The Garden Below

I came to the Amazon looking for ghosts because I was no longer comfortable being in the same room with the living. Five years ago, I had a table on the thirty-fourth floor of a building on Wall Street that smelled of lemon polish and men who knew they were going to win before they opened their mouths. In April of 1920, the market took everything I had and most of what I didn't—leverage does that to a man, it makes you wealthy and empty at the same time. My colleagues called me lucky until they didn't, and then they called me cursed. Both words are just cowardice wearing different coats.

I left America in the summer of 1921 and spent two years in places where the maps stopped being reliable. India. Burma. The highlands of New Guinea, where the men who carried my gear refused to go higher because, as one of them said in a voice that contained no fear and all certainty, "the sky ends there and the ancestors begin."

The river that brought me to the valley was a tributary of the Madeira, unnamed on any chart I possessed. I had been hired by a rubber company that no longer existed—its assets had been seized by the Brazilian government in 1917, but the directors, sitting in offices in London and New York, had not received the telegram informing them of this fact. They wanted to know what had happened to an expedition they had sent upriver in 1912. Five men, two guides, and four tons of equipment. Nothing had been heard from them since.

I found their camp on the fourth day. The tents had been dismantled with care, not abandoned in panic. Their supplies were mostly intact—tinned food, kerosene, medical supplies—arranged in neat rows beneath a lean-to they had constructed. This was not a camp that had been abandoned. This was a camp that had been surrendered.

On the fifth day, I found the waterfalls. Three of them, cascading down a cliff face I had not noticed from the river because the jungle canopy hid the rock entirely. Between the second and third waterfall, there was a gap in the rock—a horizontal entrance, low enough to crawl through, framed by vegetation so thick it looked like the jungle itself had grown the doorway deliberately.

I crawled through on my stomach, clutching my revolver and my lantern and the conviction that I was about to do something foolish. I had done foolish things before; this was not the first. But it would be the last that changed everything.

The valley beyond the cave was perhaps two miles wide and four miles long, enclosed by cliffs so high they created their own weather. The air inside was cooler, moister, heavier with the smell of earth and something sweet I could not identify. And the valley was cultivated.

Not wild. Cultivated.

Rows of cultivated plants—broad-leafed varieties I didn't recognize, growing in terraced beds that followed the natural drainage of the valley. Between the rows were structures: not huts, exactly, but covered walkways made from woven vine and palm frond that connected clusters of storage chambers built into the cliff faces. Everything was orderly. Everything spoke of a mind at work, a society that had decided what was necessary and then organized itself to achieve it.

I stood there for a long time, holding my lantern in a hand that was shaking. I was not afraid of being found. I was afraid of being seen.

They came at dusk. Not with weapons—with questions. They spoke a language that was Portuguese, Spanish, and something else braided together so seamlessly that I could not identify any of the three. They were maybe thirty of them, men and women of every age, and they moved with the calm, unhurried gait of people who had nothing urgent to attend to because all urgent things had been resolved centuries ago.

The woman who spoke first was maybe forty, with hair the color of dark earth and eyes that had the particular flatness of people who have spent their lives in spaces where the sky is rock. She took my lantern from my hand, examined it with a curiosity that was clearly intellectual rather than technical—she had never seen one before, or she had seen one once and forgotten—and then looked at me and said something I understood only because of the way she said it: with a question mark at the end, the way you ask a dog whether it means to stay or go.

I nodded and said, "I mean no harm."

She looked at me for a long moment and then gestured for me to follow her.

I stayed with them for eleven months. Their name for themselves was something that sounded like a vowel followed by a breath—their word for the valley was "the place where the water goes down but never reaches the bottom," and they called their people "the gardeners" in a translation that felt adequate but not exact. There were about fifteen hundred of them, living in a system so carefully balanced that every output was someone else's input. The fungal waste from the underground growing caves became fertilizer for the terrace crops. The terrace crops provided food and building material. The cliff faces provided shelter and a steady seepage of mineral water that they channeled through clay pipes to every household in the valley.

I asked the woman—her name was Ana, a word that meant nothing in their language but became hers anyway, the way names do—how many generations they had lived there. She held up four fingers and then made a gesture I understood to mean "many more."

"Before us," she said slowly, speaking in a Portuguese that was heavily accented and archaic, like a recording from a century ago, "my grandfather's grandfather came down. His people were Spanish and Tupi. The Portuguese took their land. The smallpox took their children. The rest of them went deeper into the jungle, and some of them found the waterfall, and the rest is garden."

They had been there for perhaps four or five hundred years, cut off from every civilization on earth, and in that time they had built something that no surface society could claim to have matched in sophistication. Their agricultural system was more sustainable than anything in Europe. Their social organization had no concept of wealth as accumulation—every family received what it needed from the communal stores, and there was no such word as property. They had no medicine, no weapons, no writing. They had something those things were built to achieve, and they had achieved it not through technology but through patience.

I was living in a utopia, and I was the only person on earth who knew it existed.

But utopias cannot contain the knowledge of their own existence for long. That was my second discovery, and it was worse than the first.

In the eastern wall of the valley, Ana showed me something she had not shown me before—perhaps because she had decided, in the eleven months I had been there, that she could no longer keep it from me. It was a tunnel. A passage being dug from the bottom of the valley upward, at a precise angle that would have emerged somewhere on the cliff face above. It was not an ancient tunnel. It was being dug now. By children and the elderly, by people whose hands were cracked from working in wet rock, by people who had no expectation of living to see it finished.

"They think the light comes from above," Ana said, and I understood immediately what she meant. "They think that if they dig up, they will find the source of all light. My grandfather's grandfather told them. And the people who came before my grandfather's grandfather told them. And the people before them told them, until it became not a story but a law: the light is above, and to reach it is to reach the end of the world."

The tunnel was a disaster in progress. The eastern wall of the valley was not structurally sound—I could see it from the quality of the rock, from the way moisture seeped through the fissures. Every blast of their limited gunpowder—a precious commodity they traded three months' food harvest for for each explosion—weakened the wall further. And yet they continued digging because the belief was deeper than engineering, deeper than survival, deeper than anything I had ever seen in the churches of New York or the universities of Oxford.

I tried to stop them. I spoke to Ana, and through her to the council of elders. I told them the tunnel would collapse. I told them the world above was dangerous—though that was a lie, because the world above had not harmed them in four hundred years, and the only danger they faced was themselves. I told them to turn their energy to their crops, to their water, to the garden that sustained them. But they had already seen the edge of their world, and the human heart cannot unsee what it has seen at the edge of anything.

In November of 1925, the tunnel collapsed. Three hundred feet of eastern cliff came down in a single afternoon, taking with it half the valley's fungal stores, a third of their terrace crops, and forty-seven people who were either sleeping or working in the lower levels when the rock gave way. I stood on the cliff above and watched the dust rise and did not know whether to cry or to laugh, because the tragedy was so entirely of their own making and so entirely human that I could not decide how to feel about it.

Ana found me there. She was covered in dust and blood that was not hers. She looked at the valley below and then at me and said something in a voice so quiet I almost missed it over the sound of the rain:

"You know what this is, don't you? You came from above. You know what we're doing."

I told her yes. I told her I had seen it before—in cities, in markets, in the Board of Trade where men bet on things they had never grown and would never eat, thinking that the numbers on the page were more real than the wheat they represented. I told her that humans will always dig upward toward light they cannot see, even when the ceiling is about to come down.

She was silent for a long time. Then she said, "Will you tell them about us? The people above?"

I wanted to say no. I wanted to stand there in the rain and the dust and swear to a woman I had known for eleven months that I would protect her people the way they protected their garden—patiently, completely, at any cost.

But I am not that man. I am a man who believes that knowledge belongs to everyone, who believes that discovery is inherently good, who believes that a valley like this one should not be hidden from the world because the world deserves to know it exists even if the world will destroy it the way it has destroyed everything else it has found.

I told her I could not promise that.

And I meant it with everything I had, and I knew at the same moment that it was the worst thing I had ever said.