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Day 21: Decoding the Underworld

The sweltering heat drops to an odd, unexpected chill. The relentless sun fades into shadow. The craziness of basecamp slows to an eerie stillness, broken only by wisps of mist rising past us like phantoms escaping whatever lies below.

If the mountain’s summit is the land that time forgot, a place that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, then its largest sinkhole is something else. Something beyond ancient. Beyond prehistoric. Beyond primordial even.

It’s not a lost world.

It’s another world.

Basecamp,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela

After what seemed an age, the platform lift clanged to a halt, landing on a small metal catwalk bolted into the face of the natural shaft. The vegetation that encrusts the rest of the sinkhole walls had been cleared here, revealing a doorway.

Beyond that doorway lay inky blackness. The unknown. A mysterious world of questions. Who built the labyrinth of tunnels here? Why did they? How did they? And the biggest question of all: why did someone erase all evidence of these ruins and their former inhabitants, literally chiselling out the history of an entire people?

What happened here?

It was the moment we’d all been waiting for. We are not the first to explore these ruins. Indeed, Kira Sharpe, the billionaire philanthropist who found them, investigated several hundred metres deep before being rescued.

Today, we were not the first down there. Juan and Alverez, two of the Venezuelan militiamen assigned to protect the expedition, had already been down, scouting the tunnels and using remote control drones to check their stability.

Even among our expedition, we were far from the first. Juliet McKinney, the expedition leader, had been taking groups down for an orientation tour all day.

She brought us about halfway down the Sima Humboldt by a contraption of metal scaffolding and high tensile cables attached to what amounts to little more than an open-top cage.

Sid gripped my hand so tightly it went numb.

Her first voyage down the sinkhole on the lift was finally over. She always knew this adventure would see a confrontation with her fear of heights. Yet thinking about facing your fears and doing so are two very different things. After all, we now live on a table mountain and work halfway down a thousand-foot deep sinkhole on its summit.

My attempt to calm her by comparing our descent to the early explorers from the 1960s didn’t seem to have the desired effect. Indeed, they descended into the sinkhole with nothing but ropes and audacity. They didn’t have a modern, specially engineered hoist powered by a noisy generator (the only non-solar-powered piece of technology we have here). Yet, despite such advancements and cash-throwing, thanks to UNESCO and Sharpe Enterprises funding, we faced the same dilemma they did.

The sinkhole widens 200 feet down so that any ropes end up dangling freely, away from the walls. The ugly scaffolding supporting the lift, as you might see in a mine, is of no use past that point. Instead, for the last couple hundred feet, you are suspended on nothing but metal cables, swinging high above the forested floor far below before reaching the platform protruding from the doorway.

McKinney opened the lift’s gate and led us onto the catwalk, looking up at the ancient doorway.

I’ve seen pictures, of course. We all have. They’re plastered over magazines and tabloids, on the news and even on ‘The One Show’. The Adventure Channel (who, for the first time I’ve noticed, aren’t sniffing around McKinney) have even used it as the ‘hero’ image to advertise the documentary they’re filming and the live stream.

But seeing a picture is nothing like seeing it in real life. I experience the same awe every time I face something from the past. Indeed, my first find on my first dig was a slither of pottery at which the more seasoned excavators around me scoffed. But, to me, it was a portal to the past, something held by a person long gone, used, loved, cherished, discarded. It had a story, however mundane. And what is life if not a story?

Indeed, this simple doorway surely tells a story more remarkable than any potsherd. But of what did the hieroglyphs that once adorned it speak? Did they relate the history of the place? Did they list its great kings, queens, or another type of ruler? Did they explore the mythological deeds of great heroes, like some South American Heracles or Gilgamesh?

I ignored McKinney’s diatribe as she explained to us – once again – what we already knew and what I’d already written about in a previous blog post. Instead, I fixed my attention upon the single remaining hieroglyph. It is no different, of course, from the photo I have seen of it. Yet, just as standing before the doorway brings the past to life more than any photo, so does seeing the hieroglyph with my own eyes.

“It’s a warning,” I whispered to Sid. “I’m certain of it.”

I thought I had kept my voice low enough that only Sid could hear. But McKinney whirled on me instantly. It was less than twenty-four hours since our last disagreement/discussion/argument, and it seemed she was ready for another.

“I’ve read your . . . idea,” she snarled at me. She didn’t even deign to call it a theory, merely an idea.

I discussed my ‘idea’ (if we’re going to stick with that definition) in a previous post. But briefly, the image of two feet is largely agreed to be reminiscent of an epi-Olmec symbol for ‘lord’. The snake that surrounds it is more open to interpretation (unless your name is Juliet McKinney and your opinion is the only opinion that counts).

McKinney believes that the snake, linked to the ‘lord’ symbol, references Kukulkan, the famous Mayan ‘feathered serpent’. Like much to do with ancient Mesoamerica, many scholars suggest Kukulkan may have come to the Mayans from the earlier Olmecs (the epi-Olmecs were a successor culture to the Olmecs).

McKinney’s theory, shared by the majority of the academic establishment, is that the snake has a dual purpose. It symbolises Kukulkan in the most obvious form – as a Snake Lord if you like – as well as a more nuanced one. Snakes and rivers are often symbolically entwined for obvious reasons. As Kukulkan was a god of water, a sort of transliteration of this hieroglyph could be something like ‘Water Lord’ . . . Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent, the Lord of Water perhaps.

I’m not saying they’re wrong. It’s a perfectly valid theory.

But so is mine.

As a by-product of our work on the Progenitor Theory, my father and I spent years not just compiling images, folklore and mythological traditions but ‘syncretising’ them. We called it the Universal Motif Language (UML). Through a joint initiative with some brainiacs from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, we produced a sophisticated interactive database.

The theory behind the UML is quite simple. Whoever you are, wherever you are in the world . . . we all originated from Africa (barring a few less adopted ideas of Multi-Regional Human Development). During the tens of thousands of years that our species, in particular, our species’ brains developed in Africa, certain . . . thoughts, I guess you could say – images, ideas – became so ingrained in our consciousness that they remain with us all today. We see them in the similarities between people and cultures separated by tens of thousands of miles or even tens of thousands of years.

We know fire will hurt us without the need to put our hands in a flame. We know water will quench our thirst. We know the sun will warm us.

Instinct? Learned responses to external stimuli?

Perhaps. But, maybe that is the point of the UML – perhaps the UML is a visual understanding of innate instinct.

Because it goes further than that. From the rock art in caves in Europe to the experiences of shamans in South America, from the myths of ancient Egypt to the oral traditions of modern-day Innuit, we see the same ideas, the same themes, the same patterns repeated again and again. Painted hands in caves, sun-gods, pyramids and holy mountains, Great Floods and heroic saviours.

There was a time when academics and explorers sought physical links to explain these similarities. With ideas of cultural diffusion and mass migration, men like Thor Heyerdahl set off on transatlantic voyages to prove that ancient Egyptians travelled from North Africa to build the pyramids of Central America. Or that God-men walked the earth bestowing the gift of civilisation upon humankind. Hell, we’ve even investigated extra-terrestrial interference, from alien landing strips at Nazca to Stargates hidden beneath Giza (okay, that last one may have been a movie, but you get the picture).

Despite discrediting our Progenitor Theory, many scientists have adopted the UML as an additional way of investigating past cultures. Of understanding the way they may have seen the world.

And, if one image repeats the same message, again and again, it is the image of the snake.

An image of danger.

An image of death.

My second argument with McKinney ended much the same as the first. She dismissed me without even entertaining the notion that the more interpretations we have, the greater the chance of arriving at something resembling the facts.

I sense she already has a narrative in her head, a storyline that paints her as the great discoverer of the truth of Sarisariñama.

She led us on a tour of the tunnels (well, about a hundred metres or so of them – I’ll write more about them in my next post) before we returned to the lift and headed topside again.

But, all through the tunnels and all through the evening, as we ate in the Mess Tent and engaged in the usual pointless, repetitive conversations, I couldn’t help but think of McKinney’s forced storyline.

After fame and glory, she is looking for a tale of adventure she can sell to the media. She is not looking for the truth.

If we are not careful, we will never decode the secret of Sarisariñama, never unveil the truth of what happened here. A truth hidden by time and smothered by the rainforest.

A truth that I sense someone locked away for a reason.

One I am determined to uncover.

Benjamin King

My name is Dr Benjamin King, and I am an archaeologist working on the UNESCO Sarisariñama Expedition. Join me on my epic journey to one of the most remote places on the planet – a tabletop mountain towering above the Venezuelan rainforest. This will be my home for six months as my colleagues and I attempt to unravel the mystery of the ancient ruins that lie buried within an enormous sinkhole. Not only do I blog updates about the project, but also the trials and tribulations of life in the jungle. Something tells me that the danger of the jungle’s predators is nothing compared to the perils of being trapped with the same group of people for the next six months! Don’t miss out on a single moment of this extraordinary adventure - follow me on social media @benking1209 Benjamin King is also the fictional hero of the action-packed adventure series ‘The Xibalba Saga’ by James Richardson. Read it now https://amzn.to/3dD9wZW Stay up to date on new releases and exclusive free content at www.moonmask.net and @worldofmoonmask

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