This is a chapter of the novel Earth’s Embrace by Space Cadet Michael. In this novel, the little and the lost becomes the fulfilled and the found - It is a novel of jungle adventure, artificial intelligence, and the answer to what happened to Percy Fawcett. See the full chapter list here.
Previously, we were introduced to the Amazonian scientist named Greg as a person who helped the narrator in a time of need.
-Greg-
Greg lets the cool air chill him because he knows he will not be this cool again for weeks. His thin expedition shirt does little to block the relentless wind, but it is a welcome change from the hot, stagnant air under the trees. He sits in the back of his expedition’s lead boat watching the tangled jungle pass by on either side, keeping an eye out for the river inlet on their left that marks where they will alight and continue on foot into the jungle. His two support boats with a cook, porters and equipment, follow close behind.
Somewhere deep in that jungle is an enormous ancient city. Many people have tried to find it, all have failed. Some call it El Dorado, city of gold, named that because it might hold vast riches taken by the dying Incan Empire in their last escape from the Spanish Conquistadors. But Greg is not looking for treasure, he seeks another kind of glory, recognition as the scientist who has found proof of an ancient truth.
Greg Townsend is a recently hired global ecologist at the Carnegie Institute for Science, one of the world’s premier research institutions. It is his dream job, way better than being a professor at a university. He has no classes to teach, no students to get in the way of his important work studying the role of the ancient Amazonian peoples on the ecological history of the Amazon rainforest. Greg hypothesizes that large advanced civilizations, as powerful and learned as the ancient Egyptians, Mayans or Aztecs, once lived in the Amazon basin, and he seeks to study their effects on the ancient ecosystem to teach modernity how to live in concert with the biodiversity of the rainforest. A worthwhile cause.
Modern science knows people can live in the Amazon, but for most in the civilized world, life in the jungle as we’ve seen it has seemed incompatible with large civilizations. The soil is poor, preventing mass agriculture, and the land is dangerous and poor in the metals required for industry. But it wasn’t always like this. Despite the Amazon’s poor sandy soil, large tracts of land have been found to have rich, developed soil. Not only are these regions of soil perfect for farming, they could only have been made by intensive, human, farming, over generations. Where now there is untamed jungle, once there were generations upon generations of people working the land. Enough people that they must have had cities and technologies that rivaled the other great civilizations of the last few thousand years. At least that is the theory.
But without ruins, without an archeological record of people and their buildings, this ancient civilization has been relegated to conjecture and hearsay. Reports of millions of people along the river banks from Gaspar de Carvajal who rode the rivers in the 1540s, before Spanish disease had a chance to spread through the population like wind-whipped wildfire, suggest that there was a large and advanced society here, but they are dismissed as exaggerated fantasy. Gaspar de Carvajal spoke of finely detailed enamel pottery and lords who could field armies of fifty thousand soldiers. He also spoke of cultures closer to the mountains who made their bowls of gold and silver.
Greg is fairly certain he has finally found archeological evidence of these cultures. Five years of work developing a new method of imaging spectroscopy has brought him to the verge of walking into one of these ancient cities. Most of those years were spent collecting samples from the rainforest to measure their reflected spectra in his lab. Once he’d built up a large enough database, it was a simple matter of convolving the spectral readings of the samples they’d collected with various fractional abundance based on their in-situ locations and coming up with a simulated satellite signal. Comparing this convolved in-situ measurement with the actual satellite measurements Greg found that they matched quite closely. In fact, permuting the fractional abundance with literature weights for this region using the standard Monte Carlo method showed him that they are comparable with 98% confidence. This makes him able to interpret satellite measurements of the Amazon jungle with higher accuracy than anyone on the planet.
But the real breakthroughs came in the last two years, after he was hired into his current position and able to afford two critical post docs. They made a program to automatically correlate the simulated satellite measurements with certain trace chemical markers that only show up in the leaves of trees growing out of certain types of rock. They then scoured thousands of satellite images to look for trees growing in these certain rocks and an interesting pattern emerged. In satellite images that to the naked eye just looked like a uniform sea of jungle canopy, they found large groves of trees in strange geometrical patterns growing out of a type of rock that should only be found miles away in the exposed rock of the Andes. The largest of these sites, the size of a very large city, is just a day’s boat ride and five day hike away.
Just six days until he becomes a scientific superstar.
Unfortunately for Greg, even though he has made the discovery, he has competition. A Norwegian team has replicated his published results and they are far better funded. They are using state of the art Japanese robots to carry their gear, have used helicopters instead of boats, and are expected to reach the site in four days.
“Look, a capybara!” A post doc sitting ahead in the boat shouts. He is a short, dark haired young man with a thick, closely trimmed beard that grows in full overnight, and large, black-rimmed glasses. He clumsily points his enormous Canon L-series telephoto lens at the wildlife. “It has a baby with it!”
“Hey! Andrew! I told you to leave that back at base.” Greg yells above the motor and the wind, bristling with anger. He leans forward and rips the camera out of Andrew’s grasp, but the cord is still stuck around his neck.
“Woah, woah, woah.” The other post doc grabs the camera strap to take some pressure off Andrew’s neck but Greg keeps pulling it taught. “Children, children!” Her name is Kristy. She is tall and has dark skin, and a thick head of curly black hair that poofs out and stops at her shoulders. She is not used to acting like a mother to grown men, though Greg has noticed that she has assumed that role more than once on this trip so far.
This is not a birdwatching tour Andrew.” Greg yells, taking one hand off the camera to try to unfasten the strap. ”I told you it’s too heavy to bring!”
“It’s ... not .. a ... burden ... if ... I ... carry ... it!” Andrew hollers between getting throttled backwards by the strap around his neck and trying to turn around in his chair and grab the camera. He turns around in his seat and grabs for the camera just as Greg unfastens it from the strap and lurches back into his seat, tossing the camera into the river in one smooth motion.
Andrew and Kristy sit staring at Greg in shocked silence.
Greg sits back in his chair and says nothing, halted by a vague feeling that any words that might come out at this moment would do more harm than good.
Andrew turns back around, folds his arms, and stares straight ahead. He is not cajoled into any kind of reaction by Kristy’s repeatedly pointing out birds until about half an hour later. They see a toucan perched on a branch high above the bank and, as Andrew stares in awe, Kristy hands him her small point-and-shoot camera.
“I won’t let you ruin this Greg.” Andrew says as he snaps photos. “That is a real live toucan!”
“Look, Andrew.” Greg leans forward and puts his hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “It’s a shame about your camera, but you’ve never been out here before. I need you to follow orders out here. You don’t appreciate what little margin for error we have.”
No sooner have the words left Greg’s lips than a sickening crack of splintering wood explodes from just behind them as their boat lurches backward from under them.
Next to Greg, his guide, Reeto, had been expertly piloting the boat with one hand on the obnoxiously loud outboard motor’s control rod. Greg turns to see Reeto wrestling with the outboard motor for a split second before it twists from his grip and drops into the murky water. The fuel line goes taught, straining to keep the motor attached to the boat.
Greg has thrown his hat to the deck and is diving towards the motor before he can think. His hand is around the fuel line just before it wrenches free from the boat. He clamps his eyes shut and holds on tight, kicking hard after the motor.
It is not deep and Greg soon feels slack in the hose before his free hand smacks into the rocky bottom. The swift current pulls him past the motor, his grip on the hose wrenches him about face. He follows the short length of rubber hose upstream to the engine, grabs the engine tight and places each foot on the river bottom. He lifts the engine just off the floor but he has misjudged the force of the water on him and he tumbles backward.
Fortunately he’d kept a hard grip on the fuel line. He reels himself into the engine a second time and tries again. This time standing with one foot downstream to steady himself, and he pushes off from the floor and leans into the current. He kicks hard but the weight of the motor pulls him straight back down to the bottom.
He is starting to feel his lungs aching for air. He doesn’t have much more time.
He shifts the motor to one arm, making sure to keep the sharp propeller clear of his legs, cradles the motor over his hip and stands tall, lifting one hand as high as he can. He feels the turbulence of his fingers just breaking clear of the water as the current sweeps him off his feet.
But he is ready. He kicks, his hand breaks free of the water, then he sinks, hits the ground, pushes hard, kicks, breaks free of the water, sinks. And again, and again.
With no other options coming to mind, he keeps bouncing down the river with one arm outstretched like some strange statue of liberty. Waiting, hoping Reeto will see his hand and pull him up.
His lungs burn. He holds his breath. With every bounce Greg imagines screaming a new obscenity at Reeto and his stupid equipment that is going to kill the expedition.
But nothing is going to kill this expedition. Not broken motors or lack of air. Greg steels his diaphragm and his grip on the motor. And he pushes, and kicks, and falls. And pushes and kicks and...
A strong hand grabs his, and tugs. Greg kicks hard. When his head breaks the water he hears shouting, cheering. He passes up the motor, then uses that hand to wipe the water from his face before opening his eyes and letting his lungs heave for oxygen. Reeto still clasps Greg’s hand as he hangs, catching his breath.
He grabs the boat, lets go of Reeto’s hand and pulls himself up onto the boat. Just a half second later he grabs Reeto by the shirt and pulls him an inch from his face.
“You said you upgraded the motors!” He screams so loud he sprays Reeto with some of the water still running down his face.
“I did. The motor is brand new.” Reeto’s characteristic wide grin disappeared. “But the boat, you remember I told you the boats were old. Too expensive to replace, you said.”
Greg yells aloud an angry noise as he releases Reeto and turns away from him. Years of work, wasted because their engine falls off like it is some sort of jalopy. He’d paid good money to get Reeto and the boats, they shouldn’t have been falling apart.
What will they do, go back and try again next year? He doesn’t have funds to do this again. He doesn’t have the time to go back.
Greg motions at the motor sitting in a watery puddle of broken dreams on the wooden deck. “Can you fix it?”
Reeto’s grin returns as he adjusts his shirt. He bows low with his arms out to the sides and says:
“It’s as good as done.” Reeto looks to the porter holding them steady with a long wooden pole sunk into the muddy river bed and points to the shore. The porter expertly poles them to shore and the team get to work.
Unfortunately for Greg, it turns out that the motor is as good as done. Too much water has entered the combustion chamber, and despite spending hours on the shore cranking and cranking the engine, trying to clear it of water, they can’t get it to run more than a few seconds before it putters out.
The sun is falling lower in the sky when Greg finally, resigns to his new reality, orders the team to transfer their equipment from the damaged boat into the two other boats and they continue on, heavier, slower. Barring any horrible equipment failures, the Norwegians are going to beat them to the site by more than three days. There is nothing to do but keep on and hope things aren’t easy for the Norwegians either.
They slowly make their way up the river for two more days, stopping during the day only to use nature’s Water Closet (as Reeto calls them, a sand bank with men going to the left and the one woman going to the right), and stopping each evening to make camp. Just before noon on the third day, as the sun beats down relentlessly from unusual blue skies, the river bends around a hill and a tributary comes into view. The tributary has traveled far from the towering Andes mountains behind it. Its muddy water runs out into the clearer water of the main river, its untold secrets brought to light in the clearer water. Though they can’t see the mountains for the trees, they can feel their presence, inferred from occasional glimpses when a long section of river has happened to point that way.
Andrew is studying their GPS unit. “This is as close as the river gets.”
“That’s us then,” Reeto points to an opening in the riverside shrubs just past a muddy tributary feeding into their much clearer river. An animal trail disappeared into the trees.
“Oo, this is so cool!” From the boat Andrew has seen a capybara and its babies, caymans, tortoises, dolphins, egrets and a toucan. He’s been wildly excited about all of them, taking photos and pointing them all out loudly to Kristy. “I can’t believe we saw a tapir!” The tapir flicked some sort of switch in his mind and he’s not stopped talking about it.
Not getting any response he leans over to Kristy, “A tapir!”
“Imagine what we might see on foot.” Kristy is humoring him, although she is certainly interested too.
Andrew responds with wide eyes and raised eyebrows and a look of “OMFG this is so cool!” Greg has never been that excited about anything in his entire life. He kind of resents Andrew for it. But Andrew does good work, so Greg puts up with it.
They disembark on a plank that keeps them out of the squelching mud of the river’s edge. Greg and Kristy inventory the gear coming off the boat and Andrew fiddles with their GPS, saving the coordinates of their landing site.
Reeto and the porters tie a rope to the front of each of the boats in turn, hauling them out of the water and stowing them in the shrubs out of sight of the river.
“Let’s see the GPS Andrew.” Andrew hands it to Greg. Greg looks it over and then calls to Reeto. “We ready?”
“Yes sir.”
So Greg takes the old animal path into the jungle, machete in hand. Andrew follows in single file, then Kristy, the four porters, and Reeto brings up the rear. They keep a good pace, since animals like tapirs or hogs have cleared a path to knee height. But it is mostly too overgrown for a person to pass and Greg hacks almost continuously since this is not the kind of jungle in which you really want to be rubbing up against plants.
Two words: bullet ants. They crawl on leaves and simply brushing by some leaves can land one of these ants on your arm or down your shirt. It’s called the bullet ant because it is about the size of a 20mm bullet, or perhaps it's called that because its bite feels more like being shot by a bullet than being bit by an ant. It’s not that Greg is afraid of the ants, he can deal with the pain, it is just such an inconvenience being able to think of nothing but the searing pain for twelve hours that he avoids them like the plague.
Minutes turn to hours. They camp and begin again in the morning. Day after day Greg hacks along feeling like a sweaty automaton that is high on life. Step, slash, step, step, slash. Endorphins. His hand is raw from hacking the jungle, and his feet are raw from carrying a heavy pack for days. Every step and slash is an exertion of will. The more he has to struggle the more alive he feels.
The monotony is broken only by the occasional break to remove a red bandana from his pocket and dab his body’s attempts to survive the oppressive heat before it trickles into his eyes and blurs his vision.
A racket far above them makes many of them look up. Monkeys swing from tree to tree, paying the visitors only a passing glance as they make their way past to wherever they are going. “A whole family of Tamarins!” Andrew says aloud, stopping and unbuckling his pack, meaning to lower it and pull out Kirsty’s camera that she has let him keep.
Greg expected Andrew’s excitement to taper off after a few days. Much to his chagrin, it has not. “We’re not stopping for you to be a tourist Andrew, come on.”
Andrew rebuckles his pack and keeps walking, but keeps his eyes fixed upwards at the canopy above. “There’s so much going on up there, I can't see a single inch of sky!” The canopy above is so dense that no sunlight reaches the ground. Dozens of different looking vines crisscross, and trees of various heights mean you cannot not see far in any direction. “So beautiful, oh!”
Greg hears Andrew stumble behind him, recover, and keep walking. “Watch where you are going Andrew. If you twist your ankle I won’t carry you out.”
They continue on for a few hours. Along the way they see many interesting animals and bugs. A butterfly with transparent windows in its wings, wild cacao pods, a tree with razor sharp thorns, and a tarantula’s nest. Andrew calls each of them out loudly in glorious appreciation. Greg is able to keep Andrew from stopping at all except one, that their expedition takes a moment to appreciate all together: a tree that provided shelter for ants in a network of tunnels and chambers it grows in its trunk. One can notice these trees because in return for shelter, the ants kill any plants that try to grow near it and keep a perfect circle of ground around it clear of any single piece of debris, down to the bare dirt. In a jungle floor covered in leaf litter, plants, twigs and all sorts of things, the circle of bare dirt stands out.
Then they come across their first buttress roots. “Oh wow!” Greg hears Andrew from right behind him. “Those are huge!”
The giant buttress roots of the kapok tree spread out from the central trunk like gnarled solid wood walls, each root standing more than twenty feet high. Greg makes his way around them. He’s passed one, two and three before a flash of dark movement at the base of the tree catches his eye. He turns to see a black Jaguar standing over a large gray bulk of a fresh kill. It is hemmed into a canyon of tree roots and scowles at the intruding people.
Greg stops still and holds up his arm with a fist to tell those behind him to do the same. Andrew does not notice in time and barrels straight into Greg. Greg stumbles and catches himself but Andrew falls forward under the weight of his pack and sprawls spread-eagle completely blocking the only escape for the Jaguar.
The Jaguar is even more upset by this and jumps up the back wall frantically clawing into the hardwood and bounding from one side to the other. But it finds no foothold and ends up back on the ground between its kill and the people. Its back is arched, its tail is low. Greg is no big cat expert but he knows when he is being threatened.
Greg crouches slowly forward, “get up very slowly Andrew. Face it, good. Now back up towards me. Slowly.” Andrew does as he is bid and soon there is some space for the Jaguar to escape. Greg and Andrew back away together out of sight of the Jaguar and turn around to face the curious faces of Reeto and the rest of the crew.
“What was it?” Reeto whispers.
“Jaguar. We’ll find another way.” Greg says and so they backtrack and then hack a way off the animal trail, keeping a wide arc away from the kapok tree and the Jaguar.
“A black Jaguar!” Andrew blurts out in excitement, apparently unphased from his near death experience.
They hike some time before Andrew says, “Did you know the jaguar is unusual among big cats in that its jaws are so powerful it likes to kill by crushing the skull with a single bite?”
Greg stops and turns around, “Andrew.”
“Yeah”
“Can you do a bit more paying attention and a bit less commentary? You were lucky back there.”
“Yeah, OK. Sorry.”
They continue on, the only talking coming from the back of their party where there is a lot of muttering from the porters in Spanish interspersed with much louder Spanish from Reeto trying to calm them down.
“What are the porters going on about?” Andrew asks Greg in a low voice after sulking quietly for a while.
“They’re just being superstitious.”
“Superstitious!? About what? The Jaguar?”
“Yes. The Hioso-Inon. Did you not read any of the material I gave you? It was in Roe’s text.”
“I must have missed that part.”
“It is a mythical creature, a kind of guardian of the underworld. It likes to take people out of this world and down into the dark caves where it lives.”
“Hmm, well I bet they don’t literally believe that is going to happen.”
“They do rationally know it won’t happen, but it’s still a bad omen for us. We disturbed it, cornered it while it was feasting a fresh kill. They want us to go back and kill it. If we don’t, they say it will return and take revenge. Kind of like a curse on our expedition.”
“That is poppycock.”
“Maybe not entirely,” Kristy has been listening and catches up to join the hushed conversation. “I read a paper by Grotskov that theorized that these myths often result from some sort of truth and can serve as a warning to others to keep safe. He was able to trace three different Brother’s Grimm tales to verifiable happenings.”
“There aren’t mythical jaguars now and there never were.” Andrew says matter-of-factly.
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