"This is a once and a lifetime opportunity, we gotta do this." It seems like nothing ever good comes from that sentence. Usually whenever you hear it's a once and a lifetime opportunity, it is a lot like hearing this is a limited time offer, order now. Just gimmicks and ploys to make you go along. This however was different. This time, my life was actually changed from the experience. And not even in a bad way.
We were deep in Sumatra. I don't even to this day know how Vegas, my best friend through life that got me in more trouble than I care to remember, found this place, this guide, even this island, but he did. Vegas had a friend that had found something incredible and wanted me and Vegas to be the first ones to see it. We are reporters. And some of the best ones in the world. Through our intense competition to the top of the reporting world is how we met and became friends, but that is a story for a different day.
Three days of walking across a jungle path that, at best, was wide enough for us to follow single file, and we finally arrived. Vegas and I were expecting something grand and spectacular, especially by how excited the friend was, but we had arrived to what looked like nothing more than a small opening in the ground, barely large enough for a man of reasonable size to fit through. The guide spoke very little English, but from what I understood at the time was that we were going to be a little uncomfortable. And that was a very large understatement, especially for anyone who is even a tiny claustrophobic.
It seemed like an eternity at the time, but looking back, it couldn't have been more than an hour or so of wiggling our way through the very small hole. It wasn't pleasant at all, there were things living in the hole first off, and there was just barely enough room to take a full breath. We were all exhausted by the end of the tunnel, and I remember very clearly being overwhelmingly relieved to be out of that cramped space, even though I had fallen out of the tunnel, into an underground pool, that felt more like one of the Great Lakes. Looking back, I don't know how the situation got better, but at the time it didn't matter. Somehow we managed to make our cramped tired bodies follow the guide to a shore where he shot off a flare. The cavern was immense, and so was the underground pool we just got out of. We appeared to make it to some sort of island. We set up camp and rested. The guide told us that we had a lot of walking to do.
The island was strange, but our destination was stranger. The ground we walked on for turned from sharp and ragged to flat and smooth. Also, the cavern began getting lighter. The closer we got to the light, the more movement there was. You could hear the bats above, and see the ground moving below. Then the source of the light. A whole way above in the cavern ceiling. No bigger than a football field. It gave enough light for sparse vegetation even. The guide pointed to a very large rock. Or what looked like a rock.
"You guys made it!"
It was Vegas' friend, he came from around another rock that we hadn't even noticed. There were tons of these rocks, all around, even where we came in, somehow we hadn't noticed them. As if that all wasn't enough, there was more. We heard a bark from behind us. It was a dog, but none like we had ever seen before. It was completely bald, and ghostly white, almost see through. Oh ya, it also had no eyes. It didn't even seem to notice. Vegas bent over to pet it and it's tale wagged.
"Guys, there is an entire society down here, undiscovered, this is their leader. They even have their own language down here, I have been trying to figure it out, and I've been getting pretty good. Oh, they don't shake hands, they fist pound. Ha cool huh?"
The man that he was standing next to was very short, no more than five foot, and he too was not only completely naked, but also 100% white. He still had eyes, but they were barely the size of pennies, and completely black.
Vegas and I stayed down there for a while and learned about the new society. It was hard to believe, too hard. That is why we decided that it was our duty to leave these people be. If we released the information we got about them, it would ruin them. They would become every scientist, every anthropologist, shit, everybody's little scientific experiment. We couldn't bring all that publicity to those people, so we left them be. I'm a writer though and writing is what I do, so here it will stay, on this blog for nobody to see.
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