Tarana and the Island of Immortality

DEDICATED TO ALL TRAVELLERS

INTO THE FUTURE

2011

ISBN Buch 978-3-922800-97-2

ISBN pdf 978-3-86710-024-3

ISBN epub 978-3-86710-022-9

ISBN mobi 978-3-86710-023-6

© Mirapuri-Verlag, Gauting, Germany

Production: Miraprint Offsetdruck, Gauting, Germany

Grafik and Lyrics: Michel Montecrossa

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Phone. 0049 - 89 - 850 87 51

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Prologue

A WORLD-SHATTERING DISCOVERY

In 1999 a new island unexplainably emerged from the Sargasso Sea. The scientific world was never able to agree about how it had formed. When one of the seven expedition teams made a sensational ­discovery that would have seemingly revealed the island’s mystery, the whole area was closed off. Further expeditions were carried out in secret by special military units. The public was told that the island had come into being through a volcanic eruption. Then all reports of the island disappeared from the media and the island was forgotten. The first civilian scientists that had begun studying the island were sworn to silence.

Nevertheless the rumors and speculation continued. Professor Kim, the former leader of the international team of scientists, had found a nearly rotted diary in the niche of a cliff. It had belonged to an English writer by the name of Douglas Goldfield who, according to the notes, had already lived on the island at the end of the 19th Century. In the diary he had described the island’s secret and the fairytale-like story of the island’s queen, Tarana, who ruled there a realm of immortality.

TARANA at the shore near the hut of Douglas Goldfield in the moonlight

Scientists of all disciplines were stirred up in the first weeks about the discovery of the diary, especially because many other ­discoveries on the island seemed to confirm the story that Douglas Goldfield had written nearly one hundred years earlier about his fate, the immortal Tarana, about the island itself and its mysterious future.

Although no one could disprove Goldfield’s words, the ­specialists and scientists remained sceptical. After the military took over the ­further investigations the diary was declared a fake and with it the miracle and the riddle of that island, which was, however, included in the ocean maps as the “Island of Immortality.”

Only Professor Kim, who had found the diary, remained utterly convinced for the rest of his life that the little book was not only ­accurate in every word of its description of another form of reality, but also that it contained a world-shaking revelation about the future of all life.

I had the good fortune of having sought out Professor Kim shortly before his death. That was after many years in which the few hints and theories about the fascinating story of the “Island of Immortality,” which had made their way to the public despite all secrecy, had been occupying and dancing through my often doubting and yet ever-and-again mysteriously enchanted mind. He was over 90-years-old and lived in seclusion in a modest home near Kyoto. As I was led into his room, his face beamed with a graceful smile. His wife, who sat by him in silent attentiveness signalled to me with a simple gesture that had something noble in it to take a seat next to his bed. I had already been told that Professor Kim had lost the ability to speak and only had a short time to live. That I should be chosen, as a stranger, to be present at his moment of parting would have never entered my mind, much less that he would indicate to me to come closer to him. And yet that is what happened. I still feel today the indescribable depth of his eyes and how he slowly turned to his side to pick up a small wooden casket that he then firmly gave over to me with his finely built hands. As he did so his face lit up and he had an expression of happiness in his eyes that seemed to me to announce a new world that is yet to be discovered. He then closed his eyes and left this world. I sat motionless next to the professor’s mortal remains as his wife expressed a silent and moving goodbye and then called a doctor and several relatives and friends. Then the spell broke and I looked at the wooden casket in my hands; upon it stood one word, TARANA, and I knew that Professor Kim had given me Douglas Goldfield’s mysterious book. In that moment I also knew that I was on the trail of the truth and that I should protect and transport the secret of the Island of Immortality.

It is for that reason that, after Douglas Goldfield’s diary entries, I want to tell the story of Tarana and the Island of Immortality. My name is not important. But I will tell you this: We will meet face to face when the things have taken place that are reported by Douglas Goldfield and, more so, Tarana.

Chapter 1

JOURNEY TO AN UNKNOWN DESTINATION

As I, Douglas Goldfield, began a sea journey with destination unknown on September 17th, 1899, I could not have dreamt in the slightest into which truly unknown dimensions I would plunge, nor the greatness of the destination I was to reach. Until that day, the unknown had reached my darkly-stained, massive wooden desk in the form of reports and treatises, which were, for the most part, dry and tedious and riddled with technical Latin phrases. Texts, which I had procured in search of something fascinating and entertaining to read. In a word, I was a writer with the doubtful good luck of working for a prestigious geographical journal, for which I was to magically transform academic texts each month into sensational essays. As I had a certain talent for drawing and had preserved, somewhere within me, the dreams of a child, I was able, in my English editorial office, betwixt globe, spyglass and world maps and with the help of a fine pipe to dream up truly marvelous tales. Stories, intended for the bored nobility and the eternally noble-acting financial world, serving mainly as a bit of reading for those of society. My goodness, what a fine career! I consoled myself by thinking that I had not been born for true adventure and that the Creator had therefore given me the gift of adventurous dreams. How else was I to bare this eternally unchanging life between editorial work and the redbrick houses in their uniform rows, dozens and dozens of redbrick houses with geometric gardens before them. Well, one often sets up one’s own life’s philosophy without asking fate of its opinion. For that reason I could quite harmlessly – accompanied by some palpitations – accept an invitation which was extended to me by a noble who had read my pseudoscientific children’s stories for the pleasure of something different. It concerned a journey to the Sargasso Sea in order to carry out a diving expedition without any particular location, using a newly-developed diving sphere. It was hoped that one would be able to view some of the wonders of the deep sea and, at the same time, to find financial help for later scientific experiments. My role was to be that I should write an exciting and entertaining account of the journey.

In writing my fantastic tales, I often felt a secret joy. Yet I now had a different feeling in expectation of the coming journey: the unknown took hold of my heart and made it beat faster and faster.

With this feeling I made off on the 14th of September for the Northwood Forest where my sister, Margaret Goldfield, had a horse ranch. Margaret was quite the opposite of myself: I was a dreamer and an armchair philosopher and she a wonderful realist who was practically always with her horses and spent nothing more than the most necessary time in taking care of unavoidable household chores.

During the three-hour carriage journey, various memories passed before my inner eye. It was raining as it can only rain in England. The atmosphere of a world between two worlds. And the whispering voices of ghosts. I caught myself sliding off into new tales, dream worlds and then pulled myself back into reality with a jolt.

Indeed, it was just these sorts of dreams which Margaret, with her fine sarcasm, could expose and thereby, with a raw sincerity, bring me down to earth with both feet on the ground.

“What you’re missing are true adventures,” she said to me laconically as I had just told her a fine tale. In fact, it was her sober commentaries which helped me the most in making my writings and scientific editorial work more believable.

And now I had before me a truly adventurous journey and I wished to invite her along and I was indeed proud of the fact that I now had something true to show her. Yes, Margaret was able to sober up my imaginings which I had presented to her in fiery tones with a simple: “Hmm.” In that moment three hours of carriage dreams dissolved.

“You’re impressed by nothing, you realistic monster!” I said, ready for a fight.

“I’m so impressed,” she said in a sweet tone. “For, after all, traveling about in a barge full of decadent snobs, shuttling about in the ocean, boring oneself to tears seems to me truly a pleasure to die for.”

I was speechless and yet she condescendingly continued and said: “But I shall come along brother heart, for someone must hold you on the planks when your spirit for adventure goes overboard for lack of true adventure and, most likely, your poor armchair-trained body as well.”

I was quite impressed by her esoteric care and at the same time absolutely decided not to allow my lively joy, which had not stopped for a moment, to be disturbed.

“At least there could be a terrible storm so it wouldn’t be so boring for you!” I said bitingly, unknowing what portentous words I had spoken.

And so, three days later Margaret and I went aboard the Mayflower II, an imposing expedition ship, which, with its huge paddle wheels and decorated sails was to travel in direction of the Sargasso Sea.

I was pleased at Margaret’s threatening prophecy regarding the entertainment that awaited us on the Mayflower expedition only held true to a small extent. No doubt those traveling with us were experts in the boredom of high society and had perfected it. But it did not remain that way.

After all a large ship is something of a microcosm and it brings those aboard together but also takes away their masks, at least some of them.

Margaret and I could amuse ourselves famously imagining how Lord Snowdown must have attempted, each evening, with his long, trembling legs, to squeeze into one of the Mayflower’s small bunks. Or the stout banker, Mr. Upperpretty, who, after an enormous meal, would dream that the round window of his cabin was the eye of an enormous fish, which intended to consume him! Or the Lady Swine, red as a lobster, who understood perfectly how to articulate her unfortunate name so that it sounded something like “wine” and who generally came into conflict with the tightly measured-out planks of the ship’s deck which left so little room for distinguished strutting.

“Shocking!” was her constant commentary – “shocking” in every shade, tone and mode of expression.

Lady Swine was Margaret’s favorite conversational partner; she had always had a liking for true outsiders. “Lady Swine,” she revealed at the onset of our expedition as I was admiring the wood paneling of our cabin, “is not of noble origins.”

“How can you know that, Margaret?” I questioned as I went over to the brass work of the cabinetry and the portal window. I very much loved the golden magic of that metal on my spy glass and on my globe stand. Yet here, in what was for me the new world of a ship, wood and metal achieved an artistic interplay that gave the place a homey feeling.

Just then I noticed that Margaret had not continued speaking but had simply let me sink into my brass dreams.

A sarcastic smile played upon her full lips, a smile which was usually the prelude to a devastatingly sobering commentary. Given that I had been silently daydreaming there was some hope that she was setting her sights on someone else.

“She smokes cigars,” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“Swine.”

“Lady Swine?”

I was astonished and I didn’t believe a word.

“And she drinks rum like a fish.”

The last remaining illusion regarding the behavior of the elegant noble dissolved into nothingness.

I laughed: “Now you’re fibbing. What strange fantasies you have, little sister.”

A dull sound from the gangway reached my ear as if a sack of flour had been dropped.

“Too much rum,” Margaret remarked dryly before I could say anything. I looked at her in disbelief. Her eyes had such a derisive spark that I sprang to the door and had a look into the gangway. There I indeed saw Lady Swine pulling herself up after having fallen down the short but steep stairs from the deck. As she stood up there was no doubt that she was not sober. To the contrary, she was quite solidly drunk. “Shocking!” I heard her screech.

I too was shocked and softly pulled the door shut after having seen that she had not been injured.

That was the beginning of our journey and in the course of time that sound lost its unsettling character as it was regularly accompanied by a many-shaded “shocking!”

I was also no longer shocked by the fact that Margaret and Lady Swine disappeared to the deck nearly every evening to smoke a cigar. I only hoped that our stately Captain Thunderbolt with his impressive moustache, his decorated uniform, his bear’s voice and his sparkling eyes was also a real captain and that Professor Pickering, the inventor of the diving sphere with which one could admire the wonders of the ocean, hopefully knew what it was he had invented.

As we all met in the salon they all seemed perfectly noble, scientific and reliable in their snobbiness, thank God, so that I was able to regain my confidence.

We had a few days to get to know one another and get fired up about the moment when the diving sphere would go into action; after all I was not the only one who was ever-and-again tiptoeing around the dully shimmering wonder of science with an uneasy feeling, on the one hand excited, on the other, terrified.

I often ran into the well-to-do Scottish pair, the McCormics, who for reasons unknown wished to involve themselves in deep sea investments – they would suddenly stop talking and we would exchange awkward smiles as if they had not just been inspecting the diving sphere. And also Lord Dunhill with his French girlfriend – supposedly of royal decent – or Mr. Bankroft from the insurance company bearing the same name were regularly in the vicinity of the diving sphere.

Yet the experiences within the closed society of landlubbers was, thank God, not the only occurrence on our journey to the Sargasso Sea. After we had already sighted whales, we were joined on the third day by an enchanting school of dolphins which expressed such a beauty of movement and perfection in their jumps that I came to realize how wrong our civilized and weak bodies have become. Margaret, who was enjoying the moment with me, held her face into the salty breeze with her eyes closed and said, “their jumps are like a language and the shimmer of their bodies like music.”

Then she turned and looked at me with a smile through her wind-tossed hair: “We merely think that we are the pinnacle of the creation. I believe that a lot of animals are much more developed than we are and are just waiting for us to become less primitive.”

“But,” I wanted to begin a sentence.

“Just look at them yourself,” she interrupted, knowing well that I intended to take off on a theoretical flight, the sort of flight she was accustomed to bring back to earth.

“You have to look, my dear. Look and stop constantly thinking. Thinking makes one blind.”

What can one say to an emotion-realist? I suddenly felt boring and dry and I noticed that during the entire course of our one-sided conversation I had no longer seen the dolphins.

It gave me a lot to think about.

And so we both looked out in silence, dreamily and deep in thought, upon the endless variation of the ocean’s surface and the golden-pink shimmer on the towering cumulus clouds on the horizon. The blue of the sky was saturated with turquoise as the sun descended towards the endless sea.

I became more quiet and decided to finally learn from Margaret.

“The secrets of nature cannot be discerned through an analysis of their processes or through external observation of their various forms; what is required, rather, is a total, respectful feeling and sensing of the deep and eternal love in all created things.”

Those were the words I wrote down late into the night.

Chapter 2

WONDERFULLY SAVED

On the seventh day of our journey we reached the Sargasso Sea, and our Captain, Thunderbolt, called all of us together to discuss our situation and to inform us that thanks to fine weather and calm seas we should begin on the following day with the first diving attempts.