We will have meat for dinner, with cassava juice and pepper topping; Dybal licked his lips. Everything is good. I am sorry for the guys though. Nice fellows they were. Dick, Colonel Eichberger… Salvation was so close and real: – sighed Whitehouse, suddenly stern.

All were silent for a while. The navigator was intently smoking a cigar, puffing sweet tobacco and scattering a few mosquitoes in the sun; Makliff was rummaging with a sprig in the rifle sight slot, which was plugged with brown clay. Somewhere the fire was kindled and a blue-gray wisp of smoke drifted above them. A dog barked. The other one responded. On the roof of the hut decorated with satellite, climbed an old Indian and began tying fresh guava leaves to the rafters instead of those that were torn by the wind.

Finally Makliff cleared the sight slot and said quietly:

– Yeah, I feel sorry for the guys, Ronni. But as for Aydem and Colonel, you were mistaken.

– Strike me dead! Are they alive? Where are they, I want to hug them!

– They are not here at the moment. The irony is, they got better before us and rushed into action.

A week ago the colonel left with the hunters to the Santar Pass to banish matilones soldiers who seized the pass. By their mercy the Kichak have been sitting in isolation for three months already. No mail, no whiskey, no fuel, no batteries for radios. And the generator, which powers their TV's does not work without fuel. We still have no idea whether a new war with the Islamists broke out or not.

As for Aydem, he has been rushing about in the sands with Saurno Santo for three days now. He wants to collect those belongings that we have thrown away on our way to the mountains: first of all, the logbook, the transmitter and cadmium absorber. But there has been a snowstorm twice since then.

It is unlikely that they will find anything. All has been long covered with sand. – Sighed Mackliff. Whitehouse just shook his head in shock:

– Gee.

Dybal, throwing away his cigar and making a gulp of orange juice from a pumpkin jar continued Mackliff's story:

– Now it is very important for us to find out whether the war had started. And whose side took the SAU and if we could go to Buenoventura. Kichak know nothing. There is no contact with the outer world. We cannot find out anything from indirect observations as this area is completely cut off, isolated.

It lies at the center of a vast area that remains uncontrolled after the approach of the Desert and the destruction of Ecuador and Colombia. They have no government here. Those who did not want to evacuate, are now on their own: hunting, fishing in Braziliera that flows over this ridge, some kind of craft – figurines of black wood, woven tapestries, beads of rock crystal – all of this is changed for cartridges, alcohol and gasoline in Buenoventura, the SAU Naval Base which lies in two hundred miles from here.

The matiliones warriors boss the show here along with something that kills the Kichak hunters who come too close to the Canyon of Aborning Rocks. And it is killing them in a weird way, as if pouring napalm over them. As for the SAU fighters who shot down Eichberger’s container, they mainly patrol the coastline from Barranquilla to Cayenne, without delving into this wilderness for more than twenty miles.

Ponce returned, holding something heavy under his arm.

He nodded to Mackliff with the importance of an adult and handed to Dybal his burden, wrapped in a piece of advertising poster "Panasonic" – the real world in your home".

– Rodriguez brought this thing and gave it to Santo for adjusting the sound head. Rodriguez says that he took that stone from the Canyon of Aborning Rocks. But no one believes him. – Navigator held in his palm a strange oblong stone: smooth, shiny, as if polished, studded with many thin streaks, forming a dense network: