The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  Leish is now spreading in the United States. Over the course of the entire twentieth century, only twenty-nine cases of leish were reported in the United States, all of which occurred in Texas close to the Mexican border. But in 2004, a young man from a small town in southeastern Oklahoma, ten miles from the Arkansas border, visited his doctor complaining of a sore on his face that wouldn’t heal. The doctor cut it off and sent it to a pathologist in Oklahoma City, who was stymied by what it might be and stored the frozen tissue. A year later, this same pathologist, by sheer chance, got another tissue sample from another patient living in the same small town. The pathologist immediately called the Oklahoma State Department of Health and reached Dr. Kristy Bradley, the state epidemiologist. She and her staff ordered the two tissue samples sent to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The diagnosis came back: cutaneous leishmaniasis, of a mild type that can usually be cured by surgically removing the ulcer. (Both patients were, in fact, cured this way.)

  At the time that Dr. Bradley was investigating the disease in Oklahoma, an outbreak of cutaneous leishmaniasis occurred in northeastern Texas and in a string of suburbs in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area; the dozen or so victims included a little girl who had lesions on her face, and in one case a cat and a human in the same household got the disease. Doctors in the health departments of Texas and Oklahoma joined forces to track the source. They were especially worried because none of the victims had traveled: They had gotten the disease in their own backyards.

  Dr. Bradley led the investigation of the two cases in Oklahoma. She assembled a team that included an entomologist and a biologist. When the team visited the patients and surveyed their properties, they noted burrows of wood rats and populations of sand flies, which they concluded must have been the host and vector. The investigators trapped a number of rats and sand flies and tested them for leish. None had the disease, but by this time the mini-outbreak had died down.

  I called Bradley and asked if the leish had really died out or if it was still around. “I’m sure it hasn’t gone away,” she said. “It’s smoldering somewhere out there, quietly cycling in nature,” waiting for the right combination of circumstances to break out again. When she and her team mapped leish cases in the United States over time, they revealed an inexorable spread northeastward across Texas and Oklahoma, aiming for other states in a northeasterly direction.

  Why?

  Her answer was immediate: “Climate change.” As the United States becomes warmer, she said, the ranges of the sand fly and the wood rat are both creeping northward, the leish parasite tagging along. The sand fly genus known to spread this kind of leish has now been found in the United States five hundred miles northwest and two hundred miles northeast of its previously established range.

  A recent study modeled the possible expansion of leishmaniasis across the United States over the next sixty-five years. Since it takes both vector and host to spread the disease, the scientists wanted to know where the sand fly/wood rat combination would migrate together. They looked at two future climate scenarios, best case and worst case. For each case, they extrapolated out to the years 2020, 2050, and 2080. Even under the best-case climate assumptions, they discovered that global warming would push leishmaniasis across the entire United States into southeastern Canada by 2080. Hundreds of millions of Americans could be exposed—and this is just by wood rats. Since many other species of mammals can host the leish parasite—including cats and dogs—we know the potential problem is far greater than what was described by this study.* A similar spread of the disease is expected in Europe and Asia.

  It seems that leishmaniasis, a disease that has troubled the human race since time immemorial, has in the twenty-first century come into its own. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, “You got a really cold jolt of what it’s like for the bottom billion people on earth.” We were, he said, confronted in a very dramatic way with what many people have to live with their entire lives. If there’s a silver lining to our ordeal, he told us, “it’s that you’ll now be telling your story, calling attention to what is a very prevalent, very serious disease.”

  If leish continues to spread as predicted in the United States, by the end of the century it may no longer be confined to the “bottom billion” in faraway lands. It will be in our own backyards.

  Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.

  Modern travel has given infectious disease new ways to spread. Bubonic plague in the fourteenth century traveled from Central Asia to the Levant and Europe by horse, camel, and boat; the Zika virus in the twenty-first century jumped from Yap Island in Micronesia to French Polynesia, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Central America by 2015, all by plane. In the summer of 2016, Zika arrived in Miami, again on an airplane. The 2009 outbreak of deadly H1N1 swine flu in Mexico hitched rides on planes to strike as far away as Japan, New Zealand, Egypt, Canada, and Iceland. As Richard Preston noted in his terrifying book The Hot Zone, “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth.”

  The world’s last great pandemic was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 that killed a hundred million people—about 5 percent of the world’s population. If a pandemic like that were to happen again, it would spread faster and might be impossible to contain. According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in such a pandemic “the death toll could reach 360 million”—even with the full deployment of vaccines and powerful modern drugs. The Gates Foundation estimated that the pandemic would also devastate the world financially, precipitating a three-trillion-dollar economic collapse. This is not scaremongering: Most epidemiologists believe such a pandemic will eventually happen.

  Archaeology contains many cautionary tales for us to ponder in the twenty-first century, not just about disease but also about human success and failure. It teaches us lessons in environmental degradation, income inequality, war, violence, class division, exploitation, social upheaval, and religious fanaticism. But archaeology also teaches us how cultures have thrived and endured, overcoming the challenges of the environment and the darker side of human nature. It shows us how people adapted, lived their lives, and found fulfillment and meaning under fantastically diverse conditions. It tracks both the failures and the successes. It tells us how cultures faced difficulty and challenge, sometimes in successful ways and sometimes in ways that, while successful at first, sowed the seeds of eventual collapse. The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people; so did the Roman Empire and the ancient Khmer, to pluck civilizations randomly out of the hat. But the people of the City of the Jaguar did adapt to the challenges of the rainforest, and they continued to thrive in one of the harshest environments on the planet, transforming it into a beautiful garden—until their abrupt demise.

  I can recall the very moment when we stumbled over the cache and I first saw that jaguar head coming out of the ground. Gleaming with rain, it rose up snarling, as if struggling to escape the earth. It was an image that spoke directly to me across the centuries—forging an immediate, emotive connection to these vanished people. What had been theoretical for me became real: This spirited image had been created by people who were confident, accomplished, and formidable. Standing in the gloom among the ancient mounds, I could almost feel the presence of the invisible dead. At its zenith, the people of the city of T1, the City of the Jaguar, must have felt nearly invulnerable in their valley redoubt ringed by mountains. What power could overthrow their mighty gods and potent rituals? But the unseen invader ghosted in and visited upo
n them a destruction that was as impossible to resist as it was to predict. Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over.

  No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.

  View of the River Pao. The lost city lies on an unnamed tributary upstream from this river.

  The opening pages of William Duncan Strong’s 1933 Honduran journal. Strong was one of the first legitimate archaeologists to penetrate the region.

  Sam Glassmire in 1959, hunting for the White City, with one of his guides.

  Sam Glassmire’s hand-drawn map showing the location of the “Lost City” he discovered on an expedition in 1960.

  The valley of T1, deep in Mosquitia and ringed by almost impenetrable mountains, remained one of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth until the expedition arrived there in February 2015.

  Theodore Morde traveling up the Patuca River by motorized pitpan, or dugout canoe, Mosquitia, Honduras, 1940.

  The Cessna Skymaster containing a million-dollar lidar machine and its highly classified payload being guarded by Honduran soldiers. The plane flew missions over three unexplored valleys in the remote mountains of Mosquitia in 2012.

  Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández, engineer from the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston and the lidar mission planner, operates the lidar machine during the May 4, 2012 overflight of the T1 valley that discovered the ancient city.

  The author jammed in the back of the Cessna, ready to depart on the historic overflight of the T1 valley.

  On his first expedition looking for the White City in 1994, Steve Elkins found this carved rock deep in the jungle showing a man planting seeds, and he had a revelation that in Pre-Columbian times a major farming civilization had lived in what is today almost impassible jungle.

  Steve Elkins photographed jumping a hedge as he was running to see the first images of the lost city found by lidar in the valley of T1—the culmination of his 20-year search.

  In Roatán, Honduras, examining the first lidar image of the lost city, 2012. From left: Steve Elkins; Bill Benenson (behind); Michael Sartori (seated); Virgilio Paredes; Tom Weinberg; and the author, Douglas Preston.

  Two lidar images of a hilltop portion of T1, the first in grayscale and the second in a rotated, color-scale format. This large, mountaintop ruin has not yet been explored.

  A lidar image of the heart of the city of T1, showing the cache location and other features of importance. In Pre-Columbian times, it had been a landscape entirely modified and engineered by the ancient people of Mosquitia.

  Bruce Heinicke, fixer, gold prospector, former drug smuggler for the Colombian cartel, and archaeological looter, who was instrumental in helping find the lost city.

  The expedition’s Astar helicopter being unloaded in the jungle landing zone below the ruins of T1.

  Chris Fisher (behind), the expedition’s chief archaeologist, and the author explore the unnamed river flowing through the valley of T1 below the ruins.

  Tom Weinberg, the expedition’s official chronicler, taking notes on his laptop deep in the jungles of Mosquitia, 2015.

  The jungle at dawn, seen from the banks of the unknown river flowing through the valley, 2015.

  The author’s campsite below the ruins, shortly before it turned into a sea of mud in the relentless rain. A troupe of spider monkeys lived in the trees above and shook branches and screeched at the author, trying to get him to move. At night, the ground was covered with cockroaches and spiders while jaguars roamed about.

  A fer-de-lance, one of the world’s deadliest snakes, entered the camp the first night and had to be killed. Its fangs were over an inch long. The head was tied to a tree in camp by an expedition leader to impress on everyone the high risk of snakes.

  Andrew Wood, ex-SAS leader of the expedition, holding up the headless ferde-lance that he killed the night before.

  Bill Benenson, the filmmaker who financed the search for the lost city, exploring the unnamed river in the valley of T1 below the ruins.

  Dr. Alicia González, the expedition’s anthropologist, in the Mosquitia jungle, 2015. In the background, from left to right are: Chris Fisher, Anna Cohen, and Andrew Wood.

  Chris Fisher exploring the ruins using a Trimble GPS. This photograph was taken in the main central plaza of the lost city, surrounded by mounds and an earthen pyramid. The incredible thickness of the jungle obscured everything.

  The “kitchen” area of the expedition’s camp deep in the Mosquitia jungle, 2015. The area was so remote, the animals apparently had never seen people before and wandered about, unafraid.

  Honduran TESON Special Forces soldiers accompanied the expedition; they are roasting a deer over the fire in their camp, 2015.

  Oscar Neil, chief of archaeology for Honduras, discovered the first altar stone in the ruins a few seconds before this photo was taken in February 2015. The altar is barely visible behind his right hand; it proved to be a large, flat stone placed on three quartz boulders, in a long line of altars alongside the main plaza of the city.

  The cache or offering of stone objects, vessels, thrones, and figures, with just the tops visible above the surface of the ground. The excavation of this cache would solve one of the greatest mysteries of this enigmatic civilization: What caused its sudden, catastrophic disappearance five centuries earlier?

  The were-jaguar as it first appeared emerging from the ground. Photographer David Yoder risked his life to climb up to the cache at night to photograph the artifacts using a special “light-painting” photographic technique.

  Archaeologist Anna Cohen excavates stone vessels at the site of the mysterious cache. Visible here is the so-called “alien baby” stone vessel, which may depict a corpse bound for burial, a captive awaiting sacrifice, or a half-monkey, half-human deity.

  The mysterious sculpture placed in the center of the cache found at the base of the central pyramid, which archaeologists believe depicts a shaman in a spiritually transformed state as a vulture.

  Deforestation on the way to the valley of T1, primarily clearing land for cattle grazing. One Honduran official estimated that illegal clearcutting would have reached the valley of T1 in fewer than 8 years. The expedition and its discoveries, however, motivated the Honduran government to crack down on deforestation in the Mosquitia region.

  President Hernández of Honduras and Steve Elkins after his arrival by helicopter at the site of the lost city, 2016.

  Acknowledgments

  In addition to the people featured in this book, I would like to thank many others not mentioned in the book who made this project possible.

  I would like to express my deep appreciation for the cooperation, permission, and support of the Government of Honduras: in particular, President Porfirio Lobo Sosa; President Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado; Secretary of the Interior and Population Áfrico Madrid Hart; Minister of Science and Technology Ramón Espinoza; Virgilio Paredes Trapero, Director of the Honduran Institute for Anthropology and History (IHAH); Oscar Neil Cruz, Chief of the Archaeology Division of IHAH; and archaeologists Ranferi Juárez Silva, Norman Martínez, and Santiago Escobar. I am grateful to Minister of Defense Samuel Reyes and the Armed Forces of Honduras under the command of Gen. Fredy Santiago Díaz Zelaya; Gen. Carlos Roberto Puerto; Lt. Col. Willy Joel Oseguera and the soldiers of TESON, Honduran Special Forces.

  I also wish to thank my many fine editors: Millicent Bennett and Melanie Gold at Grand Central Publishing; Alan Burdick and Dorothy Wickenden at the New Yorker; Jamie Shreeve and Susan Goldberg at National Geographic; and Jaime Levine. Special thanks also to Eric Simonoff, Raffaella De Angelis, and Alicia Gordon at William Morris Endeavor; Jeremy Sabloff, Santa Fe Institute; Michael Brown, School for Advanced Research; David Hurst Thomas, American Museum
of Natural History; William Fash, Harvard University; the late Evon Z. Vogt, Harvard University; George Rossman, Caltech; Ann Ramenofsky, University of New Mexico; Timothy D. Maxwell, New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies; Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic Society; and Robert Crippen, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  I am as always and forever grateful to my friends and colleagues at Hachette Book Group: Michael Pietsch, Jamie Raab, Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, Brian McLendon, Deb Futter, Andrew Duncan, Beth de Guzman, Oscar Stern, Shelby Howick, Flamur Tonuzi, and Jessica Pierce. Additional sincere thanks to Barbara Peters, Poisoned Pen Bookstore; Devereux Chatillon; Garry Spire; Maggie Begley; Wendi Weger; Myles Elsing; Roberto Ysais; and Karen Copeland, who keeps it all going. And a very special thanks to my wife, Christine, and Selene, Josh, Aletheia, and Isaac, and my mother, Doffy.

  Finally, I would like to express my great appreciation to the National Institutes of Health, which, through its extraordinarily valuable and effective medical research programs, has lifted the burden of sickness and misery from millions of people in America and across the world. I would note that in the past decade, because of ill-advised Congressional budget-cutting, the NIH has seen its financing slashed by over 20 percent, which has compromised and even shut down some of its most important research programs into health issues that affect all of us: infectious disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, arthritis, mental illness, addiction, and so much more. There may be no better use of taxpayer dollars than in funding the NIH; it is a shining example of something our government does extremely well, which because of financial and profit requirements cannot be accomplished by the private sector.