Copyright © 2018 Taylor Zajonc
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3240-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3243-8
Printed in the United States of America
For Sammy, whose adventure has only just begun
CONTENTS
PART 1: THESIS
Chapter 1: Relative Concept
Chapter 2: Staging Camp
Chapter 3: Migrations
Chapter 4: Convergence Zone
Chapter 5: Extremophile
Chapter 6: Threshold
PART 2: ANTITHESIS
Chapter 7: Gallery
Chapter 8: The Elephant Tomb
Chapter 9: Shaft
Chapter 10: Controlled Descent
Chapter 11: The Anchor
Chapter 12: Base Camp
Chapter 13: The Anthill
Chapter 14: Autopsy
Chapter 15: Chrysanthemum
Chapter 16: The Pit
Chapter 17: The Serpent and the Cathedral
Chapter 18: The Shrine
Chapter 19: Sacrilege
Chapter 20: Evacuation
Chapter 21: In a Bad Way
Chapter 22: Confessional
Chapter 23: Escape
Chapter 24: Systemic Failure
Chapter 25: Fragmentation
Chapter 26: Revelations
PART 3: SYNTHESIS
Chapter 27: Search
Chapter 28: Long Pork
Chapter 29: Death Rattle
Chapter 30: Oracle
Chapter 31: Second Opinion
Chapter 32: Data Gap
Chapter 33: The Void
Chapter 34: The Lecture Hall
Chapter 35: Warrior’s Path
Chapter 36: Breakdown
PART 4: GENESIS
Chapter 37: Ego Death
Chapter 38: Rebirth
Chapter 39: Medicine Woman
Chapter 40: Fire in the Darkness
Epilogue: Exodus
PART 1:
THESIS
Because the eye has seen, thoughts are structured upon images and not upon ideas.
—DAVID CONSUEGRA (1939–2004)
CHAPTER 1:
RELATIVE CONCEPT
4,500 feet above sea level
The Land Rover bucked along the washboard road, plumes of fine dust and scrubby green trees rising in sharp contrast to the impossibly blue African sky. Now far into rural Tanzania, Milo Luttrell could no longer see Mount Kilimanjaro’s white-domed peak in the distance. Even the ever-present smell of sulfuric diesel and cooking fires had faded along with any trace of other people, leaving only clear, dry grasslands. He winced as his driver caught a deep rut under one of the thick tires, violently bouncing the truck to one side. Recovering, she steadied the wheel with her well-manicured hands and glanced at Milo with a reassuring smile. Milo shook off the jolt and tried to smile back, wondering why flat savanna still made for such desperately rough road.
Milo considered himself well traveled and a bit of an adventurer to boot. Even so, he felt a twinge of concern every time she reached a fork and invariably picked the fainter of the two roads, winding ever deeper into the endless plains, the tracks before them now barely distinguishable from the red earth.
He wished he could remember his driver’s name. Three hours ago he’d been confident—now he wasn’t so sure. Jody? Jordan? Jet lag was a bitch, and the name, ordinary as it was, had simply fallen out of his brain. He still didn’t know quite what to make of her—she’d greeted him at the international receptions gate with a sly smile, a placard reading Luttrell, and a demure, unexpectedly posh British accent. She was black, perhaps five years older than he, but wore it well: elegant though not stunning, well-spoken but unapologetically reserved. When he’d asked their destination, she answered with such charm he almost missed the absence of an actual answer.
“Can you tell me what this is all about?” Milo asked now, clearing his throat. The dust was everywhere—even with the windows up, it had formed a thick layer on the dashboard and black leather seats, on his clothes, his face, everything. “You found something out in the savanna, didn’t you?”
She winced as she shook her head in answer. “I find this just as awkward as you. But my employer was quite clear—I can’t tell you a bloody thing until you sign the non-disclosure agreement. We’ll get all the paperwork sorted out just as soon as we reach camp, I assure you.”
“Are we close?” asked Milo, not entirely willing to accept the issue as closed. “Can you at least tell me that?”
“We’re in the bush.” She smiled as she took her eyes off the road for much longer than Milo would have preferred. “Close is a relative concept out here. Have you been to Tanzania before?”
“No,” said Milo, rubbing his eyes as he tried to consciously reset his internal clock. “First time in Africa.”
The Kenyan highway they’d initially taken southbound had been smooth and new, nothing like this rough road. Designed with one lane in either direction, highway traffic was often three abreast: shoulder, main, and passing. Waves of smoke-spewing trucks and minibuses had advanced toward each other like charging tank battalions, only sorting themselves out into recognizable lanes in the last possible moments before collision.
Milo had marveled at the ballet-like precision exercised by the apparently suicidal drivers. He told his driver—what was her name again?—that it was amazing there were no accidents, but was quickly corrected. Collisions, she said, were frequent and often fatal. Milo had decided he’d rather not think about it, resigned his fate, closed his eyes, and tilted his seat back. He’d slept intermittently until they turned off the crowded highway and into the wilderness.
The border crossing from Kenya to Tanzania had been no less surprising. When he saw the lines—nearly a mile of unmoving tractor trailers and overfilled, sputtering minivans—he prepared himself for another interminable wait.
His driver had pulled over to the shoulder, slowly parting the crowds of fruit sellers, candy hawkers, water-bottle vendors, and beggars. Men and women pressed against the Land Rover, tapping the glass, chanting mzungu, mzungu, trying to get their attention. Gravel crackling under the tires, the truck crept forward with unassailable deliberateness until they were at the front of the line before a perplexed border guard and his soldiers, ignoring the glares from the long convoy of semitrucks behind them. A smile, a few spoken words, a many-stamped letter handed over, then handed back with equal speed—and they were through, freely passing the opposite stacked-up traffic waiting on the Tanzanian side. Milo realized he hadn’t even presented his passport for inspection.
“You’re the last to arrive,” the driver said, sighing as the Land Rover crawled over a low rise and dipped down the other side. “I picked up the rest of the team yesterday. Bloody inconvenient
, all this driving. I suppose your flight was delayed?”
Milo shook his head. It didn’t seem possible that he was the last one in—he’d left the very same day he’d received the phone call from his department chair. His superior at Georgetown University didn’t even know the destination, but insisted Milo take the opportunity all the same. After some brief argument, the chair admitted that a significant departmental donation had been placed in escrow pending the young professor’s acceptance. It wasn’t enough money to put him on tenure track, but it would grant Milo another yearly contract in the Darwinian publish-or-perish department. The subtext of the demand was clear—if the escrowed money went elsewhere, so would Milo.
A well-dressed chauffeur with plane tickets had arrived at his apartment with a town car shortly thereafter. He’d barely had time to stuff his oversized backpack and locate his passport. The timing wasn’t great; mid-February meant his spring classes were in full swing, and he doubted any of his colleagues would appreciate being saddled with his students. He’d had a few minutes at the airport gate to Google the name of the company that had paid for the ticket, but came up with little more than a Bahamian-registered shell company with no published corporate officers or directors.
“Where did you depart from?” asked the driver. “Before Nairobi?”
“Washington, DC,” said Milo. “Then to New York, then Dubai.”
“I understand you’re a professor of sorts?”
“Yeah,” said Milo, unsure if she was making conversation or genuinely didn’t know. “An adjunct history professor—Georgetown University.”
She smiled and nodded, signaling her approval of the prestigious institution. Still, many of the faculty he worked with probably wouldn’t have appreciated the name-dropping. Milo took pride in being a bit of an oddball in his field, often quoted in popular blogs and magazines but published in too few academic journals. Though he had joined the department with top honors and a record of innovative publications—to say nothing of his popularity with students—he’d quickly become an outsider among his peers. His superiors among the old guard regarded him as a bit of a failure, a promising mind who couldn’t hack a proper academic career.
Even his field of study was consciously unconventional. Rather than limiting his focus to a specific time period or civilization, Milo analyzed the exploratory and migratory expeditions of all peoples, from Everest to the Amazon, Columbus to Doctor Livingstone, Polynesian rafts to the lunar landing. Interesting as it all was, more than one of the faculty had quietly taken him aside for some frank advice—his career demanded either academic publications or rainmaking with private endowments. Keep on with his current path, he’d been warned, and he’d eventually be searching for a new position with a much lesser institution.
“How about you?” asked Milo. “What do you do?”
“I’m a trade law barrister,” she answered. “I work out of Birmingham. It’s all terribly boring, which is why I try to get into the wild as often as possible. The firm hates it, but what can they do? I arranged for a yearly block of uninterrupted vacation time before signing on. It was my only non-negotiable stipulation.”
“Into the wild?” repeated Milo. “I haven’t seen another car in hours—where are we going?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” She laughed.
“I really don’t,” said Milo, trying to quell his rising irritation.
“Do you have a wife? Girlfriend?” she asked, again changing the subject without so much as missing a beat. “I bet the secrecy is driving them positively mad.”
Milo shook his head. He’d recently begun casually dating a foreign aid worker he’d met through a mutual friend. She’d been surprisingly nonchalant about his sudden and mysterious departure. The fact that she worried so little made him wonder if she even cared, a suspicion he’d confronted her with in a series of rapid-fire text messages from the Air Dubai gate of New York’s JFK Airport.
You’re a historian, she had texted in response to his admittedly neurotic interrogation. How concerned should I seriously be?
He supposed it was true; it wasn’t as though he was going to one of the poverty-stricken war zones she frequented. And she didn’t owe him her worry; they hadn’t even had the exclusivity conversation yet.
All this left Milo to fill in the blanks as best he could. The best explanation was a privately funded archaeological dig for artifacts from a historic European expedition, probably from the pre-colonial or early colonial period. Maybe an amateur had gotten in over their head, needed someone to evaluate the site and their initial findings from a fresh perspective. It would certainly explain the money, the secrecy, and why his thus-far-unnamed benefactor would involve him. But he still wished he knew enough to bring the proper reference books.
“I appreciate the ride,” Milo said now, preparing to gently probe for information. “But aren’t you a little overqualified to play chauffeur?”
“You’re wondering what you’re doing in a car with a British attorney and not a Tanzanian guide or local fixer?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that—”
“There are 120 tribes in Tanzania,” she said. “Each with a complex set of family ties and obligations, networks of dependents, and ancestral relationships. To call it impenetrable would be an understatement. But none of them are quite sure what to make of a black British woman. You could say it brings out a certain cultural helpfulness. They call it undugu, which means something along the lines of hospitality, family, and so forth.”
“Uh-dugu . . . ?” repeated Milo uncertainly. He thought he’d read something about that in the guidebooks, but couldn’t quite remember the context.
“I find it all quite appropriate that such a romantic concept arose from the cradle of humanity. After all, this area has been populated continuously since the dawn of the first people. In fact, we’re not terribly far from Olduvai Gorge, one of the most important Stone Age sites on the entire planet. But I suppose you might know more about that than me—being a historian and all.”
“What does mzungu mean?” asked Milo. “At the border crossing—those people kept on saying it when they were trying to get our attention.”
“It means those who walk in circles. It’s a term of respect.”
It had to be an archaeological site, probably that of a lost European explorer. What else could explain the need for a history professor with such specific expertise? Milo racked his brain for possible explorers as the Land Rover clattered over another low hill. No good candidates came to mind. Obviously not Daniel Houghton’s disastrous expedition of the late eighteenth century; it was well established he’d been abandoned to starve on the other side of Africa. Same for Edward Vogel sixty-odd years later; he hadn’t made it much past south Sudan before his murder at the hands of the local sultan. And the lost DeWar expedition was just an old cock-and-bull story, at least as far as Milo could tell.
His mind wandered as she muscled the wheel, cutting through a sandy river-wash. Rounding a corner, the Land Rover skidded to a halt, the road blocked by a milling herd of brown cattle. At a great distance, two tall, slender men in red plaid shukas guided the herd from behind, each carrying a long, iron-headed spear over their shoulders.
“Bollocks,” the driver said, shaking her head as she rolled down the window. “When the cows start to outnumber the people they become very bolshie indeed. Move! Get out of the way!”
The livestock lazily parted as the Rover pushed through, its brush guard inches from their branded haunches.
“The elephants are even worse,” said the driver. “We saw some yesterday. This is their migration trail. They could care less if you’re trying to get by or not.”
“At least you have the right vehicle for the job.” Milo gestured to the well-appointed interior of the off-road SUV.
“Maybe, maybe not. Land Rovers are nice, but not always right for the bush. I personally prefer the Toyota minibus.”
“Really? This far off-road?”
/> “Absolutely!” She smiled. “The Landy has big tires, four-by-four with locking differentials, the whole package. But if it breaks down, you can’t get parts to save your life. Have to be shipped all the way in from South Africa or Britain—by air, no less.”
“Come on. No way a minibus does better on a trail than a Rover.”
“Not so!” she said, waving her finger in the air. “Land Rovers were designed as the ultimate off-roader, mountain-climber, river-crosser, a real go-anywhere vehicle. But in the real world, all it takes is one larger-than-average mud puddle and you’re stuck.”
“And the minibus?”
“Minibuses never get stuck or break down, not truly. When the wheels start spinning in the mud, or the engine blows—everybody just climbs out and pushes! Try that with a Landy.”
Milo allowed himself a genuine chuckle, appreciating the lesson. She waved as they passed the tall tribesmen, her eyes drifting from the road to their handsome, muscled statures.
Silence fell and he lost track of time, watching the dirt and small stands of trees go by for hours. The sun lowered in the sky, and eventually the Rover turned off the last hint of a trail and into the untamed wild.
Waking suddenly, Milo’s eyes snapped open, the sleep-inducing stillness of the open savanna now broken by the gathering roar of a cargo helicopter as it descended from high above. The heavy aircraft slowly passed, a massive generator dangling from its undercarriage in a cargo net like a raindrop hanging from spider silk. Cresting a hill, the Rover made a careful final descent down a steep bluff, turning onto a freshly bulldozed triple switchback above a pastoral tree-lined dry valley. Their view was blocked by the descending helicopter as its rotor wash kicked up massive clouds of grit. A scramble of local porters unhooked the bulky cargo net and cable from the helicopter, which then broke from hovering to soar away. The red dust settled as they drew closer, revealing a sprawling encampment of trailers, olive-drab tents, off-road vehicles, and people hurrying between equipment and temporary structures.
Milo scanned the scene for a marked-off archaeological site or anything else that could tell him the purpose of the mind-bogglingly vast encampment before him. He saw no test pits, no marked-off areas. He was briefly annoyed—without basic protocols, the trailers and trucks could destroy irreplaceable historical treasures.
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