What was once deemed to be the
center of all known civilization, the epitome of culture and grandiosity, fell
in one day. The rain did the rest and the jungle became the one to truly make
the city a myth. Where people one traded, lived and loved, an entanglement of
branches and leaves now existed. Animals now thrived were ancient philosophers
had posed the most interesting questions and had also attempted to answer them.
Fish swam up the streets that people had once used daily, not even noticing
them.
The cataclysm was so abrupt and
effective, that no one else in the entire world ever knew about that city. And
even those who had once visited now thought they could have been mistaken.
Maybe they had been somewhere else and not there, not the city of myth.
Forgotten, its walls and stone sculptures fell to the ground and were promptly
consumed by the jungle. After a while, only the strongest pillars and rocks
where still there, but it would have been very difficult to prove a city had
stood there.
The indigenous peoples that
inhabited the jungle preserved the ideas behind the city, but they were so
entrenched after years and years, that they really couldn’t say what was theirs
and what had been borrowed from those people in the past. Maybe it was their ways
of hunting or maybe they had inherited all of their cosmology from those
ancient humans. Their villages were much smaller and their people did not have
the same kind of vision of their world, but it would have been very sad if
nothing had remained.
Explorers had come every so
often, thinking they would be to unwrap the mystery and reveal to the world
some magnificent new discovery. However, they only had ancient writing and
stories to navigate the jungle with, and that wasn’t nearly enough. They would
often get lost and then be found starving to death, or the jungle and its
animals would defend their existence against them with the maximum sentence.
Bodies were known to be seen floating down the river, sometimes only parts of
them.
However, some of those explorers
were able to find bits and pieces that made the possibility of the city being
rediscovered a reality. The first one to find something was a foreigner that
had no intention to become an explorer but did nevertheless. He was eleven
years old and had been visiting the area with his parents, on a river cruise.
The boy fell in the rapids, were the boats had difficulties navigating, and he
was found to be alive only a few kilometers down the river. The most
fascinating thing was the object he was holding when rescued from a lonely rock
on one side of the river.
At first glance, it was a long
object, kind of white but also yellowish, with holes on one side and a larger
hole on one end. Clearly, it was some kind of musical instrument resembling a
flute. However, when the kid’s parents checked the object, they realized it
wasn’t made out of wood or something similar. The flute was made with bone. Of
course, the parents were disgusted by that and thought instantly that it was
something belonging to one of the tribes living in the vicinity.
When they reached civilization,
they left the object in a museum. There, it was proven to be a musical
instrument but not one used by the indigenous peoples. It was too advanced for
them and too refined for their tastes, which were much simpler. The flute the
kid had discovered had been carefully carved and its holes had been drilled
with a magnificent precision. The discovery was a revolution, because it was
something found on an area that had no relation to such craftsmanship.
The museum officials asked the
kid’s parents to interview the boy before they left for their country. He told
them that he had found the flute by accident, when kicking and tossing and
turning after he had fallen of the boat. He said that he had felt the object
just after falling, so among the rapids. The kid grabbed thinking it could help
him hold on to something, but the flute was freed from the bottom of the river
and then floated with the boy until boat reached the rock where they were found.
The kid was then interviewed by
several news outlets of the country, as the flute had become a very interesting
subject for them. Yet, people from other places seemed to be a little bit
doubtful of the whole thing. Granted, no real tests had been done to the flute
and the kid’s story could be a very elaborate lie. For all that they knew, the
parents could have been liars trying to get some attention out of the whole
thing. The fact that they were actors in Hollywood didn’t really help their
case at all.
But the museum continued its
research, trying not to pay attention to the barrage of critics and doubts
everyone was pouring in. They tested the object with carbon and were able to
prove the flute was much older than any of the objects used by any of the
tribes living in the jungle. Even the ones that lived deep inside it all could
not have been the creators of such a piece. The bone was then analyzed and it
didn’t really surprise anyone when it was revealed it was actually a human
bone. It was a humerus, to be more precise. Someone had used it to create
music, entertainment.
Now, that discovery really
traveled the globe. Of course, other people in the world had created musical
instruments from bones too but this was such an interesting story that it was
just too much not to exploit it. Everyone in the planet was talking about the
flute made out of human bone that a kid had discovered deep in a secluded
jungle. It was an interesting thing to hear about and speculations started to
pop up from every single corner. Everyone had just become an expert.
Some thought that it was maybe not an ancient piece of history but some
prank. Others thought it had been made by the lone survivor of some doomed
expedition. Some even proposed the theory that aliens, beings from some unknown
world, could have been the creators of the object. And all of those were some
of the most common ideas that people had, with the one about the aliens being the
most repeated one in social media and all over the Internet. People loved to
have a mystery in their hands.
Meanwhile, the experts kept on
working. They soon discovered something even more mysterious, that they couldn’t
just corroborate: the bone had been proven to be one from a Caucasian man, an
actual man from the Caucasus region. That place was thousands and thousands of
kilometers away and, somehow, and ancient bone from that region had been
discovered in a jungle with holes to make music with. It did make any sense but
it was what it was, and they checked their results several times.
They even lend the object to
other museums and scientists, also inviting them to visit the flute and sharing
knowledge. But after the last discovery, they had nothing. They even sent
explorer to the area where the kid had found the flute in order to comb the
area. It was a very difficult job and also dangerous, but they did it and spent
several months there. Nothing came out of it. Only people affected by spider
and snake venom, attacks by eels and confrontations with very angry indigenous
peoples.
They would never know how a young
kid, a girl, had once owned that flute. She had used it to entertain herself.
When the cataclysm came, and they all had to abandon their city, the girl took
the flute with her but sadly dropped it in the river, hundreds of kilometers
away from the place where it was found.
The flute was made from the bone
of a man they had brought into the city as a slave. He had been shown around,
like an animal, for people to see what existed beyond their borders. The man
eventually died and his caretaker, the girl’s father, took one of his bones
from the funeral pyre for himself.
