A Mersey Mariner

Prologue

PrologueThe sss Rain Forest

Distance to Liverpool, 6,000 miles

September 2003

Lit only by the brightly burning campfires in the small jungle clearing, the celebrations were well underway when Doctor Joseph De Souza seated himself on the ground beside his colleagues, Doctors Leonardo Barras and Marina Duarte, who were already enjoying their third drink of the strong, sweet tasting 'firewater' produced by their native hosts only at times of great celebration, such as this evening's festivities.

Glowing red, yellow and orange sparks from the wooden branches that fuelled the fires danced in the air, providing a natural and constantly changing effect of a miniature firework display. The faces of his two friends had adopted a red glow, a combined result of the fire's heat and the intoxifying liquid they were imbibing with great relish.

All around them, the tribesmen were dancing, laughing and becoming very drunk. As the latest tribal dance ended, with the warrior males enacting the hunting and final kill of a wild boar with great pomp and ceremony, their place was taken by a group of bare-breasted young women, their heads adorned with plumed, feathered headdresses, their skirts made of the same brightly coloured feathers. Their dance was one of celebration, in honour of their guests.

“Have I missed much?” De Souza asked his friends as Marina passed him a wooden mug of the intoxicating brew.

“Nothing we haven't seen at previous festivities,” Marina replied.

“Thought you'd have been here sooner,” Barras added.

“I wanted to be certain,” De Souza almost shouted in order to make himself heard above the chanting and the rhythmic beating of native drums. “We can't announce this without being one hundred percent sure of our findings.”

“But we have six confirmed cases, every one a successful treatment with no hint of a return.”

“I know,” De Souza replied as he took a large swig of the native brew. “But we did agree we wouldn't make any announcements until we reached ten positive results.”

“Which we'll have in another month if the others respond as we expect,” said Leonardo Barras.

“We could hardly prevent them celebrating when we told them the news about A'ginna,” Marina added, referring to the chief's daughter, herself one of the current dancers who were entertaining them and the rest of the tribe.

The sounds of the jungle occasionally assaulted the ears of the revellers. Even at night, the sss remained alive with wildlife. Numerous nocturnal species awoke with the coming of darkness and replaced the daylight dwellers on the ground and in the trees. Birds, monkeys, insects in their thousands all made the canopy and the floor of the world's largest rainforest a place of constant sound, a place where silence, if it ever came, would herald only the death of one of the world's last truly wild places. Covering over two million square miles, the sss rainforest encompasses nine nations, though 60% of its territory lies within the borders of Brazil. Rich in its biodiversity, one in ten of the world's known species lives in the rainforest, making it the largest collection of living plants and animals in the world, hence the constant cacophony of sound that surrounded those around the campfires.

As the night wore on, the revelry continued, the music, the dancing, the drunkenness that gradually overtook even the strongest of the tribal warriors, until eventually, the dancing gave way to a communal debauchery as the dancers, male and female, came together in a mass congress of s****l activity, at which point the three doctors decided to make a quietly prudent withdrawal from the festivities and more than slightly inebriated themselves, they staggered on unsteady legs back to their own accommodations.

* * *

Ten years earlier, wealthy British entrepreneur and explorer, Giles Pearce, together with his friend, Portuguese/English doctor Joseph De Souza and a dozen students arrived in the sss Rainforest. The students had replied to an advertisement by Pearce for both biological and anthropological students to join him on an expedition to a relatively unexplored area of the sss rainforest. Whilst there, they had the good fortune to stumble across a small and previously unknown tribe of native Amazonian Indians. The tribe welcomed the newcomers, and over a two-year period, the explorers learned the language, the way of life and the customs of their hosts, who were never anything but friendly.

Whilst living among the tribe, Pearce and De Souza noticed a high number of fatalities, from what at first they saw as an unknown illness that struck tribespeople of all ages, usually leading to death in a short space of time. This disease was entirely different from the instances of Dengue, Yellow fever, Malaria and Rabies the team had so far witnessed.

Eventually, Doctor De Souza was able to discover that for some reason, the people of this isolated tribe were highly susceptible to a rare form of cancer that struck without warning and usually led to death within weeks, rather than months or years. His interest peaked however, when he learned that a small number of sufferers inexplicably survived the disease and subsequently thrived, going on to lead normal lives.

Realising they could be on the verge of a great discovery, Pearce financed the building of a small but technically advanced research unit in the jungle, beside the tribe's village. Pearce hired microbiologist Doctor Marina Duarte and Leonardo Barras, a Consultant Oncologist, to assist De Souza in researching this strange medical phenomenon. His students were well paid and returned home with large paycheques, guaranteed well paid jobs, and each signed a vow of silence, never to reveal the nature of the work being undertaken by Pearce's team of experts. As each of them also went home with enough experience to ensure they would never go hungry again in their lives, they were all too happy to agree to Pearce's terms.

The tribal headman, Azilpueta, urged his people to assist their honoured guests in their work and over the next few years, De Souza, Barras and Duarte suffered failure after failure. There seemed no way they would ever discover the reason for the small but important survival rate from the disease.

Pearce paid for even more equipment to be shipped to Brazil, until so much work was taking place that he had to invest in a new, larger generator, whose ever-present throbbing became yet another constant in the lives of the researchers and the people of the tribe.

An outsider might have found it totally surreal to find such a modern, state-of-the-art facility in the midst of the rainforest, in the home of a primitive and unheard of tribe of indigenous natives, but of course, no outsiders ever came to the village, the location of which was known only to Pearce and his people.

It was purely by chance that, one day, two years ago, Marina Duarte finally made the all-important breakthrough.