History of Discovery

Hell is hot. That is what everyone would agree on. But nobody ever told you how wet it would also be, oh, so oppressively humid. And green. Indeed, hell might not be at all much like what the church has taught you, for it is a place you can visit while still alive. Hell on Earth, it is an island in the Indian Ocean, west of the coast of Sumatra. Its name is Ryl Madol.

The Black Sistrum, drawn from the notes of Michael Lustig.

Despite its size, the history of this place is shrouded in darkness. Despite sitting close to historic mercantile seaways, there are strangely no definitive accounts or even legends of its existence by either natives or colonials before its official discovery in 1908. The closest possible pre-modern mention is an offhand account linked to an artifact, written down by Vasco da Gama after his first voyage to India. In 1498, Samoothiri, the King of Calicut, had given his fleet a few presents as a sign of hospitality. Most of which were simple and customary, except for one, a rattle-like instrument, called the Black Sistrum, named so for the colour of the mysterious oily stone from which it was crafted. According to Da Gama, Samoothiri told him that it had come from an island far to the East, later named Valusia or Valucia by the Portuguese, inhabited by blood-thirsty snake people, said to rise out of the sea only once every 3000 years. Some have later theorized that the king had gifted the Sistrum to them simply to get rid of the accursed instrument. The Black Sistrum spent the following centuries in the royal treasury of the Portuguese crown, until it was played one day for the amusement of ambassadors from Spain. The result was disastrous, as the instrument’s music allegedly caused madness and nightmares in all who had listened to it. Without mentioning said anecdote, it was then covertly given as a present to Maximilian I., King of Bavaria. From thereon it spent its last years in the Antiquarium of the Munich Residenz, exhibited, but never used or anthropologically studied. In the pre-war years, only a single researcher had shown interest in it, the visiting astronomer Michael Lustig, but his notes are near-useless and seemingly written in a drug-fueled stupor, for he claimed the instrument allowed him to make contact with a moon of Jupiter. Rumours persist that, as a last-ditch effort during the final months of World War 2, the SS investigated if the Sistrum’s alleged capability for psychological damage could be used as a weapon. If there is any truth to such claims, the efforts were likely cut short before they could even begin when the Antiquarium was partially destroyed during the bomb raids by the Allies. When it was rebuilt under West-German rule, no remains of the Black Sistrum were ever found again.

1908

1908 was a year of global anomalies. It was the coldest recorded year since 1880. A massive typhoon devastated Hong Kong and another sunk a small island beneath the sea off the coast of Australia. Sailors in the Arctic could not use their compasses for a full three months. With his radiocommunication experiments, Nikola Tesla claimed to have received signals from Mars. And on June 30th, the same day as an explosion of unknown origin devastated Tunguska in Siberia, the island of Sumatra was hit by a titanic earthquake, almost as devastating as the eruption of the Krakatoa had been 25 years prior. In the subsequent days, a large cyclone of fog and storm formed to the far west of it. Navigators and surveyors around the Indian Ocean began noticing geological and magnetic anomalies. Their epicentre was eventually narrowed down to the cyclone. The Dutch Colonial Empire was the first to send a ship to investigate. Perhaps, it was thought, the earthquake had lifted up some new piece of bare land from the sea, as has happened in recent years off the coast of Pakistan. New land that could be claimed for the empire. But the Batavia never returned, its shipwreck and lost crew having yet to be found.

The British were far more successful. The HMS Caprona was able to pierce through the cyclone and venture on calm waters. After passing through a narrow gap between two large reefs, their arrival in this terra incognita was heralded by the sighting of what was at the time identified as a sea serpent. Soon after, they were perhaps the first ever humans to gaze upon the island of Ryl Madol. To their surprise, it was not a craggy rock that recently rose out of the sea. A massive landmass lied there before their eyes, clad in a bright green jungle, out of which jutted heavily eroded mountains and cliffs. A massive wall, clearly artificial, 20-metres tall, could be seen from the sea. Its ends were slowly sinking beneath the waves, along with other massive pieces of cyclopean stonemasonry. Inhuman shrieks, and perhaps voices, screamed from the steaming jungle. This was an ancient land, which had lied here for uncounted millennia unseen by modern man.

Immediately after landing, about one fourth of the Caprona’s crew died from a horrific malady of the lungs. It was soon discovered that across the island grew a small, almost inconspicuous fungus, a lichen, that almost ceaselessly pumps its malevolent diaspores into the air. The local wildlife is perfectly immune to this toxic miasma, but in humans that spend too much time on the island it causes a violent infection that fills up the lungs with water, making one drown even while standing on dry land. The crew made-do with pieces of cloth wrapped around their faces, but this was only of partial help. Seven more men succumbed to the spores. Another fourth of the crew was eaten alive by the island’s animals. Ungainly, ugly and primitive, but all the same huge, ferocious and malicious creatures called this place their home. All of them were reptilian, amphibian, arthropod or some horrific in-between in nature. No mammals or birds lived on the island. As later researchers concluded, nearly all of the wildlife on Ryl Madol traces its ancestry back to lineages which should have gone extinct somewhen during the Palaeozoic Era. With half of the crew gone, the Caprona soon departed before more lives could be lost. While the British laid a controversial claim to the island and its wonders, its inherent hostility made it impossible for them to enforce that claim and the international debate around Ryl Madol stagnated thanks to the outbreak of the First World War.

Aftermath

The advent of chemical warfare and widespread use of gasmasks during the Great War made it possible to explore Ryl Madol for longer times without succumbing to the air. At the same time, the storm system surrounding the island subsided. Colonialism reared its ugly head again and the Dutch, British, French and even the Portuguese sent expeditions to the island, both out of scientific interest but also to stake a claim. It proved all in vain. Every attempt at an outpost on the main island was doomed. Nobody was able to eradicate the toxic lichen, gunpowder weapons were barely a match for the armoured hides of the reptilian behemoths and the newly discovered intelligent inhabitants showed themselves to be hostile, untameable and indecipherable.

By the 1930s, attempts at colonizing Ryl Madol were given up. Yet private ventures continued, such as in 1933 when a French film crew landed on the island in an attempt to film a documentary-style adventure movie. Due to horrific accidents, the recorded material and most of the actors were lost, so the filmmakers instead tried to recuperate their losses by capturing one of the native flying reptiles and bringing it back to Paris. On its first exhibit, the brute “gargoyle” broke out and wreaked havoc in the city, until it flew off never to be seen again. There are rumours it now lives on the dragon mountain of Pilatus, where it continues to snatch children and cattle.

The last major act in the history of the island was the Second World War, during the occupation of the Dutch East Indies by the Japanese Empire. Pretending to send a fleet to the island in order to create a new war-time harbour, Winston Churchill tricked the Japanese navy into pre-emptively sending its own forces there, where they were devoured by the same hostile forces as everyone before them.

Although sitting in Indonesian territorial waters, in the post-war years, Ryl Madol has become internationally recognized as lying outside any nation’s jurisdiction. Although various countries still continue sending scientific teams to it, this has unfortunately attracted a whole different group of people.