The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(933)
“Jose Antonio is mentioned dozens of times in the records. He seems to have had a gift for knowing what was important. It’s nice to know Jonken appreciated him.” Kristen took out the steadily growing folder of catalogued photographs. “We don’t know for certain,” she said, pointing to a slim figure posing beside a possible observatory building with slit windows, “but we are pretty sure this is him. There are references to his helping with the preliminary surveying of this site.”
Jose Antonio looked familiar, somehow, the jaunty angle of his sombrero, the elegance of his serape, something distinctive about his sandals. As soon as we finished our meeting, I went into my office and consulted the walnut framed photograph that I had transported from our old dining room. There was Petrus Jonken, the Prince of the Wilderness, and the man on the other side of the stone work was Jose Antonio. I took out a magnifying glass. He was a mestizo, whose sharp features were at once exotic and familiar to one who had studied the artifacts of his ancestors.
Knowing his name changed the balance of the image, and I began to read the diaries with a greater alertness for the other personalities. I had seen my famous relative as alone, virtually, in the wilderness. Now I saw him as the leader of a small community, a little masculine fraternity, that worked through sweltering days and relaxed at night around campfires, swapping stories and information—and, in his case, dreaming always of the discoveries which might move him closer to his goal, the location of the great city he was convinced was lost in the jungle.
Jonken returned, thin and ill, from the first expedition, but no sooner had he recovered than the jungle exerted its fascination. It was painful to read some of his New England entries, where despite a prestigious post and an affectionate family, he was restless and almost desperate to return south. The second expedition, the one that came tantalizingly close to his goal, ended only when he had to return to raise money for continuing the work.
Jonken’s financial struggles were clearly of historic importance, but I thought those might be left to Amos with his keen appreciation of the rigors of fund raising. The third expedition was my real interest, the one when Jonken returned with the young wife who vanished in a dangerous paradise and darkened his life.
I must confess I approached the records of the third expedition with some unscholarly preconceptions. Uncle Petrus’s romance had been the story of my childhood, and I expected the diaries to follow the script: a young couple, much in love and enthralled by the romance of a lost civilization, enjoy a idyllic adventure cut short by her tragic disappearance.
Except for Alice’s loss, nothing in the diaries was quite as I’d expected. Of course, the bride was prominent during the trip down from New York. Petrus records “tutoring” her in the basics of archeology and drilling her on Spanish verbs and the essential vocabulary of the aboriginal language—not my idea of a honeymoon. I began to suspect that for all his courage and charm my famous relative had been a pedant.
Once they reached the jungle, Alice dwindled into invisibility, with the diary again dominated by references to the sites and artifacts and his native informants. More than half way through the records of the fatal expedition, I couldn’t help contrasting the amount of ink devoted to Ernesto with the few references to Alice—and not very tender ones, at that. She suffered a fever, she complained of illness, she disliked the heat, while the sounds of the jungle night, which Petrus had missed so passionately up north, grated on her nerves.
Alice was clearly not a wilderness person, and I couldn’t help wondering if I would have shared her reactions. Twice Petrus records sending her with Jose Antonio back to the nearest city for supplies, trips, arduous in themselves, which reassured her that she was not entirely stranded.
Meanwhile, Ernesto remained prominent, though I could not determine his official role. He did not turn up in the daily work records that Kristen was compiling, nor did he make any discoveries or find any artifacts that might account for his substantial weekly stipend. His only function appeared to be to encourage Petrus’s conviction that they were near some great ceremonial center. Only late in the third diary, when I discovered a reference to his absence, an absence which apparently upset Petrus, did I learn Ernesto’s profession. He was away, Petrus wrote, to conduct a highly important religious ceremonial.