Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

by Stuart Gibbs

  Milana handed Charlie a plate full of piranha. “He didn’t?”

  “No. Darwin kept the theory to himself for nearly twenty years after he returned from his trip. And even then he might not have published his work if someone else hadn’t come up with the exact same idea.”

  “Alfred Russel Wallace!” Dante said triumphantly. It seemed to Charlie that he’d been waiting to contribute something to the conversation, so that he could impress Milana. He looked to her as he elaborated, as if seeking her approval. “I’ve read about him. He was exploring in Indonesia and developed his own theory of evolution. And bizarrely, the very person he mailed his work to, to review it, was… Charles Darwin.”

  “Exactly. And Darwin kind of freaked out.” Charlie shoveled a forkful of piranha into her mouth. The fish wasn’t particularly flavorful, but she was famished after a long, grueling day of exploring. “I mean, Darwin had been sitting on top of this idea for two decades, wondering whether or not to share it, and then some other guy nearly stole his thunder. Even though Darwin was nervous about the reception his idea would get, he still didn’t want to lose the credit for coming up with it. So Darwin went to the one man he could trust, Charles Lyell, and told him everything, and Lyell arranged to have both men’s papers presented on the same day at a big scientific meeting in London. That way, both men shared the credit for the theory of evolution by natural selection. But Darwin obviously left out the part about the missing link. Instead, he claimed to have developed the idea the way we’ve always heard, by observing the differences in the animals of the Galápagos.”

  Charlie gulped down another mouthful of piranha, then continued. “Even then the papers sparked huge controversy and were called sacrilegious. Which probably convinced Darwin even more that he was right to keep whatever he really found down here a secret. For the rest of his life, he did his best to stay out of the public eye. He let other people defend his theories in London and remained at his home out in the countryside. In fact, Darwin was a very different man once he returned from his voyages around the world. The Darwin who visited South America was an avid explorer, always up for adventure. He spent weeks on horseback in Argentina, climbed mountains in Chile—and now we know he went on a major expedition into the Amazon, too. But after he got back, he lived a quiet life and rarely ventured far from home again.”

  Dante picked a piranha bone out of his teeth and studied Charlie carefully. “How long have you been working on this theory of yours?”

  “Since I heard that Darwin had made a secret discovery down here.”

  “It makes sense,” Dante said. “But it’s all just speculation. You haven’t offered any real proof that Darwin discovered a missing link at all.”

  Charlie said, “No offense, but I’m not slogging through the rain forest for days on end because it gives me quality time with you. If that’s all I wanted, we could have just gone to Disneyland. I’m doing this because I want to see what he found for myself.”

  “Plus, anyone who finds proof of a missing link will become world-famous,” Dante said. “It’d be like discovering electricity. Or DNA.”

  Charlie shrugged. “What’s wrong with being famous for making a landmark scientific discovery? It’s a lot better than being famous for assassinating someone. Or starting a war. Or being a corrupt politician.” She scraped the last bits of piranha off her plate and wolfed them down. “Of course, that’s assuming that we even find these fossils. Or that you guys don’t force me to keep them a secret.”

  “Why do you think we’d do that?” Milana asked.

  Charlie said, “Until we sat down for dinner, you guys thought we were looking for a lost city of gold. Which means that’s probably what the whole gang back at CIA headquarters thinks too. But now I’ve thrown you a curveball. Maybe our government would be just as afraid of sharing the news of a new missing link as Darwin was.”

  “As hard as it may be for you to believe, our government isn’t always the bad guy,” Dante said sharply. “The United States is a major supporter of science. The Smithsonian is the largest museum and research complex on earth. NASA is the world’s preeminent space exploration agency. And the government gives out hundreds of millions in research grants to other scientific institutions as well. If we do find fossil evidence of a missing link—or a lost city—I can promise it will be well taken care of.”

  Charlie had to admit that was possible. And there wasn’t much point to challenging Dante on the subject. So instead she said, “Good. I appreciate that.”

  Dante slapped a mosquito that was feeding on his hand, leaving a splotch of his own blood on his fingers. “The sooner we find this place, the better,” he grumbled. “I’m tired of getting eaten alive out here.” He looked to Charlie. “I don’t suppose that genius brain of yours has any idea how much farther we have to go?”

  Charlie was about to say no when, to her surprise—and Dante’s—Milana spoke up instead.

  “I think we’re almost there,” she said. “Today, while you were gone, I found evidence that there might be an ancient city close by.”

  Dante’s eyes went wide. “Where?”

  “You’re sitting on it,” Milana said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Through the trees, Oz could see the campfire burning. It was so bright in the darkness of the rain forest, it might as well have been a spotlight.

  Jose and the five other men he had brought with him saw it as well; they would have had to be blind to miss it. Without so much as a word or a signal from Oz, they all stopped paddling their canoes at once, letting them glide through the flooded forest.

  Night in the Amazon basin was not quiet; the air was alive with the hum of insects, the chirp of bats, the call of frogs. But Oz could still hear the voices of the people in the camp carrying clearly across the water.

  They spoke English, but their voices were all inflected with slight accents, as though it wasn’t the mother tongue for any of them. It was the three people who had been arrested and brought to the refinery—the woman and the two men who had been badly burned—and the one who had bribed his men to pay for their release.

  Oz had caught up to the first group of people he was following. He knew there was still yet another group ahead.

  Oz and his men had found the boats of both groups moored at the same spot at the beginning of the flooded forest. His men had recognized the speedboat as the one that had belonged to the American law enforcement officials who had arrested the Italians; they had been somewhat surprised to find it there, as that indicated that the Americans were also looking for whatever was hidden up the river. Which made Oz wonder if the Americans were really law enforcement at all.

  They had sunk both of the other groups’ boats, blasting holes in them and letting the water drag them to the bottom of the Anaconda River. If there was a lot of money at stake, Oz didn’t want to be racing anyone back to civilization.

  The canoe Oz was in bumped up against dry land. Oz climbed out, taking great care to be as silent as possible. His men followed his lead. They quietly dragged their canoes onto land and began making camp.

  All of the men Oz had brought with him had been born in this region. They knew the ways of the rain forest and had no need for a fire to make it through the night. In fact, they hardly needed any gear at all; during their journey, they had been subsisting on termites and local fruits and fish they had caught with a simple line, and they had been sleeping on the ground, under lean-tos fashioned out of palm leaves. It wasn’t easy going, but for most of them, it was a pleasant change from the drudgery of the refinery. Oz had heard more than one of the men remark that this felt like a vacation.

  Not that any of them had ever been on a real vacation before. The refinery barely paid them enough to support their families.

  Oz would rather have been at a beach resort, but even he felt a degree of excitement. He was lugging along a bit more gear to make himself comfortable—a small camp stove, a bedroll, and plenty of bug repellant—although tonight,
in the interest of not alerting the other travelers that they were close by, he would make do with less. He wasn’t sure what they were heading toward, but this did feel like quite an adventure.

  Oz stood in the dark forest, watching the campfire in the distance. Ivan and the Castellos had no idea he or his men were there, no clue that they were being followed. They spoke loudly, without any care that someone might overhear them. Oz couldn’t make out everything they said, due to the distance and the great array of animal noises in the forest around him, but he could catch snippets of their conversation.

  One word in particular grabbed his attention.

  Treasure.

  Oz tensed in excitement.

  They were discussing a trove of Incan gold, talking about how much farther ahead it might be, how they would split it up, and what they would do with their riches when they had them.

  A cruel smile played across Oz’s face. A trove of Incan gold was far better than any mineral rights he might come across.

  Jose and the others gathered around him. They were also listening to the other people in the distance, but Oz knew they didn’t understand English well enough to follow.

  “What are they talking about?” Jose whispered to him in Spanish.

  “Nothing important,” Oz replied. “They’re complaining about the mosquitoes again.” The more his men knew about any potential treasure, the less he could trust them. There was no loyalty among this bunch, himself included.

  Jose nodded, then said, “We could ambush them tonight, while they’re sleeping. Tie them up. Force them to tell us what they’re looking for.”

  Oz had considered this already himself, but he had rejected the idea. Maybe they would get some answers—but then what were they supposed to do with their captives? Hold them prisoner in the rain forest? And what if their captives didn’t give up the information? What was Oz supposed to do then? He and his men were refinery workers, not commandos.

  “Let’s just keep following them for now,” he told Jose. “Until we find out what everyone is looking for here.”

  “And then what? Kill them?” Jose didn’t say the words with menace. He seemed to be worried that this was Oz’s plan.

  “We won’t have to do that,” Oz replied. He was willing to do a lot to get rich, but killing someone in cold blood went a bit too far. Luckily, he had another plan that would work equally as well. “We’ll just take their canoes and their gear and leave them out here.”

  Jose grinned, understanding.

  Oz and his men wouldn’t have to kill anyone at all. If they stranded the others out here, the rain forest would do it for them.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dante stared at the ground illuminated by the flames of the campfire. A thin layer of dirt stretched over gray limestone. “I don’t see what’s so important,” he admitted. “It’s just stone.”

  “That is what’s important,” Charlie said, understanding what Milana had meant. “We’re sitting on stone!”

  Dante appeared embarrassed that he wasn’t grasping the idea. “And why is that exciting?”

  “Because stone has been awfully rare out here,” Charlie explained. “I just realized it myself. This whole ecosystem is built on soil. I guess it’s kind of a giant river delta, a couple thousand miles wide. It’s been dirt and mud and water, but not rock.”

  “Jeez,” Dante said. He was even more embarrassed now, realizing his mistake. It was amazing what you took for granted, like rocks. He was used to the ground under his feet being a thin layer of soil over bedrock, but the Amazon basin was completely different.

  “I dug around a bit while you were out foraging,” Milana said. “The area with stones isn’t very wide—only about six feet across—but it’s long. It goes quite a distance through the forest in both directions from here.”

  “It’s a road?” Charlie asked, excited.

  “I think so,” Milana replied. “I can’t come up with any other explanation.”

  Charlie looked around her. Even knowing that they were sitting on an ancient road, she couldn’t see any signs of it; the rain forest had reclaimed it, and the landscape around them was thick with trees. “Looks like it’s been abandoned for a few hundred years.”

  “At least,” Milana said. “From what I understand, the Incas built roads all through their empire. I’m guessing this connected to Paititi.”

  “Why didn’t you say something earlier?” Dante asked.

  “I was going to tell you when you got back. But both of you were eager to talk about what Charlie had come up with instead.”

  Charlie knelt beside the fire and swept away the dirt to fully expose the stone beneath it. It was limestone, pocked and pitted by centuries of rain and erosion. But it wasn’t a smooth, continuous sheet. It was separate pieces of rock, some small, some quite large, fitted together like a giant mosaic. “This must have been a huge amount of work,” she observed. “First they had to get all the rock here. And then they had to lay it down, for who knows how long a distance. This might have taken years to build.”

  “I’ve heard that the Incan road system rivaled the Romans’,” Milana said. “But maybe it was even more advanced. This is an extremely difficult place to build a road. They would have had to cut down thousands of trees. And make sure the road didn’t sink during floods. And then, in the mountains, they’d have a host of different problems. The Andes are a lot steeper than the Alps.”

  Charlie nodded agreement. Often, the civilizations of the Americas were looked upon as inferior to those of Europe or China. For example, the Incas were sometimes derided because they didn’t domesticate many animals, but then, there hadn’t been many animals that humans could domesticate in that area. Only llamas as pack animals and guinea pigs as a food source, while Europe had wild cattle and horses and pigs and goats and chickens and dogs. Without oxen or horses in the Incan empire, there was no point to having large carts to move goods around and thus no need to make the roads as wide, so they might have not seemed as impressive as the Roman roads at first. But they certainly were.

  Charlie hadn’t yet visited the great Incan archaeological sites like Machu Picchu, but she had heard that they were remarkable feats of engineering as well.

  “Just because we’re on a road doesn’t mean we’re close to Paititi yet,” Dante cautioned. “The Incan road networks ran for hundreds of miles. This might be only the halfway point on some ancient highway.”

  “I thought of that,” Milana said. “But I doubt that any road system around here would be extensive. The primary way to get from one place to another here is by river. No system of roads could improve upon that. So it wouldn’t make sense to build roads over extremely long distances. But a large city would need cultivated areas close by to feed the residents, which might require a relatively small road network to transport the food.”

  Dante mulled that over, then admitted, “That makes sense.”

  “So,” Milana concluded, “I’m betting we’re less than twenty-four hours away.”

  Which turned out to be an accurate guess. Before noon the next day, they would be in the city of stone.

  PART THREE THE CITY OF STONE

  The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

  —CHARLES DARWIN

  TWENTY-NINE

  The smoking waters

  Upper reaches of the Anaconda River

  Peru

  They knew they were close when they arrived at the point on the Anaconda River that looked like the Thames. Or rather, what the Thames had looked like in Darwin’s time.

  Once again, Darwin had been trying to describe something he didn’t really have words for, other than to allude to a British landmark. And again, while the clue had seemed cryptic to Charlie, Dante, and Milana at first, once they got to the right place, they understood exactly what Darwin had meant.

  London was built on the Thames River. In truth, London wouldn’t have existed without the Thames; for centuries it was the lifeline of the
city. Most of London’s businesses were built close to its banks, as well as most of its great buildings: older edifices such as the Tower of London, the houses of Parliament, the Royal Observatory, and St Paul’s Cathedral, or newer landmarks such as the London Eye, the Shard, or the Tate Modern museum. And yet, given how important the river was, the people of London had treated it terribly for most of the city’s history. It was used as a garbage dump and a latrine. Factories flushed toxic chemicals into it, and it was common to find the carcasses of dead sheep, cattle—and even humans—floating in it. By Darwin’s time, it was little more than a glorified sewer line and a breeding ground for disease. The river—and thus the entire city—became notorious for its noxious smell; at one point in the summer of 1858, it became so putrid that Parliament had to be suspended and nearly relocated from the city for good. Meanwhile, there were so many outbreaks of cholera and typhoid that life expectancy in London dropped to only thirty-seven years of age.

  At the same time, London’s air wasn’t doing much better. In the Industrial Age, the main way to heat homes and power businesses was with coal, and tons of it was being burned every day. The result was a thick cloud of soot that hung over the city, which would then combine with London’s notorious fogs to create an atmosphere so dark that it was often hard to see through even in the middle of the day. The soot turned London’s buildings black and did far worse things to the Londoners themselves, filling their lungs with particles that impaired their ability to breathe. Bronchitis killed even more people than water-borne diseases. Between the foul air and the foul water, Londoners were so unhealthy that they could easily be discerned by their pale pallor, weak physiques, and the habit of breathing through their mouths because their nasal passages were so congested.