MICHAEL CRICHTON

Africa was not thoroughly explored until the mid— nineteenth century, byBurton and Speke, Baker and Living-stone, and especially Stanley. No trace ofthe Lost City of Zinj was found by any of them. Nor had any trace of theapocryphal city been found in the hundred years since.The gloom that descended over the Project Amy staff meeting was profound. “Itold you it was bad news,” Sarah Johnson said.“You mean,” Peter Elliot said, “that this picture is based on a description, andwe don’t know whether the city actually exists or not.”“I’m afraid so,” Sarah Johnson said. “There is no proof that the city in thepicture exists at all. It’s just a story.”4. ResolutionPETER ELLIOT’S UNQUESTIONED RELIANCE ON twentieth-century harddata—facts, figures, graphs—left him unprepared for the possibility that the 1642engraving, in all its detail, was merely the fanciful speculation of an uninhibitedartist. The news came as a shock.Their plans to take Amy to the Congo suddenly appeared childishly naïve; theresemblance of her sketchy, schematic drawings to the 1642 Valdez engravingwas obviously coincidental. How could they ever have imagined that a Lost Cityof Zinj was anything but the stuff of ancient fable? In the seventeenth-centuryworld of widening horizons and new wonders, the idea of such a city would haveseemed perfectly reasonable, even compelling. But in the computerized twentiethcentury, the Lost City of Zinj was as unlikely as Camelot or Xanadu. They hadbeen fools ever to take it seriously. “The lost city doesn’t exist,” he said.“Oh, it exists, all right,” she said. “There’s no doubt about that.”Elliot glanced up quickly, and then he saw that Sarah Johnson had notanswered him. A tall gangly girl in her early twenties stood at the back of theroom. She might have been considered beautiful except for her cold, aloof45