Book II Chapter 10

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TREE OF LIFE BOOK II

CHAPTER 10

The group of men and Nicole picked their way through the forest, making good progress. Willibald was in the lead. Julian and Nicole were about a hundred feet behind him. The rest of the villagers brought up the rear. They’ve been walking now for about three hours.

Nicole was just saying to Julian that she hoped that Brian would be all right, and Julian was just telling her that she was crazy, he was hoping that the waterfall would be all right. No, but seriously, he was sure that Brian would only be dazed for a bit by the fall, and this minor little set-back for the big man only meant that now, she and Julian would have a head start of maybe a few hours at the most, so they should just never mind and hurry along.

Now that they actually had a moment to breathe, Nicole got caught up on Julian’s version of recent events.

What Brian had told Nicole was mostly true. He and his company had indeed isolated a compound that could cure cancer, but only when it was used in the Amazon rainforest. And they did, in fact, invite Julian to come in and consult on the matter, to apply his expertise. At the time, as it happened, Julian was already flying into and out of the forest on his own, in his on again, off again, life long effort to find the actual location of the Tree of Life. He wasn’t sure that the Tree would be here, but his research did show that this spot, out of any other place on the planet, seemed to be able to withstand and recover, against all reasonable odds, from the most incredible onslaught of natural disasters, and that was on top of the ever purposeful destruction of it by human deforestation measures.

“So you found the Tree?” She was grinning from ear to ear.

“Well no…” He shrugged. “…it was kind of the other way around.”

She frowned. “Huh?”

“The Tree found me.”

It was Willibald.

On one of Julian’s many forays into the jungle, one day, out of the blue, out of nowhere, Willibald and his men just happened to show up.

“And he led you to it?”

“Yup.”

It was a happy reunion. The Tree sat Julian down and for days, he talked with him and got to know him. He found out what Julian had been doing since they had parted company and was glad to hear that he was using his life in a meaningful way. In turn, the Tree began to tell him about what he was trying to do here in the rainforest, how he was repairing it, healing it, keeping it healthy and by virtue of these efforts, was helping to keep the planet healthy as a whole.

Julian had brought up the matter of Brian’s compound.

The Tree confirmed that what Brian had found was, in truth, one of the many effects of the Tree on a purely scientific level. But without the immediate presence of the Tree itself, Brian’s isolated chemical, taken out of context and into the farther reaches of the world can only degrade and be entirely useless and very quickly at that. That’s why Brian’s dreams of marketing a new miracle drug that cured cancer to the rest of the world would always remain just that—dreams and dreams only. The Tree could not be used in that way.

Julian had returned to Brian with this news and tried to explain things to him but Brian would have none of it. He just didn’t believe it. He wanted to see it for himself. Julian knew Brian and knew that he would not be satisfied with just ‘seeing’ it. And so Julian refused to take him to the Tree and they had argued and parted ways. That’s when Nicole came into the picture.

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