All three of the ex-SAS team were absurdly bundled up against the insects, covered from head to toe with insect-proof clothing, which included a hood and a head net.
“Is that really necessary?” I asked.
“I’ve had dengue fever twice,” Woody said, and launched into a shockingly graphic description of the disease, which had almost killed him the second time. It is called “breakbone fever,” he said, because it is so painful you feel like your bones are breaking.
After his tale was over, I noticed everyone quietly applying more DEET. I did the same. Then, as night deepened, the sand flies came out—in numbers. Much smaller than mosquitoes, they looked like white motes drifting in the light of the lantern, so small that they made no noise, and you normally don’t feel them biting, unlike mosquitoes. The more the night deepened, the more sand flies collected around us.
Eager to record some of the stories being told, I hurried back to my hammock on the other side of camp to fetch my notebook. My new headlamp was defective, so Juan Carlos loaned me a crank flashlight. I made my way back without difficulty. But on my return, everything looked different in the dark; I halted, hemmed in by dense vegetation, realizing I had somehow veered off my rudimentary trail. The nighttime rainforest was black and alive with noise, the air thick and sweet, the leaves like a wall surrounding me. My flashlight’s feeble beam was fading. I took a minute to frantically crank it up to a greater brightness, and then I played it carefully over the ground, looking for my tracks in the forest litter, or any sign of the trail I’d hacked with my machete earlier in the day.
Thinking I saw tracks, I moved in that direction, walking quickly, pushing aside the undergrowth with a growing sense of relief—only to be blocked by a mammoth tree trunk. I had never seen this tree before. Disoriented, I had stumbled deeper into the jungle. I took a moment to catch my breath and get my heart rate down. I could neither hear my companions nor see the light from where they were gathered. I thought of calling out to them, asking Woody to come get me, but decided not to expose myself as an idiot this early in the expedition. After intently examining the ground and cranking the light up several more times, I finally found my real tracks and retraced them, bent over and peering at the forest floor, each time waiting to advance until I located the next scuffmark or depression. A few minutes later, I spied a freshly cut leaf lying on the ground, its stem oozing sap, and then another. I was back on the trail.
Following the slashed leaves and vines like bread crumbs, I retraced the trail to the center of camp, where I gratefully recognized Juan Carlos’s hammock. Thrilled to be safely back in camp, I circled the hammock, probing the wall of forest with my light for the path that would take me to where the rest of the group was chatting. That would be easy: I could now hear the murmur of voices and see the light of the Coleman lantern peeking through the vegetation.
On my second circle of the hammock, I froze as my beam passed over a huge snake. It was coiled up on the ground, just to one side of Juan Carlos’s hammock, three feet away from where I stood. Impossible to miss, the snake was the opposite of camouflaged: Even in the dim flashlight beam it looked practically aglow, the patterns on its scaly back brilliantly etched against the gloomy night, its eyes two bright points. It was staring at me, in striking position, its head swaying back and forth, its tongue flicking in and out. I had walked right past it—twice. It seemed mesmerized by the flashlight beam, which was already starting to fade. I hastily cranked it back up into brightness.
I backed up slowly until I was out of the snake’s range, which I figured might be more than six feet—some snakes are able to strike their entire body length. I have had many encounters with venomous snakes—I’ve been struck at several times and hit once (a rattler that bounced off the toe of my boot)—but I had never in my life faced a snake like this: so fully aroused, so keenly focused, so disturbingly intelligent. If he decided to come at me, I’d not be able to escape.
“Hey, guys?” I called out, trying to keep my voice steady. “There’s a giant snake here.”
Woody responded, “Get back. But keep the light on it.”
The snake remained motionless, its gleaming eyes fixed on me. The forest had fallen silent. Woody arrived seconds later, with the rest of the group in tow, their headlamp beams swinging wildly through the murk.
“Jesus Christ,” someone said loudly.
Woody said quietly: “Everyone stay back, but keep your torches on him. It’s a fer-de-lance.”
He pulled his machete from its scabbard and, with a few strokes, transformed an adjacent sapling into a seven-foot snake stick, a long pole with a narrow, forked end.
“I’m going to move him.”
He advanced toward the snake and, in a sudden thrusting motion, pinned its body to the ground with the forked end of the stick. The snake exploded into furious action, uncoiling, twisting, thrashing, and striking in every direction, spraying venom. Now we saw just how large it really was. Woody worked the forked stick up its body to its neck as the snake continued to whip about. Its tail was vibrating furiously, making a low humming sound. Keeping the neck pinned with the stick and his left hand, Woody crouched and seized it behind the head with his right hand. The snake’s body, thick as his arm, slammed against his legs, its dazzling snow-white mouth gaping wide, unsheathing inch-and-a-quarter-long fangs that pumped out streams of pale yellow liquid. As its head lashed back and forth, straining to sink its fangs into Woody’s fist, it expelled poison all over the back of his hand, causing his skin to bubble. Woody wrestled the snake to the ground and pinned its squirming body with his knees. He pulled a knife from his belt and with his left hand, never releasing the snake with his right, neatly sliced off the head. He impaled the snake’s head firmly to the ground by driving the knife through it, and only then released the snake. The head, along with its three inches of remaining neck, wiggled and struggled, while the headless snake also began to crawl off, and Woody had to pull it back into the pool of light to prevent its escape into the brush. Through the whole struggle, he never uttered a word. The rest of us had been stunned into silence as well.
He rose, rinsed his hands, and finally spoke. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to move it. I had to wash the venom off right away.” (Later, he said he was “a bit concerned” when he felt the poison running into a cut on the back of his hand.)
He held up the headless snake by the tail, blood still dribbling from its neck. Nobody said a word. The snake’s muscles were still flexing slowly. Curious to touch it, I reached out and wrapped my hand around it, feeling the rhythmic writhing of muscles under its cool skin, a queer sensation indeed. The snake was about six feet long, its back displaying striking diamond patterns in colors of chocolate, mahogany, and creamed coffee. Everyone stared at it as the sounds of the night returned.
“Nothing like this to sort of concentrate your mind, is there?” Woody said. “Female. They get bigger than the males. This is one of the biggest fer-de-lances I’ve ever seen.” He casually slung the body over his arm. “We could eat it, they’re quite delicious. But I’ve another use for it. When the others arrive tomorrow, they’ll need to see this. Everyone needs to be fully aware of what they’re getting into here.”
He added quietly, “There’s rarely just one.”
When I retired that night to my hammock, I could not sleep. The jungle, reverberating with sound, was much noisier than in the daytime. Several times I heard large animals moving past me in the darkness, blundering clumsily through undergrowth, crackling twigs. I lay in the dark, listening to the cacophony of life, thinking about the lethal perfection of the snake and its natural dignity, sorry for what we had done but rattled by the close call. A bite from a snake like that, if you survived at all, would be a life-altering experience. In a strange way the encounter sharpened the experience of being here. It amazed me that a valley so primeval and unspoiled could still exist in the twenty-first century. It was truly a lost world, a place that did not want us and where we did not belon
g. We planned to enter the ruins the following day. What would we find? I couldn’t even begin to imagine it.
CHAPTER 15
All this terrain, everything you see here, has been entirely modified by human hands.
I lay awake most of the night in my hammock. It was a high-tech contraption, the underside made of thin nylon, with a top of insect netting and a rainfly above. You entered through a zippered seam in the side, but it left me feeling exposed, and it swayed with every movement I made. I had stopped taking my weekly dose of chloroquinone, an antimalarial drug, in a fruitless attempt to alleviate the insomnia it had been causing, a common side effect. I reasoned that there couldn’t be any malaria in an uninhabited place like this, cut off from the world.
The night clamor of the jungle was so loud I had to wear earplugs. Chris, on the other hand, confessed to me later that he recorded the night jungle on his iPhone and played it to himself back in Colorado to help calm him down when he was stressed or upset.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I got up to pee. I unzipped the hammock and peered out, probing the ground all around with my flashlight, looking for snakes. A cold and clammy mist had descended, and the forest was dripping with condensation. There were no snakes, but the entire forest floor was carpeted with glistening cockroaches—thousands of them rustling in frantic activity, looking like a greasy, jittering flow—along with dozens of motionless black spiders whose multiple eyes gleamed like pinpoints of green. I peed no more than two feet from the hammock and hastily climbed back in. But even in that brief moment it proved impossible to keep the sand flies from pouring into the hammock’s interior space. I spent a good fifteen minutes lying on my back, shining my light around, squishing sand flies as they drifted about or landed on the mosquito netting above me. After I had to get out and pee a second time, I damned the British habit of drinking tea before bedtime and swore I would not do so again.
What little sleep I did get ended for good at around five o’clock in the morning, at first light, when I was awoken by a roaring of howler monkeys, which reverberated through the forest like Godzilla on the march. When I emerged from the hammock, the forest was enveloped in fog, the treetops fading into the mist, water dripping everywhere. For a subtropical jungle it was surprisingly chilly. We ate a breakfast of freeze-dried scrambled eggs and weak tea (coffee had not arrived yet). Chris, who seemed to be prepared for everything, had brought caffeine pills for just such a contingency and popped a few. (I declined his offer to share.) The AStar couldn’t fly in until the fog lifted, which it finally did around midmorning. The first flight brought in Steve Elkins and two members of the film crew, Mark Adams and Josh Feezer.
I greeted Steve after the chopper took off. He was walking with a hiking pole and limping, due to chronic nerve damage in his foot.
“Nice,” he said, looking around. “Welcome to the Mosquitia Four Seasons.”
Alicia González, the expedition’s anthropologist, arrived in the second flight, along with Anna Cohen, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Washington, who was Chris Fisher’s field associate. I soon became friendly with Alicia, who was an amazing font of knowledge. With a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, Alicia was a small, cheerful, and imperturbable woman of sixty, formerly a senior curator in the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. Of Mexican, Jewish, and Native American ancestry, she was an authority on Mesoamerican trade routes and the indigenous people of Honduras.
The chopper also brought in Oscar Neil, chief of archaeology for the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). Neil was an authority on the ancient cultures of Mosquitia. We unloaded the chopper with the usual haste, throwing everything into a heap to be sorted and carried into camp later. The morning was spent moving supplies and equipment and organizing our campsites. I grabbed a tent and set it up next to my hammock, grateful to be on solid ground. The tent’s sewn-in waterproof ground cover would keep out the snakes, spiders, and cockroaches. I enlarged my campsite area with a machete, strung a clothesline, and claimed a folding chair from one of the loads, which I set up under my hammock. There, protected under the rainfly of the hammock, I could sit and write in my notebook. And I could store my clothes, books, camera, and journals in the hammock itself, which made a handy waterproof storage compartment.
As the day wore on, Chris Fisher became increasingly impatient, eager to begin our extraordinary task of entering the lost city. I found him down on the riverbank, in his straw cowboy hat, pacing back and forth with a Trimble GPS in his hand. Woody had forbidden anyone to leave camp without an escort, due to the danger of snakes and getting lost. “This is ridiculous,” Fisher said. “The site is just right there—two hundred yards away!” He showed me the LED screen on the Trimble, which displayed the lidar map and our position on it. I could see that the city was, indeed, right on the other side of the river, completely hidden in the screen of trees. “If Woody doesn’t free up someone to take us over there, I’m going by myself—screw the snakes.” Juan Carlos joined us at the streambank, hands on his hips, staring at the wall of trees on the far side. He, too, was eager to venture into the ruins. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. It was true: We had only ten potential days to explore the valley, our time being strictly limited by the rental period of the AStar helicopter from Corporate Helicopters in San Diego. Its pilot, Myles Elsing, had to fly it back to the States—a four-day journey—for another assignment.
“Someone’s got to talk to Woody,” said Fisher. “This is why we’re here”—he gestured across the river at the hidden city—“not boiling water for frigging tea.”
Finally, about three thirty in the afternoon, Woody agreed to lead a reconnaissance into the ancient city. He told us to be at the LZ in a half hour, with our packs fully loaded with the emergency overnight kit. We would have one hour in the ruins—no more.
At the appointed time, we gathered at the stream, stinking of DEET. There were eight of us in the group: myself, Woody, Chris Fisher with a machete in one hand and GPS in the other; Oscar Neil; Juan Carlos, also carrying a fearsome machete; Lucian Read, with a video camera; and Mark Adams, with a forty-pound field audio kit consisting of a wireless audio mic system, portable audio mixer/recorder, and a six-foot boom mic with windshield. I couldn’t believe Mark was going to hump all that through the jungle. Dave Yoder, burdened with heavy camera equipment, followed in watchful silence, ceaselessly shooting. Steve Elkins could not come; the nerve damage, caused by a deteriorating disk in his spine, gave him a condition known as drop foot, in which he was unable to control the position of his foot while walking. He felt the jungle was too thick and the hills too steep to take the risk of injury so early in the expedition. He did not want to be laid up, or worse, have to be evacuated. It was a bitter pill to swallow. “If you guys find anything,” he said, waving a two-way radio, “call me.”
Woody checked our packs to make sure we had all our emergency supplies, and we set off, wading across the stream. On the far side we encountered a thicket of heliconia that formed a virtually solid wall, but the fleshy stems were easily felled with the swipe of a machete. Woody carved and slashed his way through, one step at a time, the leaves and flowers showering down left and right. The cut vegetation lay so thickly on the ground that there was no possibility of seeing where we were putting our feet. Still shaken by my encounter with the fer-de-lance, I couldn’t help but think of all the snakes that must be hiding in that undergrowth. We crossed two muddy channels, sinking up to our thighs, struggling through the morass with sucking sounds.
The embankment beyond the floodplain was precipitous: close to forty degrees. We climbed hand and foot, grasping roots and vines and branches, pulling ourselves up, expecting at any moment to come face-to-face with a fer-de-lance. We could see little beyond a dozen feet in any direction. The embankment abruptly flattened out, and we arrived at a long ditch and mound that Chris and Oscar examined and felt were man-made. They appeared to mark the edge of the cit
y.
And then we came to the base of the presumed earthen pyramid. The only indication that this was artificial was that the ground rose sharply in an unnatural change of slope. Until Chris and Oscar pointed it out to me, however, I would never have recognized it. We could see nothing but leaves. Here we were, at the edge of a lost city, and we had no sense of the layout or distribution of the mounds and plazas so crisply visible on the lidar maps. The jungle cloaked all.
We labored up the side of the suspected pyramid and reached the top. There, in front of us, were some odd depressions and linear features that Chris believed might be the remains of a structure, perhaps a small temple. Oscar knelt and, with a hand tool, dug a sondaje or test pit into the soil. He said he saw evidence of deliberate construction. I peered at the layers of earth he had exposed just below the surface, but my untrained eye could make out nothing.
Even at the top of the pyramid, the highest point of the lost city, we were immersed in a disorder of leaves, vines, flowers, and tree trunks. Chris held his GPS over his head, but he had trouble locating satellites because of the trees. I took many pictures with my Nikon, but they all ended up showing the same thing: leaves, leaves, and more leaves. Even Dave struggled to get photographs of something other than an endless green ocean of vegetation.
We descended the side of the pyramid into the first plaza of the city. The lidar images indicated that the plaza was surrounded on three sides by geometric mounds and terraces. As Fisher tried once again to get a GPS reading with his Trimble, in order to start ground-mapping, Oscar gave a shout. He knelt, brushing dirt and vines off the corner of a large stone, almost completely invisible in the riot of plants. The stone had a shaped surface. After pulling back and cutting away some of the vegetation, we began to uncover more such stones—a long row of them, all flat, resting on tripods of round, white-quartz boulders. They looked like altars. “We have to clean these stones,” Chris said, “to see if any have carvings, and we need to locate them on the GPS.” He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called Elkins, back in camp, to report the news.
The Lost City of the Monkey God Page 13
