“You have quite an impressive library,” Dane said, looking around the room.
“Thank you. I fear this is, as they say, only the tip of the iceberg. All of my rooms, save the kitchen and bath, are in a similar state. I have always had a fascination, and perhaps an obsession, with books.”
“You know, I’ll bet you could put all of these on one e-reader.” Bones cocked his head, as if performing the calculations in his head. Kaylin frowned and nudged Bones’s leg with her toe, but Wainwright laughed.
“I have one of those as well. Most of my books, however, are too old and obscure to be available electronically. If you would like to scan them for me, I’m certain it would not take you more than a few decades.”
“You don’t want Bones touching your electronics.” Dane took a bite of a sandwich and forced down a grimace. It tasted like cream cheese and cucumber, or something like that.
“I scanned my butt once and emailed it to Playgirl. They didn’t write back, though.” Bones stuffed two of the small sandwiches into his mouth at once.
“I’m sorry, Mister Wainwright.” Kaylin laid a hand on the man’s arm. “We are not as crazy as we must seem. Well, Dane and I aren’t.”
“Nonsense. It is a delight to have young people in the house. I was a university professor for many years, and I miss the absurd humor of youth.”
Dane couldn’t remember the last time he’d been categorized as young, much less youthful, but he’d take it. “The reason we are here is actually in regard to a book. One that belonged to Percy Fawcett.”
Wainwright gave him a shrewd look. “What book might that be?”
“A copy of The Lost World. A personal copy in which he took notes. It was supposedly one of his most treasured personal possessions.”
“I see.” The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Wainwright sat up straighter, his posture stiff. “May I ask why you are interested in this book?”
Dane sensed he would have to tread carefully. His instinct also told him that anything short of the truth would not suffice. Wainwright impressed him as a sensible, perceptive man.
“We are searching for a friend who disappeared in the Amazon. From what we have learned so far, we believe he was on the trail of Fawcett’s final expedition, and we think he found information in this book that guided him on his search.”
“He has been missing for some time now.” Kaylin sat her cup on the table and folded her hands together in a supplicating gesture. “He is not some crackpot — he is a college professor, like you were. We need to find him.”
“What is his name?” Wainwright still eyed them with suspicion.
“Thomas Thornton.” Kaylin took a photograph from her purse and handed it to Wainwright, who looked at it for a long moment, and then seemed to sag.
“I warned the lad. He was here, I don’t recall for certain, perhaps a year ago, if that. I let him look at the book, and told him what I know, and what I suspect about my granduncle’s final expedition. I’m sorry. I tried to dissuade him. Truly I did.”
“Thomas was here!” Kaylin’s face and voice were filled with hope. “Did he show you this picture, or a picture like it?” She handed him the image of the Fawcett painting.
“Ah! The portrait that hangs in the Institute. No, he did not show this to me, though I am familiar with it. It is, in fact, the final portrait Fawcett commissioned of himself.”
“Thomas left this for us as a clue to his whereabouts,” Dane said.
“Did he? Well, it certainly ties several things together. Fawcett, The Lost World, the island, Quest, and, of course, the amphorae.” Three seconds’ tantalizing silence followed the statement. Dane’s heart raced, and he found himself inching forward in his seat, as if the old man’s words would reach him sooner. Finally, Wainwright shook his head and continued.
“I fear Fawcett was losing his mind prior to his final expedition. The story has been passed down through the generations of my family. It is said that he paced the floor, muttering to himself about something he lost on the shipwreck. He spent long hours poring over his copy of The Lost World, works of ancient history, and the Bible.”
“The Bible?” Dane was puzzled. “What was the connection there?”
“No one knows. At any rate, something happened on his next-to-last expedition into the Amazon that made Fawcett more certain than ever that the lost city of Z was real, and that its inhabitants were descended from the ancient Greeks. Hence the portrait he had commissioned and donated to the Institute just before his departure. He knew he could not make public what he believed about Z. He was already a subject of some skepticism because of his beliefs. To share the conclusion he had come to would have held him up to public ridicule.”
“But if this portrait represents what he thought he was going to find,” Bones began, a look of deep concentration on his face, “he could come back later and tell the world, ‘See, I knew it all along. In your face!’”
“That is one way of saying it.” Wainwright smiled. “Fawcett was a proud man, and it would have been important to him to prove that he had not simply stumbled upon the lost city by happenstance, but had set out to reach it, already knowing it was there.”
“What exactly happened on the previous expedition that affected him so?” The familiar feeling of anticipation that always came when he was on the verge of a breakthrough, surged through Dane. Bones and Kaylin also sat in rapt silence, waiting for the answer.
Wainwright, clearly enjoying his captive audience, took a sip of tea, and carefully placed his cup and saucer atop a stack of books before beginning his tale.
“Understand, what I am about to tell you is conjecture, partly supported by cryptic phrases jotted in the margins of Fawcett’s copy of The Lost World, and partly based on family legend of the things he supposedly said during his final months at home.”
Dane nodded, and Wainwright continued. “Fawcett was just completing an extended trek through the Amazon. Supplies and morale were low, and he and his party were making their way out of the jungle, when a young man stumbled into their camp one evening. He was in bad shape: weak from hunger and dehydration, eaten up by insects, and nursing old wounds. He looked, according to Fawcett, decidedly Mediterranean, and he spoke an odd language, containing enough words familiar to Fawcett and his native guides that they could piece together bits of his story. Some of his words, however, sounded Semitic to Fawcett. He recorded a few of the words, spelling them phonetically, and eventually concluded they were Punic.”
“You lost me there,” Bones said.
“Punic was the language of Carthage,” Dane said.
“Oh yeah! Hannibal and the war elephants. Cool!”
“They were descended from the Phoenicians,” Dane said, “the first great sailors in the ancient world. Some say the Phoenicians reached the New World centuries before Christ.” Dane wondered if this could possibly be true, or had Fawcett fallen prey to hope and wishful thinking?
“Precisely.” Wainwright took another sip of tea. “From what they could gather from the young man’s ravings, he and a young woman had fled their home, a place he called ‘Keff Sess.’ You have, I presume, heard the legend of Kephises?”
Dane nodded and motioned for him to continue.
“The young woman was lost along the way, the victim of what the young man called ‘the Dead Warriors.’ He offered, as proof, fragments of pottery Fawcett believed were Mediterranean in origin, as well as some sort of plant material that the young man said had strange, mind-altering properties. He also gave Fawcett a map carved in stone. It was very old, and showed the path his ancestors had taken to Keff Sess. His home, he said, was ‘in the air,’ and could only be reached by taking a secret path — the Path of Five Steps. These steps, Fawcett wrote in his copy of The Lost World.”