The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  We followed Sully to the outside patio of the hotel, where he had arranged a duffel bag of gear. He showed us how to put on a climbing harness, how to edge out on the pontoon of a hovering chopper, abseil down a rope using a mechanical slowing device called a descender, unclip, signal, and move away. I had had some experience rappelling down cliffs and frozen waterfalls, but that was always with the security of a vertical face to put my feet on as I descended. Roping down from a hovering chopper in free space seemed less secure, and if you didn’t properly release yourself once on the ground, the chopper might take off with you still attached. We each practiced the maneuver multiple times until we had nailed it to Sully’s exacting standards.

  The small AStar that would go in first could only carry three passengers, or two with gear. The final question was who exactly, out of our lucky five, would get a coveted spot on the very first flight. Elkins had already adjudicated some angry disputes among members of the team as to who would be included. Chris argued successfully that he had to be on the first flight in, because he needed to make sure the LZ was not itself an archaeological site that would be damaged by helicopter landings. Dave Yoder demanded to be on that first flight, so that he could capture the moment when boots first hit the ground; one of his fundamental principles as a photographer was never to shoot a reenactment. Steve assigned the third seat to Lucian Read, the DP (director of photography) of the film crew, so he could record the moment on film.

  I would fly in on the second trip with Juan Carlos and a load of essential gear. The five of us and Woody’s team would make a primitive camp that night. The rest of the expedition, including Steve, would fly into the valley in the succeeding days. Excited as he was to be fulfilling a lifelong dream, Steve had sacrificed his own early place in the helicopter for us, because he felt it was important to get the filmmakers, the writer, and the scientists into the valley first. He would fly in the following day.

  The Honduran military, with their larger helicopter, would have to find a landing zone farther downriver; the soldiers would then have to hike up the river to establish a camp behind ours.

  So for that first day and night, we would be on our own.

  CHAPTER 14

  Don’t pick the flowers!

  On February 16, at dawn, the advance team piled into a van and drove to El Aguacate airport, a shabby jungle airstrip built by the CIA during the Contra war. It was located near the base of the mountains about ten miles east of Catacamas. The two helicopters were waiting: the AStar, brightly painted in candy-apple red and white, which had been flown down from Albuquerque, and a Honduran Bell 412 painted in combat gray. This first flight was to be a visual reconnaissance only, to scout out the two possible landing zones: one below the archaeological site, the other at the junction of the two rivers. There would be no landing in T1 on this aerial mission.

  I rode in the Honduran chopper with Dave Yoder, while Elkins rode in the AStar. We took off at 9:45 a.m., heading northeastward, under the agreement that the two birds would stay in visual contact with each other at all times.

  The Honduran helicopter I was in had trouble getting off the ground and then immediately began flying erratically, with a tilt. As we flew, various red lights and an alarm went off on the console, and then we turned around and headed back to Aguacate, where the helicopter made a crooked, skidding landing. It turned out a computer controller had gone bad. I’d been in sketchy aircraft before, but a helicopter is another level of concern, because if the engine fails there is no glide; the pilot must try to execute an “unpowered descent,” which is a euphemism for dropping out of the sky like a stone. Because helicopters are very expensive to fly and require much maintenance, the Honduran military can’t afford to give its helicopter pilots the same number of flying hours that, for example, USAF pilots have. Even less reassuring was the fact that these helicopters were old and had cycled through the air assets of several foreign countries before being acquired by Honduras.

  As we waited at the airstrip, the AStar finally returned. Despite the agreement to stick together, the AStar had gone ahead anyway. Elkins bounded out. “Bingo,” he said, raising his thumb with a grin. “We can land right at the site! But you can’t see the ruins at all—it’s so thick.”

  The Honduran Air Force brought in a replacement Bell, and both choppers made a second reconnaissance later in the day into the valley of T1. This time, the AStar pilot wanted to hover over the potential landing zone and scout it out more thoroughly. The military chopper, on the other hand, would be examining the bigger landing zone downriver, to see if it could accommodate its larger size. As the two LZs were only a few miles apart, the two birds would fly in together and maintain visual contact throughout.

  Once again I flew in the military chopper. For half an hour we were flying over steep terrain, but vast areas of the mountainsides had been cleared, even on slopes of forty to fifty degrees. This was all new territory to me: In 2012, we had flown in from the northwest; now we were flying in from the southwest. I could see that the clearing was not for timbering; it appeared that few if any trees had been taken out, and were left lying on the ground to dry out and be burned, as evidenced by the plumes of smoke rising everywhere. The ultimate goal, I could see, was to turn the land into grazing for cattle—which dotted even the steepest hillsides.*

  Finally we left the clear-cuts behind and were flying over a virgin carpet of jungle-cloaked peaks.

  Once again I had the strong feeling, when flying into the valley, that I was leaving the twenty-first century entirely. A precipitous ridge loomed ahead, marking the southern boundary of T1. The pilot headed for a V notch in it. When we cleared the gap, the valley opened up in a rolling landscape of emerald and gold, dappled with the shadows of clouds. The two sinuous rivers ran through it, clear and bright, the sunlight flashing off their riffled waters as the chopper banked. I remembered it from the lidar flight three years earlier, but now it looked even more splendid. Towering rainforest trees, draped in vines and flowers, carpeted the hills, giving way to sunny glades along the riverbanks. Flocks of egrets flew below, white dots drifting against the green, and the treetops thrashed with the movement of unseen monkeys. As had been true in 2012, there was no sign of human life—not a road, trail, or wisp of smoke.

  In the larger Bell, we followed the winding path of the river. The AStar was ahead and below us, and as we closed in to the upper LZ, the one near the ruins, the AStar went into a hover over an area along the riverbank covered with thick vegetation. We spent twenty minutes circling this LZ and then circled the second one downriver, which was larger and more open. With both landing zones now firmly identified—one for the Bell and the other for the AStar—we headed back to Aguacate.

  The next morning, on February 17, we arrived back at Aguacate at dawn for our flight into the valley, where we hoped to land and establish base camp. The airstrip terminal, a shabby, one-room concrete building, its ceiling tiles falling down, was now full of gear: portable generators, stacks of water bottles, toilet paper, plastic bins packed with Mountain House freeze-dried food, tarps, Coleman lanterns, folding tables, tents, chairs, cots, parachute cord, and other necessities.

  The AStar took off with Woody, Sully, and Spud, equipped with machetes and a chainsaw to clear the landing zone near the ruins. The chopper returned two hours later, having successfully dropped them into an area alongside the stream where there were only a few trees, with a plant cover six to nine feet deep, which could be easily cleared with machetes. Only a few small trees would have to be cut.

  All was going according to plan. It would probably take them four hours to clear it. We would not have to rope down from a hover after all; the chopper would be able to land firmly on the ground.

  Chris Fisher, Dave Yoder, and Lucian Read went in the next flight. Two hours later, the chopper returned and refueled, and then Juan Carlos and I walked out onto the hot tarmac to get in. We each had backpacks with all our essential gear, including food and water for two days, as
the camp would not be fully stocked for at least forty-eight hours. We would have to be self-sufficient for those first few days. Because the LZ at the site was so small, and the AStar unable to carry more than a tiny amount of equipment, most of it would be ferried into the valley on the Bell, offloaded at the downstream LZ, and from there shuttled in by the AStar in many back-and-forth trips.

  Juan Carlos and I stowed our two backpacks in a basket attached to the port side of the helicopter, since there wasn’t room inside. Steve Elkins brought out his iPhone, and he taped me as I gave a ten-second video farewell to my wife, Christine, since I would be out of contact for the next nine or ten days. It was strange to think about what might happen before I was next in touch with her. Steve promised to e-mail the video to her when he got back to Catacamas.

  Just before we lifted off, I had a chance to chat with our copilot, Rolando Zuniga Bode, a lieutenant in the Honduran Air Force. “My grandmother used to talk about Ciudad Blanca all the time,” he said. “She had a lot of stories.”

  “What stories?”

  Rolando dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “You know, the usual old superstitions. She said the conquistadors found the White City and went in there. But they made a mistake: They picked the flowers—and they all died.” He laughed and wagged his finger. “Don’t pick the flowers!”

  Juan Carlos and I donned our helmets and buckled in. He was excited. “When I first saw the images with the buildings, the dimensions of those things—they are big—I had ten thousand questions. Now we’re about to find the answers.”

  After the helicopter took off, we fell silent, taking pictures of the amazingly green and rugged landscape unfurling below.

  “There’s Las Crucitas,” Juan Carlos said. “I asked the pilot to take us this way.”

  I looked down at the remote archaeological site, the largest that had ever been found in Mosquitia before the identification of T1 and T3. In an open, grassy area, I could see a series of sharp mounds, earthworks, and plazas, situated on both sides of the Río Aner. Many had speculated that this was Morde’s Lost City of the Monkey God, but of course now we know Morde had found no such thing—and had never even entered this region of Mosquitia.

  “It looks a lot like T1, don’t you think?” Juan Carlos said.

  I agreed. From the air it looked strikingly similar to the lidar images—the same bus-like mounds, same plazas, same parallel embankments.

  Beyond Las Crucitas the serious mountains loomed up, some almost a mile high. As we maneuvered our way through them, the clear-cuts gave way to unbroken cover. At one point, with Rolando at the helm, the chopper swerved violently.

  “Sorry. I dodged a vulture,” he said.

  Finally the telltale notch into T1 loomed up ahead, and in a moment we had cleared it and were inside the valley. Two scarlet macaws glided below us as we followed the line of the river. Pressed to the window, I took pictures with my Nikon. In a few minutes the landing zone came into view, a green patch littered with cut vegetation; the chopper turned, slowed, and descended. Woody knelt at the edge of the LZ, signaling the pilot as he came down. The trees and bushes around us thrashed with prop wash as we descended, the river surface whipped into a froth of white water.

  And then we were on the ground. We’d been ordered to grab our gear and get clear of the LZ as fast as possible, keeping our heads down. We jumped out and seized our stuff, while Woody and Sully ran to the chopper and unloaded gear and supplies from the basket, throwing them into a pile at the edge of the LZ; in three minutes the chopper was back in the air.

  I watched it rise above the trees, pivot, and disappear. Silence descended, soon filled by a strange, loud roaring from the forest. It sounded like some giant machine or dynamo had been started and was cranking up to full speed.

  “Howler monkeys,” said Woody. “They begin calling every time the helicopter comes in and out. They seem to respond to the noise.” The landing zone had been macheted from a thick stand of “lobster claw” heliconia plants, also known as false bird of paradise, their fleshy stumps oozing white sap. The red-and-yellow flowers and dark green leaves were strewn everywhere, carpeting much of the LZ. We hadn’t just picked the flowers; we’d massacred them. A part of me hoped that Rolando hadn’t seen this as we landed.

  Woody turned to us. “Grab your kit, get a machete, pick out a campsite, and get yourself fixed up.” He nodded toward the impenetrable wall of jungle. A small dark hole, like a cave, had been cut into it, offering a path in. I hoisted my pack; Juan Carlos did the same; and I followed him into the green cave. Three logs had been laid across a pool of mud, and beyond that the freshly cut trail went up a five-foot embankment. We came out in a deep, gloomy forest, with trees rising like giant cathedral columns into the unseen canopy. Their trunks, ten to fifteen feet in diameter, were braced with massive buttresses and knees. Many were wreathed in strangler figs, called matapalos (“tree killers”). The howler monkeys continued roaring as my eyes adjusted to the dimness. The air carried a thick, heady scent of earth, flowers, spice, and rotten decay. Here, among the big trees, the understory was relatively open and the ground was flat.

  Chris Fisher, the archaeologist, appeared, wearing a white straw cowboy hat that shone like a beacon in the gloom. “Hey, you guys, welcome!”

  I looked around. “So… what do we do now?” Woody and the other two SAS men were busy arranging supplies.

  “You need to find a place to string your hammock. Two trees, about this far apart. Let me show you.” I followed him through the trees to his campsite, where he had a green hammock set up, with a rainfly and mosquito netting. He was lashing together a small table from cut pieces of bamboo and had strung up a tarp to sit under in case it rained. It was a very good camp, efficient and well organized.

  I walked fifty yards into the forest, hoping the distance would preserve my privacy after everyone else arrived. (In the jungle fifty yards is a long way.) I found a pleasant area with two small trees the right distance apart. Fisher loaned me his machete, helped me cut a small clearing, and showed me how to hang the hammock. As we worked, we heard a commotion in the treetops. A troop of spider monkeys had collected in the branches above, and they were unhappy. They screeched and hooted, coming down lower, hanging by their tails while shaking branches at us in a rage. After a good half hour of protest they settled down on a limb, chattering and staring down at me as if I were a freak of nature.

  An hour later, Woody came by to check on my camp. He found my hammock job wanting and made some adjustments. He paused to watch the monkeys. “This is their tree,” he said, sniffing a couple of times. “Smell that? Monkey piss.”

  But it was getting late and I didn’t want to go to the trouble of moving my camp. I was beyond the fringes of the group, and concerned that after dark I would need a good trail so as not to lose my way. I walked back to the LZ, clearing a better trail with the machete, losing my way several times, having to backtrack by following the cut plants. I found Juan Carlos in his newly set-up camp. Along with Chris we went down to the bank of the stream and stared across the river at the wall of trees. It mounted up, tier after tier, a barricade of green and brown, dotted with flowers and screeching birds. Beyond that, no more than two hundred yards away, began the edge of the lost city and the possible earthen pyramid we had seen on the lidar images. They were cloaked in rainforest, completely invisible. It was about five o’clock in the evening. A soft yellow sun spilled into the rainforest, breaking into rays and flecks of gold, scattering coins on the forest floor. A few fluffy clouds drifted past. The stream, about three feet deep and fifteen feet wide, was crystal clear, the limpid water burbling over a pebbled bed. All around us, the rainforest chattered with the calls of birds, frogs, and other animals, the sounds mingling together into a pleasing susurrus, punctuated by the call and response of two scarlet macaws, one in a nearby tree, the other distant and invisible. The temperature was seventy degrees, the air clear, fresh, and not humid, perfumed with the sweet smell of fl
owers and greenery.

  “Have you noticed?” said Chris, holding up his hands and smiling. “There aren’t any insects.”

  It was true. The fearful clouds of bloodsucking insects we had been warned about were nowhere to be seen.

  As I looked around, I thought to myself that I had been right and this was not at all the scary place it had been made out to be; it felt instead like Eden. The sense of danger and unease that I had been carrying as an unconscious weight since Woody’s lecture subsided. The SAS team had, naturally, tried to prepare us for the worst, but they had overdone it.

  As dusk fell, Woody invited us into his little bivouac area, where he had a tiny stove going with a pot of boiling water for tea and for hydrating our evening’s freeze-dried dinners. I opened a packet of chicken tetrazzini, poured in boiling water, and then, when it had absorbed the water, spooned it from the bag into my mouth. I washed it down with a cup of tea, and we stood around listening to Woody, Spud, and Sully tell stories of their adventures in the jungle.

  Within minutes, night dropped like the shutting of a door—absolute blackness fell upon us. The sounds of the day morphed into something deeper and mysterious, with trills and scratchings and boomings and calls like the cries of the damned. Now the insects began to make their appearance, starting with the mosquitoes.

  There was no fire. Woody lit a Coleman lantern that forced back the darkness a little, and we huddled in its pool of light in the great forest while large animals tramped, heard but unseen, in the jungle around us.

  Woody said he had spent a large part of his life in jungles all over the world, from Asia and Africa to South and Central America. He said he had never been in one like this, so apparently untouched. As he was setting up camp, before we arrived, a quail came right up to him, pecking in the dirt. And a wild pig also wandered through, unconcerned by the presence of humans. The spider monkeys, he said, were another sign of an uninhabited area, as they normally flee at the first sight of humans, unless they are in a protected zone. He concluded, “I don’t think the animals here have ever seen people before.”