Heart of the Jungle

He sat in the shade of the wall in the suffocating humidity of the jungle. The wall even decayed with age and collapsed dwarfed him, well over 30 metres high, the lime mortar infiltrated and choked with ivy and vines. The building and civilisation it protected long since dead and yet also unknown.
Similar civilisations of this area used to disembowel and cut the hearts out of children in an offering to a supposedly watching god, the children, their own, went willingly, the slaves they captured from the surrounding tribes whose flesh could be purchased at markets for consumption were not so lucky, particularly when the broken skulls in their severed head rolled bouncing down stone steps like some perverse game of slinky.
At least thats the minimum they have confessed to in their pictographical codices printed on slaughtered animal hides, depicted in statues and written on their templo mayor stone monuments.
He wondered these days how the black hearted liberals would look at a ritual of child sacrifice, the deliberate murder of a willing child in a freakish extreme munchausen by proxy infanticide ritual designed on a hunch to please a god they have never seen and may not exist. With their stances on criminals they would be only too accepting of their noble savages infanticide rituals, especially given their warped marxist morality free from basic christian concepts like thou shalt not kill.

He banished his thoughts he didnt have long, he had given his guide the slip and this area was forbidden, it belonged to the children of Tlaltecuhtli, at least that had been the most he'd been able to pry out of the man while pouring him whiskey. He'd said dangerous as well, but he may have been referring to the state of disrepair of the walls, as they are and despite their thickness the ivy had pushed the mortar from them, who could say when a sufficient lateral loading of wind could occur and start a cascade of stones and ivy burying whatever was beneath.

The figure Tlaltecuhtli was an interesting one a massive grotesque figure, skin the roughness of cracked and parched earth. Wide black eyes that swallow light, jagged teeth, strong limbs and claws. Around her neck she would wear a necklace of sacrificed human hearts, the offering of a terrified and obedient people to offset her terrifying wrath and caprice.

He tapped his british webley revolver in its leather holster, he had his own way to tame the supposed goddess and her savage followers. He moved past the wall into the huge city, this entire area was undocumented, he had to record as much as he could, immediately he set about sketching the buildings, the templo mayor, the codices, he noted the road, the buildings.
The massive structures made from stone, wood, straw, clay, lime and sand.
Large flat areas for markets lay abandoned, spaces between for salting and drying meats, sometimes human, lay empty.
Suddenly he heard scuffing behind him, he turned expecting to see his guide and be scolded but instead was met by a small girl, extremely dirty, covered in mud.
Stunned he approached the girl, concerned, "hello dear are you okay?", he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and walked over to her gently grabbed her, trying to wipe some of the mud out of her face, it was then he saw the teeth marks and scars, evidence of the brutal abuse of a tribe absent christian laws, she saw him see this and pulled out of his gentle grip, "its ok dear we can take you to see the doctor, we can take you away, from here, from them".

She ran, "fuck" he thought and ran after her, leaving his priceless sketches and drawings and notes of the undocumented city in the dust.

Several men, painted in earth came out of a building as he ran after her and he ducked back into a nearby alley to avoid being spotted. They didnt see him, but he lost sight of the girl, suddenly he heard some commotion from what must have been the town centre, a gigantic stone building stood out, two blocks of stone buildings away, he moved through the alleys low, caredul not to be spotted in the shadows of the buildings. As he got closer he saw a few figures peppered about the top, as he got even closer in the shadow of the building he saw it was the little girl and another larger figure, he moved to the edge of the alley to get a better look.

The figure standing over her on the stone slab was huge, half again as tall as a man, skin the colour of earth, rough, cracked, arms red up to the forearm, huge hands endng in claws, around its neck on a necklace a number of bloody raw hearts, a series of bodies already lay at the foot of the steps bloodless white, ripped open, headless, arms and legs bent at odd angles from their rough trip down. The figure was male and terrible to behold.

Before he could react, the figure plunged its hand into the little girls chest as she lay held on the stone slab, ripping apart the ribcage at the sternum with ease. It ripped the organs expertly out with a practiced economy placing each on an alter, her tiny heart the beast claimed for itself.

Without thinking anything else but the word savages, he drew his revolver, thumbed back the hammer and aimed it in one motion, he lined the little bead up with the figure and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed in the street and he was rewarded with a tiny red hole and a spray of pink mist behind the monstrous figure. The figure staggered, chanting, looking to the sky and collapsed.

Immediately other large figures burst from a building to the left of the high altar, these too with necklaces of hearts, these rotting brown and shrivelled.They had skin the texture and roughness of the red and black parched earth, craters and all. In their clawed hands they bore massive clubs the size of a man, as if these weren't brutal enough they were fixed along the edges and around the heads with shards of obsidian, the obsidian looked as sharp as obsidian gets, monomolecular edged, sharper than surgical steel, a brutally damaging weapon on unarmored foes such as the tribes people surrounding their village. Those brutal clubs would saw and rend flesh while the heads would shatter, skulls and bones break.

The warriors also wore horrifying masks topped with leaves and feathers that became painful to look at if one stared too long. He aimed but the masks seemed to make it heat haze like a mirage, the heat also affecting his equilibrium, the figures were also shockingly fast, shockingly large, the distance made them seem normal but as they closed with him.... his heart stuttered involuntarily, his adrenaline dumped into his blood stream turning him pale.
He had fought in the british afghanistan war, he had seen civillian caravans been torn apart and raped by afghani tribal cavalry, the survivors, families of the men that fought them enslaved in their slave markets, the women had a worse fate, he had withstood an afghan cavalry charge in battle line and been victorious as they had been ulalating and calling to their savage god of martyrdom consisting of suicidal murder amid the dust in the air, the dryness of his parched throat and the thump of their cannons and his sides own. Ge had been there as the numbers and horses had dwindled as the storm of sand had kicked up, as they had ran on foot with their lhyber knives, he had seen it all.

Yet what he saw here made his stomach drop, it incited all those feelings and more, the savagery of these giants, a terror gripped his heart, his mind froze, he fled, fled for the entrance to the city, the wall.
He turned to see the giants savage a normal sized tribesman that strayed carelessly into their path, a single savage backhand blow took the tribesmans head off leaving a savage stump of neck and lower jaw.
He involuntarily moaned, while running, the moan turned to a scream, he ran covering the distance of the market square, his lungs burned, breahtless from his screaming terror, he passed his sketches and recorded codices leaving them without a second thought such was his terror.

He passed the wall, the figures were not stopping still running, he swear he could feel the earth rumbling with their inhuman charge. They would catch him, he looked around desperately seeing the crumbling wall and shot all 5 remaining rounds into it, shattering smaller stones, there was a sound like a branch cracking and then a trickle of falling stone, this became a cascade which became an avalanche as the wall shed a small amount of it overall mass collapsing into an avalnche of rock, blocking the path to the forbidden city.

He turned and fled down the trail that eventually turned into a road, hours, days, down the road that finally turned to a modern slum, he lost time, he had been alternating jogging and walking for hours. He collapsed in the heat, his mind still full of the terror he had seen, as the figures he felt chasing him transition smoothly to his nightmares.

When he woke he was in his room in the hotel, a mission doctor standing over him.
The yellow cracked wallpaper surrounded him, the oppressive heat of the room suffocating him, yet he felt safe, assured of his life. The doctor looked up, "ah so you are finally awake".
"Mnhf" he said groggily.
"You collapsed, rather serious heatstroke I'm afraid, we were afraid you had fried your brain, one cant be too careful in the heat of the jungle, one loses water at a fierce rate, you were so hot we feared you had gone psychotic, mumbling as you were about giant figures chasing you in the jungle".
"What were they?" he asked the mission doctor.
"What were who the giant figures?".
He nodded.
"Figures of your imagination i suspect, in this heat and while suffering heatstroke ones mind can tend to halucinate, especially within the closeness of the jungle with its sounds and history, one may fill in certain details with their subconscious, one may be driven utterly mad by imagining what has once been, of course some believe that acts and devotions of terror and love leave scars on the physical plane, there is much we do not know and may never know, i suggest next time you take a water bottle, wear a hat and stick to the shade".
With that he left the room, and i dropped my head to my sweat stained pillow and fell asleep. My dream haunted by the charge of Massive tribesmen with skin the colour of the earth, and necklaces full of the hearts of the once living.