The Return of the Sun

   “Objetos arqueologicos,” read the sign on the box.

The crack team of special forces of the Colombian Army closed in. One fighter was dead then another; the soldiers gained the truck and surrounded it.

The remainder of the narcotics gang fled in their pickups, heading towards the jungle.

     The box contained sacred objects of the Colombian people;  sacred gold objects, of the ancient Muiscan culture, looted from the state gold museum in Bogota, several months ago.

     Virtually priceless for their cultural value, they were looted for their worth as raw metal; gold was at an all time high on the world metal markets and governments were scrambling to hoard gold to bolster their currencies.  Melted down on the open market the gold would have fetched a good price.

     Capitan Hermano Torrado prised open the lid with his commando knife. He needed to check this was in fact the real thing, not a trick by the retreating drug gang.

He was a compact man, dark wiry hair, with the characteristic features of his people. As a Muisca he had been given the honour of leading the recovery team.

     As the lid splintered off, he encountered a cloth bundle and carefully unwrapped it. Inside were flat gold figures, toccos, cut from gold sheets as if they were pastry with thin rolled gold to delineate their features such as eyes, nose and mouth. Stick like arms held close to the body, again in thin rolled gold, then they culminated in breadstick fingers pointing back up towards the face. Each figure had a headdress of rolled gold rods, arrayed along the brow like reed canes sticking upwards. The legs tapered together to form a grip. And amongst these figures was the crowning glory, a sacred gold raft, and on it a chief, his warrior aristocrats, priests and rowers. These objects were meant to be carried in procession, ancestor figures of great power, linking the present to the past.

He barked into his radio in Spanish ,

     “It is all complete; two narcos dead. We are returning now.” He gave a signal and the team headed back to the helicopter.

     Lifting off they flew over the dense jungle of the Muisca. The pointed hills below contained the sites of ancient towns and villages now covered in dense forest.

These had been his people. Some did remain, in an isolated pocket cut off from mainstream society. His family, although Muisca, had some generations back blended in to the plains society but they still had ancestral traditions that directly linked them to their ancient past.

     At Christmas his grandmother

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: alastair macleod
Bildmaterialien: alastair macleod; "woman guerilla", royalty free photo purchased from dreamstime.
Lektorat: alastair macleod
Übersetzung: title typeset in ankehand and classical
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 11.02.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-1236-2

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
“A long time ago this land was peaceful," he began, " the ideas were peaceful. There were two gods, the sun and the earth. There was equilibrium. There was not capitalism, communism, liberalism. There was the sun god and there was tierra madre, the father sun and mother earth; there was balance"