It took Nate fifteen minutes of hiking before he noticed something strange about the forest around them. Exhaustion must have dulled his senses. His feet slowed. His mouth dropped open.
Manny bumped into him. “What’s the matter?”
His brow furrowed, Nate crossed a few steps off the path.
“What are you doing, Rand?” Kostos asked.
“These trees…” Nate’s sense of wonder overwhelmed him, cutting through his unease.
The others stopped and stared. “What about them?” Manny asked.
Nate turned in a slow circle. “As a botanist, I recognize most of the plants around here.” He pointed and named names. “Silk cotton, laurels, figs, mahogany, rosewood, palms of every variety. The usual trees you’d see in a rain forest. But…” Nate’s voice died away.
“But what?” Kostos asked.
Nate stepped to a thin-boled tree. It stretched a hundred feet into the air and burst into a dense mass of fronds. Giant serrated cones hung from its underside. “Do you know what this is?”
“It looks like a palm,” the sergeant said. “So what?”
“It’s not!” Nate slapped the trunk with his palm. “It’s a goddamn cycadeoid.”
“A what?”
“A species of tree thought long extinct, dating back to the Cretaceous period. I’ve only seen examples of it in the fossil record.”
“Are you sure?” Anna Fong asked.
Nate nodded. “I did my thesis on paleobotany.” He crossed to another plant, a fernlike bush that towered twice his height. Each frond was as tall as he was and as wide as his stretched arms. He shook one of the titanic leaves. “And this is a goddamn giant club moss. It’s supposed to have gone extinct during the Carboniferous period. And that’s not all. They’re all around us. Glossopterids, lycopods, podocarp conifers…” He pointed out the strange plants. “And that’s just the things I can classify.”
Nate pointed his shotgun to a tree with a coiled and spiraled trunk. “I have no idea what that thing is.” He faced the others, shedding his exhaustion like a second skin, and lifted his arms. “We’re in a goddamn living fossil museum.”
“How’s that possible?” Zane asked.
Kouwe answered, “This place is isolated, a pocket in time. Anything could have sheltered here for eons.”
“And geologically this region dates back to the Paleozoic era,” Nate added, excited. “The Amazon basin was once a freshwater inland sea before changes in tectonics opened the sea to the greater ocean and drained it away. What we have here is a little peek at that ancient past. It’s amazing!”
Kelly spoke up from beside the stretcher. “Amazing or not, I need to get Frank somewhere safe.”
Her words drew Nate back to the present, back to their situation. He nodded, embarrassed at his distraction in the face of their predicament.
Kostos cleared his throat. “Let’s push on.”
The group followed his lead.
Fascinated by the forest, Nate hung back. His eyes studied the foliage around him, no longer peering at the shadows, but fixed on the jungle itself. As a trained botanist, he gaped in disbelief at the riotous flora: stalked horsetails the size of organ pipes, ferns that dwarfed modern-day palms, massive primitive conifers with cones the size of VW bugs. The mix of the ancient and the new was simply astounding, a merged ecosystem unlike any seen before.
Professor Kouwe walked beside him now. “What do you think about all this?”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t know. Other prehistoric groves have been discovered in the past. In China, a forest of dawn redwoods was discovered in the eighties. In Africa, a grotto of rare ferns. And most recently, in Australia, an entire stand of prehistoric trees, long thought extinct, was found in a remote rain forest.” Nate glanced to Kouwe for emphasis. “So considering how little of the Amazon has been explored, it’s actually more surprising that we’ve not found such a grove before.”
“The jungle hides its secrets well,” Kouwe said.
As they walked, the canopy overhead grew denser, the forest taller. The morning sunlight dwindled to a green glow. It was as if they were walking back into twilight.
Further conversation died as everyone watched the forest. By now, even nonbotanists could tell this jungle was unusual. The number of prehistoric plants began to outnumber the modern-day counterparts. Trees grew huge, ferns towered, strange twisted forms wound among the mix. They passed a spiky bromeliad as large as a small cottage. Massive flowers, as large as pumpkins, grew from vines and scented the air thickly.
It was a greenhouse of amazing proportion.
Kostos suddenly stopped ahead, freezing in place, eyes on the trail, weapon raised and ready. He then slowly motioned them to get down.
The group crouched. Nate shifted his shotgun. Only then did he notice what had startled the Ranger.
Nate stared off to the left, the right, even behind them. It was like one of those computerized pictures that appeared at first to be just a blur of random dots, but when stared at cross-eyed, from a certain angle, a 3-D image suddenly and startlingly appeared.
Nate suddenly and startlingly saw the jungle in a new light.
High in the trees, mounted among the thick branches, platforms had been built, with small dwellings atop them. The roofs of many were woven from the living leaves and branches, offering natural camouflage. These half-living structures blended perfectly with their host trees.
As Nate looked closer, what had appeared to be vines and stranglers crisscrossing between the trees and draping to the ground were in fact natural bridges and ladders. One of these ladders was only a few yards to Nate’s right. Flowers grew along its length. It was alive, too.
As he stared around, it was hard to say where man-made structure ended and living began. Half artificial, half growing plant. The blend was so astounding, the camouflage so perfect.
Without them even knowing it, they had already entered the Ban-ali village.
Ahead, larger dwellings climbed even taller trees, multilevel with terraces and patios. But even these were well camouflaged with bark, vine, and leaf, making them difficult to discern.
As they stared, no one in their party moved. One question was on all their faces: Where were the inhabitants of these treetop homes?
Tor-tor growled a deep warning.
Then like the village itself, Nate suddenly saw them. They had been there all along, unmoving, silent, all around. Bits of living shadow. With their bodies painted black, they had melded into the darkness between the trees and under bushes.