BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “Precisely,” the professor said, obviously pleased with himself.

  “That’s great,” I said, “but what does it have to do with the location of Z?”

  “Wait and see.”

  Like a magician opening a mystery box on stage, Eduardo lifted the lid of the old-fashioned watch. He revealed the cracked glass and the hands which had stopped at twenty minutes past twelve some day in the previous century. After a few seconds wasted trying to discover a clue in that time, I noticed what looked like symbols scratched inside the lid with the tip of a knife.

  Cassandra was always quicker than I was. “What’s that there?” she asked.

  The professor smiled and passed his finger over the surface. He announced proudly: “They’re numbers, my dear. And as the last symbol is clearly a Z, I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming these are the geographical coordinates of the location we’re looking for.”

  In the semidarkness of Iak’s hut and with its owner counter spying outside, we read the inscriptions on the watch while the professor wrote them down at the back of the journal with a fountain pen he had salvaged from our wreck.

  “Very good,” I said when he had finished the transcription. “If we read them correctly there are two series of numbers, one above the other: 75838 and 524834. Translating these into degrees and minutes, it would read as: 7º 58’ 38” South and 52º 48’ 34” West.”

  Cassie was deeply intrigued. “Hang on, how did you do that?”

  “Very simply. The last two figures are always seconds of degrees, the next minutes of degrees, and the rest are degrees of either longitude or latitude. As we’re below the Equator and in the Western Hemisphere, the logic’s pretty clear.”

  “That’s all? As easy as that?” She blinked in disbelief. “Those are the coordinates of Z?”

  “I believe they are.”

  “Great!” the professor exclaimed. “Now all we have to do is go there! Let’s leave at once!”

  “Wait a minute,” Cassandra said, “Not that I want to be a wet blanket, but… aren’t you forgetting something? The alligators ate all our maps and only God knows where the GPS is by now. Without that and a map”—she spread her empty hands wide—“the coordinates are useless.”

  “What do you mean?” the professor asked crossly. “Mr. Fawcett wrote down those coordinates almost a century ago. There were no GPS or maps of the area then!”

  “But don’t forget he was an experienced cartographer, and he was also carrying the instruments he’d need to mark locations. So unless one of you has brought a sextant from home…”

  “Damn!” The professor stomped on the ground. “And I thought we had it!”

  “Hang on, Doc,” I said thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling. “We’re not done yet. There may be something we can do about it.”

  I was thinking back to my navigation classes and trying to remember a system that could be used to find a course, providing you had the coordinates for arrival and destination. The problem was that that particular class had coincided with the Champions League final, and…

  “Okay, let’s see…” I said at last. “By any chance do you remember the coordinates Valeria sent? Because they should correspond more or less with where we are now.”

  “Yes, of course. I read them so many times I memorized them: 8º 26’ 34” South and 52º 39’ 09” West.”

  “Fantastic. May I borrow your pen?”

  I wrote down the new coordinates beside the ones we already had, and after a little simple subtraction I gathered we were about twenty-nine minutes further south and nine and a half minutes further west than the coordinates scratched on the watch. I knew that a minute of arc of latitude—or the sixtieth part of a degree—equaled a nautical mile. As we were very near the Equator, we could apply the same measurement without being too wrong as to the degrees of longitude (which are smaller as we get closer to the poles). This gave me two sides of a right-angled triangle. One side was twenty-nine miles north, the other nine and a half miles west. All I had to do now was use the Pythagorean theorem by adding the squares of the length of those two sides to obtain the square of the length of the third.

  I had been scribbling numbers with a stick all over the floor of the hut when I raised my head and saw Cassie looking at me as if I had suddenly sprouted a third eye in the middle of my forehead.

  “Since when have you known anything about numbers?” she asked, intrigued. “You couldn’t even remember your own credit card pin number!”

  “When you left… umm… I mean when we parted, I decided to get my sea captain’s license. I had no choice but to learn a thing or two about courses and coordinates.”

  “Great. I’m glad you didn’t waste your time.” It was meant as praise, but it sounded more like veiled reproach.

  “Get to the point, Ulysses,” the professor said. “Have you drawn any conclusion from all this mess of numbers?”

  “Be patient, Doc.”

  I picked up the stick again and made a few more calculations. Finally a square root left me with the figure 30.51.

  “There you are,” I said pointing at the ground proudly. “That’s the distance, according to Fawcett, between us and the Black City.”

  “Only thirty miles It’s very close!”

  “Well, Professor,” Cassandra said, “don’t forget that distances aren’t the same over open ground as in the forest. You can spend a whole day there covering five hundred yards.”

  “But we have the river, don’t we? And it does flow south to north, more or less, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s true,” I said. “If we’re lucky, we can cover a lot of distance using a canoe.”

  “That’s all very well,” Cassandra said a little scornfully, “but we still don’t know what pinche direction we have to walk those thirty-odd miles.”

  “Not a problem,” I said, pleased with my success at trigonometry. “Professor, may I borrow your pen again, please?”

  “Of course.” He handed it to me with a mock bow.

  Then his smile froze on his face as he saw me begin to take it apart and pick out various small parts of the mechanism.

  “But, what the…?”

  I winked at him. “Hang in there, Doc. Have a little faith.”

  “That’s exactly what he said to me about a year ago…” Cassie muttered under her breath but loud enough for me to hear.

  I tried to ignore the comment and went on with what I was doing until I found the piece I was looking for: the little coil that acts as a spring. I straightened it out until it lost its shape, then went over to Cassandra and took a lock of her hair.

  “What on earth do you think you’re doing, man? What do you want with my hair?”

  “Please, Cassie. I need you to stay still and quiet for a few minutes. It’s something I have to do.”

  “But…”

  “It’s important.”

  Reluctantly she stayed still as I rubbed the wire against her blond hair, which felt as soft as ever even though we had not taken proper showers for days.

  “Okay,” I said after a minute. “I think it’s ready.”

  Cassandra turned to me puzzled.

  “I think I understand about rubbing the wire with hair so as to magnetize it with static electricity,” she said squinting her eyes, “but what does that have to do with me being quiet?”

  “Oh nothing, really.” I moved away from her, well aware of the murderous look she was giving me.

  I took one of the bowls of water they had left for us and put the wire on a leaf. Here it floated freely until at last it lay completely still.

  “I still don’t understand,” the professor said.

  “It’s simple,” I said. “By rubbing the wire on hair I’ve charged it with electricity, and now it’s sensitive to the magnetic field. The direction it’s now pointing in is roughly north. That means that the Black City is…” I closed one eye as if I were sighting a gun and pointed my finger to a spot on the horizon, slightly left of where the
wire was aiming. “More or less in that direction.”

  The professor and Cassandra looked at me with something between awe and disbelief.

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as you can be with a piece of wire and a bowl of water.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to use a compass to do it right?” the professor asked, putting his hands together and twiddling his thumbs. “Instead of destroying my beautiful fountain pen and using Ms. Brooks as a magnet?”

  “A compass? Sure, but as far as I know—”

  Before I could finish the sentence, the professor had taken out a small magnetic compass from Jack Fawcett’s box. It hung on a chain, and he dangled it in front of my eyes.

  “This was there too, among the things of Iak’s grandfather,” he said with one eyebrow raised. “If only you’d asked…”

  27

  It was not too difficult to convince Mengké and the Council of the Elders to provide us with two old canoes so that we could follow the Xingu down to Sao Félix at two hundred miles or so due north. They were only too willing to see the last of us in their village. Obviously we did not tell them we were really planning to stop halfway to look for the Black City. If we had, they might not have offered us the eight men in front of us who were now carrying the canoes on their shoulders. They were going to take them beyond the Cachoeira do Ubá, the enormous waterfall we had nearly gone over in the hydroplane.

  It had been harder to convince Iak to come with us. The thought of going near Morcego territory did not appeal to him at all. All the same, though reluctantly, he gathered his few belongings together and agreed to make use of his temporary banishment by being our guide on the river part of the journey. It might have been gratitude toward us, or else a way of atoning for having shown his grandfather’s journal to Valeria.

  Shortly after leaving the village—to the relief of Mengké and the rest of the tribal elders—we found ourselves on a path that was surrounded by gigantic trees, with roots like the buttresses of a church. Their tops were lost in a green confusion which was so thick that it barely let a tenth of the daylight through.

  The twelve of us walked slowly through the rainforest. The warriors, wearing yellow feathers on their heads, were at the front carrying the heavy canoes. Following them came our friend Iak, wearing his faded sports shorts, with a cloth bag on his back and a bow and a dozen arrows in his right hand. Last came Professor Castillo, Cassandra, and myself, closing the line. I was carrying the single remaining red backpack with the few things we had rescued from the fury of the alligators, Fawcett’s old watch with the coordinates for Z, and the three hammocks we had been sleeping in. The Menkragnoti had generously given us the hammocks, although we suspected they would have burned them otherwise, for fear of catching something.

  Luckily, the three of us had been wearing our trekking clothes since the beginning of our trip as well as waterproof footwear which was best for walking in the rainforest. The mosquitoes were already swirling around our heads and alighting on our shirts by the dozen as they tried to bite us through our long sleeves. We could not understand why they ignored the Menkragnoti completely. I did not even want to think what would have happened to us if we had been wearing shorts and sandals.

  “I was thinking—” I said out loud.

  Cassandra turned around. “Thinking? Are you feeling all right? Do you need to sit down and rest?”

  I ignored her. Well aware that apart from Iak none of the other natives understood a word of English, I went on:

  “As I was saying, taking into account where we’re assuming Z is, we may have flown over it as we were on our way here. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s true,” the professor said, half turning. “Did either of you see anything?”

  “I fell asleep too,” I said. “Like you.”

  “Well, I was awake and looking through the window,” Cassie said, “and I swear I didn’t see anything that caught my attention.”

  “That’s weird, isn’t it? We should’ve seen something from the air.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that, Ulysses. If there really is such a place as Z, we’re probably talking about a small religious center, with a handful of stone buildings in ruins overgrown with vegetation. A jungle like this could swallow a city the size of New York in just fifteen or twenty years.”

  “Aren’t you exaggerating a little?” the professor asked.

  “Exaggerating? In the south of Mexico and north of Guatemala, which is a far smaller area than Amazonia, not a year goes by without someone uncovering a new Mayan city that had been hidden by vegetation until then. Even Machu Picchu, which is one of the world’s most famous archeological sites, was only discovered one hundred years ago. And it’s right in the middle of Perú, in an area that wasn’t too dense or too difficult to reach.” She pushed her hair back and added, “Just imagine what could be hidden here, in a region that’s practically unexplored, under trees as big as buildings.”

  We had been walking for more than an hour when the path reached the riverside. The porters lowered the canoes onto a thin fringe of yellow sand beside the water, which lapped gently on the small beach.

  We were facing the Xingu as it flowed wide and quiet, without whirlpools. The line of trees was clearly visible on the other side, two hundred yards or so away.

  On our right, though, much closer to us, clouds of spray veiled nearly half of the sixty-five foot height of the Cachoeira do Ubá, which hit the rocks at its base with a noise like the roar of a jet plane’s engine. Luckily, we were heading in the opposite direction. According to Iak, we were to follow a quiet watercourse free of rapids and treacherous waterfalls for the next sixty miles.

  The only drawback was that quiet watercourses were the favorite haunts of alligators and piranhas. Our Menkragnoti friend assured us, on the other hand, that alligators did not normally attack canoes, and in any case never before noon. And piranhas only did if they smelled blood, or if they were hungry, or if they felt threatened, or if you fell in the water, or if they just decided to.

  “More dangerous puraqués, you call electric eel,” he warned us, his face stern. “They kill human even if only one finger in water. And some continue attack until prey stop moving. Very dangerous,” he said gravely. “Very dangerous.”

  We looked at each other, thinking that perhaps taking the canoes had not been such a good idea after all. Before we had time to react, the eight Menkragnoti porters turned around and, without even a goodbye, left us in the company of the banished blue-eyed half-breed. We were on the shore of one of the least explored rivers in the world, and all we had with us was a couple of worn-out canoes, four paddles, and a knot in our stomachs.

  28

  I paddled slowly, letting the gentle current carry the canoe I shared with Professor Castillo, who was sitting at the bow putting his paddle in the water warily as if he expected some sharp-toothed jaw to appear and swallow him. I could feel my heart beating excitedly at the ever present lush rainforest which seemed to spill over firm land like a chaos of green spray.

  The whispering silence of the jungle was only broken by the rhythm of our paddles hitting the water and the occasional call of a bird taking flight startled by our presence. As I was looking at a solitary cloud that crossed the cobalt sky and reflected itself faithfully on the tannin tinted water of the Xingu, I thought that this was the closest I would ever get to real paradise.

  The white man had not put his hands on that forest so full of life, and the jaguars, snakes, fish, and birds still lived in a habitat that had stayed the same for one, ten, or a hundred thousand years. Everything there was pure, virgin, real… The worries and pittances we build our lives upon have no meaning when you find yourself in the midst of Nature in her truest expression. If we are especially lucky, a brief ray of sanity might make us look up from our own belly button and realize that our planet Earth, on which we are born, die, and so badly live, is exactly like this. Exactly as it was and as it will be long after we hav
e become extinct.

  “It’s incredibly beautiful…” Cassandra said from the other canoe.

  I turned to look at her and saw her just as beautiful, with her golden hair reflecting the sun and her eyes wide open watching everything around her, spellbound.

  “You’re absolutely right, my dear,” the professor said. “It’s really a shame.”

  “What’s a shame?” I asked.

  He turned halfway in the canoe. “Don’t you remember the dam they’ve built downriver?”

  “It’s true! I had completely forgotten about it.”

  “Well, keep it in mind because soon all this area will disappear under water.”

  “La gran chingada,” Cassie said bitterly. “When that happens, all this rainforest will disappear. With all the trees, animals—”

  She realized that Iak had turned around and was staring at her.

  “What you talk about?” he asked.

  We could not believe it. As our canoes swayed side by side in a river bend, Iak assured us again and again that no one in his village had knowledge of the existence of the dam or the fact that most of their territory would soon be turned into a reservoir.

  “Time ago men from city come. They offer gifts in exchange for Menkragnoti to leave land. Nobody accept. Why need we washing machines or televisions?”

  “So, what happened?” I asked.

  “Nothing. They get very angry and leave. Never come again.”

  “They must’ve been from the construction company,” the professor said.

  “But how can it be?” Cassandra was getting really angry. “Those bastards not only don’t give a damn about leaving the indigenous people without their land. They don’t even bother to warn them so they can evacuate! Sons of bitches!” She had gotten all red in the face.

  “How long do you think they have, Professor?” I asked, biting my lips.

  “It’s hard to say…” He rested his paddle on his lap as he cleaned his glasses and thought for a moment. “Although a reservoir that big isn’t like a bathtub and takes a long time to fill up. If we consider that the Menkragnoti village is little above the level of the Xingu, it could take a month. Although if it rains a lot at the top of the river, it could be weeks or even less… but, as I said, it’s hard to predict.”