Jungleland (14 page)

Alberto had bushwhacked a path over the years to this hut and then populated his land with cattle. He owned a twenty-year-old modified 4×4 pickup, which he had parked a couple miles back along the path. Alberto had two brothers living a mile or so east. His village was called Perlas. Translated into English,
perlas
means “beads”—like a bead of sky cut out of the bush.

Never in my life hungrier, I ate four portions of rice. Night drew on, and I changed into dry clothes. When I peeled off my boots and socks, I saw that my left heel was one giant red blister. I tried to clean off my muddy boots with a wad of toilet paper that I had taken from the hotel in Catacamas. But the paper crumpled up into a dirty little ball without cleaning or drying much of anything. I fretted over my poor feet.

We slept on the floor, and for a second I thought about white sheets and a plush mattress. Maybe room service and a good movie. Just a break. But then I stopped myself. Amy would have laughed.

Before sleeping, we asked Alberto about the lost city. He knew about it but had never gone looking for it. A long time before, someone had told him that a gang of vicious jaguars protected the city. “I know Río Blanco,” he said, referring to the river where Burke had told Morde “no white men had gone before” and the Indians had started to express concern about spirits. “It’s not far from here. I’ll tell you the way.”

“All Had Faded into Thin Air”

E
ACH VENTURE INTO
the woods starts with two prayers,” Morde wrote during his stay at Camp Ulak. “One that we will see no snakes, the other that we will get a jaguar.”

A third may have been to strike it rich. Morde, Brown, and Burke prospected for gold up and down the flooding creek when they weren’t searching for clues to the city—mounds in the soil, stray artifacts, anything. They backtracked along the rivers that had brought them to Ulak and investigated others they’d never seen. They mapped the land, their route through the river system; they were far beyond the expeditions of Strong, Mitchell-Hedges, and Captain Murray.

They rarely left camp without a gun. The expedition was now tracking in territory patrolled by natural-born killers, “where the treacherous tangled growth creeps down to the very edges for streams and where dread malaria . . . and jungle beasts roam.” The one afternoon Morde did venture out unarmed, he caught the glassy eyes of a snake peeking out at him from behind a boulder as he cut through a swath of brush only three feet away. He and the snake stared at each other, and Morde felt his heart stop. He could see the deadly snake’s slender triangular head angling for a quick strike, the yellow diamonds sewed across its back—a fer-de-lance. He froze for several minutes that felt like hours. The snake must have been eight feet long, he thought while slowly backing away. He was amazed that the snake didn’t strike. Instead, it watched him—four paces, six, and then it was gone. Back at camp, Brown told him he looked as if he’d just seen a ghost. Lying down on his cot, Morde had the sensation that he’d just barely escaped death. “It was as if a machine gun had been trained on me,” he reflected later. “A finger had reached for the trigger, then suddenly, the machine gun and all had faded into thin air. Or so it seemed.”

IN ALL, THE
explorers spent about a month at Ulak, settling into a rhythm of river prospecting and hunting for signs of the city in the jungle around them. In photographs of those weeks at the edge of the world, Morde comes to look ragged. His gabardine pants are snipped off at the knees, and his brown safari shirt, rolled to the elbow, is streaked with dirt and wrinkled. His hair is greasy and pushed back, unwashed for weeks, his jaw chiseled into a look of determination, legs skinny as a boy’s, though corded with muscle and strapped into tall black boots.

Their supplies, though, had thinned. They ate beans and smoked the stems of tobacco leaves. Sometimes Burke surprised them with dishes from the jungle. One night, they ate two toucans, chucking the colored feathers away. “Good eating, being all dark meat,” Morde wrote of the cuisine. “More highly flavored than most similar small jungle birds.” They ate wari when they could run them down, an occasional fish, something they called a “guinea pig like animal,” and other birds. Burke became quite adept at making yellowtail pie.

As May turned to June, the rain came daily. The rivers continued to climb; the creek in front of their camp was only about eight feet from them now, which was cause for concern. “This afternoon at about 4 o’clock, a regular cloud burst descended on camp and drenched about everything,” Morde wrote on June 8. They were grateful for the smaller showers that rinsed off their dirty bodies and washed their even dirtier clothes. When the rain came in torrents, however, the grounds around them turned to a mush that swallowed their feet, and tiny rivers guttered through the earth. There was nothing to do but wait for it to stop, the way hostages wait to be freed. Yet the stress of the rainy season only focused their obsession on finding the ruins.

In the day, roars like those of lions startled them. They stopped and stared up at the spears of daylight shooting through the canopy of trees. Other noises came to seem vaguely human, as if the jungle were attempting conversation. White-faced monkeys regularly ganged up on the three men, pitching branches and fruit down on them.

Burke identified rare birds. One day, they encountered a bird that he called a “Margarita,” which he claimed was sacred to the Aztecs, as well as to the local Pech, who believed that the species descended from a beautiful woman who had been exiled into the mountains by a spurned lover. Each wing looked like a rising sun—a blaze of yellow offset by brown and black wing tips.

In what seemed like a fit of sentimentality for the lives they had left behind, the men decided to keep it as a pet and built it a cage out of bamboo. They called it Pete and hoped that it would act as a kind of watchdog for the camp. The hairy beasts, thankfully, remained elusive. “We found no traces of the legendary half human great apes,” Morde reported.

Much of the details of the expedition’s search parties for the lost city out of Camp Ulak are missing or vaguely sketched in the journal. There were some days when either Burke and Brown took to the pages and mentioned Morde going off on treks alone, taking along only his rifle and walking stick. What he did out there is unclear. No one ever says.

Maybe there was another journal, where those details were recorded. There was the chance, of course, that Morde’s evasiveness was only boredom, that he didn’t actually have anything to report and didn’t want to engage any darker thoughts swirling in his mind. Such as, did the lost city even exist? Although he never wrote about his doubts, Morde surely worried deep down that he might never find anything in this endless jungle. You could walk for days and see nothing but trees and vines and rain, until it all started blurring together. But how could he live with that possibility? How would he muster the energy to go on? And what would he tell the world when he returned to New York? That he had spent four months in the jungle and discovered nothing?

Part III

The Jungle That Disappeared

T
HIS IS WHERE
Morde’s world begins,” Chris announced as we stumbled up a hillside. He flipped open his GPS and pointed over the lush valley. “Río Blanco should be over there.”

“Should?” I asked.

“I could be wrong.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then we should hope that we didn’t walk too far away from where we have to go.”

Pancho now took the lead, going off Alberto’s directions to the river. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but we had already been walking for three hours and my feet were sore and soggy. Rain squalls blew up and vanished minutes later, leaving behind fizzing soil and blasting sun. The effects of Alberto’s ten-sugar coffee had long worn off, and I was tired after a sleepless night on the ground, where I couldn’t shake the thought that the snorting pigs around the hut might eat us. We had cut a curve through hillsides and over landscapes thick with creeping bushes and trees, ledges and drop-offs that gave way to flat swamplands swathed in high grass and fields where cattle milled beside clouds of mosquitoes.

Both my feet now had blisters, which had ripped open and turned into a pulp of purple and black, forcing me to walk on the front of my feet to reduce the pressure. At one point, Angel stopped to watch me limp by and snickered.

We passed small huts and saw men and women sitting on tiny porches or working patches of the cut jungle, and I wondered what they thought of our crew, outfitted with our combat boots, rip-resistant pants, quick-dry shirts, and giant backpacks. Some didn’t seem to notice, while others watched us closely, observing the white dudes trekking through the jungle.

Soon there was no one but cattle and cut-down trees, dozens and dozens of blackened stumps in a wide-open space the size of probably six football fields. I was stunned and a little terrified. The impenetrable, supernatural-seeming mass of green that I had imagined had been completely and utterly slashed and burned. “So this is the jungle,” I said sarcastically. It didn’t exactly feel like Morde’s dense malarial wilderness.

“It used to be,” said Chris. “It was different in Morde’s day.”

Now the area looked like a giant lawn of ashes. Settlers, loggers, and ranchers had been clearing the jungle for years, illegally in many cases. “This is the colonization front,” Chris said. Jungle clearing was a problem all over Honduras. The colonizers took the land for houses or pasture, or just for the wood. Many times they didn’t replant anything.

In the last decade, the country had lost about 7 million acres (about 10,000 square miles) of forestland—an area the size of the combined Hawaiian Islands. Some of the timber ended up in products sold in the United States. The U.S. embassy has reported that the clearing continues at a rate of about 3 percent a year, further shrinking Central America’s largest rain forest and everything—birds, beasts, bugs, and all manner of flora that double as herbal medicine for the local people—within.

As I traveled deeper into the jungle, I heard stories of bustling timber hubs hidden from the view of passing planes. Pancho told me about secret jungle trails wide enough for tractor-trailers to pass into and out of the deeper parts of the bush, clandestine sawmills and their shadowy overlords, or
chemiseros
. Sometimes the timber smugglers and even the ranchers worked with the narcos, who flew small planes into hacked-out landing strips. The absence of law enforcement contributed to the mayhem. Violence was always percolating. When the police did venture in, they were sometimes on the wrong side; they became protectors of the underworld, even hit men.

In 2006, a timber gang executed an environmentalist in the ragged mountains that climbed above the Río Patuca. He had been mapping the boundaries of a forest preserve near Olancho. The assassin was never found. A year later, to keep the family quiet, the gang returned in masks and murdered the dead man’s brother, who was the sole witness, as well as his father-in-law and mother-in-law, who’d happened to be with him when the Mafia arrived to settle its score. No one was ever arrested.

That same year, around the same area, two more environmentalists were killed. That time, four policemen thought to be working with
chemiseros
did the work. They pulled the two men over as they traveled by car from Gualaco to Silca. I’d driven on the same forlorn dirt road on my way to Catacamas. Maybe the men thought at first that it was just a security stop. Maybe they thought, hey, it’s no big deal, it’s just the police. But they also might have known that they were in trouble. They were part of a prominent NGO called Environmental Movement of Olancho (MAO), and, like others who lobbied to save the diminishing jungle, they had been warned to stop bothering the loggers. Don’t protest. Don’t talk to the media. Keep your mouth shut, or else. But they hadn’t listened. It was the life they had chosen. It was their land. The police told the men to get out of the car. One was forty-nine, the other twenty-nine. I heard the story at least three times. The police marched them to the center of the nearby town of Guarizama and stood them in front of a municipal building, as if to make a point to anyone who needed a lesson. You see this? Never cross us. We own this place. Some forty shots rang out, and the two bodies slumped to the ground.

Meanwhile, Pancho pointed at dark clouds piling up in the sky. There was no time to dwell on the burned land. He turned and began to walk. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I asked. Pancho didn’t look back, which I took to be his way of saying that he was in control and we had already wasted enough of the day there.

It was almost noon when we spotted the Río Blanco, just as Alberto had said. From a high cliff, the river below stretched out like a gray scribble. We hurried down as the rain came, stumbling over rocks and vines, and came across a thatched hut. Pancho flipped off his cowboy hat and asked the old man inside for directions. Nodding, he invited us to sit on a wood bench. He said he knew the way to Ulak but warned us not to go.