The Sentinels of Z’Karuma

More about The Sentinels of Z’Karuma

I first heard of the place during my third journey along the upper reaches of the
Zamboro River, though at the time I did not recognize the significance of the tale
being told. It was late afternoon, the hour when the jungle begins to soften its glare
and the river turns the color of old bronze beneath the lowering sun. My guide—a
taciturn fellow who had spent most of his life upon those waters—sat in the stern of
the canoe and watched the forest slip past as though it were reading from a long-
familiar book.

Without warning he lifted his paddle and pointed toward the western bank.

“Look there, bwana,” he said quietly.

At first I saw nothing unusual—only the thick green wall of the jungle and the slow
swirl of the river eddying against the shore. The canoe drifted a little farther, and two
shapes emerged from the foliage: twin pillars of stone rising from the earth like the
broken teeth of some ancient gate.

They stood with a deliberation that no accident of geology could explain. The forest
had claimed them, as it claims everything in that country, yet they remained upright
and purposeful, as though still fulfilling the task for which they had been set there
long ago.

My guide watched them with an expression I had not seen on his face before.

“The Sentinels of Z’Karuma,” he murmured.

I asked him what lay beyond them, but he only shook his head and pushed the
canoe back toward the current. For several minutes he said nothing, though I
noticed that he kept glancing over his shoulder at the twin towers of rock as they
receded into the gathering dusk.

At length he spoke again.

“The old river knows that place,” he said. “It bends that way when it wishes to
remember.”

He told me that long ago—before the dunes marched across the southern plains and
before the jungle swallowed the broken roads of forgotten peoples—travelers who
followed the river inland would sometimes pass between those two pillars. Beyond
them, he said, the land folded inward upon itself in a manner that maps could never
quite capture. Hills rose where none were expected. Valleys appeared that could not
be found again by those who searched for them later.

And somewhere within that hidden basin stood the remnants of a city so old that
even the jungle seemed to regard it with caution.

Few men of the outer world had ever seen it.

Fewer still had returned.

My guide would say no more, though I sensed the story was not finished. Indeed, it
was only years later—after other journeys, and after hearing the same whispered
name along distant trading routes—that I began to suspect that the twin pillars
beside the Zamboro were not merely ruins left behind by a vanished people.

They were markers.

Set there patiently beside the river, waiting for the rare traveler curious enough to
pass between them and continue upstream—into a country the jungle has kept
secret since before the first caravans ever followed the river inland.