The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  “I ask him if he had heard about Ciudad Blanca. He says yes. I say my husband tried to find this city twenty years ago. He says, ‘This sounds kind of interesting, keep going.’ I say he’s been there.* He says, ‘Can your husband go there again?’ And I say, ‘That’s why we need your permission.’”

  Lobo looked at her and finally answered: “Okay, you made it through here. You got to me, God only knows how. I’ve heard about this city but I’ve never heard of anyone who’s been there physically. I trust you and I want you to trust me. I will introduce you to a member of my cabinet. He will speak for me, and he will be able to get all your permits and everything you need to get this done. His name is Áfrico Madrid.”

  So Mabel went to where the cabinet had gathered and found Áfrico. “I start talking with him about the project. He said, ‘Wow, that does sound interesting.’ He said, ‘If the president told you we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it. I’m going to get you everything you need.’”

  They exchanged e-mail addresses.

  As Mabel was leaving, she saw the president getting into his car and rushed over to him, asking to have a selfie taken with him on her cell phone. He obliged and then asked for the phone, saying he wanted to speak to her husband. She gave it to him and he called Bruce Heinicke in the States.

  “I’m sitting in St. Louis, and here comes this call,” Heinicke said to me. “It’s the president of Honduras on the phone. He asks me, ‘You really know where it’s at?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I want to do this. It will be good for the country.’”

  The president hung up the phone and gave it back to Mabel, saying, “Now can I go?”

  “Yes, Pepe,” she said, “you can go.” Mabel recalled: “He took off like I was going to chase him down and ask for something else!”

  Elkins was astounded and skeptical when he heard this bizarre story, which happened to coincide with his reading the article on lidar. But when he followed up with Bruce and the new Honduran government, he discovered it was true. President Lobo was enthusiastic about the project, seeing the advantages such a discovery would offer his country as well as its potential to bolster his own shaky popularity.

  With the president’s blessing and his permits assured, Elkins flew to Houston to meet with the staff at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, which had mapped Caracol, to try to persuade them to take on his scheme. NCALM is a joint project of the University of Houston and the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the National Science Foundation, and its mission is confined to academic and scientific research, not raw exploration for lost cities that probably don’t exist. The co–principal investigator and chief scientist at NCALM is a man named William Carter, one of the fathers of lidar. As a graduate student, Carter had worked on the Apollo missions and helped design and operate one of the first lunar laser ranging stations, able to measure the earth–moon distance to an accuracy of a few centimeters.

  Elkins spent the day trying to convince Carter and Ramesh Shrestha, director of NCALM, and their team to join in the search for the lost city. It was an eccentric proposal, unlike anything NCALM had done in the past. With Caracol, they were mapping a world-renowned site with guaranteed results; Elkins’s project was a crapshoot that might be a waste of time and a scientific embarrassment. Lidar had never been used before as a tool of pure archaeological exploration—that is, to look for something nobody could be sure even existed.

  “We don’t really know if there’s anything there,” Shrestha said. “The question is: Can we find anything at all?” But Carter was impressed that Elkins had earlier enlisted NASA in the hunt for the city. He looked over Ron Blom’s images of T1 and felt there was enough there to take a chance.

  It was a risky project on many levels. Shrestha remembered their debate. “It was something that nobody had done. It had the potential to find something and have a significant impact in the archaeological field. I said explicitly to Steve: ‘Look, this is an experimental project. We will do the best we can. We can’t promise it will work—and we can’t take the blame if it doesn’t!’” Shrestha and Carter were both, however, attracted to the challenge of trying to map terrain under the densest rainforest on earth. If lidar worked in Mosquitia it would work anywhere. It would be the ultimate test of the technology.

  A few members of the NCALM team were more skeptical. “There were some on my staff,” said Shrestha, “who said we cannot do this” because the rainforest is too thick. “‘Without trying it,’ I said, ‘you can’t tell me it’s not doable.’”

  Others were troubled that no archaeologists were involved. “Steve Elkins is a film guy,” Michael Sartori, the chief mapping scientist at NCALM, said to me later. “Many times, I told my coworkers that this was a bad idea, that this is not the kind of project we should be doing. This is not the normal mode of supplying quality data to academics in the field of archaeology.”

  Elkins first proposed to NCALM that they survey all of Mosquitia with lidar. But when he learned it would cost millions of dollars, he whittled down the search area to about fifty square miles. Mapping that would run to about a quarter million dollars in direct costs and a similar amount in supporting costs.

  T1 was only twenty square miles. In case T1 came up empty, Steve chose three other unexplored areas to survey. He called these T2, T3, and T4. T2 was a deep valley surrounded by white limestone cliffs that had also been rumored to contain the White City. T3 was an area like T1—difficult to get to, scientifically unexplored, a gentler landscape with large open areas, locked in by mountains. T4 was the valley where Elkins believed Sam Glassmire had found his ruin.

  Elkins did intensive research into the four target areas to see if any recent exploration had been done, archaeological or otherwise. He pulled together the latest maps of all the known archaeological sites in Mosquitia. He combed the archives of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History looking for unpublished reports, and he searched the official Honduran register of archaeological sites.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists had identified about two hundred archaeological sites in Mosquitia. This is almost nothing when compared to the many hundreds of thousands of sites recorded in the Maya region, or the 163,000 registered archaeological sites in my home state of New Mexico. These two hundred Mosquitia sites ranged from some large settlements with massive earthworks to many smaller sites, cave burials, rock art, and artifact scatters that all appeared to belong to the same widespread culture. Many of these sites, unlike in the Maya area, were simply dots on a map that had never been accurately surveyed, and virtually none had been fully excavated. A century of archaeology in Mosquitia had produced few answers, and much that had been done was limited, superficial, or of poor quality. Archaeologists so far had not been able to answer some of the most basic questions of this culture—who they were, where they came from, how they lived, and what happened to them. Without doubt, Mosquitia harbored many, many undiscovered sites that would yield essential secrets.

  Elkins could find absolutely no archival evidence that anyone had ever explored T2, T3, or (aside from Glassmire) T4. With no record of human entry, they were blank, unknown to science. But were they also uninhabited? The archives wouldn’t document indigenous use of the areas for hunting and gathering.

  Elkins ordered the latest satellite imagery of the four target areas. When the imagery came in, he had a shock. The most recent satellite photography of T4, the valley containing Glassmire’s White City, showed that it was pockmarked with several recent clear-cuts from illegal deforestation. Deforestation and archaeological looting go hand in hand; Glassmire’s ruin, if it existed, would have been uncovered and quietly looted, its movable artifacts likely dispersed into the black market or hauled off by locals. But Elkins also knew that there were many big ruins in Mosquitia, known and unknown, any one of which might be the legendary White City, if it indeed existed in its described form, which was at the time an open question. Elkins eliminated T4 from
the list.

  Sadly, T4’s fate was far from unusual. The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Between 1990 and 2010, Honduras lost over 37 percent of its rainforest to clear-cutting. All of Elkins’s targets of interest lie within or close to the nominally protected Tawahka Asangni Biosphere and Río Plátano Biosphere Reserves, but protection and law enforcement are weak. The remoteness, the rugged mountains, and the hostility of the jungle are no match for the profits to be gained from logging and cattle grazing. Archaeology is in a race against deforestation; by the time archaeologists can reach a rainforest site to survey it, it may well be gone, fallen prey first to the logger’s ax and then the looter’s shovel.

  The permits to lidar the Mosquitia rainforest were granted in October of 2010. They came with the blessing of the president and the minister of the interior and population, Áfrico Madrid, along with the full support of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH) and its chief, Virgilio Paredes. The new government of Honduras was squarely behind the search.

  President “Pepe” Lobo was taking office after a contested election at one of the lowest points in Honduran history. The Honduran economy was the second poorest in the Americas. Large swaths of the countryside, towns, and parts of some large cities had been taken over by narcotraffickers. Gangs had sprouted up and were running brutal extortion and kidnapping rackets. The murder rate, already the highest in the world, was skyrocketing. Corruption was rampant. The judicial system and law enforcement were in collapse. The people were impoverished, adrift, cynical, and restive. The 2009 coup had left the country, including the archaeological community, bitterly fractured. Honduras was a country desperately in need of good news. The discovery of the White City, President Lobo told me later, would be that good news.

  CHAPTER 10

  I would never go back up that river. That’s the most dangerous place on the planet, that river.

  With permits in hand, Elkins went out to raise money. He asked a friend, filmmaker Bill Benenson, to help him find investors for a film project documenting the search. Benenson knew a lot of money people. But after thinking about it for a while, Benenson decided to look for the money in his own pocket. This was too good an opportunity: He would finance the expedition himself. Eventually, Benenson and Elkins divided their filmmaking roles into being codirectors of the documentary film, with Benenson being the sole producer, and Tom Weinberg and Steve credited as coproducers.

  Seventy-two years old at the time of the project, Benenson is a fit, handsome man with a close-clipped beard. He speaks with deliberation, weighing every word, and he does not look like a man who takes risks. He admitted that the project was an “amazing insanity” but he felt driven to take a chance on it. “I’m interested in this story. And also in this lost city and all the adventurers, liars, and crazy people who’ve been looking for it. If you’re going to be a gambler at all with a film project, I thought this was the one to put my money on. This was my number 17 on the roulette wheel.”

  Benenson’s grandfather, Benjamin, came to America from Belarus in the late nineteenth century and settled in the Bronx, New York. He worked as a carpenter, initially building houses for other people, switched to building for himself, and today Benenson Capital Partners, of which Bill is a principal, is a major real estate company owning premier properties in Manhattan and elsewhere. But Benenson’s real love is film and its intersection with anthropology and archaeology. Out of college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Brazil, where he made his first film, Diamond Rivers, which aired on PBS. Today he has more than twenty feature films and documentaries to his credit. He was an executive producer of the documentary Beasts of No Nation, and he directed and produced The Hadza: Last of the First, about the last true remaining hunter-gatherer people of East Africa.

  Benenson had a keen eye for offbeat projects, and he believed that even if nothing was found, the failure of yet another crazy search for the legendary city would actually make an engaging film. Elkins and Benenson, with other partners, created a company called UTL, LLC—“Under the Lidar”—to handle the details of the expedition and film.

  With things finally turning a corner on his decades-old project, Elkins proceeded to put together a team. He and I had been in regular communication for years, and he asked if I’d write about the search for the New Yorker, for which I occasionally wrote archaeological pieces. I agreed, but only reluctantly. Truth be told, I was so skeptical about the outcome that I decided not to pitch the idea to the New Yorker at all until after the expedition was over—and only then if they found something. I didn’t want to risk looking like a bloody fool if the lidar survey came up empty, which I thought was likely, given that every attempt to find the lost city in the past five hundred years had ended in fraud or failure. When I confessed this to Steve, he said, “Well, if we draw a blank, at least you’ll get a vacation out of it.”

  On April 28, 2012, the ten members of the expedition rendezvoused in Houston and flew as a group to the island of Roatán, in the Gulf of Honduras. Roatán is a world apart from the Honduran mainland; thirty miles long and about two miles wide, it is a tropical paradise of pearlescent sand beaches, turquoise waters, dazzling coral reefs, fishing villages, and luxury resorts—a major cruise ship and scuba dive destination. Because of its history as a British colony, English is the primary language.

  Lovely as it was for a vacation spot, Elkins and Benenson had chosen Roatán, above all, because the island’s airport offered better security than the mainland for our plane and its classified payload. The State Department had issued a two-week permit for the plane to leave the country, but the permit required it to be kept in a high-security, nonpublic area with armed guards protecting it day and night. Elkins and Benenson hired the Honduran military to do the job.

  Roatán, being in the northeastern part of the country, was also well situated with regard to Mosquitia: The three target areas were only about an hour’s flying time away. It had one drawback, however: The Roatán airport was forbidden to stock aviation gas. Because of narcotrafficking, avgas was tightly controlled in Honduras. Fuel tankers were routinely hijacked, the drivers killed and the fuel diverted for drug smuggling. The Cessna would have to touch down at the airport in La Ceiba, on the mainland, to refuel after every lidar flight before returning to Roatán.

  At our headquarters, the Parrot Tree Plantation on the island’s south shore, the expedition team occupied a cluster of bungalows with red tile roofs, spreading along the shores of a turquoise lagoon, surrounded by white sand beaches, burbling fountains, and rustling palm trees. The suites sported marble bathrooms, kitchens with granite countertops, and bedrooms trimmed in polished tropical hardwoods. The complex was air-conditioned to frostbite levels. Behind the bungalows sprawled a huge freshwater pool, set among fake rocks, waterfalls, bridges, and dew-laden clusters of tropical flowers, with pergolas draped in snowy sheets, chiffon curtains billowing in the tropical breezes. At the adjacent marina, million-dollar yachts sat in their berths, lapped by Caribbean waters, their polished hulls blazing in the sun. The hills above were sprinkled with whitewashed villas.

  “Why be uncomfortable?” Elkins said, as we gathered for a dinner of grilled lobster tails under a palapa on the beach, looking out over the lagoon, the night sky glittering with stars, the waves whispering along the strand.

  These luxurious surroundings, however, only heightened the expedition’s anxious mood. On its journey down from Houston, the tiny Cessna had gotten stuck in the Florida Keys, grounded by a series of storms over the Gulf. It could be days before the weather cleared. Benenson and Elkins were paying thousands of dollars a day for everyone to sit around waiting. Nobody was happy.

  NCALM had sent down three lidar engineers to run the mission: Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández Díaz, mission planner and chief lidar engineer; Michael Sartori, resident skeptic and data-mapping scientist; and Abhinav Singhania, lidar technician.

  Fernández was, by
happy coincidence, Honduran by birth. He had a PhD in Geosensing Systems Engineering from the University of Florida; he also held an MBA, summa cum laude, from the Catholic University of Honduras, and he was a Fulbright scholar. His familiarity with Honduran politics and culture, his fluency in Spanish, his knowledge of lidar, and his engaging personality would make him one of the most indispensable members of the expedition. The thirty-five-year-old engineer had a calm, matter-of-fact presence, behind which lay a brilliant scientific mind and a sly sense of humor. He was diplomatic, soft-spoken, and never ruffled when everything was going to hell around him, which happened frequently during the course of the expedition. Juan Carlos was delighted to be part of the project, and his involvement has since made him into a kind of national hero in Honduras. “It has to be the Monkey Gods,” he said with a laugh, “an amazing combination of luck, chance, and fate that I was in a position to help. If you’re from Honduras, you’re a mix of so many different things, Spanish and Indian. Even though my name is Spanish, I know there is some Indian in there.” He was hopeful about what the effort would mean for his country. “The people of Honduras don’t have a clear cultural identity. We have to start learning more about our past in order to create a brighter future.”

  Sartori, by contrast, made no secret of his skepticism. “You’re really going to go down there in this huge wilderness, and you’re going to target these areas, but you don’t know what’s there? It just seems like such a crazy shot in the dark.” The absurd poshness of the resort, so unlike the usual penurious academic field expedition, added to his misgivings.

  The expedition team also included a film crew, a still photographer, and Tom Weinberg, the film’s other coproducer and the expedition’s official chronicler. Weinberg was a man with an infectious laugh and a sweet, gentle personality, seventy-two years old, with a fringe of unruly gray hair and a beard. He had been working with Elkins since 1994 on the White City project. In his long career in film and television, he had earned several Emmy Awards and had become a legend in the Chicago film world. He cofounded the TVTV video collective in 1972, which produced “guerilla video” documentaries on progressive subjects in American culture and politics; later, he created the Media Burn Independent Archive, which, long before the Internet, stored thousands of hours of important documentary footage that might have been lost otherwise, including most of Studs Terkel’s interviews.