ENCOUNTER by Hep Aldridge (bill gates books recommendations .txt) 📕

Its flickering light added a peaceful quality to our surroundings. Dinner conversation was dominated by speculation about the road, its construction, and who built it. There was no doubt in our minds that this track would lead us to the lost city. However, the distance to our destination was still unknown.

According to the priest’s journal, it was a day’s travel from the village to the city. That was under different circumstances. The chief knew the way, and the route probably had been much clearer and easier to negotiate. Our optimism kicked in, and we agreed that by following the road, we should reach our destination sometime tomorrow. This likely outcome was arrived at after Dimitri had broken out his bottle of vodka and passed it around.

One swig to knock the chill off and one to celebrate our discovery.

Sitting there, we were able to study the road closely. Brushing away the dirt and debris, we saw that the blocks, making up its construction, were perfectly formed and fitted tightly together. It reminded me of the joints of Inca megalithic structures. The road surface was unbelievably level from side to side—no elevations, bumps, or raised stone corners, nothing. Completely flat, an impressive feat of engineering, I thought. And the stones themselves bore no resemblance to any that I had seen before. They were smooth as glass but not slick. I have no idea how that was accomplished, but then, I had no idea how this road could be here either.

As I gazed down its straight as an arrow track, it reminded me of the sacbes of Mesoamerica, sacred roads, or causeways that the Maya and others had built. The sacbes are raised three to four feet off the jungle floor with rock and fill, then covered in a thick coating of white plaster—very smooth and even. And they were built solely for foot traffic since the early Meso-American civilizations had no beasts of burden or the wheel. They were so well made; many of them still exist today, and more are being discovered every archaeological season.

Doc’s voice broke me out of my reverie as he asked, “So, what do you make of all this?” he asked with a sweeping arm gesture.

“Impressive, very impressive,” I said, “now we just have to find out where it leads.”

“Hopefully to the lost city,” Dimitri said.

“I believe it just might,” I replied, “It just might.”

So many questions to be answered, but for now, the exertion of the day hit us all as sleeping bags were rolled out and more wood put on the fire. Joe did a quick check on the trail cameras we had set—nothing new. We set guard rotation, even though I wasn’t as concerned about visitors as I had been earlier. I had every confidence in the early warning camera system we had in place.

The conversation at breakfast the next morning centered around more speculation about the road, its builders, the construction material, and the technology needed to accomplish such a task—much speculation and no real answers. We broke camp after covering our presence as best we could. A notable fact, when we cleared the fire debris, there was no indication of it left. The heat had no impact on the stone surface, and there was no discoloration of the stones whatsoever. Another mystery we hoped to answer.

The roadway, I’ll call it, was leading us into more rugged and rocky terrain. We were led into a canyon with sides that increased in height with every mile we covered. The canyon had been about seventy-five yards wide in the beginning but was now choked down to maybe thirty or forty and getting narrower.

The roadway curved and twisted through the canyon as it continued its upward track. We came around one turn to find a massive boulder the size of a house on the roadway. It was so large it practically spanned the width of the canyon. Other rocks filled in the space from the boulder to the canyon wall. It would have completely blocked off the canyon, except the center of it had been removed, and the roadway continued right through it. The rock did not interfere with passage along the road at all.

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to set out a stick of butter in a butter tray at breakfast, and it never was put back into the fridge until after supper, if then. By the end of the day, it had been at room temperature for hours, and you could take a butter knife and easily slice through it. Okay, here’s the reason for this story. Imagine you slice through the stick of butter and then slide the two pieces apart with the blade leaving an inch gap in between. You remove the knife, and you have two pieces of butter with perfectly smooth sides where you cut it and two pieces still in the shape of the butter stick.

That was our boulder. It was as if someone had sliced it, removed the center, and left the outer sides of the rock in place. This boulder was some sixty feet high, and at least eighty feet wide, with sides sliced as smooth as a hot knife through butter, and our seven- to eight-foot-wide roadway went right through its middle. No, this was not normal. There had to be hundreds of cubic yards of rock removed, and there were no debris piles or extra rock piles visible anywhere.

As we walked through the space, looking in every direction in awe of what we were seeing, Joe commented, “That’s some pretty impressive rock clearing.”

We all nodded as our eyes scanned our inexplicable surroundings.

The walls of the canyon continued to get higher the further we went. They were well over one hundred and fifty feet tall when we came to our next road project. Another blockage that had been cleared in the same way as the previous one, except this time, three large boulders had their centers cut out and removed, and the road