The Nubian Codex - Prologue by Rebecca Bibbs

Cruz Hunt ignored the cacophony of howler monkeys behind him as he stepped into the clearing. He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki cargo pants to wipe away the sweat he’d worked up walking through the dark, dense Honduran rainforest. He ran his long, calloused fingers over the small mark he’d carved into the trunk of the ceiba tree eight months earlier and smiled at his cleverness in leaving landmarks only he would recognize for his eventual return to the site.

The ceiba trees, the only ones he’d marked, were intensely symbolic for this offspring of an African-American man and Mexican-American woman. It shared a similar heritage, reaching from the Western Hemisphere to the Eastern Hemisphere. Like Cruz, the majestic tree with its buttresses and branches dreadlocked with aerial vines had a distant cousin, the baobab tree, in West Africa.

Ever alert, the 41-year-old Stanford-trained archaeologist stood at attention as he heard a crackling sound from the rainforest floor. Though he felt in his element, the jungle still could be a dangerous place. And he’d felt all along that he was being watched, as if he was being followed.

“Probably a tapir or peccary” he shrugged, talking to himself. An amateur naturalist, Cruz was familiar with most of the 180 terrestrial mammal species recorded in the Honduran rainforest.

Satisfied there was nothing out of the ordinary, Cruz pulled the small notepad from the breast pocket of his shirt to double check his directions. The backpack, carefully packed with 150 feet of nylon rope, tins of sardines and ravioli, a can opener, first aid and snake bite kits, and sleeping bag, seemed especially heavy in the thick 87-degree heat. But the rugged outdoorsman, who spent nearly as much time trekking through the underbrush as warming the chair in his office at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, needed enough minor rations and notebooks for two to three days.

Cruz dropped the 40-lb backpack to the ground. He’d walked for three hours and figured he’d make it to his destination well before nightfall. He hunkered down next to the backpack, looking up only long enough to see the blur of a rainbow lizard as it
skittered by. He pulled the liter-size bottle from the netted pocket on the side of his backpack and walked the 100 yards toward a small stream that babbled away from a 180-foot waterfall to refill it. On the way back to his backpack, he stopped to pick some wild nance to accompany a foil-packed bag of tuna and casabe, the hard bread made of yucca he’d bought from a nearly toothless Garifuna woman at Sambo Creek. He pulled the water purification tablets from his backpack, dropped one into the bottle and sat down to enjoy his lunch.

Clearing his palate with a swig of water following a bite of the tuna, Cruz popped a cranberry-sized nance into his mouth. The acidic taste of the yellowish-orange fruit was an acquired taste, but the adventuresome explorer loved trying any foods. As it happened, he already had acquired the taste for the fruit by drinking nance-flavored carbonated beverages and its fermented cousin, chica.

Sated, he carefully folded up the empty foil packaging and returned it to the backpack. He lay on his back and looked up at the rainforest understory, spying the
emerald and red-colored plumage of a male resplendent quetzal chasing one of the frogs, insects or snails that made the ceiba its home.

Having the rainforest as his office came with many perks, including dips in the pools that collected at the bottom of the falls, fresh fruit and solitude. But those days would soon be over, Cruz thought, with his marriage to Marisol, the book he was going to write on his extraordinary find and the whirlwind of publicity that was sure to follow it. Future excursions would be fewer but well-funded. The explorer fell asleep thinking how he’d become the foremost authority on the ancient connection, maybe leading to a new discipline at the university.

An hour later, Cruz slowly opened his eyes, sat up and stretched. He felt refreshed. The siesta had been a success. He unbuckled the bowie knife that was strapped to his thigh. He pulled off his well-worn combat boots and his sweat-soaked socks. He stood up and unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a chest, back and arms made muscular through climbing up and down ravines and gorges. He unzipped his pants under which he went commando to prevent crotch rot.

Back home, Cruz would be considered a hunk. As a teenager growing up in East Chicago, Ind., he could barely keep his female classmates – Mexican, Black or otherwise - from running their fingers through his straight blue-black Aztec hair. Back then, he kept it short, but now he wore it shoulder-length tied back in a thick ponytail. Grown women envied his flawless skin with its Peruvian rosewood coloring and his long, camel-thick eyelashes. The lucky ones were permitted to stare into his mahogany eyes and kiss his beautifully chiseled lips. But the rainforest fauna didn’t care. He was just another animal trying to survive.

Down to nothing but the gold crucifix his mother had given him for his First Communion, Cruz rolled his clothes together and tied the strap with the bowie knife around the bundle and attached it to the sleeping bag. He then picked up the backpack and headed toward the stream. Lifting the backpack over his head, he stepped into the stream, crossing the 20 feet that brought the water at its deepest to just under his firm buttocks.

Once on the other side, he dropped the backpack to the ground and resisted the urge to take a dip in the pool at the foot of the waterfall in the interest of time. He refreshed the layer of insect repellant that had washed downstream as he waded through the water. He dressed quickly and refilled the water bottle. He then searched for the mark he’d made on the tree on this side of the stream.

Heading into the trees, Cruz started for his final destination. Occasionally, he stopped to take a picture on his new digital camera of a clutch of scarlet macaws feeding on a clay lick, a mother skunk and her babies waddling by or a blue morpho butterfly sipping the juices from overripe fruit. In addition to the books on his archaeological finds, he hoped one day to publish a coffee table book featuring his photographs of rainforest life.

Just as the dusk made the already dark rainforest even darker, Cruz stepped into what once had been a clearing upon which the forest now encroached. He became melancholy when he couldn’t share his observation of the irony of the jungle creeping over what was left of a civilization while civilization whittled away at the outskirts of the rainforest.

Relieved to have arrived at his destination, he quickly set up camp and with the last of his daylight went to observe just how much new growth had crept over his magnificent find since his last visit two months earlier.

Just as Cruz removed the water bottle from the backpack in preparation for supper, he heard a noise in the forest. Turning slowly to look behind him, he saw a set of eyes glinting in the firelight.

A puma or a jaguar he surmised. Cruz knew the law of the wild: Most animals don’t attack unless threatened, and humans usually aren’t part of feline diets. Still, it might not be safe to open a can of Vienna sausages if the big cat was close enough to catch a whiff of their scent. Cruz took one of the crude torches he’d fabricated from sticks and thrust the end wrapped in cloth in the fire. As he turned and walked slowly toward the eyes, they suddenly vanished.

He speared the torch into the ground and returned to the backpack. Reaching in, he pulled out a can of chili and a can opener. He pulled off the paper wrapping, opened the can and placed it at the edge of the firepit to warm.

Again, Cruz heard a sound from the trees. Assuming the puma or jaguar had returned, he reached again for the torch. As he moved toward the trees, he was startled to see a human silhouette emerge from the shadows.

“What are you doing here? How did you find this place?” he demanded.

Cruz heard a quick whoosh of air and felt a sting to the carotid artery in his neck He registered a cloud of startled bats fluttering to the upper rainforest canopy as he reached up and touched the shaft of the dart before falling immobilized to the ground. The batrachotoxin from the glands of a poison dart frog coursed through his body. His heart beat irregularly.

A pale man’s face came into view as Cruz’s attacker leaned over him. As the neurotoxin chewed its way through his system, his failing vision rendered the man’s features into a pastel blur. He heard the man’s voice:

“Sorry, but we couldn’t allow you to change history as we know it,” he said. “The white man has so little left.”
He knew that voice from somewhere, but Cruz was too panicked to place it. He didn’t know who, but he understood why. Fortunately, he’d taken precautions. Others would be able to continue where he left off.

Cruz’s body convulsed violently, and he salivated uncontrollably. His breathing became tight like one of the asthma attacks of his childhood, only worse. Within a minute he was dead, his last thoughts of Marisol and her radiant smile.

His attacker already was rummaging through his backpack.