River of Death by Alistair MacLean Page B

with the two cliff-sides meeting in the middle distance. A fifth group, obviously taken I80° from the same position, showed a flat, grassy plateau, the sides curving to meet like the bows of a boat. Nearly incredible as those pictures were, the next few groups were staggering.
    They were taken from the air and as transparency succeeded transparency, it became evident that they, like a number of the previous ones, could only have been taken from a helicopter.
    The first of those helicopter shots showed the entire ruined city from above. The second, from perhaps five hundred feet higher up, showed that the city was perched on top of a vertically-sided,boat-shaped pinnacle of rock splitting a river which swept by on either side of it. Both arms of the river were rock-strewn, foaming white and clearly unnavigable. The third and fourth groups, from an even higher altitude, were a shock: taken horizontally they showed pictures of a densely crowded rainforest, reaching out, it seemed, almost to touch the camera and extending, unbroken, to the distant horizon. The fifth set, vertically downwards, made it clear that the great outer cliff-walls of the twin gorges were at least several hundred feet higher than the top of the cliff-walls that formed the island on which the Lost City was built. The sixth group, taken at a still higher elevation, showed just a narrow gap between two great stretches of forest reaching towards each other, with the Lost City just vaguely visible in the gloomy depths below. The seventh and last group, taken anywhere between five hundred and a thousand feet higher up again, revealed nothing but the continuous majestic sweep of the Amazonian rainforest, unbroken from pictorial horizon to pictorial horizon.
    It was small wonder, then, that the planes of the Brazilian ordnance survey services, whose pilots claimed, probably rightly, to have crisscrossed every square mile of the Mato Grosso, had never discovered the site of the Lost City. It just could not be seen from the air. But the ancients had stumbled across it, discovered the most invisible, the most inaccessible, the most impregnable fortress ever created by nature or devised by man.
    The viewers in the Villa Haydn drawing-room had sat throughout in silence. They knew they had seen something that no white man, with the exception of Hamilton and his helicopter pilot, had ever seen before, something, perhaps, that no-one had ever seen for generations, maybe even for centuries. They were hard people, tough people, cynical people, people who counted value only in the terms of cost, people conditioned to disbelieve, almost automatically, the evidence of their own eyes: but there is yet to be born a man or woman the atavistic depths of whose soul cannot be touched by that one questing finger that will not be denied, that primitive ancestral awe inseparable from watching the veil of unsuspected history being swept aside.
    The slowly comprehending silence stretched out for at least a minute. Then, almost inaudibly, Smith exhaled his breath in a long sigh.
    ‘Son-of-a-gun,’ he whispered. ‘Son-of-a-gun. He found it.’
    ‘If your intention was to impress us,’ Maria said, ‘you’ve succeeded. What on earth was that? And
where
is it?’
    ‘The Lost City.’ Smith spoke absently. ‘Brazil. In the Mato Grosso.’
    ‘The
Brazilians
built pyramids?’
    ‘Not that I know of. May have been some other race. Anyway, they’re not pyramids, they’re-Tracy, this is more in your field.’
    ‘Well. Not really my field either. One of our magazines had an article on those so-called pyramidsand I spent a couple of days with the writer and photographer on the job. Curiosity only, and wasted curiosity—I didn’t learn much. Pyramid-shaped, sure, but those stepped-sided and flat-topped structures are called ziggurats. No-one knows where they originated although it is known that the Assyrians and Babylonians had them. Oddly enough, this style bypassed the virtually