Chapter 6

After strenuous months on living on the camp, the team members were on shifts so that scientists could come home and visit their families, but Helena took a vacation. Helena's intense academic career had left her without family and she never married. While she was busy traveling the world on archeological digs and burying herself in books, others had met partners, bought houses, had raised children. Helena had no regrets. She liked her life, going all over the world for months at a time, decrypting old manuscripts, and connecting with the local population. She had brief affairs; they never lasted very long. Men wanted commitment; they wanted a wife, a house, a woman to tend to their needs. She was none of this. Helena opted of a resort close to Dar es Salaam. Of course, first there was the long hike down the Uluguru Mountains with guides and a security team for protection. Helena realized she had not gone down the mountains in over four months. They had been isolated and, yet, time did not seem long, with the long work hours and the excitement of the discovery. Takashi Inoue had to force her to take a break. Helena was just about to finish the first draft of the translation of the tablets and she was very excited by what she had learned. Dr. Inoue had allowed her to take her laptop with her, with a powerful encryption program on it to prevent anyone to read the files in case it was stolen. Helena had reached the forest line and the weather changed from cool and dry, to warm and humid. They were greeted by a driver in a jeep and then began the long drive through the red soil hills, lined by farms and patches of wild forest. As they were going down in altitude, the weather turned very warm and they soon reached Morogoro. Children on bikes waved at them and they passed an old man leading a donkey covered with loads of bags, probably heading to a nearby market. The houses were often shacks covered with metallic roofs and lots of building were run down and falling apart. Morogoro remained the center of a rural agricultural region. The buildings used to have their glory in colonial times before the First World War, when this part of the land belonged to Germany. The shady politics of the region, the oppression of the native populations by the colonists, Eastern Africa slave trade and horrors committed there led eventually to the destruction and collapse of the colony. Years of war and political instability left old gorgeous buildings to disuse and the town was rebuilt after the Second World War as the center of a large and fertile agricultural region and market. While the town had lost its past brilliance and slumped into poverty, it recovered nicely when more road connections were established and the agricultural market thrived. The streets were very busy and loud, with lots of people walking, laughing, chatting, selling goods, or simply sitting on the ground playing board games, drinking or smoking. Looking at faces of unknown people in the street, searching their eyes, she came to wonder if they were the ancestors of these ancient people. It was hot and the air was filled of dry dust. In the back, near the horizon, the Uluguru Mountains were rising sharply from the ground, step, dark and covered with clouds, almost forbidding with their cooler climate and their gloomy appearance. But for Helena, the Uluguru Mountains were now her home, peaceful and quiet, swept by the wind and haunted by the memory of those who came there such a long time ago. She took a small plane with her two armed bodyguards from the airfield to Dar es Salaam, the same way she came in at the first place. And while flying low over the African landscape and watching the mountains disappearing on the horizon. Helena reflected on how much she had changed in these few months. Looking that the landscape and the people through different eyes, she realized that the world would never be the same for her, now that she knew that 150,000 years ago a technological advanced human population had come here and settled.

Helena had booked a vacation in a resort by the Indian Ocean. She wanted quiet and time to rest after the frantic schedule of the research team over the past four months. She had reserved a bungalow on the beach by the ocean and a pool nearby by the main building of the hotel near Dar es Salaam. Her security detail was housed next to her. She had to get used to this, but with the dangers of the region and the important confidential work she was doing, there was no escape. Dr. Inoue would not let anyone travel out of the research site without proper protection. She was not sure if she was protected or if her work was. And she was even more aware of her privileged status, which left her uncomfortable. She slept well on a real bed, cradled by the sounds of the ocean, dreaming again, as she had for the past months, of Laura, the mysterious woman of the ridge.

Helena dove in the water of the pool letting the cool water clear her thoughts, as she went through her swimming routine. Swimming was her favorite sport and she was practicing it daily back at the university and she had missed it dearly while being in the Uluguru Mountains. She had picked this resort for the pool and its proximity to the Indian Ocean with its white beaches and its clear water. But for her athletic swimming she preferred the pool to the ocean and she enjoyed it now fully. She had spent the day looking at the first translation of Laura's books, which she knew now were her diaries. She had no doubt that the diaries would be the subject of the most intense scrutiny of all of the academics around the world, historian, anthropologists, philosophers, graphologists, chemists, physicists, astronomers and even medical doctors. She knew it was the biggest discovery of all times and she felt privileged to have been the one allowed to translate them. She wanted to honor the woman who wrote those pages. The woman, just her! Nothing else! Helena could not reduce her to an academic discovery. Helena saw her strength, her doubts, her courage, her fears and her commitment to write down their history for all to remember. Laura, dead for 150,000 years, had inserted herself deeply emotionally under the skin of the academic professor. Laura became real, brought back to life, her voice speaking through time, more than just an archeological artifact. She had existed and her wisdom needed to be shared to the modern world.

Helena dried herself and changed. She walked in her thoughts back to her bungalow, absentmindedly, as the sun set behind the mountains and projecting red colors on the ocean. She ordered a light dinner on room service and settled on the computer. She pulled the file of the translation that she was working on, ready to start typing the final text. Of course as any translation, especially for such an ancient language, she had to make inferences and she was hoping that her writing would not betray the spirit of Laura. For the past months, she had painstakingly built a huge database of their language, cataloguing the letters, words and signs and their meanings, based on the proto-indo European language and the typed books found in the crate. The database was extensive. The work was done, the language deciphered, grammar rules established. She had more than 50,000 words of vocabulary recognized and a set of names of persons and locations. Helena was ready. She whispered: "Laura, I hope I will not betray you. If your soul and spirit hear this, please, guide me so that I relate your thoughts well." She closed her eyes for a minute, sighted and caught the look of a deity, set on a shelf as a decoration, following her, staring at her. The statue was a representation of the White Tara, a Buddhist icon of wisdom, following Helena with her seven eyes and peering into her soul. Helena did not know why a Buddhist statue would ornate a hotel room in East Africa. Why was it there? Who left it? She would never know, but the statue was here, staring at her with her bronze eyes. She looked again at the picture of Laura and Bill, digitally enhanced and started to type the final translation of Laura's diaries, under the watchful seven eyes of the White Tara.

End of Part I.

The story continues, here, with Part II, Laura's Diaries and Part III, The Lost Tribe.

Please review. It helps to know how you feel, as I am working now on Chapter 20, onwards.

I tried to do some research on the region (central Tanzania and Morogoro region). Please forgive any inaccuracies, historical and/or geographical. If you do notice any, please do let me know, it would be very appreciated. I like to be accurate.