The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  After crossing the field, we waded into the river and hiked downstream. A tree had fallen across the river, with a tangle of limbs in and out of the water. The trunk was streaming with excitable, noxious red ants, which were using the tree as a bridge. We carefully wormed our way through its network of branches with the utmost care so as not to disturb them. We were lucky no one had been showered by these ants so far, which would require an evacuation and perhaps even a trip to the hospital. The river made a broad turn against the encircling ridge, running along a steep rocky slope thick with jungle trees that leaned over the river, dropping curtains of vines and aerial roots that trailed in the water, swaying in the current. The water was crystal clear until we stirred up the bottom, when it blossomed opaque with clouds of auburn silt. In some areas the river narrowed and became too strong and deep for wading; we were forced up on the embankment, where we followed the Honduran soldiers as they macheted a path for us, expertly flicking their machetes left and right, the blades going ping, snick, tang, snap—each species of plant making a different sound as it was cut.

  As usual, we couldn’t see where we were putting our feet, and the fear of snakes was never far from our minds. And we did see one: a beautiful coral snake, banded in bright colors of red, yellow, and black, slithering through the grass. This snake has a bite that injects a potent neurotoxin, but unlike the fer-de-lance it is timid and reluctant to strike.

  A few times we had to cross the river through rapids; there the soldiers formed a human bridge by linking arms in the water, while we waded through the current hanging on to them for dear life. As we reached the gap, we saw the first evidence of historic human occupation in the valley—a tattered cluster of wild banana trees. Banana trees were not native; originally from Asia, they had been brought to Central America by the Spanish. This was the only sign we ever saw of post-Conquest habitation in the valley.

  We neared the gap: two forested slopes meeting in a V notch. The river took a ninety-degree turn at a place of heartbreaking loveliness, with thick stands of flowers giving way to a lush meadow and a beach. The river flowed in a singing curve over round stones and spilled in a waterfall over a ridge of basalt. In the shallows along the stream edge grew fat, blood-red aquatic flowers.

  From the turn the river ran in a line as straight as a highway through the gap, faster and deeper, tumbling over rocks and fallen trees, sweeping around sandbars, dappled in sunlight. Rainforest giants leaned over the river from either side, forming a great cave echoing with the calls of macaws, frogs, and insects. The cloying smell of the jungle yielded to a clean scent of water.

  Most of the people in our group halted at the opening to the ravine. Steve stretched out on a flat rock at the edge of the river, drying himself in the rare sunlight, not wanting to risk his bad leg by going on. Oscar cut some big leaves and laid them on the ground, making a bed, on which he took a nap. I decided to continue downstream looking for the petroglyphs, along with Bill Benenson, three soldiers, and the video crew.

  Beyond the gap, the footing downstream got more treacherous, with waist-deep currents, hidden rocks, sunken limbs, and potholes. In places gigantic moss-covered tree trunks had fallen across the river, spanning the gap. Where the river got too swift, we scrambled up on the steep embankment. A faint animal path ran along the river, and the soldiers identified tapir dung and jaguar scat. The character of the river, now swiftly flowing between cliffs and overhung with trees, had become darker, mysterious, and unsettling. There were many boulders and ledges sticking out of the water, but we found no petroglyphs; the soldiers suspected the water had risen and submerged the rock carvings. We turned back when the river finally became too deep and the ravine walls too steep to continue. At several points I feared one of us might be swept away.

  Indeed, once we’d returned to the gap, Bill was nearly carried off by the current while crossing a stretch of deep water. Steve rescued him by sticking out his foot, which Bill seized as a handhold. When I arrived, Steve ruefully handed me his iPhone, which was very hot. He had dropped it in the water and hadn’t completely clicked shut the waterproof flap over the charger port. As a result it had fried, and he’d lost all the photographs he had taken of the expedition he had spent twenty years bringing to fruition. (He would spend over a year working with Apple to recover the photos, to no avail; they were gone forever.)

  We hiked back to the Honduran LZ, where the AStar picked us up and flew us back to camp. When we arrived, Woody told us that more bad weather was expected. Not wanting to risk anyone getting stranded, he had decided to begin extracting the team from the jungle a day early. He said he had scheduled me for a flight in one hour sharp; I should break down my camp, pack up, and be waiting with my gear at the LZ at that time. I was surprised and disappointed, but he said he’d worked out the evacuation on paper and this was the way it had to be. Even Steve had to come out that day. He clapped me on the shoulder: “Sorry, mate.”

  The treetops were filling with golden light as the helicopter came in. It upset me that I had to leave when the weather had finally cleared, but I took a certain schadenfreude in the fact that torrential rains might soon be returning to torment those lucky enough to stay. I threw my pack in the basket, boarded, buckled in, and put on my headset; we were airborne in sixty seconds. As the chopper banked out of the LZ, sunlight caught the riffling stream, turning it for an instant into a shining scimitar as we accelerated upward, clearing the treetops, heading for the notch.

  As we thundered through the gap, a feeling of melancholy settled over me at leaving the valley. It was no longer a terra incognita. T1 had finally joined the rest of the world in having been discovered, explored, mapped, measured, trod upon, and photographed—a forgotten place no more. Thrilled as I was to have been a member of this first lucky few, I had the sense that our exploration had diminished it, stripping it of its secrets. Soon, the clear-cut mountainsides came into view, along with ubiquitous plumes of smoke, farmsteads with glittering tin roofs, trails, roads, and pastures dotted with cattle. We had returned to “civilization.”

  CHAPTER 19

  These are our ancestral fathers.

  We stepped out of the helicopter into dry heat shimmering off the tarmac. It was a blessed relief from the sticky jungle. The soldiers guarding the airstrip were surprised to see us wet and coated with mud because, they said, it hadn’t rained at all in Catacamas, seventy air miles away. Before allowing us in the van, they politely asked us to hose ourselves off. I picked and scraped the mud from my boots with a stick; even with the hose it took a good five minutes to get the sticky clay off. Back at the hotel I called my wife, took a shower, and donned a fresh outfit. I bundled my stinking clothes in a sack and dropped it off for the hotel laundry, feeling sorry for whoever was tasked with washing them. I lay back on the bed, hands behind my head, my glumness at having to leave T1 tempered by the glorious sensation of being dry for the first time in eight days, even if covered with bug bites.

  Eventually I joined Steve by the pool, where we both sank into plastic chairs and ordered frosty bottles of Port Royal. He looked wrung out. “It’s a miracle we all got out of there safely,” he said, dabbing his brow with a napkin. “And nobody was bitten by a snake. But, my God, what an effort! I started with one simple objective: to prove or disprove the legend of Ciudad Blanca. That was the start, but it led to so much more. Maybe that’s what the monkey god wanted, to draw us in.”

  “What do you think? Did you prove it?”

  “Well, what we proved is that there was a large population in Mosquitia with a sophisticated culture that compares to anything in Central America. If we can work with Honduras to preserve this place, I’ll feel I’ve really accomplished something. It’s a work in progress. This’ll probably go on for the rest of my life.”

  That evening, Virgilio joined us at dinner. I asked him about the clear-cutting that checkerboarded the jungle we had flown over. He was shocked and concerned by what he’d seen. He said we had found the site in the nic
k of time, before deforestation and looting reached it. He had discussed the issue with the president, who was determined to halt and even roll back the illegal deforestation. He spread his hands. “The Honduran government is committed to protecting this area, but it doesn’t have the money. We urgently need international support.”

  That support would soon be coming. A year later, Conservation International would investigate the valley as a potential preservation project. The organization sent Trond Larsen, a biologist and director of CI’s Rapid Assessment Program, into T1 to investigate how biologically important the valley was and whether it was worthy of special protection. CI spearheads vital conservation efforts across the globe, working with governments and others to save areas of high ecological importance. It is one of the most effective conservation organizations in the world today, having helped protect 2.8 million square miles of inland, coastal, and marine areas across seventy-eight countries.

  The Honduran military flew Larsen into the valley, where he did a five-mile transect, explored the ridges, and journeyed north and south along the unnamed river. His interest was solely in the biology, not the archaeology.

  Larsen was deeply impressed by his visit. “For Central America, it is unique,” he told me, a “pristine, undisturbed forest” with “very old trees” that “has not seen a human presence in a very long time”—perhaps for as long as five hundred years. He said it was a perfect habitat for jaguars, as evidenced by all the tracks and scat everywhere. It was also, he noted, an ideal habitat for many sensitive rainforest animals, especially spider monkeys. “The fact that they’re very abundant is a fantastic indicator of forest health,” he told me. “They are one of the most sensitive species of all. That is a really good sign that there has not been human presence for a while.” He shared photos he had taken of the spider monkeys with the celebrated primatologist Russell Mittermeier. Mittermeier was intrigued, because he felt the markings on these monkeys were unusually white and might indicate they are an unknown subspecies, although he cautioned he would have to observe live specimens to be sure.

  This brief exploration impressed Conservation International so much that its vice chair—Harrison Ford, the actor—sent a letter to President Hernández of Honduras praising him on his preservation efforts. Ford wrote that CI had determined it was one of the “healthiest tropical forests in the Americas,” and that the valley of T1 and surroundings were an “extraordinary, globally significant ecological and cultural treasure.”

  The night after our emergence from the jungle, Virgilio told me that the president wanted to get the news of our finds at T1 out to the world as soon as possible, before rumors and inaccurate stories leaked out. He asked if National Geographic could post something on their website. The next day, I submitted a short, eight-hundred-word story to the Geographic, which was published on March 2, 2015. The story read, in part:

  EXCLUSIVE: LOST CITY DISCOVERED IN THE HONDURAN RAIN FOREST

  In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.

  An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”

  Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.

  The piece touched a nerve. It went viral and garnered eight million views and hundreds of thousands of social media “shares,” becoming the second most popular article National Geographic had ever published online. The story was picked up and became front-page news in Honduras and across Central America. Inevitably, many news outlets reported that the White City had been found.

  President Hernández ordered a full-time military unit to the site to guard it against looters who might have figured out its location. Several weeks later, he helicoptered in to see it first-hand. After he came out, he pledged that his government would do “whatever it takes” to protect the valley and the surrounding region. He promised to halt the illegal deforestation that was creeping toward the valley. “We Hondurans,” the president said in his speech, “have the obligation to preserve our culture and ancestral values. We must get to know and learn from the cultures that came before us; these are our ancestral fathers who enriched our nationality. For this reason my government will do whatever it takes to begin the investigation and exploration of this new archaeological discovery.”

  Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who takes a special interest in Honduras, gave a speech on the Senate floor calling for the United States to support Honduran efforts to “secure and preserve” the site of T1.

  While this was going on, controversy erupted. Christopher Begley of Transylvania University (the archaeologist in Jungleland) and Rosemary Joyce of Berkeley began circulating a letter criticizing the expedition and inviting their colleagues and students to sign it. The letter alleged that the expedition had made “false claims of discovery” by exaggerating the importance of the site; that it had not acknowledged previous archaeological research in Mosquitia; and that it had disrespected indigenous people by failing to recognize that they already knew of the site. It criticized the stories published in National Geographic and the New Yorker, saying they displayed “rhetorical elements that represent antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” that were “at odds with anthropology’s substantial efforts at inclusion and multivocality.” They were concerned about language that felt like a throwback to the bad old colonialist, Indiana Jones days of archaeology.

  The letter made some valid points. There are certain phrases associated with the archaeology of the past that the profession has now banished. The sad truth is that, until recently, many archaeologists were shockingly insensitive and arrogant in the way they conducted fieldwork, riding roughshod over the feelings, religious beliefs, and traditions of indigenous people. They dug up burials without permission, sometimes looting the graves of the freshly interred. They put human remains and sensitive grave goods on public display in museums. They hauled off sacred objects to which they had no legal right of ownership. They talked about “prehistoric” Indians as if they had no history until the Europeans arrived. They lectured native people on what their past was and where they came from, dismissing as myths their own origin beliefs. They claimed to have “discovered” sites that were already well known to native people. The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans “discovered” the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn’t exist before Europeans saw them. Phrases like “lost cities” and “lost civilization” were uncomfortably associated with the archaeology of the past. While I agree with most of this argument and am delighted that modern archaeological vocabulary is increasingly nuanced and sensitive, it poses a challenge for those of us writing about archaeology for a lay audience, since it is nearly impossible to find work-arounds for common words like “lost” and “civilization” and “discovery” without tying the English language up into knots.

  But the letter went far beyond a critique over word usage. The accusation that the team was ignorant of—or worse, deliberately ignoring—previous archaeological research in Mosquitia seriously angered some academics. It was also false. Steve Elkins and his researchers had researched archives in both Honduras and the United States, collecting copies of every published and unpublished paper, report, photograph, map, diary, accession record, and scribbled note they could find regarding Mosquitia going back almost a century. And my 2013 New Yorker piece on the lidar discovery featured Begley and his work, extensively quoted Joyce and other archaeologists, and contained an overview of Mosquitia arc
haeology. The National Geographic reports on the discovery linked to that article. No one had been ignored.

  Begley also claimed that nobody from the team had contacted him, but this, too, was not true. Tom Weinberg had in fact enlisted Begley’s help in the late 1990s—as a string of e-mails and reports prove—but Steve later dropped him from the project. After the successful lidar mission in 2012, Begley sent several e-mails to Steve offering his expertise, writing: “I’d be glad to help on the ground truthing and any other way I can.” Steve declined on the advice of others involved with the project—who asked Steve not to include Begley for reasons touched on below.

  American Archaeology magazine sent a reporter, Charles Poling, to cover the controversy. He interviewed Begley and several other signers. Begley expanded at length on the accusations in the letter. He said the publicity attending the discovery was not justified. He told Poling: “This site is not actually any different from what archaeologists have found there for years, either in size, or the stone artifacts on the surface. What merits the publicity?” He objected to the involvement of filmmakers in the discovery and called it a “B movie fantasy” that was resurrecting the “trope” of “the big hero explorer.” He said that, while he was not privy to the location of the site, he was nevertheless “certain that local folks know about the site and the area”—and he also suggested that he, himself, had probably explored the ruins. Other signatories were equally dismissive. Joyce told American Archaeology that in her view the expedition was an “adventure fantasy trip.” Mark Bonta, an ethnobotanist and cultural geographer at Penn State University who specializes in Honduras, said about the expedition: “One day it’s this, the next day it’s Atlantis. It’s almost like it’s a reality show.” Another letter signer, John Hoopes, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas and an authority on ancient Honduran culture, posted on his Facebook page a lidar image of a section of T1 that had been released by UTL, and ridiculed its small size. “Are the ‘lost cities’ in Honduras actually Lilliputian in scale?” he asked sarcastically. Begley and others joined in posting mocking comments on the small size of the site—until Juan Carlos pointed out to Hoopes that he had misread the scale bars on the lidar image by a factor of ten: What he thought was a hundred meters was actually a kilometer.