Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

by Stuart Gibbs

  “Don’t push your luck, kiddo.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Dante. You need me a heck of a lot more than I need you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You just said I was better at finding all these things than you.”

  “I was telling you what you wanted to hear so that you’d help me out of that muck.” Dante gave Charlie a cocky smile. “Milana and I are perfectly capable of finding Paititi.”

  “Maybe so,” Charlie replied. “But you’ll still need me. Because Paititi wasn’t Darwin’s big discovery.”

  Dante’s smile faded. “You’re bluffing.”

  “I’m not. In fact, I know exactly what it was. And it’s something far more important than a lost city.”

  Dante stared at Charlie. To his frustration, it seemed that she was being honest. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you in a bit.” Charlie shifted her attention back to the pechado. “But first I need your help collecting something.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Because she couldn’t feel pain, Esmerelda had always been cautious where injuries were concerned. Any time she hurt herself, she went to the doctor to get checked out. She had been similarly protective of her brothers, always insisting that they look after their health, no matter how good they felt.

  But now they weren’t being cautious at all. Ivan Spetz hadn’t allowed them to be.

  She and her brothers had been badly injured in the fire Charlie Thorne had caused, but instead of going to a nice, sterile hospital for proper medical care, they had headed to one of the most dangerous places imaginable. There were probably a million ways their wounds could get infected out here in the Amazon basin, and if things took a bad turn for them, they were weeks from the closest doctor.

  And yet this time Esmerelda probably would have been taking those same risks even if Ivan Spetz hadn’t forced her into helping him.

  Ivan had presented himself pleasantly enough when he had first arrived at the refinery, offering to be partners in their quest for Darwin’s treasure. They each brought something to the table: Esmerelda and her brothers had knowledge, while Ivan had the funds. But Esmerelda didn’t trust Ivan one bit, and she was quite sure that he didn’t trust her or her brothers either. The man slept with a loaded gun holstered to his leg and a knife under his pillow. Plus, she had seen his true nature when he had intimidated the people at the kapok tree; that hadn’t been an idle threat. He was willing to burn down their resort and start hurting people to get what he wanted.

  But then, so was Esmerelda.

  She had sacrificed so much for Darwin’s treasure. So many years of her life. And now she had sacrificed her beauty as well. Her face was scarred forever, she was certain—thanks to Charlie Thorne. Not only was Esmerelda determined to find Darwin’s treasure, but she was going to make Charlie pay for what she had done.

  She just had to stay alive long enough to enjoy it.

  She was well aware that any normal person who had suffered the injuries that she had would have still been in excruciating pain, even now, well over a week after it had happened. She knew that her body had been weakened by the accident, whether she felt it or not, and thus her resistance to disease and infection was lower than normal. So, as she worked her way up the Anaconda River with Ivan and her brothers, she took every precaution possible for her health. She sterilized and redressed her burned skin every day. She carefully tended to every insect bite and scratch. She had looted the small infirmary at the eco-lodge and she was taking medication every few hours to preemptively fight off any infection she might develop.

  Still, the flooded forest was rife with dangers. Stinging insects swarmed. Piranhas abounded in the river. Venomous snakes lurked in the trees, while anacondas slithered through the shallow waters. The whole place was a death trap.

  All that kept Esmerelda going was the lure of Darwin’s treasure—and revenge.

  It helped to have Charlie and the others leading the way. They had left a path, unaware that Esmerelda was following them. For starters, there had been their speedboat, moored at the point where the river became impassable for it. But now, in the flooded forest, there were more subtle markers: a few snapped tree branches to mark the best route through a thicket, the ashes of a fire to indicate a decent place to camp for the night. Esmerelda wasn’t sure quite how far behind Charlie they were, but she felt they were making up time.

  Ivan, who was an adept tracker, seemed to agree.

  “This was made earlier today,” Ivan said, studying a footprint in the mud. It was nine days after they had found the kapok tree where Darwin’s code had been, and three since they had entered the flooded forest. The footprint was from a big, thick boot. The man’s. “It’s between six and eight hours old.”

  “We’re closing in on them,” Esmerelda observed.

  “Yes, but not quickly enough.” Ivan turned from the dry land on which he stood and considered both their canoes, which were moored in the shallow water and heavily laden with supplies. “We’re dragging too much weight. If we dumped everything but the necessities, we could make much better time.”

  “Everything we have is potentially a necessity,” Esmerelda argued. “We don’t know what else we might encounter. And we could be out here for another few weeks.”

  “Weeks?” Ivan asked.

  “We still might have a long way to go up this river.…”

  Ivan shook his head. “No. The terrain is changing. It’s subtle, but it’s happening. We’re getting near the end of the flooded forest.…”

  “That doesn’t mean our journey will be over.”

  “Darwin’s clue said we should follow the red river until we get to a place that looked like the Thames. That’s the river through London. Therefore, this city of stone must be on the water.”

  “We have no idea what Darwin meant by that,” Esmerelda cautioned. “We can’t be cavalier here. It might be quite a bit longer until we reach this city of stone. And once we get there, we’ll still have to get all the way back to civilization. That could take us twice as long.”

  “Twice as long?” Ivan repeated, curious.

  Esmerelda realized she had made a mistake and said too much. She had been thinking that it would take longer to return to civilization because their canoes would be even more loaded down. If they found Darwin’s treasure, they would be hauling plenty of it back with them. And, if all went according to her plan, there would only be three of them doing the work. Ivan Spetz would no longer be in the picture.

  However, she hadn’t let Ivan in on her theory that the city would be full of gold. And she certainly didn’t want him to know she was thinking about abandoning him out in the jungle.

  “It makes sense to err on the side of caution,” Esmerelda said, to cover her mistake. “A thousand things could go wrong out here. Any one of which could cause us a delay in getting back up the river.”

  Ivan suddenly burst into laughter. It was the first time Esmerelda had heard him laugh in all the days she had known him, and it was so sharp and loud that it startled her at first. “All this time, you’ve been thinking that we’ll be going back the way we came?” he asked. “No. I have something much more efficient planned for our return.”

  “What?” Esmerelda asked.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Ivan replied. “Now help me dump some of these supplies. We need to pick up our pace.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Charlie waited until she and Dante were back with Milana to explain her theory, so she wouldn’t have to say everything twice.

  It was nearing dusk. Milana had set up camp for the night, built a fire, and was already grilling two piranhas that she had caught. Each was the size, shape, and thickness of a small frisbee. She had run sharp sticks through their mouths, so they looked vaguely like piranha lollipops, and was roasting them over the flames.

  Charlie and Dante had each brought an armload of aguaje fruit, which Dante was peeling with a Buck knife.

  Charlie was holding a s
mall plastic container in which she had placed the bullet ant she had caught earlier. There were three other bullet ants in there with it, which she had been carefully collecting throughout the journey. She had put some leaves inside for the ants and was watching the new one carefully to see if it would eat.

  Insects were all around them, lured by the firelight. They were dying in the fire by the hundred, making tiny wet pops as they burned.

  “Darwin might have found a lost city, but that’s not what he would have been so excited about,” Charlie said. “His carving on the tortoise shell in the Galápagos said he had discovered the greatest treasure in human history.”

  Dante said, “If Paititi has a lot of gold in it, that would make sense.”

  “Darwin was a scientist, not a treasure hunter,” Charlie insisted. “Even if he found a thousand tons of gold, he wouldn’t consider that the greatest treasure in human history. For him, a great treasure would be a scientific discovery. A huge one. One that would change the world.”

  Milana suddenly looked up from the fire, understanding what Charlie meant. “No,” she said. “You don’t think…”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “I do.”

  “Hold on,” Dante said. “I’m lost here. What are both of you talking about? What did Darwin find?”

  “Evidence of evolution,” Charlie said.

  “He found evidence of evolution in the Galápagos,” Dante said dismissively. “After he came here. That’s what he based all his theories on.…”

  “That’s what he claimed he based all his theories on,” Charlie corrected. “But it makes sense that he might have found something here first—before he got to the Galápagos—something concrete that convinced him evolution existed.”

  “Concrete?” Dante echoed. “Like what?”

  “Like a missing link between apes and humans,” Charlie said.

  Dante and Milana both stared at her across the flames of the campfire, stunned by the very thought.

  “That’s not possible,” Dante said finally. “Humans evolved in Africa. That’s where all the fossil protohuman remains have been discovered. There’s no way there could be a missing link all the way over here, on the other side of the world.”

  “First of all, protohuman remains have been found in plenty of places around the world,” Charlie said. “Java man was discovered on a Pacific Island thousands of miles from Africa. Protohumans were extremely widespread.”

  “But they spread out after evolving from apes,” Dante argued. “And all the evidence indicates that happened in Africa. It couldn’t have happened more than once.”

  “Of course it could have,” Charlie said. “Things like this happen all the time. It’s called convergent evolution. Different species in different places evolve extremely similar traits in response to similar environments.”

  “Like what?” Dante asked.

  Charlie waved to the sky above her, where bats were once again pinwheeling through the air in search of insects. “Bats evolved wings completely independently of birds. So did insects. And pterosaurs, for that matter. Bat wings and pterosaur wings evolved hundreds of millions of years apart, but they’re extremely similar in design. Or, as another example, whales and dolphins evolved from terrestrial mammals, but they evolved fins very similar to those that evolved on fish hundreds of millions of years earlier.”

  “But that’s just evolving similar traits,” Dante argued. “You’re claiming that humans developed in two different places. Which is very different.”

  Charlie shook her head. “No. I’m not saying that humans could have developed in two different places. That’d be impossible. I’m saying that something similar to humans could have evolved here. That evolution might have followed a similar track twice. And that is extremely possible. Like, there’s a snake that lives around here, the emerald tree boa, which looks almost exactly the same as another snake that evolved in the South Pacific—the green tree python. It’s nearly impossible to tell them apart unless you’re a specialist. Both snakes are virtually the same color green and live in trees and have the same behaviors. Because they evolved separately to fill similar niches on opposite sides of the world.”

  “And you think that’s what happened here?” Dante challenged. “That apes started evolving into men here as well as in Africa?”

  “First of all, apes didn’t evolve into men,” Charlie said. “Humans and apes diverged from a common ancestor a couple of million years ago. But yes, I’m thinking that a divergence could have happened here as well, though from monkeys, seeing as apes didn’t evolve in South America, as far as we know. It obviously didn’t survive… but then, most protohuman lines died out. Like the Neanderthals. The only line that made it to the modern day was us.”

  Dante shifted his attention to Milana, who had been listening to all this intently while cooking the piranhas. “You agree that all this is possible?”

  “Yes,” she said, then asked Charlie, “So you’re thinking that Darwin’s big discovery was some fossils that looked like a link between monkeys and humans?”

  “Right.”

  “But why didn’t he just reveal them to the world back then?”

  “Because the world wasn’t ready for them,” Charlie said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Charlie explained. “Scientifically, the world was a very different place back when Darwin visited this area. For example, most of the world’s greatest scientists didn’t have the slightest idea how old the earth really was. They thought it might be only a few thousand years old, if that. And so did almost everyone else. The few people who suggested otherwise were considered lunatics, the same way Copernicus had been when he suggested that the earth revolved around the sun.”

  “And you think Darwin was worried about being considered a lunatic?” Dante asked.

  “That’s only part of it,” Charlie replied. “The thing is, you have to know how incredibly old the earth is for evolution to make sense. Darwin couldn’t have proposed that life evolved slowly over millions of years if everyone thought the earth was way younger than that. But science was changing dramatically at that time. Particularly geology. Humans were gaining the ability to cut through the earth to put in canals and roads, and every time they did, they exposed layers of rock. Geologists were starting to realize how those layers had formed and how long that might take. And eventually a Scottish geologist named Charles Lyell wrote a book called Principles of Geology, where he ended up proposing that the earth might actually be millions of years old. A lot of established scientists thought it was heretical. But Charles Darwin found it fascinating. He brought one of the first copies of it along on the Beagle and read it over and over.

  “So, when Darwin was exploring South America, he kept seeing geological evidence that Lyell might be right about the age of the earth. In fact, early on during his voyage, he imagined that his big contribution to science would be a book on the geology of the continent. But his thoughts about how old the earth was started to affect his thoughts about biology. At the time, the general idea was that every species of animal had been around since the beginning of creation, and Darwin was starting to realize that theory didn’t hold water. Like, it didn’t explain dinosaur fossils. Plenty of those had already been found in Europe and no one had any idea how to explain them—and then Darwin found some fossils of giant extinct mammals in Patagonia. He also noticed plenty of examples of convergent evolution, like that there are giant birds called rheas in Argentina that fit the exact same ecological niche as ostriches in Africa. None of that really makes any sense in the old theory. Why would bones from giant animals that didn’t exist anymore be scattered all over the planet? And why would there be one kind of giant bird on one continent and a whole different kind of giant bird on a different continent?”

  “So he was already starting to think about evolution,” Milana said.

  “He was definitely searching for an explanation for everything he was seeing,” Charlie replied. “And then he comes on an expedit
ion to where we are right now and he finds exactly what he’s looking for. Evidence that evolution exists—and that it isn’t just animals that evolved over millions of years but humans, too. That’s something he would consider an incredible discovery. The greatest treasure in human history. Literally.

  “Unfortunately, the rest of the world was still struggling with the idea that the earth was way older than the Bible said. So imagine what it might have been like to present evidence that humans had evolved. There are plenty of people today who consider that idea to be blasphemous. Back then it would have been even worse.”

  Dante and Milana pondered that for a while. Dante gazed thoughtfully into the bonfire, listening to the pop and hiss of insects dying in the flames, while Milana pried the cooked piranhas off the skewers and removed the skin from them with a knife.

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Dante said finally. “But even so, I can’t imagine that Darwin would leave such a great discovery behind.”

  “I doubt that he did.” Charlie tucked the container with the bullet ants into her backpack. “I think he tried to bring back the fossils, and it didn’t go well at all. I’m not sure what happened, though I assume Captain FitzRoy and the crew of the Beagle were horrified by what Darwin found. Which would explain why any record of the Beagle coming to Ecuador was removed from their journals.”

  “They covered up the discovery,” Milana said.

  “Exactly,” Charlie agreed. “And they probably destroyed the fossils, too.”

  Dante asked, “You really think FitzRoy and the crew got that upset over some bones? None of them were scientists. How would they even know that they were the remains of a protohuman and not a monkey?”

  Charlie said, “The skull of a protohuman doesn’t look anything like the skull of a monkey. Or an ape. The crew would have recognized that it was something in between monkeys and humans—and it probably would have scared the pants off them. Darwin obviously feared that something might go wrong with the fossils since he left clues to return to the fossil site along his way back. But I’m betting the reaction was far worse than he had expected, because he never mentioned the fossils again. He almost didn’t propose the theory of evolution at all.”