The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (37 page)

             
Here Ffellowes stopped for breath and a quick drink. The library stayed utterly quiet
.
Then he began again.

             
"Must really sound as if I was and am still batty, eh? Felt a bit that way myself, though hopelessly confused, hyper-nerved up and more than a bit scared as well, might sum up what I was feeling then. The twin blows on eyes and ears at this point staring at this weird, shrouded city with its aura of abnormal age, and then those shocking sounds too. You fellows would have had to be there to understand.

             
"Then I checked my watch for something to do that was normal. Damn if a full twenty minutes had passed since that third, moaning yell had quit
.
I looked at Lucas but his eyes were fixed in front locked on that great stone wall. I looked back at it too, as if pulled by the thing, sort of mesmerized. So I also saw it all, from the start
.

             
"As if laid on for an instant vision, pre-ordered by Fate or God, the great half-rotted gates in the wall began to open!

             
"My jaw must have dropped and Lucas' did because I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Sort of thing one sees unconsciously and only recalls as fact long afterward. In any case, and my apologies for these random
divergencies
, slowly and creakingly the bloody things opened, shoving back built
-
up soil and plants as they did. There must have been one or more other exits from that cavernous fort and it really was more of a huge fort than a city. In a second, you'll hear and realize why there had to be."

             
He took a long breath, the only one to be heard in that big room, and continued. "Shocking the way I forget to tell details. Those gates were not pushed open by machines or electricity. On the inside of each half, exerting three times
at least the strength that the same numbers of men could have done, were five
goldy
-red pelted bipeds. I didn't need to look at my neighbor. We knew what they were as if we'd smelt 'em. But these specimens were dressed, unlike what had fallen upon us earlier. They had short kilts of stuff that glittered like woven metal, which in fact it was, as we soon
saw. There were things hanging from heavy belts as well, things that had to be weapons and some of them glinted brightly also. One had something strapped to his or her back which looked awfully familiar to me. If it wasn't a rifle it was a close copy, and I could discern the breech and metal
-
tipped butt easily.

             
"This was all happening rather fast, but I'm trying to keep my tale a bit slow deliberately, so as not to miss anything else as I almost just did. Next, the ten gate openers fell back and lined up, each bunch of five with backs to its own half of the gate. There was a hush and even the distant birds seemed to shut up. All at once, there was movement in the shadowy opening, movement and noise. Barking cries, the clank of metal, the thudding of feet, all came at once. No problem for me to construe. I'd heard variants of that noise all my life. An armed body of considerable size had begun to move. If my eyes had been shut it might have been the Scots Guards, same number of U.S. Marines or probably even a gang of Alexander's hoplites for that matter. Any troops make the same noises at times. I expect Chaka's Zulu regiments would have sounded much the same when moving out
.
Because one thing allies all such groups, which is discipline and a cadence, a
rhythm
. And what was now appearing through the gate had it
.
The strangest little army on our planet was marching, not walking, marching out, and they were in both a formation, a column of fives, and in step to boot
.
Lousy pun, that, since they were barefoot
.

             
"About a hundred came with officers on the flanks and one in front
.
Half way to our position, they stopped on a barked command as if a lion had been Regimental
Sgt
Major or a gorilla. Just what the Guards would like, unless they've changed. Behind this advance now came the cavalry, the most amazing body of mounted troops that ever existed, past or present
.

             
"When I saw the first one, the leader or colonel or whatever, appear, I damned near choked.
T'wasn't
the rider, and I don't say 'man' for all the infantry who'd come first were our giant ape men. And so were the lines of mounted troops, and they were troops, now emerging. But that first one!

             
"She was another of these
ultra females
, gold breastplates and all, who might at a distance have been a twin to my big
catgirl
!

             
"Have you noticed I've carefully said 'mounts' and not 'horses' once? No, they weren't mules, donkeys or even zebras. They were massive, with legs like elephants, though smaller, hair like coarse, greyish wire and long noses like pigs, noses that were pink and twitched but with broad, flat muzzles and nostrils set side by side. And tiny, short tails that hung straight
.
They each weighed about as much as a medium horse but had narrow, ridged backs and the massive legs were so short that the riders' bare feet almost hit the ground, even though their knees were pulled up high.

             
"In short, Lucas and I were observing a force, the only such there ever was, of jungle cavalry, designed for the rain forest
.
Their mounts were not
equids
at all but tapirs!"

             
Ffellowes stopped and looked around at us, a grin on his face as he watched our reaction to this fantastic story. In the silence that followed, someone else cleared his throat and then spoke quickly. It was an older man named
deCamp
, an economist I believe for the U.S. Government "I'm a student of zoology as a hobby, Brigadier," he said. "Did you know, by any chance, that tapirs,
rhinoceroses and all types of horses, asses, donkeys and so on are all related? They're the only living mammals, I mean those three groups, that are related, each to the other two sets. I mean like rats and
squirrels both being members of the
Rodentia
?"

             
Ffellowes laughed aloud. "Yes, My dear man, I do know it; know it now, that is. I certainly didn't at the time, and would have had you clapped into bed or a hospital due to either alcohol or fever if you had ventured to tell me such a thing in those days.

             
"And now, my friends, I suddenly understood a lot of what I had heard, and more than that I knew a lot that made perfect sense from the very beginning, from the story of 'Jones' for instance and the secret message thrown aboard the Hooper vessel.

             
"There was an army, a secret army, which had given our poor ex-agent the fits when he somehow discovered it
.
There were actual and very real reasons for the Amerindians to avoid this territory and there always had been, since the dawn of human civilization. Certainly since the Classic Age of Greece. Aristo
tl
e and Plato had known what they were talking about,
gentlemen
. There had been a great culture far to the West, whose name at least had come to them. I was standing in its lost and last colony, preserved through the ages. There was an
Atlantis
!

             
"All of this data flashed through my mind at once, as lightning comes through a cloud. I knew it all. And I knew more. Alone in the world, the world of
Homo sapiens
, the world of what Science calls Reasoning Man or Modern Man, Man the gorilla hunter, the Orangutan shooter, the Chimpanzee trapper, there had been one wiser branch long ago. And this one, isolated by its home's disappearance under the A
tl
antic waves, had survived!

             
"Like the British garrison at
Lucknow
in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, this colony too had survived. In this case, they had been surrounded by the oncoming hordes of alien Amerindians who were pouring down from North America to the end of South America at Cape Horn. Some, perhaps many, had already gone past the lost colony of A
tl
antis, gone South forever. But more would come and Home could never
now send help or even exist as a place to go back to, if evacuation had been possible at all.

             
"What to do, when all seemed lost, for these isolated men and women and probably some children too? What help was there in this hostile forest world? Think of it, men, think of it
.
Picture perhaps a few lonely ships, the last galleys perhaps, but possibly better ships than galleys, for the Atlanteans were wise, far ahead of the Minoans, the Egyptians and the south-migrating Dorian Greeks. Read Plato, who knew something of them. Can you see those lonely vessels and their crews with straining eyes, as they used the stars to navigate and again and again, crossed and
recrossed
the stormy Atlantic, looking, always looking, for the Home that now was not the Home that Never Was, for them?"

             
As the Brigadier brought that tragic story, one of the greatest of human tragedies ever, to life again and I thought of those gallant and forever lost seamen, my own eyes filled with moisture and my breath caught
.
I could hear some vigorous nose-blowing and throat clearing nearby, and I knew that I was neither a hurt child nor alone in my feelings.

             
Like the born tale spinner he was, Ffellowes gave it a moment to sink in. Then he started again, his calm uninfected voice as soothing and quieting as some old nurse's. There is some child in every thinking man, I am sure.

             
"You may ask, did these folk know Europe? Did they know that behind the Gates of Hercules lay the Mediterranean and its peoples, the ones I have mentioned? Why of course they did. No doubt they took them for slaves on occasion and traded with some of them on others. How else could the bare knowledge of that lost and mighty realm have come to Plato and to others from whom he, in turn, got it? Consider two facts, taken in order. First the far-ranging and
skilful
seamen of Carthage, Hannibal's city which Rome killed; plowing the
levelled
ground with salt and obliterating her great foe forever.

             
"We know from the Greek historians that the Carthaginians rounded the tip of Africa, going South down the East Coast and North up the West Coast
.
We know they reached the Canary Islands, whose still extant natives, the
caucasoid
or 'white' if you like,
Guanches
have never had any boats, not so much as a raft and still speak a dialect or rather their own language related to the mountaineers of the Moroccan Rif. Who put them there? Carthage or perhaps an earlier race of seamen? And remember this, too. The men of Carthage were most secretive. They did not and would not, say where they had been and especially how one got to any trading place by sea. They kept the secret of British tin, vital to the ancient world, for centuries. And why were they always want to go West? All the other seamen of the ancient Mediterranean and the Black and Red Seas too, knew about this obsession of the Carthage rovers. They were thought to be, and were called by others, mad. What were they seeking? Hell, Gentlemen, those folk knew the world was round, a knowledge later lost
.
There was regular sea trade with India and Ceylon, now called by its name of those days, Sri Lanka. Could they have learnt of this lost colony?

             
"Fact two. Why were blond Spaniards, starting with that greedy bastard Alvarado, Cortez' lieutenant, revered by the Aztecs and other Amerindians of Central America? Not North, mind you or South. Only by the
MesoAmerican
folk, from Aztec to Mayan, and many more minor tribes. What was so holy about blonds and redheads? A lot of that scrambled mythos of Quetzalcoatl has to do with fair skins and light hair.

             
"So back to my own story. All of the above hit me at once and in one orderly, intelligible blast, as in the aforesaid lightning bolt
.
And more besides, the ultimate key to the whole mystery and it was a complex key, a mix of Genetics, Myth and Anthropology, all fused together. As another detective that imaginary," (Ffellowes paused a strangely long time at this point in the sentence which was odd)
"
chap S. Holmes, was wont to remark, 'When one has eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer.' I had it now. What about the long-rumored Sasquatch, the 'Big Foot,' the
Wendigo
of the northern Amerindians? There are clever men, scientists, who are still searching and sure that a few are alive and in hiding. And if so, who and what might they be?