He was amazed that the tributary was still navigable. The Amazon was almost a thousand miles away at Itacoatiara. To get from that major river to here, one had to travel on the Madeira for over five hundred miles, then branch south on a tributary.
This morning they had met the American at Vilhena, the regional capital for this part of Brazil, a small city sprawled on the riverbank. A fistful of cash had hired Ruiz’s services and they had headed south and west from the town all day long, going onto progressively smaller branches until Ruiz had no idea where exactly they were and the water was less than twenty-five feet wide, the large trees from either side almost touching overhead and constant depth measuring being needed to prevent them from grounding themselves. The boat drew only two feet, but as the day had worn on, the amount of water between the keel and the bottom had gone from a comfortable five feet to a nerve-racking three. Already they’d had to pull the boat over three sunken logs.
Ruiz looked over his shoulder. Harrison was looking at his map and scratching his head. Ruiz climbed the few wooden steps to what served as the boat’s bridge. He leaned close and kept his voice low.
“May I be of assistance?” The American was a very large and fat man, used to the easy life of the city.
Ruiz was a different breed of man from both the American and the street peasants. He was one of the few who made their living on the upper branches of the Amazon. Sometimes trading to remote outposts, other times guiding various expeditions and tours. Sometimes poaching. Sometimes capturing exotic birds and animals for sale on the lucrative black market for such creatures. Ruiz had also made some money off the illegal recovery and shipping of antiquities, particularly from countries west of Brazil, in the Andean highlands and mountains.
“We are on track,” Harrison said.
“For where?” Ruiz asked.
Ruiz knew little about the American other than that he was from one of the many universities in the United States. He had said he was one of those who studied ancient peoples.
Harrison looked about at the thick jungle that surrounded them. He turned back to his guide. The American had paid good money. He had several plastic cases lashed to the deck, the contents of which were unknown to Ruiz when they were loaded.
“I am looking for something,” Harrison said.
“I could help you if I knew what you were looking for.”
“The Aymara,” Harrison said.
Ruiz kept his face fiat. He had won many a poker hand on the river with that look. “The Aymara are only a legend. They are long dead.”
“I believe they still exist,” Harrison said
“Senor, the ruins of Tiahaunaco, where the Aymara lived, are in Bolivia. Many hundreds of miles from here. Many thousands of meters higher. We can never reach there by boat.”
Despite not knowing exactly where they were, Ruiz was very interested. He knew they only had to turn around and go with the flow of the water and they would eventually reach Vilhena. But one of the reasons he had grown to love the river area were the fantastic stories his grandfather had told him. Of ancient cities hidden under the jungle. Lost cities of gold. Hundred-foot snakes. Strange tribes. And guiding someone like Harrison could lead him to a site to return to and plunder, something Ruiz had done more than once.
“How did Tiahuanaco appear so suddenly?” Harrison asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “And how did the Aymara disappear so abruptly?”
Ruiz had heard stories about both those events. “Kon-Tiki Viracocha.”
Harrison paused and looked at Ruiz. “Yes. The strange white man who legend says founded Tiahuanaco. Some myths say he was from Egypt. Jorgenson sailed in his boat of reeds across the Atlantic to prove the ancient Egyptians could have made such a journey here to South America. He felt that the pyramids built at Tiahuanaco were so similar to those in Egypt that there had to be an ancient connection.
“And even before that,” Harrison continued, “Jorgenson showed that the people of South America could have populated the Pacific, sailing his raft of balsa wood, the Kon-Tiki, west from Chile to the islands of the southwest Pacific. He speculated a worldwide connection between early civilizations, and he was laughed at despite his evidence and his expeditions. Now that we know about the Airlia, we know that he was right and there was a connection between the earliest human civilizations.”
Ruiz was intrigued. He had read the papers about the aliens, but it had been hard to sort through all the conflicting accounts. “Jorgenson is at Tucume, on the Peruvian coast. He is digging at the pyramids he found there.”
Harrison looked at his guide with more interest. “Yes. And now that we know Atlantis was real, his theories gain even more support. He was right, while those that scoffed at him are now the fools.”
“Kon-Tiki Viracocha could have come from Atlantis?” Ruiz asked.
“It is possible. While others look in Egypt and at the ruins of the cities along the coast, what I am searching for here, deep in the jungle, is evidence of what happened to the people.
“Tiahuanaco is the key, not Tucume. Tiahuanaco once was a thriving city located on a mountain at over twelve thousand five hundred feet in altitude. It has a pyramid over seven hundred feet wide at the base and three hundred feet high. It ruled an empire that extended through the area we are now traveling, hundreds of miles from here to the Pacific Coast. But when the Incan Empire expanded south in A.D. 1200 and came across Tiahuanaco, the city was abandoned, the old empire gone. The people had to have gone somewhere. I think they went into the jungle.”
“Why?” Ruiz asked.
“Why did they go into the jungle or why did they leave the city?” Harrison asked in turn. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Something terrible happened to them. It had to have been very bad for them to give up their magnificent city. And why the jungle?” Harrison waved his hands around. “Where else would you go to hide?”
“Hide from what?” Ruiz asked.
“That I will know when I find the Aymara. But it must have been something very terrible.”
“You think ancestors of the people of Tiahuanaco are still alive?”
“There have been many reports over the centuries of a strange tribe, far up the tributaries of the Amazon — a tribe where the members are white! To me that means they are the ancestors of Kon-Tiki Viracocha.”
Ruiz rubbed a hand through the stubble of beard on his chin. “I have heard stories,” he began, but he paused.
“What kind of stories?” Harrison pressed.
“Of a place. A very strange place. Where white men live. Have lived for a very long time.”
“The Aymara? Their village?”
Ruiz shrugged. “People only speak of it in whispers. They call it The Mission. I have met no one who actually has seen the place. There are only rumors. It is said to be a very dangerous place. That anyone who sees it dies. I do not know where this place is. Some say it is deep in the jungle. Others say it is near the coast. Others say it is high on a mountaintop in the Andes.” “What is this Mission?” Harrison asked.
“It is said that the sun god, Kon-Tiki, lives there.”
“What else?”
“I do not know any more,” Ruiz said abruptly. He glanced down and noticed his fingernails were digging into the wood on the bridge shield.
Ruiz looked upriver. He knew it was just an illusion, but the river appeared to be shrinking, getting narrower every second. “Let me see your map, senor.”
Ruiz took the sheet and stared at it. He placed an aged finger on the paper and traced a forty-kilometer circle east of the border of Bolivia and Brazil. “We are somewhere here.” He shook his head. “There are dangers ahead. The river could close up on us. And there are other dangers. We should go back.”