A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

this was known at the time except the age and action of the glaciers, but needless to say, that savannah had been thoroughly explored.
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    In the spring of 1950, my dad and brother made a survey trip. Why anyone would want to penetrate that waterless interior to live in camps, not in a house, was a mystery to many. One of my mother’s friends said we would get dirty. My mother said, “The earth itself is not dirty.” One witless anthropology professor published a paper in which he claimed that my dad was looking for a lost city. I’m glad I wasn’t one of that professor’s students—God knows what else he told them. The very last thing to be found in such a place was a city, and the very last thing my dad would want to find was a city. If he had wanted a city, there was a big one called Boston near his house.
    Other people thought he was prospecting for diamonds. Rumor had it that diamonds were scattered all over the ground. There weren’t any diamonds, at least none on the surface, but this theory had more credibility than the lost city, so more people believed it. Even so, it too was false. My dad went to the Kalahari in 1950 to learn what he’d need in 1951 if he wanted to travel for months through hundreds of miles of uncharted bushland. When he figured that out, he came home with my brother and prepared an expedition. In 1951, he and my brother went back there and my mother and I went too.
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    I’ve also been asked why I went. Not a few people have wondered why a teenager would want to leave college and all her friends to go somewhere with her parents. I find the question dumbfounding. I did know a boy whom I later married, but we were just friends at the time, and I was so excited to be going that I didn’t realize how much I’d miss him.
    I knew I wouldn’t miss college. My parents had forced me to major in English, so why would I want to listen to some professor droning on about
Pilgrim’s Progress
when I could listen to lions roaring in the African night? The slowly dripping faucet did not compare to the thundering Victoria Falls.
    I’ve written many articles and two books about my time in the Kalahari. One of the books,
The Harmless People
, I wrote soon after my last long-term visit there, and the other,
The Old Way: A Story of the First People
, I wrote about fifty years later to review what I’d seen in the light of some of the scientific knowledge that has been gathered since. But one way or another, the Kalahari is in all the books I’ve written. To put it differently, I always seem to write the same book. Whether I’m writing about dogs, cats, deer, people, or anything else, the lens through which I see them is the Kalahari. With the exception of some jobs I’ve had—teaching in various universities, teaching in a maximum security prison, and working as an academic adviser for the Embassy of the State of Kuwait—all of which required at least a college degree if not an MA, I could have skipped college altogether.
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    My dad wanted the time and energy we’d spend in the Kalahari to amount to something, so after his first visit, he discussed his projected return with his anthropologist friends at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, next door to the museum that housed the stuffed tiger. Bushmen were known to live in the interior, but little was known about them, and much of what was said about them was not true. They’d kill us, some white South Africans had told my dad. But we’d never see them. They’d hunt us down and shoot us from ambush with poisoned arrows and we’d never know they were there. That was the state of knowledge of the Bushmen at the time—they were mysterious, invisible devils.
    Dad was not impressed by these claims. When he met with his friends from the Peabody, he asked if an anthropologist would come with us to study the Bushmen. He offered to pay that person’s salary and all