The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  And much more did, as later excavation would reveal. The cache was vast, containing over five hundred pieces, but more intriguing even than its size was its existence at all. This particular type of ritual collection of artifacts seems to be a special feature of these lost cities of ancient Mosquitia—they have not been seen in Maya culture or elsewhere—meaning that they could hold a key to what distinguishes the people of Mosquitia from their neighbors and defines their place in history. What was the purpose of these caches? Why were they left here? While similar caches had been reported in Mosquitia before, none had been found so fully intact, offering a rare opportunity for the spot to be systematically studied and excavated. The significance of this offering would prove to be the expedition’s greatest discovery so far, one that had important implications far beyond Mosquitia. But it would be a year before we understood the scope of those discoveries.

  Even with the intense excitement and high spirits, the hike back to camp was grueling, as the steep hillsides were impossible to descend except in a semi-controlled sort of falling slide. In spite of Woody’s worries, the stream had not risen much and remained fordable. The rain abated; the sky began to clear; and we hoped the helicopter would soon be able to come in with more needed supplies for the camp, which was still only partly set up. We lacked food and water, generators to charge up laptops and batteries for the camera gear, and we needed to set up a medical tent and guest tents for scientists who were expected to arrive over the following days.

  Back in camp, Chris declared he was now going to explore what appeared in the lidar images to be an earthwork behind our camp. His energy was impressive. We hiked back behind camp, passing through the soldiers’ encampment. They were building a communal house using one of our tarps, and paving the muddy floor with thick leaves. They had a fire burning—I had no idea how they managed it in the rain—and one soldier was returning from the hunt with a deer haunch thrown over his shoulder. The deer, it turned out later, was a threatened Central American red brocket deer; a week later, the military ordered the soldiers to stop hunting and began flying in MREs. The soldiers told us it had taken them almost five hours to make the journey to our camp on foot from the lower landing zone at the river junction, a distance of three miles. They had traveled in the river, wading upstream, easier and safer than slashing through the jungle.

  Behind the soldiers’ camp, a steep slope thrust upward. This was the anomaly Chris wanted to explore. We climbed to the top and came down on the far side, finding ourselves in an oval area with a flat bottom, surrounded by what appeared to be dikes or man-made earthen banks. The area was open, with little understory. It looked like a large swimming pool, with a flat bottom and steep walls. A small outlet at one end led back down to the flat area where we were camped. On the other end, a swale that looked like an ancient road passed down the side of the hill. Chris concluded that these earthworks had probably been a reservoir for collecting water during the wet season, to be released during the dry season to irrigate crops in the area where we were camped. “That whole terrace we’re on was probably an agricultural area,” he said, that had been artificially leveled. Part of it may have been a cacao grove; Alicia González had identified what she believed were some small cacao trees growing near her campsite.

  The dark clouds drifted off, and finally blue sky appeared in patches for the first time that day. A milky sun emerged, sending spears of sunlight through the misty canopy. An hour later we heard the thudding of the incoming chopper, rousing once again a furious chorus from the howler monkeys. We had two visitors: Lt. Col. Oseguera, who had come to check on the situation of his troops, and Virgilio Paredes, the IHAH chief. The colonel went to review his troops while Virgilio retired to the kitchen area and listened with interest as Steve and Chris described to him the discovery of the cache. It was too late in the evening to go back up, so Virgilio and the colonel decided to spend the night and visit the site the next day.

  I had first met Virgilio in 2012 during the lidar survey. He was a tall, thoughtful man who, while not an archaeologist himself, asked probing questions and had taken pains to become thoroughly versed in the project. He spoke fluent English. He was descended from an ancient Sephardic Jewish family named Pardes, who left Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrated to Segovia, Spain, where the name was Hispanicized to Paredes. During the Fascist regime of Franco, his grandfather left Spain and went to Honduras. His father went to medical school in Honduras and became a biochemist and a businessman, but now, close to retirement, he was considering making aliyah and moving to Israel. Virgilio was raised Catholic, went to the American School in Tegucigalpa, got a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and lived and studied in diverse places in the world, from Germany to Trinidad and Tobago. He was working for the Ministry of Culture at the time of the 2009 coup, when the interim president asked him to head the IHAH. It was a big change: For the past sixty years the IHAH had been headed by an academic, but the new administration wanted a manager instead. Some archaeologists were unhappy. “The academics were fighting with the tourist sector,” Virgilio told me. “If you have the golden chicken, the archaeologists don’t want the chicken to produce any golden eggs, but the tourist guys, they want to cut it open to get all the eggs at once. There should be a balance.”

  He had known the story of the White City since he was a boy. When he first heard that Steve’s group was looking for it, he thought the whole project was “mumbo jumbo.” Since taking the job, a steady stream of crazy people had been coming through his office or sending him e-mails about Atlantis or legendary shipwrecks with millions in gold. He thought Steve was in that same category. “I said, ‘Tell me another story!’” But when Steve described lidar and how it had the potential to bare the secrets of Mosquitia, Paredes got interested: This was a serious technology and Steve and his team impressed him as capable people.

  The rain started again. After dinner and another tot, I retired to my campsite, stripped off my muddy clothes, hung them on the clothesline for the rain to rinse clean, and crawled into my tent. My camp—and everywhere else—was now a sea of mud. Taking a cue from the soldiers, I tried to pave the mud in front of my tent with waxy leaves, a failing strategy. Inside, the mud had worked its way under the tent, and my waterproof floor was squishy like a water bed.

  As I settled into my sleeping bag, I could feel insects crawling on me. They must have been on me all along without me realizing it until I stopped moving. With a yelp I unzipped my bag and turned on the flashlight. I was covered with ugly red welts and patches, hundreds of them—but where were the actual bugs? I felt something biting me and pinched it off; it was a chigger the size of a grain of sand, almost too small to see. I tried to crush it but the shell was too hard, so I carefully placed it on the cover of my John Lloyd Stephens book and stabbed it with the tip of my knife, making a satisfying crunch. To my horror I soon discovered more chiggers, not just on my skin but also some that had dropped off inside my bag. I spent a half hour collecting them, placing them on the execution block, and stabbing them. But the tiny creatures were nearly invisible in my bed, so I covered myself with DEET and resigned myself to sleeping with chiggers. By the end of the trip, the book’s cover was so full of stab marks that I threw it away.

  At breakfast Alicia reported another jaguar as well as hearing a faint, whispery noise creeping alongside her tent that she was sure was a very large snake.

  CHAPTER 17

  This is a very ancient place, a bewitchment place, they say.

  The morning of our third day in the jungle, we hiked to the site of the cache with Virgilio, the colonel, and four soldiers. Even with the fixed ropes that Sully and Woody had strung up, it was tough getting up the hill. Chris asked Anna Cohen to take charge of clearing the cache site of vegetation, marking each object, inventorying, recording, and sketching them all in situ. The soldiers would help her. Chris, Woody, Steve, and I set off to explore the city to the north. With Chris leading, we crossed pla
za 1, climbed in and out of the ravine to plaza 2. We chopped our way through tangles of bamboo, vines, and plants. Fisher had a long checklist of features seen in lidar that he wanted to visit on the ground, and his GPS took us into some fiercely dense jungle. In places it was like digging a tunnel through green. We visited more mounds, the remains of principal houses and ceremonial structures, two more bus-like features, and several terraces. We came to a break in the canopy, where the collapse of a tall tree had brought down a dozen others with it and created an opening to the sky. The understory had run riot in this sudden wealth of sunlight, massing into an impenetrable thicket of bamboo and catclaw vines that we skirted. Visibility in the undergrowth was so limited that Woody, Chris, and I often kept track of each other by sound, not sight, even though we were no more than a dozen feet apart.

  When we returned to the cache after a long circuit of the city, we found the company again in a minor uproar. As the soldiers were clearing the area and Anna began to sketch, an annoyed fer-de-lance had shot out from under a log in the midst of everyone, causing panic. It hung around long enough to get itself thoroughly photographed, the video crew delighted to have an unexpected extra on set; but when Sully tried to capture and move it, it escaped back under the log, where it remained, thoroughly irritated. As a result, nobody would go into the area behind the log, which we could see was packed with artifacts.

  Virgilio, Steve, Woody, and I continued back to camp. Virgilio flew out on the chopper, anxious to brief the president on the cache discovery. In the meantime, the AStar, which had continued flying in supplies, was nearly brought down by a vulture that afternoon. The pilot had swerved to avoid the bird but it hit one of the rotor blades and its guts were sucked into the transmission space at the base of the shaft. The rotting contents of its final meal created a hideous mess in the transmission and filled the cabin with a frightful odor. The near accident reminded us of how acutely dependent we were on the two helicopters, our only connection to the outside world. If we were stranded, evacuation would have involved an overland journey of weeks, with limited supplies.

  While we had been up in the ruins, Alicia had spent the day talking with the Special Forces soldiers in their camp behind ours, and I was curious to hear what anthropological insights she’d learned. Many of the Special Forces soldiers taking part in Operación Bosque were from indigenous Indian groups in Honduras. Some came from Wampusirpi, the closest indigenous town, on the Patuca River about twenty-five air miles away, an isolated village normally accessible only by water. What did the soldiers think of all this?

  “It was pretty wonderful,” Alicia told me. “They said they’d never seen anything like this place, and they said it with such joy. They felt like they were in the middle of a paradise. Of course, some of them just want to get back to their girlfriends. But most are thrilled to be here.” Some felt that the fortress-like nature of the valley made it a kind of sacred place. She had persuaded one of the soldiers, who was Pech, to flag the cacao trees so she could map them and see if they were in fact the remains of an ancient, cultivated grove. Chocolate was sacred to the Maya, who treasured cacao and considered it the food of the gods. It was reserved for warriors and the ruling elite, and the pods were sometimes used as money. Chocolate was also involved in the ritual of human sacrifice. Cacao trees and the chocolate trade very likely played an important role in ancient Mosquitia; it would have been a valuable commodity that was traded with the Maya. “He says it’s a very ancient variety with small pods,” Alicia said. “Mosquitia is full of cacao.” (Some doubt was raised in retrospect, never resolved, as to whether these were actually cacao trees or a related species.)

  A few days later, some of the soldiers took Alicia to Wampusirpi in the military helicopter, to meet their families. Alicia showed them pictures on her cell phone that she had taken of the deforestation northeast of Catacamas. “They were astounded,” she said, and deeply troubled. “They said, ‘No wonder the rivers are drying up, the animals are going, the fish are dying!’”

  Wampusirpi has an organic cacao cooperative, which produced blocks of pure chocolate, shipped downriver to market. It is said by chocolate aficionados to be some of the finest single-source chocolate in the world. Some of the cacao pods are harvested from wild cacao trees growing in the Biosphere Reserve forests surrounding the town. The men harvest the pods and the women ferment and toast them. Alicia toured the cooperative and they gave her a four-pound brick of pure, bitter chocolate.

  In response to her questions about Ciudad Blanca, or Casa Blanca (White House) as the Pech call it, she was introduced to a man in his eighties. He told about it as the children gathered around. “He said the gringos came a long time ago and took all the gold and desecrated Casa Blanca. He said Casa Blanca is way up in the mountains; it’s where the sukia went, the shamans, and it’s controlled by the shamans. This is a very ancient place, a bewitchment place, they say, inhabited by people before the Pech.”

  The morning of the twenty-first arrived as usual—foggy, dripping, and dank. I had now been in the jungle four days, and it seemed like the time was passing much too fast. At 8:00 a.m. we hiked a quarter mile upriver to look at the L-shaped feature that was so prominent on the lidar images. We walked in the river itself, easier and safer than trying to push through the jungle on either embankment.

  The L feature was clearly man-made, a large geometric earthen platform raised about ten feet above the floodplain. Enormous trees grew around and on top of it. One of the trees was truly monstrous, with a trunk at least twenty feet in diameter. I took a slew of photographs of it, some with Steve, and Steve took some of me. According to Chris, the platform probably supported a neighborhood of tightly packed houses, raised above the seasonal flood zone, with cultivated fields on the floodplain below. On the way out, struggling down a steep embankment, I tumbled into the river. I was fine but my Nikon camera didn’t survive. Luckily, I was able to recover all the photographs from the card after I returned to civilization. I had my cell phone with its camera flown in the next day.

  We hiked downriver about half a mile to a large series of plazas that were prominent in the lidar images. As we journeyed along, the unnamed river revealed itself as one of the loveliest I had ever seen, crystal-clear water running over a cobbled bed, with gravel bars, sunny patches thick with flowers, riffles and pools, and every once in a while a little waterfall. In places, huge trees and other vegetation leaned over the river, turning it into a furtive green tunnel haunted by the sound of water. Every bend disclosed something new—a shimmering rapid, a fern-draped tree trunk, a deep pool flashing with silvery fish, scarlet macaws and snowy egrets rising from the treetops. I regretted not having a camera to record these images.

  According to our lidar maps, the river made an extreme hairpin bend about halfway to our goal. Woody decided we could save time with a shortcut straight across. The route plunged us into thick jungle, every inch forward won only with the blade of a machete. We crossed a ridge and came down into a ravine, which we followed back to the river. After an hour, we stopped to rest on a gravel bar opposite the presumed ruins, and we ate lunch.

  We talked about how difficult, if not impossible, it would have been to explore the valley and its ruins before the advent of GPS and lidar. Without the lidar maps, we could have walked through the middle of the T1 ruins and not even realized they existed. Only with lidar maps and GPS did we know where to look for features otherwise cloaked in vegetation. The wall of trees on the far side of the river, across a meadow, gave no hint whatsoever of the mounds and plazas we knew were there.

  After lunch we waded across the river and pushed into a field of dense, chest-high grass, the idea of snakes never far from our thoughts, as there was no way to see where we were putting our feet. We entered the forest with relief and came upon the first sharp mound, another bus. Parallel mounds extended from it on either side. Chris suggested this site was an extension of the upper city, but Oscar believed it to be a separate settlement entirely. Th
is was not a trivial disagreement. The lidar images showed that there were nineteen major sites strung along the valley, all close together. Were they part of the same polity—the same economic and political unit—a single city? Or were they separate villages, each with its own governance? So far, the evidence suggests that most but not all of them were part of an extended city, but the question remains unresolved.

  We explored the site for several hours. It was very much like the first set of plazas, only smaller. We climbed a nearby hill hoping it might be another earthen pyramid, but at the summit Chris and Oscar concluded it was just a naturally conical hill. We found more rows of flat altar-like stones, several leveled plaza areas, and bus-like mounds. On the way out, at the very edge of one of the mounds, we all traipsed, unawares, past a huge fer-de-lance. Lucian (again at the rear) spied it. We had each walked within two feet of it, so close that one of us could easily have stepped on it or brushed it. The snake remained peacefully asleep, its head tucked into its chocolate-colored coils. It was virtually invisible in the forest litter, although it looked to be five or six feet long, almost as big as the one we killed the first night.

  When we returned to camp, more visitors had arrived. Tom Lutz, a writer, literary critic, and founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books, was covering the expedition as a freelancer for the New York Times. Bill Benenson, the expedition coleader and financial backer, arrived with him.

  The rain started again—a massive downpour—and I huddled under my hammock, writing in my journal, before rejoining the group under the kitchen tarp. The atmosphere was one of focused work: Dave Yoder was downloading massive numbers of photographs onto hard drives, while Lucian Read and the film crew fussed with their equipment, cleaning it and working to keep it dry—a never-ending job—and charging batteries with the newly arrived generators. The ex-SAS crew was busy cutting bamboo to lay down paths over the deepening mud. The entire camp area was flooding, and as the mud rose it came oozing in under the tarps.