Jungleland (13 page)

In a small notebook, Morde and Brown noted the details of the unmapped realm, the pretty blue-and-orange butterflies, the monkeys calling out, the yellow macaws arcing over the water, the crocodiles basking on the muddy banks, the stray footprints of a solitary human. They also noted their boat speed and compass positions.

The mosquitoes swarmed them, but the ticks were worse, particularly near the shore. “The ticks drop on to your skin from branches and quickly sink their claws into you,” Morde wrote. “We average 30 to 40 a day. You have to scrape them out and once out, the procedure is to crush them.”

Although the sun made appearances, the rain came most days, the sky turning abruptly black, as if a switch had been flipped. Morde and Brown would soon have to start thinking about taking precautions for the wet season ahead. Flash floods were a concern, waves as high as thirty feet suddenly rising up out of the river and taking down everything in their path. The floods would carry even more abundant debris, scores of ripped-up tree trunks and brush shooting downstream like missiles. Because of the rain, the men were always wet, and a pungent stink of mildew clung to their clothing. They stopped expecting their boots to dry. Their beards grew thick and the heat got to them. “If this is the tropics,” Morde wrote, “we’ll take Alaska.”

Some days seemed to never end. On May 24, nearly a week after leaving the last Tawahka encampment, Morde noted a mounting sense of isolation. The myth of the monkey god occasionally haunted him, as if the verdurous air was slowly affecting his brain. One day, he shot a howler monkey—a son of the race of hairy men—out of a tree for its meat. But once the men reeled the monkey into the boat, Morde admitted to experiencing a feeling of guilt. There was something about the monkey’s face that reminded him of a dead relative, and its eyes, which would not shut, seemed to be “looking into my soul.” He abandoned the furry carcass to the river.

SOMETIMES THE TWO
men wondered about the unknowable Burke. Why had he killed a man? Would he do it again? No one asked him. As the expedition pushed farther into the wild, they seemed content that he was on their side. “To see him plunge into the snake infested green hell barefooted gave us courage,” Morde mused on one occasion. “Not to do likewise but at least not fear the bush.”

There were moments when the jungle seemed to consciously push back at them. Fire ants rose up and invaded camp one night; a squad of a dozen swinging monkeys hurled branches down as their boat passed under the canopies. Another day, a herd of several hundred wild pigs, known as wari, attacked them during a reconnaissance trek into the brush.

Hezekiah Butterworth, an explorer in Nicaragua around the same time, once noted that you could hear the wari coming by the “savage sound of [their] teeth” and that they “moved hither and thither, as though hung on wires.” The pigs were known to travel in packs to protect themselves from jaguars and would strike if they felt they were in danger.

One afternoon, the men killed six wari. In the hot sun, the odor of the blood was, as Morde put it, “distressing.”

“We are cut and bruised and tired and hungry,” Morde wrote after a particularly taxing day. By now, they had run out of whiskey and tobacco and had taken to smoking raw puro leaves. “We talked about strawberry shortcake and ice cream to keep up our spirits.”

Soon Isidario and Julio began to talk of turning back. The expedition was about to enter the so-called forbidden region. They turned off the Patuca and were on the Cuyamel, a smaller interior river, with soaring box canyons and cold mountain water.

In late May, seven weeks since they had begun, the explorers arrived at the confluence of the Cuyamel and Blanco rivers. They were about two hundred miles from the coast, far beyond any map or guidance they had taken from Captain Murray. “White men have never before penetrated this far up the river,” Burke told the men. The remoteness of the place was both hopeful and disquieting. The Indians agonized openly about evil spirits and warned the party that it was not a savory place to explore, but Morde and Brown were determined. They bade good-bye to the Indians and told them that they would see them when they returned. “In six hours, they had made a raft from the logs of the buoyant balsa wood and floated off downstream, leaving us to explore and face the dangers of Ulak Land alone,” Morde recalled.

Morde, Brown, and Burke settled on a raised piece of land along a creek just off the Blanco and built camp in three days of concentrated labor. It made sense for them to stop here—it was in the middle of the Indians’ so-called forbidden region, the land they hoped was home to the famous lost city. They macheted away seventy-five square feet of jungle, and on the razed patch they built three open-walled huts—one for sleeping, one for a writing desk, and the last for a kitchen, where a fire would burn. In photographs, the huts appear sturdy and primitive, though also idyllic, like something out of
Robinson Crusoe
. Each was about twenty by twelve feet, constructed from tree branches and waja leaves, and bound together with strips of vine and bark.

Morde dubbed the camp Ulak, after the creek and the hairy men for which the creek was named. It was from there that the expedition would finally begin the search for the ruins, as well as commence some gold prospecting.

By now Morde, Brown, and Burke had each lost about twenty pounds, and their beards itched in the heat and stank in the rain. “It is fortunate that we have each other’s company,” Morde wrote. At night, the men sang along with a harmonica, played bridge, and often dwelled on “the possibility of gold” that waited for them in the distance like a giant question mark.

Loco Men

T
HE NEXT FEW
days I don’t fully remember.

We were up at 5 a.m. In Catacamas we bought four machetes, sharpened them, and then squeezed into a banged-up yellow-and-black school bus that looked like something out of
Mad Max
, with roll bars and heavily treaded tires. The bus took us southeast toward the Río Blanco, where we planned to find the site of Morde’s Ulak camp. Above the driver’s head of stringy black hair, a paper listed the “bus rules,” including my favorite: “Please be kind and keep this bus clean. Throw your garbage out the window.”

A girl who must have been in her teens sat in front of me with a tiny baby wrapped in a blanket. Chris told me that she had just given birth at a hospital and was now returning home.

On the road, I drifted into and out of sleep. We stopped at places that looked as if there was nothing but forest, despite the people climbing on and off. The bus radio played American country songs. When the main road ended, we turned onto narrower muddier roads, and tree branches sometimes crashed into the windows.

Eventually we climbed off and got into the back of a rusted Toyota pickup with about twenty dark-faced passengers. I sat on the side rail next to an old man with oily hair and mirrored glasses and a young muscle-bound kid in a white tank top. We drove exceedingly fast through heavily forested hills and then flatlands where cattle roamed. When I asked how far it was to the jungle, Chris said only, “It’s a ways still.” This was just countryside. The truck bottomed out at least ten times, its carriage scraping dirt and rocks. Five hours later, after multiple military stops, my hair caked with dust, my hands burning from holding on to the rail, the truck stopped and the driver said we’d reached the end of the line. It was time to start walking.

We weren’t anywhere I could locate on the map that Chris spread out on the grass. Even when he pulled out his GPS, we seemed to be standing in an unidentified span of green. As far as we could tell, we were about twelve miles north of the Río Blanco, but there was no road from here to there. Hills and forest lay in between.

It was midafternoon, the sun severe. Eventually Pancho found a trail that he felt would lead us to the river—or close to it. It was narrow and muddied by a morning rain. As we made our way forward, the cicadas blared in stereo, so loud, in fact, at times that the noise unbalanced me. I adjusted the straps on my sixty-pound backpack, though that didn’t make it feel any lighter, and for a second I wondered if I had left anything else behind besides the snake gaiters. When I bent down to insert my soccer shin guards into the fronts and backs of my pants, Chris said, “Not now. The snakes will come later.”

Pancho wore the same blue shirt that he had worn when we met three days before—and it still looked as if it had just been ironed. As he walked, he swung his machete at the brush and listened to his battery-powered radio for updates on the case of exiled president Mel Zelaya. At one point, he announced, “He’s coming over the mountains on horseback.” We never saw him.

Angel had changed from his dress shoes into black rubber farm boots that rose almost to his knees. Although he knew that there was no cellular coverage out here, every half hour or so he would extract his phone from his pocket, hold it up in the buggy air, and turn it on, at which point I would hear the Nokia’s power-up jingle. Waving the phone, he would wait and wait for it to receive a signal—to no avail.

In time, the jingles of the Nokia powering up and down became a kind of joke among all of us; Angel seemed to think only about calling his girlfriends. “He’s on the hunt,” Pancho said. Laughing, Pancho made the sign for a telescope, as if he were sighting a woman miles away, through the thicket of green. Angel smiled, because he knew it was true.

Our pace was slow at first because of the brutal heat, which was closing in on 100 degrees, and the weight of our things. There were fields with cattle, then heavy jungle, then steep hills. Here and there I noticed big droopy plants like the potted ones sold at the plant stores in Brooklyn. For hours there was no one else in sight and no signs of habitation. My feet were comfortable in my combat boots, though I couldn’t stop thinking that we were going the wrong way.

After a couple hours, I had to stop. We found a few boulders in a circle of shade and plunked down to eat Clif Bars. Resting there, my entire body began to throb, violently pulsing as if it might all just explode apart—my feet, my ankles, my legs, my chest, my shoulders, my back, my hands, even my eyes and the short strands of my sweaty hair.

When I looked up, I saw that Angel had taken off his boots and was massaging his bare feet. “By the end of this trip my feet are going to be raw,” he said with a sour face.

That admission made me feel a little better. I got the impression that Pancho hadn’t been completely open with him about the extent of our journey. “Did your father tell you we’d be walking every day?” I asked.

He shook his head, and Pancho smiled. “He told me there would a lot of walking,” Angel said. “But not with this.” He pointed at the backpack.

Suddenly Pancho put his hand in the air, as if he was demanding silence from the noisy insect world. He sensed things that the rest of us did not—or at least not immediately. He pointed at the path behind us. We all turned around, our attention rapt. As if materializing from the heat, a young woman appeared in thin-soled black flip-flops. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She was pretty—slender, with long shiny black hair and a shy smile. She carried a young girl, no more than two years old, in one arm and a live blotchy white chicken in the other. The chicken had seen better days; it was missing feathers, and its beak was chipped. We stopped the girl, and I asked what she was doing out here and how far she’d walked. Angel was grinning, always happy to be around a girl.

She spoke to us in Spanish, saying that her name was Lucía and that she had already walked three miles. She said this casually, as if she’d just been out for a stroll down a paved suburban road. “Carrying your daughter like that?” I asked, incredulous. I couldn’t imagine carrying my daughter in this heat, up and down these hills, let alone picking up my backpack again.

Lucía told us she was heading to her uncle’s house, another two miles off, where she was going to deliver the chicken as a gift. She told us that some “loco” men had gunned down her twenty-one-year-old cousin a few hours earlier, during the night. He’d apparently been involved in a dispute over some nearby land. With very little evident emotion, as if reciting the weather, she said we’d see the blood in the path up ahead.

IT WAS LONG
after dark when we made it to the house of Alberto Aguilera. At first, we weren’t sure whether we could trust him. Hours before, armed men on horseback had warned us that we couldn’t stay just anywhere in the jungle. Big landholders were protective of their land. We wouldn’t be safe sleeping outside until we entered the state reserve, which was still many days away. The riders suggested that we go to the third house; the owners of the others, they said, were “untrustworthy.” But we hadn’t seen any huts for miles. The sun had gone down, and even with our headlamps the dark was like a shut-up basement. We were too tired to go on, so we decided to take a chance.

We passed through an iron gate ringed with barbed wire and held our machetes at our sides. Several big dogs jumped out of the shadows, and a man yelled. As he approached us, I saw that he was shirtless, with a big hairy belly and a wide-brimmed brown cowboy hat. A handgun was tucked into his faded jeans. I heard pigs snorting somewhere in the dark.

Pancho stepped forward and explained to the man why we were out there. Alberto shook his head and smiled, and Pancho laughed. Pancho knew how to charm. When he came back to us, he said that Alberto was a good guy. We gave him rice and beans and a few packets of Tang, and he agreed to let us stay on the open porch of his two-room wood hut that night.

Alberto hung around with us as we rested on the dirt floor and ate rice that his wife had cooked earlier in the night. His wife was now asleep, and one of his boys sat next to him. There was no electricity, just a couple of candles flickering. Chris mused that the family was the modern-day equivalent of the nineteenth-century American “49ers” who had headed west for free or cheap land where they could forge a new life. He was no different from Pancho before violence forced Pancho out of the jungle.