by Dan Arnold
“I’ve done some research. You’re quite well known in certain circles.”
The man narrowed his eyes.
“Exactly which circles are those?”
“You’re a frequent presenter on the lecture circuit, especially those which cater to people who have an interest in ancient origins. I’ve read one of your books and seen some of your videos.”
“So, what’s your point?”
“If you’ll look behind you, you’ll see we are not alone.”
The men turned to find Phillipe and Harry had emerged from the rented four by four.
Harry had removed his shirt, ready to do combat. His enormous torso, shoulders and arms were covered in colorful tribal tattoos.
Phillipe grinned at the men, slowly slapping a cricket bat against his palm.
Jake spoke, returning the attention of the men to himself.
“Now, it’s true, you outnumber us. But I assure you, if you insist on violence, my friends and I will be the only one’s walking away. Can we talk?”
Dingane Gogo made a face, his frustration in full evidence.
“Fine,” he spat. He pointed at the two trucks, a sign for his men to stand down and go back to the vehicles.
As the men walked away, Phillipe and Harry followed them, keeping their distance.
Adrienne sat on one of the stones as Jake started the conversation.
“I understand you not wanting me and my people here.” Jake said. “You’ve found a potential cash cow. You’re considered an expert on the calendar and the mysterious circles of stone. You’ve traveled all over the world giving lectures on the subject. You’ve become something of a celebrity among the ancient origins crowd.
Being a native of South Africa, you’re in a unique position to profit from the tourist trade. You have that little shop with trinkets and tee shirts and what not. It wouldn’t do to have credible scientists interfering with your business. Have I about summed it up?”
“No. you haven’t. It’s a museum. I’ve collected artifacts from around the world. You really don’t know what you’re talking about. You think science has all the answers. It doesn’t. There are mysteries and wonders all over the world and you know nothing of my people or our customs.”
Jake crossed his arms.
“Is one of your customs making up stuff as you go along?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jake sighed.
“I’m talking about your repeated references to ‘the star people’ and your theory they created humans by mixing their superior alien DNA with that of apes. Your theory about the thousands of kraals across southern Africa being some sort energy source used by aliens to mine gold is also popular in certain circles.”
“It’s as good a theory as any. Can you explain why all those kraals have no gates, doors or other openings?”
“No, I can’t. All I know for certain is that more research is needed. Listen, Mr. Gogo, We have no interest in your business ventures. We’re not here to ridicule you or debunk you in a public forum. In fact, I’m more like you than you know. I’m as fascinated by the mysteries of human origins as you are.
Where we’re different is I don’t try to claim I know the answers. All that stuff about ancient aliens seeding humanity throughout the galaxy to mine gold for them is perfectly fine science fiction, but it has no basis in fact. It shouldn’t be presented that way.”
“How do you know? You don’t. My claims are based on extensive research. There are millions of people who believe the same way I do.”
“What is it you believe?”
“My people were here for thousands of years before any white man showed up. We have a long standing oral tradition that this spot, where we’re standing at this moment, is the place where the gods—the star people, made the first man.”
Jake shrugged.
Mr, Gogo was just warming up to his subject.
“What the old ones didn’t know is that there are no gods, at least not like they thought of them. They thought the moon, stars and planets were gods. We now know that stars are distant suns. Each of those suns may be at the center of worlds as yet unknown. There are infinite galaxies and dimensions beyond our ability to view or even comprehend.
Don’t you see? What the ancient scholars called the Anunnaki or Nephalim are actually visitors from another galaxy or dimension. They came here to this little rock because gold and other precious minerals are fuel for their explorations. They left humans on the planet to mine these minerals and energy sources for them.”
Jake held up is hand.
“Mr. Gogo, please don’t lecture me on the subject. No sale, I don’t buy it.”
“…Why not? There is just as much science pointing to that possibility as there is pointing to gradual evolution from slime. You scientists always seem to go back to that theory. You believe everything is random, accidental and meaningless.”
Jake shook his head.
“Please don’t tell me what I believe. This isn’t about belief. It’s about research. Look, all we want to do is examine the evidence. We aren’t going to debate the various theories. We’re not here to cause you any kind of trouble. If you will leave us alone, we’ll do the same for you. Is that OK?”
Gogo shook his head.
“Not really, but I guess it’s the best solution for the moment. OK. We won’t interfere with your work anymore. You must promise not to make me look bad in public, especially not here in my own country. I have the right to make a living any way I can, even lecturing in certain circles.”
Jake nodded.
“Fair enough, as I say, it was never our intention.”
Jake held out his hand. Dingane Gogo shook his hand and walked back to the trucks.
Adrienne stood up, brushing the dust off her pants.
“All’s well that ends well,” she said. “Too bad we didn’t get to mix it up. I was ready.”
Jake grinned. Tilting his cowboy hat back on his head, he winked and said, “That’s what she said.”
Sixteen
Leaving it all behind
Kutoasa regarded the important members of the village who were gathered before him. He stood both to get their attention and to be heard by everyone assembled in the ceremonial circle.
“Listen to me. The scouts say the raiders from the north will be here within ten days. Nearly a thousand warriors armed with weapons of iron are coming this way.
The runners I sent to the chief of all our people have not returned. I think they will never return.
I believe we must leave this place. We can wait no longer. Tomorrow, I want to have all the cattle herded together and all the goats as well. They will be guarded by our warriors overnight. On the morning after that we should be ready to leave at first light.”
Pausing to let his words have their effect, he held his arms out at his side as he continued.
“It is not our way to have one man make such an important decision. I will now hear from the elders.”
His pronouncement caused a general buzz of conversation throughout the circle. Kutoasa gave them all a moment to confer. He held up his hands and shouted above the murmur.
“Enough! Let me hear the words of the elders.”
His father’s brother, Bhalele, stepped forward on behalf of the elders.
“We must hear from Doinga-Potu, the shaman. He will give us guidance from the spirits.”
Knowing they would say this, Kutoasa had already spoken with the shaman. He knew what everyone was about to hear. He called upon the shaman to speak.
“Speak to us, Doinga-Potu. What have the spirits shown you?”
Doinga-Potu stepped forward.
“Hear me! My soul is troubled. All night have I danced. No food or water have I taken for three days. I have been blessed with knowledge from the spirit world. Hear Me! This is what I know.
The land no longer has game. Our hunters are gone for days at a time. Now strange enemies come from the north. Have we
not angered the gods? Is this not the reason our crops grow less productive every year?
The graves of our dead are too many. Even now their spirits walk among us.
Kutoasa has spoken wisely. We have lived here too long. We must leave this place.”
His words caused an even louder buzz.
Kutoasa recognized from the way the crowd sounded and moved, fear and insecurity was taking hold of the people.
Once again he raised his arms and his voice.
“Silence! Let us hear from the elders.”
Bhalele, stepped forward again.
“Before we can give you an answer we must ask a question. Where would you have us go, Kutoasa?”
That question had also been anticipated. It suggested the elders knew it was time to move the village.
“We will go south across the mountains. Just on the other side there is good savannah with much game. The streams are abundant to irrigate our crops. We can make the trip easily in about ten days with all our children and livestock. We have enough food and water to last that long, but the hunters will bring us meat and there are streams along the way. What say you?”
Bhalele looked back at the other elders, who nodded in agreement. He stood tall and announced, “It is time to go. We will move the village.”
Seventeen
Around and around we go
“These stones are remarkably similar to those we found in the other kraals.” Adrienne said. “You can see they were shaped and smoothed by the hydraulic forces of the streams from which they were taken. Oddly, some of them appear to have been deliberately shaped. How that was done without metal tools is a mystery. We’ve found some that have holes in them, making them bowl shaped. Some of the smaller circles of stone appear to have been ovens or maybe even forges. The wonder of it all is how many there are and how many people it would’ve taken to build all these circles. Can you imagine? Most of these rocks weigh eight or ten pounds. There are thousands of them just here in these kraals where we are today.”
“Is there any way we can determine how long ago these stone circles and terraces were built?” Jake asked.
“Not reliably. Each site we’ve examined was from a different time period. Some, like this one, are ancient beyond telling, maybe thousands of years old. Others are more recent, maybe hundreds of years old. I’m sorry Jake. I can’t date them.”
“Of what kind of stone are these walls built? They aren’t granite.”
“Yes, they are. They’re igneous in origin with a very high crystalline content, which is why they fractured the way they did. I’m not sure if they all acquired these shapes in the stream beds. Like I say some of them appear to have been altered somehow by the people who built these structures.
“So, after two weeks research, one spitting cobra and a potentially violent encounter with angry locals, what have we got? Tens of thousands of stone circles spread across the face of southeast Africa.
We think they represent some type of village which the locals call kraals. We don’t know for sure who built them or why they were abandoned. Does that sum up what we have so far?”
“Hey,” Phillipe called. “Is this anything important?” He was inside a distant kraal holding something up, something too small to identify at a distance.
Jake and Adrienne walked along the ancient stone lined path to join him.
Phillipe handed Jake the object he’d been waiving around.
“It’s a pottery shard,” Jake said. “Where did you find it?”
“If you dig around in the soil, there’re a bunch of them in the rubble inside this small circle here.”
“Beaudreaux, for a helicopter pilot you make a pretty good archeologist.”
“Really, is that piece of broken pottery important?”
“It’s not just this piece. The fact there’s evidence of any pottery in a structure this old would be significant. There being multiple fragments in just this little structure is immensely interesting.”
“Why is that?”
“It suggests this structure was used either for storage or disposal of unwanted stoneware. Either way, it points to a level of civilization not typical of the other indigenous people who were here in this region at that time. There needs to be a full blown archeological dig at this site.”
“But, you said the South African government doesn’t have the resources,” Adrienne said.
“Correct, but this could change everything. Think about it. We have evidence of a network of villages. Each village had domesticated livestock and cultivation of crops with terraces and irrigation. Now we find pottery. These circles of stone aren’t just some old cattle pens. They represent a very real, ancient civilization that occupied a vast area of the continent. If the South African government won’t organize an archeological research team in conjunction with a major university, I will.
Beaudreaux, my sharp eyed friend, fly us to Pretoria.”
There was little conversation at the beginning of the flight to Pretoria. Everyone’s attention was focused on the circles of stone so common on the South African hilltops they flew over.
The discovery of a complex society existing for thousands of years beginning in the Stone Age, and continuing beyond the Bronze Age, was thought provoking.
Jake’s thoughts centered on the theory popular among so many other scientists. The conventional wisdom was that early man was just a smarter kind of ape, slowly evolving from other simians.
He’d been taught that in a gradual process, over hundreds of thousands of years, each generation of hominids became a little smarter and walked in a little more upright fashion. We began to use crude tools, basically sticks and stones. This was the Stone Age. Early man’s grunted and gestured communication skills, combined with facial expressions, eventually developed into spoken, then written language. Hunter/Gatherers learned agriculture and this was what gave birth to civilization. The Bronze Age began when stones were replaced by smelted metal forged into tools and weapons. It evolved into the Iron Age when machinery was developed and began to replace part of the labor force. Mass production prompted the Industrial Age. The Information Age brought us worldwide communication, space craft, computers and artificial intelligence that would take us beyond the stars.
Jake had never been able to fully accept that theory. He saw modern humans as being neither more intelligent, nor more sophisticated then early man. What we call civilization was, to Jake, a thin veneer. Was it his experience in combat as an Army Ranger, his upbringing as a Christian, or his research as a scientist that brought him to this thinking? He decided it was all of those things in combination.
Jake learned through personal experience that when you take the smartest, most sophisticated and cultured “modern human”, strip him naked and deposit him in a wilderness, that man with his wealth of knowledge and intelligence might well die of thirst, hunger or exposure. It wasn’t a matter of not being smart enough. It was his lack of basic skills. If his survival was threatened the same man would kill his neighbor with a rock, a stick or his bare hands. Civilization was merely a construct, not an evolutionary step up.
Naked in the wilderness, even with all the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years, how long would it take that sophisticated man, using only his bare hands, to create a useful knife or a functional bow and the required arrows? From what would he make them? Sticks and stones. Even if he had the complete knowledge of metallurgy, to forge the metal and build a metal saw or a bicycle would take more time than he had left to live. Would a thousand such modern people in the same circumstance engineer and build a permanent city, or would they be too busy hunting, gathering and making war on each other?
Jake knew that so called “modern” man was no smarter than “early” man. The difference being the time it took to make discoveries and turn ideas into finished constructs. Each generation expanded on the previous generation’s accomplishments. This was not because each generation was more intelligent, but because they could combine earlier
discoveries with current ones. When an entire civilization was wiped off the face of the earth by a cataclysmic event, how long did it take to start over? The few survivors would have little to work with as they struggled to build a new life.
All over the world there were remnants and ruins of ancient, even prehistoric, civilizations. Little was known about them. The theories about who built them, how they did it and why they disappeared ranged from unknown people, to ancient aliens creating human slaves, possibly even angels or gods manipulating the elements.
That thought made Jake smile.
His work had just begun.
A loud ‘pop’ woke him from his reverie. Alarm claxons immediately began sounding as the helicopter lurched.
“We’re going down,” Beaudroux One’s words were clipped. He tried to radio a ‘mayday’ call with their current location, but another ‘pop” crazed the windscreen.
Jake looked at his friend, only to see his head fall forward and blood streaming from a bullet hole through the back of the pilot’s seat.
Now, the chopper was spinning and rolling over.
The impact with the hilltop brought searing pain followed by silence and darkness.
The unmarked Bell 412 EP helicopter circled above the crash site, allowing the sniper to scan for survivors. Seeing none, he slid the door closed.
As the attack chopper banked away disappearing to the east, one person alone crawled from the wreckage among the circles of stone.
Epilogue
After previously circling the property, he was now satisfied only two men were posted as night sentries. Each man carried an automatic weapon. On this occasion, it made them enemy combatants.
From their positions, one by the locked front gate and the other orbiting around the central dwelling, they would only see each other about every three minutes.
That was all the advantage he needed.
His reconnaissance concluded, he flipped up his night-vision goggles. He wouldn’t need them for what he was about to do. The interior of the compound was well lit.