The Dreaming Treasure

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Dave McFather

 

 

THE

DREAMING TREASURE

 

 

SYNOPSIS

 

A young couple travels by car around a lake in Marshland, within the Portobello coast.

The tour they perform brings them several memoirs about an ancient treasure, supposedly brought there by the Normans when founding a colony in Murtoyland, a small town on the edge of lake Avia.

The treasure hunt begins guided by some old maps the protagonists carry with them.

Although, will they ever reach such a treasure?

 

 

 

 

NOTICE

 

Port Obal is the name of an ancient Phoenician port that is thought to have been situated on the northern banks of lake Avia,

also known as Ria or the Haff.

 

In this narrative many names of places like villages,

towns and cities, are used but only a few of them are

coincident with the current or original name.

Merging Past with Present, the narrator makes the reader watching to ancient historic scenes such as the invasion of Murtoyland by the Normans, who left forgotten treasures in those territories, and presents the readers with a brief visit to the ruins of the ancient

Fort of Car Regal and to the lost giant Towers of the Ria.

The Marshland islands are a grateful stopover to the narrator and his girlfriend Michaela, once it allows them to describe the animal and plant biodiversity oonthese Islands that currently proliferate through the Haff due to increasing council drainage interventions that are the source and the knot of discord generated by different political ideologies in Port Obal and Aviarium cities.

Nevertheless the treasure left by the Normans is still there,

where the Normans left it, we are to assure you.

Question is: Who will be the lucky one to find this Norman Treasure?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE

 

DREAMING TREASURE

 

 

FIRST TRAVELS

 GOLDEN BEACH

 MICHAELA DAYS

 MARSHLAND

 VIKINGS' & NORMANS' WANDERINGS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1 - FIRST TRAVELS

 

 

 

HELLO!, my name is Titus Economicus.

I like to dream about treasures.

I indeed want to tell you about this Norman treasure, but first let me talk about my school days, when I studied in Aviarium city. ( See map). To follow my narrative you should time to time search on the maps annexed.

 

I remember, during my last year-term in Aviarium's High School, I used to go hitch hiking with some friends who also decided to get involved in such a project. We agreed to dress stylish academic garments from Coinbridge University. This kind of apparel was a means and an end. A lift would show up on the first hitch hiking attempt of a harm stretched over the road. Students dressed in academic style presented to their fellow citizens, as unreal Round Table Knights. They were acknowledgeable small gods of easy speech, ironic and mocking attitude, to whom no one should deny anything, to whom all doors should remain open. They would be the future Lawyers and Doctors to whom everyone would sooner later recur. Weighing on their back, centuries of academic tradition should be respected.

Back in History, students would have had a pact with the Devil, were individuals of all kinds of wired things, especially those who had been keen enough to sell their soul to Satan, like Faust and Dorian Grey did, if you ever heard about them.

 

It is taken for granted that students unravel the mysteries of the world, because they study it, or because they are the most free individuals with long enough holidays to ramble around the planet.

Travels are every time a great source of information and experience. Those who are often absent from their home town and their families, or their tighten circle of friends, have

more opportunity to open the limits of their sights and minds. This is because what is new reacts against what is old, forcing this last accepting its innovations.

All this was happening long before, me and Michaela ( my girlfriend ), knew about the treasure, or even acquainted one each other.

So, I used to leave the beaded-iron-dark-green-grid – the fence around my school – when Spring started creating some desire of freedom. Why on earth did I have to learn one Language, one Religion, one History and, most of all, onePolitics!, in addition to all other Sciences, which besides was, among everything else, a task against what, the spirit of any good student contested, although not doing so by totally refusing it. We could accept to learn as many languages and even as many axioms we were supposed to learn, even if axioms start by teaching not to argue, in the first place. However, to be successful in our future lives it became necessary to take languages and axioms by heart.

 

During my life as a student, I lived in a shared house – a cottage with doors and windows all the time very well maintained and painted, in a street by the High School. The Landlady outstanding for her waxed floor, and, alas!, if her guests or even her children, put at shoe or a toe, out of carpets inside ways!

To reach our rooms, we had to endeavour through a narrow corridor with access to a staircase, covered by a red plastic carpet.

Our rooms were a sort of tiny little closets which walls leaned to some divans, tables and chairs. At the top of the stairs, in between rooms, the common wardrobe.

By noon, we stood at the school's gate, shaking our heads, nodding, looking at the sad marks obtained in the tests assessed and delivered by our teachers – or cogitating about having been invited during lesson to approach the blackboard. Beautiful object was, no doubt, that black-heavy-slate attached to the wall, looking moreover like a sad night rather than an object made of stone. It was a sort of consolation prize after the small framed slate that we carried along with manuals in Primary School: instead of transporting it, we were, thereby it, carried on during lessons.

 

After school, by noon, I went home for lunch where I could immediately feel the habitual chickpea-soup-ill-fated smell.

Sitting at the table, eating the bloody chickpea-soup and listening to the news, as Radio Renaissance was all the time tuned up throughout the building. Portobello's news service was usually concerned, about events that just happened to occur abroad. This was followed by a comedy of the preference of our hostess, a woman of dried breasts and feelings who boasted her guests to be anaphylaxis, well treated, very clean and tidy. We were a sort of pets, entrusted by our stupid mums to others of the same resemblance, who, in turn, entrusted us to our teachers.

Our readings and hobbies contained affinities to some techniques used in treasure discovery and excavations, so, as to operate on firm land and underwater, such as the use of diving technique using bottled oxygen and mask.

In my Grammar School year 8, by remarkable coincidence, the nine subjects that comprised the curriculum for that year, were ministered by nine different young female teachers. In the awakening of sexuality, spending the whole day listening to beautiful, well dressed masters, chattering about numeracy and literacy was, indeed, very exciting. Staring all day turning our eyes to the knees of some less prudish young governesses, or to be lucky enough to glimpse the panties' colour of some less careful, was taken by all students of class, much more attractive than to follow their chatter. So, it happened often that sit number one in class portfolio, usually occupied by Adam, was the same way, often, disputed at the Golden Buttons' Game, if not through playground fist fights.

But, at the end of the day, our mums were, as a rule, always happy enough with the rough C marks we could grab from the greedy hands of our teachers.

 

When I started hitch-hiking, wearing academic cap and gown, I was already somehow showing a quite beardy face. I was an enough old big prick and decided to temporarily swap the company of my usual co-Science companions for the most loquacious and intellectual colleagues of Arts and Literature. When in the last two years of my high-school days, I choose to move to a different guest house; the time I spent in the path I had to walk, after leaving the new residence to get to school, was longer and passing through the city centre.

This allowed me to keep tracking my companions even further in the way, when returning from school, leaving them at their homes' door and continuing the journey in the company of some other ones, until, finally, I reached home myself. The stores had not yet closed, cafés were filled with customers, and I frequently preferred to delay in such environment rather than going boring under the dim light atmosphere coming from the skylight of my bedroom.

Not that often this wasn't the sole solution to redeem my laziness, when I entertained myself drawing maps of far exotic lands, giving special attention to the scraping shape of the sea coast or lacustre lines, using Indian ink to pop out in relief the more characteristic details.

It was by this time of my life that I resolved to begin, consciously, start travelling round the country. By the finalists' tour date, me and my colleague Jonathan Euphrazius, we rather fancied to travel on our own, to the unknown and sleepy city of Ullipseya, ( the city of Ullysses ). After duly cherish at the city's centre, and try out its memorable city's centre Lift and Subway, we made acquaintance with two Spanish girls outside a Hotel. The chicks showed up well on time. Immediately seduced by our magic cloaks, right under our dolmens they accommodated and settled under our embrace. Ullipseya is a quite beautiful city but, as well offering us two nice guapas, it was a hit! During those days we visited the best places in the city, either walking down the main routes, or, climbing and descending alleys on its mysterious neighbourhoods, listening to the city's best folk singers, listening to the Fado, eating and drinking in the best typical city restaurants and taverns.

 

It also happened that one of my frequent stops was the city of Lehrida. I have some friends in this town whom I use to meet, just for acquiring some quiet motionless ideas, each time I return from my travels, or just when I feel like in the need of a bit of philosophic discussion. Although these friends are not any kind of intellectual blokes, instead, they prefer to have some drinks and sing the Blues, or other countryside urban traditional songs. It happens often we ended up evenings waiting the dawn while striking our viols and guitars. Most of the time was spent at T-Rex King Pena's home, light hearted and cheerful artist from the 60's who spent the days drinking frequent shots of whisky and playing electric guitar, with what he prepared himself for the band's rehearsals. These could extend until late at night, especially when it required the intervention of the iconoclast, say, sonoplasta or sound man, Mr Pine Hero, generally integrating circuits in other already previously integrated ones. The contracts for the band were provided by show house manager Mr. Tom Neck, an enthusiast on Progressive Bands.

This playhouse had three different floors, with a Coffeeshop on ground floor, ballroom, tea house on first floor and Casino on top floor. The tea area was especially adequate to organize meetings or simply was a good place for isolation and study. It contained a small library with volumes of literary discoveries relating to lands and other holdings in Africa and on the far Est Asian lands, aside the complete works of Verne and Dumas. This was where I merged Science and Fantasy and studied old maps, redrawing and memorizing them, however just taking a first glimpse of what could be the utility of such a hobby. I was just a little fellow overwhelmed by Art and Literature.

 

*

 

Out of record: the implementation of any artistic activity requires an artist to live intrinsically from it. Any other activity becomes tedious even when material aspects of life, depend on it. To survive, man, carries out activities, in most cases, completely out of his original goals. I mean, the man who spiritually minds, i.e., the man whose goal is to create, however not the Creation which exclusively consist in maintaining the existence of the specie. This activity has essentially an animal origin. Animals engage in intercourse only because nature tells them so, without however finding the beauty of sexual act. Religion seem to have little or nothing to add to the point, since they only favour the missionary's position .

 

Sexual act between man and woman, closes aesthetic shapes that society tolerates and that are shown through Arts, like Painting and Cinema, although sometimes these arts and sense of beauty can be ill-handled or ill-marketed. But the beauty of sex can, nevertheless, be appreciated outside these commercial reproduction. Say, like in front of a mirror, following an appropriate procedure.

Please start by stripping yourself naked! Now, look at yourself in front of an enough large mirror. Enjoy watching your face, your breasts, your gender. Turn profiling. You must, of course, appreciate your profile, because if you don't, your personality is diverted from itself. You think you like other profiles rather than yours …

Until you love yourself, it may happen you love nobody else. Self-esteem is essential to love. Love is all the times a way of surviving, sometimes the most important one. You may have money, own a house, be married and have children, car and a nice job. While you constantly complain that all that is yours, as if they were your property, meaning, when you repeatedly mention your wife, your son, your car, your money – in the same way, other people will be forced to share your attitude. What I really want to say is that your wife, to me, has no name, if you don't call her by her name when you talk about her, either in her presence or absence, I dare not to say you talk about Kelly or Mary, just as few as Mark's wife or John's wife. I understand that you are depersonalizing your wife. Sorry to say.

 

In her turn, 'your' wife, also reawakening depersonalizing you: my husband, my man, my Mike, are part of jargon expressions of today's small bourgeois talk-talk. Now, I can tell who you are when I eventually listen to such kind of expressions. I will not believe you, nor your wife, neither your children!

You will be able to contest my statement with all the philosophies that knowledge can enclose, if, by chance, you are an educated person. But, if it happens that your daughter falls in love for me, ( as an Artist, of course ), you will not forgive her so easily, by disrupting your heritage. If me and her decide to live together with no official marriage, or by any means at all, even she has already reach adulthood, you will not give up compromising and get away to convince both of us to marry at least civilly, once about religion, you don't care too much, a.s.o., blah, blah, blah …

 

And you will even get your intentions achieved, because perhaps your daughter she is not as brave as she thinks and she is completely alienated by the bad paternal education you gave her. It seems, even, to have happened that you were, in a recent phase of your life, in love with your daughter, and vice-versa, was it not? You bloody jealous dear-daddy-oh! …

The ladette-girl goes to school to learn about Numeracy and Literacy, Costumes and Fashion; mum has shown her some books that shed light on peculiar subjects; that sex and the pill should only be tried after the wedding and all other contraceptives methods fail by many as a certain percentage, and that the 'temperature method' is the one valid once it looks the most moral of all, makes laddets have many children and also makes people going to Heaven when they die. However, evidence shows that, most of times, best contraception method is to have a glass of water instead of ...

 

... and, at the end of the day, there she comes, your little girl, poor thing, asking me to explain what you should have already explained her for long, taking me simultaneously by her father, her brother, her lover, and who knows what else! Oh yes, my lovely doves, as long as you keep believing the sacrosanct wisdom of Mum and Dad, it's ascertain that you will marry soon and arrange hubby, home and loads of babies. I wish you all, the best!

 

***

 

At home, a composite of varied sounds and silence, returned. The sound of the wind caressing the foliage of trees throughout the yard. Birds chirping quietly. Blackbird will keep singing until late in the rainy afternoon, leaving in the air a dull light of an overcast grey sky. The lady next door opens the door on top of the stairs, coming down stairs hitting her clogs on the steps, singing a malicious chorus song: a mix of Jazz and Gregorian chant. In the backyard little more is heard. Chickens numbed with boredom lining up on their perches, getting closer one to each other, necks under their wet and pasty feathers. The dog curled up inside his hut. The cat stalks without any opinion. On this side of the house, where the clock works and the nib groans, is the road, the neighbouring houses and the front building. Modern buildings with large balconies over the street, usually uninhabited. Cars pass hooting on the curve-corner of street. Drivers are mere plastic figures sitting behind the wheel. They leave a void and a silence between each shifting gears to disappear in the next corner, down the road.

Beyond the house, multiple backyards. From the main window in the hall I can have a glimpse of a small abandoned handball court. It is an uneven hard gravel enclosure, wooden beaded, rotten and waving, soggy with humidity, that endeavours to keep up, pushed by vegetation tufts and wild spiky herbs covering the audience sits threatening ruined concrete benches. Surrounded by ancient uncoated walls than that of polypodium rhizomes adorning them, the handball court is actually completely abandoned…

During the time the nights turned into shiny mornings, the small young group of trainees, coached and sported throughout Summer. The intense blue sky, the sun, races around the court, jumps, the strong handball shots! Ball here, ball there, around the small area. The attack, the defence, the scores.

 

When I get back home in cold winter afternoons, usually I carry out an operation consisting in moving, from my bedroom to the living room, a heater with infrared resistances and a portable tape recorder, in which I insert a tape of classical music. Then I grab a book, a novel most of the times. The days are starting to be very cold by Christmas Eve. On these days one feels like reading a nice book. Stretch out on the couch and let the time go by until I am called for dinner. The room is hot, the music in Prelude compass and so, there I am, legs stretched and crossed along the sofa. From the street arrives to my ears the sound of latecomers passers-by to collect their motor vehicles, hurried or slow, thoughtful or easy going.

Winter is a tough time for both body and heart, causing people's concern, determining, among other things, the colour of their garments. Although the shop windows and the streets are adorned, Christmas packages are flowery giving magic to the objects they contain and passers-by shoes are brand new, there is more hardness in people's hearts than one might expect from such a season. As in a mental calculation, thus are working their hearts.

 

The Family will meet these days, and trough it, Country & Kingdom. Around their families people gather, discovering their isolation from the rest of planet's families and individuals feel the same repeated rough feeling, revealing how each one's role, ultimately, turns out to be quite so restrict within one's family.

 

These memories refer to interregnum periods between meditations, study trips and some procedures for several countries and continents long before the more contemporary events, related to climate change, occurred on the planet, which are necessary to known if we are in the need to gain a thorough understanding of the conclusions arrived after those vicissitudes came across in our search for the lost treasure in the mud shoals of the Haff, ie, the lakeside area that circum-write the expedition to recover these riches.

 

Once upon a time, by Christmas, I decided travelling to a city in northern France where I would spend Xmas with some French friends whom I had met in a previous summer: a couple of real Britons of robust completion, both blond, nice blue eyes and beautiful white skin not ever captured by sun stroke. I caught a train called the 'Emigrant Train'. 'There goes the Emigrant', someone shouted, planted on the deck of a lost station in the mountains. On that long time ago Xmas, I arrived to a city called Lille, a large industrial city on northern France. However, I barely had chance to know the city.

In addition to having moved to the city suburbs, we, ( me and my French friends ), never got to the city before dark in the evening which arrives early in those regions, that compared with southern countries' soft climate, can almost be considered as Arctic, if you know what I mean. Everyday we used to drive on a road

among the fields, crossing a few urban areas, all with the essential requisites of a well organised society and civil life, from petrol stations open at any time of day and night, to large supermarkets divinely illuminated, before entangling ourselves in the amazing density of road traffic main link to Paris.

 

 

In those days it was a predilection of my friends and other companions, to show and offer for tasting some varieties of beer at an infamous local Brasserie, among domestic and foreign labels. At the third or fourth Gueuse, ( a most famous Belgium beer ), I probably did not know too well what I was speaking about. I was speaking a strange language, possibly placed among Portuguese, Spanish and French languages, that could be called French Geese or, eventually, French Gaulish. The French fellows, as they mixed Cognac with their beer, in order to increase the alcohol percentage, ( already high enough for an eventual tumble to be serious ), started to speak in some French dialect that they never learned at all in their school days. After exemplifying various regional arrangements of speaking their native language, they concluded that French was a language that did not exist at all! and that, in reality, there was only a certain number of ways of speaking it, sufficiently different one from the other, so that it was impossible for native folks from two contiguous geographic regions, to make understand each other, or to understand mutually very poorly and very deficiently. Folks just could talk in their restricted dialect variants, since what, there just were Dialect Variants, not posterior, the Language, not made up after the existence of the Language. Therefore, the Official Language of a country, would be some kind of language prototype invented by scholars and not at all a natural way of speaking ...

 

In this way, I could understand them, however, they could not always understand me. Or, they understood me but I did not always understand them, or, (  never mind ) ... everything depending on the language array chosen by them to communicate with me. In fact, no one was understanding anybody at all. I was saying things like 'j'aime beaucoup de banana, because n'a pas de carosso' meaning ' I like very much bananas because there's no stone inside', or ' la vie est belle mais les femmes dont  cabo d'elle', meaning ' Life is beautiful but women spoil it most of the times'. 

Gorged with Belgium and German beer, we returned home. At home I delighted myself with the plenty  varieties of cheese and sausages it was possible for me to find there. Whatever the time we arrived home, the heating system was continuously switched on, lending a warmth and relaxing environment inside the house. A table for a score of guests, length-guarded by long benches, occupied the bottom of the large living room. There were also chairs of various colours dispersed throughout the compartment.

We, informally sat down at the benches, drank and smoke.

By the end of the year, I briefly visited London. I crossed the Channel together with the philanthropic company of one of the palls of the copins Fench group. All together, our budget was made of a few tens of pounds. We roam through London streets until the dosh wasted completely. Thence, after returning to Lille, I blew to Paris where, I was welcomed back again by other French friends. Some visits to the major museums in the City of Light, solidified my artistic and cultural goals. Some walks along the river Seine repaid me the 'Lost Illusions'. Next I flew from Paris to Rio de Janeiro to meet my brother. Returning, I flew to Zaire, where it was excessive heat and bad working conditions. More recently I travelled to Belgium and Morocco, both of them very exotic countries, believe me. And finally, I went to the Algarve that, some say, is a pretty great nation. What more are you expecting from me, mates?!

 

I still intend to go to Swabian, Turckey,and Sindhia and, why not, Tchina?

To the States and to the USSR, to assess the respective war potential, since stuck as I am between two fires, it's all the time good to know what one can take over one's head.

To the Moon I would much enjoy as well to go. And not just!

Therefore, my friends, here you see me, once again, patiently waiting at this lost roundabout outside my home town, hovering desperately my thumb over the road in order someone give me a lift !

 

 

 

 

However, despite all the contingencies related to travels ( either by hich hiking or using personal or public means of transportation), I stubbornly departed, carrying maps, binoculars, compass and other exploitation artefacts, towards lake Avia or, alternatively, towards Golden Beach with the intention of finding treasures ... ( see maps )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

 

GOLDEN BEACH

 

 

 

GOLDEN BEACH was the place where I studied and defined the necessary paths to achieve successfully extraordinaries expeditions in search of this graceful dreaming treasure left by Normans and Vikings on Haffland.

But these were not just strategic or tactical situations related to such expeditions that I was worried about. There were other philosophic contexts that also afflicted me while visiting Golden Beach.

I could even found in those moments that to write or talk beyond what self- experience can tell, is an act that shows as useful as talking about what we don't know or trying to draw conclusions about matters that were never witnessed or understood.

The experience gained on every day tasks is multiple and diverse, making individuals unique beings each one different from all others, due to imperceptible differences. But the common background that is received by the various human groups, continues unabated in certain periods of History, causing the spread of ideals, mass movements, revolutions and wars.

To describe the processes extending from experience to its reflection, and from this last to the summaries prepared by our own mind, and the actions of independent individuals, or individuals acting in a group ... may, or may not be, the goal of this context.

 

 

To myself, walking through streets and places filled with happy and unhappy people such things are commonplace, they can be part of this story.

 

I walk over the pathways, I see people crossing by, greeting each other more or less formally and I follow unpretentious, looking the gestures so often repeated and forever fixed in the shop windows' glasses open to plazas and streets, such as oil paintings on large canvas as spleens of another world.

Obviously, these strange cogitations that occurred me in Golden Beach, distracted me often from issues related to the pursuit of the Norman treasure, that I promised myself to enterprise the most soon I could. These ruminations of mine were stronger than my own will and, in almost all countries, one can experiment this sensation. Hallucinations, you may call it. That may have been, however, these ramblings stood so relevant in my mind, I never deviated a grain from the main goal of my preliminary studies: the certification and location of the Norman treasure.

 

Urban streets are obviously as well the houses and sideways. Houses are good for almost everything these days: to live, love, work and die. Business houses are placed at the economic fulcrum of all urban centres, from the most devious towns to those situated on a great city centre, all of them having its doors open and shop windows displays quite filled all the time.

Inside, clerks can be spotted with an upright attentive look, behind heavy wooden desks or counters. They move in a small rectangular area in front of inside displays, are slow and meticulous in their gestures, gentle in their manners, polite when greeting, kind.

They are as so, thereby, attending their customers ...

“May I help you sir?”- they use to ask.

 

All this I watched or remembered casually as I sat down at my usual table at a Café that you may as well know, from which windows one can overlook the seashore. At my usual table, while remembering past situations, I entertained myself sketching maps and planting on them

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: PAIS
Lektorat: DGA, LISBON 1987
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 24.05.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-2936-0

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