unknown.
“Hey, I’ve seen that painting!” Zoe said. “It was at…”
“It was at the First Vertex,” Wizard said. “Which suggests a clear connection between our quest and the Neetha. The key, however, is Hieronymus.” He clicked through the database on his laptop. “Hieronymus… Hieronymus…Ah, here it is!”
He’d found the entry he was after: a scan of an ancient scroll, written in Greek.
“What’s that?” Lily asked.
“It’s a scroll that was kept at the Library of Alexandria, a scroll written by the great Greek teacher and explorer, Hieronymus.”
Years before, Wizard and Jack had uncovered a vast collection of scrolls in the Atlas Mountains—a collection which, it turned out, was that of the fabled Alexandria Library, long believed to have been destroyed when the Romans burned down the famous Library. After months of careful scanning, Wizard had managed to load all the scrolls onto his various computers.
“Hieronymus was a truly exceptional man. Not only was he a great teacher, he was also an explorer beyond comparison, the Indiana Jones of the ancient world. He taught alongside Plato at the Academy, teaching no less a student than Aristotle himself. He was also the man who stole the Delphic Orb from the Neetha and took it back to Greece, where the Oracle at Delphi later used it to foretell the future.”
“The Delphic Orb?” Zoe said as she flew. “You mean the Seeing Stone of Delphi? One of the Six Sacred Stones?”
“Yes,” Wizard said. “Hieronymus stole it from the Neetha, but from what I’ve studied of him, he always intended to return it. That was why he wrote this scroll—it’s a set of instructions detailing the location of the Neetha, so that the Orb could one day be returned.”
“Was it ever returned?” Alby asked.
“After they saw its power, the Greeks didn’t want to give it back,” Wizard said, “but late in his life Hieronymus crept into the Oracle’s temple-cave, grabbed the Seeing Stone, and fled from Greece by boat. He stopped in Alexandria—where he deposited these scrolls, written in Greek and Latin, at the Library—before he headed south into Africa. He was never seen again.” Wizard turned to Lily. “Think you can translate this scroll?”
She shrugged. It was in Latin, and Latin was easy for her. “Sure. It says:
“AT THE VALLEY OF THE ARBOREAL GUARDIANS
AT THE JUNCTION OF THE THREE MOUNTAIN STREAMS
TAKE THE SINISTER ONE
THERE YOU WILL ENTER THE DARK REALM OF THE TRIBE THAT EVEN GREAT HADES FEARS.’”
“‘The tribe that even great Hades fears’?” Zoe said. “Charming.”
Solomon said, “The Neetha have a reputation so fearsome it has become myth; many Africans use tales of Neetha bogeymen to frighten young children: cannibalism, human sacrifice, killing their young.”
“Takes more than a scary story to frighten me off,” Lily said in her best adult voice. “So what’s the ‘Valley of the Arboreal Guardians’? That seems to be the starting point.”
“Arboreal means trees,” Alby said. “The tree guardians?”
Wizard was clicking through more entries on his computer. “Yes, yes. I’ve seen a reference to just such a valley before. Here it is. Ah-ha….”
Lily leaned over, and saw on his screen the title page of a book, an old 19th century pulp fictioner called Through the Dark Continent by Henry Morton Stanley.
“Stanley wrote many books about his expeditions in Africa, most of them pure romantic rubbish,” Wizard explained. “This one, however, detailed his genuinely remarkable trip across the African continent, from Zanzibar in the east to Boma in the west. Stanley departed from Zanzibar with a caravan of 356 people and, over a year later, emerged at the Congo River estuary near the Atlantic with only 115, all of them on the verge of starvation.
“Over the course of his journey, Stanley recounted numerous gun battles with native tribes, including one particularly gruesome skirmish with a tribe that resemble the Neetha. Immediately before that battle Stanley recounted traveling through an isolated jungle valley in which the trees had been carved into marvelous statues, towering statues of men, some of them over seventy feet high.
“Such a valley has never been found, an unfortunate fact that has only added to the overall historical opinion that Stanley made up most of his adventures.”
“So…” Zoe prompted.
“So, I believe Stanley was telling the truth; he just got the details of his route wrong—something he did quite a lot. That’s why no one’s ever found this valley. But if we can reconstruct Stanley’s actual route from landmarks and land formations mentioned in his book, we just might get lucky.”
“Can’t say I’ve got a better plan,” Zoe said.
“Me neither,” Lily said. “Let’s do it.”
THE CONGO.
Formerly known as Zaire but renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997, the Congo is the third largest country in Africa, almost as big as India. Yet only 3 percent of its vast land area is cultivated, meaning 97 percent of the Congo is pure jungle, much of which remains unexplored to this day.
It is a brutal land—from the dangers of the mighty Congo River to dense jungles teeming with snakes and hyenas, not to mention the chains of active volcanoes in the wild southeast—the dark heart of the Dark Continent.
