"I don't like the looks of that weather up ahead. You may want to rethink this, amigo."

Mitch Cassidy had already noted the angry thunderheads building up over the highlands, but he urged the young Venezuelan pilot on. "Just a little farther, Roberto. Just over that ridge."

"The one with the darkest clouds? Not a good idea. What's so important over there, anyway?"

"A window to the past," said Mitch. "My grandfather journeyed there once. I'd kinda like to see it for myself."

Roberto hesitated for a moment, then sighed. "Okay, you the boss. But if that storm comes in, we're goin' back to La Esmeralda. You're a pilot yourself. You know."

To underscore his point, those dark clouds were backlit by a flash of lightning.

Mitch did indeed know. But he'd come too far to turn back now. Following in his grandfather's footsteps was the point of this trip, after all. He compared the landscape below to his grandfather's journal as Roberto guided the float plane over the crest.

"Hey, check out this mountain," Roberto said as the first drops of rain spotted the windshield.

It was an almost flat-topped mesa, the kind called tepuis in Venezuela. As tepuis went, it was relatively small and unremarkable, except for the waterfall issuing from a crevice about three quarters up on the southeast side.

"What in the world?" As they passed over the uneven summit, Mitch was staring down at a massive void, roughly circular in shape, dropping into an emerald green darkness, seemingly from summit to base.

"Sinkhole," explained Roberto. "One of the mysteries of the tepuis."

"It's like something out of The Lost World," said Mitch as he grabbed his camera. "I wonder what's down there?"

They had time for one pass before the rain began to pick up. "We're heading back," Roberto announced.

He banked but as the plane came around, it was bucked by a sudden gust of wind. "Hold on tight, amigo. It's about to get rough."

Mitch popped a stick of Beemans into his mouth, a nervous habit inherited from his grandfather. It helped to ease the tension when the flying got dicey. He hoped Roberto knew what he was doing. The kid couldn't have been much older than twenty-two. He scanned the sky ahead and the forbidding jungle below when something caught his eye. "Hey, look at this—" he began.

But Roberto cut him off. "Take a picture. We're outta here."

And now the sky unleashed its fury as a hard rain pelted the windshield and the wind came screaming down from the highlands like an equatorial jungle banshee. Roberto tightened his grip. "We gotta put down and wait it out."

"Make a run for the river," Mitch advised, as an abrupt crosswind punched the plane, lurching it to the left.

Roberto countered with rudder and control yoke to the right. The bottom dropped out of Mitch's stomach as they lost a hundred feet of altitude. Roberto goosed the throttle and eased the nose back up.

It was only twenty minutes back to La Esmeralda, but the sudden storm left them not even time enough for that. Towering cumulus clouds boiled all around, boxing them in and leaving no safe route other than down. The river, the only possible landing site, lay directly into the teeth of the storm. The fierce wind seemed to be coming from all directions as lightning made the dark clouds even more menacing. The poor little plane pitched about, a mere plaything of the winds. Mitch rode the turbulence with a seasoned attentiveness, his hands and feet intuitively reaching for the yoke and pedals that weren't there. He wasn't used to being the passenger. Still, he remained as focused as if he were the one in the left-hand seat. Roberto was nervously humming the theme from Star Wars, as he wrestled with the weather for mastery of the little plane.

The Rio Pamoni snaked like an anaconda through the dark jungle below. Mitch struggled to see past the rain-lashed windshield and eyed the trees, too close for comfort, as they descended. Roberto fought to keep the twisting river under him.

"There!" shouted Mitch, pointing ahead to the only stretch that looked long enough and straight enough for a landing.

Roberto nodded as he steered it in. "Hold on," he said once again. "We're goin' in."

The approach would be tight, but it offered the only safe refuge. They'd get just one shot at it. Real seat-of-your-pants flying, the kind Mitch lived for.

And apparently, Roberto as well, as he guided the craft with a deft hand, making continual small corrections against the buffeting wind. Mitch worked his gum furiously. Beside him, Star Wars increased in tempo and volume.

A sudden gust kicked the plane like a mule, sideslipping them to the right. Mitch's eyes grew wide as he saw the leafy green wall coming up fast. He had no time to shout out a warning as he instinctively leaned to the left. A sharp bump and a flash of green outside his window told him they'd just shaved the top corner of a tree.

Meanwhile, Roberto continued to hang on, refusing to give up, even as he battled to bring the plane under control. Seeing his chance, he throttled back and lowered the flaps, lining up with the widest part of the river.

Another flash of lightning kept them alert, even as they dropped below the worst of it. Mitch scanned ahead for rocks in the river as Roberto feathered the throttle further and put back pressure on the yoke to bring the nose up.

And then the world was reduced to a blur of green as the floats skimmed the surface, tea-colored water jetting to the sides.

"Rock!" called out Mitch, barely in time.

Roberto stomped on the rudder pedal, but on the water, the plane was slow to respond. Mitch winced at the loud scrape of rock against aluminum.

And then they were in open water, aiming for the riverbank. Roberto cut the throttle immediately. They both let out huge breaths as they settled with the deceleration.

Mitch turned to Roberto, a look of respect in his still-wide eyes. "Well, done, my friend. You must have aviation fuel running through your veins."

Roberto gave a lopsided grin. "How is it you say . . . any landing you can walk away from . . ."

He eased the plane up to a rocky beach and for the next few minutes they waited out the deluge while swapping hair-raising tales of aviation derring-do. Mitch was a bush pilot himself, running fishermen, divers and sightseers out along the Florida Keys, out of Boca Raton. If this wasn't Venezuela, he'd be flying his own plane instead of relying on a local pilot to get him from Puerto Ayacucho to the jungle outpost of La Esmeralda, deep in Amazonas State. He'd been lucky to find Roberto on short notice. As one pilot to another, they'd built a rapport on the two-hour flight. He'd been hoping to catch a boat tour down the Casiquiare River, but he'd persuaded Roberto to extend the flight for sightseeing. They'd been exploring the area southeast of La Esmeralda, between the Orinoco and the Rio Pamoni.

As the rain eased up Mitch shifted the conversation to what he had spotted. He checked the two pictures he'd been able to take and was glad to see the detail he was hoping for. It was the wreckage of a small plane, a DeHavilland Beaver by the looks of it, its nose partially buried in the dense green foliage. Mitch's first thought was to trace its origin and find out who it belonged to. "Somebody's gone missing," he said. "Whoever was flying that plane, he never made it to where he was going. Somewhere, somebody's looking for him. They need to know."

But Roberto was looking at it from a more practical, and local, perspective. "Planes go down all the time out here," he argued. "The jungle just swallows them up. There are too many dangers here. It is why it is no good to fly around here." He waved his arm to the jungle across the river. "We shouldn't even be this far out without a permit. The Parima Tapirapeco Reserve is up ahead. It is a restricted zone. The Yanomami live there. Then there are the drug runners and FARC revolutionaries. They see you, they shoot you out of the sky before you see them." Now he pointed to the clearing sky above. "The weather. You see yourself how it changes here. The mountains, they no want you to fly over. So the jungle, it just swallows you up. Whoever it was, it is too late now. Probably just another drug smuggler. Best just to forget. And count yourself lucky it wasn't you."

By now, the torrent had stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. The sun had come out full force, and the jungle was steaming with the fresh blast of heat and humidity. Mitch and Roberto both climbed out of the plane and hopped over to the small, rocky beach to assess the damage.

"We got lucky when we clipped that tree," said Roberto. "Just lost the starboard running light. It coulda' been the whole wing."

They both knew that if that had happened, they wouldn't be standing here.

The rock they'd hit upon landing had left a mean dent in the aluminum pontoon, but Roberto took it in stride. "It's okay," he said. "I fix it up like a Cuban auto mechanic. I was gonna switch back to the bush wheels next week anyway."

For a few more minutes, Roberto studied the sky and the lessening wind, trying to decide on the best time to resume their flight. Mitch, watching the river, spotted a curious, small green stone at the water's edge. Reaching down and picking it up, he could see that it was crystalline, emerald-like in appearance, and looked as if it could have been shaped by human hands. It looked remarkably like a long, narrow arrowhead.

"What do you make of this?" he asked Roberto.

Roberto studied it for a moment. His eyes seemed to get wide for a second, but then he looked vague again. It was another long moment before he spoke. "There is an old tale," he said, as he handed the stone back to Mitch. "Some of the elders of our people, the Piaroa, know of it through the elders of one of the bands of the Yanomami. And they are the ones who know of, at least they say, of another band of Fierce Ones, deep in the highlands, who hunt with arrows like no other. The People of the Emerald Arrows, they call them."

"I seem to remember my grandfather saying something like that once. He was down here in the fifties. He said he'd heard things and seen things. He never brought back any physical evidence, though. I assumed it was just a jungle legend, like the Lost City of Z or something."

Roberto shook his head. "I don't believe it. That stone, it could be anything. Could be dropped by some tourist who picked it up at a curio shop in Puerto Ayacucho. Emeralds? Better you should look across the Orinoco, in Colombia. Better you should forget that stone, just keep it for a souvenir of your adventure with the storm. Better you should forget that plane, too." He checked the sky again. All clear, and the wind had slowed enough for safety, but with enough of a good headwind for takeoff. "And better we should get out of here, while we can," he concluded.

By the time they made it back to La Esmeralda, the boat tour Mitch had been hoping to join had long since departed. When he got back to his hotel in Puerto Ayacucho, he was exhausted and had just enough time to bring a late dinner back to the room. Then he sat down on the bed with a soothing cup of herbal tea and examined that stone he'd found. It was an emerald. He was certain. Maybe there was something to Grandpa Russ' stories after all.

He needed to get back to the States; he had work to do. But he needed a way to come back down here and explore the old legend further. If the tale was true, there might be a fortune to be found.

He got out his camera and looked again at the pictures of that downed plane. Just maybe . . .

He took another sip of tea, took out his grandfather's journal, the journal that had sent him to Venezuela in the first place, and began reading the familiar story, the one he'd read many times, ever since he was eleven years old.

* * *

7 November, 1953 - Key West, Florida.

So, whatever happened to Percy Fawcett, who set off into the Amazon in search of his lost city of "Z," never to be heard from again? Well, that's what Jerry and I hope to be able to find out. After all, working for National Geographic does have its advantages.

We left yesterday out of Cape Hatteras. The flight to Brazil promises to be an adventure in itself. We're on our way to Belém to do some research and hopefully persuade the magazine to launch an expedition to discover what happened to Fawcett, or at least see if an article is warranted.

And so we find ourselves in Key West for the night, en route to Belém, by way of Havana, San Juan, and Caracas. Maybe we'll be the ones to pick up Fawcett's trail and discover his fate. If not, we'll at least have ourselves one Grand Adventure . . .