Cassandra opened her eyes wide as she finally understood.
“But that wasn’t meant to happen till a week from now!” she cried. She turned to the professor. “That’s what you said!”
He raised his hands defensively. “Wait a minute. I know I said it could be weeks before it happened, but that was only a guess. If it’s been raining harder than usual at the head of the river, hundreds of miles away from here… well, it could all get under way a lot faster.”
“How much faster?”
Without answering the question, Professor Castillo looked back at the stone causeway that had brought us here. He took a deep breath and without looking back walked swiftly away .
“Very fast…” I heard him mutter. “Too fast…”
Shortly after that, we became aware of the oppressive quiet that enveloped the place. Only the occasional buzz of an insect mingled with the rumor of our footsteps on the dead leaves which covered the causeway like a carpet. We walked warily, like astronauts stepping on a new world. On both sides of the way, the fallen remains of the buildings we had seen from the top of the pyramid could be seen, or sometimes just guessed at, through the foliage that wrapped around them.
There were mostly heaped-up remains of what perhaps had once been proud buildings but which now looked like so many gigantic Lego pieces a child had scattered around. Now and then part of one of the structures was still standing, sticking out through the leaves and branches, revealing solid rounded columns or lintels carved with that variegated cuneiform writing I found so hard to believe that anyone had ever deciphered.
It was a ghost city we were wandering through like scared lost children, trying to imagine what this place must have been like when its streets buzzed and bustled and the buildings of huge polished granite blocks reflected the light of the equatorial sun.
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I whispered, deeply moved.
Cassandra walked in front of me, looking everywhere with wonder in her eyes.
Without turning she also whispered, “The word amazing doesn’t even begin to describe all this.”
“I agree,” the professor muttered, also absorbed in the grandeur that surrounded us. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“Only one?” I said, amused.
“Of course not.” He smiled shyly. “I mean why hasn’t any satellite or plane been able to see all this from above? With Google Maps I can see my own car parked in the street on my computer screen. And yet nobody seems to have noticed this immense archeological site, several miles across. It’s unfathomable.”
“Not really,” Cassie said. “Think of the resolution satellites need to pick out a street in Barcelona. It’s not the same as what you’d use to photograph an area of rainforest, where no one’s expecting to find anything special.”
“Besides,” I said as I pointed at the nearest building, “from the point of view of a satellite, this place is virtually invisible because of the foliage.”
“And planes?” the professor insisted. “You wouldn’t see anything from a plane either?”
“Same thing. It would be very difficult to see from the air, even if you were looking for it thoroughly and flying as low as possible. Even the tallest pyramids donn’t stick out beyond the trees. And because they’re totally covered by vegetation, no one would know they were here even if they crashed into one.”
“I see.” He nodded and then looked around the remains of that lost city and muttered, “But still…”
Two hundred yards further on, beside the right-hand edge of the causeway, the dignified remains of a few powerful columns rose amid a tangle of lianas. They held up a roof that was no more, as if the entire weight of the sky were resting on them.
“This must’ve been a huge temple,” the professor said dreamily, as he caressed the stone.
The columns were around ten feet wide. There was barely space between them because of the lianas and ivy that stuck to them, but Cassandra managed to open a narrow passage with the machete. After the first row we discovered a whole forest of stone columns extending further than the eye could see. Many of them were intact, standing in close formation twelve or even fifteen feet tall.
I let out a long whistle. “This is ridiculous!” I said. “I bet those ancient men had very small dicks.”
“They were a touch megalomaniac, sure,” Cassie said.
“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged,” the professor said from behind.
I smiled. “Are you going to go all biblical again, Doc?”
“Save your scorn. What I mean to say is that we can’t judge a civilization that may have been extinct for centuries by twenty-first century values.”
“Well, I’ve got to allow you that,” Cassie said.
“Okay,” I conceded. “But just look around you. From any point of view, this city was built on a totally excessive scale. It’s as if instead of being built for men to live in, it was all to glorify their kings, gods, or whatever.”
“The truth is, it’s perfectly normal for men to build to beg favors from the all-powerful. Whether they’re smoke or flesh and bones,” the professor said.
“Or to beg their forgiveness.” Cassandra cleared her throat.
I turned to her, puzzled by her comment, when a distant yell from Iak broke the silence of the jungle.
We ran out of the forest of columns, splashing in the puddles with our rubber boots, in the direction of the Menkragnoti’s cry. My heart was beating wildly in my chest. Fearing something terrible must have happened I passed through the thicket like a possessed spirit as I imagined a dying Iak, after a viper’s attack.
Cassie was right behind me. “Iak!” she called, “Iak! Where are you?”
There was no answer, but a moment later we arrived in the clearing and saw the indigenous man. He was crouching down with his back to us, but obviously quite calm and far from dying in agony.
“Fuck!” I gasped. “You scared the shit out of me! I thought you were dying!”
“What’s the matter, Iak?” Cassandra asked, panting.
He turned around, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
“Iak not want to worry you,” he said apologetically, “but you look here.” He pointed at the ground in front of him.
Cassie and I looked closer out of curiosity, as the professor caught up with us. He stood there in the middle of the clearing with his hands on his knees, gasping like a fish out of water.
“What…?” That was all he could say as he tried to regain his breath. “What on earth… happened?”
I was already beside Iak, looking at what he was looking at. I motioned my friend to join us and said,
“I think you’ll be interested in this, Doc.”
40
The print of a boot was clearly marked, sunk in the mud, surrounded by dead leaves.
“It’s a footprint!” the professor exclaimed. “A recent footprint!”
“That’s what it looks like.” I turned to Iak. “How old do you think it is?”
He rubbed his chin as he thought.
“Everything wet. Rain a lot.” And like a bad TV detective, he concluded, “Iak not know. Can be one day or one week.”
“It has to be them!” The professor was euphoric. “Which way do you think they’ve gone?”
The Menkragnoti stood up and took a few steps forward. He moved some leaves with his toes, then pointed ahead, in the opposite direction to the one we had come from.
Without thinking twice, the professor grabbed the machete from my hands and headed in the direction of our guide’s pointing finger. He slashed at a liana that was in his way and disappeared into the thicket without looking back.
Cassie and I exchanged looks of surprise at this sudden burst of energy from the historian. Then his head emerged from the bushes, eyebrows raised in a sign of impatience.
“For heaven’s sake! What on earth are you waiting for?”
We followed Iak,
who scrutinized the ground for more footprints as he went. We walked on our tiptoes behind him as if the slightest noise could erase the prints or distract our tracker. The professor was clearly restless, treading only a couple of feet behind the Menkragnoti. Each time that Iak stopped to look at something, his head would look over the native’s shoulder to check what he had found.
Our guide’s steps seemed to be sure as he followed signs that were invisible to us. The ground was mostly covered by a thin film of water.
At last he stopped in front of a great ceiba tree, then circled around the thick trunk, which must have been ten feet across, and returned to us. As he stood in front of the professor he said, “No more prints.”
“What do you mean, no more prints?” the professor asked distrustfully. He looked around. “Are you sure? Have you looked well?”
Iak shook his head. “I look very well. No more prints.”
“But that’s impossible!” the professor insisted. He crouched down on the mud as if he were looking for a lost contact lens. “They must have faded, but if we look carefully we might just—”
“Professor.”
“What?” he said as he raised his head.
“You’re wasting your time. If Iak says there are no more prints, there are no more prints.”
“I don’t give a damn! I’m not going to stop following the tracks of someone who might well be my daughter just because—”
“You didn’t understand me, Doc. I didn’t say we’d lost the track, only that there are no more prints and that you’re wasting your time looking for them.”
“What are you saying? I don’t understand what you—”
In answer, I lifted my chin and stared at the imposing tree that rose in front of us, losing itself amid the roof of branches, leaves, and lianas that formed the canopy of the forest.
He pointed upward. “Do you think that—”
“Can you think of any other explanation?”
“Hmm… well… dunno,” he mumbled looking up at the lowest branches of the tree, which were about sixty feet above us. “It seems to me rather complicated, you know… that someone would… want to climb up there. I don’t see how they could.”
“I could,” Cassie said looking up, covering her eyes with her hand against the light.
We all looked at the petite Mexican in surprise.
“Stop looking like idiots!” she scolded. “At my parents’ house in Acapulco there were lots of trees and I loved climbing them. I was pretty good, too.”
“I’d never doubt it for a moment,” I said. “But surely they weren’t ceibas a hundred feet tall, and… well, you’re not twelve anymore, are you?”
“Are you saying I’m old?”
“Of course not, Cassie, please. It’s just that… Well, I didn’t say anything.”
“Chale, then there’s nothing more to talk about.”
“But, how are you going to do it?” the professor asked, intrigued, as he passed his hand over the surface of the tree. “The trunk is too smooth. I don’t see where you can get a hold.”
Cassie gave us one of her mischievous smiles. Then, stretching her arms up, she grabbed one of the lianas that hung from the lowest branches high above our heads.
“Who said anything about using the trunk?”
Watching her climb up the liana, using feet and hands without any apparent effort, I could not help but feel proud and also—why not admit it—rather nostalgic, to think that I had held that wonderful woman in my arms.
“How’s it going?” the professor asked, using his hands as a megaphone.
Cassandra looked down. She was red in the face. “It’s the most fun I’ve had in a long time!”
“Well, be careful, anyway,” I said. I knew a fall from that height would be fatal.
“Don’t worry! This is safer than—”
Suddenly the liana gave with a dull crack and Cassandra fell headlong toward the ground with a cry of panic.
There was no time to react. The professor stifled a cry, and I jumped forward instinctively in an absurd attempt to break her fall.
For a fraction of a second the world seemed to stop.
And in fact it did stop.
Inexplicably, Cassandra was hanging upside down with her arms dangling loose, forty feet above the ground.
To add insult to injury, she looked at me, smiled, and burst out laughing.
It took me a while to understand what seemed to be a miraculous piece of levitation.
The damn girl had wrapped her legs around the liana like a circus artist, then let go of her handhold deliberately, just to scare the living daylights out of us.
“You… monster!” I said with my arms still stretched out like an idiot.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again, do you hear me!” said the professor, who was as white as a ghost.
The Menkragnoti, though, seemed to find the trick funny, and he giggled uncharacteristically.
“Pucha, you have no sense of humor,” Cassandra complained. Showing her abdominal muscles and great flexibility, she pulled herself up again. She grabbed the liana and went on with her climb.
After an eternity of five minutes, she scrambled up the lowest branches of the ceiba and sat astride one of them. She looked around, then stood up on the branch without a sign of vertigo. She then walked along the branch to its base—it was practically horizontal, and thick as a beam—where it thickened to several feet wide as it joined the trunk.
“Someone’s been up here!” she cried. “There’s the wrapping of an energy bar, and I’d say…”
“What?” the professor asked impatiently.
“I’d say that whoever it was spent the night up here. There’s some sort of nest made of branches and leaves.” She thought for a moment and added, “Like the ones gorillas make.”
“There aren’t any gorillas here, Cassie,” I reminded her.
“I know, dumbo. I said like. This was made by someone who climbed up here to sleep.”
“It doesn’t seem to make much sense…” the professor said. “Particularly with all the buildings nearby where you could shelter from the rain.”
“That I couldn’t say,” she said from up there. “I’m only describing what I’m seeing. I’m sure someone has been up here, and just a few days ago because the cut leaves are still green.”
“Good observation.”
“Thanks!”
There was something else that intrigued me even more.
“Cassie, do you think you could move on to another tree from this one?” I shouted up at her.
Her voice came down mockingly.
“Do you think I’m Tarzan of the Apes? Climbing up here is one thing. Hopping from branch to branch like a chimpanzee is something else entirely.”
“I’m not telling you to do it, only asking whether you think you’d be able to.”
She took a long look around and finally nodded.
“I guess I could,” she said, not sounding too convinced. “I mean, the branches are very close together. Why do you ask?”
“Well… there aren’t any footprints around this tree, so whoever it was might have come down another one.”
“That’s true,” the professor said thoughtfully. “But that would mean they could’ve gone in any direction and it would be impossible to follow their track.”
“Not necessarily,” I said as I looked up again. “Cassie, can you see anything else from where you are?”
“Trees.”
I sighed. “Okay, anything else?”
“Maybe, from higher up…”
Before I had a chance to protest, she was already climbing up to the next branch, and from there to the next, until she was lost in the foliage of that dark green canopy.
A few minutes went by without any sound from her. At last the professor felt obliged to call her with a shout.
“Cassandra! Are you all right?”
Silence.
“Cassie!” he repeated, louder still.
&n
bsp; Nothing.
“What if something’s happened to her?” he asked uneasily.
“Don’t worry. If she’d fallen from the tree we would’ve seen her, don’t you think?” I was joking but it was not funny.
Just then, from very high above, like a rumor from the tomb, her voice reached us.
“Hello! Can you hear me?”
“More or less!” I shouted back. “Did you go very high?”
“I’m at the pinche top of the tree! I think I can see my house from here!”
“Can you see anything… besides trees?” the professor asked.
“You bet!”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I yelled.
“Exactly that. I don’t know!”
The professor raised his voice to the limit. “Can you describe it?”
“I could…” She paused and then shouted back. “But I think it would be best if you saw for yourselves…”
41
When Cassandra climbed down from the tree, we followed her as she made her way through the thicket. In about half an hour we reached what she had seen from the tree.
Speechless with shock, we stopped at the edge of an enormous clearing, trying to make sense of what was in front of us.
In the middle of a curiously open area of that insatiable jungle there rose a huge rectangular building. It stood on a rise, partially hidden under a layer of soil and vegetation that must have accumulated over centuries. It was something over fifty feet tall, with the remains of four turrets above its corners. It was a colossal building without any decoration, as far as we could make out. It must originally have looked something like an upturned table, I thought.
The whole area surrounding the low hill where the building stood was totally devoid of trees, bushes, or even a single blade of grass; a mere fringe some eighty feet across scattered with forgotten stumps. Absolutely and ruthlessly barren, as if someone had poured tons of salt over the land with the intention of sterilizing it forever, just like some Amazonian Carthage.
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 17