Lemuria, Burt Clinchandhill [adventure books to read .TXT] 📗

“Very funny.” Ignatowski rose from the ground. “Did you find anything else?”

Lindsey shook her head. “Nothing. And we need to get out if we’re to make camp with the last bit of daylight left.”

“What do we do with them?” Ignatowski pointed to the three natives.

“We go sleep,” Bishop said and put two hands beneath his tilted head and pointed at the exit of the cave. “Kajaq?” The natives looked up but didn’t respond.

“I’m glad we brought our translator this time,” Lindsey joked. “Let’s go outside, and we’ll see what they do.”

The three picked up their things and walked toward the exit. Bishop looked behind them several times on the way out. Nothing happened, and no one followed them.

“Did you bring the paper from the table?” Bishop asked Lindsey as they walked out of the cave. She waved the roll of paper in the air.

“You want to take a look first?”

Bishop looked up at the last rays of sunlight, casting their light through the treetops. “I think it’s better we set up camp first and make a fire. I don’t want to set up camp in the dark by flashlight. We can look at it later by the fire.”

An hour later, the small contours of three green, small Nemo Dragonfly tents cast their shadows from the campfire against the cave’s rock wall behind them.

“That wasn’t too bad.” Bishop looked at the empty can in his hand. “Spicy chicken and corn chili,” he read from the label. “I’ve had worse.” He threw the empty can in a plastic bag. “So, finished. Shall we have a look at the drawing?”

“Sure,” Lindsey confirmed.

“It’s about time,” Ignatowski added.

Bishop took a small bottle of hand sanitizer from his jacket pocket, gave it a few pumps and rubbed his hands with it.

“Ah, I see that, uh....” Lindsey pointed at the vial.

“Well, actually, no. I’m good now.” He waved his hands in the air. “I’m ninety-nine percent over my mysophobia. This is just personal hygiene. A few years back, I went to therapy, and most of the time, I’m good.”

Lindsey smiled. “Good for you.”

Bishop took the roll of paper and unrolled it on the ground. He took a few nearby rocks and put them on the corners. “There you are.”

An old-world map revealed itself in the light of the campfire. There were only a few names on the map, and on each, different colored continent, lines were drawn and numbered, like roads that ran all over the world.

“You recognize it?” Lindsey asked.

Bishop nodded. “Sure, I do. It’s the Hypothetical Sketch of the Monophyletic Origin, again by Ernst Haeckel.”

Ignatowski pointed to the lower right side of the drawing. “Amazing. It says so right here, at the bottom.”

“Can’t you boys play nice for a day or two?” Lindsey’s face contorted.

“Thanks for pointing that out.” Bishop narrowed his eyes. “The drawing was made by Haeckel in the late nineteenth century. At that time, he was convinced that the world was inhabited by twelve races like it says here.” He pointed to the lower left on the map. “The Papuans, Hottentots, Kaffirs, Negroes, Australians, Malays, Mongols, Polar, Americans, Dravidas, Nubians and Mediterranean. On this map, he laid out the origin of his human species.”

Ignatowski pointed to the lines and numbers on the map. “What about the numbers?”

“Well, it’s a bit hard to see in this light. All the lines are numbered, and each number corresponds with a race here in the legend. The lines you see are much like how we monitor the movement and spread of animals all over the world today. In fact, the lines are long arrows, you see, here? There’s an arrow at the end of each line. They are like uh....”

“They’re migration patterns,” Lindsey finished his sentence.

“Exactly, that was the word I was looking for. On his map, Haeckel suggested that all human life started at one place and spread over the world following these lines and, on their way, they created new uh... offspring, you could say. New biological, humanlike species. He based his findings on his own and other scientists’ travels and people’s physics as he encountered them all over the world.”

“And if they all originated from one place....” Ignatowski pointed to a gray spot on the map, from which all the lines seemed to originate.

“Aha.” Bishop gave a big smile. “And that’s where the real fun starts, and the mystery begins.”

“Now that part was named Lemuria by the English zoologist Philip Sclater. Sclater theorized that in the distant past, there was a land connection between Africa, Madagascar and South Asia. He substantiated his theory with the spread of species of lemurs in Madagascar and fossils found in India.

Lemuria was suggested to have been roughly the size of the Indian Ocean. Later, the Tamils from the region adopted the theory and called it Kumari. They theorized that an ancient Tamil civilization resided there. The hypothesis is that sometime, millions of years ago, it sank beneath the ocean by a catastrophic event like a pole shift.”

“Like Atlantis,” Lindsey proposed.

“Exactly like Atlantis,” Bishop confirmed. “Now, Haeckel expanded on Sclater’s theory and connected Lemuria to his own theory of the twelve species and suggested they all evolved from one humanlike species that originated from Lemuria. According to him, it could also explain the theory of the absence of fossils from ‘the missing link’ we talked about earlier. Since we never found any, they must have been buried under the ocean with Lemuria. Now, the fact that—”

“I read about Lemuria,” Ignatowski said, interrupting Bishop. “And I understand that the theory about its existence was debunked some time ago.”

“Well, you’re right. The theory, by most scientists, has been rendered obsolete through modern theories of plate tectonics. There probably are sunken continents, like Zealandia in the Pacific and Mauritia and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean. But there’s no evidence of a geological formation beneath the Indian or Pacific Oceans that suggests an ancient land bridge.”

“So, what does this have to do with why we’re here?”