We Dine With Cannibals Read online

  Also by C. Alexander London

  WE ARE NOT EATEN BY YAKS

  C. ALEXANDER LONDON

  With art by JONNY DUDDLE

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

  To my sister, who first

  made books come alive for me,

  and to whoever does it for you.

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Text copyright © 2011 by C. Alexander London. Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Jonny Duddle.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission

  in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off.

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  Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.

  Edited by Jill Santopolo. Design by Semadar Megged. Text set in 11-point Trump Medieval.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  London, C. Alexander. We dine with cannibals / C. Alexander London. p. cm.—(An accidental

  adventure) Summary: All eleven-year-old twins Oliver and Celia Navel want to do is watch television,

  but their explorer father takes them in search of El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold, and their long-lost

  mother. [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Explorers—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

  4. Twins—Fiction. 5. Television—Fiction. 6. Indigenous peoples—Fiction. 7. Rain forests—Fiction.

  8. Amazon River Region—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.L8419Wg 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010041993

  EISBN: 9781101577356

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  1. WE ARE NOT EXPLORERS

  2. WE CAN’T EVER GET WHAT WE WANT

  3. WE ARE BUGGED

  4. WE HAVE SOME HISTORY

  5. WE BATTLE BIODIVERSITY

  6. WE ARE NOT CLEANING UP

  7. WE PLAY PEGGO

  8. WE BORROW A LLAMA

  9. WE ARE DISAPPOINTED WITH DAD

  10. WE CHANGE CHANNELS

  11. WE GET SCHOOLED

  12. WE KNOW OUR LIZARD

  13. WE WOULD RATHER FACE LIONS

  14. WE AWAIT OUR PUNISHMENT

  15. WE ARE RECEIVING VISITORS

  16. WE ARE NOT ON VACATION

  17. WE ARE A LONG WAY FROM HOLLYWOOD

  18. WE OOO-LA-LA AND BLAH-BLAH-BLAH

  19. WE UPSET SOME CHICKENS

  20. WE DO NOT HEAR PEACE DRUMS

  21. WE MAKE A SPLASH

  22. WE ADMIRE THE FURNITURE

  23. WE ALWAYS WEAR UNDERWEAR

  24. WE ARE NOT MONKEYING AROUND

  25. WE TAKE A HIKE

  26. WE GET WHERE WE WERE GOING

  27. WE WOULD PREFER GREG ANGSTURA

  28. WE ARE DOOMED, AS USUAL

  29. WE UPSET SOME OTHER CHICKENS

  30. WE GET SOME TV TIME

  31. WE TAKE A PATH

  32. WE’VE GOT A GAMBIT

  33. WE PREPARE FOR LANDING

  34. WE TRY A DIFFERENT TRICK

  35. WE MISSED MOVIE NIGHT

  36. WE ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT

  37. WE ARE SO OVER “IT”

  38. WE GET SUCKED IN

  39. WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT PLAY-DOH

  40. WE LOSE A FRIEND AND GAIN A FRIEND

  41. WE ARE PRESENTED WITH A PRESENT

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know … if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”

  —PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  in a letter to Frank Chapman, ornithologist

  1

  WE ARE NOT EXPLORERS

  CELIA NAVEL CLUTCHED the rope as if her life depended on it, although her life did not depend on it.

  Her brother’s did.

  Even though she could no longer see him, Celia knew that her twin brother, Oliver, was hanging by his belt loops at the other end of her rope inside a deep, dark chimney that stuck out of the ground. The opening was overgrown with weeds, and the chimney looked like the top of carrot. Celia did not like carrots. In fact, Celia did not like vegetables of any kind.

  Celia squeezed the rope so hard that her hands turned red and her knuckles ached. She hoped Oliver wasn’t bumping into the walls. There could be bats. Oliver did not like bats. In fact, Oliver hated bats.

  Celia leaned back, using all her weight to keep the rope from slipping, and she let it out slowly, hand over hand. Every time she moved her feet, the stone ledge crumbled a little more beneath her. She tried to remember what she had learned from the latest episodes of The Celebrity Adventurist, starring teen heartthrob Corey Brandt.

  Corey Brandt’s First Rule of Mountaineering: Don’t let go of the rope.

  Corey Brandt’s Second Rule of Mountaineering: Really, don’t let go of the rope.

  Great, thought Celia. Now all I can think about is letting go of the rope.

  The moon shifted behind high mountain peaks, casting strange shadows among the ruins that surrounded her. She squeezed tighter and continued lowering her brother.

  The ledge on which she stood, and the chimney into which her brother was sliding, were part of a temple in the ruins of Machu Picchu, high in the Andes Mountains of Peru. The ruins contained old stone houses where no one lived anymore and grand temples where no one prayed anymore and hundreds of steps, towers, and terraces where no one did whatever people used to do on steps, towers, and terraces. During the day, it was a popular tourist spot.

  Oliver and Celia, however, were not tourists. Tourists did not come to the abandoned city in the middle of the night. Tourists did not dress all in black. And tourists did not slide down overgrown chimneys into the ruins.

  If we can call Oliver and Celia Navel anything other than Oliver and Celia Navel, we would have to call them explorers, though please don’t tell them. They’d rather be called just about anything except explorers. They’d rather be call
ed couch potatoes or dullards or dimwits or even tourists. Just not explorers.

  Their parents are explorers. Most of the adults they know are explorers. They live on the 4½th floor of the Explorers Club in New York City. Explorers, they had learned through countless hardships and misadventures, were nothing but trouble. The kind of trouble Oliver was in right now, in fact.

  As his sister lowered him down the narrow shaft, Oliver heard the snap of threads in his belt loops. He hoped they wouldn’t rip before he reached the floor. Oliver was an expert rope tier, thanks to the Saturday morning survival classes their parents had made the twins take. For every knot they learned how to tie, they were allowed to watch a half hour of cartoons. They quickly learned over a hundred knots and never missed a Saturday morning cartoon again.

  Try as hard as he could, Oliver couldn’t unlearn all those knots, so he was certain that his knot wouldn’t break. However, his pants were not made for descending into ancient ruins. The belt loops were straining against his weight. He knew that his sister, high above, was straining too.

  Oliver wasn’t afraid of falling, though. He’d done a lot of falling off of things in his life. Earlier that summer, high in the mountains of Tibet, he had fallen out of an airplane, off a cliff, over a waterfall, and into an underground pit. How bad could a six-hundred-year-old chimney be? He was, however, afraid of a much slower and more painful end. He was afraid of upsetting the large Heloderma horridum hanging on to his back.

  For those of you who are not herpetologists, which is what an explorer might call a lizard scientist, a Heloderma horridum is a poisonous lizard found in Mexico and Guatemala that is roughly the size of a small dog. It is covered in greenish-brown bumpy scales, which give it its name. Heloderma horridum is Latin for “horrible armor,” though the lizard is known in English as the beaded lizard. “Horrible armor” is a much more fitting name, however, for a lizard with such a grim expression and such a painful bite.

  The one on Oliver’s back was named Beverly. She wore a purple collar with a silver tag and liked eating Velma Sue’s snack cakes. At least she and Oliver agreed on that. He patted his pocket to make sure he still had the snack cake he’d brought down with him—chocolate cake with bright red strawberry cream filling. Just in case he got hungry during the descent.

  Beverly’s claws were digging into his back and her head was resting on his neck. She kept flicking her tongue to remind him she was there. As if he could forget. If she bit Oliver with her venomous fangs, his face would swell, his nerves would twitch, and his whole body would be paralyzed. Then he’d throw up his insides. He’d looked it up on the Internet. He really wished he hadn’t. Too much information could be a really terrible thing.

  Oliver, like most sensible eleven-year-olds, hated being bitten by poisonous lizards. It had happened to him before.

  Twice.

  He doesn’t like to talk about it.

  Five minutes earlier, he hadn’t been nearly as worried about getting bitten by a lizard. He had been standing on the edge of the chimney with his sister and Beverly.

  “Why should I have to go down there?” he had objected. He spit down into it to see if he could hear the splat when it hit the bottom. He couldn’t. That took away all the fun of spitting off of things.

  “Because I’m older,” Celia explained.

  “But we’re twins!”

  Celia sighed. She gazed out over the dark ruins. They were on the far edge of what was once a great stone city, separated from the rest of the ruins by a deep ravine. Whoever had built this strange chimney didn’t want to make it easy for anyone to get to it. No wonder it hadn’t been discovered in all the time that had passed since explorers first found Machu Picchu in 1911.

  “Technically,” she corrected her brother at last, “I am older. Three minutes and forty-two seconds older.”

  Oliver wasn’t very good at details, especially the really important ones, like who was actually older. Celia believed that being three minutes and forty-two seconds older gave her some authority over Oliver in important decisions, such as what to watch on television and who should be lowered first down dark chimneys into ancient ruins at midnight. Oliver rarely agreed with her on either of those things.

  “I can’t go down there,” he said. “I have the lizard.”

  “You can take her down with you. She’ll scare away the bats.”

  “You think there’s bats down there?”

  “Don’t be a sissy.”

  “Easy for you to say. You never go first.” Oliver began tying the end of the rope onto his belt. “This is an injustice,” he said while he tied. He could never win arguments with his sister, so he thought he’d save time by tying the rope while they were still arguing. He’d lose in the end anyway. He just tied his figure-eight knot and imagined he was tying his sister up with it. “I know my rights. I’ve seen more episodes of Judge Baxter than you have.”

  “Judge Baxter’s a pet judge. He’s on the Animal Network.”

  “It’s still a courtroom. He’s still a judge.”

  “He’s a dog!”

  “Dogs know what injustice is.”

  “Do not!”

  “Do too!”

  “Do not!”

  “Do too!”

  “Are we ready yet? We don’t have all night!” a voice crackled over the walkie-talkie that Celia was holding.

  Both of their heads shot up. Oliver and Celia looked across the ravine to a stone terrace in the main part of the city. There was a little man standing on it, surrounded by three large llamas. The man was the same height as Oliver and Celia, though he looked tiny next to the bored-looking llamas. He had an extravagant red mustache and a sour expression on his face, just like the lizard on Oliver’s back. In fact, the lizard belonged to this man. The llamas were rented.

  The girl who owned the llamas sat on the stone steps of a temple a few yards away with her head in her hands, staring out at the jungle below. She hadn’t said a word since she and her llamas had been hired. That was what the little man wanted. He’d hired the girl because her llamas were cheap, she knew the way to Machu Picchu, and she was mute. She couldn’t say a word. The little man didn’t want strangers talking about his business.

  Like Celia and Oliver, the little man was dressed all in black, but his black outfit had a vest and a jacket and a black fedora. He would have been invisible in the moonlight if it weren’t for his big red mustache and his bright red ascot. Even in the high Andes Mountains, the little man dressed to impress. The llama girl wore a colorful alpaca hat with long earflaps to keep her warm.

  The twins stared across the chasm that separated them.

  “Well?” the little man’s voice crackled over the speaker again.

  “You didn’t say ‘over.’ We didn’t know if you were done,” Celia said. “Over.”

  They didn’t need to listen through the speaker to hear the little man cursing. It echoed off the ruins and mountain peaks. We won’t repeat the words he used here. Not all of them were in English, but their meaning was clear enough. The little man spoke into the walkie-talkie again.

  “Will you please get down that shaft so we can begin, before I lose my temper and ship you both off to Siberia?” he said. “Over.”

  “I don’t like Peru,” Oliver said as he leaned forward, testing the rope. “Too many llamas.” He was hanging over the edge of the chimney now. His sister began to lower him hand over hand. Oliver was still talking to her over his shoulder, his face pointing down toward the unknown.

  “I don’t like llamas. Too many letters. Why should they have two l’s? Lama with one l isn’t much better … although that kind of lama tried to kill us in Tibet. I don’t think I like llamas or lamas. At least lamas don’t smell as bad as llamas. But still, I think the extra letters are confusing and not even …”

  Oliver was still muttering to himself even after Celia could no longer see him. Soon she couldn’t even hear him, but she could still feel him moving around at the end of the rope. She
leaned back and held on tight. She’d made him go first and now Oliver’s life was in her hands.

  It was true that earlier that summer a man claiming to be a Tibetan lama had tried to kill them. He was really nothing more than a grave robber named Frank. He was eaten by a yeti. His partner, Janice, who had pretended to be a mountain climber, was still at large. That made Celia nervous. She didn’t like having a grave robber bent on revenge wandering around at large. Although Janice the grave-robber-at-large was the least of her worries right now.

  She had just heard a hissing sound from down in the chimney.

  The hissing could have been bats, she thought. That would really make Oliver unhappy. But the sound could have been Beverly too. That would be much worse.

  Like all Heloderma horridum, Beverly hissed when she was about to bite.

  2

  WE CAN’T EVER GET WHAT WE WANT

  THE NAVEL TWINS, as we noted, were not sneaking into ancient ruins in South America in the middle of the night with a poisonous lizard because they wanted to.

  They were there because their father had lost a bet with the little man wearing the fedora and the ascot, and explorers take bets very seriously. Because their father had lost the bet, the Navel twins belonged to the little man for the rest of summer vacation. They actually belonged to him for every vacation until they turned eighteen. Their father had made a very bad bet indeed.

  The little man’s name was Edmund S. Titheltorpe-Schmidt III, but he insisted that everyone call him Sir Edmund, which everyone was happy to do because “Titheltorpe-Schmidt the Third” was not easy to say.

  Try it.

  You’ll be grateful he’s called Sir Edmund, even if no one really believed that he earned the title of “Sir,” which you can only get by being knighted, which means that you’ve done something noble and virtuous. And that you’re British. Sir Edmund was neither noble nor virtuous. And he was not British. In fact, no one knew where he was from. Namibia? Uzbekistan? Dayton, Ohio?