Page 86 - Brugger Karl The chronicle of Akakor

The Chronicle of Akakor
extremely reasonable, vivacious, and inventive. That can be seen in all their works they produce, whether
these are sculptures, drawings, or many-colored paintings. The settlements are carefully built and ordered,
although it would appear that they depend on cities located further in the interior."

According to the Chronicle of Akakor, the Ugha Mongulala ruled over an extensive empire which extended
down almost the whole course of the Amazon. Then the White Barbarians arrived with the new symbol of
the cross and induced the Allied Tribes to break their allegiance. The Inca tragedy was repeated, albeit
slowly and in stages. The Portuguese may not have known any mercy either when it was a matter of
converting the natives to Christianity or relieving them of their unnecessary luxuries. But they lived in a
country without any visible political center, and they were fighting natural forces that seem to resist even
the most modern machinery. The Transamazonica spur of the road between Manaus and Barcellos on the
lower Rio Negro, built in 1971, was overgrown by tropical vegetation within a year. The technicians even
had difficulties locating the approximate direction of the road. It is not surprising therefore that there are no
more signs of "white cities."

The Amazons
Traditional historiography has almost ignored Padre Gaspar de Carvajal’s travel log, possibly because the
report of those eight months in regions that have retained their mystery until today deals mainly with the
search for food. Settlements existed merely as possible targets for looting. A traveler avoided white cities
and rejoiced when he came across small and defenseless villages. Carvajal’s contemporaries paid attention
to just one tiny section—the reference to a tribe of warlike women with a fairy-tale capital of gold. This part
of the journal caught the imagination of greedy conquerors. They advanced from all directions to the region
on the upper reaches of the Orinoco to find the tribe of the Amazons and their legendary capital, El Dorado.

The military expeditions that were dispatched in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries invariably took the
same course. Spanish and Portuguese forces, German and French mercenaries under the leadership of
various commanders, wandered for months through inaccessible territories. They met the attacks of a
warlike population, adverse natural forces, and a constantly flooded terrain. The men were defeated by
hunger; they devoured their pack animals and ultimately turned to cannibalism. "We took the bound Indian,
and when we came to the stream, we killed him and divided him among us. We lit a fire and ate of his flesh.
Then we lay down to rest for the night, but first we fried the rest of the meat." This is the report of Cristobal
Martin, a soldier in the expeditionary force of General von Hutten.

The valiant Amazons and mysterious El Dorado were never discovered. According to the Chronicle of
Akakor, they fought against the alien invaders for seven years. Then they were exhausted. They destroyed
Akahim and retreated into the underground dwellings.

During the centuries that followed, El Dorado assumed a peculiar character. The fabulous golden city
seemed to wander from one point of the Brazilian jungle to another with the fascination and inconstancy of
a Fata Morgana. Immense areas were explored in search of the elusive city, and innumerable legends were
rediscovered or fabricated. But El Dorado had vanished. Early in the twentieth century, its alleged location
shifted from the Orinoco on the frontier between Brazil and Venezuela to the Mato Grosso jungle. The
English explorer Fawcett claimed to have discovered giant pyramids in this region. He was so firmly
convinced of their existence that he embarked on a number of dangerous expeditions. He justified his belief
in a letter to his son: "One thing is certain. A dense veil lies over the prehistory of Latin America. The
explorer who succeeds in finding the ruins will be able to expand our historical knowledge in an
unimaginable way."

Like many of his predecessors, Fawcett failed due to the geographic and climatic conditions of the tropical
rain forest: He never returned from his last expedition in the summer of 1943. But his fate did not prevent
other courageous explorers from continuing the search for a distant past. In 1944, the Brazilian ethnologist
Pedro E. Lima discovered a well-defined Indian path from the headwater region of the Xingu to Bolivia.

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