November 14, 2012

No. 243

The ruins had been discovered once before. In 1904 a man stumbled out of the jungle with a crude map and unintelligible stories of a city made of gold. Before he could recover enough to tell his tale or make a copy of the map, a storm swept down the river valley. A dam burst, and the small village the man had been taken to was wiped out by a wall of water.
 Only two people escaped with their lives. Their accounts of the strange man were the only proof he existed at all. He became a statistic, an anonymous casualty of the flood. His city, it seemed, had been lost with him.
But not forever. I can tell you that he was Percy Spruce, and I know this because I found the city. He’d carved his name into a golden pillar in the central square. The scale of the wealth here is unbelievable. The entire metropolis is covered in gold foil. The holiest buildings are sheathed in inches of the precious metal. The pillar is 15 feet tall, and near as I can tell, solid.
I don’t have much time to explore, though. I believe that I was followed here. In the morning, the bandits will come. I will need to be ready.

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