A new chapter for this New Year 2016. Please leave reviews! Thanks.

Chapter 3

It was late in the night and Helena had tried to quiz Takashi Inoue about the reason for her presence here. It was very clear that they had found a lot more and she had to be called here for a translation. But he seemed to want to deliver the information little by little, maybe to avoid overwhelming her. He said they would reconvene in the morning. So Helena was assigned to a tent in the camp and she went there exhausted. The tent was practical, with a cot, pillow, and blankets. There was a small desk and chair. Helena did not even turn on the lantern. She lay down on the bed, slid into the down sleeping bag and put the heavy blanket over her body. Takashi had told her it could get quite cold during the night. Despite her tiredness, she did not fall asleep right away. The wind was blowing outside the tent and the fabric was flapping in rhythm, like a giant wing. It seemed that the mountain was singing to her, a long lullaby, telling her stories of this long lost place, telling the story of the woman on the ridge, speaking of her pain, her spirit and her love. Helena fell asleep listening to the wind telling her story. She dreamed of her, a woman with long reddish brown hair floating in the wind and smiling at her. She was whispering in the wind and calling Helena. 'Tell my story'. Her soft voice kept on resonating in Helena's mind. She woke up suddenly, gasping. The sun was high in the sky already and the wind had calm down. Birds were chirping outside. It was cold but Helena grabbed a sweater and she exited the tent rapidly, aware she had overslept, and made her way to the tent which contained the remains and the lab.

"Would you care for some coffee?" A young man was handing her a steaming cup. "I am John Evans, from the chemistry department. Dr. Inoue is expecting you in the lab."

Helena was excited to see more of these artifacts, as she was certain there was a lot more than she had been shown the night before.

She entered the lab and without preamble she asked: "When are you going to show me the writings you have found? You sent for a linguist, didn't you?"

Dr. Inoue never stopped smiling. "You did not change, didn't you?"

"Come on Takashi, show me the treasure!"

He motioned her to the side of the lab and pulled out another set of specimen bins.

"We did not find this in the grave, but a few meters down that hill. They were preserved in what I would best describe as a time capsule, a small titanium alloy crate that was not even eroded or dented. They use these alloys on the space shuttle to avoid corrosion and they are extremely heat resistant. It was completely sealed and there was very low air pressure inside, a vacuum."

"A vacuum?"

"Yes, it is as if someone really wanted this crate to keep its contents for a long time, and it did. Inside we found books."

"Books?"

"Books, yes. Several of them. A number of printed books, a small one had a hard cover that is made of brown fabric with gold lettering. The others have soft cover. One especially has a soft leather cover with a different print and some illustrations inside. It looks older than the others. We also found pads, or tablets of papers, fifteen books, filled with handwriting. There are two different types of tablets, with two different handwritings. They are in very poor condition. They disintegrate when you touch them, we had to scan page after page. They were stored in this crate under the most precise care, but they are very old, as old as the body and the grave. Oh yes, all of them, oddly, have their corners cut."

Dr. Inoue showed her the transparent display boxes holding the books.

"I cannot open them for you. They are too fragile. But everything has been carefully scanned, catalogued. We used x-rays and ct-scan and made sure we would not miss any page or hidden writing."

She looked at the books. She looked at the printed characters of the writing, immediately analyzing the writing, recognizing the characters. She studied through the transparent barrier the pads of paper with the slanted handwriting, realizing she was looking at a 150,000 years old text and tears came to her eyes.

"This is incredible"

"What is incredible is this: we found a picture."

Helena was stunned. He continued.

"A picture, which was inside the brown book. It is almost completely faded. Look."

The picture was kept in a separate small box. It was very grey and you could see only the shadows of two individuals standing side by side, clearly a man and a woman. "We scanned the picture and digitally enhanced it for contrast and color based on MR Spectroscopy analyses of the pigments found on the picture." He walked over to a computer terminal and entered his login and password and opened a folder. The digital picture loaded slowly and there it appeared in high resolution on the computer screen.

"Oh my God!"

Helena could see a man in uniform, looking stern, with peppered grey hair cut short military style, with a woman on his side. She was wearing a suit, dark, with a white shirt. Her hair was long, wavy and dark red. She had a small-restrained smile. She looked very dignified and strong, an image of power. In the background there was a flag, which she did not recognize. Helena could not detach her gaze from the green eyes of the woman. She touched the screen with the tips of her fingers.

"This is Laura."

"We can't be sure of that."

"Of course we have no evidence. But it would make perfect sense, wouldn't it? She knew she was dying, so she wrapped her belongings in that crate. Or maybe that was a ritual they had."

It could be a coincidence too."

"Did you do DNA analyses? Did you find DNA traces on the books?"

"Our molecular biology team is running the tests at this instant. We will have the results in a few days."

"Did you scan the region? Maybe the man on the picture is buried around here as well."

"We did not find a second body and we have scanned the entire plateau of this mountain. But the climate conditions on the east slopes are much more humid and the geology is different, allowing for far worse conditions to preserve remains that old. It looks like this woman was buried alone." Inoue replied.

Helena Harper continued now in full professional mode.

"I will need to have access to all of the scans of those documents. I think we will find a lot of answers in those books."

"Consider it done." Takashi Inoue replied, he continued, thinking aloud. "A civilization advanced enough to have photography, medical care, leaders in uniforms. On the background of this picture, it looks like a flag, this suggest some political organization, a nation, a government. But we never heard of them. We never found remains, buildings, and writings other than those. It is like they got wiped out from the surface of the planet."

Helena replied:

"I disagree. There are hundreds of legends of lost civilizations, semi-gods with awesome powers ruling the earth. Mythologies around the world speak of gods dominating the natives, of heaven kingdoms, of lost islands, lost cities, lost countries, lost continents. We know that no continent was lost, we have no remains of lost civilizations, but we have this now and it suggests strongly that some of these legends might have a base in some true facts. Maybe they are not just stories after all, maybe there are half remembered tales of a very distant past, distorted over generations and generations and millennia. These humans certainly had modern technology, and that would have scared off the natives, certainly they would have appeared as gods to them." She paused. "I need to work on these texts. The printed books will give me a great reference for the script found on these note pads, assuming they all are the same language. Do you have access to the international language database of the UNESCO?"

Dr. Inoue nodded and he opened the files of the scanned pages of the first book they had. It was the bound brown book. The cover of the book appeared. It was made of dark brown fabric with gold letters on the cover, which were very imprecise. It looked like the book had been burned as some scorching marks appeared on the sides.

"What do you make of it?"

"It looks like an early form of Sanskrit, maybe proto-indo-European language, which does not fit because it is not found in Africa. In this part of the world, I would have expected some Sumerian related language."

She scrolled down the pages. The first page and a hand written note, then the printed text began.

"Definitely proto-indo European, that language that gave rise to Sanskrit, India's dialects and European languages. This is fascinating. This predates Sumerian, who was until now the first written language. Proto-indo European has been reconstituted from the roots of all languages as the mother of all tongues. But it was not believed to be ever written, just spoken. This resembles Sanskrit but it is clearly more ancient. It's got the same roots. We will see how accurate the proto-indo European scholars have been in reconstituting this language. It seems we are facing the first ever written account of it."

Helena was assigned a workstation in the lab with computer access and encrypted internet access to all the necessary databases. She selected the oldest known form of Sanskrit and worked her way backwards from there to decipher the characters of the text in front of her. She cross-referenced it to the proto-indo European database. She pointed to the first sign on the title of the book.

"Assuming they are reading from left to right, which would make sense considering the roots of this language, this first sign is 'ocean' or a large body of water. This other sign is for 'travel' or 'traveler' and that one is for a bird of prey, an eagle maybe?"

Inoue tried to put it together.

"Ocean traveler eagle? It does not make sense."

"Well, that is it really. A novel, maybe, about traveling over the ocean like a bird. I can't be sure until I work an extensive vocabulary database."

"I will let you work."

Dr. Inoue left and Helena sighted at the daunting task in front of her. She looked at the picture: a time forgotten, older than old. The man in the picture stood with his hands crossed on his front. The military uniform was straight and strict. His hair was perfectly combed back, as the severe image of a military man. The woman was strong as well in her demeanor, a hint of a smile, and behind her strength, somewhere hidden, something fragile in her look. She was right next to him and there were no obvious signs of affection between them. Yet, Helena could not stop thinking of them as a couple. Behind them, luxurious flags, colorful, with signs on them she never seen before. Her hair was beautiful. "She would lose her hair later" thought Helena. She bent over to look at her hand. She was not wearing a ring, but the man was. She had a silver bracelet, a simple oval bangle opened on the inside of her wrist with two small spheres terminating its sides. She made a mental note to ask Takashi if he retrieved it with the rest of the artifacts.