Her eyes shone with the idea of endless unopened boxes full of amazing treasures.
An idea came to my head. It was something which had been bothering me ever since we had gone to the Nazi camp for the second time. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the Germans who went to the Black City might not have been on an archeological exploration at all?” I said, following my own train of thought.
Cassandra frowned in puzzlement. “What on earth would they be doing there apart from that? There’s no other reason to go to that place apart from archeology. There’s nothing else to see.”
“Yes there is, Cassie. Something that might’ve been much more valuable to the Nazis.”
“What is it? We didn’t see gold or jewels anywhere. They must have taken any valuables away in their balloons.”
“I’m not talking about what, Cassie. I’m talking about who.”
“Who? I don’t follow you. There was nothing else in those ruins except—” Suddenly she understood. That possibility hit her like a rock, and she suddenly turned pale. “Do you think…” she muttered after a few seconds, as she forced herself to accept that possibility and its consequences. “Do you really think the Nazis went to the Black City… for the Morcegos?”
“It’s just a hypothesis,” I said cautiously, “but to be truthful, it makes a lot of sense to me.”
“But… why? With what aim?”
“With what aim?” I repeated trying not to sneer. “Can you think of a more terrifying soldier than a Morcego trained to use twentieth-century weapons? Imagine what it would’ve meant in the battlefield. The Morcegos might have been that final weapon Hitler was always bragging about in his speeches. Who knows whether his plan was to capture them and make them breed so as to have an army, just as the Ancients had done thousands of years before.”
“But… it would’ve taken them centuries to manage that,” she replied, unable to conceive the idea.
“True.” I shrugged my shoulders. “But don’t forget, Hitler predicted a Reich that would last a thousand years. Those people thought in the long term.”
She shook her head, as if to drive the thought away. “Be that as it may, the important point is they didn’t do it.”
I could not help raising my eyebrows skeptically. “How do you know they didn’t?”
“What do you mean? If the Nazis had used Morcego soldiers, the world would know about it.”
I half-smiled. “Like the existence of the Black City, or the Ancients?”
She was about to say something more, then realized that this was an open-ended debate with no evidence as a basis: a disturbing possibility hanging by a thread, but a possibility nevertheless.
“Anyway,” she said, “when the professor translates those journals, we might find out.”
“Maybe,” I said feigning indifference.
I knew perfectly well that what I had just suggested sounded crazy. But unfortunately “crazy” and “Nazi” usually fitted very well in the same sentence, and the combination of Nazis and Morcegos was particularly terrifying. Fortunately the era of the Nazis was over, and it seemed that everything they might have obtained from their ill-fated expedition to the Amazon had died with the disappearance of their rule of terror, without their being able to make any use of it.
Or, at least, there was no record that they had done so.
Not yet.
“Hey, what happened, man?” Cassandra interrupted my thoughts with an amused expression. “Where did you go just now?”
“Oh, sorry, I was thinking of what you were saying about going on investigating on our own,” I said scratching my bearded chin, which I still had not shaved. “The truth is that it sounds very tempting. Although you know I’m not that keen on archeology, I’d like to find out more about the Morcegos. I’d like to know whether the Nazis really tried to take them to Germany, and if they finally did.”
“Then… you’re in?
“I didn’t say that.”
“I think you did.” She smiled mischievously.
My defenses crumbled before that smile. “You’re right,” I said catching her good humor. “Of course I’m in. How could I not be?”
She leaned forward with a look of satisfaction and sighed, momentarily silent. “You know what?” she said in the end, suddenly changing the subject. “I never thought I’d be back in this apartment. Sitting at this table and eating with you.”
“I didn’t either,” I admitted, somewhat surprised by the turn the conversation was taking. “To be honest I’d given up hope of being like this again, you and me together.”
Cassandra studied me without saying anything.
I decided to put all my eggs in one basket. “I’ve missed you, Cassie. I’ve missed you each and every day since you left and I’ve finally realized that I love you… like I’ve never loved anybody else in my whole life.”
She kept silent for a few more seconds, which seemed to me like an eternity. I feared she would say that she had been very happy since the moment we had broken up, and that she would rather go back with the Morcegos than stay with me.
But then she leaned across the kitchen table to bring her face close to mine. “You’re an idiot,” she whispered. Then she placed a brief kiss on my lips.
I was speechless. I was so stunned I could not react. It took me a couple of minutes to understand what had happened, and that there was only one thing I could and would do.
I leaned across the table, dislodging bottles, glasses, and a mess of cutlery. Then I took her face in my hands and kissed her with all my heart, as deeply and passionately as I had been dreaming of doing for months.
Then I half-opened my eyes, just as an unexpected sunray pierced the clouds, flooding the kitchen and illuminating the world with its warm autumnal light. I saw Cassie smiling while our lips were still joined.
I also smiled, happy as I could not remember having been for a long time.
In that instant, my heart filled with joy, I thought that after all that might just be the beginning of that new adventure.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Obviously, Black City is an adventure novel born out of the present writer’s imagination. The action, characters, and dialogues are pure fiction but contrary to what is usually said in these cases, any similarity to reality is very far from pure coincidence.
To begin with, many of the characters who appear, such as Colonel Fawcett and his son, are absolutely real. So are the Menkragnoti tribe, the controversial reservoir on the Xingu River, and even the terrifying Morcegos about whom a multitude of legends circulate in the immense and unknown Amazon rainforest.
The original version of this novel was published after two years of writing, revisions, and research that enabled me to discover particularly relevant circumstances and historical facts which often remain wrongly overlooked in the attic of mythology.
Nazi explorers did visit a good part of the Amazonia for reasons which are still unknown, and the remains of their camps still stand in the remote jungles of the state of Pará. In the same way, although few people know of its existence, there is solid evidence of a worldwide apocalyptical flood, which possibly gave rise to the well-known myth of the Great Flood shared by many different cultures in distant points of the planet. The cause of this unimaginable flood that destroyed the planet’s coasts some twelve thousand years ago and raised the level of all the seas is still unknown, but the theory of the overflow of the Laurentian Sea, as given in this novel, seems the most plausible for the moment.
On the other hand, the Black City as I describe it in this book is of course fictitious, although perhaps not its existence or location. It may be hard to believe, but ninety-five per cent of the Amazon rainforest is still unexplored, and even nowadays we are still finding tribes and indigenous villages which have never come into contact with the western world, or even know of its existence. We have barely scratched the surface of this impenetrable territory, but already archeological sites have sprung up which prove the presence of
large human settlements and unknown civilizations in those lands whose existence we did not even suspect only a few years ago.
In this way, as I studied hundreds of maps and satellite photos with eyes wide open and liters of coffee, I found an unusual structure about three miles across and shaped like a five-pointed star (see the photograph at the end of this note) which suggests an unequivocally human origin. This structure, which has not yet been explored, is in the heart of Kayapo territory, more specifically in that of the Menkragnoti tribe, a few miles away from the turbulent Xingu River, exactly at the coordinates noted in Fawcett’s watch.
This unexplored landscape in which most of the novel takes place has therefore not been chosen at random, as you can see. Although I very much doubt that there really is a city as I have presented it (I would be the first one to be surprised, believe me), if you study the photo carefully you will agree that it can hardly be a natural formation.
Who knows what may be hidden in the jungle? But you can be sure of one thing: there is something there.
I would also like to acknowledge Javier Reverte’s wonderful book The River of Desolation, which enabled me to recreate a part of the Amazon I did not know, and from which I have borrowed some of the descriptions and personal anecdotes I have used for my characters.
As a final note, in case you are wondering about the truth of the Ancients or the disturbing monolith, let me tell you that those two plot elements also have a historical foundation, however little known (the name I have given the Ancients is fictitious), and as with the above information, there is a mass of documentation and research behind them. Therefore not only does the existence of this prehistoric civilization, predecessor of many others, have a concrete origin and an exact epicenter in the biography of humankind, but if you look deeply enough you may follow its subtle cultural trace along the whole of history.
A fabulous civilization, whose existence will need a whole book in order to be revealed. This will happen in the next novel of the Ulysses Vidal adventure series which have Ulysses Vidal, Cassandra Brooks, and Professor Castillo as protagonists.
I hope you have enjoyed this novel, and I would appreciate it if you would kindly write a review on Amazon, so that other readers may know about it and share their opinions.
And if you also want to write me, I invite you to do it to: [email protected]
Thank you for deciding to accompany me on this extraordinary journey.
See you in the next adventure!!!
If you want to know more:
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Actual image of the Amazon rainforest showing a section of the Xingu River, together with a structure of human origin with a diameter of 2.79 miles in the shape of a five-pointed star with a pentagon inside, corresponding to the location of the Black City indicated by Colonel Fawcett.
Photograph taken May 18, 2004 from a NASA satellite, available on Google Earth.
OTHER TITLES
THE LAST CRYPT
Diver Ulysses Vidal finds a fourteenth-century bronze bell of Templar origin buried under a reef off the Honduras coast. It turns out it has been lying there for more than one century, prior to Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. Driven by curiosity and a sense of adventure, he begins the search for the legendary treasure of the Order of The Temple. Together with a medieval history professor and a daring Mexican archeologist they travel through Spain, the Mali desert, the Caribbean Sea and the Mexican jungle. They face innumerable riddles and dangers, but in the end this search will uncover a much more important mystery. A secret, kept hidden for centuries, which could transform the history of humankind, and the way we understand the universe.
CAPTAIN RILEY
It is 1941, and Captain Alexander M. Riley and his crew of deep-sea treasure hunters believe they’re setting off on yet another adventure—to find a mysterious artifact off the coast of Morocco for an enigmatic millionaire with questionable motives. Part-time smugglers, world travelers, and expats who have fought causes both valiant and doomed, Riley and his crew soon find themselves in the crosshairs of a deal much more dangerous than the one they bargained for. From Spain to Morocco to an Atlantic crossing that leads to Washington, DC, Captain Riley must sail his ship, the Pingarrón, straight through the eye of a ruthless squall and into a conspiracy that goes by the name Operation Apokalypse—a storm that only he and his crew can navigate.
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SUNRISE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Departing Barcelona, Spain on January 2, 2000, Carmen Grau spent the first seven months of the new millennium on a challenging personal, spiritual, and intellectual journey of cultural exploration.
Using Bangkok as her jumping off place, Carmen visited all the countries of the Indochinese peninsula––Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma––and then moved on to Malaysia, as well as Sumatra and Java in Indonesia. She also made brief visits to Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore.
While visiting many cities and famous destinations Carmen also made the point of traveling slowly, often trying to leave the beaten path, and have close, personal encounters with the people, languages, and cultures of these lands that remain, as she describes in vivid detail, mysterious, exotic, baffling, and enchanting.
Her rich, extensive, and engaging travelogue describes her time in more than sixty different locations, cycling the streets of Vientiane, walking through the quiet Burmese countryside, learning to scuba dive in Malaysia and make traditional wood carvings in Sumatra, and often venturing to unfrequented, out of the way places. Sunrise in Southeast Asia is Carmen's bestselling account of this adventurous journey through Indochina and beyond.
"Carmen’s frank, open-minded, good humored narrative of her ups and downs along the road will surely inspire readers to challenge themselves to find the courage to depart from familiar, comfortable places and assumptions to discover the heart of humanity in the world at large." Brendan Riley
Acknowledgments
This novel would not have been possible without the collaboration of a number of people whose names do not appear on the cover. That is why, in all justice, I am highlighting among them, in the first place, my parents Fernando and Candelaria, and my sister Eva. The three are the irreplaceable supports which help me to keep faith in my possibilities and bring this project to fruition.
I also wish to publicly thank Sergio Matarín, Diego Román, Patricia Insúa, Manuela Pulido and Eva Erill, for their time and infinite patience in correcting the manuscript and for the gift of their ideas and impressions.
Nor do I wish to forget my favorite translator, Christy Cox —traduttora ma non traditora— and Peter Gauld, and the author and editor Carmen Grau, the best editor that a writer can have, in this or any other universe. A great professional and friends, who made this book possible.
And of course, above all, my deepest gratitude to the thousands of readers all over the world who read The Last Crypt, turning it into a bestseller and making the two years of research and work spent on writing this second part worthwhile.
To all of you, a heartfelt thank you.
Dedicated to Nuria Badal Jiménez
(5/9/1975 - 7/6/2012)
Que su recuerdo jamás se extinga.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
OTHER TITLES
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Acknowledgments
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 47
