# 007

THE IMAGE OF THE SOLDIER'S LETTER was on my notebook's screen, defying me to read characters written by the trembling hand of a dying man. I opened a notepad in another window, so I could take notes while reading it. Actually, it seemed to be part of a letter, perhaps one of the last pages. I hadn't noticed other pages on the body when I was in the cave. They were probably covered by dust or had fallen somewhere else. The only page, in Arabic language, went more or less like this:

"...and I don't know exactly what happened to her. The confusion was great, since the fight begun in January, 1842. The last time I saw her, she was with the other women, away from me as an impossible love should be. Such a British lady would never marry someone like me, a blood so mixed that not even I am sure if I am half British, half Egyptian, half Turkish, half Jew, half Indian, and half something else. There are too many half to make myself anything whole. But I know she loved me. I could feel it.

"Now that doesn't matter anymore. I am dying and will probably meet her soon. It is better to die here in this cold cave, than out there in the hands of some tribesmen. A young man I met -- I think he was a writer -- once told me part of a poem he was writing: 'When you're wounded and left, on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out, to cut up your remains, just roll on your rifle, and blow out your brains, and go to your God, like a soldier.' At least in this cave I don't have to do that. I can die peacefully and buried.

"Wounded as I am, it seems easier to write in the language I learnt from my mother. I am not sure why I am writing this. She is also gone anyway. And now we were defeated beyond compassion. Pottinger, Elphinstone, they are all dead as well. The last one I saw alive was Dr. Brydon, the army surgeon. He met me laying on the ground with the bridle of my horse still in my hand. There was nothing he could do for myself, so I urged him to take my horse and go. 'Take my horse and God send you may get to Jalalabad in safety', I told him. I knew his name, but he left without even asking mine.

"Then a young man riding a camel came from nowhere and found me. When he saw me, he jumped from his camel and made the animal to kneel down, so he could manage to carry me to the saddle. The camel already had a heavy load, he left in this cave where he brought me to. He told me he was the servant of an archeologist, Sir Blackmore, but he was not sure if he was among the hundreds of civilians who died in the past weeks. His master gave him the mission to save some old objects and specially an old manuscript in a metal box, which I've adopted as my last pillow.

"He said the manuscript was written many years ago by a man from Damascus, whose name was Bishr Ibn Al Sirri. That kind servant brought me to this cave, and left to go search for his master. Not without first making a fire and confiding, in brief, the contents of the manuscript. According to him, it is all about..."

At this point the letter ended. At least the only page I had taken a picture of. Before coming to Afghanistan I had read something about the Afghan wars, specially about the terrible defeat in the nineteenth century when, from a multitude of thousands of soldiers and civilian, only one man had managed to arrive in Jalalabad alone and alive. A doctor called Dr. Brydon. To me this showed the soldier's report to be genuine. Now my journalist sense of duty was pushing me on to find out who was Bishr Ibn Al Sirri.

# 006 Click here to read from the beginning. The postings are in a reverse chronological order.


"WE WILL KILL EVERY AMERICAN!" After last night's "Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong, these were the first and harsh words waking me up in that not yet sunny morning in Islamabad. I was sure it was not Louis Armstrong's voice, nor they were part of the original song. The shout came through the open window of my hotel room, only one store above the street level. I took a careful look there, only to see what could become a bloody battlefield gathering a few feet below.

Many foreign journalists were in that hotel and the crowd knew that was a perfect place for a manifestation. The man who probably woke me up with his shout, did it again, now with renewed strength and addressed to me and the other journalists and photographers, who were already positioning their cameras. "Write! Write! Because of America, we are killing our own people!", shouted him again.

You could feel the tension in the air. Hundreds of people, some carrying guns, shouting slogans and following a group that seemed to be carrying a dead body. Mourners of somebody killed by the police the day before, in another manifestation. Now they were venting their rage against Pakistan authorities for sheltering American soldiers in their war against Afghanistan. Fortunately the police managed to contain the crowd and they turned left in their way to a Mosque nearby.

It took me some time to put my thoughts together and get back to my original plans for that morning. The first thing I did was to connect my notebook to the Internet and upload the files with the pictures I had taken in the cave to a safe backup service in the Web. When you travel like I do to different places, you never know where someone will decide to 'borrow' your notebook, camera, or anything you have. Later on I would learn that had been a wise decision. By them I did not know what was in the manuscripts, where they came from, and where they would take me. Perhaps the dead soldier could tell in that letter. So, lets read it.

# 005 Click here to read from the beginning. The postings are in a reverse chronological order.


IF IT WERE NOT FOR THE SOLDIERS who came back to that kindergarten battlefield, by now I would be history. After being responsible for starting the first civil war in the post-war era in Afghanistan. But the incident was good enough to give us time to leave that area. I lost my GPS, that vanished in some boy's hand during the discussion, to be used as his game until the batteries run out or he finds someone to exchange it for food. But I kept my discs with digital photographs, and could not avoid laughing how I did this. Even now it is hard to me to believe that, as it is hard to you to believe in anything I am writing here. Sometimes I think this has been a dream or you would take me as a kind of Forrest Gump. Anyway, his mamma was right when she said that life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

Yes, I know you have many questions about this and that. Let me explain few things to you while we get back to Jalalabad. From there we have to travel to Kabul and then to Islamabad, where I made my little headquarter in a hotel room. The trip will be long and there will be not many things worth to describe along the way. Just ruins, corpses laying by the side of the road and corpses walking by the side of the road. So, while we travel we can talk and time will go by faster.

You might be asking if I know any html to build a page or publish this story, don't you? Ok, I know part of it. FrontPage knows the rest. And if my page is cool, it is because I am using the same html code from my original page at www.tora-bora.blogspot.com, where I would like to be, but I can't. After I published my first words there, their servers were hacked and my password does not work anymore. It would be easier to publish this thing there, in their automatic publishing blogger, without having to create a new page every time.

Any other question? Oh, yes, how can I, being a journalist, bury my led, instead of writing in the inverted pyramid style and giving right in the first paragraph the whole story? I have to confess I am also a writer, with one book published, a second one being revised by the publishers and a third one with its last pages just coming out from my brain. In this case, I can't give all the information right away, because I don't have all the information. I am still working on the manuscripts, but from what I saw I can assure you that it is a life-changing and life-challenging text.

Perhaps you would like to ask how come a journalist doesn't want to publish a huge scoop because it will ruin his reputation, right? Be sure that the best stories are still unpublished by the newspapers, because they too are companies who have interests in selling ads and want to please their shareholders. This is not the case, but just to tell you that we all have interests in this or that and many times we do what is against the common sense to preserve our interests.

Or do you believe in everything you read? Know what? We've been so used to believe in the power and wisdom of newspapers, radio, TV etc., that Internet came to teach us a little discernment. Or do you believe in everything you find on the Web? You are better start filtering it as you should when you read the news or watch TV. As a writer, I know the power of the word and I can publish a lie that sounds like true and a truth that sounds like a hoax. Any one can do that. So, lets put our little neurons to work before we drink of any water that is being offered to us.

I am glad there are no more questions, because I've already arrived in my hotel room and the first thing I want to do is to take a good shower. A shower seems to take away the dust and the guilty, doesn't it? But in my case it seemed inefficient to take away the memories from the battle field. So I stretched my broken body on my bed while Louis Armstrong's was singing in my notebook a MP3 version of 'What a Wonderful World'. Yes, he was the first one to sing the virtues of the WWW. Listening and arguing!

Hey, mister! Back there I could see trees of green and red roses too, but those were more easy to find on cemeteries. Where they don't bloom for me and you. Sure there were the skies of blue and clouds of white, but where is the rain? The bright blessed day and the dark sacred night were just a succession of bombing and fear. With no colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky. Sure, I saw friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, but none of them was saying 'I love you'. Perhaps just asking each other where they could find a VCR to buy. If they had money. Yes, I could hear babies crying, but I don't believe many mothers will watch them grow. They have seen too much, more than I'll never know. And I think to myself, what a [not so] wonderful world!

I was entertaining a thought that the answer for a wonderful world could be in the manuscripts, when Louis Armstrong stopped singing and the dark room was inundated by the most beautiful and blue light I'd ever seen. Was that what the English language describes as feeling blue? No. The Windows in my notebook decided to crash and bring out that blue screen, painting blue the darkness of my room and of my thoughts. So I decided to close my eyes and sleep. In the morrow I would think about the picture I took from the soldier's letter. It was too late to deliver it anyway.

# 004 Click here to read from the beginning. The postings are in a reverse chronological order.

First published on December 31, 2001

THERE WAS THIS OTHER GROUP of Afghan tribesman armed with Russian guns and three photographers with them, two of them working for a NY newspaper and the other one for a news agency in Tokyo. When I arrived they were trying not to give them his discs containing digital photographs.

I am not sure what those tribesman -- I should call them tribeskids -- wanted. It seemed they had to ransack someone to have a story to tell when they got home. They were very young, perhaps the oldest one was 16 or 17 years old, and quite nervous. If there is one thing that scares me is being assaulted by a non-professional, and those high-graders who fled before they were taken to a kindergarten were not professionals at all! They were too young to know how to count up to "three" before shooting. They would do it in the "two" or even in the "one"!

After about 45 minutes the American soldiers came. Not like in those movies, when the cavalry arrives and the enemy runs away, I am afraid to say. The dead soldier in my cave would have had a greater influence on them. They just looked at what the kids were doing at us and one of them said, "Uh?" and the other answered "Uh, Uh". And walked away. Not of much help, considering the photographers had already given their discs with the digital photos that were in them.

It seemed I would be next and I didn't want to loose the pictures I had for nothing in this world. I still had my GPS in my hand and did the best I could to look at it as it was the most precious thing I had. It worked. They made a circle around me and had to point their guns up or down to come closer and see that little tech wonder.

The techniques from Dale Carnegie's book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' I had just read -- ok, I confess I read those books, specially old ones -- would save the day. With the help of one of them as an interpreter, I explained in Arabic how you can find your enemy using a GPS. If I had taken a handful of that, they would gladly exchange their guns for them.

Because I had just one, they started arguing at who should keep it, 'I am the oldest' and 'Do you know who my father is?' and that kind of stuff. And now they had walked back widening the circle around me and were pointing their guns to each other and yelling like crazy. Guess who was in the midst of the circle? You guessed right, I was! I closed my eyes and expected for the worst. But don't be afraid. If I am writing this in the last day of the year, it means that was not the last day of my life. How I escaped? Next year I tell you. Which I hope, for you and for myself, will be better than this one that ends.

# 003 Click here to read from the beginning. The postings are in a reverse chronological order.

First published on December 29, 2001

HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO FIND ANYTHING in a dark cave in Tora-Bora, Afghanistan? Neither I did before. Touching the ground, I found dust, stones and bones before I could feel the flashlight back in my hand. Fortunately it was not broken and I had light again. But I had to hurry if I wanted to take pictures of the things I found in the cave. Or do you think I am crazy of leaving that place with my pockets full of old little statues, my arms fashioned with bracelets, a crown on my head (no, I am not sure there was a crown in one of those bags) and an old book under my arm? Oh! Yes, the book... lets get back to the book.

It had been very carefully wrapped inside the box, with some kind of cotton stuff mixed with hair (camel's? kashmir?). The cover was made of wood, covered with reddish-brown leather. It was embossed with a double cross in a circle, which was inside a square. Leather thongs fastened the leather to the wood by what seemed to be large nails. The leather was all cracked, but still in one piece and in much better shape than the soldiers belt. Leather artifacts manufacturers should see that. Well, there was a little part of it missing near the bottom corner on the back cover. Perhaps somebody did that when he tried to take off the code bar label. Ok, sorry, just kidding. :)

Hold by the leather covered wood, where dozens of pages of parchment in much better shape than the skeleton. At least they were not falling apart. I said dozens, but I believe there were more than one hundred pages there, some with little holes that appeared to be there before anything was written, because the writer had carefully avoided them. In some places the parchment had been repaired, but it also seemed that had happened before it was written. Don't ask me what the parchment was made of, because I am not an archeologist. It seemed like a kind of cloth, thin and resistant. It was written in Arabic characters and it seemed readable, if you give a discount for obscure expressions that probably made sense when it was written.

I had two digital cameras and good lens for close-up, so I started taking pictures of the pages, one by one, without reading them right in the spot. I had to save time and when I finished it, I realized I had been there enough time to worry about what the soldiers would ask. So the last thing I thought -- some kind of panic took me -- was to look into the bags with the art objects. For some strange reason, before leaving I put the book back in the box and the soldier's skull back the better I could where had been his neck. Perhaps in the deep of my soul I felt sorry for that guy (you would too... he could have been your grand-grandparent's friend!) and wanted to be sure he had a decent burial. If I could not bury him, I would push a big rock to the cave's entrance.

To get out was as blindfold experience as getting in. I saw the stone I wanted, pushed it against the cave's entrance -- it seemed to be made for it! -- and took the GPS from my bag to record my position when an Afghan tribesman appeared. Them other five jumped right in front of me with those old guns pointed at my chest. They uttered words I could not understand (must be some local dialect) and then pushed me to what seemed to be my final fate. Would they shot me? I didn't believe, because the American soldier should be close. We had not walked much when I had another surprise.

# 002

NO, IT WAS NOT ALI BABBA's CAVE, I am not Alladin and the cave was not large enough to hold forty thieves. And it was not filled with gold and precious stones. On the other hand, there were not those traps you see in the movies and I was not wearing Harrison "Indiana Jones" Ford's hat. There was a man laying there, with his head resting on a kind of metal box the size of a computer CPU, if I can use that to give you the idea. Well, it was not really a man, but what was left of him. It was more than just an skeleton, because for some strange reason the skin was still on his face and he was dressed.

When I saw that body, it reminded me the bodies I saw in the Palermo catacombs (yes, you can find some links about it doing a search in www.google.com). The man was dressed like a nineteen century soldier and I could not see many details of his trousers, because of the dust and the limited light of my flashlight. Notwithstanding, I could see a piece of paper on his body, near what had been his right hand. It seemed to be a letter he wrote before he died and it was written in Arabic. When I tried to touch it, I felt the paper would turn into dust, so I decided to take a picture of it and read it latter.

On the opposite side of the cave I saw four big leather bags. They were just pig skins sewed in a way you could carry things in them. My guess is that they used those to transport things on camels. And they had really transported a lot of stuff in those I saw there! The bags were full of art objects, so different in shape and colors that I could not tell their origin. They seemed to be Indian art, perhaps. Or even Afghan. Following my journalist instincts, I did not touch them, but took pictures. Not many, because those things were not intriguing me as much as the metal box under the soldier's skull. So I went after it.

To pull a metal box from under a hundred or so year old skeleton is an easy task. The difficult part of it is to keep the body whole. An archeologist would had cried if he saw the mess I did in that potentially historical site! The first thing that happened, and I should had expected it, was to see the skull rolling away from the body, as if the man had reminded to go look for something and forgot the rest of him behind. Do you want to know if I was afraid? Of being alone in a dark cave with a skeleton in there, a war out there and a skull rolling like crazy? Of course I was! I almost had to borrow the guy's pants to leave that cave clean!

Now I had a beheaded skeleton on one side, a head with big hollow eyes staring at me on the other side, and the metal box waiting for me to open it. Which was not an easy task. It had not a locker or something like that, but they had put some kind of material to seal it. I can't tell whether it was wax, vegetal resin or some kind of mortar. The truth is that years of dry season (Afghanistan had not seem rain for the last three years!) turned that into a thing I could take of with the help of a knife.

You guessed it! The man had a knife attached to his belt and before you could spell Osama-Bin-Laden, I had the knife. And a body that was now in three parts, because there was a kind of emptiness where that man's belly should be. Had him starved unto death? May be. Boy, that body was really falling apart! To take a belt from him without breaking his body in two would had been as impossible as undressing the Statue of Liberty! But now I had a knife and was able to open the CPU size metal box. No, I did not find a hard drive or a mother board inside it. But I found a book.

I carefully took it out from the metal box. Contrary to the letter the man had on his body, the book was in very good condition, as if people had taken good care of it along the years. Which were not few, by what it looked like. From visiting museums around the world I could tell I had something of great value in my hands. I didn't look inside the leather bags, under the objects I could see on the top, to see if there were any jewelry, gold or precious things, but the way things were disposed in the cave -- the bags at one side and the soldier alone with the metal box on the other -- were telling me that, if there was a treasure in that cave, it was that book. I was so astonished that the flashlight fell from my mouth and instantly turned off. I had to find it in the darkness before I could take a good look in that book.

# 001

MY NAME IS ALI KILABAH and I am a journalist from a Middle East country. Ok, it is not my real name, but I had to adopt it for safety reasons. I don't expect you to believe in what you are going to read. It is hard for me to believe in the events and the things I've been studying during the last days. I know many will not think this could be true -- my story, the manuscripts, its words or my opinion and conclusions on them. Anyway, I am publishing this story on the Internet, hoping it can be of help to some.

However, while reading, you will have to suffer my English, which is not my first language. It happened to be written in the book of my destiny that I should be a journalist among a group of foreign journalists that were in Afghanistan just after the war. We were taken to an area were the US planes had dropped tons of bombs in an effort to destroy the caves where Taleban soldiers could be hidden.

That was an effort done by the US Army to show they had nothing to hidden from Middle East journalists like me. Of course the caves they took us to look at had no interest at all. I should had thought it would be like that when the invitation arrived. Even so, it was a long and dangerous trip from Jalalabad in a convoy that could be attacked by Taleban forces or hit by one of those intelligent bombs Americans are so proud of, but that have killed their own soldiers. Besides me, there were journalists from different nations: two American, one from China, three from France, one from Germany and ten others from Middle East countries. In the last moment the journalist from Iraq had his permission denied to come with us. Should I take that as a sign of future attacks against Iraq? I don't know.

After the usual bombing, the US decided to use laser-guided bombs, which they call "thermobaric" weapons or the bunker-busting bomb. It is a high-temperature, high-pressure explosive that uses a new class of fuel-rich explosive in its warhead. The explosive releases energy over a longer period of time than conventional explosives and creates more destruction via higher temperatures. In another words, the bomb kills without collapsing the tunnels and caves. They thought this would be a way to find out if Osama Bin Laden's and other Taleban leaders' bodies were there or not. It would be easier to find out who is who if they could avoid playing Lego with parts of bodies.

Well, but this is not the subject of my story. You can read all that stuff in the news if you like. What is important now is to tell you that while we were there, my group walked away from me. Even the soldiers who were escorting us did not notice I had to look for shelter behind a big rock to do my physiologic needs. Yes, even foreign correspondents do that, and sometimes use newspapers to have it well done. I had barely finished my duty in that dusty restroom when I noticed a hole on the side of the mountain. Soon I found it was a little old cave, closed for centuries. One of the many bombs that so heavily changed that landscape must have opened it, and my destiny was to be the first person to find it after centuries. At least I think so.

Notwithstanding, now this little adventure of mine is putting my job as a journalist under risk, because I am dealing with information that even I can't check its veracity. You bet I will not publish it in a regular paper and expose my name to the ridiculous. To do this could mean to ruin my credibility as a professional. The newspaper I work for would fire me. On the other hand, there are religious implications, considering all this is in direct opposition to all I've learnt from my father, my grandfather and the leaders of my religion. Sometimes I believe everything is true. But, if true, I am talking about the very future of this planet and the key to events many would have given all their treasures to discover.

Now you understand why I am using a pseudonym. While I write this, I feel like if someone else is looking over my shoulders, ready to tell it all to the leaders of my religion. Then, not only my profession would be under risk, but my life as well. Back to the cave, it had this narrow entrance and I got into it by crawling, while holding my flashlight in my mouth. Inside, it was large enough for me to stand and it was about the size of a small room. Like the size of the hotel room in Islamabad, Pakistan, where I am writing this before I leave to Cairo. The cave was so dark that even with a flashlight, I had to wait for a while to get my eyes used to the darkness. Then I saw. And what I saw amazed me and has been the means of a great change in my life.