BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  Half an hour later, in the darkness, we reached the top and sat down on the edge. We were exhausted and sweating in the yellowish light of our torches, which were nearly spent by now.

  Cassie let out a long breath. “I can’t believe I’m sitting on the top of a pyramid… in the middle of the Amazon!”

  “Well, I can’t believe,” I puffed, “they wouldn’t have thought of building a stairway.”

  The professor got to his feet with difficulty. “I think we ought to take a look inside, you know, before the torches go out altogether.”

  We all stood up and confronted the mysterious structure at the top of the pyramid.

  It was a sort of granite cube with walls about thirty feet across. The weather had rounded the corners and erased any relief that might have been carved on the outside wall. Cassie and the professor could barely contain their excitement as they realized that the walls seemed to have been built with blocks of stone of different sizes and shapes which fit together perfectly without need of any kind of cement or filler.

  Again and again as they passed their fingers over the dark stone, I heard them commenting that this type of architecture belonged solely to the Andean cultures. Identical structures could be found in Cuzco and Sacsayhuamán, in Perú.

  As for me, it made me think of a gigantic black stone Tetris game, where each stone weighed a thousand tons.

  As a structure it was sober, severe, and timeless, without any trace of superfluous decoration. It was as though its mere presence were enough and needed no extra justification to be admired. It was an almost perfect cube, with the exception of an extravagant pentagonal doorway about the height of a man. It was gloomy and threatening, and there was nothing in the least inviting to go inside.

  And so we waited, the three of us with Iak standing warily behind us, exchanging looks of doubt and excitement, unable to decide whether to venture into that black granite cube.

  Finally Cassandra stepped forward. “What the hell, it’s a small step for man…” she paraphrased, “but a great one for this woman.”

  And without a second thought, she went on into the darkness with only the dying embers of her torch to light her way.

  38

  The professor and I followed her into what appeared to be an empty chamber. Only a few vines had crawled inside.

  Cassandra was in the center of the room looking around in disappointment. “There doesn’t seem to be anything here,” she whispered.

  The professor took a few cautious steps forward, as if to corroborate her words.

  “Perhaps this was a royal chamber,” he ventured. “If it had been a temple there ought to be some kind of altar, either for making offerings or sacrifices.”

  Cassie got closer to the professor. “It could be,” she said, “but don’t forget that we still don’t know anything about the builders of this place. Who knows, maybe they didn’t even have gods at all.”

  Even in the faint light I clearly saw my old friend turn to Cassie with a sneer. “Are you serious? How many civilizations can you think of now or in the past that haven’t worshiped some kind of deity or other?”

  It seemed to me the right moment to intervene. “Come on, what’s with the riddles? Let’s start by making sure there aren’t any creatures in here, just in case something scares us in the middle of the night.”

  They left their religious debate for later and moved around cautiously as they swept their dying torches along the floor in wide arcs.

  Meanwhile, Iak was outside, not daring to cross the threshold of the chamber. I told him there was nothing to fear inside, but he simply shook his head in refusal without offering any explanation. Eventually I shrugged my shoulders and went back inside.

  Following the example of my friends, I swept the stone and loose dirt floor in wide arcs with the tiny flame of my torch, although for some reason I could not explain, I was positive that no animal of any type could have made its home in the cube. When I reached the far wall not having seen anything crawling, my guess was confirmed. I straightened my back with a crack and raised the torch to look at the ceiling.

  I almost fainted from the shock.

  “Doc! Cassie!” I said hearing my voice enormously amplified within those four walls.

  “What is it?” Cassie asked from the other side of the room.

  “Is it a snake?” the professor said. “Have you seen a snake?”

  I tried to keep my voice down. “No, there’s no snake. But you must see this!”

  “La gran púchica, Ulysses, you scared me to death!” Cassie said reproachfully, holding her hand to her heart.

  “What is it you want us to see?” the professor said behind me. Then he saw what I was looking at and he swore out loud.

  Not more than three feet above my head, a pair of huge eyes looked down on me. They were chiseled into the form of a stone face twisted in an evil expression. Where the mouth should have been under a wide, flat nose, something like the jaws of an ape jutted out from the skull. They were wide open, showing the sharp fangs of a predator. All this was set into a head that I could only describe as grotesque. The skull seemed to narrow upward, lengthening exaggeratedly to end in a protuberance on the crown of the head.

  To my surprise, however, it was not the engraving of that B-movie monster which caught Cassie and Eduardo’s attention but a fringe of funny dots and lines around the image, like a frame around a family photo.

  With shaking hands, Professor Castillo passed his fingers along them like a blind man reading Braille.

  “I know it’s not… possible,” he muttered, “but this is just like—”

  “It is,” Cassie said, her voice unsteady with excitement. “It certainly does look like it.”

  “But, how can it be?” The professor shook his head in disbelief as he took a step back. “No one ever… and when? Holy Mother of God, when?”

  “Who knows,” Cassie said, hardly managing to stay calm. “I mean, there it is, right in front of us, and there’s no way around it.”

  It seemed the right moment to interrupt. “Excuse me, would you mind explaining what you’re talking about?”

  They both turned and gave me a strange look. If eyes could talk, those two pairs would have been calling me a dimwit, or even something stronger.

  The professor pointed at the fringe of lines and dots. “Can’t you see?”

  “All I can see is lines and dots.”

  “Those lines and dots are some kind of writing,” my old friend said.

  “Writing?” I looked more closely. “How do you know they’re not just dots and lines that don’t mean anything?”

  “Because of the patterns, man!” Cassie said. She pointed at the symbols. “Can’t you see they repeat themselves with variations just like the letters of an alphabet in a text?”

  “An alphabet?”

  “An alphabet. Quite similar to the cuneiform one, to be precise,” the professor said, his excitement growing.

  “Okay,” I said after focusing on the wall for a few seconds. “So we’ve discovered an alphabet like the cunni—”

  “Cuneiform,” Casssie corrected.

  “That’s right, cuneiform. But, at the risk of you calling me names, I’ll say: so what? The Maya had a kind of writing based on glyphs and the Incas used quipus for theirs. What’s so extraordinary about the fact that these people used dots and lines for their writing?”

  Cassandra rolled her eyes as the professor raised his own to heaven, begging for patience.

  At last he sighed. “There’s no known civilization in America that’s ever had a system of writing like this. It’s something unique in the whole continent. It’s exceptional! More than exceptional! It’s just plain impossible!”

  “Okay, okay, if you say so. But surely they’d have had to write somehow, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. What’s remarkable and unheard-of is that they used something so close to the cuneiform alphabet!”

  Hard as I tried, I could not
see what was supposed to be so incredible about the whole thing. I guess it must have shown on my face, and that’s why, with unexpected sweetness, Cassie said “You’ve no idea what a cuneiform alphabet is, do you?”

  “Not a clue.”

  She exchanged looks with the professor, who cleared his throat in preparation.

  “Let’s see… where do I begin?” He scratched his beard. “Look, the thing is, this writing evolved from the prehistoric pictograms of people, animals, or objects to describe something. These drawings gradually got more and more schematic until they became what you see here: vertical and horizontal lines, and something like dots; only if you look closely you see they’re more like triangles. Do you follow?”

  “Of course I follow. I don’t know anything about archeology, but I’m not stupid.”

  “All right then. So, the cuneiform writing has been known since the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t properly translated until 1913, when Aaron Bartonin, in his book—”

  “Doc, excuse me for interrupting, but you just said this kind of writing had never been found before.”

  “In America, Ulysses, It’s never been found in America.”

  “You mean to tell me… this writing comes from someplace else?”

  The old professor of Medieval History smiled broadly.

  “Exactly, my friend. Cuneiform writing is the oldest kind ever to be discovered. Until today, it had only ever been found in archeological digs in ancient Sumer.”

  It was hard for me to believe what I was hearing. Although ancient history certainly was not my forte, I did remember that the Sumerian civilization had emerged and disappeared a long time ago by the banks of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Precisely where Iraq is today.

  “Are you talking about Sumer, in Mesopotamia?” I asked in astonishment. “In the Middle East?”

  “There was no other, as far as I know.”

  “But that was a long time ago, right?”

  The professor looked at Cassie and invited her with a gesture to continue.

  “The dates are approximate,” she said. “But the oldest cuneiform texts found until today were written more than five thousand years ago. A period much older”—her pupils dilated with sheer joy—“than any American civilization we know about.”

  “Although when, my friend,” the professor said as he put his hand on my shoulder, “is not the most important question.”

  I immediately realized what he meant. “The question is how,” I said.

  He smiled looking pleased, like a teacher when a student answers correctly. “Exactly. How could a type of writing that was used on the other side of the world, thousands of years before Columbus set foot on this continent, manage to make its way over here?” He breathed deep and turned to look once again at those incomprehensible symbols. “That is the question.”

  39

  The torches did not last much longer that night. So, without either a light or anywhere to hang our hammocks, we ended up sleeping on the hard floor. Iak, still uneasy about the place, refused to come into the creepy chamber and slept outside, at the entrance.

  It was a long uncomfortable night. In spite of the sultry weather, the stone floor was cold as well as hard, so that in the dampness of the night I woke up sneezing several times. I prayed for daylight and warmth.

  In the end, though, it was not the morning light that woke me up but a strange monotonous chanting coming from outside. The chamber was lit by the ghostly orange light that announced dawn.

  I rubbed my eyes as I got to my feet, my body aching from the granite hardness of the bed. I stepped toward the entrance, intrigued by the strange litany.

  Once at the threshold I rubbed my eyes again, blinded by the incandescent orb of the sun climbing the eastern sky. I pressed my lids tight in an attempt to get rid of the fogginess of sleep.

  I stretched my arms, leaned back and yawned loud… and I was petrified. Just like a Christ with mouth agape.

  To my right Iak was kneeling, facing the rising sun, on a corner of the ledge which bordered the great stone chamber. With raised hands he was bowing in praise as he fervently intoned the weird chant that had woken me up.

  But that was not at all what had astonished me.

  From my privileged lookout over the sea of rainforest which spread in all directions to the horizon, I saw for the first time something I knew to be extraordinary, even though I knew nothing about it.

  A multitude of ruined buildings were scattered at my feet. Although veiled by the mantle of vegetation, they were still recognizable. This must once have been a metropolis full of temples, monuments, and palaces, perhaps as magnificent as Babylon or Angkor Wat.

  What we had glimpsed at ground level the previous afternoon was only a fraction of the total number of buildings whose presence could be guessed at, and which in places could be seen through the trees. The dark gray of the stone was clearly visible in those areas where the vegetation was thinner. Simply counting the ones in the vicinity of the pyramid, it was easy to guess there would be dozens more scattered in the surroundings.

  A few more obelisks like the one we had seen when we arrived stood here and there. Some were bigger or more solid than others. There were even some still standing upright, showing how proudly they had withstood the passage of time.

  The most impressive in that city of ruins were, without a doubt, the fabulous pyramids.

  From my position I could see about ten of them. Some were triangular with a wide base, rising at an obtuse angle. Others were tiered, like the one we were on, and still others simply consisted of huge square blocks, each one smaller than the one below, placed on top of each other.

  While I was still absorbed in that fantastic vision, I heard tired dragging footsteps that came to a stop beside me.

  “Oh, my God!” the professor said.

  A few minutes later, while the Menkragnoti went on with his prayers, the three of us were contemplating the incredible landscape that spread out before us. The professor and Cassie had barely recovered from their initial astonishment. They pointed right and left, assigning origins and architectural styles to everything they saw. This turret was similar to a Maya one in Yucatán. Those three tiered pyramids were more like Mesopotamian ziggurats, and the obelisks were like the ones from ancient Egypt…

  It seemed pretty clear to me that I had to put a stop to the debate. Otherwise, with the two of them discussing architectural design and Iak greeting the morning sun, we would be there till Christmas!

  “I’m hungry,” I said interrupting them. They did not pay me the slightest attention.

  I heaved a noisy sigh, but they did not even deign to look at me.

  Instead, Cassie took my arm and pointed at the spot where we had come through into the city.

  “It’s a wall!” she cried.

  “What?”

  “A wall, Ulysses!” she insisted. “What we came through yesterday to get into the city was just an entrance in a wall, hidden by vegetation. Look carefully.”

  Reluctantly, I followed the direction of her pointing finger. Sure enough, I saw what looked like a high solid wall. Not only did it rise perpendicularly to the causeway but it continued further into the city. If you followed its outline, it was obvious that it surrounded the city completely, like a Great Wall of China hidden under the luxuriant greenery of Amazonia.

  “All right,” I said impatiently. “Granted, all this is very interesting. But I’m afraid you’re forgetting the most important thing.”

  The professor and Cassie exchanged doubtful looks.

  “What do you mean?” the professor asked and looked at the horizon over the rim of his glasses, as if the answer were somewhere in the distance. “Is there something I still haven’t seen?”

  “I can’t believe it… Your daughter!” I said pointing at the jungle awaiting us below. “We’ve come looking for your daughter!”

  Carrying our few belongings (which consisted of the remains of the rain jacket, Iak’s hunting gea
r, and the small red backpack with a couple of items of clothing in it), we began the descent from the pyramid, clambering down the steps like babies from a high chair.

  When we reached ground level we were sweating from the effort. The professor’s landing was undignified, which caused him some bruising and made me suppress my amusement. Straight away, I realized that something had changed.

  “Hmm, this is weird,” I said almost to myself as I put my foot on the ground and lifted it several times.

  Beside me, Cassandra gave me a strange look.

  “It’s called a footprint,” she said rather scornfully. “But it’s of no value unless it’s on the Moon.”

  “Thank you so much for your input,” I replied with a fake smile, “but take a look at this.”

  “I can see it. It’s the print of your boot in the mud,” she said with exasperation.

  “Can’t you see? Look what happens!” I sank my hand in the mud with all my weight on it and then took it out. “It fills with water!”

  She looked at me as if I were claiming to have invented onion soup.

  “Híjole, Ulysses. Have you forgotten yesterday’s deluge? It follows that the ground is soaked.”

  “It would follow if late yesterday it’d been like this, but it wasn’t. After the deluge the ground was damp.” I waved my arm at it. “Today there are puddles everywhere.”

  “So what?”

  At that moment the professor approached to see what we were arguing about. I explained my discovery, and unlike Cassie, his reaction was anything but careless.

  “Damn!” he said, running his hand through his scant hair. “It’s happening already.”

  “What’s happening?” Cassie asked suspiciously. “Will you please tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  “Have you forgotten about the dam they’ve built upriver?” I said. “The forest is beginning to flood!”