BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  In fact, the natives had not only gone quiet but also very still, so much so that a small dog that had followed us all the way, barking and jumping around us, looked frozen. I was giving myself one more minute before demanding an explanation when a cracked voice came from the darkness of the threshold, as if from a huge throat, murmuring incomprehensibly.

  Obeying a silent order, the guards moved away. The warriors pushed us inside, not very gently, until we were at the other end of the maloka. Here we were made to stop in front of the source of the voice, which spoke again gravely.

  Inside that great structure there was not even a little flame to light the place, so that it was darker than outside.

  “Hello! Is anybody there?” I said into the dark.

  “Ulysses!” Cassandra scolded me from the shadows. “Be patient.”

  “I am very patient, Cassie. But I’m getting tired of so much silence and mysterious ceremony,” I said as

  I reached up to light my headlamp. Then a spark shone a few feet in front and in a matter of seconds it turned into a flame which then turned into a fire. Beyond the fire a wrinkled old man who looked a hundred years old was sitting on the ground, eying us severely.

  “We aleké la ba maloka…” he said, pointing a bony finger at us. With the same cracked voice he added, “Anú la mere cala, mi aroa kané já… Vaná!”

  Of course I did not understand a single word, and to judge by their silence, nor did my friends.

  At that moment, unexpectedly, a new actor walked into the scene. It was a young man, slightly taller and lighter of skin than the rest of his people. But what really caught our attention were his unusually blue eyes which stood out strikingly in his copper face. He was wearing sports shorts instead of a loincloth and, apart for the red stripe on his forehead, his body was free from decoration or feathers.

  “Me call Iak. He be our shaman, big chief Mengké of the Menkragnoti,” he said in broken English. “We give welcome.”

  “Thank you,” the professor replied in a hurry. “We are also—”

  The interpreter interrupted him with a gesture. Apparently he was not done talking.

  “But you no can be here.” He pointed outside the hut. “Mengké say you leave nossa aldea. Now.”

  17

  I have to confess that I had not been expecting that.

  Neither had the professor or Cassie, who after the initial shock was the first to react.

  “Leave? Why?” she asked, bewildered.

  The interpreter bent over to the elder respectfully and passed on the question.

  The reply was a string of incomprehensible words accompanied by some revealing gestures. He pointed at each of us, then at himself and put his hand on his chest as he dropped his head to one side with his tongue sticking out.

  “You doomed,” Iak explained. “If white man stay in village we die.”

  I turned to my friends in perplexity.

  “Did he just say what I think he said?”

  “According to the old man,” the professor, who obviously found it as hard to believe as I did, confirmed, “we’re doomed… and if we stay, we’ll kill them all.”

  “That’s nonsense!” I said looking at the interpreter. “Tell the shaman that we’re not doomed, and that we’re not going to kill anybody, and that—”

  “Anú aroa mañá!” the old man interrupted me impatiently. “Ta uaré me ilea aleké anú!”

  “Mengké say all whites bring disease. If stay, we sick and die too.”

  “I see,” Cassandra said. “What he means, and he’s right, is that all of us white people carry diseases that are deadly for them and that if we stay they run the risk of contagion.”

  “Wait a minute,” the professor said. “Is he talking about the diseases the Conquistadors brought? But that was centuries ago!”

  “I don’t know what to say, Doc. All these tribes that live so far from the white people have no immunity to some of the epidemics that we’ve spread throughout the world. One single virus could eliminate half the population of this village.”

  “And if we promise not to sneeze on anybody?” I said, half jokingly.

  Meanwhile Eduardo Castillo had stepped toward the shaman and was addressing him with due solemnity.

  “We are very thankful to you for saving us in the river, and I assure you that we don’t wish to cause you any harm.” He waited until the interpreter had translated his words and went on. “But even if we want to go, we can’t.”

  The elder listened to his words and replied through the interpreter.

  “Mengké say no worry. This night you sleep here. Tomorrow warriors take you in canoe downriver to next village.”

  “Moito obrigado,” the professor said with a nod. “But we have come here for a very important reason and we can’t leave yet.”

  He took the photo out of his wallet and showed it to the old man.

  “This is my daughter Valeria,” he said coming closer.

  The interpreter took the picture and handed it to the shaman.

  Then the professor went on. “We know she was here a few weeks ago but then she disappeared. We are here to look for her.”

  The elder studied the photo without a sign of recognition. He shook his head and gave it back to Iak who returned it to the professor.

  “Mengké say he never see woman.”

  For a moment the professor stood there staring at the photo without understanding, as if he feared he had shown him the wrong one.

  “But… you must have met her,” he muttered, puzzled. “She was here. That’s for sure.”

  The man in the sport shorts seemed to hesitate for an instant. He looked at the shaman, who shook his head imperceptibly, then he turned to the professor again.

  “You wrong,” he said in a tone that did not invite discussion. “ White woman not in village. Never.”

  “But—”

  “Kaualé!” said the shaman standing up with the help of his staff.

  “Never,” the interpreter repeated.

  Then a pair of warriors got in between us and the shaman and brusquely indicated that we should go out.

  “Calm down, Doc,” I whispered to my old friend trying to comfort him. “We’re not going to get anything else out of them, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to make them angry.”

  The professor looked at the photo in his hand. “But it’s not possible,” he insisted. “There’s no doubt that the coordinates are correct.”

  Cassandra took his arm gently. “Perhaps there’s been a misunderstanding. We’d better do what they say and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a new day.”

  “But—”

  I took his other arm. “Cassie is right. In the morning things will look different and we’ll try again. Now we’d better go.”

  “Valeria was here,” he repeated to himself as the warriors escorted us outside the maloka. “She had to be here.”

  We were outside again. The small crowd remained expectantly silent but they kept their distance.

  “Don’t brood on it,” I said as they led us toward a small palapa a little apart from the rest. “Be assured that there’s a logical explanation for all this. You’ll see.”

  “That’s right,” Cassie said, trying to cheer him up as his mood was rapidly darkening from confusion into despair. “We must have missed something.”

  She turned to look back at the big hut where the shaman was watching us from the door as we walked away. “Because there’s no possible reason why these people would be hiding something from us, is there?”

  18

  The place we were to sleep in was no more than a hut without walls, what in South America is called a palapa. Three old hammocks were already hanging from the pillars that held the palm roof above us. There was nothing that indicated anyone actually lived there, and we assumed it was some sort of guest house, a place where unexpected visitors could hang their hammocks up for the night.

  Apart from the faint glow of the village fires
and the moon, veiled by high clouds, the darkness was almost complete. But we could glimpse the silhouettes of two warriors posted outside.

  “Do you think they’re guarding us or watching us?” Cassandra asked.

  The attitude of the guardians, who were sitting on a couple of stumps talking in a relaxed way, was far from martial but I could tell they were not missing anything that went on around them.

  “You can bet your green eyes that they’re watching us,” I said. I glanced aside at the professor who was already lying in his hammock. He still had not said another word.

  “Well,” Cassandra said, “I don’t blame them. What I find incredible is the fact that they risked their lives to rescue us from the alligators, even knowing we’re a threat to them. It’s a noble gesture.”

  I guessed, rather than saw, the faint glow of our fire on her blonde hair.

  “Yes, very noble. But then they didn’t hesitate to kick us out.”

  “Kick us out?”

  “Just in case you didn’t notice, they’ve thrown us out of the village.”

  “Don’t be unfair. We’re putting the village in danger just by being here. And if the professor’s daughter hasn’t been here, it’s understandable that they don’t want to accept us.”

  “Yeah… sure.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “You see… I have a nasty feeling that all they want is to get rid of us as soon as possible. I’m not sure they’re telling us the whole truth.”

  Cassandra breathed out hard in the darkness.

  “Don’t be a jerk, Ulysses. Don’t insist on complicating everything by imagining things.”

  “Is that what you think? That I imagine things?”

  “I think it’s been a very long day and that you’re… that we’re all too tired to think clearly. Come tomorrow everything will seem different and you’ll realize how wrong you are.”

  “The thing is,” the professor said from his hammock, “maybe everything is a mistake and my daughter has really never been here.”

  “Is that so?” I asked skeptically.

  “You see…” He got up and picked up a twig from the ground. As he spoke he began to draw a winding line on the reddish soil. “If you remember, I told you that Valeria hadn’t arrived here like us, but had come up the Xingu River by canoe.” He made a mark at one end of the winding line.

  “Yeah, you did mention something like that,” Cassie said.

  “That means,” he went on, crouching, “that she must have been on the river for days or weeks, no doubt coming across other tribes as interesting as this one, or even more so.”

  “Where are you getting at?” I asked bluntly.

  Professor Castillo stood up, and in his voice there was now some hope.

  “Just that Valeria may have never set foot in this village.”

  Cassandra looked skeptically at the professor as she scratched her head. “You think she may have decided to stay with some other tribe, at another village?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I asked. “What about the coordinates she sent before she disappeared? They point at this place and nowhere else.”

  He took his glasses off and wiped them with a corner of his shirt. “There may be an explanation for that too. Perhaps the coordinates of this village don’t correspond to the point she was at but to the point she was heading to. Therefore a simple misspelling when the message was written down or transcribed may have brought us to the wrong place.”

  Cassandra shook her head to clear it.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “Are you trying to suggest we’ve been brought here to the end of the world, with natives who don’t want anything to do with us just because someone mixed up “I’m” with “I’ll”? And that we were rescued from being eaten by alligators by a sheer miracle?”

  The professor nodded shyly, looking at us over the rim of his glasses.

  “That’s the idea, more or less. That would explain everything.”

  “La gran chucha…” Cassie burst out.

  “I don’t believe it…” I said as I dropped into my hammock, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “I don’t believe it…”

  It was midnight and we were fast asleep. The two guardians had left their post long ago, finally convinced that we were not going to go anywhere. A silhouette stole into our palapa. I felt someone shake my shoulder, and I opened my eyes to find Iak’s ones staring back at me.

  By the light of the dying coals I saw him put a finger to his lips and motion me to wake Cassie and the professor up.

  “What do you want?” I said brusquely. “Have you come to hurry us off?”

  He lowered his head with embarrassment.

  “Iak bring something,” he said in a low voice.

  I did not hide my annoyance. “A farewell gift?”

  “No… no,” he said without noticing. “It be a… a…” He seemed to be having difficulty thinking of the right word. Not being able to come up with it, he took a leaf-woven bag he had been carrying on his shoulder and put it in his lap.

  Then he put his hand in the bag and took out a rusty tin case the size of a shoe box. On the cover you could still make out what looked like an embossed coat of arms.

  Iak handed me the case with great reverence, looking around all the time as if he was afraid of being seen.

  “This belong my father,” he said solemnly. “Before this belong father of my father. For this, me have name Iak.”

  He took off the rusty cover with difficulty, so I figured he did not open it often.

  “I guilty that white men go to land of morcegos,” he whispered. “Elders forbid, but I want know of my grandfather.” Iak looked at me as if asking for understanding or even redemption. “I no obey. I show this to woman of photo… Two days after, she leave.”

  “Say that again,” I said. I brought my face close to his. “Are you telling me that the old man lied to us? That the white woman was really here?”

  He nodded.

  “Mengké tell lie for good of all,” he said. “He no like lies.”

  He searched inside the case. With my flashlight I could see several objects: a pocket watch; old, almost faded, sepia photos; a simple compass on a fine silver chain, and what looked like the pieces of a broken sextant. From the bottom, Iak took out a book. It looked as if it had originally been bound in leather but was now brittle and moldy like old pastry.

  He handed it to me so I could have a better look.

  I was absolutely speechless. I stared at Iak with a hundred questions running through my mind. I looked at the book I now held in my hands and opened it. In spite of the yellowing of the paper and the mold that blackened it, I could still read the heading on the first page.

  My heart leapt as I sensed that in this book we could find the answers to many of our questions and even those we had not yet thought of.

  “Cassie, Professor,” I whispered, making an effort to keep calm. “You have to see this.”

  19

  Cassandra held the book on her knees, except that it was not really a book. Our heads were bent over it while Iak, sitting opposite, watched us intently.

  The dense writing in ink, covering pages that had once been white, indicated that it was really a journal. A journal written in English, whose heading I had read a moment before. Now Cassie was reading it out loud.

  “This is the journal of Jack Fawcett with the account of the fatal expedition that brought us, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, my dear friend Raleigh Rimell—may they rest in peace—and myself, to discover the Lost City of Z.”

  She raised her eyes tensely and found both the professor and me with our mouths open and eyes fixed on that first melancholic, moth-eaten page.

  “What is the Lost City of Z?” she asked in puzzlement.

  “No idea,” the professor muttered. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “Maybe it explains further on,” I suggested.

&
nbsp; The professor turned to Iak. “You say this belonged to your grandfather?”

  He nodded. “Menkragnoti no understand symbols of white man but my grandfather give to my father and my father give to me, to look after and give to my son before I die.”

  “Of course!” burst Cassandra, “hence his name! It’s not Iak, it’s Jack. Like his grandfather Jack Fawcett, the author of this journal.”

  “That would explain his blue eyes, too,” Professor Castillo said.

  “So you believe it’s authentic?” I asked him.

  My old friend was so deeply caught up in thoughts that he was taken by surprise.

  “Authentic?” he replied, looking at me over the rim of his glasses. “Of course I believe it’s authentic. But what’s really important,”—he tapped the book with his finger—“is that in here is the clue to what’s happened to my daughter. If we believe Iak, Valeria was right here and left two days later. Ergo, if we find out what she found in these pages,” he concluded enthusiastically, “we may be able to deduce where she was heading and why, then can follow in her footsteps until we find her.”

  The first part of the journal, as far as it was legible, was about Jack’s own childhood and adolescence, where he gave an outline of his father’s career.

  Apparently, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett had been a true adventurer, an explorer in his own right, perhaps the last of the twentieth century. Founding member of the Royal Geographic Society and friends with people like Arthur Conan Doyle—who, according to Jack, had used his father’s experience in the jungle for the plot of his famous novel The Lost World. This Englishman, born in Devon in 1867, made no less than seven expeditions to the Amazon rainforest between the years 1906 and 1924. He was financed by the governments of Perú, Bolivia, and Brazil in order to establish clear frontiers in the jungle margins of these three countries. This led him to explore a large part of Amazonia including areas where no one had ever set foot before and where—according to Jack—no one ever would again.