If you dream of a little place in the country with white, ruffled curtains, cozy fireplace and lilacs in the spring—don’t marry a paleontologist.
I did. And overnight my dreamhouse changed into a dreamship, soon to become another Noah’s Ark with me the red-haired nursemaid to a menagerie of fossilized freaks. This transformation really started in a palm-shaded chapel in Calcutta, India, when I married one Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History.
Having finished my schooling in an upstate New York convent, I had embarked with a graduate student group on the first leg of a world tour. The Orient—especially India—loomed large in my imagination. It loomed large also in the plans of a fellow-passenger heading a bone-digging expedition to that charmed part of the globe.
Then as now, Dr. Brown was tall, straight, deliberate and thorough, with twinkling blue eyes that went well with pince-nez. His features suggested the scholar rather than the field-explorer, being a bit on the dignified side. Personally I thought he approached pretty close to the public’s idea of what a scientist should look like.
Such was the man who whisked me from altar to jungle for a prehistoric honeymoon. He was a big-game hunter—the kind whose game has been dead some millions of years. In other words, Barnum dug bones for a living, and our so - called honeymoon was largely a bone-digging affair marked by the triumphant unearthing of several ancient monsters.
The first turned up in the Siwalik Hills—a strip of lost world bordering the Himalayas and famed as India’s foremost ghouling grounds.
“Boasts more skeletons to the square mile than any other part of the Orient,” Barnum had explained. “Bygone haunt of sabre-tooth tigers, and hyena-bears, and extinct pythons, and strange dogs big as lions.” Nothing aroused him to a higher emotional pitch than the thought of bone, unless it was actually uncovering some monstrous relic. “God’s country,” he called that strip of lost world.
To me it looked as if the devil ha d long since taken title. The region had a bad reputation, too, in a ghostly sort of way. According to local superstition, it was under the curse of Siva, Hindu god of destruction, and the bones were those of ancient giants who had aroused his anger long a go.
