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Occasional sketches and pressed plants interrupted the prose. While I flipped through the pages, Ronan pointed out some of his favorite adventures.
"Take a look at this." He traced a line of text with a fingertip. "The date is June 15, 1962, when Great-Uncle Ian was in Egypt."
Ronan leaned in close, and our shoulders touched. "Read it," he encouraged.
I read the words out loud:
"We're suffering from terrible heat, but the siren call of new discoveries keep us focused. Today, we found a series of hieroglyphs that could point to a chamber in the Valley of the Kings no modern man has seen. I hope our translations are correct because they could cause the rewriting of history books."
In the margin, he'd sketched a pyramid. It included the details of seams between the blocks, and he'd drawn tiny people that I assumed represented his team.
"Wow. Did they find what he thought would change everything?"
Ronan shook his head and chuckled softly. "I don't think so, but this is a perfect example of how Great-Uncle Ian operated. He was always in hot pursuit of the next big thing, even if the quest right before didn't work out as desired."
A few pages later, Ronan pointed out another adventure. "I'd love to head to the Amazon someday, maybe with you."
While I envisioned riding in a canoe with massive anacondas hanging from trees and alligators gliding along in the water beside us, Ronan read from the 1965 entry:
"The jungles of Peru aren't for the faint of heart. We've been trekking for days, sometimes by water, and sometimes by trail, following clues given us by an aged Incan priest at Machu Picchu. He told us about a golden temple deep in the Amazon rainforest, but I'm starting to think it's merely a legend."
At the end of the entry, he'd pressed an elegant red flower. The color was still vibrant almost sixty years later.
"Your Great-Uncle got around, didn't he?"
Ronan smiled. "I remember him saying that the world was too big for him to stay in one place. He thought life was too short, and he'd miss important things if he didn't keep moving."
A 1970 entry was fascinating:
"I've never experienced anything quite like the Siberian wilderness. The cold is inescapable, but there's a stark beauty about it all. Our guide says that he's seen where a full wooly mammoth is preserved in the permafrost. If we can locate it, it might be a major 20th century scientific discovery."
Great-Uncle Ian had added a sketch of a mammoth tusk at the bottom of the page.
I turned to look at Ronan. "Did he find that, or was it another near miss?"
"I'm afraid he struck out there, too. Late in his life, he claimed that they'd chipped the mammoth mostly free of the ice, but then it fell through a crack in a glacier, hundreds of feet down, before they could document it for posterity. Most of us didn't entirely believe him, but he stuck by his story."
When I was turning the last pages in the journal, something odd about the back cover struck me. In places, it appeared to be a little thicker than it should be. I couldn't think of any reason why the leather they used for the cover wouldn't be uniform.
I closed the back cover, the leather creaking softly under my fingers. Tilting the journal toward the warm glow of the floor lamp, I noticed how the light caught on an unusual bulge in the binding. "Do you see that?" I whispered, my heart beginning to pound.
"The journal? Yep, and I'm afraid there isn't any more." Ronan sighed.
"No, there might be." I ran my fingers along the edge of the cover and then held the binding fully open, reaching down between the leather and the book's pages. "There's something here. It's a pocket sewn onto the inside of the leather."
Ronan's eyes opened wide. "You're right. How did I never notice that? Is there anything inside?"
Carefully, I pushed my fingers down and gently opened the pocket. Seconds later, I pulled out a folded piece of paper yellowed with age.
Ronan held onto my forearm. "Careful, please. Don't tear it. All of this is so fragile."
"Let's take it to the desk over there and unfold it under the lamp. It's the brightest light in the room."
I carried the paper to the desk in the far corner of the room. "Oh, my God," whispered Ronan. "This all just gets crazier and crazier.
As I spread the document out on the desktop, Ronan whispered, "It's a map. Handwritten, but it's obviously a map."
Our hands shook as we did our best to smooth the paper. The lines and drawings were surprisingly bold and easy to read.
