The hours feel like days. The days feel like weeks. Time slows to a crawl, like a guard at the prison door, trapping me in a state of eternal purgatory.
Finally, the phone rings. The voice is familiar, my father’s best friend, a surrogate uncle to me. Yet, as he speaks, he might as well be a stranger, his words carrying the coldness of truth.
“They’re calling off the search, Benjamin.” A pause. Another eternity. Then the words, the hollow, empty words, the customary phrase that just has to be said at a time like this.
“I’m sorry.”
Miami,
USA
Deciding to join the Sarisariñama Expedition was one of the most difficult choices of my life. I can’t shake the sense that if I had accompanied my father to Africa instead of signing up for this, he might still be alive.
As I listen to the rain hammering down outside again, I feel like it is a much-needed breath of fresh air. The calm before the storm. The breath before the plunge.
When the expedition kicks off, it will be a media storm (an aspect of it that I’m not looking forward to). My dad’s disappearance in Africa has already propelled the Kings to fame, but not the way most people would want.
The worst tabloid headline of all?
‘Idiot archaeologist gets wife and daughter killed. Decades later, his entire expedition is found beheaded and dismembered.’
Certainly didn’t pull any punches on that one (also inaccurate: only six members of my father’s team were found. The others, including him, remain missing). But, at least it didn’t attempt humour or wordplay or poetry like some others:
‘Indiana Gone – ruined archaeologist leads students to the slaughter.’
‘To Moon or Not to Moon.’
‘The Dark Side of the Moon [Mask].’
‘Blood Moon falls on doomed archaeologist.’
You would think that running off to the middle of the Amazon rainforest would shield me from the constant requests for comment. Or the accusations about mine and my father’s theories leading good men and women to their deaths.
But no.
The media will be following me to the heart of the jungle, and I’m going to do everything I can to stay out of the limelight.
You see, The Adventure Channel is one of numerous media outlets owned by Sharpe Enterprises, the major commercial partner who worked with UNESCO to bring the expedition to life. It plans on following us every step of the way, getting real-time updates to the world as and when they happen via social media posts, blogs and vlogs. Ultimately, they’ll have a flashy, glossy documentary detailing every moment of what they are already advertising as the most remarkable discovery since King Tut’s tomb. I imagine that if Twitter and YouTube had existed in 1922, Howard Carter would have been similarly inconvenienced.
It’s not just archaeologists going, of course. However, those of my ilk comprise the main body of the science team, from seasoned professionals, such as Professor Juliet McKinney, the expedition leader, to a host of experienced specialists like me, Sid and Nadia, to a mixture of postgrads and interns.
But the last time any scientific mission set foot on Sarisariñama was in the seventies. Even then, it was nothing on this scale and lacked modern techniques and technology.
Therefore, part of the expedition’s remit is to look into the mountain’s natural elements, hence the complement of geologists, botanists and zoologists we’re taking along for the ride.
Not that their investigation is separate from ours, of course. The nature of the tepui, the table mountain, would undoubtedly have shaped the evolution of the tunnel builder culture who lived there. Likewise, the tunnel builders undoubtedly shaped the mountain in more ways than just building tunnels. This symbiotic relationship will be a core element of the study.
Indeed, as I sit here listening to the afternoon rainstorm, I find myself increasingly eager to start our real adventure.
Our day has been a carbon copy of yesterday. Breakfast, accompanied by our iguana table guest, followed by a walk through the manicured gardens down to the beach for a few hours before heading back to the hotel to shelter from the afternoon downpour. Perfectly pleasant. Perfectly nice.
Perfectly boring.
My taste of anticipation for the adventure to begin comes as a relief.
For Sid, the expedition is her dream job. In fact, it’s a dream job for any archaeologist (the real ones, not the ones happiest sitting in the library). Yet, she was willing to turn it down.
For me.
She wouldn’t go without me.
After years of allowing me to pursue my research, supporting me, and defending me and my less conventional theories, I couldn’t let her do that. Besides, almost every academic worth their salt had belittled, degraded and condemned my work as nothing but hearsay, folklore and fantasy.
My dad, the co-author of most of my papers and research, was making one last effort to drag the King name out of the mire. Yet another search for the fabled City of the Moon. But even I could see it was a long shot this time. Every reasonable avenue of research in our quest to uncover the Progenitors had been spent.
The university knew it too. They cut our funding. And my contract. And I knew that, despite Sid’s promises, after everything she had sacrificed for me, if I was what stopped her going to Sarisariñama, she’d never have forgiven me.
Nor I myself.
And so Marc Duval, my dad’s far more respected lifelong friend and my old professor, pulled some strings and got me a place.
The one proviso: I leave the past behind. The Progenitor Theory. The Moon Mask. The Black Death. Everything.
The expedition would be a fresh start. For me. For my career. For my relationship with Sid.
But that meant letting my dad down.
It turns out I let him down in the most significant way imaginable. And the knowledge of that betrayal, the look of disappointment in his eyes, has soured every thought I’ve had about this expedition since.
Until now.
Perhaps it’s just being here. On the cusp of adventure. Ready to leap into action. Ready to take the plunge.
Perhaps, while uncovering one past, it is time to bury another.