"On Mexico's Sea of Cortez a marine biologist prepares to encounter an animal" "local fisherman fear more than sharks." "He is exploring a nether-world between fantasy and fact, pursuing a legendary monster of the deep that does, in fact, exits..." "Around the world, strange carcasses drift ashore, and fishermen catch huge creatures they have never seen before." "Bit by bit, the secret life of this strange animal is becoming known." "We can study its anatomy and the behavior of its smaller relatives... the bizarre and wonderful creatures called cephalopods." "If they did live anywhere where a man lived, they would make mince-meat of him in no time." "Fiction has always branded the giant squid a ferocious enemy of man, and some of its close relations can be terrifying indeed." "Master of the deep ocean, the sperm whale knows what we cannot, but recently scientists have found a way to learn its secrets." ""Whales were known to feed on squids, so it made sense to me try to use the sperm whale as our "hound dog" to lead us to the giant squid." ""We really don't know very much about what happens to whales once they leave the surface." "So we're working with a mystery that is hunting a mystery."" "Descend with us now into the dark and mysterious world of the sperm whale and its fearsome quarry, Architeuthis, the giant squid." "For most of human history the ocean has seemed a terrifying place." "Superstitious sailors reported many strange sightings at sea." "Their stories summoned up a fantastic variety of monsters that threatened them." "These ominous creatures were often blamed when disaster struck... as it frequently did." "Perhaps the most feared of all was called "the Kraken"" "a many-armed beast of incredible size and strength." "But most sea monsters proved to be harmless or non-existent." "All but "the Kraken"... known today as the giant squid." "The national Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C." "houses over a hundred thousand squid specimens... one of the largest collections in the world." "In this working laboratory," "Smithsonian zoologist Dr. Clyde Roper is engrossed in the study of cephalopods, such as octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid... and he welcomes the notoriety of the giant squid." ""People have to have their monsters, for some reason, and, uh, of course squid make a perfect monster because I really think that, um, especially for many young people today that the giant squid has become the new dinosaur."" "It's called Architeuthis, Greek for "the ruling squid"." "It is the perfect sea monster in fantasy, and a formidable predator in fact." "It dwarfs most other life in the sea." "It deploys a writhing mass of suckered arms and tentacles which ensnare its prey and jam it into a parrot-like beak." "It glares upon the world with the largest eyes in the animal kingdom." "Clyde Roper has a life-long passion for the giant squid, and is determined to see one alive in its natural habitat." "It all began when he was a teenager, working as a lobster fisherman in New Hampshire." ""It doesn't take very long, when you're working on, on cephalopods..." ""squids especially, uh, become aware that giant squids actually exist." ""and, as a idealistic young fellow," "I was pretty, um, incensed that so many..." ""mis-truths could be told about these magnificent animals." "And, as I got deeper and deeper into it," "I understood why there were so many misunderstandings and that is because there were so few specimens that had ever been found, no giant squid had ever been seen alive and, until this day, has never been seen alive and photographed." "So, I became interested in trying to learn about these animals just so I could tell the truth about them and try to dispel the myths."" "The aura of terrifying mystery is not easily dispelled." "A report, by a French warship, of an encounter with a giant squid fired the imagination of novelist Jules Verne." "His classic 20,000 leagues Under the Sea was published in 1870." "Verne's fictional squid updated the ship-eating legend of the Kraken." "This squid did not hesitate to attack the Nautilus," "Captain Nemo's electric submarine." ""Giant squid astern, sir!"" "The terror of the giant squid may be fictional, but its mystery is very real." "Once in a while, a giant squid carcass will be washed ashore." "Often, these are juvenile squid... more bizarre and pathetic than threatening." "Only an expert can tell its species, and that it could have grown to may times this size." "In modern times, more and more giant squid have been caught by fishermen as they work in deeper water." "They are almost always dead, or nearly so, when brought aboard." "Rarely does a scientist get to examine a newly caught specimen, and never a live one." "Most have turned up in the waters around New Zealand," "Norway, and Newfoundland." "This one, measuring more than 30 feet, was caught off Tasmania." "From such fragmentary evidence, scientists conclude that giant squid live in deep water and that they are predators." "They are believed to live only a few years and to grow very rapidly... no one knows how large." "The biggest actually measured was almost 60 feet and weighed about a ton." "It is the world's largest and most powerful invertebrate, portrayed as a villain in many tales of the sea." ""Giant squid have a reputation for being vindictive and vicious and fierce."" ""They have no reason t be, uh, vindictive and fierce." "They normally don't interact with human beings." "Uh, in fact, I wish they would act a little more, react with human beings so that we could find them." "At any rate, I think the reputation is certainly not deserved at all." ""Because they're so interesting, on their own account, that we don't need to make things up about them." ""Squids are really exciting to me because they have wonderful adaptations for the, for their life in the sea, and these include things like:" "like photophores or light organs, where they can flash and glow, uh, different colors;" "they are fast animals; they're powerful; some like cat's claws to, to collect their prey; uh, some of really are fascinating animals."" "Squid are weird and wonderful... they, and their close relatives, have been called "aliens from inner space."" "Indeed, they ride the underwater currents with a serenity that seems almost supernatural." "Squid are remarkably intelligent, and their primary nerve fibers are the largest in the animal kingdom... a hundred times the diameter of humans." "Thousands of multi-celled organs, called chromatophores, are scattered across their skin." "Each, receives signals directly from the brain." "This allows cuttlefish and squid to transform their appearance... in less than a second." "These changes in appearance provide camouflage and a dramatic means of communication." "From seductive yearnings to aggressive warnings, all can be conveyed by resplendent displays of light and color." "The advanced nervous system gives them lightning reflexes and a deadly attack." "Off the California coast, near Monterey, a submersible robot is lowered into the deep." ""sonar is..."" "Below, is Monterey Canyon, the deepest submarine fissure along the continental United States and probably the most carefully observed deep water in the world." "Scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have been studying life in canyon on a regular basis for more than a decade." ""Yeah... what's up here to the right."" ""Look at this guy, right up..."" "Any day, they could discover a living Architeuthis and they have observed many remarkable squid." "They have also observed species of squid never before seen alive in their natural element." "Moroteuthis, a slender and very large squid, which grows up to 15 feet;" "Like the giant squid, almost nothing is known about its behavior." "Perhaps the strangest is Vampyroteuthis." "It's been called a "living fossil"" "and is completely covered with what seem to be light organs," "But whose exact function is unknown." "It's a remarkable contortionist, presenting to its enemies a ball of spikes." "The spikes are soft however and probably are used only for detection." "As varied and mysterious as they are, squid are short-lived, fast-growing and very prolific." "Shallow water species gather in huge numbers to breed." "These tentacled couplings are anything but random... as males compete savagely for females." "Many die naturally soon after mating... if they don't fall victim to the countless predators that pursue them." "Squid are among the most numerous free-swimming creatures in the sea, and a crucial part of the oceanic food chain." "Today, they support a massive fishery." "Some two million metric tons of squid are consumed annually, much of it in Japan and the Far East." "Small squid are the most popular sushi." "But everyone has heard about the giant squid... and it's gotten to be like the "Jolly Green Giant"" "for Japanese consumers." ""Hungry?" "..." "Nissin Seafood Noodle."" "Mexico's Sea of Cortez:" "Every few years, squid of unusual size and ferocity are reported here." "Clyde Roper has come to investigate." "The squid live in dark underwater canyons." "They rise close to the surface at night to feed." "They're called Dosidicus gigas..." "or the Humboldt squid." "For safety, Roper will deploy a protective shelter where he can find refuge if he needs to." "This time of year, Dosidicus still have a few feet to grow." "But already, some are six feet long and, at times, they feed like starving piranhas." "Roper has never seen Dosidicus this big before, but he's eager to have the experience." ""They have, a, a, an incredible reputation and, uh, many of the fishermen say they would rather fall into a uh, into the water with, uh, sharks in a feeding frenzy rather than in a, a feeding frenzy of Humboldt squid" "because they have been known to kill people when they fall into the water with them." ""There, here he comes." ""In fact, they are so aggressive that they become, uh, they become cannibalistic."" "A hungry squid immediately begins to feed on the one that is hooked and defenseless." "Dosidicus often prey on one another... one thing that could account for the rapid growth of those survive." "Some might consider this an experience to be avoided;" "but big squid like the Humboldt don't survive in captivity." "For Roper, the chance to see them in the wild is a priceless opportunity." "Like smaller squid, Dosidicus shows vivid flashes of color when aroused or threatened." "Roper wants a close-up look..." "not easy when the object of study can deploy two tentacles, eight arms lined with powerful suckers, and a razor sharp beak." "And all this is concealed at times by clouds of dense ink, deployed by squid to confuse their enemies." "Having a squid inside the shelter was not part of the plan." "Roper tries to give it room to escape but gets a sharp nip from the departing squid anyway." ""Ech!"" "Later, Roper feels bold enough to venture out and observe Dosidicus in open water." "It is as close as he has ever come to seeing what Architeuthis might be like when feeding." ""At first, I was quite apprehensive." "Uh, it was a little scary." "But we were dealing with mostly individuals." "They were not in a feeding frenzy, so it, uh, it felt more comfortable." ""Oh, what a great animal." "I was impressed at how incredibly powerful it is and how it swims..." "Clyde Roper is not the first scientist to be caught up in the thrill of the hunt for big squid." ""and to see the funnel so expanded and, and moving out so fast, it was great."" "In the nineteen sixties, in fishing villages throughout Newfoundland, curious posters appeared." "The reward for a giant squid was the brainchild of the late Frederick Aldrich." "An expert on mollusks, Dr. Aldrich found himself in a region where giant squid are a proud part of local history." "Back in October 1873, Newfoundland fishermen came upon a giant squid" "The squid wrapped a tentacle around their boat." "But one fisherman, a 12-year-old boy, quickly hacked the tentacle off, and the monster retreated." "Only a month later," "Newfoundland fishermen hauled up a giant squid 32 feet long." "This was the first complete specimen ever examined by scientists." "And it was the first of many giant squid stranded or caught by Newfoundland fishermen." "But examining the dead was not enough for Frederick Aldrich... he went after a live one." ""Fred was really one of the first people to actually want to go out and try to find giant squid." ""I think Fred liked the mythology and he liked the, the, the giantness, the bigness of it all." "In 1989, Aldrich managed to mount a deep sea expedition to look for the giant squid." "It was an enterprise that has been compared to parachuting at night into an area of the United States picked at random... and hoping to see a grizzly bear." "But Aldrich was determined." "The sub descended a thousand feet in an area where giant squid have often washed ashore." "It was literally a shot in the dark." "Bait attracted an array of bottom fish." "For ten hours Aldrich watched and waited, but Architeuthis ignored his invitation." "I am not disappointed." "The fact that I didn't see one does not effect my understanding of these animals whatsoever." "I never really held out much hope that I would see one, because 'oh, Lord, the ocean is so big and my ship so small." "The brief expedition ended and Aldrich died a few years later." "As deep water technology has improved, there have been more and more expeditions that could encounter a giant squid." "Many new species have been observed." "And some have been seen that could indeed be called monstrous." "This is the biggest shark ever seen in the deep sea." "A pacific sleeper shark that turned up in Japan's Suruga Bay." "Well over 23 feet in length, it loomed so large the camera couldn't see it all." "After investigating the sub for five suspenseful minutes, the giant went way, leaving observing scientists excited ...and a bit relieved." "Once dismissed as mere sensationalism, the search for the giant squid continues to gain impressive proponents today." "One is Dr. Malcolm Clarke, a specialist in sperm whales and oceanic squid." ""I think the good has always got to have a balance of evil." "You, you see the beauty in, in the sea." "Many of, uh, the fish are very beautiful to look at, uh, and, uh, have wonderful silvery sides, they make pretty lights." "Uh, that's the beauty... you need a few big-teethed, big stomached monsters to go along with it." "As a young graduate student," "Malcolm Clarke conducted research aboard a factory ship that hunted sperm whales... once considered sea monsters, in their own right." "Little was known about sperm whale biology despite centuries of killing them." "Only dwindling populations put scientists aboard whaling boats to study the huge animals." "Clarke inspected hundreds of sperm whale stomachs." "One thing he found were the beaks of deep-sea squid, too tough to be digested." "This proved that squid are the sperm whale's primary source of food." "And Clarke amassed a huge collection of beaks... as many as eighteen thousand from a single whale." "Among them, are many beaks of the giant squid." ""This came from a giant squid that was taken from the stomach of a sperm whale caught in the Azores." "Uh, so that, uh, it wasn't a tremendously large one." "It was probably, uh, thirty, in excess of thirty feet in length." "So it was quite a big squid, but, um, not one of the biggest." "Uh, but certainly, it's got very, very powerful jaws." "So that this is very, very formidable." "And, uh, of course, if they did live anywhere where a man lived, eh, they would make mincemeat of him in no time." "On a remote shore in New Zealand, sperm whales have stranded." "What causes whales to strand is still a mystery." "Clyde Roper and Malcolm Clarke undertake the grim task of examining the carcasses and discover evidence of their common passion, the giant squid." "The skins of sperm whales are like weathered maps of ancient battles." "The circular scars were left by sharp-toothed suckers of giant squid, marking their last desperate struggles in the jaws of the Leviathan." ""They have fifty teeth." "These are in a, uh, form two rows in the lowerjaw." "They don't have any upper teeth usually." "Uh, but the jaw is very, very narrow." "It can be about fifteen feet long and, uh, be a foot across." "So, it's very, very long and narrow." "Uh, and it's a snapping jaw, it's rather like some of the crocodiles." "It can probably, uh, snap shut very rapidly and they snap this jaw against the upperjaw." "Bang!" "And, in that movement, they squeeze the squid and it doesn't matter that the teeth don't damage them much;" "the squid will virtually go paralyzed." "They, they don't like being squeezed, squids don't..." "It's one of their features..." "not like humans." "And, uh, if they're squeezed by the jaws, with these teeth, and there's a big, very powerful tongue right at back of the jaws to, to push it down the throat." "Experts on both whale and squid, Clarke and Roper are uniquely to execute a new strategy in the search of Arthieuthis." ""Whales were known to feed on squid right from the very beginning, in the earliest days of, uh, of the whale hunting expeditions, and some of those were actually giant squid." "So it made sense to me to try to use the sperm whale as our 'hound dog' to, to lead us to, to the giant squid and that quest has brought on this current expedition."" "Off the Azores," "Roper and Clarke help to deploy a hydrophone to listen for sperm whales." "They, and the other scientists on this expedition, are combining their search for the giant squid with research on the squid's most formidable enemy." "Hydrophones can detect the sounds of sperm whales from several miles away" " Iong before they can be spotted visually." "But the whales themselves have excellent hearing and often keep their distance from boats." "Today, the scientists are in luck." "The whales are feeling sociable." "A group of sperm whales is playing nearby." "Female and their young come to feed here in the warm waters of the mid-Atlantic and announce their presence with an excited chorus of sounds." ""Good grief!" "It is an audience clapping." "And they're clapping at us." "When sperm whales gather, this is anything but 'a silent world'." "A distinct series of clicks is called a "coda" used for communication." "Deciphering the sounds is a challenge for behavioral experts like Cornell University's Kurt Fristrup." ""Now that's one of the unknowns." "That could very well be used for echo-raging, sonar."" "Sometimes divers can get very close to sperm whales." "It's a tremendous thrill to be kindly received by the most powerful predators on earth." "Up close, a different sound is sometimes heard." "This loud and singular noise could be a warming or even a weapon ...loud enough to stun a whale's prey." "The sperm whale's head is fully one third of its total weight and most of it is nose ...the largest in the animal kingdom." "This is where the sounds are created." "They're generated in the front of the nose, then redirected as they resound powerful off the whale's skull." "No one knows exactly how." "This remarkable organ also holds tons of spermaceti oil." "By regulating its temperature, the whale may be able to control their buoyancy." "This would allow them to conserve energy on their long dives to hunt for squid." "In any case, the whales seem in perfect control when they sleep ...suspended virtually just below the waves and swells." "This remarkable behavior has only recently been reported and filmed." "Mother sperm whales are doting parents." "Their calves are slow to mature." "They stay in close contact with their mothers, but their ability to dive is limited." "A mature female needs more than half a ton of food a day... and her food source" " Large oceanic squid- may be thousands of feet below." "So she must leave her calf at the surface" " Sometimes for almost an hour." "The calves are incredibly trusting and playful and will often approach and even nuzzle a diver." "This one offers its mouth for inspection." "The mother can go down more than half a mile ...a plunge deep into the unknown." ""We really don't know how sperm whales locate their prey, how they hunt, how they locate their prey and how they actually consume their prey." "There are several hypotheses:" "one is that they use echolocation and get the signals back that way..." "Somehow sperm whales "see" the world around them through a panorama of reflected sounds." "This certainly helps them navigate underwater, but can they detect and catch soft-bodied squids?" "The scientists seek another explanation." ""They can use the, their eyes to see the bioluminescence that might be created either by the squids themselves or by the squids swimming through the water and creating a swirl of bioluminescence." ""When they swim through the water they disturb all the little organisms that are in the water, and these little organisms, because they're disturbed, set off a glowing or flashing." ""Perhaps the whales then key on these strips of bioluminescence or streaks of bioluminescence and will be able to home in on the squid in that way." ""So, it's a little difficult to know exactly what it is and that's just one more thing we could see if we could get down into the sea with these giant whales."" "To follow whales into the deep has long been a favorite theme of poets and a dream of engineers." "Now, with support from the National Geographic Society, one man has managed to do it." "He's Greg Marshall, inventor of a system called crittercam." "It's a simple concept that has proven very difficult to execute." ""I had the idea for the crittercam 11 years ago." "Since then, basically, every waking moment," "I've spent thinking about, developing, working on making this thing happen."" "In early experiment, cameras were strapped to the backs of sea turtles before being risked in the wild." ""What motivates me is the, the possibility of discovering totally new phenomena of nature, seeing things we've never seem before."" "The spirited fur seal provided a greatest challenge." "A smaller, more rugged camera needed to enter its frenetic world." "With sperm whales, every step from deployment to retrieval has been fraught with difficulty." ""It's only through, you know, really carefully engineering and then some trial and error and experience the field that we've, that we've finally been able to succe in the way that we have."" "After years of experimentation, crittercam is finally ready for serious field work in the Azores." "The scientists are hopeful that the camera can survive a deep water dive, and be located and recovered afterwards." ""Um, underwater it weights nothing, of course, so that, uh, it just floats right back after it's released from the animal." "Floats back at about this orientation and, uh, will stick out of the water about this far."" "The system must be able to endure extreme pressure and record picture in almost total darkness." "The compact unit includes lights;" "instruments to record depth, temperature and sound;" "acoustic and radio homing transmitters;" "and a video camera able to amplify light over 50,000 times." ""Greg!" "Come over!"" "The first task is often the hardest ...getting close to the whales." ""You guys, can direct us to where it is, okay?"" "Scientists have used these techniques to attach instruments to whales, but no one has tried to attach a camera before." "They are breaking new ground." ""It was a challenge to get close to these whales, an emotional challenge." "Uh." "Clearly, we'd heard all the stories of, of the, the havoc that the sperm whales had wreaked on ships in the past and so forth and, you know, I, I didn't know," "what, uh, reaction of a, of the whales might be to us." "So, when we first started approaching the whales," "I was a bit nervous, there's no question about it."" "The camera can be attached by a tag the size of a paper clip" " Or with a large suction cup." "A successful deployment depends entirely on the whims of the whales." "At the moment, they appear to want a little time to themselves." ""We spend a lot of time on the water trying to get close to the whales, a lot of time on the water, and you have to do that because the whales are only at the surface of a few minutes every hour." "Uh, so we have to be perfectly in position, anticipating where the whales are coming up, uh, in order to place ourselves close enough so that we can get to them during and opportunity deploy."" ""You've got whales, uh, right ahead of you." "They'll be off you, uh, starboard bow, about a hundred and fifty meters." "Uh, there's a whole gaggle of them, they're a social group." "Three or four small ones and a couple of large ones." ""What we've found, for the most part, is that the whales tend to be quite curious about us." "If we're quiet in their environment, we've found that, as often as not, they tend to actually come over and investigate us." "The system is launch..." "and we are riding in a pod of whales." "The clicking noises are made by the whales, and for the first time we can see exactly how their sounds relate to their behavior." "It's a revelation how close the whale are... in their constant calling and with their bodies touching one another." "Then, as dolphins join the array, it's like an undersea dance." "They sometimes ride the subsurface waves generated by the forward thrust of the whales ...these mountains of movement." "Crittercam is working well near the surface." "Now comes the real test as whales descend into the deep." "They will disappear for more than 20 minutes." "The scientist are left alone with their hopes and their fears." ""If we don't retrieve the system, we get none of the data, we get none of the images, none of the audio, we learn nothing." "Unless we recover it, it's a bust."" "A messenger form another world, crittercam returns from the deep." "It has detached before it should have, but its homing signal is loud and clear." "After eleven year of trial and error and months on the high seas, a moment of truth has arrived." ""Look at that, look at that, what is that?" "That's the... the blowhole ...look, puffs up there..." "The camera is tethered about six feet behind the blowhole and face forward ...we are with several whales diving together." "On the right, a juvenile." "This could be a training dive." "Calves only gradually learn to dive as deep as their mothers." "The clicking sounds appear to be coming from more than one whale." "Some scientists believe that each whale has its own signature coda." "Tapes like this one could help support the theory." "It's darker and deeper now and another whale comes into view at the upper left." "Strange new sounds are heard ...growls, grunts... even squeals." "No one has conclusively identified these sounds with sperm whales before." "Now the whales are over nine hundred feet deep and a strange thing happens." "They almost stop and one moves back as if inspecting crittercam... it's head and eye are just to the right off camera." "There is a long moment of consideration and then, apparently satisfied, the whales speed up again, going deeper still." "There's two, there's two of them there." "This is the calf." "1200 feet... at this depth the pressure is enormous... over five hundred pounds per square inch." "Until the 1960's, no conventional submarine could descend this deep without being crushed like an eggshell." "How sperm whales survive these depths is still not understood." "But they've been doing it for million of year" " Lured here by vast bounty of large oceanic squid." "They will not find Architeuthis this time, but each moment is a revelation for Roper and his colleagues." ""The interesting thing here, you can, you can hear that these different coda that we're hearing, um, each one is slightly different and, and every once in a while we hear a buzz." ""Now the whales have stopped." "The, the camera is pointing right down, uh, right down into the skin of the, of the whale that's, uh, that's carrying the crittercam." ""There see, now I'm hearing that, hearing that buzz which is..." "That's fantastic, that's so..." "Yeah, that's a fantastic sound, that long, long buzzing sound and, uh, this is, uh, what, we believe is the sonar that they're using for, when they're actually hunting," "or have actually picked up a prey organism and they're zeroing-in on the prey and getting closer and closer to it." ""Now they're starting to move again and, uh, have turned and turned back towards the surface because now we can see, uh, the lighted, uh, the background that's lighted." "So they're heading back up to the surface." ""Whoa!" "There comes a, a, a whale right across, another one, right across in front of the camera."" ""There's two more." "Look at that!"" ""And there's a, there's a third one over on that side on the right." "So, that makes four whales..." "The, the crittercam has been knocked off, that's how closely, uh, the whales were to each other, really rubbing along, uh, side-by-side."" "No giant squid was found." "But this and other crittercam dives make the expedition a stunning success." ""We were able, for the very, very first time, to enter into the deep-sea domain of the sperm whale." "By playing these instrument on the whale, um, we were able to get down to many hundreds of meters deep and how the animal actually behaves down in those depths."" "But the sperm whales seem blissfully unaware of our efforts to enter and understand their world." "They have appointments to keep far below, which we can still see only our imagination." "One day, in the not too distance future, a whale may bring us a living portrait of Architeuthis... and one of the last great challenges in natural science and photography will be met." "But for the moment, we must contemplate these great whales as we always have, fascinated by their physical powers, tantalized by the secrets they hold in their great brains." "Two-thirds of our planet lies in the deep ocean, and that mysterious realm is their home." "In search of the giant squid," "Clyde Roper and his colleagues seem undaunted by the obstacles they face ...happily engrossed in the hunt for the creature that fascinates them." "Perhaps there is much truth in John Steinbeck's observation, that men need sea monsters in their personal oceans... that an ocean with its nameless creatures would be like sleep without dreams." "Paradise, for some, is simply an empty beach on a Caribbean island." "But for wild creatures this is not a destination, but a dividing line." "Here the tranquil inland world comes to an end and a far more complex and surprising one begins." "Vast coral reefs and sandy plains shimmer beneath the crystal Caribbean Sea." "And the tropical sun illuminates an array of living jewels." "Here are creatures rare and fantastic." "Here are figments of our nightmares and flights of wonderful fancy from our dreams." "In waters famed for hidden treasure, another kind of wealth is stunningly abundant." "Here, immersed in beauty and subtle mystery, we now discover the JEWELS OF THE C ARIBBEAN SEA." "The largest living structures onplanet Earth are controlled from outer space." "Every year, with uncanny precision, the orbiting moon somehow sets in motion the process of spawning in coral reefs throughout the world." "The same response occurs at different times in great coral reef systems from the Red Sea to the Pacific and greater Caribbean." "Tiny bundles of brain coral eggs and sperm rise like miniature moons." "Millions of them flood the sea." "Different species of coral respond in different ways." "Some corals are hermaphroditic and release packages that contain both eggs and sperm." "Other types release them separately." "It is all unbelievably subtle and complex." "The great blooming mass of eggs and sperm floats to the surface where the eggs will be fertilized and become larvae." "The larvae will drift, sometimes for many weeks," "Before setting to be bottom and perhaps beginning a new reef a hundred miles away." "The result of a few minute coral larvae given thousands of years to grow and reproduce can be this a city in the sea the glory of the Caribbean." "It is home to creatures as tiny as a single bacteria as huge as the manta ray." "Coral reefs may be hundreds of feet thick, many miles in length." "They are by far the largest structures created by living creatures." "Yet they are made almost entirely from the skeletons of tiny coral polyps, some the size of a single pearl." "The living coral grows about half an inch a year." "It lies upon the skeletons of dead coral, layer upon layer." "Along the edge of the reef we are seeing growth that took thousands of years." "Twenty feet down we are on the reef that Columbus might have seen." "At 85 feet we are in the time of Christ." "At 180 feet we have reached the time of the pyramids." "Around the reef great predators roam." "A Caribbean reef shark snaps up the weak and the unwary." "These swift killers don't always prevail." "In slow motion a small snapper makes a quick turn, tumbles down the shark's back, and slips off its tail." "Those that escape a shark may fall victim to a black grouper." "But the coral city is a community of strange alliances where the threat of sudden death can be mysteriously suspended." "This coral head is a special place." "It's called a cleaning station." "Tiny cleaner gobies cluster near the base of the coral head." "The tiger grouper often visits here." "Trusting in an ancient and mysterious relationship, the gobies do not hesitate at the tiger's mouth." "The gobies are allowed to crawl all over, feeding on parasites and dead tissue." "In return, every inch of the grouper is sanitized and groomed." "Other cleaners have other clients." "This Pederson shrimp, waving its white antennae, is issuing an invitation and is accepted by a Nassau grouper." "Cleaning is a striking example of symbiotic behavior." "As a result of its service, the cleaner is fed." "And the fish that is cleaned is healthier as a result." "But researchers suspect that the simple pleasure it provides is also important a sensuous interval in the struggle to survive." "The shrimp is allowed astonishing liberites." "It crawls through the delicate gills in search of tiny parasites that irritate the host." "On the reef many creatures may not travel more than a few inches in their entire lives." "But others are visitors creatures who have come here on journeys of thousands of miles." "During these winter months, parts of the Caribbean fill with the music of humpback whales." "The whales come here from far to the north." "Little or no feeding takes place during the several months they stay here." "Males give themselves to fighting for the right to escort a females, and females are giving birth and caring for their calves." "In early spring they'll head back north as far as Greenland and Barffin Island one of the greatest migrations in the ocean." "In a winter storm a hundred years ago, a steel sailing ship carrying molasses from Caribbean plantations sank here on Little Bahama bank." "Drifting coral larvae have settled on the wreck, and a new reef city is being born." "Coral polyps absorb calcium from seawater, which they use to create the hard structures that make up a reef home for a new community ofjewel-like inhabitants." "From its den beneath the collapsed bow of the wreck, a" "Ioggerhead turtle emerges to greet a new day." "Turtles, like whales, are tied to the surface by their need for air." "The loggerhead must breathe every 30 minutes or so." "Then he continues this leisurely but unrelenting search for food." "The slipper lobster has sacrificed speed for the protection of camouflage." "Not exactly lightning fast himself, the loggerhead relies on persistence and his powerful jaws." "Above the wreck, swifter predators are waiting." "The barracuda hovers around the reef most of the day." "Smaller fish tend to ignore it." "But everything can change in an instant if it gets hungry." "The highly maneuverable yellowtail snapper can sometimes avoid becoming a meal." "These waters also swarm with ballyhoo often not as fortunate." "This is one of the most intelligent creatures on the reef the Caribbean reef squid." "It is a creature from another world." "Their skins are alive with signals of great sophistication." "Not only can they warm that a predator is near, but they can even distinguish one predator from another." "Males competing for the affections of a female engage in a kind of visual combat, displaying spectacular colors and patterns." "No damage is done, the contest is highly ritualized." "Squid  courtship is also very visual a synchronized and extravagant display." "The actual mating however, is so brief, it's almost invisible." "The male lunges at the female with a special arm, attaching to her a packet of sperm." "The female can take her time deciding if she will accept the packet for self-fertilization or later get rid of it, rejecting it in favor of another." "In spring many reef creatures are breeding." "Excited schools of mating fish dance frenetically and animate the placid Caribbean." "After mating, the male yellowhead jawfish is left by himself with the fertilized eggs." "He has them in his mouth, spitting them out from time to time to aerate them." "For five days he'll continue his tender vigil until the baby jawfish finally hatch." "Hundreds of Cerole wrasse school in long columns as they migrate every day across the reef." "They are deadly marauders, attacking new generations of other fish." "Parrotfish are spawning, and the arriving Creole wrasse rush in to gorge themselves." "They eat the eggs the moment they are released by the female parrotfish." "Thousands of eggs vanish in a few seconds, but inevitably some escape and a few tiny parrotfish survivors will inherit the reef." "The Creole wrasse stop by a cleaning station." "Ajuvenile Spanish hogfish fearlessly takes them on." "It dashes from wrasse to wrasse checking for parasites." "Requesting to be cleaned, the Creole wrasse stand on their head." "Then, as the hogfish moves on, the next wrasse dashes eagerly to the head of the line" "The smoke rising from this barrel sponge is a dense cloud of sperm." "When a sponge starts to spawn, it triggers a chain reaction along the reef as others of the same species hurry to mix their spawn." "The sea is aswarm with their fertility." "High over the teeming city, clouds are gathering." "This is a springtime swarm of thimble jellies." "Ninety-five percent water, without brains or complex nervous systems, they are little more than fragments of the sea itself." "Each is the size of a thumbnail." "Thimble jellyfish are armed with stinging cells that carry a mild venom." "But this doesn't seem to discourage many inhabitants of the reef." "The clouds of thimble jellies drift out into the open sea and into the haunt of giants." "Sperm whales spend most of their days diving far underwater where they hunt for squid." "They surface every 45 minutes or so to breathe and bask in the Caribbean sun." "But not all sperm whales plunge into the deep." "Newborn calves lack the endurance to make these epic dives and must wait near the surface for their mothers to return to them." "This calf lools in a gentle sea as his mother descends a quarter of a mile." "As she soars through the darkness and searches undersea canyons far below him in pursuit of squid, he can still hear her familiar sonar clicks." "Fearless and playful, the lone baby whale turns and spins, exploring the dexterity of his great body in the weightless freedom of oceanic space." "He is covered with remoras, harmless companions who cling to him for a spectacular free ride." "When he learns to dive, they will probably leave him, unable to stand the cold and pressure of the abyss." "The baby whale hears his mother returning and joins her to explore their favorite waters deep channels off volcanic islands in the Caribbean." "They swim by islands packed with more and more hotels and holiday homes." "Seemingly lush and abundant, Caribbean ecosystems are very vulnerable to the tourists who come here." "To make room for them, native vegetations is stripped away." "Over the years ecosystems disappear and so do the creatures that inhabit them on land and in the sea." "The dark patches behinds the shelter of the reef are prairies of turtle grass." "They cover hundreds of square miles of the shallow banks." "This is home to a manatee." "Once great numbers of these gentle undersea mammals grazed here." "How the sight of one is like encountering a lone buffalo on the midwestern prairie." "Remoras cling to the manatee." "They get food from its waste." "The lone manatee probably gains nothing but companionship." "The gentle stately manatee faces many dangers." "Today, its greatest enemy is probably pollution." "Easy targets for a harpoon, manatees once were hunted almost to extinction, and poachers still take them when they can." "Only the tip of the snout is exposed while breathing." "Manatees are highly vulnerable to being hit by motor boats and jet skis." "Many bear propeller scars and many die of their wounds." "When manatees are not feeding, they are often sleeping." "Despite the camera, this one is just dropping off." "There he's fast asleep, oblivious to the tide of change sweeping away his world." "The manatee's fate, and that of dozens of other species, depends largely on strangers who pass this way briefly and travel in splendid isolation." "Few of these travelers are aware of their fatal impact on the wonders all about them, great and small." "The reef at night." "Many fish sleep." "This redtail parrotfish slumbers with eyes open, lying on her side on the coral." "As a prelude to mating, a spiny lobster male gently caresses the carapace of a female." "Lobster larvae, when they are born, look like spun glass." "The spiny lobster female helps her tiny larvae into the world." "She agitates her tail to help move them out into the current." "By the thousands the tiny larvae drift past their mother's eye, never to be seen by her again." "Larvae, eggs, plankton, and tiny fish all drift out from the reef, a dazzling assortment of creatures cast with seeming carelessness onto the sea wind." "This is a venomous sea wasp." "Its stinging tentacles find larval fish, which are quickly anesthetized and consumed." "Reef squid lie in wait for passing fish and crustaceans." "And out of the darkness a giant manta ray joins the feast." "The manta loops to stay in the area most dense with plankton." "It's maneuver as graceful as it is efficient." "The arms on either side of her face are cephalic lobes that channel plankton into a foot-wide mouth." "Her wings span six feet and she weights several hundred pounds." "All night the eerie feast of plankton will go on." "Out on the prairie a pearlfish stands on its head, mimicking the surrounding turtle grass." "Camouflage makes it almost invisible." "This unappealing animal is a sea cucumber." "It consumes sediments, which are filtered internally for digestible bits of organic matter." "It is also home for the pearlfish." "when in danger, the pearlfish" "Locates the rear end of the sea cucumber with its nose." "Then it inserts its sharply tapered tail and slips back into the cucumber's anus to reach a safe hiding place in the intestine." "The pearlfish obviously benefits." "But what's in it for the sea cucumber, if anything, is not known." "Comes a sultry Caribbean dawn, and the placid sea gives no hint" "Of the night's events." "A baby loggerhead turtle emerges from the sand to greet its first day." "It begins a life that could last more than 60 years, orjust a few minutes." "Turtles produce abundant young, but only a few will survive to carry on their species." "The baby heads instinctively for its ocean home." "If a female, she may return to this very beach to lay her own eggs in 25 years or so." "If a male, he will never again leave the water." "Now the baby turtle must cross the reef and make its way to the open ocean." "It's a dangerous crossing." "Predators gather quickly when the sea is full of hatching turtles." "But this turtle is lucky." "After 36 hours of nonstop swimming, the hatchling finds shelter." "It will spend its first year near the sargassum fronds, later head north, then eastward across the Atlantic to the Azores and the Canary Islands." "The flotsam of the sea accumulates where ocean currents converge." "Sargassum weed and other drifting plant and animal life also gather here, along with an increasing mass of human rubbish." "Jellyfish congregate here too, and one is the first meal for the newly hatched loggerhead." "These waters often teem with jellyfish and some of them are voracious predators." "This large stinging cauliflower has captured several moon jellies." "They are helpless in its deadly tentacles." "The medusa fish may be resistant to the cauliflower's stinging cells orjust incredibly nimble." "It feeds on scraps and leftovers from the cauliflower's meals and uses the broad bell as a personal magic carpet." "Convergent currents drive moon jellyfish together by the tens of thousands." "Their translucent bodies form a gently pulsing cathedral in the sea." "The sargassum weed is a safe nursery for many Caribbean reef fish." "Spawned on the reef, schools of baby fish hide here in the open sea until they are old enough to return to their more hazardous home." "A loggerhead turtle is hunting for lobster." "The lobster uses its spiny antennae." "They are covered with sharp barbs and the lobster aims them at the turtle's eyes with uncanny accuracy." "Eventually the loggerhead discouraged and returns to his home in the wreck." "In a long, slow-paced life, one lobster more or less makes little difference." "Adult loggerheads lead settled lives." "They hunt by day and at night usually hole up to sleep in a favorite crevice." "Another turtle, a hawksbill, is on the prowl." "She eats sponges." "She spends her days searching out the varieties she likes best." "When she finds one, she contents herself with just a few bites and then moves on." "The sponge will survive." "Its tissue will heal and later the turtle will be back for more." "For the French angelfish the sponge is now an easy meal, because the turtle has torn through its outer layer." "But this sponge has a defender." "Some damselfish are farmers." "They cultivate patches of algae on sponges that they rely on for food." "Although the queen angelfish is many times the size of a damsel, the little fish is unrelenting." "It will attack almost anything to protect the algae farm." "Other kinds of algae have changed the face of the Caribbean." "As they grow, several species concentrate calcium in their tissues." "When they die, the calcified skeletons of these plants decompose and become find sand." "It's known for its delicate grain and brilliant whiteness." "After thousands of years this sand has created sand banks that can stretch for miles between and shore." "Plains of this and other types of sand are scattered throughout the Caribbean." "Seemingly barren deserts, they are home for many creatures that specialize in concealment and camouflage." "A male peacock flounder has excellent eyesight." "He watches from a high sand mound, trying to spot a mate." "At last, a female." "He confronts her and displays his long pectoral fin." "Seducing her will not be easy." "The female is not sufficiently impressed." "He must try again." "He displays all the signals signals proper for his species, but still she is unresponsive." "A cold fish indeed." "A curious mutton snapper butts in just as the reluctant female begins to show some interest." "Finally she responds." "It all ends with a single exquisite shiver and a tiny puff of spawn." "During the long summer day the voices of dolphins can often be heard across the sandy plains." "These are Atlantic spotted dolphin." "Like other mammals, dolphin babies are nourished by mother's milk, which is squirted into their mouths under pressure." "Baby spotted dolphins don't develop their spots for a few years." "Dolphins are social and very intelligent animals, and their private lives are highly visible here in the open." "These dolphins relax here after a night of vigorous hunting." "During the day the look for flounder and razorfish that lie concealed on the bottom." "The dolphin's sensitive sonar can locate prey partially buried in the sand." "Once discovered, a small fish has little chance to escape." "Dolphin's are extremely efficient hunters." "They are very playful and have plenty of time to fool around." "Like chimpanzees and other intelligent mammals, they often reinforce their social bonds with sexual behavior." "What starts as gentle foreplay soon turns to mating." "Dolphins mate belly to belly." "The large gray dolphins here are male bottlenose dolphins a completely different species." "Female spotted dolphins pet the bottlenoses and coax them to play." "Soon this becomes a sensual frenzy." "The two species will mate, an event only recently recorded in the wild." "As a result there may be hybrid young, but they will probably be sterile and have no offspring of their own." "Dolphins show hyper-sexuality in captivity and this is often attributed to boredom." "But films like this confirm that they are also highly sexual in the wild." "It has never been demonstrate that dolphins have language as we know it." "But these dolphin vocalizations, slowed down six times, show just how much information could be conveyed by their intricate sounds." "The dolphin language, if any, remains an unsolved riddle to science." "Whatever their meaning, dolphin sounds are rich and varied, an essential part of their social lives and an expression of their soaring spirit." "For weeks in summer the dolphins' playground is mirror-still, a warm and crystal sea seemingly frozen in time." "Then, finally, the long summer ends when the first winter storm clouds start to gather over the reef." "The jewels of the Caribbean take shelter." "As winter arrives among the creatures that seek safety and security on the reef is the spiny lobster." "Lobsters group together and dash for the safety of deep water at the edge of the reef." "They are in the open here, vulnerable to predators, so speed equals survival." "One lobster takes the lead, seeking the shortest course to the protection of the reef." "Each following lobster uses its antennae to engage the one ahead." "Like racing cars, they take advantage of the draft." "The train of lobsters makes the trip faster than one could traveling alone." "Their trek ends at the reef." "Here they find calm water protected from storms." "Spreading out over the reef, each will find a sheltering hole or crevice that will serve as its winter home." "Another winter visitor has only just arrived." "Returning to this city in the sea, humpback whales have come back from the north." "A mother humpback whale is sleeping." "Her newborn calf snuggles under her chin." "Calves spend their days playing, nursing, and just basking in an ocean filled with the songs of whales." "The Caribbean is an ideal nursery for the baby humpbacks." "They're 12 to 14 feet long at birth and grow very quickly." "They'll each take up to 50 gallons of milk a day and soon be strong enough to make the long journey north." "The round trip is over 8,000 miles." "Once these humpback whales were hunted almost to extinction." "Only a hundred or so wintered in the Caribbean." "Now they have made a modest comeback." "But all is not well in their environment." "Each time they return, these waters are increasingly unfamiliar." "This area once included thousands of manatees, reef sharks, and grouper." "Now many of them are gone." "The reef itself has declined." "Many of its jewels are missing." "In just a few years there has been dramatic change." "One reason is a new predator, ever more common, that strikes from above." "Fisherman of the Caribbean cast their nets." "Their hunt for food from waters around the reef is more and more intense." "Their methods are increasingly sophisticated and life is strained from the sea." "Longlines are set for groupers and sharks, and lures are trawled through the waters by game fishermen." "In some places the remaining jewels look to a future shadowed by change." "Their homes are not what they used to be." "New reefs grow on structures that are artificial and for the residents are fraught with danger." "Oil rigs provide shelter on one hand, the threat of spills and pollution on the other." "And these new reefs may not endure for thousands of years." "They are here today by man's whim and could easily be gone tomorrow." "In these devastating times a new creature has come to the reef the sport diver." "Because of divers, sea life is increasingly valuable alive and free." "This single shark brings millions of tourist dollars to the Bahamas every year." "This grouper attracts thousands to resorts in the Cayman islands." "These dolphins play with thousands of divers, bringing wealth to the struggling nations of the West Indies." "So there is a new form of symbiotic behavior in the undersea world." "Marine creatures bring joy to creatures of the land and we, in turn, must provide protection against the ravages of overfishing and pollution." "Above all, now there are human witnesses to the damage humans are doing here." "There is still a wealth of precious jewels strewn about the Caribbean, and there is still time to save them." "In the heart of southern Africa stands the remains of a once mighty city," "Great Zimbabwe." "For hundreds of years a mysterious civilization reigned supreme here in the Zimbabwe plateau." "Then suddenly in the 16th century it crumbled, leaving behind only a riddle:" "who had built these massive walls?" "Obsessed with legends of a lost white civilization, a German explorer stumbled upon the ruins." "Was this the legendary city of Sheba, he thought, whose queen captured the heart of King Solomon?" "Fifty years later, an archeologist in her quest for the truth unearthed an even more remarkable past." "Had Great Zimbabwe been the center of a powerful black culture, one of the greatest cities of its time?" "This idea sparked furious debate and threatened to overturn centuries of bias about Africans and their history." "1871." "The German explorer Karl Mauch searches for a legendary city he's convinced lies hidden in wildest Africa." "Mauch has spent six years in Africa overcoming poverty, sickness and numerous scrapes with death in pursuit of his obsession." "Against all odds," "Mauch discovers immense stone walls that cover hundreds of acres." "He is over awed." "What he has found are the ruins of an ancient civilization, the only one of its kind in sub Saharan Africa." "Mauch believes this discovery will be his crowning achievement." "Mauch's obsession with Africa began as a child." "At that time, Africa was a land of mystery." "Fantastic stories hinted at wondrous landscapes, populated by exotic animals and wild natives." "At age 10, while gazing at a map of Africa," "Mauch vowed to one day explore its unchartered lands." "Like many Europeans," "Mauch's understanding of Africa was based on legends that grew out of the Bible." ""And she gave the King 120 talents of gold." "Never again gave such an abundance as these that the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon."" "Solomon, the wisest and richest Hebrew king from the Bible inspired many later legends." "One told of Solomon's gold mines at a place in Africa called 'Ophir'." "Others spoke of the enigmatic Queen of Sheba." "She was a beautiful seductress who appeared in Jerusalem, paid homage to King Solomon, became his lover, and just as suddenly disappeared back to her mysterious land which lay hidden somewhere in Africa." "Arab traders pried the east African coast in search of the lands of Sheba and Ophir." "The Africans who traded with these Arabs came to believe that Solomon's mines and Sheba's lost city were somewhere in the interior." "Mauch burned to be the man who would discover these legendary lands." "But Mauch was poor, his options limited." "Living in very modest circumstances." "I was bound by my parents to become a teacher; and I was, unfortunately, denied the opportunity for further studies at a university." "I've endeavored to obtain knowledge of medicine by talking to doctors and reading medical journals." "I have studied the practice collecting insects, birds and minerals." "Karl Mauch did not come from a privileged background whatsoever." "Karl Mauch was a self made man." "What he did was he taught himself cartography, geology, all the sciences that were needed for him to be a great explorer in Africa like Livingston, Burton, Speak." "That's what Karl March came from, that's what he wanted to be." "The dream of African exploration consumed Mauch." "By practicing gymnastics and walking six miles a day in every season, over any ground, often without food or drink," "I've tried to steel my body." "Mauch wrote to the German Geographical Institute in hope of gaining their support for an expedition to unexplored Africa." "The response was harshly negative." "It warned that African exploration should be left to the professionals." "It went without saying this meant people of higher social standing." "He carried this letter with him for years." "Karl Much was not accepted by the German Geographical Institute because really he wasn't a member of the club." "He was self taught, he had never been to university, he had no titles, he had not connections." "He had no hope, really." "The German Geographic Institute had good reason to reject Mauch." "African exploration was a dangerous and expensive affair." "By the time Mauch dreamed of Africa, hundreds of European adventurers and missionaries had already died there." "Most explorers were independently wealthy or well connected." "In Africa, they could afford to hire scores of natives who became their laborers, porters, guides and translators." "Mauch, however, had nothing." "Not even ship fare to Africa." "Determined to explore wildest Africa, Mauch, age 27, enlisted as a crew member on a ship sailing for Durban," "South Africa in 1864." "At last the ship reached Africa." "How I wished for the time when, for the first occasion," "I would be able to set foot on this strange soil." "But the reality of Durban and the many other European settlements in South Africa clashed with Mauch's dream of an untamed land." "South Africa, in 1865, was inhabited by, of course, a great number of tribes:" "the Xhosa, the Zulu, the Sotho." "By this time, quite a few white, about a quarter million whites, had come settled, immigrated, whatever you like." "And, in fact, conquered a bit." "Mauch wanted to be at the frontier, at the edge of the excitement, the adventure." "But even in a small forest near civilized Durban, he felt lost in an alien world." "It struck him all at once" "That Africa might pose a greater challenge than he could handle." "I got into denser bush." "The high trees were somber crowns growing close to one another." "Even the small sound could be heard." "In all honesty, a feeling of fear got hold of me." "I felt so terribly deserted amid the surrounding strange nature." "He overcame this panic and struck out on foot for the frontier in what is now northern South Africa." "Mauch walked for three weeks doing odd jobs at farms in exchange for food and shelter." "He joined one of the wagon trains hat carried supplies to frontier settlements." "In his spare time, he took notes, sketched and collected specimens." "He fell in love with the country, but not the settlers, most especially the Boar, the Dutch colonists." "He thought they were uncivilized, and their treatment of blacks a disgrace." "A 'kafir' or native colored is in the opinion of the Boar, not a man." "Mauch's trip to the frontier took months, but it carried him to the threshold of his goal:" "unchartered Africa." "Scattered African villages and European farming towns dotted the vast tracks of open land along the frontier." "You have now, I could tell myself, passed the prepatory class and entered the high school of traveling." "You have become the top of the fall." "Over the next year," "Mauch tentatively ventured from the frontier towns and villages to explore what lay beyond." "Many of the Africans he encountered were unfriendly." "White settlers were pushing from the south, and the Africans resisted further intrusions." "They were especially suspicious of anyone making maps or surveying the land." "To disguise his intentions, Mauch developed a novel plan." "He feigned a sort of madness." "It succeeded." "The Africans pronounced him insane and left him free to do as he pleased." "With just a simple compass and a pen and ink set," "Mauch created the first maps and sketches of the South African interior." "He sent his journals to the Geographical Institute in Germany, the same group that had rejected him." "They began to publish Mauch's accounts." "And, to his great satisfaction, portrayed him as a model German explorer." "German sponsors even began to send small sums to support his efforts." "Mauch's status grew even further when he made the first gold discovery in southern Africa." "Word quickly spread." "Prospectors filtered into the area, but Mauch never staked a claim to the field." "I have before me a choice between my gold discoveries and my explorations." "Without hesitation he chose exploration, and so gave up the chance to make a fortune." "Adventure and respect were what Mauch had desperately sought and was finally achieving." "He wanted more." "In 1968, at the age of 31," "Karl Mauch set off on an expedition into unexplored Africa." "I may, without exaggeration, call this journey a long fight against hunger." "Game were scarce." "Bands of hostile warriors stalked Mauch." "He lived in constant fear." "While mapping swampy coastlines, Mauch contracted malaria." "He went without food for 8 days and fell into a coma." "Fevers and ill health would torment him for the rest of his life." "Mauch revived when local Africans told him of an abandoned stone city past the Lompopo River." "Though still weak," "Mauch resolved to find the fabled city and in January of 1871 six years after arriving in Africa he set forth on the adventure he believed was his destiny." "When Mauch crossed the Lompopo River, he entered a land unknown to Europeans." "It was also an alien world in which Mauch offered an easy target for chiefs who demanded gifts." "His trade goods quickly dwindled." "In these circumstances one has to exert patience." "One has to assume the right expression on one's face when handing out presents." "As Mauch pushed into the interior, villagers who did not own firearms demanded he hunt for them." "At one point he was feeding 40 people a day who did no work in return." "While other explorers bullied and slashed their way across Africa," "Mauch tried negotiation and generosity with his porters." "A cold wind blew during the night between the mountains." "I took pity on their naked skinny figures shivering in the cold, and gave them my own woolen blankets." "His efforts to win their good will failed." "Eight months into the trip, they disappeared." "They had sliced open his bags and stolen much of his goods." "He felt trapped." "I could not flee." "As the second night followed the first, my position was desperate and it was, therefore, not surprising that the thought occurred to me to take my own life before I succumb to slow torture." "But Mauch must have known that his goal was near." "The next day he snapped out of his despair and headed to a local village." "There he hired guides who led him to a distant mountaintop." "Mauch beheld ancient walls in the valley below." "God be praised!" "That is what I have been seeking." "Only a few days before I was occupied with great thoughts of death, and today I stand before the most brilliant success of my travels." "After six hard years of exploration," "Karl Mauch discovered Great Zimbabwe." "He was amazed by what he saw." "Stone walls spread over a square mile of the valley floor, bounded on one end by ruins on a hill." "At the center of its all stood an enormous enclosure 30 feet high and hundreds of feet around." "Mauch realized he stood within the remains of a sprawling city." "It had been a culture unique in sub Saharan Africa." "Thousands had lived in the city, and remarkably they built in stone." "Mauch dismissed the possibility of local Africans having created it." "Mauch was not immune to European prejudices about Africa, and they guided his thinking." "In Mauch's mind Africans built grass huts and lived off the land." "It was inconceivable to him that they could construct such a magnificent city." "The local Africans seemed to share Mauch's views." "All are absolutely convinced that white people once inhabited the region." "Overlooking clear signs of African occupation and ignorant of archeology," "Mauch turned to the Bible and legend for his answers." "The whole fantastic site, Mauch believed, was the Queen of Sheba's palaces and temples." "The center of the legendary 'Golden Realm' of Ophir." "Mauch searched for evidence to support his theory." "He cut splinters from a wooden beam." "The smell which it exudes is of great similarity to that of cedar wood used in pencils." "The color too is the same." "Mauch believed Sheba had imported the cedar from Lebanon, a land to the north of ancient Israel." "The local Africans tribes provided further evidence for Mauch." "He thought their customs of circumcision and ritual butchering had been learned from Sheba generations before, and passed down through the years." "Mauch was ecstatic." "He believed he had just made one of the greatest discoveries of all time, a legendary lost city rescued from oblivion in Africa." "Mauch's frenzy of excitement crashed when he again fell sick." "Desperate and alone, he knew that to stay alive he would have to return home." "After seven years of adventure and hardship," "Mauch dragged himself to the coast and left Africa forever." "Germany had changed radically during Mauch's time in Africa." "War and politics preoccupied his countrymen." "And Mauch's earlier exploits had largely been forgotten." "But the greatest blow fell when the people Mauch most admired, scientists and historians, dismissed his theories about Sheba." "A chemist determined that the wood Mauch had cut from the Zimbabwe ruins was indigenous to Africa it wasn't cedar brought there from Lebanon." "Others pointed out that" "Mauch's sketches of Great Zimbabwe's walls" "looked nothing like the buildings of ancient Jerusalem." "And they ridiculed the idea of black Africans practicing Jewish rituals." "In his furious attempts to make sense of Great Zimbabwe," "Mauch became more disoriented than he had ever been in the wilds of Africa." "Racked by fevers, he grew increasingly irrational and unpredictable." "In early 1875," "Mauch fell to his death from the window of his garret." "The circumstances surrounding his death are still unclear." "Karl Mauch died at the age of 38." "Despite all that Mauch accomplished and all that he overcome to reach Great Zimbabwe, the only memorial to him stands in Germany at a teacher's training college." "His theories about a lost white settlement did, however, find an eager audience, especially in the British colonies of Rhodesia and South Africa." "The imperial mission in Africa was really one of racial superiority." "To have it thought that Africans had constructed such enormous buildings as these on such a vast scale was really unthinkable." "No one could have imagined it no one could have believed it." "Therefore, for imperialism it was very important that these building were thought to be built, by outsiders, people other than Africans." "Almost anyone would do." "South African and Rhodesian settlers would fight to the last for their vision of a white Great Zimbabwe." "They countered any challenge to the myth of white superiority with a storm of vitriol and ridicule." "Only a formidable character would withstand this onslaught." "Fifty years later in 1929 one of the worlds foremost archeologists," "Gertrude Caton Thompson, scoured the ruins of Great Zimbabwe for clues to its origins." "Years of hard work and struggle had won Gertrude grudging respect in a male dominated field, but Great Zimbabwe posed her greatest challenge yet." "All evidence of the identity of the city's builders appeared to have been erased." "But failure was not an option for Gertrude." "Tireless in her pursuit of the truth," "Gertrude would search until she found what she needed:" "the key to unlock the mystery of Great Zimbabwe's origins." "Few would have predicted such a life for Gertrude." "She was born in 1888 into a privileged English family." "But it was also unstable." "Her father died when she was young;" "her mother was sickly." "From an early age, Gertrude learned to rely only on herself." "Travel was one of the few constants in her life." "Something of value had been gained from the travels of my early childhood." "Pompeii and Rome stand out in memory because I felt the first stirrings of interest in past civilizations." "But it would take time for these stirrings to become passion." "In her twenties, Gertrude's existence was a nameless one." "Life at home was pleasant for a well to do family during that pampered pre war period." "Visits to relatives and friends were leisurely things, constant amusement at games, parties, dances and theaters followed each other endlessly." "She became attracted to a young solider, Carlion McFarland." "In 1914, just after the outbreak of the first world war," "Carlion received a short leave from the fighting in France." "He visited Gertrude." "Time flew." "And apart from the war we talked nostalgically of the carefree past." "I faced the fact that I loved him with my whole being." "For the next two years as Carlion fought in the trenches," "Gertrude threw herself into the war effort." "In 1916, news arrived that turned Gertrude's life upside down." "On September 16th Carlion was killed in an ambush." "Gertrude never recovered from his death." "Almost 25 years later, she visited McFarland's mother." "When I left to say good bye she was in bed." "After a parting embrace," "I noticed for the first time Carlion's swords and medals." "She said in a tone of assertion, not of query, "You loved him." ""I replied, "He was loved by everyone who knew him."" "For Gertrude the option of marriage and a family of her own died with Carlion McFarland." "And it wasn't a subject that she talked about much, or hardly at all." "But it must have had a huge influence on her career." "If she had become being married, probably been an ambitious soldier's wife, she might never have gone in for the things she did." "Gertrude withdrew from almost all personal relationships." "In the later years, one of the few deep friendships she formed was with the de Navarro family." "Gertrude helped raise their son Michael." "His memories are of a woman whose strong character intimidated others." "But to him she was warm and devoted." "She was a formidable person." "Somebody of the type that you don't have now, I think." "Very much somebody of her age." "Passionate in support of the things she believed in." "Obstinate." "No lover of fools, and certainly no patience with them." "Yet very loving and affectionate to those very close to her, to those lucky enough to have been." "In 1920, Gertrude sought to escape the easy trappings of her earlier life." "She volunteered at an archeological dig in the South of France." "During the visit I made a new interest: pre history." "With the determination that marked the rest of her life," "Gertrude, now 32, pursued her new passion: archeology." "Archeology was still a new and rapidly expanding field." "Demand for specialists created opportunities for professionals." "The discipline and precision of modern archeology suited Gertrude's exacting perfectionist nature." "Her dedication brought her to the dedication of one of the world's top Egyptologists, Sir Flinders Petrie." "He asked her to assist him on a dig in Egypt." "Sir Fliders Petrie was a demanding and often difficult teacher, but Gertrude excelled." "In 1924," "Sir Fliders Petrie helped her obtain a small grant for her own dig in Egypt." "It was a great success." "Her conclusions pushed back the date for the origin of Egyptian civilization 5,000 years." "Although they have since proved correct, they contradicted Sir Petrie's own theories." "He severed all support." "Gertrude raised the funds herself and continued." "She would never relent to threats or bullying." "An Anglo Rhodesian foundation approached Gertrude about conducting a dig at Great Zimbabwe." "The hoped to uncover clues about the mysterious civilization that once flourished there." "Gertrude Caton Thompson was a formidable woman." "She had worked under the most impossible conditions and under the most impossible archeologists in Egypt, and in the end running large scale excavations of her own." "She was carefully chosen to undertake the work at Great Zimbabwe." "She was ideally suited to it." "The Foundation set one condition that Gertrude present her conclusion about Great Zimbabwe's origins to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in only eight months time." "This was a tight deadline under the best of circumstances." "Undaunted, Gertrude accepted." "Gertrude arrived in Bera just ahead of a raging cyclone." "The noise of the collapsing town, the many ships in harbor dragging their chains and crashing into each other hooting wildly was dramatic." "Mercifully, I am not easily alarmed." "She rode out the storm with typical calm, but found that the cyclone had destroyed the rail lines." "Gertrude drove towards Rhodesia, but the rain season turned the roads to mud and the rivers to churning torrents." "After weeks of delay, she finally reached Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia." "Rhodesia was named for the great industrialist and imperialist, Cecil Rhodes." "Rhodes master minded British expansion throughout southern Africa, personally controlling thousands of square miles of land as he created one of the world's greatest fortunes." "In the capital of Salisbury, Gertrude paused to gather supplies." "In just 40 years white settlers had created a bustling farm community in Salisbury, but it had been built at the expense of black Africans." "Whites lived well, overseeing farms and mines, while blacks were relegated to menial jobs with subsistence wages, poor housing and no education." "The white mindset of racial superiority was pervasive, poisoning every aspect of life." "When one prominent white woman asked if her sons might help with the upcoming excavation," "Gertrude said they could if they would dig alongside the native workers." "Just as Gertrude expected, the request was promptly withdraw." "At dinner one night the governor promoted the idea that Great Zimbabwe's ruins were of ancient and thereby white origin." "Gertrude countered that her job required objectivity." "I replied that I had no idea one way or the other, and only hoped I might get an answer." "The team Gertrude brought to Great Zimbabwe reflected her willingness to flaunt convention." "It was an all women team." "I think very deliberately she always worked with women and was one of the first feminists in archeology." "It was one of the first all female archeological teams in all history." "Gertrude and the others examined miles of ruins in their first days there." "Normally, a site this size offers numerous options for an archeologist, but many others have been there before Gertrude." "She was stunned by what they had done." "Generations of treasure hunters and previous archeologists had laid bare practically all that had remained." "In brief, fulfillment of my task seemed dubious." "For Gertrude Caton Thompson the site at Great Zimbabwe had changed enormously since Mauch's time." "What had happened in fact was a whole bunch of people had decided they could would find gold here at Great Zimbabwe, and they had literally pillaged, plundered, pulled the walls down, done everything." "Prospectors formed the Rhodesian Ancient Ruins Company to extract gold." "They dug numerous trenches and undermined walls, but found little gold." "What they did loot was of great archeological value." "They'd melted it down and sold it as bullion." "Priceless artifacts were lost forever." "Early treasure seekers also uncovered stone birds." "Cecil Rhodes bought two to mark the entrance to his estate, and hired men to search Great Zimbabwe for evidence that it had been built by a white civilization." "In their rush to prove that Zimbabwe was of white origin, excavators moved tons of topsoil, destroying artifacts of African origin." "The damage was irreparable." "As for evidence of white occupation or construction, nothing was ever unearthed." "The devastated condition of the ruins left Gertrude at an apparent dead end." "She and her team dug at several sites, and she paid the laborers bonuses for their hard work." "Still, she found nothing conclusive." "Time was running out." "The British Association meeting loomed." "Gertrude arranged for a plane so that she could inspect the ruins from a new perspective." "She became one of the first archeologists to use aerial observation." "As she swept past the hill ruins," "Gertrude spotted a path that from the ground was obscured by vegetation." "It led to terraces beneath the hill walls, and had clearly not been used in hundreds of years." "Treasure seekers had overlooked the seemingly inaccessible terraces." "The next day, Gertrude moved her team onto the hill terraces." "There they uncovered a wealth of objects untouched by anyone but the original inhabitants." "Everything that Gertrude Caton Thompson found was clearly African." "There were changes in the pottery and the pottery designs, but always African." "The only foreign material she found were glass beads and Far Eastern ceramics," "Near Eastern ceramics, but these were firmly dated to about the 13th century." "So they, in fact, reinforced the African material that this was a 13th century local culture that had trade connections overseas." "Gertrude determined that Great Zimbabwe had been a black African city from the 9th to the 14th centuries, a major hub in a huge sophisticated trade system." "Great Zimbabwe had straddled the trade route Africans followed as they carried ivory and gold from the interior to the coast." "Their trade partners were Arab merchants, who were the great middlemen, dealing in goods from as far away as India and China." "Gertrude compiled her findings just in time for the British Association meeting." "She expected a hostile reaction to the idea of a black Great Zimbabwe, but headed into the controversy with her usual poise." "Gertrude presented her findings to an overflow crowd in Johannesburg on August 2nd, 1923." "Her presentation was meticulous." "Her conclusions, crystal clear." "Instead of a degenerate offshoot of another civilization, you have here a native civilization showing national organization of a high kind originality and amazing industry." "She portrayed a living, vibrant, black African city" "in which the walls formed a series of interlocking courtyards where women cooked, children played, men worked." "In one extraordinary paper," "Gertrude killed the myth of a lost white civilization." "In its place, she described a thriving black metropolis." "It was estimated to house ten to fifteen thousand people, a city as large as many in Europe at the time." "Many were scandalized." "They remained convinced that" "Africans were simply incapable of creating such a civilization." "Several stormed from the room." "Even the normally calm Gertrude was shaken by the fury her conclusions triggered." "Gertrude Caton Thompson's work gave her the highest reputation among the academics and scientists." "It did nothing to persuade the settler to overcome his prejudices." "And nothing that anyone could do either Caton Thompson or in the fifty years subsequent to her were going to convince people with such strong racial prejudices that Great Zimbabwe was not exotic." "She bade farewell to her African work." "Her sense of irony surfaced when she recalled how the foreman asked to come with her." "I explained that he would not be happy in our cold country with no one to talk to in his Bantu language." "'Are there no black men in England?" "' he asked." "I replied, 'No, we are all white." "'After a puzzled reflection he said, 'No blacks?" "Then who does the work?" "'" "Gertrude left for England in late 1929, but the controversy surrounding Great Zimbabwe followed her." "In 1930, Gertrude's findings from Great Zimbabwe were exhibited at the British Museum in London." "I undertook to be present three days a week to answer questions and be long suffering to the many who continued to believe in the Queen of Sheba." "In the exhibit's wake came letters in the press and lively correspondence from strangers." "I refrained from being drawn into these." "But she kept a special file." "Caton Thompson was a very professional scientist." "She could be quite cold and quite clinical in the things she did." "She put the quality of her work above all else, and she could not tolerate fools." "And to her, many of those who speculated on Great Zimbabwe were nothing but fools." "Gertrude's combative nature worked against her in 1938 on her last major dig." "She traveled to South Arabia with another all female team, but she fought constantly with an associate over everything from the food to the expedition's purpose." "Gertrude hoped to find connections between South Arabia and Great Zimbabwe." "Perhaps the Arab traders who had brought goods to the African coast from India and China had influenced Great Zimbabwe's builders." "Gertrude looked for common architecture, art, stone masonry, anything that might link the two place." "She encountered Arab's who still practiced traditional stone building techniques, but their ties to Great Zimbabwe were unclear." "Towards the end of the expedition, she became gravely ill." "Sick and exhausted, she returned to England." "She began to suffer from spells of lightheadedness that plagued her for the rest of her life." "A doctor diagnosed a distended heart." "Now 50 years old, Gertrude settled into a quiet life with her friends the deNavarros and their young son, Michael." "They became the stable family she'd never had." "But in the end she moved in with us, and that was a very happy arrangement." "It was like having an extra and honorary aunt living as part of the family." "Gertrude's greatest legacy was to reveal that high civilization arose in sub Saharan Africa." "White settlers could no longer claim Great Zimbabwe as their own." "When the black majority in Rhodesia gained control in 1979, they renamed their country 'Zimbabwe' to identify themselves with Africa's glorious past." "The ruins which once illustrated the folly of prejudice and bias not stand for an independent, dynamic Africa." "As Gertrude Caton Thompson said," ""Great Zimbabwe lies in the still pulsating heart of Africa."" "In westernmost China lie 100,000 square miles of desert and misery." "Once cities thrived here, oases enriched by China's fabled Silk Road, until war and the desert did them in." "It's a wasteland so cruel its name itself is a warning" "'Taklimakan' means those who go in don't come out." "Two courageous men entered the Taklimakan one in search of truth, the other, treasure." "Both battled for their lives against the haunted desert and in the grip of death found treasures that would change the world." "Budapest, Hungary, 1872." "A studious 10 year old explores a map of Central Asia." "Fascinated by the exotic East, young Aurel Stein follows the path of his hero," "Alexander the Great." "The first world's conqueror marched his armies from the Mediterranean all the way to India." "The land where Alexander's conquest ended captivated the boy." "Much of the region where east meets west was so wild and remote it had never been mapped." "Here treasures from a secret past surely lay hidden in sands." "The shy young scholar's obsession surprised no one." "So lost in ideas was the boy that his own family considered him boring." "What no one could guess how firmly this region and habit of solitude would shape Aurel Stein's life." "And how alone, for years at a time, he would take on some of the most daring archeological explorations of the 20th century." "His favorite place was this place called Mohan Marg, which was a field up in Kashmir in the mountains that was only free from snow in the summer." "And he would go up there with some texts and sit and write all day long." "I think at one point he wrote 200 pages in 20 days, so he didn't see to need to be with people, but he needed letters." "25 August 1891." "The tribal people who pasture their flocks in the high valleys gave me a real serenade." "Some of the songs were very melodic and reminded me of Hungarian songs." "You have to be solitary because the thing is about exploration is you've got to be at peace with yourself." "You've got to be content with your own company in order to do something like that." "You couldn't sit doing what Aurel Stein did sitting in the middle of a vast windswept desert for months on end, with nobody to speak to in the English language except for your dog, but you're not going to get an answer from a dog." "Stein's boyhood obsession with Central Asia flowered at universities in Austria and England." "He studied ancient languages to understand the ruins he'd one day explore and translate documents pulled from the ground." "A Ph. D. In oriental languages was Stein's ticket to Asia." "He landed a position with the British government in Pakistan, which was then part of British India." "His home base for the rest of his life would be Lahore in India's Punjab, the farthest point reached by Alexander the Great in his bid to conquer the world." "At the Lahore Museum," "Stein discovered the artistic legacy of Alexander's conquests." "Images of the Buddha with a decidedly Grecian look." "How far east, he wondered, did his legacy reach?" "It was a question Stein would pursue all the way to China's Taklimakan desert." "Aurel Stein was interested in the connection between civilizations." "He was fascinated by the remnants of Greek influence in Pakistan, and that he felt there was a connection between that and the art in the Taklimakan desert." "Before Stein came here, he was well prepared." "He had very special training in ancient languages, such as Sanskrit." "At the time, Sanskrit is an incredibly hot field." "I mean, people are so excited by the idea that" "Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, they're all in the European languages." "So, today, I think, when people study Sanskrit it seems so archaic, but for Stein it was computer science it was the computer science of the 19th century." "Armed with Sanskrit, Stein got practical field experience around colonial India with the British Army." "Stein accompanied army maneuvers as regimental map maker." "He had done a year of military service in Hungary and he learned how to survey, and that proved to be crucial to everything he did because when he went out into Inner Asia, he made maps." "In some cases his maps are still the most accurate maps we have of the region." "In India, Stein put his scholarship to work." "He began closely examining a book" "By a long dead Chinese monk called Xuanzang." "Around 630 A. D., on a quest for Buddhist scripture, the holy man had trekked some 10,000 miles from China to India and back." "His account of his travels called "Records of the Western Regions,"" "gave Stein an authoritative guide to temples in colonial India, temples that had been living centers of worship in Xuanzang's time." "When Aurel Stein was in Kashmir he tested out Xuanzang to see whether his topographical information was correct, and it was." "So for all three of his expeditions he had Xuanzang with him." "The monk proved to be an infallible guide in India." "But Xuanzang had also written about a thriving civilization in hina's Taklimakan desert." "About this wasteland the modern world knew almost nothing." "Had Xuanzang given Stein a treasure map to a lost civilization?" "And he realizes that he can go into Chinese Turkestan and discover things, and discover a past, and that's what becomes his real intellectual passion." "And Stein makes a case to the British government in India that they should fund him to go out there and explore." "And I think Stein is saying let me go to this whole region and I will come back and tell you what the history of it is." "In 1900, financed by England," "Stein headed east to seek the lost world of his dreams." "His goal to track down the cities and civilizations written about by Xuanzang." "With a crew of translators and servants," "Stein crossed the Pamir Mountains and dropped down to Kashgar." "From there he followed the southern arm of the Silk Road, the ancient trade rout followed by Xuanzang on his return from India around 640 A. D." "The thousand mile journey was a brutal ordeal from man and beast alike, and it had barely begun." "The morning of the 7 th December." "Starting the campaign in the desert." "My goal:" "Dandan uilk." "Most of the time Stein worked during the months of December to January, and that was always the driest and coldest season." "He had to carry a huge amount of ice with him as a source of water so he could leave it behind at certain stations to ensure there was enough on the return trip." "Also the cold and dryness are very much a threat." "One could easily get lost and die." "It was the most difficult terrain that anybody could go to at the time." "I think the best modern equivalent is going to the moon." "Now Stein's navigation skills kept his men alive," "for he had entered the Taklimakan, one of the most dangerous deserts on earth." "About this desert, the monk Xuanzang had warned:" "It is all the work of demons and evil spirits." "When the winds rise, both man and beast become confused and forgetful." "Sad and plaintive noise are heard, and piteous cries." "Combined with the site of this place where nothing lives, man often lose their lives." "Characteristically, Stein ignored these warnings and even the haunted desert's Dante esque name." "The Chinese call it 'the Desert of Death'." "The name Taklimakan translates as 'you go in but you do not come out. '" "The temperature of the desert is formidable." "In the summer the temperature can reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit." "It is also a winter desert, when Aurel Stein was excavating sites like Niya, he did record snow in the desert in December." "The worst part about the desert is that the sand dunes are so high;" "in places they are 1,000 feet high." "So it is very difficult to walk through them because they are soft sand." "When you're walking through such a sea of sand it is very difficult to think that you might come out at the other end." "But it is also very inspiring to walk somewhere where you know it is virgin sand and nobody else has walked it before." "Yet Stein was convinced that people had walked there, some 1,000 years before." "Xuanzang had written about oasis cities that had been thriving centers of trade and religion now buried somewhere in the desert." "If Stein could find them he'd be the first to write the history of a vast unmapped region of Asia." "But at what cost?" "100 miles into the Taklimakan the temperature plunged to 10 degrees below zero." "Hobbled by the loose sand, men and animals grew exhausted." "Was the monk Xuanzang guiding them to a lost city or a dusty grave?" "Finally, on the 11th day hope." "Traces of a ruin natives called 'the Place of lvory Houses. '" "It was the first in a series of sites where Stein would find evidence that stunned even him." "Stein excavates." "And he finds pictures of Westerners in the middle of the desert." "They saw pictures of angels in this region that is now a part of China." "He also finds some Chinese written on wooden slips." "And you could date the slips to the end of the 8th century." "And that it was going to be possible for him to write a history of the different Silk Road oases by careful excavation and by taking all the documents that he found and sending them to scholars who could decipher them for him." "For Stein the remarkable discoveries were deeply personal." "First, the civilization that he found showed signs of ancient Greece." "Alexander the Great's influence had penetrated China." "Second, he'd uncovered scrolls from the monastery library dating from the 5th and 6th centuries." "On his return trip from India," "Xuanzang would probably have visited the monastery now buried by the desert." "Perhaps he'd even poured over these scrolls." "Stein must have felt how his own monastic life mirrored that of the solitary holy man." "One year after he'd set out, Stein turned for home." "With him, cases of artifacts evidence of a lost civilization." "They would set the world of archeology on fire and make his name." "But they would also give him a reputation as an archeological looter that would haunt him for the rest of his life." "Stein had the approval of the Chinese government." "But on his travel papers it didn't say he was an archeologist and would carry on excavations in this area." "A British diplomat had told Stein," ""Never tell the Chinese you're doing excavation here."" "In time, Stein's disregard for Chinese authority would catch up with him, but now he had more pressing concerns." "Because of his discoveries the whole world knew what lay beneath the Taklimakan." "The race is on." "Stein goes digs in the ground, and then a kind of race starts to discover the lost languages and documents of this very remote region of the world." "And it becomes, kind of, a mark of a civilized country to have an expedition in Central Asia." "In 1907, a German archeologist had just returned from what was said to be a very profitable trip." "A French orientalist was scheduled to enter the desert any day." "Spurred by competition," "Stein set out on a course chartered by Xuanzang." "Once more his company traced the southern arm of the Silk Road." "But this time the grueling trip gave Stein a sense of foreboding." "He wrote to a friend:" "What a desolate wilderness, bearing everywhere the imprint of death." "On two expeditions the desert had taken a grim toll." "His crew had quarreled and come to blows." "One of his most trusted assistants had tried to kill himself." "Now, without warning, /Stein's devoted surveyor went blind." "Finally, Stein's own health gave out." "Malaria racked his exhausted body." "And worse, the French team of explorers were somewhere in the desert." "As he packed his new finds into crates," "Stein was anxious about his next destination, a cave complex called Dunhaung where he hoped to find ancient Buddhist scrolls." "It is an anxious thought, as you can imagine, whether I shall find the French there already." "Crossing the Taklimakan to the north," "Stein had the eerie experience of stumbling across his own footsteps." "I could quite distinctly recognize my own footprints of seven years before." "I could even make out those of my little fox terrier, Dash, the ever faithful companion of that journey." "More shocking, was evidence of German and French expeditions." "Where Stein carefully protected his digs by filling in them in afterwards, his competitors left theirs open to the elements." "Artifacts whose value they dismissed were recklessly tossed aside and broken." "Near Dunhaung, Stein recruited a new team of workers to explore the westernmost section of China's Great Wall." "Of this crew Stein remarked:" "They're the craziest crew I've had led to digging." "So turbulent and feebled by opium are they." "Yet the discovery of Great Wall remnants revived his spirits." "If his second expedition had ended there, it would have been enough to secure any archeologist's reputation." "I feel, as I ride along the wall, as if I were going to inspect posts still held by the living;" "2000 years seems so brief a time." "At the Wall, just days away from his greatest discovery, Stein felt at peace." "Perhaps he through that the monk Xuanzang was literally guiding his journey." "Perhaps he knew his competitors could never match his stamina or his scholarship." "In any case, his devotion to the haunted desert had rewarded him beyond his greatest expectations." "And still ahead, at a place called Dunhaung, he would find one of the astonishing ancient texts ever discovered." "Aurel Stein heard that there were some very valuable documents in the Dunhaung caves, and he went there and he met somebody called Abbot Wong, who was sort of a curious moody monk, who had sealed up the caves so that nobody could get in." "So when Stein finally met him, he said, you know," "I've been following in the footsteps of Xuanzang on all my journeys." "He's my patron saint." "So the moody abbot sort of softened and said, "Oh?"" "The priest proved, in fact, quite as ardent an admirer of Xuanzang as I am." "He proudly showed the series of painting representing scenes from the great pilgrim's marvelous adventures." "The fantastic legends there depicted were just those which had transformed Xuanzang throughout China as a sort of saintly Munchausen." "He negotiates four silver horseshoes for thousands and thousands of documents and scrolls, and Wong goes for it." "And Stein knows that it is a really low price." "He knows." "He writes a letter saying I've gotten an incredibly good price, because one of the Sanskrit manuscripts in and of itself would be worth that price." "But most of all was the apprehension that the timorous, shifty priest would be moved in a sudden fit of alarm or distrust to close down his shell before I had been able to extract any of the pearls." "Stein was a devoted scholar and explorer." "It was unthinkable to him not to be interested in the things he found in Dunhaung, and it is just natural for him to try any means to get what he wanted." "He and Abbot Wong were not on the same level." "Stein was very educated and knowledgeable, while Abbot Wong was relatively ignorant about what Stein was doing." "They were just piles of waste paper to Wong." "Like a chip of broken glass to me, to you is a diamond." "The ancient scrolls Stein took from Dunhaung included ballads, stories and correspondence a portrait of a civilization in letters." "One of the fragments has since been thought to belong to a Buddhist text, which Xuanzang himself is known to have translated between 645 and 664 AD." "I felt quite sure that my patron saint must have passed within a few years of the debris covered here." "Stein was able to get many of the documents, take them back to the British Museum, and one of them is the Diamond Sutra, which is the world's oldest printed book." "It sits in the British Museum opposite the Gutenberg Bible." "So Stein really this was the triumph of his career." "For misleading the abbot, Stein felt no regret." "He reasoned the scrolls he salvaged would have remained lost forever had he not intervened." "You know, the easy answer to "Is Stein a thief?"" "the very PC answer is, sure, he took away antiquities from China, and they were never returned." "But if you judge him by the standards of his day, he wasn't a thief;" "he was an explorer." "He published everything he found." "If we judge Stein or the fate of the manuscripts by the person who discovered them, if you were found by the Chinese, it's very hard for us to see you." "You were a lucky manuscript to be discovered by Stein because people today can see you, they can actually see you on the Web." "For his astounding discoveries," "Stein would receive a knighthood from his adopted homeland, England." "But the comforts and adulations of Europe paled against the call of the East." "Again and again he would return to this bleak part of the world to try and slake his thirst from knowledge in the deserts of China." "At 81, Stein would die as he lived in the saddle while exploring Afghanistan." "But he would never again match the solitary years long struggle that put him on the trail of Xuanzang and the lost treasures of the Taklimakan." "The Dunhaung Scrolls made archeologist Aurel Stein's reputation." "His Chinese translator speculated that finding the rare Buddhist text was no accident." "They were a gift from the monk Xuanzang sent across a sea of time." "Xuanzang, like Stein, had risked his life not once, but many times for the sake of these scrolls." "One of history's most remarkable journeys began in a world in crisis." "China, 620 A. D." "As the great Tang Dynasty begins, the nation convulses in violence." "Bandits beseech cities within, while neighboring kingdoms assail its waters." "China's golden age is born in blood." "In a remote trade depot, a figure in peasant's robes, takes advantage of the chaos to flee China." "He's a monk on a suicidal mission to aid Buddhism in China." "In the crisis, the Tang emperor has forbidden foreign travel, but the monk has ignored the ban." "He hopes his disguise will fool the emperor's henchman." "But there's no disguising this monk's size." "Xuanzang was supposed to be 7 feet tall." "There may be some difference in the way Chinese calculate things, but he was very tall and he had black bright eyes." "You know, the descriptions of him make him sound like some idyllic creature." "From boyhood, Xuanzang had always been larger than life." "By age 13 he had mastered the Buddhist texts." "By 20, he had humbled the faith's most renounced scholars in debate." "Xuanzang's virtuosity delighted the priests." "'The shining of the sun of wisdom, ' they had told the young monk, 'will surely depend on you. '" "In fact, Xuanzang would light the way for generations of Buddhists and explorers of Central Asia." "There is no question about the historical judgments of Xuanzang's contribution." "By any standards he is a hero." "He is a hero in many ways." "He is a very inspiring figure not just for people in his age, but also for people born in the world." "At age 26, Xuanzang wasn't yet a hero, but a wanted man on a holy mission." "His study of Buddhist texts had revealed grave contradictions." "His solution to travel to India and obtain the original teachings." "He is frustrated that he had multiple versions of the same text that conflict, and that nobody in China could reconcile the differences." "His thirst for knowledge is so great, he decides the only way out of that dilemma is to go to India and find the original teachings." "The devout Buddhist had another reason for the trek." "He wanted to make the pilgrimage to India, the birthplace of his beloved Buddha." "600 years before Christ, an Indian prince renounced the world to search for a solution of death and human suffering." "After six years of spiritual discipline, he achieved supreme enlightenment while meditating at a place called Bodh Gaya." "For the rest of his life, the gifted teacher was known as Buddha, which means 'the enlightened one. '" "There are four places that every believing Buddhist should go to:" "where the Buddha was born, where he died, where he preached his first sermon, and where he achieved enlightenment." "So Xuanzang was a pilgrim." "He wanted to go to the Buddhist holy land, just as a Christian might want to go to Bethlehem." "Yet the trip came with unholy risks." "When the Chinese Emperor Taizong got wind of Xuanzang's plan, he ordered the monk's arrest." "Under this threat, the monks accompanying Xuanzang lost their taste for the journey." "Perhaps it was just as well." "According to caravan traders, the road to India was choked with murderous bandits and wild beasts." "And the worst threat lay just ahead the Taklimakan desert." "Somebody called it "the abomination of desolation."" "It is a place where you go in and you don't come out." "Even Aurel Stein talks about other deserts in Arabia as being tame deserts." "By day its temperatures can reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and by night plummet to 20 below." "According to legend, thriving cities, whose souls numbered in the thousands, had vanished in its black hurricanes, never to be seen again." "Caravan traders warned the unworldly Xuanzang about the dangers, but the pilgrim replied:" "I intend to visit the holy places and seek the law." "I will not regret if I should die on my way." "But years of monastic study hadn't prepared Xuanzang for the desert's special tortures." "Of this desolate badlands he wrote:" "There are no birds in the sky, no beasts on the ground, no water or vegetation anywhere." "So he's alone." "And he started across the desert, a couple of hundred miles it was, and his water bag fell down into the group." "The water spills." "And he travels for four and a half days with no water, and he is hopelessly lost." "Now Xuanzang considered turning back, but he no longer knew which direction that was." "According to his biographer, the monk was assailed by the desert's restless spirits." "By day, the wind whipped up terrible sandstorms." "By night, demons and goblins bearing torches are as many in number as the stars." "The monk prayed to Buddhist guardian spirits to protect his soul." "It was kind of what some Christian mystics call a dark night of the soul." "He ran out into the unknown, he experiences terrible things." "He has this dark night of the soul." "This is a typical's hero's journey in the Taklimakan desert." "In the dream a spirit called out," ""Why are you resting when you should be marching forward to India?"" "It was the horse that seemed to take offense." "He set off in his own direction, Xuanzang following behind." "After four miles, the horse broke into a trot as a green oasis came into view." "And this old and sickly horse, which has been recommended to him because it has done the trip 30 times, takes him to an oasis, and he falls into this pool of water and drinks and drinks." "He was able to survive." "He was able the find water and other food to eat." "This must have meant a lot to him." "I think in his mind this must be a kind of blessing from" "Buddha himself." "The stories about people finding water in the desert are recurrent, right?" "It happens to Xuanzang;" "it happens to Sven Hedin, it happens to Aurel Stein." "Anybody who goes into the desert runs out of water, and then the ones who live tells us the same story." "The ones who die, don't tell us anything." "Safely across the Taklimakan, Xuanzang entered the kingdom of Turfan." "Again, he was proceeded by his reputation but as a holy man, not an outlaw." "The king and queen of Turfan were overjoyed to have such a renowned scholar for company." ""From the first day I heard your name," said the king," ""I've been in a state of ecstacy." "I couldn't keep my hands and feet still from excitement." "But when Xuanzang told him of his mission, the king became stormy." "He demanded the monk cease his journey and remain in Turfan." "He wanted Xuanzang to be his resident guru." "He wanted him to stay there and not go to the West." "He got very angry at Xuanzang and shouted at him and said," "You've got to stay here." "I'm not going to let you go."" "Xuanzang objected." "I came here on my way to obtaining the Great Law." "You can imprison my flesh and bones, but you cannot rule my spirit." "So he decided to starve himself." "He fasted for four or five days." "He didn't take water or anything." "Each day the king brought him rich food, but Xuanzang wouldn't touch a morsel." "Again he almost died, and the king of Turfan was shamed and he gave in." "And then the king of Turfan gave him gold and silver and 24 letters of introduction to all the kings and khans all the way up to India." "So he had protection." "He was going to be taken care of for the rest of his journey." "The king provides servants and horses and clothes." "The most crucial thing the king gives him is contact with the Turks who control the region west of China with whom the king has allied." "So suddenly Xuanzang has gone from this solitary march through the desert to having a retinue with him and diplomatic credentials." "With India almost in sight," "Xuanzang approached the fulfillment of his mission and the greatest trials of his life." "By now, Xuanzang had trekked more than fifteen hundred miles." "He had become a skillful traveler, falling in step with the merchants and pilgrims whose precious goods enriched the trade depots of western China." "He grew into the roles of accidental diplomat and impromptu preacher." "And throughout, the always hearty giant endured the unexpected." "After he leaves Turfan, he doesn't have to worry about money, right?" "He's bankrolled and he has diplomatic credentials." "But then he has the problems that beset rich travelers, like robbers." "There are a bunch of robbers that are interested in clothes." "That is interesting." "He's robbed twice of his own clothes." "He was not just once robbed on his journey he was robbed many times." "Because of his inner strength sometimes even under great danger he was able to escape from those dangers." "Finally a year after plunging into the desert the pilgrim set foot on Indian soil." "He'd proved wrong all predictions of his imminent death and reached the country of his beloved Buddha." "Guided by priests, he visited sacred 'stupas' or shrines, examining the stories painted on the walls and committing them to memory." "Assisted by as many as 20 scribes, Xuanzang got down to business translating and copying Buddhist scripture." "The most significant contribution he made is to translate a large amount of Indian Buddhist scripture." "Scholars are amazed at how accurate his translations are." "His reputation seems, by this time, to have proceeded him, so that when he got to a new place monks seemed to know all about him." "It was customary for the kings, when he got to the border, they would come and meet him." "They would give him a big elephant to ride on." "Seven years passed like a dream." "Xuanzang's celebrated knowledge carried him and his scribes from one monastery to the next." "At each awaited new Buddhist texts and spirited debate." "It was customary in many of those countries in northern India to have a debate." "There are several kinds of Buddhism, and so an exponent of one kind would debate against another kind." "And he studied the other guys' beliefs so that he knew their arguments and his arguments." "And that may be one of the reasons that he was so good." "Xuanzang never loses a debate with anybody, even if he's debating in Sanskrit on arcane points of Buddhist document in India." "It's just not credible." "Every time that he meets somebody, he bests that person in the debate." "At last it came time for Xuanzang to fulfill his personal pilgrimage." "He and his followers traveled by boat down the sacred Ganges River their destination, Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha's spiritual transformation." "But on the river, according to his biographer, another calamity awaited." "A whole mess of pirates came in and took his party, and shoved them ashore." "They wanted a sacrifice for their god, Durga." "They said, oh, there's that handsome fellow, he'll be just fine." "They decided he's the perfect sacrifice." "They tell him this, and he has a very Buddhist response which is he doesn't wanted to be killed, but if he's going to be killed, that's fine he wants to be allowed to meditate." "If this cold body is suitable for sacrifice, then I dare not crush the offer." "But if you kills this body of mine, I fear it will bring you misfortune." "At that moment a tremendous gale came that scared the hell out of the pirates." "And so they said, who is this man?" "He was really not afraid of death." "He was prepared for death." "He is not just a courageous person;" "he was also a very calm person, an intelligent person." "Whenever he faced difficulty, he always showed this kind of calmness." "So, of course, according to the biographer they threw away their weapons, and they became good Buddhist, so to speak." "This is another story that follows a very fixed pattern, which is that a representative of the Buddha encounters the representatives of a given local deity, and the Buddha bests the local deity the Buddha proves that he's more powerful than the local deity." "So, did it happen?" "We don't know!" "These are just stories, I think, but they're good ones." "Finally, Xuanzang arrived at Bodh Gaya." "Here the Buddha had achieved enlightenment." "But for the wandering pilgrim, something very different was in store." "Xuanzang's trials and years of devotion did not yield even a taste of the sublime unity experienced by the Buddha." "Instead, under the sacred tree where the Buddha was transformed," "Xuanzang could only weep at the frailty of his own mortal spirit." "When Xuanzang finally got there, he knelt down and he asked himself:" ""In what cycle of life was I when the Buddha lived?"" "And then he wept." "And there were lots of other Buddhist monks around, and they were all very moved by this." "At a time when the Buddha perfected himself," "I know not in what condition I was in, but in the troublesome world of birth and death." "It's very rare for an enlightened Buddhist monk to do so, and he was crying almost, prostrating." "This kind of gesture was witnessed by any visitors at the time." "Where Xuanzang saw unworthiness, the witnesses saw breakthrough." "The most virtuous among them bent with humility." "This is somebody whose whole travel description is completely dry and factual." "He has, for him, a very emotional experience bursting into tears and saying that he can never be as good as the Buddha." "In a remarkable adventure, this was Xuanzang's moment of truth." "He was perfectly humble for a Buddhist, a perfect state." "At last he arose more determined than ever to pursue his destiny on the wheel of life, come what may." "On his return trip through western China," "Xuanzang anxiously awaited word from Emperor Taizong." "How would he receive the monk who flagrantly disobeyed him half a lifetime ago?" "At Dunhaung's 'Caves of a Thousand Buddhas' Xuanzang paused, probably to let monks copy the scriptures he brought back from India." "While he waited, the holy man studied three centuries of painting and sculpture in the cave's many rooms." "Little did he know that a record of his own epic journey would someday join these sacred images." "Eventually word would come to the pilgrim waiting on the lip of the Taklimakan Xuanzang was forgiven." "The Emperor Taizong said he wanted to talk to him." "And then, of course, he said to Xuanzang," ""Why did you go on this trip?"" "Emperor Taizong at the very beginning probably had a kind of utilitarian purpose in his mind as he realized that someone who has spent so much time and energy traveling through Central Asia to India had a great knowledge about these regions and the region" "that he always had a great political interest in." "Afterwards, they gradually developed this kind of very close personal friendship." "The emperor invited the prodigal monk to be his foreign minister." "But Taizong would settle instead for a book in which Xuanzang described each step of his remarkable journey." "There are plenty of bookworms in the world, and there are lots of great trekkers, and there are some good diplomats, and there are some devout Buddhists, but he was all of them." "And I think he was a real man for all seasons." "The monk's last bit of uncommon good fortune was the emperor's friendship." "It permitted Xuanzang to spend the rest of his life as he wished, translating the treasures he wagered his life to find." "India a land of seductive riches, land of the Kohinoor diamond" "a priceless gem which legend says was given by the god Krishna to test mankind's greed." "Possessed of such wealth and beauty, thought Krishna, would men behave like beasts?" "or would they think and achieve wisdom?" "This is the story of India and its conquerors." "One stormed south across the mountains, one came from across the seas, both were hungry for wealth and dominion." "Each would become his own answer to Krishna's question wise man or beast?" "For three hundred years the Mughal empire dominated India." "It was a Mughal emperor who created the radiant mountain of white marble called the Taj Mahal, one of the wonders of the world." "The wealth and sophistication of the Mughal court were legendary." "Here, Mughal kings ruled from the famous peacock throne made of gold, rubies and sapphires." "All these treasures of the Mughal empire were the legacy of one remarkable man, a poet, a killer, a wild nomad who was not from India at all." "His name was Babur." "Babur's life began in 1483 in Fergana, a small kingdom in the highlands of central Asia." "Fergana was one square of a bloodstained checkerboard of competing dynasties, each struggling to expand its little empire." "But a little empire wasn't what Babur had in mind." "Babur's dynasty was part Turk and part Mongol" ""Mughals" as the Persians called them." "Babur was a direct descendant of the two greatest conquerors of Central Asian history," "Genghis Khan and Timur or Tamerlane." "He wanted something that would be worthy of their memory." "From the very beginning," "Babur tried to take inspiration from Genghis and Timur." "These were his two heroes." "And it was probably this reason which had, at times, goaded him to think of India as his final destination." "Born to nobility, at 11 Babur inherited Fergana." "Almost immediately other warlords tried to take it away from him." "Not surprisingly for one so young, the fortunes of war started to turn against him." "Before long, he had lost much of his kingdom and his men deserted in droves to hitch their fortunes to more promising leaders." "All seven or eight hundred of my lords and warriors deserted me." "It was a terrible blow." "I remember, I couldn't help crying." "He was only fifteen." "It was a harsh education which made young Babur's heart ache." "But his early failures toughened him." "If you desire to rule and conquer, you don't just fold your hands when things go wrong you act." "Action meant war." "And with whichever followers he could muster, he started to wage guerrilla warfare against his more powerful neighbors." "He and his men seesawed between victory and defeat." "Allies deserted him;" "enemies became allies." "One day in 1501, he laughed when he realized a sword he had given to an ally as a token of loyalty one year, was the same one that almost split his skull in battle the next." "My own soul is my most faithful friend." "My own heart, my truest confidant." "Always, Babur's ambition was to found a great dynasty like his ancestors." "He needed children who would be his heirs." "He admitted he was so shy as a young man, his mother and sisters had to bully him into sleeping with his first wife." "But before long he had more wives, and a son, Humayun, on whom the weight of Babur's dreams would fall." "With his succession assured, the question that now dogged him was:" "what would he leave his sons?" "He had lost his kingdom and was being shut out of Central Asia." "So where was the land in which his dynasty could flourish?" "Slowly, Babur's reputation as a warlord was growing and with it the perception that he might be a future ruler after all." "Lured by the promise of conquest and booty, warriors of other dynasties began to join him." "In 1504, Babur's fortunes took a decisive turn for the better." "He caught wind of tumult in the Afghan kingdom of Kabul to the south." "Here, he thought, was a chance." "At the age of 2 1, Babur rode out of the mountains with his small band of men and raced toward Kabul." "Warriors joined him as he approached and they swept into the city." "The battle for Kabul was short and Babur triumphed." "As he settled into his new home," "Babur immediately fell in love with Afghanistan, its cool climate, and the beautiful rivers of its fresh upland plateaus." "Kabul signified a new beginning, an end to the years of wandering but not, of course, an end to his dreams of empire." "Not far to the south lay the vast, teeming land of Hindustan, India." "He had heard many stories of its wealth." "He realized it was now within his grasp." "From the time I took Kabul, I set my heart on Hindustan." "In 1504, the Indian sub continent" "Was a disunited mass of independent kingdoms and ultanates" "Hindu in the south, largely Moslem in the north." "One of the largest and most powerful of these was Hindustan, controlled by the sultanate of Delhi." "Babur knew he stood no chance of directly confronting the armies of Hindustan." "But having taken Kabul, he lost no time in making an exploratory raid into the plains of northern India just to see." "With a small army he moved south in 1505." "He was amazed by what he found." "I had never experienced such heat or anything like Hindustan before different plants, different trees, different animals and birds, different tribes and people, different manners and customs." "It was astonishing, truly astonishing." "India exceeded his wildest expectations." "He discovered beautifully crafted textiles, refined sugar, perfumes and spices." "Here indeed was a rich land." "As he headed back to Kabul, his resolve to return was redoubled." "But he would have to bide his time." "For 20 years Babur made Kabul his home." "20 years in which he finally had time to taste the pleasures of life." "Until now he had been a clean living and sober young Moslem." "In Kabul all that started to change." "At that time I had not committed the sin of drinking to drunkenness and did not know the delight and leasure of being drunk as it should be known." "Here all the implements of pleasure and revelry were ready and present." "If I didn't drink now, when would I?" "He discovered a taste for fine wines, and the sweetmeats laced with hashish called Ma'jun." "In Kabul he drank often." "His memoirs filled with parties, drunkenness and head splitting hangovers." "We drank on the boat until late that night." "We got on our horses, reeling from side to side, then let them gallop free reined." "The next morning they told me I had galloped into camp holding a torch." "I swear I didn't remember a thing, except that when I got back to my tent I was extremely sick." "In Kabul, Babur learned how to let go, but he never forgot that if he was ever to take Hindustan his troops had to stay disciplined." "He had no qualms about extreme punishments." "I had one of the soldiers clubbed at the gate for stealing a pot of oil." "He died." "The others were successfully cowed by this punishment." "As he explored Afghanistan, this ruthless nomad who was perfectly capable of putting entire cities to the sword, became a keen student of flowers." "All sorts grow in these foothills;" "I once counted them and found 32 or 33 different kinds." "We named one the rose scented tulip because it smelt rather like a rose;" "it grows all by itself on the Sheikh's plain." "Joy was to sit peacefully in one of his beautiful highland gardens and write poetry." "He built no fewer than ten gardens in Kabul." "Before long, Babur's seven wives had produced him eighteen children." "He was devoted to all of them but it was his first born son," "Humayun, who he was determined would inherit a great kingdom." "Babur bided his time, watching and waiting for his opportunity in India." "Finally, in 1526, it arrived." "The Sultanate of Delhi was overtaken by internal strife." "Babur realized his moment had come." "It would be now or never." "Babur marched into Northern India with 12,000 men." "The sultan of Delhi marched to meet him with 100,000 men and 1,000 armored elephants." "They met on the plain of Panipat north of Delhi." "Babur's trump card was the discipline of his troops and his Turkish artillery." "The Indian elephants charged but were met with explosions of canons and mortar." "They panicked, spun, and stampeded." "The whole army fell into disarray." "Just a few hours after it began, the battle became a rout." "The Indians, including their leader, were massacred as they ran." "Babur had just pulled off an astonishing military feat." "Finally, Hindustan was his." "With Hindustan in his grasp, one of the first things Babur did was to send Hindustani dancing girls to entertain his wives in their harem in Kabul." "It was a gracious gesture." "His wives, covered and restrained, their faces painted stiffly white in the central Asian style, must have been astonished." "Out of meetings like this, of the stark world of central Asian Islam with the lush anarchy of India, would arise the glories of the Mughal style." "As Babur took stock of his new possession, even he well versed in plunder was stunned." "The astonishing treasuries of Hindustan contained the Kohinoor diamond." "Its name, he learned meant "mountain of light."" "He was told it was worth enough to feed the entire world for two and half days." "Offered it as a gift," "Babur refused and left it with his son Humayun." "Suddenly he was less interested in the riches than in how to govern this strange new land." "But as he surveyed Hindustan, his enthusiasm for it started to melt away." "There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility or manliness." "The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry." "There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets." "The peasantry and common people parade around stark naked." "Hindustan is a place of little charm." "But Babur was determined he would build Hindustan into something worthy of his dynasty." "He would introduce Mughal order and symmetry into what seemed to him a chaotic and senseless land." "He made the princes of Hindustan, the Rajputs, submit to him and laid foundations for the future empire." "And it dawned on Babur that it was no longer enough to be a successful conqueror." "To fulfill his dreams for his heirs, he had to become a wise ruler as well." "A sacrifice to god was necessary." "In an extravagant public ceremony, Babur swore off drink." "He had his drinking vessels crushed and distributed the gold and silver to the poor." "At the age of 43, Babur had achieved his dream of empire." "He settled into Hindustan and continued work on his autobiography the first ever written in the Moslem world." "I have simply set down what happened." "I have reported every good and evil of father and brother, every fault and virtue of relative and stranger." "May the reader excuse me." "And everywhere Babur built the square, symmetrical gardens called 'charbagh' which were the perfect expression of Mughal beauty." "The radiance of nature bound by the rigid geometrical order of Islam." "And it was in his gardens that he reflected on his turbulent life and his successes in battles, both with enemies and himself." "The temptations of alcohol had been almost overwhelming." "Two years ago my craving for a wine party was such to bring me to the verge of tears." "This year, praise God, that desire has completely left my mind." "The one thing that never left his mind was his homeland, Fergana." "One day as he ate a melon he found himself crying as its flavor brought back memories of the fresh uplands of his childhood." "He confessed to his youngest daughter that he wanted to retire and turn the reins of power over to Humayun." "But In 1530, four years after the conquest of Hindustan," "Humayun fell sick." "His doctors gave him up for dead." "It was a catastrophe the death not only of a beloved son but the heir to Babur's dynasty and empire." "Babur had learned the wisdom of sacrifice." "But what on earth could he offer God to persuade him to spare his son?" "Priests and advisors came with suggestions:" "He could sacrifice the Kohinoor." "But Babur knew it was a worthless bauble compared to the life of his son." "He decided only one sacrifice could possibly compare." "For days, he prayed fervently to Allah to take his own life in exchange for Humayun's." "Soon after, Humayun recovered and sure enough, Babur fell sick." "He stayed true to his oath and refused all offers of treatment." "He'd made a deal with Allah a life for a life." "Who was he to renege?" "He turned his face to the wall." "Three months later he died, aged 47." "Babur had ruled India for only four years, but the dynasty he founded would rule it for almost 300." "Akbar, Babur's grandson, would for the first time unite the subcontinent." "Shah Jahan, Babur's great great grandson, would build the Taj Mahal." "The Mughals laid the foundations of the India we know today." "They were able to create a large empire within India;" "they were able to establish the great institutions of empire through their army, their especially important domestic and other alliance policies with the Rajputs." "It was a very creative fusion." "Over the generations, Mughal India would become synonymous with opulence, refinement, and wealth." "Before long it attracted the hungry gaze of yet other treasure seekers." "This time they would come from further west." "Just over three hundred years after Babur died," "India was swallowed by the British empire." "By the end of the 19th century, Britain dominated most of the world but India was its most valued possession." "Queen Victoria called it the jewel in her crown." "The man who gave all this to Britain was an unlikely conqueror a tormented soul who came from nowhere, driven only by an unwavering ambition." "His name was Robert Clive." "1772, The Houses of Parliament in London." "Robert Clive is fighting for his survival." "He has laid the foundations of the British empire in India and in the process made himself a vast fortune." "Now he stands accused of criminal greed and exploitation." "In the House of Commons he rises to his defense." "Gentlemen, a great prince was dependent on my pleasure, an opulent city lay at my mercy;" "its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles;" "I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels!" "Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!" "Robert Clive will not be bowed." "His life is ending as it began in a furious and lonely struggle." "Born in 1725 in Shropshire in the West of England, he was given up by his mother as a child and raised by relatives." "It happened at the insistence of his father an ineffectual lawyer from the minor country gentry, who barely earned enough to keep the family afloat." "Rejected by his family and naturally unruly, young Robert was soon running wild in the little town of Market Drayton." "He pioneered the business methods, which would make him his later fortune as the head of a juvenile gang." "It was a protection racket if merchants agreed to pay a small fee, the boys would agree NOT to break their windows." "Robert was adventurous, brave and bad." "He was an average student and much more interested in mischief than in school." "He climbed the church tower of Market Drayton and hung over the side for the sheer thrill of it." "Robert grew up craving excitement, but wanted acceptance by his family even more." "When he was 17, a job as a clerk in the East India Company promised adventure, money and a chance to redeem his family." "Clive set his sights on India." "On the first of June 1744, a cutter deposited Robert in a rowboat just off the coast of Madras." "Splashing ashore, he got his first sight of India." "The Madras, Robert discovered, was an exotic melting pot of Indian, Southeast Asian and European influences." "Here British, French and Dutch traders had established themselves to take advantage of the astonishingly lucrative trade in cloth, spices and opium." "In those days the young men who became clerks in the East India Company were a little bit like the Eurobond dealers of our day." "If you wanted to make a pile° ° °" "I mean there was a great risk attached to this because you could go out to India and promptly die of some dreadful disease." "But there was a chance also, 50/50 really, that you might make a whole sort of pile of money." "These early European colonialists merged with the Indian population much more completely than later ones would." "Many traders went native, and began to behave like local potentates." "So they lived as Indians, wore Indian clothes quite often, certainly adopted Indian manners and customs." "Many of them had harems." "As far as the Indian princes are concerned, they looked upon the company as another Indian presence, not as a foreigner necessarily invading." "This was global capitalism in its infancy." "Clive and his friends were pioneers of the system that would soon dominate the entire world." "But in 1745 Robert was discovering that the life of a clerk in India was not easy." "His salary was five pounds a year." "He soon felt desperately lonely and more cut adrift from home than ever." "His unhappiness came to a head when several ships appeared in the harbor." "Every European in Madras received a letter or package from home except Clive." "He was devastated." "Clive had a mercurial temperament." "This apparent humiliation at the hands of his family plunged him into the depths of depression." "Feeling utterly alone and cast off, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger." "Twice it failed to go off." ""Fate it seems must be reserving me for some other purpose,"" "he would later tell a friend." "In fact, fate had extraordinary things in store for Clive wild swings of fortune, dizzying heights but also the darkest depths." "Throughout his life periods of intense, feverish activity would alternate with bouts of deep despair." "He would probably be diagnosed today as a manic depressive." "Clive soon discovered that opium was the only cure and he would use it as a medicine for the rest of his life." "Clive got used to loneliness." "The British lived in Fort St. George." "You had the fort and then you had Blacktown outside." "They called it Blacktown, and that's where all the Indians lived." "The British seldom ventured into Blacktown except when they wanted to go and pick up hookers, basically." "And Clive, certainly it was known he had this sort of fondness for prostitutes." "Perhaps the one consolation for Clive and his fellow colonialists was that, being so far from home, they could do almost whatever they liked." "As a proverb of the time said:" ""there are no sins south of the equator."" "As Europeans woke up to the phenomenal profits to be made in India, the competition for trade intensified." "Finally in 1746, open war broke out between the British and French in India each side supported by their local allies and clients." "It was just the push Clive needed." "He was galvanized by new energy and enthusiasm." "For the next five years of Anglo French conflict in India," "Clive fought in the militia of the East India Company where his raw aggression and boundless energy won him promotions and success at the same furious pace." "In return for his victories against the French, culminating in the battle of Arcot, he was rewarded with an appointment as quartermaster of the company factory at Madras." "He would find a way to make a profit out of the soldiers' provisions." "Now, it doesn't sound very grand, but the great thing about quartermaster is" "You were given a great wad of money and told to go feed your troops." "And if you could feed your troops on half the amount of money you'd been given, then you were allowed to keep the rest." "By the time Clive was 27, he had made himself a small fortune 40,000 pounds" "Clive was also being credited with turning the tide against the French." "News of his success astonished the family back in England." "His father is said to have remarked:" ""Perhaps Robert is not such a booby after all"." "Finally Clive was getting the recognition he craved." "Now he hungered for it on a wider stage." "One event would set the seal not only on Clive's fortunes in India but that of the British as well." "In 1756, the Mughal Nawab, or 'prince of Bengal' Siraj, seized the British East India Company's fort in Calcutta." "The British in India were furious." "Their outrage soared when stories circulated about the Mughals' treatment of European prisoners." "When he seized the fort," "Siraj had ordered the imprisonment of all company employees." "The Indians locked their British captives in a cell designed by the British for Indian captives." "It was tiny 18 by 14 feet with only a couple of minuscule, barred windows." "The night of June 20th, 1756 was suffocatingly hot." "When the door opened the next morning, at least 40 British were dead." ""The Black Hole of Calcutta" they called it, and the incident sparked uproar." "It was just what Clive had been waiting for." "Here was a chance to really take control of India and make a name for himself." "He received command of a small British army." "Clive and his troops hit Bengal like a monsoon." "In 1757, he swept into Calcutta and forced the Nawab's troops to withdraw." "With promises of lucrative deals," "Clive then strong armed an Indian prince into joining him in a military alliance against Siraj." "With typical guile," "Clive secured the allegiance of his Indian allies with fraudulent treaties." "Finally, he marched into Bengal with 800 European troops and over 2,000 Indian sepoys." "It was an impressive force but nothing compared to what Siraj mustered against him." "50,000 well armed men backed up by the French and 50 pieces of state of the art heavy artillery." "The two armies met near a town called Plassey." "The Nawab's superiority may have seemed overwhelming but Clive knew that discipline, not numbers, was the key." "The Europeans had already gone through something like a bureaucratic military revolution in the organization of their armies." "Everyone is trained to act in unison and it is not heroic battle action which matters but the discipline of formation and quick succession to anybody who falls in the field of battle, exactly as one faceless bureaucrat is replaced by another." "Clive was outnumbered enormously, but he could use his resources much more effectively." "Faced by the disciplined phalanxes of the British trained troops, the Mughal army fell apart." "Clive's triumph at Plassey effectively gave India to the British." "Although the British empire in India would not be formally declared for another 100 years," "India now belonged to the British East India Company." "Clive became known as the Master of Bengal and lost no time in turning his position into an astonishingly lucrative business." "He had learned the technique years ago as a quartermaster in Madras." "Indian merchants were prepared to do anything to ensure their continued good relations with the East India Company." "On the same principle, the Prince of Bengal now paid Clive huge sums to ensure his favor." "On top of this Clive was collecting trade and land revenues." "Within the space of two years he had amassed a huge fortune." "But with the action over, it was not long before Clive slumped into another cycle of depression, accompanied now by agonizing pains in his stomach, gout and prostration." "In 1760 he returned to England as Clive of India a very rich, very famous and very sick man." "When Clive returned to London, one of the only things that could drag him from his gloom was the prospect of a spending spree." "He now had wealth, recognition, fame in India the only thing he didn't have was social position in England." "He decided he would buy his way into the English upper classes." "He hungrily set out to amass property and social status in equal measure." "He remodeled the family home at S0tyche, and bought four more a luxurious town house in London's Berkeley Square, two more estates in England and one in Ireland too." "He engineered himself a seat in Parliament and one for his father also." "The power and reach of Clive's money was huge but not limitless." "The one thing Robert Clive wanted more than anything else was to be accepted by the establishment and the aristocracy and for people to consider him a gentleman." "He did flash his money around." "And sadly, people considered him to be rather vulgar." "They didn't like this chap coming back from India out of nowhere and buying all these estates and big houses and, you know, sort of buying his own furniture if you like." "Clive soon found himself mired in the intricacies of the English class system." "Try as he might, spend as he might, the inner circles of the aristocracy would not let him in." "His rough manners only made things worse for him." "They called him a 'nabob'," "English slang based on the Hindi word 'Nawab' or ruler." "The nabob is a pejorative expression for an Englishman who has given up to bad stomach, bad digestion, bad temper as a result of overindulgence in India." "And usually plundered India and made a lot of money." "They're something like robber barons in fact." "And their idea was to make a fortune here and then establish themselves in England as respectable notables." "And try to make a political career there." "Now in England they were looked upon as adventurers who were slightly seedy, and Clive was a classic example of that." "The English aristocracy closed its doors in Clive's face." "But Clive was not to be put off." "Still intent on his social climb, Clive decided to try a different tack." "To enhance his reputation, he agreed to return to India in a different role." "No longer just the businessman, but now statesman as well." "In 1765, only five years after leaving, the 40 year old Clive returned to India as governor of the British East India Company." "He now cast himself as a high minded champion of British interests." "Clive's mission was to clean up the practices of the British in India." "They certainly needed it." "In the eight years since Clive's victory at Plassey, profiteering had run wild in Bengal." "The British had achieved an effective trade monopoly." "British merchants and soldiers strong armed and extorted money from Bengali traders just as Clive himself had once done." "Resentment was seething." "Clive countered the growing unrest with a tone of patrician contempt for all the practices that had made him rich." "The confusion we behold, what does it arise from?" "Rapacity and luxury;" "the unreasonable desire of many to acquire in an instant, what only a few can or ought to possess." "With almost biblical fervor," "Clive launched reforms outlawing the abuses he had instituted." "In a whirlwind 20 months" "Clive totally revamped the British East India Company." "By the end of it he was drained." "And it was now that disaster struck." "In 1769 the monsoon rains failed in Bengal." "And in 1770 famine set in." "Hundreds of thousands died as much as one third of the population." "Share prices for the East India Company's stock plummeted." "By 1772 the Company's credit had failed." "Meanwhile stories were circulating that" "English merchants were hoarding rice as Indians starved." "There was a public outcry against the company." "People looked for a scapegoat." "Fingers pointed at Clive." "It was a bitter irony." "Only as Clive was at last making a noble hearted effort to clear up the morass of greed in India, was he finally accused of being its cause." "A parliamentary committee was formed to investigate the company and Clive's role in it." "The accusation?" "Extortion and profiteering in India." "As usual, energized by the prospect of a fight," "Clive rose magnificently to his own defense in the house of commons." "And it was now he made his famous speech saying that given the opportunities for self enrichment in India he was astonished at his moderation." "Clive was cleared but there was no joy in it for him." "He had been stung by the accusations." "He had effectively given India to Britain." "Now he was furiously bitter at what he felt was his country's ingratitude." "He was once again being rejected." "Predictably, he plunged back into depression." "His agonizing stomach pains returned, this time complicated by gallstones." "Even opium did little to relieve the pain." "I have a disease which makes life insupportable, but which the doctors tell me won't shorten it an hour." "He drifted from one mansion to another, barely unpacking before setting off for the next." "Little did he know, many in the British government had in fact been deeply impressed with his reforms of the East India Company." "They were on the verge of giving him control of yet another colony that was in chaos and on the verge of revolt North America." "Unaware of the honor that was pending," "Clive was consumed by humiliation and despair." "On the 22nd of November, 1774, as his family prepared to leave the London house at Berkeley square for Bath they heard a crash in Clive's room." "When they rushed in, they found him dead." "Robert Clive, still only 49 years old, had cut his own throat." "Clive's death created a huge scandal, there was a sort of big hush up and a lot of sort of muted whispering going on in the corridors of power as to whether he had killed himself." "It sounds like he slit his throat with a penknife." "Suicide was a sin." "In grief and shame, Clive's family removed his body by night and buried him without a headstone in the little church of Moreton say, outside Market Drayton, the town where he had run wild as a child." "After Clive's death, the British grip on America loosened and tightened on India." "The profits to be earned there resumed their flow." "A hundred years later, the Kohinoor, the fabulous diamond Babur had dismissed as worthless compared to the life of his son, was in the British crown jewels." "Krishna's gift had been a test of mankind's greed." "What would they do with all that wealth?" "Would they behave like beasts or think and achieve Wisdom?" "Peru." "For centuries home of the high civilizations of the Andes." "Here the Sun Kings of the Inca ruled over a vast empire, which stretched for 2,000 miles along the mountain spine of South America." "In 1532, that empire was destroyed with tragic ease by the Spanish." "As their world crumbled around them," "Inca nobles retreated into the remote recesses of the mountains." "There they struggled to keep alive their culture in its final refuge." "The last city of the Incas Vilcabamba." "This is the story of two men lured by the silent call of that last Inca hiding place." "One to rediscover it the other to destroy it forever." "Machu Picchu." "For centuries, this spectacular Inca citadel lay forgotten, hidden by the plunging ravines and coiling mists of the mountain cloud forest." "The year is 1948." "Machu Picchu is visited by a retired American senator a man, who in his youth, revealed it to the world." "He has done many things in his remarkable life, but Hiram Bingham knows he will be remembered for one:" "this astonishing archeological discovery." "Hiram Bingham is a sort of accidental archeologist." "He's been scorned by better trained excavators, but he really doesn't care he's used to coping with bad press." "Back in Washington he'd been elected a Republican senator in the Roaring Twenties." "His flamboyant style was perfectly in tune with the times." "A bribery scandal, an affair with the wife of another Congressman, divorce, accusations that he'd embezzled his first wife's fortune had all left him unscathed." "In 1929, he landed a Zeppelin on Capitol Hill as a publicity stunt." "Hiram loved headlines." "He was a very, very colorful character a man of enormous energy, tremendous ambition." "He was capable of doing almost anything, and he had an attitude that led him to believe he could accomplish whatever he set out to do." "Perhaps Hiram's adventurous life was the perfect reaction to his upbringing." "Born to pioneering Christian missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands," "Hiram was raised for a life of Puritan austerity." "In the world of his childhood, any extravagance, lack of discipline, even dancing were strictly forbidden." "Not surprisingly, Hiram was eager to escape." "Resourceful and intelligent, he saved and studied to get into school on the mainland." "Before long, he was headed for Yale." "Hiram threw himself into Yale college life." "Gone were the puritanical days of his Hawaiian childhood." "Suddenly, a new world of temptations was beckoning." "Intellectual excitement, adventure, and girls." "Dear Mother, what can I do?" "I know it will hurt you to think that I dance, but people here in the East do not understand why anyone should not dance, unless one is sick or lame." "I can see nothing wrong with it unless carried to excess." "Although reserved, Hiram was determined to enjoy himself." "Thanks to his charm, he was soon moving freely in this atmosphere of wealth and privilege." "Before long, he met Alfreda Mitchell, heiress to the Tiffany fortune." "Alfreda was irresistible, wealthy, and from the high society" "Hiram was now determined to be a part of." "In 1900, two years after they first met," "Hiram and Freda were married at the Mitchell's grand estate in New London." "Hiram took to wealth like a duck to water but there was a down side." "There was obviously an economic asymmetry." "The wife brought with her a set of expectations about the style in which she should live, and her side of the family was apparently very active in making sure that those expectations were met." "He liked the money and status, but hadn't banked on the pressures from his in laws." "Used to his independence," "Hiram soon began to feel like a bird in a gilded cage." "He had every prospect of a professorship at Yale, but before long university life, too, started to feel suffocating." "Feeling hemmed in by academia, in laws, and the pressures of domesticity," "Hiram soon started looking for an escape." "He decided field research for a book about Simon Bolivar would be his ticket to some adventure." "In 1906, he said good bye to Alfreda and headed off for South America." "I feel the Bingham blood stirring in my veins as I start for little known regions, as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for ten generations have done before me." "Freda wasn't happy about the long separation imposed by his travels." "Hiram wrote soothing letters as if he wasn't either." "Dearly beloved, I love you with a love that increases from day to day." "Let us not complain about our long separation but rejoice in the opportunity to accomplish a good piece of work." "But thousands of miles away, Hiram was ecstatic." "He may have missed Alfreda, but at last he met his true calling adventurer." "It was through the actual process of travel that he began to realize that exploration rather than documentary research was what really drew him." "Bingham abandoned his academic research to write a book about his travels." "When he reached Peru," "Bingham came face to face with the Inca world for the first time." "He was entranced." "Here was the remains of a civilization as vast and sophisticated as ancient Egypt, and yet little was known about it." "Its descendants still populated the Andes." "The ancient sites which littered Peru spoke to him of a magnificent bygone world, but he had no idea how to interpret what they said." "He had to find a method on the spot." "Fortunately, I had with me that extremely useful handbook," ""Hints to the Travelers," published by the Royal Geographic Society." "In one of the chapters I found out what should be done when one is confronted by a prehistoric site:" "take careful measurements, plenty of photographs, and describe as accurately as possible all finds." "He was soon eagerly examining Inca sites all over Peru." "One episode of Inca history fascinated him above all others Vilcabamba, last stronghold of the Inca kings." "Sixteenth century chronicles recounted how a core group of Inca nobles and priests had escaped the carnage of conquest and fled into the impenetrable high jungles to the north of the Inca capital, Cuzco." "And there, at a place called Vilcabamba, they'd constructed an Inca court in exile." "A palace, a temple, a final refuge of their world." "They had taken their sacred relics of gold with them." "Many had been lured by the accounts of Vilcabamba and gone in search of it." "None had ever succeeded in finding it." "Perhaps the relics and the gold were still there, hidden in the jungle, waiting to be discovered." "Hiram was spellbound." "It was a treasure seeker's dream." "Suddenly, Hiram saw a fantastic adventure opening up before him:" "he would discover Vilcabamba, lost city of the Incas, and unearth its hidden treasures." "Hiram returned to the U.S." "and threw himself into fundraising and his researches on Vilcabamba." "He pored over maps and chronicles of the Conquest." "Based on these, Hiram made meticulous calculations of where Vilcabamba must be." "After months of research, he was certain the last refuge of the Incas had been in a remote place now called Espiritu Pampa." "Now all he had to do was raise the money for the expedition." "He was too proud to be totally bankrolled by his wife's family." "He went down to the Yale Club in New York City, and he gave a speech." "A number of the people came forward." "When they saw the pictures of his earlier travels, they became very excited." "Last night a classmate, of whom I have seen very little, came over and talked with me." "When I told him about my plans and how I needed $1800 to pay for a topographer he smiled and said," ""Eighteen hundred dollars?" "I'll give you that."" "I could have shouted with joy." "The New York harbor on June 8th, 1911," "Hiram Bingham stood on the deck of a steamer once again waving goodbye to his wife." "This time it was harder." "They had just had another son, Hiram IV." "I shall never forget how you looked as you stood on the wharf with Harry, so brave and courageous, and yet so little and so appealing." "It did seem too cruel for words that I should be leaving you all alone." "But soon he was back in Peru doing what he loved most." "In July 1911, he set off from Cuzco northwards on the long journey to Espiritu Pampa." "Back in his element, Hiram was overjoyed." "He was also extraordinarily lucky." "After less than three weeks easy trekking down a newly opened road, a local farmer told him about some old stone terraces on a mountain nearby." "Hiram asked the man what the place was called." "He scribbled down the answer in his notebook Machu Picchu." "He decided to have a quick look at it the next day." "A young Indian boy led the party up onto a plateau a few hours away." "Hardly had we rounded the promontory than we were confronted by an unexpected sight:" "a great flight of beautifully constructed stone faced terraces, perhaps a hundred of them." "I could scarcely believe my senses." "Would anyone believe what I had found?" "Fortunately, I had a good camera." "He knew he'd found an Inca ruin of exceptional beauty, but I think because of his lack of experience, he didn't fully appreciate how unique the discovery was." "It was an entire city which had lain untouched since the Incas had abandoned it almost 400 years before." "Not understanding what he had found, Hiram left two of his team to start clearing and mapping the site while he pressed on to his real goal, Vilcabamba." "He forged on northwards" "pushing his team through tangled. ." "jungle and perilous ravines sure he was heading toward greater discoveries a fabulous lost city of temples and palaces that would put any other Inca ruin to shame." "Finally, after weeks of arduous trekking, he approached the area where he knew Vilcabamba must be." "For days his team hacked through dense underbrush and tangled vines." "To their great astonishment, they found nothing." "Espiritu Pampa was a desolate upland plateau with a few unimpressive stone foundations and a lot of dense jungle." "It was a far cry from the magnificent city Bingham had imagined." "He was disappointed and confused." "Could this be Vilcabamba?" "Or had his calculations been wrong?" "A perplexed Hiram turned back the expedition." "The men were exhausted and supplies were running out." "As his team trudged back to civilization, morale hit rock bottom." "I often wonder why under the sun I picked out a career that would force me to spend so much of my time away from my dear ones." "The future is not clear to me." "As Hiram headed back to the U.S. and Alfreda, gloom and uncertainty hung over his whole project." "Once back in the U.S., Hiram's spirits revived, and with them his dreams of Vilcabamba." "He rechecked his calculations of its position." "If it was not Espiritu Pampa, could it be Machu Picchu?" "But Machu Picchu's position still seemed wrong." "He decided to return to Peru the following year and investigate his find more thoroughly." "When he arrived in Machu Picchu again in the summer of 1912, what the workmen had revealed was, quite simply, stunning." "It clearly was some sort of city its size, its spectacular location, its magnificent terracing, all made him sure it was a royal city." "No one but a king could have insisted on having the lintels of his doorways made of solid blocks of granite, each weighing three tons." "What a prodigious amount of patient work had to be employed." "Overcome with excitement, Hiram immediately began to speculate that this must be the last refuge of the Inca kings." "Even if the location was wrong, everything else was so right." "Here in this breathtaking hideout, the Inca rulers had surely sheltered the last remnants of their world." "Hiram devoted himself to his spectacular find at Machu Picchu." "It was his passport to worldwide fame." "National Geographic devoted an entire magazine issue to Bingham and his work in Peru." "Suddenly, everybody knew about Machu Picchu and the man who uncovered it." "At a special National Geographic Society dinner he was honored along with the world renowned discoverers of the North and South Poles." "Hiram had finally achieved the fame he'd always wanted." "But his career as an excavator was not to last much longer." "He returned to Peru in 1915 to a storm of controversy." "For many Peruvians, the apparent absence of spectacular gold among Bingham's finds was deeply suspicious." "Rumors flew that Bingham had found gold and was smuggling it out of the country." "Fed up, fearing arrest, Hiram packed and left Peru." "On his return to the U.S., he decided to abandon his excavations." "The first World War was raging." "He signed up as an aviator." "World War I offered him a very convenient way of extricating himself from what had become an intractable situation in Peru." "He could honorably say that the world needed him to become involved in the military effort that, as a patriot, he should do that." "After a tour of duty in Europe," "Bingham had the perfect qualifications for a political career." "Yale man, world famous explorer, and now war hero." "He was elected in 1924 to the U.S. Senate with little difficulty." "His political star rose steadily through the 1920s, but a bribery scandal and the Great Depression brought it down fast." "The political tide turned against Hiram and his buccaneering style." "He lost his Senate seat in 1932." "Before long, he lost Alfreda too, and left taking a large part of her family's money with him." "Remarried, eager to make up for past mistakes, he turned back to tend the one reputation he knew was secure, discoverer of Machu Picchu." "He believed to his dying day that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba." "As it turned out, here too he was mistaken." "Later discoveries made it clear the real Vilcabamba was exactly where Hiram's first calculations had put it, at Espiritu Pampa." "Beneath the tangled overgrowth of Espiritu Pampa's desolate jungle, the remains of Vilcabamba had been lying only a few hundred yards from where Hiram had searched." "Determined to dispel any lingering doubts that Machu Picchu was not the last refuge of the Incas," "Hiram devoted many of the years up to his death in 1956 to his researches into Vilcabamba and its fall." "His studies took him back to the 16th century." "The bloodstained and tumultuous era of the Conquest and to a brilliant, chilling, now largely forgotten man who changed the course of Peru's history" "Francisco de Toledo, administrator of genius, passionate believer in the law, destroyer of Vilcabamba, killer of the last Inca king." "Francisco de Toledo was born in 1515 into the high Spanish nobility in the town of Oropesa." "In the 16th century, you couldn't get much more privileged than this." "Spain was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth." "Its massive armies had subdued Moslems in the Middle East and Protestants in Europe's north." "It was the powerhouse of the West." "The recent astonishing discoveries of a whole new continent promised an inexhaustible supply of wealth, and it all belonged to Spain." "This was the confident, aggressive and opulent world" "Francisco was born into." "But despite his family's position, his early life was not easy." "His mother died in childbirth, and young Francisco was raised by nuns." "He grew up isolated in a world of austere Catholicism and fervent devotion." "Young Francisco took on the qualities of the religious world that shaped him." "He became tough minded, disciplined, and an ardent believer in the justice of Christ." "His family had always been loyal servants of the Spanish crown, so at 15 Francisco became a page at the royal palace." "In 1532, Francisco would have been at court for only two years when he heard the astounding tales of Pizarro's conquest of Peru and the astonishing ransom in gold of the Inca king, Atahuallpa." "These were reports from beyond the edge of the known world." "How could his imagination not be seized by the faraway kingdom of Peru and its amazing riches?" "Francisco joined a religious and military order at the forefront of Spain's expansion." "He took the necessary vows and dedicated his life to Christ, Spain and the law." "Toledo was brought up to be what we would consider a humanist." "He had training in the law, he could read Latin." "So, he was a man trained to be like, today we would say a Harvard or a Yale man, ready to rule." "Francisco rose fast through the ranks." "By 1558, he'd become a permanent, powerful member of the royal household." "He was one of the chosen few present at the bedside of King Charles V when he died." "Francisco went on to serve the next king of Spain," "Philip I I, who on taking the throne was confronted with the devastating and unexpected realization the empire was broke." "Overextended in Europe," "Spain had also financed decades of conquest and exploration in the Americas." "Very little was coming back." "All that Inca and Aztec gold that had been melted down turned out to be a drop in the ocean." "The real wealth of the colonies was in the hands of the 'encomenderos, ' the new Spanish overlords who had divided up the lands and the Indians amongst themselves." "In a feeding frenzy over the astonishing wealth of their newfound land, the encomenderos had spawned Spain's very own Wild West," "where lawlessness and the sword ruled." "They were busy making themselves rich, and not paying tribute to the crown." "Philip realized he desperately needed someone who could straighten out the colony in Peru and get some revenues flowing back to Spain." "That man, he decided, was Francisco de Toledo." "In 1569, Francisco set sail for Peru to take up the most challenging and important job in the Spanish Empire, Viceroy of Peru." "The grueling journey took almost an entire year across the barely charted waters of the Atlantic," "and then down the Pacific Coast of South America to Peru." "On November 30th, 1569," "Francisco arrived in the Spanish capital of Peru, Lima." "Anxious for his favor, the local encomenderos gave him an enthusiastic welcome." "But in a letter to King Philip, he secretly confided his disgust for the anarchic little frontier town and its Spanish overlords." "The Spaniards in this kingdom have tried to fill their greedy hands in the looting of ancient tombs and sacred worship sites." "And it is the most common thing for them to wildly flaunt their finds." "But this is what he'd been sent to put right." "The new viceroy threw himself into the task of reforming the delinquent colony." "It quickly became clear to him that the colony was being pulled apart by two powerful forces." "On the one hand there were the encomenderos who fought amongst themselves and enslaved the Indians." "On the other, there was the Church, which also felt it had a moral right not only to Indian souls, but their labor." "The whole colony was feeding itself on Indian toil and Indian ignorance." "Not surprisingly, the native population simmered with resentment and discontent." "Francisco could immediately see where he had to focus his reforms." "I am informed that the Indians are not free as a result of their weakness, and the great awe they have toward Spaniards." "It is, therefore, my duty as their protector to see they are not cheated in their work." "Francisco also learned the Inca court in exile, now established in Vilcabamba, had already been at the center of the violent rebellion which had raged for years." "When Toledo arrived to Peru, he was sympathetic to the Inca." "On the other hand, there had been this famous uprising of the Incas." "The Incas had retired to Vilcabamba and they were threatening the whole process of the conquest." "Francisco had to somehow introduce order into this volatile and chaotic situation." "He realized he could never put things right unless he came to understand it in greater depth." "So he proposed something that, for the time, was absolutely remarkable a research trip to find out at first hand what was happening in the colony." "I saw clearly that I would not be able to govern the Spaniards or the Indians with the zeal that I had for serving God or Your Majesty unless I saw the land, traveled through it, and inspected it." "It was what we would do today in a social survey." "It was completely innovative." "The government up to that point was based on brutality and the use of arms." "What Toledo proposes is government based on knowledge, which makes him a man ahead of his time." "So in 1570, Toledo set out on his remarkable voyages of investigation through the remnants of the vast Inca Empire." "They would last for five years." "With translators and scribes, he traveled from one end of the colony to the other, interviewing Indians and Spanish alike, collecting data on population, land holdings, resources and local history." "In the years of his travels, he accumulated an astonishing 600,000 documents." "As Francisco listened to Indians talking, he understood the magnitude of their catastrophe." "Not only had they been subjected to the encomenderos, but they were dying by the hundreds of thousands." "A series of devastating epidemics of European diseases to which they had no resistance had already wiped out over half the Indian population of Peru." "In just 30 years since the arrival of Pizarro, almost a million people had died of colds, flus, measles and small pox." "In despair, many people were focusing unreal hopes of salvation on the Inca court in exile." "Francisco started to believe that" "Vilcabamba's hold on the Indian imagination had to be broken." "Francisco traveled on." "In the course of his research he covered all the territory from what is now Quito in Ecuador to Bolivia." "And as he traveled, he learned something else." "The Inca Empire had been composed of many different tribes." "The Incas were just one of them who had come to dominate the others only recently, about 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish." "Just like the Spanish, they had waged fierce war to conquer the country." "There was no shortage of evidence of Inca brutality to weaker tribes." "The Incas are tyrants, and as such, intruders in the government of these lands." "I think he was looking for arguments in order to justify the Spanish conquest within this particular region." "And he saw that the excuse could be to blame the Inca people as being tyrants, as being dictators, as being people who had imposed themselves with force on the populations they had conquered in order to present the Spanish Conquest" "as a sort of liberated process." "He wasn't wrong." "What happens is when you use the word 'tyrant' it has a whole moral connotation." "The Incas were an authoritarian system, with an imperial military force which was extremely violent, cruel, and would use the sorts of torture which would scandalize us if they were used in European wars." "As Francisco pondered the realities he had discovered on his voyages, any doubts he might have had about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest evaporated." "With typical thoroughness, he came up with a plan which was brilliantly argued, utterly coherent and totally draconian." "His vision was of a great kingdom of stern justice in Peru." "He would impose Spain's authority on the quarreling encomenderos and church alike." "He knew he would make enemies of both of them." "He did it anyway." "And he would totally reorganize the Indian world so it could experience both the justice and authority of the Spanish crown." "The Indians were to be resettled from their remote villages into more accessible towns where they would pay taxes to Spain and be protected by her." "And he would insist that, as subjects of Spain, they had rights." "But there was one terrible price to pay for Francisco's vision of a just social order in Peru" "there would be no place for Vilcabamba." "There could not be two kings in the colony." "Vilcabamba and the remaining power of the Inca kings must be destroyed." "Unknown to Francisco, the Inca king he was deciding to destroy was little more than a boy, Tupac Amaru." "Brought up by the Inca priestesses of Vilcabamba, he was deeply religious and knew nothing of the outside world." "He was gentle, famously beautiful, charming, and it seems, not very smart." "Tupac Amaru was very young when he was crowned Inca." "Tupac Amaru is referred as an 'Uti'." "Uti is meant to be sort of not mentally retarded, but not the quickest, not the brightest." "Tupac Amaru was a very young person." "I don't imagine him as being very well politically trained." "He was very young." "He was just a symbolic figure." "Tupac Amaru was an innocent, but that wasn't going to save him." "On June 16th, 1572, Spanish troops thundered towards Vilcabamba." "As they charge into the citadel," "Tupac Amaru manages to escape with his wife who is expecting their first child." "They don't get far." "The bewildered young Tupac is dragged back to Cuzco, and on September 2 1 st, 1572, condemned to death." "As Tupac Amaru is led through the streets to his execution, the town is seething." "Everybody has fallen in love with the handsome young king, not just Indians, but Spaniards too." "They all want Francisco to relent." "Francisco locks himself in his office and refuses to see anyone." "In the main square of Cuzco, Tupac Amaru rises to the execution block." "An eyewitness records the scene:" "as the multitude of Indians saw that lamentable spectacle, they deafened the skies making them reverberate with their cries and wailing." "There are two versions of what happens next." "In one, Tupac quiets the crowd and says nobly," ""Mother Earth, witness how my enemies shed my blood."" "In another, he makes a rambling, tearful speech and renounces the Inca gods." "Everyone prays that Toledo will change his mind." "But from Toledo's closed office, there is a resounding silence." "Toledo writes to King Philip:" "what Your Majesty has ordered concerning the Inca has been done." "But His Majesty had not ordered the death of Tupac Amaru, only a solution to the Indian problem." "From this moment the tide starts to turn against Francisco." "Toledo accomplished the mission that he had set out for himself." "That's why he wanted it to be so public and so theatrical, to send a message, "This is over; this is it."" "But it wasn't over." "As Tupac's head was mounted on a pike in Cuzco's central square, the Inca king's faithful subjects held vigil all night." "And immediately the stories circulated that" "Tupac Amaru's head became more beautiful with each passing minute." "As the centuries passed, it became more beautiful still." "Tupac Amaru was converted into a Christ like figure of martyred innocence, the symbol of native resistance to oppression." "For 500 years, almost every popular rebellion in Peru, from the Great Indian uprisings of the 18th century, led by Tupac Amaru I I, to the urban guerrillas of the late 20th century, have invoked his name." "It's a tragic myth, because everybody who invoked Tupac Amaru failed as well." "Tupac Amaru I I failed, the Peruvian Revolution of '68, which relied on the image of the two Tupac Amarus, also failed." "As history turned Tupac Amaru into a tragic hero, it turned Francisco into a caricature of the cruel Spaniard." "Forgotten were his stands for justice and the rights of Indians against the brutal exploitation of the encomenderos, he became famous for one thing:" "executing the innocent boy king, Tupac Amaru." "You've got to remember who was writing that history." "The history of Spain was written by priests, the missionaries who hated Toledo." "I think he held everybody to the same standards." "In administrative terms, he did the right thing." "In terms of his conscience, only he can tell." "After a remarkably successful reform of the colony in Peru," "Francisco returned to Spain expecting honors for his years of faithful service." "Instead, insults and disgrace were heaped on him." "The church had worked its influence on Philip." "The king who he had served with such brilliance and devotion dismissed Francisco without an audience." "Go away to your house." "I sent you to serve a king, and you killed a king." "It was a devastating blow." "Mortally wounded, he returned to his family's home." "Six months later, Francisco de Toledo," "Fifth Viceroy of Peru, died a broken man." "His stern vision of a realm of justice in Peru never came to be." "The greed and corruption of the colony slowly reasserted itself." "The Indians were exploited as never before." "As the screws of colonial oppression tightened, the memory of Francisco faded, and Vilcabamba became the tragic myth which would return to haunt Peru forever."