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

bisected them perfectly. We took some time to examine these rocks more closely. Their cut surfaces were as smooth as if polished, and the cuts were perfectly vertical.

“Why do you suppose these were cut?” Doc asked.

“What do you mean?” I replied. “They wanted to put the road through here.”

“That’s not what I meant. I think we can safely assert that the builders of the road are the same ones that owned the silver cubes we found on the galleon, and since the one block can levitate heavy objects when gold is applied, why didn’t they just move them out of the way?”

I stood there, pondering the question, when Reggie said, “Where would they have put them? This canyon is so narrow, you couldn’t just shove them out of the way, so that means they would have had to float these things hundreds of feet high to remove them. Maybe, with their technology, this was the easiest way to solve the problem.”

Joe thoughtfully said as he examined the smooth walls, “They must have had another tool that can do this to stone. Cut through it and remove the rubble. Maybe one of the other silver cubes, the ones that were activated with the gems, can do that.”

Dimitri added, “Well, it’s not done with lasers. They would have left molten slag residue on the edges. And this is a smooth surface; no saw or grinding marks, just perfectly smooth.”

“Well, we’re not going to find the answer standing here,” I said. “Let’s move out; with any luck, we’ll find our answers at the end of the road.”

A couple of hours later, we took a break. We were making good progress on the road, but it was still heading up, and the constant climb with only a few level sections to traverse had our leg muscles burning from the exertion. I told Joe to check our trail cams to see if they had picked up anything. He reported back that the signal from them wasn’t the best because of the canyon walls surrounding us, but he was able to verify that no traffic had passed any of the cameras.

That was great news since that meant we had almost a three-day lead on the Vatican mercs if we hadn’t lost them completely. After a forty-five-minute break, energy bars, jerky, and water, we continued onward. The canyon walls had continued getting steeper as we made our way up the road, probably over two hundred feet overhead now. It was getting dark when I called a halt for the day, and we set up camp. We needed to rest and relax as much as possible, not knowing what might be in store for us tomorrow.

Our fire warmed us as on previous nights, and our talk centered around speculation on the builders of the roadway and the boulders we had encountered. Were they there when the road was being built and had to be shaped, or had they fallen in place after the road was built and a pathway had to be cleared through them? Of course, there was no answer to be had, so we left it hanging as we all said our good nights, curled up in our sleeping bags, and fell into a deep slumber.

The day dawned cold and damp; cloudy skies held back the sun, and gloom hung over the camp. We hurried through breakfast, anxious to be on our way. The canyon continued in front of us, presenting an imposing tunnel vision effect on the road ahead. The gloom and ground fog seemed to have sucked out much of our enthusiasm as we plodded along. We all noticed the feeling, and it became the topic of discussion as our voices echoed off the canyon walls, providing an eerie backdrop to our conversation.

We pressed onward, trying to shake the dark feeling affecting us. The canyon walls seemed to be closing in as we walked one foot in front of the other in a slow, muscle-burning processional. Three hours later, we rounded a bend, and in the distance, we could see what looked to be a significant landslide that had blocked the entire canyon. The walls were now well over two hundred feet high with a slight inward lean to them, creating an almost inverted V, narrower at the top, wider at the bottom. The clouds had started breaking up, and sunlight broke through now and then, throwing shafts of a golden glow down into our world.

Within a half-hour, we had reached the massive landslide that blocked our way. Huge boulders and rubble filled the canyon and reached almost a third of the way up its sides. We could see no indication of what caused this massive impasse but getting to its top would not be easy—a task we would worry about later as we threw our tired bodies down at its base. It was early afternoon, and our decision had been made for us as to where and when to set up camp. I would not want to try and summit this obstruction as tired as we were.

We managed to scrounge enough wood to make a decent fire and sat down to a warm meal. The MREs came through again, spaghetti and meat sauce, sugar cookies, and orange-flavored beverage, a meal fit for a king or at least a hungry explorer. We took in our surroundings, and our discussion once again centered on the road and speculation about the origin of this massive rock fall. The canyon sides, while not smooth, did not seem to be the source of this obstruction. So, where did it come from? We posited it might have fallen from higher up the canyon above, but it seemed a little too organized to be some landslide from hundreds of feet overhead.

We did some minor exploration after dinner, climbing a bit and poking around to no avail. It was still going to be a task to get to the top, and what lay beyond? We could tell the road continued underneath