...Continued from previous day
"Where are your parents?" she asks. He looks away. No one asked that before. Everyone here knows what happened.
"They've disappeared. They fell off one day when lightening struck the tree they were harvesting fruits from," he murmured.
"I am sorry," she says, a little guilty to have asked. Then she asks, "If you don't mind me asking, where do you have your cemeteries?"
He answers, still a little despondently, "Up on that red cliff is where we carry the dead to and bury them there. But my parents, and others who have fallen off the canopy, would be left in the darkness below."
"'Darkness below'?" she asks, quizzically.
He looks at her with some apprehension but also curiosity, "That is what we called the world below, where the trees extend from. It's dark down there and no one has ever returned from having gone down, either accidentally or willingly." Then he wonders what she would say next.
She thinks for a little bit and says, "It's strange. Maybe there are strange creatures below, or acid or something. We've never explored down there."
He opens his eyes wider and asks, "Who is 'we'?"
She explains that she's a researcher. They discovered this island by accident. It's not clear why it isn't registered on any map. She and two other researchers, in botany, have come to the island.
"How did you get here?" he asks, ever more curious.
"Hot air balloon, actually. We didn't want to make a lot of noise using helicopter," she said, "Our ship is on the other side of the island. You haven't seen us?"
He shakes his head. So they came from the sky. This beautiful woman came from the sky, so to speak. Before he can start asking lots of questions, she continues, "We are interested in how your people survive on the canopy. Our anthropologist colleagues have studied you for a while, without disturbing you. But we are here because of the plants, especially the ones below. We were told that you all are afraid of descending. And we intend on finding out what can possibly be so bad down there. If it's true that no one comes back up, we want to know why. My colleagues will join me soon, but I wanted to come take a look first. I am curious, not only about the plants, but about the people who live among them."
He's quite stunned by the mere fact that there are people beyond this island, and furthermore, that they have come without letting his people know. He asks, a little surprising for himself, "Will you stay here for a long time?" She smiles and shakes her head, "No, just until we can get some specimens from below for studying."
"It's dangerous! I don't want anything bad to happen to you," he says, trying to control his alarm."
"Richard will descend with a camera that relays images back to us up here. If there is danger he will see it first and we will just haul him back. We can't see to get to the bottom of the canopy from the shores. The trees are too thick and tough for us to get through without using heavy machinery that would destroy a lot."
"It's too dangerous." Then he says suddenly, "Send me down. If anything bad happens, at least I can see what took my parents away."
She doesn't want to risk his life for their project, but he became livid and excited. But then she said that they needed a professional botanist down there so the right samples can be collected. His heroism wouldn't be allowed to happen. He was disappointed.
She smiles at him one more time and tells him that she would be back later with the crew. "It's really nice meeting you. I hope we will see each other later. We will not make a lot of noise. Our anthropologist colleagues suggest that we make as little disturbance as possible because you have never seen other kinds of people before. So I hope I haven't shocked you too much by greeting you. You, at least, don't look so different, just got different clothes." She shakes his callous hand again and walked off to where she came from.
