Sinbad and the Lost Continent – Excerpt

The following is an excerpted chapter from my upcoming novella Sinbad and the Lost Continent, a lost world adventure inspired by the 1001 Arabian Nights. Enjoy, and be sure to check out the full novella once it comes out!


It was before daybreak when I awoke. I climbed up from the hatch onto the Black Tiger’s upper deck. Not that I had been sleeping well the past several nights. It had nothing to do with the fact that there never was much else to do aboard our small and humble vessel. I had merged so deeply into the water’s simple and monotonous rhythm that I lost track of the many days that had flown past since we set sail from Baghdad. After we had entered the Persian Gulf from the mouth of the Tigris and then advanced eastward into the Indian Ocean, nothing but the sea’s blue vastness had surrounded us. A landsman like me could lose his sanity when faced with such endless horizons, unable to cope with its full enormity, but the sailors told me they relished it, seeing it as the ultimate freedom.

Omar had deduced on our compass two to three days before that we were nearing the world’s equator. I inferred that the geographic word “equator” meant the world’s waistline, assuming he and the scholars at the Madrasa in Baghdad were right in claiming it was round instead of flat. Beyond that, we did not know our precise location.

I started to wonder whether Kishore was right to doubt our destination’s existence. He had never bought the other Sinbad’s accounts of his seven voyages to exotic faraway lands and the riches he had earned from them, even if that other Sinbad’s small yet ample investment of those riches had allowed me to purchase that old Greek map as well as the provisions for our voyage. As Kishore himself had claimed, neither he nor his father had ever witnessed sights as fantastical as the other Sinbad, and so many of his fellow sailors, had boasted of. No rocs, no giants, nothing like those at all.

Still, I was happy that Kishore had not only let me use his father’s old dhow, but also came aboard with me himself. If we were to perish out here in the heart of the ocean, at least my dearest friend would be beside me.

I was still groggy when I traipsed to the gunwale on the dhow’s port side, expecting another day of nothing but the unending blue ocean in front of us. I rubbed my half-shut eyes, gazed at the sunlit horizon, and blinked in disbelief.

It was land! Or was it my blurry vision playing tricks on me again? I closed and reopened my eyes, rubbing them again on my tunic’s sleeve. Still the green sliver of a hilltop rose before the rising sun.

 As the Black Tiger drifted eastward, the sliver expanded into a thicker, dark green band. An unmistakably solid band, implanted as it rose from the water. The faint cawing of gulls rose over the splash of the boat’s wake.

My whole body trembled with excitement. “Land! Allah is merciful, for we have found land!” I yelled.

I rushed back to the hatch and opened it. Kishore was already scampering up to the deck, with the rest of the crew climbing the ladder behind him. “What is it, Sinbad?” he asked.

“Land!” I repeated as I thrust my finger through the air beyond the port side. “See for yourself, my friend!”

He adjusted his turban and rubbed his eyelids before squinting in the distance. His eyes widened and brightened in the middle, reflecting the glow of the rising sunlight behind the approaching island. “Holy Krishna, I don’t believe it!”

“It has to be it!” I spoke.

“What? Land? Of course it’s land!” Kishore said. “Must be an island.”

I shook my head like a swabbing mop. “No, no, my friend, it could only be Lemuria, the lost continent of legend, like on our map!”

Kishore’s smile vanished, with a dubious look at me replacing it. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Sinbad. You know we’ve never been to this part of the ocean before, so it could be any number of islands out here. It might even be one of those islands that other Sinbad spoke about in those stories he told everyone.”

“Well, then, let’s look at the map and then decide. Omar?”

Omar emerged on the deck upon calling, plucked out the old map from his sash, and unfolded it in his hands. I bent over next to him and followed his finger as it traced our course to date until it slowed to a point.

 “The latitude given here matches what I noted from the stars last night,” Omar said, his nasal voice brimming with confidence.” Right down on the equator. The longitude should be close as well.”

Earlier in our voyage, Omar told me that he could determine how far north or south our dhow stood relative to the globe’s equator, by calculating the angle between the horizon and one of the stars. He could also tell how far west or east we were from our destination, and even from Baghdad, by measuring the distance between the moon and a given star. Once he did that, he would pull out a book of tables, which he claimed was a copy by the mathematicians that studied what they called al-Jabr, and then compare its figures with his measurements. It left me feeling foolish to know that a man could find out where he stood in the vastness of the world the way Omar did.

Captain Rabih looked over our shoulders and stroked a long, matted beard as fierce as his eyes. “Even if it isn’t your fabled Lemuria, it’s as good a place to rest as any,” he said. “Not to mention restocking our provisions. There might even be fresh water there.”

The corners of Kishore’s lip turned downward in a concerned frown. “Those gulls… those gulls…”

“What about the gulls?” I asked.

“They sound strange. Not like gulls at all. Or like any kind of bird I’ve ever heard. Can’t you hear them?”

He was right. They did not sound like the typical persistent, annoying caws of seagulls I had heard when our dhow sailed along the Persian Gulf, but rather a more prolonged screeching. I would have dismissed it as simply a different species of gull had I not recalled what Theognostos had claimed as he sold me the map.

If you think the giant birds of prey, great serpents, and oversized fish of that other Sinbad’s tales are terrible, or hard to believe without first seeing them, you’ve not yet heard a word yet about the creatures of Lemuria.

I looked down at the map again, taking in the assortment of hideous dragons, crocodiles, serpents, and other reptiles that populated it the way sea monsters would populate the seas in other charts. Those were parts of the legend I had never taken so seriously, or even paid much attention to. Why would I, when my thoughts and eyes were focused on the treasure supposed to be hidden throughout the continent? Treasure was real. Jewels, coins, bracelets, and amulets I could touch with my own fingers and carry in my own hands, but not dragons or other monsters.

The green slopes continued to reach up from the horizon toward the rising sun as we watched from behind the gunwale. I made out a peak higher than the others with gray smoke billowing from its summit, much like the range of mountains on the map. My hope soared that we had sighted Lemuria itself, my confidence swelling with it. Somewhere deep in the legendary island’s tropical forests before us awaited treasure more ancient and more valuable than the other Sinbad and his fantastical stories could imagine, at least if the Greek merchant’s story was true.

I imagined us loading the Black Tiger to her very limits with heaps of treasure and returning to Baghdad rich as the Caliph himself. Or at least rich enough that when they praised Sinbad the sailor’s wealth, they would not know which Sinbad they were talking about. No longer would I have to steal, or to make the barest living carrying loads on my head as a porter. Furthermore, I could also come back with stories as fantastic as the other Sinbad’s, though I did not know what those stories would be yet.

Bestial cries of immense volume interrupted my thoughts, screeches and yells that were drawing closer. The tar-black likenesses of birds flapped their wings toward us from the shore, their caws louder and clearer than earlier. Their bodies expanded before us while they advanced, their wingspans appearing to stretch longer than a riverman’s raft. I realized to my amazement that they were bigger than any birds I had ever seen—if they even were birds. Their ebony wings, which sprouted triplets of glinting claws from their bends, shone like thick leather rather than feathers beneath the morning sunlight.

What could such creatures be? Not even the other Sinbad had described anything like them in his stories. At least the giant rocs were just an oversized kind of eagle according to him, but these bizarre leather-winged creatures on the other hand could not even be called birds!

“The map has a picture of one of those labeled in Greek,” Omar said. “It’s called a pterodactyl.”

“A what?” I asked.

“Pterodactyl. A ‘winged-finger’.”

“You mean like a bat? And do you know what they eat?”

Omar frowned, his olive complexion turning pale. “I am afraid not.”

Nonetheless, the creatures’ beaks, long and piercing like spear points, suggested an answer to my question that chilled my blood.

If Kishore’s face were not as dark as it was, it would have blanched like a washed-out sky the way he looked at the approaching pterodactyls. “Why are they coming toward us? Like they’re attacking us?”

The captain grabbed the hilt of his saber. “Because they’re hungry. We ‘re food to them. Draw your weapons and prepare to defend ourselves!”

Sinbad faces off against pterosaurs near the coast of the lost continent of Lemuria!

They didn’t waste any time. As soon as we grabbed our weapons, the foremost of the flying creatures reared for a moment, spreading out its wings before folding them inward and diving toward me. I sidestepped out of the way, but its beak slashed across my flank like a sword’s stroke, cutting through the fabric of my tunic and skin to draw hot blood. I flinched and began to hunch over, sharp pain slicing through me as I gripped the hilt of the scimitar I had acquired aboard the dhow and slid it out of my belted sash. Before I could fully draw my weapon, another pterodactyl grabbed my right forearm with its beak and tugged at it. I punched one of its beady, violent yellow eyes with my free fist to break its hold. I then freed the scimitar from my sash and slashed off the leather-winged devil’s head.

That only seemed to infuriate the flock even more. They swarmed around us like wasps over the deck. We brandished swords and knives while the airborne reptiles bombarded us with their stabbing beaks and razor-sharp finger-claws. Over the increasing din of cursing men and shrieking creatures, a sailor screamed when one of the beasts impaled him through chest like a stake through the heart, then lifted his body vertically above the boat and flew off. 

Another pterodactyl swooped toward Captain Rabih from behind. The captain would have met the same fate as the first sailor had another sailor not stopped his attacker by puncturing and then slicing its wing with his sword. A third creature ambushed this sailor from behind, pinching his tunic’s collar with its beak until it tore off. Just when the pterodactyl jabbed again at him, I threw myself at it and sent my sword through its neck exactly like the last one I had killed.

It seemed that for every one of the flying monsters we slew, at least two more darted in to take its place. My muscles burned with strain and sweat, with sprayed blood slickening my skin, as the creatures’ wings flapped furiously, whipping up an evil zephyr over me. If they did not massacre us with their relentless diving attacks, I realized, the pterodactyls would fight us to exhaustion. Then they would swoop down and feast on our flesh. All we could do was endure them the best we could.

Just behind me, I heard a desperate holler. It was Kishore! A pterodactyl had snatched him by the arm and picked him up from the deck like an eagle might hoist a snake with its beak. He thrashed his limbs and kept screaming for a help we could not provide as we watched the infernal demon haul him back toward the continent’s shore.

I closed my eyes for a brief second, trying to erase the picture of his upcoming death from my mind.

I could not let him go like that. I quickly hacked my way through more of the pterodactyls to the port side, leaped over the gunwale and plunged into the tropical water below, my scimitar’s blade in my teeth. The times Kishore and I swam across the Tigris jogged my memory as I threw out my arms in breast strokes in the direction the pterodactyl had flown with him. My arms burned as I swam, my mind filling like an endless foundation with our days as boys in the slums racing down the streets, chasing dogs, and pilfering only what we needed, but never more, from merchants’ stalls or patrons’ purses in the bazaar. I swam and swam, recalling the stories we told while feasting on whatever we could obtain either through purchase or plunder.

Even our secrets we shared, not least of which was Kishore coming to feel for men the way I felt for women. It was an admission that shocked me at first, as I had been raised to consider such feelings as sinful, but in the end, it had no bearing on our friendship. Besides, for all I knew, Kishore’s faith minded it less than mine did.

Those memories, and secrets, kept feeding me like nectar, giving me the strength I needed to propel myself all the way to the beach. When my fingers first dug into the damp sand beneath the surf, I could hear my old friend’s screams persist overhead, even though his voice was hoarse. While catching my breath, I exhaled a quick sigh of relief that Kishore still lived. The pterodactyl was taking him to a tongue of headland atop some slate-gray cliffs to my right, with several more of its kind bedded down on top of it. That had to be the creatures’ nesting site.

I scurried to the shade of coconut palm trees that bordered the opposite side of the white sandy beach and wove my way around them toward the headland’s cliffs. Vines thick as rope festooned the cliff that touched the jungle further inland, allowing me to scramble up the jagged face using the same holds and moves that enabled Kishore and I to climb Baghdad’s buildings, where we would gaze at stars as big as dates from the rooftops while he taught me his native Tamil. Still, the cliff must have reared at least twenty feet from foot to lip, so it was with stretched and aching forelimbs, left even more painful by the long swim, that I reached the headland’s top.

I peeked carefully across the stony surface. Pterodactyls watched over nests of branches, leaves, and seaweed, with numerous bones and chalk-white droppings strewn between them. The creatures did not nestle on the ground with wings folded along their sides like birds, but instead stood on all fours like bats, the claws on their wings’ bends acting as front feet. One of the nests had a lively brood of tinier pterodactyls hopping around on it, chirping with gleeful hunger as their mother began lowering her catch to them.

That catch was Kishore, his movements now slow, fighting with every ounce of energy to stay alive.

I clutched my scimitar and raced toward the nest, maneuvering around the younger creatures while dodging their winged architects’ piercing beaks. The mother pterodactyl dumped Kishore into her nest, and her famished brood pounced on him. I didn’t know if I could get to my old friend before the little devils pecked out his eyes, or his life. They were hungry and wasted no time swarming over him.

By the time I scampered to his side, they had already pocked his skin with cuts and deep wounds that bled while he shielded his face with his arms.

I swung my weapon over Kishore, slicing one of the hatchlings in half. Its mother screeched the loudest I’d heard yet, her fury absolute over her baby’s death. She launched herself at me. I ducked underneath her, grabbed Kishore by his shoulders, and propped him up while he shook off the other hatchlings. The puny creatures continued to peck at and harangue him, while their mother and her companions did the same to me, despite my best efforts to keep them at bay with my sword. I sliced it through the air, over and over.

A pterodactyl snapped onto my sword-arm and pulled me off the headland, my arm still wrapped around Kishore. It began carrying both of us, the flapping of its wings unsteady as we weighed it down, two men apparently too much for her to carry. Yet, to our utter amazement, the creature lifted us higher into the sky. The world began to shrink beneath our dangling legs.

“What’s it planning to do, Sinbad?” Kishore cried over the beating of the reptile’s wings.

The pterodactyl shook its head furiously, reminding me again of the fury of eagles holding snakes in their beaks.

“Whatever it is, don’t look down!” I yelled.

A thin dark shaft whizzed up from the jungle’s edge to puncture the pterodactyl’s breast. After emitting a pain-filled screech that diminished into a staccato croak, the aerial beast released its grip on me, and we plummeted alongside its limp body into the ocean.

Family Reunion

50,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, an ancestress of the East Eurasian peoples faces off against a tiger!

Southeast Asia, 50,000 years ago

A high-pitched scream pierced through the jungle. Ungu stopped in her tracks, stunned by the noise, and plucked out her ivory knife from under the deerskin bands around her thigh. She darted her eyes over the surrounding undergrowth, searching for the source, while chilled perspiration collected on her brow. She could mistake it for nothing other than a human cry.

The rattling of leaves and branches, the cracking of twigs, and the scuffing of little feet on the damp earth followed another scream. To her left, Ungu could see a nearby tree-fern’s feathery fronds slap a short, dark shadow that ran past it. Close behind shot a larger, orange blur that leaped and fell upon the former figure, with both disappearing behind a screen of thrashing foliage.

Ungu dashed toward the disturbance to find a little boy pinned beneath a tiger’s paws. The poor child yelled and squealed as he flailed his fists at the striped cat’s face. Undaunted by his pathetic efforts to keep it at bay, the huge feline opened its drooling maw, lowering its fangs to his gullet, while its claws cut into his body.

Shrieking her huntress’s cry, Ungu launched herself onto the tiger. She squeezed her arm onto its thick furry neck and pulled it away from its victim while drawing her knife overhead. Before she could stab the beast, it bucked her off, throwing her onto the jungle floor. Ungu rolled back to her feet and jumped to cut the cat off from the boy, who had in the meantime scurried to hide behind the buttress root of a tapang tree.

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Why Tyrannosaurs Probably Didn’t Have Feathers After All

Artwork by Michael W. Skrepnick, showing a mother T. rex with its downy hatchling

I admit it, nine-year-old me would have cried at the idea of Tyrannosaurus rex, my all-time favorite dinosaur, sporting a coat of feathers like a bird.

I first encountered the above illustration in an issue of National Geographic back at that tender age. The issue had a whole article on then-recent discoveries of dinosaur fossils sporting impressions of feathers from China, with numerous model reconstructions and other artwork depicting how the animals would have looked in life. Mind you, I was already aware that some theropod (or “meat-eating”) dinosaurs were close relatives of modern-day birds, and that the “first bird” Archaeopteryx demonstrated a visible link between the two groups. What the new Chinese fossils demonstrated was that the prevalence of feathers among theropods went beyond Archaeopteryx and its immediate ancestors and covered groups once thought to be scaled like other dinosaurs, such as dromaeosaurids (“raptors” such as Velociraptor and Deinonychus), oviraptorosaurs (Oviraptor), and compsognathids (a family including, well, the tiny Compsognathus).

Seeing Velociraptor, the intimidating antagonists of Jurassic Park, portrayed as feathered like birds was already enough to ruffle my feathers (pun very much chosen with intent). But the most offensive illustration in that issue by far, in my juvenile eyes anyway, was the one suggesting that Tyrannosaurus and its cousins in the tyrannosaurid family would have possessed a feathery coat as well. It didn’t matter that the illustration contrasted a downy hatchling with its scaled adult. The very idea of my favorite dinosaur, lord of the jungle of Late Cretaceous North America, ever having the telltale body covering of a lowly, cowardly bird seemed a major downgrade. It was heretical enough to put me off the idea that any dinosaurs evolved into birds at all.

Twenty years have passed, and I have matured enough to recognize that some so-called “non-avian” dinosaurs did, indeed, have feathers, and that all of today’s birds represent an offshoot of these dinosaurs. The preponderance of evidence so far does suggest that, contra the Jurassic Park movies, that dromaeosaurids like Velociraptor would have been feathered by default, as would the flock of Gallimimus seen in the first film’s stampede scene (at least as shown by new fossils of its cousin Ornithomimus). I cannot dispute this, nor do I even mind it anymore.

My feelings about feathered tyrannosaurs, on the other hand, have come full circle. Beginning in the early 2010s, I have warmed up to the idea and was eagerly drawing full feathered coats on them between 2012 and 2013. It was after that period of my life that my skepticism of the concept returned. In the years since, I have lost any remaining love for it and, if anything, have grown even more sick of it than I ever was as a child.

This time, however, I have good reason to believe that neither Tyrannosaurus rex nor the other members of the family Tyrannosauridae ever had feathers. And not only because they look better without them.

Continue reading “Why Tyrannosaurs Probably Didn’t Have Feathers After All”

The Sultan of Finback Isle – Opening Excerpt

Cover illustration for my e-novelette “The Sultan of Finback Isle”, showing our heroes Abdullah and Monique Kalua being encircled by a hungry Dimetrodon.

A new novelette available in ebook form on the Amazon Kindle store!

Having broken off from the other continents two hundred and sixty million years ago, the landmass known as Finback Isle has protected a unique ecosystem in the equatorial Pacific older than the dinosaurs themselves. Only a near-extinct nation of Polynesian settlers, together with the crew of Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, have ever set foot on the island within the annals of human history. 

And then Ibrahim Fawal, a native of Casablanca turned controversial new Chief of Police in Los Angeles, decided to establish his private winter getaway there.

Enter Abdullah and Monique Kalua, a daring husband-and-wife team of FBI agents sent to investigate the LAPD’s accelerated record of corruption and brutality under Fawal;s leadership, including the shooting of Monique’s own close relations. Their mission is to penetrate Fawal’s secret lair and bring him to justice.

Not only must they brave treacherous jungle littered with Polynesian ruins and teeming with beasts from the late Paleozoic Era, but they must also contend with the armed officers of one of the most vicious men ever to head the police of Los Angeles…the Sultan of Finback Isle!

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The Battle for Djamba

Our heroine, Queen Butumbi of Djamba, shoots from the back of her tame T. rex Tambwe.

Tambwe craned his big head upward, inhaled through his nostrils, and let out a deep rumbling growl from his mouth of blade-like teeth. The tyrannosaur’s tail swayed behind him as he sat crouched within the wall of jungle that reared alongside a moss-stained road.

Butumbi, Queen of Djamba, stroked the deep green scales on her mount’s neck while murmuring an incantation to calm his temper. She could hear the giant predator’s stomach grumble with a hunger for fresh meat that had grown over the past week’s southward march. With a voice as soft as that of a mother reassuring her child, the young Queen promised Tambwe that he would have more than enough to gorge on before sundown.

Other than the normal chorus of bird squawks, insect chirps, and monkey hoots, the jungle lay silent on both sides of the road. Even from atop the saddle behind her tyrannosaur’s neck, Butumbi could see little of the force she had laid out before her. Armed men and women lay beneath the cover of undergrowth and creepers, as did the packs of feathered deinonychus that had been hired to protect their flanks. Only the tiniest glint of iron weaponry and jewelry of gold and copper could betray anyone’s presence.

It was as Butumbi had planned. The forces of Ntambwa would not know what struck them until it was too late.

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Tyrant Lord

North America, 67 million years ago

The sunrise’s golden glow drifted across the rolling sea of treetops. It descended through the canopy’s tangle of leaves, branches, and vines in scattered beams until it reached the forest understory. Within this maze of trees and tropical underbrush slept a giant.

A hide of black and dark green scales camouflaged his nine-ton bulk amidst the shadowed foliage until he cracked his flaming yellow eyes open. With the help of short yet brawny double-clawed arms, he propped himself off the forest floor onto even stronger hind legs, with his thick long tail hovering behind. He shook his head, stretching his neck muscles, and took in a great yawn with jaws lined with ivory spikes. Inside his cavernous stomach grumbled hollow.

He was Tyrannosaurus rex, tyrant lord of the jungle, and he had awoken hungry.

He craned his head up to scan his surroundings. Six monsoons had passed since he had carved his territory out after leaving his mother’s brood, and he had since mapped out its every tree, bush, and stone in his memory. He recognized that the ancient kapok tree he had rested underneath last night stood a few hours’ walking north of a river fed by waterfall, where game would gather to cool off once the heat reached its noontime peak. Between then and daybreak, they would browse the jungle glades for their morning meals.

And the tyrannosaur would make his own breakfast out of them.

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