Chapter 00 - Prologue - Finding The Journal

One day in the middle of summer on the island of Cyprus, a British archaeologist named Richard Anderson made an amazing discovery.  It was, in fact, entirely by accident, for this particular archaeologist was on holiday and had nothing on his mind except getting a suntan, enjoying some local food, and perhaps meeting a beautiful local lady who couldn’t understand a word he was saying.  Instead, he made one of the most mind-blowing discoveries of his entire career – something so amazing he could not share it with anyone for a very long time.

The first unusual thing occurred on the beach at Ayia Napa where this archeologist was lounging.  He was trying to work up the courage to go over to an attractive young woman who he thought had been eyeing him to see if she might really be interested.  As he moved in her direction, she looked at him again and smiled in an inviting manner.  Things were definitely looking good at that moment.

“Kalimera, me léne Richard,” he said.

“Kalimera, Richard, léyome Sophia,” she answered, extending her hand.  “Would you like to sit down?” she continued in Greek.

Of course he would!  Plopping down next to the beautiful sunbather, Richard prepared to continue this promising conversation.

Suddenly, just as he was about to open his mouth again, another man showed up.  He was well dressed in an elegant business suit and matching silk tie.  In a place full of semi-clad tourists, though, he looked shockingly out of place.  This intruder barged right up to the woman and started arguing with her harshly in some unknown tongue.  The archaeologist had learned a little Modern Greek so that he could survive in the restaurants and hotels, but he did not recognize anything this man was saying.  It may have perhaps been Turkish, he thought at first, for he did not understand a word of that language.  However he had heard many Turks talking with each other in the villages to the north, and this strange dialogue sounded nothing like it.

The argument continued a bit, escalating quickly.  More and more heads were turning to see what all the commotion was about.  Just when it seemed like either of them might attack the other, the woman swiftly grabbed the archaeologist by his head and arm, pulling a knife out of nowhere and pressing it to his neck.  She was taking him hostage!  The intruder backed off a bit at that point, but now a crowd was forming around the three.  The woman was furious, possibly crazy, something that had the archaeologist very worried, but he was much more amazed at the blade by his neck.

This was no normal knife!  He could tell it was incredibly sharp, for the edge of it was resting lightly on his skin yet cutting him painfully nonetheless.  It was a rather long blade, so while she was holding it against his jugular he had a few moments to examine the tip up close.  Its surface looked more like a hologram or a CD’s recorded surface than like a knife.  He had a hard time distinguishing where the edge of the blade was, for it became transparent as it tapered off.  There was a script on the blade, which surprised the archaeologist even more.  It was written in Etruscan!  This knife looked very new and high tech, but the inscription was clearly in a language that hadn’t been spoken for twenty centuries.  This was no touristy gimmick either.  Only a few archaeologists in the world could decipher Etruscan.  From what he could tell, the blade was dedicated to the Earth goddess Cilens.

Before the archaeologist’s amazement over this artifact could subside, the strange man attacked the woman – something that astounded poor Richard even further.  Had he been able to communicate with the two, he would have begged the man not to do anything rash so as not to startle the woman into accidentally slicing his jugular.  Instead, the well-dressed man did the rashest thing imaginable.  In the blink of an eye, he grabbed the knife by the blade with his left hand, pulling it away from the archaeologist’s neck.  With his right hand, he pulled Richard by his hair safely away from the crazed woman.

The woman and man now faced each other, locked in a violent struggle.  These two looked as though they had trained in martial arts for a very long time, for the fight looked like it had been choreographed in a Hong Kong film studio.  The crowd just looked on in amazement as the two Bruce Lees duked it out.  At first the man was unarmed, and the woman was slashing away at him with the strange knife in an attempt to land a blow.  After a few minutes of this, the man swiftly sidestepped one rather wild, off-balanced slash, grabbed the woman’s arm in both of his hands, snapped the limb back so hard that all three arm bones broke, and plunged the knife into the woman’s chest while her hand still held tightly to the hilt.  A couple onlookers fainted at the sight, one or two pulled out mobile phones to call the police, but most of them started backing quickly away.

The victorious businessman grabbed the knife back out of the woman’s bleeding chest and took off toward the inner island through the ever widening hole in the shrinking crowd.  Richard was dumbfounded for a few seconds but quickly overcame his shock at what happened.

The archaeologist side of him wanted desperately to take a look at the knife again, and the human side of him wanted to flee the scene before the cops arrived. He followed the strange man with the knife as he made his way through the parking lot.  Conveniently he dashed right by his rental car, so Richard hopped in in order to pursue the fleeing man more effectively.  As he caught up behind the runner, though, he suddenly picked up his pace.  “This can’t be,” thought the archaeologist – the man was running about 35 miles an hour, showing no signs of tiring out.  He didn’t even appear to be sweating!  The chase continued for several hours, unbelievably, until the man turned off into a thick patch of trees and bushes near the village of Klirou in the middle of the island.

The archaeologist shut off the car and pursued on foot.  He had spent some time in the British Army many years ago, so he knew a few tactics when it came to tracking a fleeing enemy.  He quickly picked up the trail and followed it for a few kilometers.  It was somewhat hard to trace, owing to the enormous strides the man was laying down.  He must have still been moving at a tremendous speed!  Nevertheless, the archaeologist tracked the fugitive to a cave deep in the forest.  The archaeologist was quite afraid of the man at this point, his fear swiftly overwhelming the desire to thank him for saving his life.  He still wanted to get a look at the knife though.  Not knowing what else to do, he hunkered down out of site and calmly waited for the man to emerge.

It was a long wait.  The fugitive obviously knew he had been followed and wasn’t about to leave his hideout.  Throughout the long hot day, the archaeologist sat there bored out of his mind, wondering why he was giving up a wonderful time on the seashore just to look at some stupid dagger.  Late in the evening, right when he was about to call it quits, another man walked up to the cave, looking furtively here and there.  This man was dressed like a local.

The archaeologist’s curiosity fully recharged, he overcame his some of his fear and sneaked closer to the entry so as to hear what these two might say.  He wasn’t sure he’d understand, but hopefully they’d speak in the local man’s native tongue, Greek.  Once he was within earshot, he was relieved to find that this was the case.

“There’s someone out there spying on us,” the fugitive was saying.  “I can still smell him.”

The archaeologist quickly sniffed his armpits, thinking he perhaps reeked of body odor.  He could detect nothing.  Could this strange man get any weirder?

“Is he a threat?” asked the newcomer.

“No, but I really don’t want him to find out any more about what happened back there.”

“Well there’s nothing you can do.  This is public land, and he has every right to sit there until he starves if he wants to.”

“I can outlast him.”

“I’m sure you can, but you have to be somewhere tonight, remember?”

“I know,” said the fugitive, agitated.  “Athos, make him go away.”

The other man laughed.  “How about I just guard the cave while you’re gone.”

“Fine,” said the fugitive, “don’t underestimate him, though.  I think he’s had some military training.  He did a fine job tracking me here.”

“If he’s not armed, I have nothing to worry about.”

“I hope he didn’t call the police.  Then you will have something to worry about.”

“Just go.  I’ll be fine.”

The archaeologist heard the strange man get up and rummage about the cave, preparing to leave.  He dashed back to his hiding place and waited.  Once the mysterious fugitive was gone, he overcame his fear completely and walked up to the entrance of the cave.  He had no intention of attacking the local man.  He just wanted to talk.

“Kalispéra,” he said.

“Good evening to you as well,” said the local, responding in accented English.  “Please leave me alone.”

“I don’t want to bother you.  I’m an archaeologist, you see, so I was naturally intrigued by the knife that woman used to nearly kill me.  I just wanted to take a look at it.  If you would, could you also thank that nice man for saving my life?”

“Too scared to do it yourself?” asked the other.

“Well, er, yes,” admitted the archaeologist.  “He ran ninety kilometres in just under two hours to get here.  That’s not normal!”

“He’s a good runner, but I doubt he ran that far that fast,” chuckled the local man nervously.  “My name is Athos, by the way.”

“Richard.  Pleased to meet you,” answered the archaeologist.  “He did run that fast.  I followed him in a car and clocked his speed.”

“If you say so,” laughed Athos.  “I think the intense sun here has clouded your mind.”

Richard shifted from one foot to another, than said, “May I look at the knife?”

“Wait here,” said Athos.  He went into the cave, coming back out a few moments later with the blade.

The archaeologist gently examined the knife and started translating the script, “A gift from mother Cilens: use it to defeat your enemies from Atlan.”

“You can read that?” asked the local, a mild surprise visible in his eyes.

“I’ve studied the Etruscans extensively, however very few people can read their language.  This blade is unbelievable!  It looks so high-tech, yet it’s obviously quite old.  It also seems to indicate the Etruscans were familiar with the legend of Atlantis.  I previously did not think this was the case.  Whereas the Central American civilisations, the Greeks, and even the ancient Britons believed similar accounts of a land mass disappearing into the ocean, the Etruscans had no such literature.  Albeit, we are lacking in large amounts of Etruscan writings…”  Richard often sounded like a professor when he talked about archaeology.

“Most ancient peoples had a legend or two about some island sinking into the sea,” Athos interrupted.  “As an archaeologist, you probably already know this.”

“Quite true,” admitted Richard.  “Still, this artifact is unique in the world of Etruscan archaeology.  I have another question.  The man who rescued me was speaking an unfamiliar language with that woman who nearly killed me.  Do you perhaps know what it was?”

“Basque probably,” answered Athos.

The mysteries kept piling on.  Why on earth would they be speaking Basque?  The archaeologist stood for a while in silence, letting all these things sink in.

While he was contemplating all this, a snake that had silently crawled up behind Athos while they was talking lashed out and bit the local in his heel.  It was a small, skinny snake with a black body and red and blue markings on the head and tail.

“Watch out!” shouted Richard, far too late.

“Get me to a hospital,” gasped Athos weakly.  “That one was poisonous!”

“Hold on, I have a rental car a little ways back.  Can you move?”

“Only if you help me.  Quick, tie a tourniquet around my leg first.  There should be a sheet on a bed there inside the cave.”

Richard dashed in, looking for the bed sheet.  While looking he noticed that the walls of this cave were stuffed with thousands of ancient parchments and scrolls.

“What are those?” he muttered to himself.  Perhaps this was why the businessman and Athos had been acting so inhospitable to him.  He didn’t have any more time to think about this, though.  He found the bed, grabbed one of the sheets, and dashed back to Athos who by now was moaning in pain, propped up against a tree.  Richard ripped a strip off the sheet and tied it around Athos’ calf just below the knee without quite cutting off his circulation.

“I’m not tying it any tighter than that.  Let’s hurry to the car.  I’ll carry you as much as I can, so don’t exert yourself.  You should be fine as long as you don’t get your heart rate up.  Is there a clinic in Klirou?”

“Yes,” said Athos weakly.

The two men hobbled away from the cave as quickly as they could.  It took a good twenty minutes to get back to the car, where Athos collapsed in the back seat as soon as he was in.  Richard barely had any more energy than Athos after half-dragging his lame companion to the car, but his fear that this local man he barely knew might die in his car gave him a renewed sense of urgency.  Ten minutes later, Richard drove up to the doors of the local clinic, following the directions Athos had given him.  An hour later, Athos was in stable condition but unconscious.  Richard was somewhat amazed at how weak he had gotten.  Normally snake bites don’t work that fast if you used a tourniquet.

Once the  doctors assured Richard Athos would be fine, he returned to his car and drove back to the forest.  It was now nearly midnight.  He felt a slight twinge of guilt for leaving Athos like that, but his greatest weakness was his uncontrollable curiosity.  The whole time he was rescuing him, he could think of nothing else but getting back to that cave and looking at those forbidden documents.  Upon reaching his old parking spot, he turned the car off the road and slowly maneuvered it into the forest as far as he could.  About three hundred meters from the cave, he could go no further, so he got out and hustled to the entrance as quickly as he could in the darkness.  There was a full moon, so the trail was easy to navigate.

He soon found the cave, and once he got in, he started examining the parchments with a flashlight.  They seemed to be well organized, so he grabbed the first one and sat down on the nearby bed.  They were very old vellum scrolls– perhaps two thousand years or more – but the archaeologist was amazed to find that he could relate to the text better than he’d expected.  The language was Ancient Greek – something he could understand even better than Modern Greek, but the subject could have been straight out of a newspaper.

After reading a few paragraphs, Richard couldn’t breathe.  How could this be?  This obviously ancient document was describing the recent conflict in Iraq!  The writer didn’t use the word Mesopotamia to describe the region – he transliterated Iraq into classical Greek.  Even more amazing were the descriptions of the battles.  The writer had transliterated military terminology like ‘Humvee,’ ‘A-10 Warthog,’ and ‘Navy SEAL,’ into the Greek script.  Richard slapped himself to be sure he wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating.  Even the place names were modern.  ‘As-Samawah,’ ‘Baghdad,’ ‘An-Najaf’ – none of these cities went by those names two thousand years ago if they even existed.

He spent a couple minutes reading the first few paragraphs of the parchment.  Then he picked up the next one.  The second parchment was in a language Richard did not understand.  It looked like it was written in some sort of ancient Chinese script – possibly one used two millennia ago.  The third parchment was in Aramaic.  Richard’s understanding of this language was far less than his grasp of Greek, but he could still tell that the writer was describing the same thing.  He could recognize the unusual transliterations of modern military terminology and place names.

The next one was written in Latin, containing the same story as the first.  A couple more scrolls followed in languages Richard couldn’t understand.  After shuffling through the rest of the stack, Richard counted over two hundred different languages – all describing the same modern events, all of them in languages that only existed two thousand years ago.

“Where’s Athos!” shouted a voice behind Richard in Greek, causing him to nearly swallow his own tongue in fright.  He turned around to face the terrifying fugitive not two feet away from him and nearly wet himself.

“H-he got b-b-bit by a snake!” stammered Richard.  “I-I t-took him to the local clinic!  I wasn’t going to steal anything.  I’m an archaeologist, and I just wanted to examine that knife and study these ancient writings.”

“How much did you read?” demanded the fugitive – this time in perfect American English, causing Richard to become even more flummoxed.

“I-I-I read s-some of the first parchment – the one in Greek.  Then I examined the other two hundred in this first group, but they were all presumably talking about the same thing.  I c-could only understand a few of the languages.”

“You say a snake bit Athos?”  The man’s demeanor and voice were now calm.  “Describe what happened.”

“I was looking at the knife you took from that woman on the beach.  Thank you, by the way, for saving my life.”

“It was nothing.  Please continue,” said the man.

“While I was talking with Athos about the blade and its origin, this tiny snake crawled up behind him and bit him on his heel.”

“That’s not normal snake behavior.”

“I wouldn’t know.  I’m not a biologist,” answered Richard.  “He needed a tourniquet, so I dashed in here to get a bed sheet.  I noticed some documents sticking out of gaps in the walls.  I wanted to read them, but there was no time.  After putting the tourniquet on his leg, I took him to a local clinic where they gave him an antivenin shot and stabilised him.  He’s resting now, but they expect to release him tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you for taking care of him like that,” he said, his mood softening somewhat.  “Athos is tougher than you think.  I bet he’ll be back here before then.  Your fate is another matter.  If you’ve read some of those parchments, you know too much now,” said the mystery man matter-of-factly.

“Are-are you going to kill me?” asked Richard, his eyes widening in terror.

“No, no, of course not!” he said with a dismissive wave.  “But you’d better grow eyes in the back of your head.  Someone else who doesn’t want these documents read might try to.  My name is James Learner, by the way.”

“Richard Anderson.”

“Are you religious, Richard Anderson?”

“Er, not really,” he confessed.  “Why?”

“Well, I suggest you keep reading those parchments you started,” said James.  “Keep an open mind when it comes to the hereafter, and remember, everything you read is true, no matter how unbelievable it sounds.”

“How is it that some ancient Greek scribe around two thousand years ago came to be writing about modern events with such accuracy?” asked Richard.  “These have to be forgeries.”

“If we had the means, you could carbon date the parchment and the ink.  Believe me, they’re at least two millennia old.  You’re an archaeologist – surely you have an eye for what’s real and what’s fake.”

“They certainly look authentic.”

“Well, keep reading them.  The top scroll in each batch is in classical Greek.  If that’s the language you are most comfortable with, stick with it.  I haven’t had time to write them all down in modern English.  Once you reach the end let me know.  I’m going outside to make sure there aren’t any more snakes, or worse.”

To Richard, it seemed as though James were saying that he was the author, but that couldn’t be.  He had meant to say ‘translate into modern English,’ not ‘write down in modern English.’  This day was weird enough without worrying about who authored the blasted scrolls.  So under the watchful eye of James Learner, who apparently wasn’t going to let him leave until he was done, Richard picked up the first Greek parchment and continued the story.