Читать книгу Tarana and the Island of Immortality - Michel Montecrossa - Страница 5

Prologue

A WORLD-SHATTERING DISCOVERY

In 1999 a new island unexplainably emerged from the Sargasso Sea. The scientific world was never able to agree about how it had formed. When one of the seven expedition teams made a sensational ­discovery that would have seemingly revealed the island’s mystery, the whole area was closed off. Further expeditions were carried out in secret by special military units. The public was told that the island had come into being through a volcanic eruption. Then all reports of the island disappeared from the media and the island was forgotten. The first civilian scientists that had begun studying the island were sworn to silence.

Nevertheless the rumors and speculation continued. Professor Kim, the former leader of the international team of scientists, had found a nearly rotted diary in the niche of a cliff. It had belonged to an English writer by the name of Douglas Goldfield who, according to the notes, had already lived on the island at the end of the 19th Century. In the diary he had described the island’s secret and the fairytale-like story of the island’s queen, Tarana, who ruled there a realm of immortality.

TARANA at the shore near the hut of Douglas Goldfield in the moonlight

Scientists of all disciplines were stirred up in the first weeks about the discovery of the diary, especially because many other ­discoveries on the island seemed to confirm the story that Douglas Goldfield had written nearly one hundred years earlier about his fate, the immortal Tarana, about the island itself and its mysterious future.

Although no one could disprove Goldfield’s words, the ­specialists and scientists remained sceptical. After the military took over the ­further investigations the diary was declared a fake and with it the miracle and the riddle of that island, which was, however, included in the ocean maps as the “Island of Immortality.”

Only Professor Kim, who had found the diary, remained utterly convinced for the rest of his life that the little book was not only ­accurate in every word of its description of another form of reality, but also that it contained a world-shaking revelation about the future of all life.

I had the good fortune of having sought out Professor Kim shortly before his death. That was after many years in which the few hints and theories about the fascinating story of the “Island of Immortality,” which had made their way to the public despite all secrecy, had been occupying and dancing through my often doubting and yet ever-and-again mysteriously enchanted mind. He was over 90-years-old and lived in seclusion in a modest home near Kyoto. As I was led into his room, his face beamed with a graceful smile. His wife, who sat by him in silent attentiveness signalled to me with a simple gesture that had something noble in it to take a seat next to his bed. I had already been told that Professor Kim had lost the ability to speak and only had a short time to live. That I should be chosen, as a stranger, to be present at his moment of parting would have never entered my mind, much less that he would indicate to me to come closer to him. And yet that is what happened. I still feel today the indescribable depth of his eyes and how he slowly turned to his side to pick up a small wooden casket that he then firmly gave over to me with his finely built hands. As he did so his face lit up and he had an expression of happiness in his eyes that seemed to me to announce a new world that is yet to be discovered. He then closed his eyes and left this world. I sat motionless next to the professor’s mortal remains as his wife expressed a silent and moving goodbye and then called a doctor and several relatives and friends. Then the spell broke and I looked at the wooden casket in my hands; upon it stood one word, TARANA, and I knew that Professor Kim had given me Douglas Goldfield’s mysterious book. In that moment I also knew that I was on the trail of the truth and that I should protect and transport the secret of the Island of Immortality.

It is for that reason that, after Douglas Goldfield’s diary entries, I want to tell the story of Tarana and the Island of Immortality. My name is not important. But I will tell you this: We will meet face to face when the things have taken place that are reported by Douglas Goldfield and, more so, Tarana.