“Stay where you are,” Gamay ventured.

“My guess, too. These two fellows with spears might mean join me to fight. Little guy and the animal could stand for hunt.” He chuckled. ' Almost as good as a cell phone."

“Better,” Gamay said. “It doesn't use batteries or cost you per minute.”

Paul asked Ramirez if he could open another bag, and the Spaniard gladly assented.

“Fishing kit,” Trout said. “Metal hooks, fiber line. Hey,” he said, examining a crude pair of metal pincers. “Bet this is a pair of pliers for pulling hooks out.”

“I've got you beat,” Gamay said, emptying another bag and pulling out a connected pair of small wooden circles with dark transparent surfaces filling their openings. She attached the apparatus to her ears with fiber hoops. “Sunglasses.”

Not to be outdone, Ramirez also had been poking through bags. He held a gourd about six inches long, unplugged the wooden top, and sniffed. “Medicine perhaps? It smells like alcohol.”

Hanging from the bottom was a miniature bowl and a wooden handle with a flat piece of stone and an irregular wheel on a rotating axis. Paul stared thoughtfully at the gourd, then took it from the other man. He filled the dish with the liquid, brought the wooden device near, and flicked the wheel. It scraped across the stone and emitted sparks. The liquid ignited with a poof.

“Voila,” he said with obvious satisfaction. “The very first Bic cigarette lighter. Handy for starting a campfire, too.”

More interesting discoveries followed. One bag held herbs Ramirez identified as medicinal plants including some he had never seen. In another was a slim, flat piece of metal, pointed at both ends. When they placed it on a glass of water it swung around until one end pointed toward the magnetic north. They found a bamboo cylinder. When held to the eye the glass lenses imbedded inside offered about an eight-power telescopic magnification. There was a knife that folded into a slim wooden case. Their last find was a short bow made from overlapping strips of metal like a car spring and curved to provide maximum pull for an arrow. The bowstring was of thin metal cable. It was hardly the primitive design one would expect to find in the rain forest. Ramirez ran his hand over the polished metal.

“Amazing,” he said. “I've never seen anything like this. The bows the villagers use are simple dowels pulled back and tied with a crude bowstring.”

“How did he learn how to make these things?” Paul said, scratching his head.

Gamay said, “It's not just the objects themselves but the material they are made of. Where did it come from?”

They stood around the table in silence.

“There is a more important question,” Ramirez said somberly. “Who killed him?”

“Of course,” Gamay said. “We were so overwhelmed by his technical accomplishments that we forgot that these objects be long to a dead human being.”

“Do you have any idea who might have murdered him?” Paul asked.