknife and scraped around it and it seemed to be some kind of plastic-wrapped package. I was angry for a moment thinking that it was one of mine which Shasta had stolen as a souvenir, but when I opened it I found it was not my writing, and it had obviously been buried for some time. The most amazing thing is that it is a chapter of anthropological research notes and a couple of grainy photographs of Shasta with a middle-aged, rather unattractive Caucasian male.

  My first thought was for my own thesis. It would be hopelessly redundant if this bastard had been here first. I couldn’t understand it. I’d done a total search of all publications and I couldn’t imagine that someone had published work on the Nloko that I had missed. The tribe’s entire attraction for me had been that no-one had lived with them before. I’d get them fresh.

  He’d been working, predictably enough, on rites and ritual. There was a whole load of notes on primitive fertility rites – I’ve no time for that sort of thing. It seems to me to be hardly worth the paper it’s written on. Who cares if they crush fruit to make the rains come, or kill fish, or cut the throats of monkeys? What difference does it make? My kind of research is immediately applicable to social science in the US. Puberty, how to manage it. What are adolescents like in a natural world? That kind of stuff. Solid research in its own right and very, very sellable.

  I blundered out of the hut with the notes and snapshot in my hand and bumped into Shasta’s aunt, who was shelling beans at the foot of the feast table. I waved the photo under her nose and asked her, ‘Who is this man?’

  I was surprised by her reaction. She jerked back at once and I could see, under the painted spirals and the dark skin, that she had gone pale. She muttered something very softly and then she tried to take the photos and the papers away from me. I tugged back, and then finally I pushed her hard, so that she had to let go. She sat down with a bump and I asked her again, while I had the upper hand, ‘Who is this man?’

  She said that word again – previous husband. The word I had heard before. Previous husband. But she said nothing more. Neither my shouts nor, I’m ashamed to admit, a threatening fist, got another word out of her.

  I stamped back to my hut to sit on the sleeping board and think. There had been another anthropologist here, and he had lived in this hut, my hut. And he had probably slept with Shasta. And then he had gone. But why hadn’t he published? And why hadn’t he taken his research notes? I knew that I would never be parted from my research notes. So maybe something had happened to him, in the forest or on the river. Maybe he had gone out one day, taking a break from work, and had an accident, and now he would never publish and never make money and never sit in an attractive office at a good college with a sexy secretary to make the coffee.

  I shivered. I looked out of the open door of the hut to the dancing ground in the centre of the village and the ramp and the big trestle table covered with flowers and fruit. I suddenly wanted to be safely away, with my feet up on the rail of the launch and a can of cold beer in my hand an