EVAN CRANKSHAW

Not all the text is readable in this format, regrettably, but the language of the first three chapters (all of which is assembled from snippets of Thor Heyerdahl's KON-TIKI) are recreated here:

 

 

I could see the little island clearly in my mind's eye, with its jagged rust-red mountains, the green jungle which flowed down their slopes toward the sea, and the slender palms that waited and waved along the shore. We sat on a lonely beach and looked out over the same endless sea, evening after evening.

 

We filled our nostrils with an aroma of rank jungle and salt sea and heard the wind's rustle in leaves and palm tops. We were collecting.

 

So it had begun, by a fire on a South Sea island.

 

In the years that followed, breakers and jungle ruins were a kind of remote, unreal dream which formed the background and accompaniment to my studies; of the men of our race (who boldly called themselves the discoverers of the islands), of an unknown people, and all kinds of live creatures and images and other relics of a dead culture.

 

***

 

I would have to cross vast spaces of sea which, because they lie outside all shipping routes, are practically unknown. There, I should find islands of green jungle and shining rivers, lowlands hidden under an endless sea of rolling vapor, dry mountainsides and bare cliffs that climb from the mist right up to a brilliant blue sky.

 

***

 

All roads into the jungle are impassable. But, once inside, one might have made a parachute jump into a strange world, thousands of miles from civilization and the mysterious, legendary 'white men'an antiquated other-world in which one is swallowed up in an atmosphere of lion-hunting, mountaineering, ancestor worship, tusks, war drums and spears, Indian carpets, idols and model ships, flags, photographs and maps, old pyramids, carven stone statues, surprising traces in culture, mythology, and language, and curious civilizations of antiquity.

 

A world we had never dreamed of. East of the sun and west of the moon—outside time and beyond space.

 

***

 

I was no longer in doubt, and one day my theory was complete. I felt sure that a roar of agreement came from the breakers. And then they slowly subsided while I slept.

 

***

 

Round us, in well-arranged glass cases, lay fragments from the past, traces leading into the mists of antiquity. The walls were lined with books. Some of them one man had written and hardly ten men had read. Our host, who had read all these books and written some of them, sat behind his worktable and explained over a bottle of good whisky,

 

“You can't treat ethnographic problems as a sort of detective mystery!”

“Why not?” I said.

 

I knew nothing about the man beyond what an open face can say. It may say a good deal. So we bought two tickets and flew to South America, ahead to the adventure. Detectives off to the end of the world.

 

****