Area 51: The Sphinx-4 by Robert Doherty Read Free Book Online Page A

Seeing it, Mualama allowed himself to feel the excitement of making a true discovery, of another step in his long and strange path about to be completed. He had feared this entire trip would turn up nothing, as previous trips to other places in the past had, but the mark was where it was supposed to be, and that meant— Mualama stopped himself from thinking too far ahead.
    Bauru slid down the rope and arrived, leather gloves keeping his hands from burning on the nylon. The two porters followed, as Mualama examined the carving.
    "What is it?" Bauru asked. He had never seen such strange markings.
    "It is Arabic script for the number one thousand and one," Mualama translated.
    The water had worn smooth the edges of the carving.

    "Arabic?" Bauru touched the rock. "This has been here for a long time. What Arab would have been here that many years ago? You said Fawcett was an Englishman."
    "The mark was carved there in 1867, long before Fawcett set out on his journey.
    But it was an Englishman who carved the numbers. An Englishman who spoke and wrote fluent Arabic. Sir Richard Francis Button."
    "I have not heard on this man." Bauru said.
    "He was a famous explorer and linguist. Burton was

    -48-

    assigned as British consul to Brazil in 1864. He was based on the coast in Santos. In 1867 he left Santos and traveled alone for almost the entire year. It is known he navigated the San Francisco River north of here for over fifteen hundred miles in a canoe. He barely survived, arriving at the coast suffering from both pneumonia and hepatitis."
    "Why did he do this?" Bauru thought most foreigners quite strange. He would never travel that far in the Mato Grosso atone. It was akin to committing suicide. He was amazed that the man had made it to the coast, especially given the limited equipment he must have had over a hundred years earlier.
    "To hide something." Mualama pointed down. "It must be underneath. 1 think Burton traveled here during the dry season of the drought of 1867, when the water was much lower. In one of his papers I found in England he described a chamber under a flat rock like an altar, in the throat of the Devil." Mualama looked around. "We are in the Devil's Throat This is a flat rock in the right place. And this mark is his."
    "How do you know that?" Bauru asked.
    "Burton translated the story of the Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. To mark his way, he used riddles that only someone who knew about him would recognize. I have no doubt we are in the right place. I must go underneath and find the chamber."
    "Is this what Fawcett was looking for?"
    "I believe so."
    "But Fawcett never returned," Bauru noted.
    "He might never have made it here," Mualama said. "The journey is easier now."
    Bauru looked at the water askance. "There is much
    danger in the rivers here. You cannot see more than six
    inches in that muck. There are--"
    "I have to," Mualama cut him off. "Like Fawcett, I

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    have been on Burton's trail for twenty years, and this is the next step."
    Mualama pulled off his shoes and socks.
    "Why did Fawcett lie about what he was looking for?" Bauru asked, trying to forestall the professor's going into the water.
    "Because it is a very dangerous path he was trying to follow, and because there are those who guard it most jealously." Mualama pulled his shirt over his head, revealing his lean torso, a black metal medallion hanging around his neck that featured an eye superimposed on the apex of a pyramid, and a back covered in scar tissue.
    Bauru and the porters were shocked by what they saw. "What happened to your back?"
    "I was caught in a fire." Mualama said. He had only his shorts on. "I am going over the side."
    "Here." Bauru pulled a shorter section of rope out of his pack and handed one end to Mualama. "Tie this around your waist."

    Mualama quickly looped the rope around himself and tied it off. After a sharp exchange in their native dialect, Bauru and the two porters held the other end.
    Mualama slid