Area 51: The Grail-5 by Robert Doherty Page A

things that could not be explained any other way at the time.
    Artifacts from these Airlia have become part of the lore of many lands, being given various names. Most have been called no more than literary devices by scholars with no basis in fact. I had always thought such thinking naive.
    Now I know it to be.
    What I have discovered is that the Legends are real, and they date back before the shadows of what those same scholars call the beginning of history.
    On these pages I will write of the Grail, the Spear of Destiny, Excalibur, the Ark, and other objects shrouded in myth and legend.
    Much of what I write on these pages cannot be proven. Most comes from documents that I have translated with great effort from tongues that have not been spoken for a very long time and from another tongue that scholars insist does not exist despite all evidence to the contrary. Other information comes from tales told to me in shadowy rooms by men and women, and even those who are not completely human, whose veracity may indeed be questioned, but I believe it all because of the pieces of the
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    tale I have seen with my own eyes. And because of the efforts that were made both to aid me and to hinder me in this path, too much effort was made to stop me, for there may be some truth in what I have learned, truth that others want to keep buried.
    The story begins before Rome was founded, before the Greeks etched their letters on stone tablets, even before the pyramids themselves were built—before the dawn of recorded time.
    Turcotte hit the scroll key, but nothing happened. "That's it?" He turned to Quinn.
    "That's all of Burton's prologue," Quinn said. "Inserted behind those first pages were several written in a different hand."
    Mualama leaned forward. "Do you know of Sir Richard Burton? His life? The controversies surrounding him?"
    "Not really," Turcotte replied. He was anxious to be moving, to be planning a second assault on Giza and rescue Duncan. He didn't understand Mualama's fascination with an old manuscript.
    "Burton translated the Kama Sutra," Mualama said. "And the Tale of the Thousand and One Nights. He was more than a writer and translator of other's written works. He was a famous explorer. A man who dared to travel where others feared. He searched for the source of the Nile hidden in the heart of Africa. It has been widely believed that his wife, Isabel, burned a manuscript when he died." Mualama pointed at the screen. "It appears she burned the only copy of this manuscript."
    "The next few pages tell what happened on the night 53
    Burton died," Quinn said, "and why she did what she did. It is most intriguing."
    "Put it on the screen," Turcotte ordered. The writing that appeared was written with black ink, a thin spidery lettering:
    My love is dead. His body not yet cold.
    I write to warn you. If you read these words and have this manuscript in your possession, you are cursed, as my dearest Richard was.
    As Richard had feared for so many years, the evil creature who started him on his path, his tarigat, came for us last night just as Richard finished the manuscript. I was making a copy, as I always did, of Richard's work. The opus was complete and Richard felt he had done all he could with the life he had been given.
    The creature came in the dark. Its face was pale, its twisted body cloaked in black. The eyes—I will always remember the eyes. If my sins—and they are many according to those who say they know those things—send me to Hell, I readily expect to see eyes like that again. But is there a Hell? I wonder because I no longer believe in Heaven.
    I wander. My mind is not in this. Richard lies dead just down the hallway.
    But you must know of the creature who knows not death. Because if you are reading this, then the creature will eventually come for you too.
    The creature wanted the manuscript; the information Richard has so painstakingly translated and gathered over the past four decades.
    It came after dark.