Lost Empire

Lost Empire

CHUMBE ISLAND , ZANZIBAR,
TANZANIA
THE SHARKS DARTED AT THE EDGES OF THEIR VISION, SLEEK GRAY
shapes that offered Sam and Remi Fargo only glimpses of knife-edged
fins and flicking tails before disappearing into the curtain of swirling sand. As usual, Remi had refused to pass up the photo opportunity, and as usual she’d asked Sam to serve as scale as she focused her highspeed underwater camera past him and at the feeding frenzy. For his part, Sam was less worried about the sharks than he was the precipice at his back—a hundred-fifty-foot drop off the sandbank into the dark deep of the Zanzibar Channel.

Remi pulled her face up from the camera, smiled with her eyes
behind the mask, and gave him an OK sign. Sam thankfully finned
forward to join her. Together they knelt in the sand and watched the
show. It was July off the coast of Tanzania, which meant monsoon
season, which in turn meant the warm East African Coastal Current
(EACC) was surging from the southeast until it met the southern tip
of Zanzibar, where it split into inshore and offshore currents. For
sharks this created a “food funnel” in the eighteen-mile gap between
Zanzibar and the mainland as prey fish were driven northward. An
irresistible moving buffet, Remi called it.

Sam and Remi took care to stay within what they’d dubbed the
Safe Zone, that fifty-yard, crystal-clear water strip off Chumbe Island. Past that was the drop into the channel. The demarcation was hard to miss: The current, moving at six knots or more, threw up a roiling curtain of sand as it scraped along the island’s sandbar. This Sam and Remi had dubbed the Good-bye Zone; step into this rip current without a safety line and you were in for a one-way trip up the coast.

Despite the danger—or perhaps because of it—this yearly trip to Zanzibar was one of their favorites. Along with sharks, prey fish, rip currents, and underwater sandstorms that lasted for months, the EACC offered up treasure—albeit usually bits and pieces worth nothing more than their curiosity factor, but this was enough for Sam and Remi. Over the centuries, ships had been plying Africa’s east coast from Mombasa to Dar es Salaam, many of them laden with gold and gems and ivory bound for colonial empire cities. Countless ships had sunk in and around the Zanzibar Channel, the contents of their holds spilled along the bottom, just waiting for the right current to uncover or move them within reach of curious divers such as the Fargos. Over the years they’d recovered gold and silver coins from the Roman Empire to Spain, Chinese ceramics, Sri Lankan jade, silverware . . . From the fascinating to the mundane, they’d uncovered it. So far on this trip, they’d found only one item of note: a diamond-shaped gold coin so barnacleencrusted they could make out no details.

Copyright © 2010 by Sandecker, RLLLP