The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  The rain continued all afternoon. That evening, after the usual freeze-dried dinner, we remained under the tarps, the day’s work finally done. Woody tried to light a fire by digging a hole in the ground, soaking a roll of paper towels in gasoline, piling wet wood on top, and lighting it. But the accumulating water soon reached the hole and flooded it, putting out the wretched fire.

  A disagreement had flared up that morning about what to do about the cache of artifacts. Steve called a general meeting that evening. We gathered in a semicircle of chairs by the light of the lanterns, stinking of DEET and mildew, drinking tea or coffee and slapping insects, while the steady thrum of rain sounded on the sheltering tarps.

  Steve opened the discussion by explaining that the site was in grave danger of being looted. Even if we hadn’t found it, he pointed out, deforestation was less than ten miles from the valley’s entrance and rapidly approaching. In that sense we had saved it from destruction, but only temporarily. Virgilio had estimated the illegal logging would reach the valley in eight years or less, which would result in the immediate looting of the cache, worth possibly millions of dollars. Even more ominous, the Honduran soldiers had reported a narcotrafficking airstrip being carved out of the jungle beyond the entrance to the valley. Enough people now knew the location of T1, Steve said, that the cat was out of the bag; the narcos had the money and planes; they would loot the site as soon as we left. He felt the team should remove one artifact—to prove what we had found and to use it to raise money for a swift excavation of the site. “We’ve opened Pandora’s box,” he said, and now we had a responsibility to protect the artifacts.

  Bill Benenson agreed, arguing that the removal of a few objects would not harm the context, that it was a kind of salvage archaeology, and that bringing out a gorgeous item would be an effective fund-raising tool to interest donors in preserving the valley and ruins. And if the site were looted, which seemed possible, at least one artifact would be saved.

  After this, Chris Fisher spoke. He was uncompromising. “The whole world will be watching what we do here,” he said, his voice raised. He was adamantly opposed to a hasty excavation of even one object. First, he pointed out, we had no excavation permit. Second, and most important, the value of the objects was in their context, not in the individual pieces. There were pieces like this already in museum collections, but no cache had ever been excavated in situ. A careful, legal excavation by qualified archaeologists might reveal a tremendous amount about this culture. Chemical analyses could show, for example, if the vessels held offerings of food, like chocolate or maize. There might be royal burials underneath, and those had to be treated with care and dignity. He said that if anyone dug up anything right now, he would immediately resign from the project, as it went against all his professional ethics.

  And what if, three weeks from now, the cache was looted? asked Benenson.

  “So be it,” said Chris. He said we could not engage in unethical behavior in anticipation of the illegal behavior of others. We must not do anything that would be viewed as unprofessional by the archaeological community. And besides, he said, it wasn’t our decision; this wasn’t our country; this was the national patrimony of Honduras. It was their site and their decision whether or not to excavate. But he hoped to God the Hondurans wouldn’t make the wrong decision, because to excavate hastily, right now, would not only turn the archaeological community against the project but would destroy the primary value of this discovery.

  Chris turned to Oscar Neil and asked him in Spanish: “What do you think?”

  So far, Oscar had been listening silently. As Honduras’s chief of archaeology, the decision to excavate would be his, in consultation with Virgilio Paredes. Replying in Spanish, he strongly agreed with Chris. He pointed out that the same narcotraffickers Steve had mentioned as a threat would actually keep looters at bay—because they didn’t want looters on their turf. “The narcos are the owners of the outlying territory here,” he said. The impenetrable forest itself was protection; the artifacts had been there for perhaps eight hundred years, and as long as the forest remained intact they would be naturally safeguarded. The saqueadores (looters) were interested in more accessible sites—and there were sites far easier to get to than this one. The narcos wouldn’t bother looting it; they had their own much more profitable business. Finally, he said, the Honduran military was already discussing plans to come in, patrol the valley, and establish Honduran government power in what was essentially an area beyond sovereign control.*

  Oscar’s and Chris’s arguments prevailed, and it was decided to leave everything in situ, untouched for now, to await careful and proper excavation.

  After the meeting, Sully touched my arm and spoke to me, lowering his voice: “I know soldiers. I was a soldier. I can tell you that the danger isn’t from some narcotraffickers or outside looters—it’s from right there.” He nodded to the soldiers’ camp in the dark behind us. “They’re already planning how to do it. Up there, they were marking every site with GPS. Downriver they’re enlarging their LZ. The military isn’t going to let looters in here because they are the looters. After you leave, it will be gone in a week. I’ve seen this kind of corruption all over the world—believe me, that’s what’s going to happen.”

  He said this to me as an aside, and while I worried he might be right, the decision had been made: The cache would be left untouched. Sully kept his opinion private, and did not share it with Chris and Oscar.

  By now, the trails in the campsite had been churned into soupy mud so deep it slopped up to our ankles. I stripped outside my tent, hung up my clothes, and crawled inside. There I picked off the chiggers and stabbed them on my book and squashed the sand flies that had gotten inside. I lay in the dark, miserably wet, listening to the usual nighttime beasts tromping around my tent and thinking that maybe the SAS guys hadn’t exaggerated the challenges of this place after all.

  CHAPTER 18

  This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore!

  As usual, it poured all night, sometimes with deafening ferocity, and it was still raining when we awoke to the howler-monkey alarm clock.

  As I crawled out of my tent and drew on my sodden clothes, Steve next door was looking up at the spider monkeys, who seemed as miserable as we were. He wondered how they could stand the rain, day in and day out. This was supposed to be the dry season in Honduras, but in this remote area a crazy sort of microclimate seemed to prevail.

  At breakfast, the discussion turned to T3. The bad weather would prevent the air reconnaissance of T3 planned for that day. The other city lay about twenty miles to the north, and Chris was passionately eager to see a glimpse of it, at least from the air, if only the weather would break.

  We waited for a pause in the rain. When it came, the AStar showed up with two more expedition members: Mark Plotkin, the noted ethnobotanist, president of the Amazon Conservation Team, and author of the bestselling book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice; and his colleague Prof. Luis Poveda, an ethnobotanist from the National University of Costa Rica. Their hope was to record and study the botany of the T1 valley, especially in relation to its ancient inhabitants; they planned to inventory any legacy plants that might remain from pre-Columbian times, as well as identify biologically useful trees and medicinal plants. Almost immediately after the helicopter left, the rains came again. We packed up for another hike into the ruins. This time Juan Carlos carried a huge plastic suitcase strapped to his back. Inside was a $120,000 terrestrial lidar unit, a machine on a tripod, with which he intended to scan the sculpture cache.

  While ascending the fixed ropes up the slippery trail, Prof. Poveda, who was in his early seventies, fell and rolled down the hill, pulling a muscle in his leg. He had to be carried back to camp and later evacuated by helicopter. At the cache it was pouring so hard that Juan Carlos had to wait an hour before he dared remove the lidar machine from its box. He set it up on the bottom slope of the pyramid just above the cluster of sculptures. Kneeling in th
e mud, with a tarp draped over his head, he fiddled with his MacBook Pro, jacked into the lidar unit as a controller. It seemed doubtful his equipment would survive the ordeal. Finally, hours later, the rain let up enough for him to uncover the machine and do an eleven-minute scan of the site. His intention was to do six scans, at different angles, to complete a three-dimensional picture, but a fresh downpour caused a delay and finally shut him down for the day. He left the equipment up there, well tarped, to complete the scans the next day. It poured again all night, and I awoke to the now familiar hammering of rain on the tent fly. My entire tent was now sunken in mud, and water was coming in and starting to pool.

  At breakfast, Oscar passed around his cell phone with a picture he had taken that morning from his hammock. Just as he was putting his foot out to step onto the ground, he said, “I had a funny feeling.” He withdrew his bare foot and poked his head out of the hammock, peering at the ground below. Directly underneath him, crawling along at a leisurely pace, was a fer-de-lance as long as his hammock. When it passed by, he climbed down and got dressed.

  Sully glanced at the picture. “Lovely way to start the day, mate,” he said, passing it along.

  I spent the morning under the kitchen tarp, writing in my notebook, thinking how fast the days had gone by. We only had a few more before we would have to break down the camp, pack up, and fly everything out. I felt a sense almost of panic that we had hardly scratched the surface. Exploring the city was clearly an undertaking that would take years.

  Meanwhile, the camp had turned into a quagmire, the mud six inches deep or more, except where there were ponds of water. The bamboo poles laid down as corrugation over the worst spots sank out of sight as soon as they were trod upon, and disappeared into the muck. Spud would cut more to lay on top, and they, too, would be swallowed.

  That afternoon, the weather broke long enough for a quick reconnaissance of T3. Steve joined the flight, along with Dave and Chris. I wanted to go but there wasn’t room. The AStar took off in the early afternoon and returned a few hours later.

  “Did you see anything?” I asked Steve, as he came back into camp.

  “It’s beautiful. Unbelievably beautiful. It’s like a paradise.” The pilot had descended almost to the ground, hovering about a foot off a sandbar, while Dave took pictures. Steve described the valley of T3 as much gentler and more open than T1, a vast, parklike expanse bisected by clear rivers with sandy beaches along the banks. The rivers were surrounded by fields of deep grass, over six feet high, broken here and there by stands of giant trees. Most of the actual ruins stood on benchlands above the river and were hidden in the forest. The valley was bounded on the east by a lofty ridge, where an unnamed river flowed through a gap, heading toward the distant Patuca; T3 was surrounded by peaks on the other three sides as well. He said there were no obvious signs of human habitation, “just forest and grasslands as far as the eye can see.” The chopper was able to hover in place for only a few minutes at T3 before heading back to T1.

  The following year, Chris and Juan Carlos would attempt a more serious reconnaissance of T3. In mid-January 2016, the Honduran military flew them in a helicopter to T3 and were able to put down the chopper on a sandbar.

  “We landed,” Chris recalled, “and the pilot said we had a couple of hours.” But the grass was so high and thick that it took them an hour and a half to go a mere thousand feet, slashing unceasingly with machetes at the tough, thick-stemmed grass. It was impossible to see anything, and they were in great fear of snakes. But when they finally got out of the floodplain and climbed up to the benchland, they came upon an amazing sight: “It was nonstop plazas,” Chris said, “with little mounds around them, and more plazas and little mounds, as far as we could go. It’s much bigger than T1. It was huge. There were a lot of people living there.” The valley of T3, like T1, gave every indication of being another untouched wilderness with no evidence of recent human entry or indigenous use. As of this writing, beyond these two reconnaissance missions T3 remains unexplored.

  Around noon, Mark Plotkin arrived back in camp carrying a turtle. I was curious to hear what he, as a rainforest ethnobotanist, was seeing in the valley. “We went upriver,” he said. “We were looking for evidence of recent habitation, but we didn’t see any. But we saw lots of useful plants.” He began rattling them off. A ginger used to treat cancer; a fig-related plant used by shamans; balsa trees; the biggest ramón trees he had ever seen, which produce a fruit and a highly nutritious nut; massive Virola trees used to treat fungal infections and to make a hallucinogenic snuff for sacred ceremonies. “I don’t see any trees or plants that would indicate any recent human presence,” he said. “I’ve been looking for chiles—seen none of that. And no Castilla.” Castilla elastica, he explained, was an important tree for the ancient Maya, who used it as the source of latex to make rubber for the balls used in the sacred game. He had also seen no mahogany trees. “What’s driving the deforestation near here,” he said, confirming what others had told me, “isn’t mahogany but clearing the land for cattle.”

  He had run into a huge troop of spider monkeys upriver, much bigger than the family above my camp. “These are the first animals hunted out,” he said. “When you see spider monkeys who don’t run away but come and look at you, that is exceptional.” Later, Chris Fisher went downriver and ran into another large troop of monkeys, who were sitting in a tree above the river eating flowers. They screeched and shook branches at him. When the inner primate in Chris emerged and he began hooting and shaking bushes back at them, they bombarded him with flowers.

  Plotkin was profoundly impressed by the valley. He said that, in all his years wandering the jungle, he had never seen a place like it. “This is clearly one of the most undisturbed rainforests in Central America,” he said. “The importance of this place cannot be overestimated. Spectacular ruins, pristine wilderness—this place has it all. I’ve been walking tropical American rainforests for thirty years and I’ve never walked up to a collection of artifacts like that. And I probably won’t ever again.”

  I asked him, as an authority on rainforest conservation, what could be done to preserve the valley and site. He said it was a very difficult problem. “Conservation is a spiritual practice,” he said. “This place is right up there with the most important unspoiled places on earth. This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore! We live in a world gone crazy for resources. Everybody on Google Earth can look at this place now. If you don’t move to protect it, it will disappear. Everything in the world is vulnerable. It’s amazing to me it hasn’t been looted already.”

  “So what should be done?” I asked. “Create a national park?”

  “This is already supposed to be a biosphere reserve. Where are the guards? The problem is people establish a national park and think they’ve won the war. No way. That’s only the first step—a battle in a longer war. The good thing about this expedition is that at least you’re bringing attention to this place and it might now be saved. Otherwise, it won’t last long. You saw the clear-cutting outside the valley. Absolutely gone in a few years.”

  That night, the rain continued to fall. I was astounded to see Dave Yoder packing up his camera gear with a set of portable lights, and loading it all on his back. He said he was dissatisfied with his pictures of the cache so far. The daylight filtering down was too flat. He was going to hike up there in the dark with Sully so that he could “light-paint” the artifacts. This is a difficult photographic technique in which the camera, on a tripod, is left with the shutter open while the photographer sweeps light beams over the objects from different angles, to highlight particular details and add a sense of drama and mystery.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re going up there in the pitch dark, with all those snakes, in the rain, wading in mud up to your balls, climbing that hill with a ton of gear on your back in a suitcase? You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  He grunted and hiked off into the dark, his headlamp bobbing aroun
d before winking out entirely. As I hunkered down in my tent, listening to the rain, I was damned glad I was just a writer.

  The rain stopped in the night and—finally—the morning of February 24 dawned beautifully, with fresh sunlight skimming the treetops. Some of the Honduran soldiers said they had seen petroglyphs downstream, where the river entered the notch on its way out of the valley. An expedition was organized to investigate. Chris Fisher and his crew decided to use the good weather to continue mapping the site, while Juan Carlos hoped to finish up his lidar scan of the cache. Steve and Bill Benenson joined our group heading downriver, along with Alicia and Oscar.

  The weather was glorious. I washed my muddy, mildewed clothes in the river and put them back on, then stood on the riverbank in the warm sunlight, holding my arms out and turning about in a hopeless effort to dry my clothes. After so many nights and days of rain, even after laundering they smelled like they were rotting.

  The AStar flew our group from our LZ to the Honduran LZ downstream at the river junction. A second group of Honduran soldiers had set up a camp at the junction, with tarps and palm fronds erected for tents, floored with cut bamboo. This was the only landing zone for the Honduran Bell helicopter, and these soldiers helped ferry supplies in and out and served as a backup to the group upstream. A side of deer ribs and two haunches were smoking over a fire, the rule against hunting having not yet been instituted.

  We set off hiking downriver, Steve hobbling along, wading in the water with his walking pole, wearing a Tilley hat. The trip down this magical river was one of the most beautiful and memorable journeys of my life. We traveled mostly by wading in the stream, avoiding as much as possible the dense embankments, which we knew were a favorite snake habitat. (Venomous snakes are easier to see and less common in the water.) Snowy cumulus drifted across a clean blue sky. The area where the two rivers came together opened into a broad grassy field, and for the first time we could look around and actually see the shape of the land. The encircling ridge formed an arc in front of us, covered with trees; the conjoined river made a sharp right turn, running along the foot of the ridge, and then an abrupt left, cutting into the mountains and rushing through a ravine. For the first time, too, we could see the rainforest trees from top to bottom. Inside the rainforest, you can’t see the treetops or get a sense of what the trees look like and how tall they are.