‘It’s real,” she said dreamily.
Ben turned back to the vista. “And there we were, upon the dreamland, the Lost World.”
“From the story?” she asked.
He nodded, letting his eyes take it all in. There was a heavy fog or low cloud, but even the plant life that he could make out was so alien to what he had seen in many other jungles before that it was near unrecognizable. And the size of everything was breathtaking — massive trunks soared high into the clouds without showing their canopies. Jagged outcrops berthed ferns and strange flowers with raw red heads, and there were the prehistoric scaly looking trees that Jenny had identified below.
But there were also strange palms with fruiting bulbs of brilliant orange, yellow, and purples, and massive columns of hairy wooded stumps that had green strips like reeds rather than leaves at their tip.
“Everything is so… big,” Emma whispered.
Nino crawled up beside them, the gravel crunching underneath him, and scanned one way then the other. “I don’t like it.”
“Well, I love it,” Emma responded.
The others came and lay beside them, with the long flat cave allowing the entire group to lie side by side.
“Well done, sir,” Barlow said between puffing breaths.
Ben turned to the wheezing man; his face was so flushed and red it looked like some sort of overripe fruit about to burst. Sweat dripped from his chin and the end of his nose. He wiped it with a dusty handkerchief.
“Well done to my great, great grandfather, I’d say,” he replied.
Barlow nodded. “Quite so.”
Further down the cave, Dan gave him the thumbs up and took pictures, and Andrea divided her time between glancing out at the jungle and examining broken fingernails.
“What’s that smell?” Emma asked.
“Sour; smells a little like cat’s piss.” Ben wrinkled his nose. “Something died in here?”
“Great, and we’re lying in it.” Emma stuck her tongue out.
Ben looked past her to see Jenny fiddling with something that looked like a lot of large chalky rocks. She was breaking them open, sniffing them, and her brow was creased. She looked up. “We should probably get out of here… now.”
He was about to ask what she was doing when Emma nudged him. “Let’s go; I want to see… everything.”
“Wait…” He grabbed her.
“Why? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
Ben shook his head. “You know, I never really thought about a plan for when we were here. I guess my goal was to see if it existed, and now that we know it does, I’m not sure what to damn well do.”
“Well, I do,” Barlow answered over their heads. “Now, we go forth on an adventure like no other.” He rested on large beefy forearms. “I want to see the specimens, the animals, plants. Think of the opportunities, the wonders, and think of the advances in medicine, paleontology, and biology. People will pay a fortune to come here.”
Emma’s jaws clenched. “All about the money, huh?”
“Isn’t everything?” Barlow turned back to the vista. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s like we have just been transported back in time for about 100 million years. I suggest we use our time well.”
“We need to think about this,” Jenny said quickly. “We also need to think about interacting with plants, animals, bacteria, and parasites that do not exist in the modern world, and haven’t for millions of years. Dangerous doesn’t begin to describe it.” She grimaced. “But…” She looked over her shoulder briefly. “… we can do that outside, okay?”
“Agreed. And please remember, we’re not the first here,” Barlow responded.
“That’s true,” Dan said. “And not just Ben’s ancestor; the Pemon or some other race, were obviously coming up here as well.”
Steve snorted. “Oh yeah, the natives; wonder what happened to them and those baskets of body parts. And no offence, Ben, but your namesake ancestor didn’t exactly die of old age either.”
“Jesus, Steve.” Emma scowled
Janus Bellakov sneered. “I think you’ll find we’re a little better prepared than primitive natives or a long-dead Cartwright.”
“Asshole,” Emma whispered.
Steve crawled forward, and looked out and upwards. “The clouds are rising.”
“Thermal effect,” Dan said. “The sun will heat up the surface, drawing the clouds away from the land. Doubt it will allow the sun through, but it’ll at least improve visibility.”
Steve hiked his shoulders. “Now or never.”
“Now.” Barlow turned. “Mr. Bourke, crawl back and retrieve our packs. There’s a good chap.”
Bourke’s lip curled down and he grumbled as he turned on his belly and crawled to the rear of the cave.
Ben chuckled, but then pointed. “Okay, there’s a tumble of boulders about a hundred feet forward and just to the left. I’ll take a quick look and if it’s safe, then we head there and stretch our legs before… deciding to do anything else. We can spend a few hours looking around and then come back here, long before either sundown or the clouds drop again.”
“That is agreeable,” Barlow said with a smirk.
Ben sucked in a deep breath, felt Emma give his bicep a quick squeeze for luck, and then he slid out of the flattened cave. He had his M4A1 assault rifle over his back and kept it there. But he unclipped his sidearm holster.
He stood tall and inhaled — it smelled earthy, alive, and damned primordial. There was bare ground for about a hundred feet around the front of the cave, and then there was the great wall of jungle. He looked along it, trying to detect the slightest hint of movement, unusual color, or even odd shape. But there was nothing.
He walked forward a dozen feet and stopped to examine some tracks in the gravel — they were bird-like, three-toed, but large like they were made by something the size of a large ostrich. He lifted his gaze again to the jungle where there were towering stump-like trees, tangled vines, and broad ferns, palms, and cycad plants. He scoffed silently — he knew it could have held a hundred creatures that had developed extraordinary camouflage abilities, and he might not even see one of them.
He turned back to the cave and saw the heads of his group as they watched from a letterbox-type crack in the wall of rock. He had expected that they would be at the cliff edge, but he remembered that the chimney was at a slight angle, so over the thousand plus feet of climbing, they had been moved a little inland on the plateau’s surface.
“Looks okay,” he said softly, but knowing his voice would carry. “Grab your stuff and come on out.”
Jenny and Nino were the last to clamber back to the rear of the cave to retrieve their packs. She saw one of Barlow’s men, Bourke she thought he was called, pulling his and his master’s bags towards himself and then removing weapons and sliding them into his pockets. He looked up to see her watching and blew her a kiss.
Ugh, she thought.
This far back in the cave, she could smell again the sharp tang of ammonia. It gave her an uneasy feeling after finding the large white chalk-like bundles that reminded her of the times she had to clean out the snake tanks in the zoo’s reptile house. It damn well looked like snake droppings. The problem was the size made that impossible.
She had broken one open and seen the remains of crushed bones and teeth — exactly the contents she would expect to find in a large jungle constrictor-type snake. But she’d only ever seen that size as coprolite — fossilized dung.
She placed a hand down on the gravel and then looked down — it wasn’t gravel at all, but thousands of teeth, mostly human. And they were ages old, possibly thousands of years. She knew that tooth enamel was mostly hydroxyapatite, a mineral form of calcium phosphate that was one of the hardest biological materials and, in fact, harder than steel.