The old town of Mesquito sits perched high up in the Andes where the angry God's dwell. Surrounded on all sides by impenetrable Andean passes and jagged mountain peaks it has always attracted those seeking adventure, fame, fortune and death. The route that leads up to Mesquito (a skinny path fit for one) begins at the valley floor and snakes to the left as you cross the river, and then with a sudden hair-pin, rises sheer to the sky. Albatross's swoop overhead, their gigantic wing flaps casting a wide berth below. As you move higher up, inching your way to the gods and certain death, the river slowly dims to a silky stream that plays with light whose shards wink diamond like. The sun beats heavy and like a gong it rings in the ears. The air is brisk but starved and the lungs struggle to get the oxygen they desperately crave.
Today, Mesquito is a dot barely on the map that hardly raises a flutter in the tourist salons of the big city of lights. However, if you trawl through the history books, if you take a little breather and do a little research in the State library, you will find that it was not always thus. In fact Mesquito was, once upon a long time ago, the sight of a most extraordinary series of events, that quite literally, changed the world. The past in Mesquito, for those who care to look, is buried under layers of topsoil. But you only have to dig a little to uncover the unmistakable lurid signs of the secret that it wishes to conceal. Conceal from whom? Itself or the world? Infamy is best forgotten lest it torment the living who must live with its weighty burdens. But secrets! No matter how hard one tries, they cannot really be erased. The slate of history is singed with the hot breath of the human condition This history passes through the conduits of the universal human consciousness - via the mediums of whispered oral tales, written words, the incantations of the priesthood, the nursery rhymes of childhood and the lay, lie and breadth of the land.
We now begin our story and we it begin many years back. Seven hundred to be kind of precise. A Spanish Galleon vessel; its hull rotting and eaten through and through by worms, is about to burst its seams upon an alien shore. You can almost hear the screams of the carrion birds as they encircle above. Their shrill cries bouncing on the beats of cannibal drums.
