“That is what I wanted to see,” Mualama said.
The rock he was pointing at was twenty feet long by fifteen wide, with a perfectly flat top. It sat about eight feet out from the edge of the gorge in the river. Mualama eyed the water. It was fast moving and full of stirred-up silt, making the water reddish brown in color.
Mualama slipped his pack off and pulled out a leather-bound notebook.
“What do you have?” Bauru asked. He thought the African most strange. They had linked up three days before at Santos, on the Atlantic Coast, just south of Sao Paulo. Even though Mualama had told Bauru he’d never been in South America before, the dark man had more than carried his load on the journey and seemed undaunted by the thick jungle.
Mualama pulled a piece of paper out of the notebook. “A copy of a telegraph sent almost a century ago.” He gave it to Bauru to read.
I have but one object: to uncover the mysteries that the jungle vastness of South America have concealed for so many centuries, We are encouraged in our hopes of finding the ruins of an ancient, white civilization and the degenerate offspring of a once cultivated race.
“Who sent this?” Bauru handed it back.
“Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British officer and explorer.” Mualama was looking about.
“Did he find what he was looking for?”
“Fawcett, his son Jack, and a cameraman named Raleigh Rimell sent that telegraph on the twentieth of April, 1925, just before setting out on an expedition. They made one radio contact on the twenty-ninth of May, reporting their position, not far from here, then were never heard from or seen again.”
Bauru wasn’t surprised. Many had disappeared into the jungle, particularly in this area of Brazil, the Mato Grosso, a vast, virtually impenetrable land of jungle, escarpments, and tortuous rivers.
“What is this city they were looking for?” Bauru asked. There were many tales about the Mato Grosso. ranging from lost cities to terrible monsters to strange tribes of white-skinned people.
“Fawcett said he believed that people from Atlantis had come here just before the island was destroyed. That they built a mighty city in the jungle that deteriorated over the years. He claims that he found an old Portuguese map in Rio de Janeiro that showed a stone city enclosed by a wall deep in the Mato Grosso.”
“You are searching for this city?”
“No.”
“You are searching for the remains of Fawcett’s party?” Bauru knew that would be an impossible task… the jungle would have consumed the three men and left no trace, especially after seventy-five years.
“No.”
Bauru was a patient man. “Then what are we looking for?”
“What Fawcett was really looking for.” Mualama was scanning the rocky crags below them.
Bauru was intrigued. “Not a lost city?”
“Oh, I think Fawcett believed there was a lost Atlantean city out there somewhere in the jungle, and certainly the events of the past month with the alien Airlia confirm there was an Atlantis,” Mualama said. “But on that particular expedition, he was searching for something else.” Mualama pointed below. “We must go down there.”
Bauru eyed the route down with trepidation. He pulled his pack off and extracted a 120-foot nylon climbing rope. He tied one end around the thick trunk of a tree, then tossed the free end over the edge. Mualama already had a harness around his waist and a snaplink attached to the front. The African popped the rope through the gate, wrapped a loop around the metal, then prepared to back over the edge of the gorge, his left hand on the fixed end coiling from his waist to the tree.
“How will we get back up?” Bauru asked.
“I will fasten the other end to the rock below,” Mualama said. “Then we can climb back up using chumars.”
“Chumars?”
Mualama held up two small pieces of machinery. “They clip on the rope, then allow it through in only one direction. You rest your weight on one, slide the other up, then rest your weight on the other. It is slow, but you will get back up.”
Mualama put the chumars back in his pack and edged over the side of the gorge. He rappelled down, his feet finding precarious purchase on the jagged rock wall, Twenty feet above the surface of the river, he paused. Mualama bent his knees, bringing his body in close to the wall, then sprung outward as he released tension on the rope. The nylon slid through the snaplink as he descended, and he landed directly on top of the rock. He knelt and hammered a piton into the top of the rock before he unhooked from the rope. He tied off the free end of the rope to the piton and looked up at Bauru and gave a thumbs-up.
Only then did he turn his attention to the stone below him. At the height of the rainy season the top would be submerged, and thousands of seasons had scoured the surface smooth. Centered on the downstream side, just before the edge, was a small mark. Seeing it, Mualama allowed himself to feel the excitement of making a true discovery, of another step in his long and strange path about to be completed. He had feared this entire trip would turn up nothing, as previous trips to other places in the past had, but the mark was where it was supposed to be, and that meant… Mualama stopped himself from thinking too far ahead.
Bauru slid down the rope and arrived, leather gloves keeping his hands from burning on the nylon. The two porters followed, as Mualama examined the carving. “What is it?” Bauru asked. He had never seen such strange markings.
“It is Arabic script for the number one thousand and one,” Mualama translated. The water had worn smooth the edges of the carving.
“Arabic?” Bauru touched the rock. “This has been here for a long time. What Arab would have been here that many years ago? You said Fawcett was an Englishman.”
“The mark was carved there in 1867, long before Fawcett set out on his journey. But it was an Englishman who carved the numbers. An Englishman who spoke and wrote fluent Arabic. Sir Richard Francis Button.”
“I have not heard of this man.” Bauru said.
“He was a famous explorer and linguist. Burton was assigned as British consul to Brazil in 1864. He was based on the coast in Santos. In 1867 he left Santos and traveled alone for almost the entire year. It is known he navigated the San Francisco River north of here for over fifteen hundred miles in a canoe. He barely survived, arriving at the coast suffering from both pneumonia and hepatitis.”
“Why did he do this?” Bauru thought most foreigners quite strange. He would never travel that far in the Mato Grosso alone. It was akin to committing suicide. He was amazed that the man had made it to the coast, especially given the limited equipment he must have had over a hundred years earlier.
“To hide something.” Mualama pointed down. “It must be underneath. I think Burton traveled here during the dry season of the drought of 1867, when the water was much lower. In one of his papers I found in England he described a chamber under a flat rock like an altar, in the throat of the Devil.” Mualama looked around. “We are in the Devil’s Throat. This is a flat rock in the right place. And this mark is his.”
“How do you know that?” Bauru asked.
“Burton translated the story of the Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. To mark his way, he used riddles that only someone who knew about him would recognize. I have no doubt we are in the right place. I must go underneath and find the chamber.”
“Is this what Fawcett was looking for?”
“I believe so.”
“But Fawcett never returned,” Bauru noted.
“He might never have made it here,” Mualama said. “The journey is easier now.” Bauru looked at the water askance. “There is much danger in the rivers here. You cannot see more than six inches in that muck. There are… ”