The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  They had an excited conversation that we all could hear through the walkie-talkie speaker. Elkins was ecstatic. “This proves,” he told Chris, “that they did use cut stone for building. It means this was an important site.”

  The GPS finally located enough satellites for Fisher to begin establishing way points and mapping the city. He charged through the jungle, slashing his way, marking way points, keen and impatient to make the most of our limited time before we had to return to camp. We could hardly keep up. Beyond the altar stones, we reached the central plaza of the city, which had clearly been at one time a large public space. It was as flat as a soccer pitch and more open than elsewhere.

  “These were probably once public buildings,” said Fisher, indicating the long mounds surrounding the plaza. “Perhaps reserved for an elite class or royalty. All this would have been open and very impressive. I imagine this area was where major ceremonies took place.”

  Standing in the plaza, I finally began to have a sense of the size and scale of the city, if only barely. Chris cut his way across it, saying that there were three more plazas and a possible ball court farther on, along with a peculiar mound we had called “the bus” because it looked like one in the lidar image. These bus-shaped mounds were prominent in both T1 and T3, well defined, each a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifteen feet tall. I had also seen several at the site of Las Crucitas. They were a characteristic structure unique to this culture.

  While the rest of the team stayed behind, clearing the vegetation from the stones, Woody and I followed Fisher northward, trying to keep him in sight. We came to more mounds and a steep ravine cutting through them. Glancing into the cut, I could see where the erosion had exposed what looked like stone paving forming an ancient surface. Fisher hurried on past the ravine, where the jungle became incredibly dense. I did not want to follow him into that frightful tangle, and neither did Woody. He called to Chris not to go any farther, that it was time to go back, but he didn’t seem to hear us. Moments later, we saw his white cowboy hat vanish into the forest. The rhythmic swiping of his machete died away into silence. “Bloody hell,” Woody muttered, and again called for him to come back. Silence. He called again. Minutes passed. While Woody was not one to express emotion, I could see a look of irritation and concern gathering on his face. Just when we were thinking Chris was gone, we heard his faint voice drifting through the trees and he emerged back out of the hole he’d cut in the vegetation.

  “We were concerned you were lost,” said Woody in a clipped voice.

  “Not with this,” he said, waving his GPS.

  Woody called for a return. While we had been waiting for Chris, the others had come up to the ravine. Using his own GPS, Woody identified a more direct route back to camp, hiking down the ravine to the floodplain, where we encountered another barrier of heliconia, which Woody worked his way through, expertly wielding his machete, scattering flowers left and right. We had to cross three parallel channels of sucking mud, once again sinking to our thighs. When we reached the stream, coated with mud, we waded in, rinsing the mud off. While the others went back to camp, I stripped, wrung out my clothes and piled them on the pebble beach, and then I lay back in the cool water and floated on my back, letting the river carry me a ways downstream, watching the treetops lazily move past.

  Back in camp, I found Steve on a cot outside his tent, which he had set up next to my camp on the other side of the spider-monkey tree. He was lying on his back, eating peanuts, and gazing straight up with binoculars at the troop of spider monkeys. They in turn were lined up on a limb fifty feet above, staring down at him and eating leaves. It was a funny sight, two curious primate species observing each other with fascination.

  Steve was absolutely beaming over the discovery of the altar stones and full of self-reproach for not having gone with us. He asked questions about how tough the hike was, and I assured him that although it was steep and slippery, and the mudholes were appalling, it was only a few hundred yards and I was pretty sure he could do it if he took it slow.

  “Screw the leg,” he said. “I’m going up there tomorrow, one way or another.”

  That night, we sat around eating freeze-dried beans and rice to the light of a Coleman lantern. I avoided tea, although I did accept a “tot” of whisky from Woody, rationed out in a bottle cap.

  Chris was elated. “It’s just as I thought,” he said. “All this terrain, everything you see here, has been entirely modified by human hands.” In one short reconnaissance, he had confirmed the accuracy of the lidar survey, verifying on the ground every feature seen in the images—along with a great deal more. The “ground truthing” had begun.

  A rising wind breathed through the treetops. “That means rain,” said Woody. “In ten minutes.” Right on schedule the downpour thundered into the treetops. It took a good two or three minutes for the water to work its way down through the canopy and reach us on the ground—and then streams of water came cascading everywhere.

  CHAPTER 16

  I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down.

  After night fell, I crawled in my tent, glad to be on solid ground and out of the dreaded hammock. I read my Dover edition of John Lloyd Stephens by flashlight as the rain drummed down. Despite the rain, snakes, mud, and insects, I felt exhilarated, not just by the lost city, but by the feral perfection of the valley. I had been in many wilderness areas, but never in a place as purely untrammeled as this. The hostility of the environment only added to the feeling of being the first to explore and discover an unknown place.

  I awoke at five to the roar of howler monkeys rising above the pounding of rain. It was a morning so dark it didn’t seem as if daytime had arrived at all. The forest was wrapped in a twilight gloom, cloaked in mist. Chris was up and as usual impatient to the point of zeal to continue his work. The camp kitchen and gathering area had now been partly erected. We assembled under blue tarps strung up over several plastic folding tables. One camp stove was boiling water and the other heating a pot of coffee, now that the supply of coffee had finally arrived. Outside, the rain was turning the jungle floor into greasy mud that seemed to deepen with every passing hour. The water collected in the hollows of the tarp, which periodically had to be pushed up with poles to dump the puddles of water off the edges.

  At breakfast, several people reported having heard a jaguar prowling about the edges of the camp in the dead of night, making a rumbling, purring noise. Woody assured us that jaguars almost never attack humans, although I wondered about that, given Bruce Heinicke’s story. Others were concerned that the large animals heard stumbling about might blunder into a tent, but Woody dismissed that as unlikely, explaining that the animals that came out at night could see quite well in the dark.

  “There are four more plazas I want to look at,” Chris said, gulping his coffee. “Upriver is a weird L-shaped mound. I want to see that. And about a kilometer downriver is another set of plazas I want to see. There’s a lot to do—let’s get going.”

  I had donned my raincoat, but the rain was so heavy that water began to trickle in anyway, and wearing it made me sticky and hot. I noticed none of Woody’s team were wearing rain gear; they were going about their business completely and cheerfully soaked. “Take it off,” Woody said to me. “Best to get it over with all at once. Trust me: Once you’re thoroughly wet, you’ll be more comfortable.”

  As soon as I did, I was quickly drenched—and discovered Woody was right.

  After breakfast, with the rain still falling, the full expedition team assembled on the riverbank, and we set out for our second exploration of the site. Despite his injured leg, Steve Elkins joined the group, carrying a blue hiking pole. Also included were Alicia González and Anna Cohen. We waded the river and went along the trail cut the previous day. When we reached the second mudhole, Alicia struggled to walk through the muck, got stuck, and—as we watched, aghast—began to sink.

  “I can’t move,” she said with remarkable calmness, even as she was sink
ing. “I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down. Really, folks, I’m going down.” The mud was already at her waist, and the more she struggled, the more it gurgled up around her. It was like something straight out of a B horror film. Woody and Sully jumped in and seized her arms and slowly worked her out. Once she was safe on hard ground, the mud draining off of her, it became clear what had happened: The mud had filled up her snake gaiters as she tried to wade through, creating an instant pair of cement overshoes, which were inexorably dragging her under with every movement she made. “For a moment there,” she said afterward, “I thought I was going to be having tea with the snakes.”

  Elkins, for his part, made it through the mudhole with his hiking pole as a balance and managed to climb up the slippery embankment, using roots and small tree trunks as handholds.

  “We’ll get fixed ropes in here tomorrow,” said Sully.

  As we skirted the base of the pyramid, happy shouts and singing echoed from across the river. Sully called Spud in camp on his walkie-talkie and learned that the Honduran Special Forces soldiers, sent to guard the expedition team, had just arrived in good spirits after a hike upstream from the river junction. They had brought nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their backs; they intended to establish camp behind ours and live off the forest, building their shelters from poles and leaves, hunting their food and drinking from the river.

  “Give them a tarp,” said Sully. “And also some water purification tablets. I don’t want a bunch of soldiers with the runs camped near us.”

  When we reached the altar stones, Elkins knelt and began clearing leaves and debris away from them, running his hand over their carved surfaces. One of the stones had a peculiar quartz vein running through it, which looked like it had been chiseled around to enhance it. It ran due north. Elkins felt this was highly significant, and someone else suggested it might have been used to channel blood from human sacrifices. Chris rolled his eyes. “Let’s not get out of hand with the speculation here, folks. We don’t have any idea what these are. They could be foundation stones, altar stones, or something else entirely.” Chris asked Anna to clear the area and survey the stones while he went northward to explore the four plazas. Alicia González and Tom Weinberg remained behind to work with Anna. Dave Yoder, his gear wrapped up in plastic, stayed back to photograph, along with the film crew, who were also struggling to keep their equipment from getting soaked in the rain. The crew posed Elkins next to the stones, clipped a lavalier mic on him, and rolled an interview.

  Chris forged ahead, once again charging through the forest like a maniac, his machete flashing. All the machetes we carried had strips of Day-Glo pink tape on their blades, so they could be seen and avoided. The vegetation was so thick that it was easy to see how someone could get sliced open by a machete-wielding neighbor, and even with the Day-Glo tape there were a couple of close calls. Woody, Juan Carlos, and I tried to keep up with Chris. Beyond the ravine, we explored a second plaza, twice as large as the first, also delineated by mounds, berms, and raised earthwork platforms. On the far side, too, were two low, parallel mounds with a flat area in between, which Fisher mapped out with his GPS. He believed it might have been a Mesoamerican ball court, having a similar geometry and size. This was especially interesting, as it indicated a possible link between this culture and its powerful Maya neighbors to the west and north. Far more than the casual recreation we think of when it comes to games of skill, in Mesoamerican cultures the ball game was a sacred ritual that reenacted the struggle between the forces of good and evil. It might also have been a way for groups to avoid warfare by solving conflicts through a match instead, one that occasionally ended with human sacrifice, including the decapitation of the losing team or its captain.

  I followed Chris and Juan Carlos around as they hacked this way and that through the jungle, surveying and mapping the plaza. I was especially intrigued to see the famous “bus” mound, which was so striking on the lidar images. In reality it was a perplexing earthen construction, with a sharply defined base and steep walls.

  “What the heck is it?” I asked Chris, as he poked around it, marking way points on his GPS.

  “I think it’s the foundation of a raised public building or temple,” he said, explaining it was situated at the far end of what had once been a big plaza, where it would have been prominently visible. “There was something on top that’s gone now, built out of perishable materials.”

  The rain ceased, but the trees continued shedding millions of drops. The light filtered down, cloudy green, as though passing through pond water. I stood breathing in the rich odor of life, marveling at the silent mounds, the immense trees choked by strangler figs, the mats of hanging vines, the cries of birds and animals, the flowers nodding under the burden of water. The connection to the present world dissolved, and I felt we had somehow passed into a realm beyond time and space.

  Soon enough, the peace was broken by another downpour. We continued exploring. It was exhausting, soaking work, pushing through the jungle, unable to see where we were putting our feet, the ground as slippery as ice. We climbed up and down steep ravines and hillsides, made treacherous by mud. I learned the hard way not to grab hold of a stick of bamboo, because it would sometimes shatter into sharp, cutting pieces and dump on me a load of rank water that had accumulated in its hollow stem. Other potential handholds sported vicious thorns or swarms of venomous red ants. Downpour after downpour came and went, like someone turning a tap on and off. Around one o’clock, Woody became concerned that the river might be rising, preventing our ability to cross back to camp, so we returned to where Anna, Alicia, and Tom were working on the row of stones. As they cleared the area, they had discovered, in the corner of the plaza, a stone staircase that went down into the earth, partially buried by slumping mounds. We paused in the rain while Woody passed around a thermos of hot, sweet, milky tea. Everyone was talking excitedly. Even with the minimal amount of clearing, I had a better feeling for what this tiny corner of the city was like, with its row of stones propped upon boulders. They certainly looked like altars, but were they places of sacrifice, or seats for important people, or some other thing? And the stone staircase that went nowhere was another puzzle. Where did it go down to—some underground tomb or chamber? Or did it lead up to something that had washed away?

  Too soon we had to leave. We set off in single file, back to camp, again skirting the base of the pyramid. It was a route we had taken several times before without noticing anything special. But suddenly Lucian Read, in the back of the line, called out, “Hey! Some weird stones over here!”

  We returned to look, and all mayhem broke out.

  In a broad hollow area, just poking out of the ground, were the tops of dozens of extraordinary carved stone sculptures. The objects, glimpsed among leaves and vines, and carpeted with moss, took shape in the forest twilight. The first thing I saw was the snarling head of a jaguar sticking out of the forest floor, then the rim of a vessel decorated with a vulture’s head and more large stone jars carved with snakes; next to them was a cluster of objects that looked like thrones or tables, some with carvings along the rims and legs that, at first glance, appeared to be inscriptions or glyphs. They were all almost entirely buried, with only the tops visible, like stone icebergs. I was astounded. These sculptures were in beautiful condition and had probably been lying here undisturbed since they had been left centuries ago—until we stumbled across them. This was proof, if we needed it, that this valley had not been explored in modern times.

  The crew crowded into the area, jostling each other and exclaiming in astonishment. The camera team was shooting and Dave Yoder was in there, too, photographing like a madman, while I also had my Nikon out, taking pictures in the rain. Chris, the archaeologist, began yelling for everyone to get back, dammit, don’t touch anything, quit stomping around, watch your feet for chrissakes! Cursing and driving people out, he finally roped off the area with Spanish crime-scene tape that spelled out CUIDADO, “warning,” w
hich he had been carrying (with remarkable foresight) in his backpack.

  “Nobody goes past the tape,” he said, “but me, Oscar, and Anna.”

  Steve, leaning on his walking stick, exhausted and in pain from the punishing hike up to the ruins, was astounded. “It’s amazing,” he said, “that there’s this place here, this jewel of a place, as pure as you could find, untouched for centuries!” The rain streamed down all around us, but nobody paid any attention. “When you’re here and see how overgrown it is,” he continued, “how much has been buried, you see how improbable it would be to stumble upon this. In a metaphysical sense it was like we were led here.”

  Chris Fisher was also a bit stunned. “I expected to find a city,” he told me later, “but I didn’t expect this. The undisturbed context is rare. It may be an ofrenda, an offering or a cache. This is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects out of circulation.” He was especially impressed by the carved head of what, to him, might be a portrait of a “were-jaguar,” showing a shaman “in a spirit or transformed state.” Because the figure seemed to be wearing a helmet, he also wondered if it was connected to the ball game. “But this is all speculation: We just don’t know.” He suspected that much, much more lay below the surface.