Jungleland (15 page)

“Beyond Hope”

W
ITHOUT EVIDENCE OF
the ancient city, Morde turned again to rumor. The first story of Ciudad Blanca came from a man named Timoteo Rosales. When he encountered Rosales, however, is unknown; no date was recorded in Morde’s journals. What is known is that Rosales worked as a rubber cutter, spending weeks wandering around the unmapped parts of the region, extracting from tree trunks the gummy white fluid known as latex. That fluid, after Rosales humped it to a river, was later turned into chewing gum and tires, among other things. He told Morde that it was in 1905, during a trek from the Río Paulaya to the Río Plátano—in the middle of the forest, far from any settlements—he looked up and saw stone “columns.” He believed it was the lost city, though he hadn’t stopped to linger over it. At another point in his travels, Morde met a man who claimed to have stumbled upon the ruins in 1898, at the place where the heads of the Plátano, Paulaya, and Wampú rivers come together. The man called the ruins “the White City”—the first and only mention of the name in Morde’s logbooks. That was a big clue, but the area at the river heads covered more than a hundred square miles. They needed more to go on.

In time, they did discover traces of the ancient people who had dwelled there. From under dirt and rocks, they dug up six stone flutes, numerous razor blades, and stone household items such as pots, spoons, and grinding slabs. They also uncovered tiny religious idols, with faces contorted by weather and time, and small masks resembling monkey faces. All of it made them wonder: could the people who made these things have inhabited the lost city?

Most amazingly, they encountered earth-covered mounds, rising like small, toppled buildings. Indians they met described the ancient people who lived in these deep parts as master stone builders. Because of this, Morde wrote of the city, “the [Indians] insisted, much had been preserved.” He also heard about a long-staired approach to the center, paved in bleached stones and flanked by “larger than life statues of frogs, crocodiles and monkeys.”

The dramatic description echoed other outlandish accounts of lost cities. In his search for El Dorado in 1542, the conquistador Francisco de Orellana wrote of “one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house,” and he observed “many roads here that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways.” He recalled too “very large cities that glistened in white.”

The most shocking thing Morde heard during those weeks was a detail of the White City’s center. “At the heart of the place was a temple,” an Indian told him, “with a high stone platform on top of which rose the towering the statue of the Monkey God himself.”

The city might be around any bend, over any hill. But as Morde and the others drew closer, the jungle seemed to grow more aggressive in its efforts to thwart their mission. “We have met our match in the jungle,” he wrote. One day, rain blew the roof off the camp’s sleeping hut; snakes and termites invaded; the water continued to rise, threatening to flood the living quarters and muddying the creek waters, making any further prospecting impossible; the dam broke once and for all. It was, as the Spanish put it, the
chubasco
, the squall. “The rain is incessant,” Morde went on. “Tempers are easily ruffled, the camp is damp and messy and the creek is beyond hope.” Another time, he added, “We often think . . . how infinitesimal we three white men are here in the green vastness.”

On June 11, they woke to Pete the bird’s frantic chattering. When they stepped outside to see what it was all about, they noticed the tracks of an adult jaguar. It had circled the camp, emerging from the depths of the jungle as if to mark its territory.

Burke, Brown, and Morde peered at the perimeter of their camp, where they heard voices. The brush disgorged five men. Four were Indians, and the fifth was a white man who introduced himself as William A. MacDonald. MacDonald was from San Francisco but worked as a mining scout for a Toronto company. By his looks, he was middle-aged. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that the buzzing jungle made it hard for the explorers to hear him. MacDonald said he’d been paddling upriver for three weeks and was now camped out on the Blanco, a few miles back. He asked about their prospecting.

Who is this man? Morde wondered. Was he also searching for the lost city? Would he try to steal from them? “He caused us great queasiness by his question of gold,” Morde wrote. Terror seized them. They steered the conversation away from their own activities in the jungle and pressed MacDonald for news of the war. The Americans, MacDonald said, were getting closer to entering the battle, which made the explorers only more uneasy about the world that awaited them upon their return to New York.

MacDonald and his men stayed for three hours before a rainstorm hit and they fled, worrying that the creek was about to flood. Even then, the encounter lingered with Morde and Brown. They felt suspicious of the scout, and they resolved to move out. “The best course is to wind down our affairs here, as hastily as possibly,” Morde wrote. “We will be able to get a line on MacDonald from our friends on the Patuca, who will possibly be able to give us some hint as to his plans.” They couldn’t risk MacDonald following them. Decamping was the only way to protect what they already knew.

Looking for Camp Ulak

T
HERE’S A WOMAN
who lives up there,” the old man said to us in Spanish. “She’s a witch. We call her La Sucia.” The dirty woman.

The man wore dusty black sandals, ragged shorts, and a white T-shirt. He was probably in his eighties. His fingers were grimy, and his hands coarse and callused. The Río Blanco roared from behind his hut. I noticed insects sneaking in through cracks in the damp walls—millipedes, fat shiny flies. Ants made their way in a vein across the smooth dirt floor, vanishing under the raised board that served, with a couple of neatly folded blankets on top, as his bed.

He told us that he had prospected the region’s rivers for decades. He had found some gold but not enough to make him rich. About thirty years ago, he had decided to move here from Catacamas and build a hut, a few miles up the Blanco. Now about half a dozen other mud huts dotted a grassy path. But even though they’d created this place here, if the village decided to leave one day, it would not be very long before everything would simply melt away into the surrounding greenery. The man called his hut “far away from things,” and the slow, quiet way he talked, along with the rain coming down, imbued his words with the mysticism of fairy tales.

“The witch protects the gold at Ulak,” he said. “There is gold there, and when men go, they see her.” He paused and opened his eyes very wide, as if imagining the sight. “She is a pretty woman with black hair. You might see her washing her clothes in the creek.”

I asked if he had seen her. He clucked as though that was a stupid question.

“The men who see her don’t leave,” he said.

I knew that this was only a legend, just as the monkey men were merely legends, though he seemed very serious about the story. Later, I would find out that it was a common story throughout Central America. The witch was called dirty because she never left the forest. She used her beauty to lure men into her hideout. Sometimes she sang, and her voice sounded like a waterfall or a mountain breeze, depending on who told the story. I almost laughed it away until the old man mentioned the dead American.

“It was a long, long time ago,” he said. “The gringo was looking for gold around Ulak. And then he got a fever.”

I told him the story of Morde, hoping to stir some distant memory, but he didn’t know the name. I mentioned the San Francisco miner MacDonald, who had traveled up this way almost seventy years before. I knew it was a long time ago, but I wondered if the dead man he was talking about might be MacDonald. In Morde’s notes, there is no further mention of the miner. He didn’t see him on the Río Blanco as he left Ulak, and he heard nothing about him from the Indians or the Germans on the Patuca. It seemed as though he had evaporated.

The old settler contemplated what I told him. He said that sometimes he found “ancient things” in the ground in the forest—broken pottery and stone slabs. But he knew of no ruins around there. He had heard of men looking for them but didn’t know if MacDonald was the dead man. It was just a story. “You can go to his grave. You’ll see it. He’s buried near Ulak in a shade of trees.”

Pancho asked the settler where to find a mule to haul our things for a bit, and soon a young man from the settlement appeared. He had a rifle slung over one shoulder. His hair stuck up in every direction, and his smile, under a wisp of a mustache, revealed a set of blackened teeth. The rain had ceased, and the sun was back. We threw our things onto his animal, which was already huffing in the heat, and the man pointed at the shin guards fastened to my legs. He mumbled something that I didn’t understand. Chris interpreted: “He wants to know if you’re playing in a soccer game out here.”

FOR A FEW
hours, we made our way along the twisting Río Blanco toward Morde’s camp. I complained about my blistered feet, but no one seemed to care. The Blanco was a fast-flowing river, about fifty yards across in some stretches. The heat got worse as the day sank into late afternoon. It rose in waves off the high grass, which I watched for snakes. At one point, Pancho bent over and picked something out of the grass. “.357,” he said, holding in the cup of his hand an empty bullet casing that didn’t look very old. He scanned the mostly flat landscape around us, blurry with sun, but there was no one else in sight.

My mind wandered a lot as we walked through these boring stretches of flatness. A million totally random thoughts rattled around inside my head like a pop song that was impossible to shake.

Sky does such a good cannonball; What’s that line from T. S. Eliot about the return of a journey is the beginning?; Man, I’d love a cheeseburger—with relish!; She’s going to be in preschool; Where did all that time go? Where will we end up?; That biker actually died; I can’t do this; Snakes!; Amy’s right; She’s got a journey too; Where are we?; You’re a complete idiot; What’s that line?; You return to the place you started and know it for the first time.

After a couple more hours, I realized that Chris had dropped behind us. By now we had probably walked eight or nine miles and had come upon some formidable hills. I waited for him to catch up and saw that his face had gone pale. “Something bit me,” he said, shaking his head. He pulled off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m burning up with a fever. I’m freezing.” His blue shirt was drenched in sweat.

“Should we stop?” I asked.

“We gotta keep going,” he said. “Night’s coming.” He wanted to make it to Ulak. Then he would rest.

I worried selfishly that we’d have to turn around and get him to a hospital, which would mean days of backtracking. It was hard for me even to imagine the energy it would take to walk back to Catacamas.

We slipped down a cliff face and traversed the Blanco on a narrow mahogany pitpan that was lying abandoned on the mucky shore. As we crossed, Chris said, “Morde probably prospected for gold here. We can’t be far from his camp.” I could tell he was struggling by the slow and labored manner of his speech and the way he kept staring off into the buzzing morass, probably dreaming of being somewhere else. That was not the film that he wanted his wife to be watching.

On the other side, the mule guide declared, “It’s up here.”

We followed him up the hill and into some of the densest foliage we had yet encountered. Trees rose high around us, eclipsing the sun. Pancho stopped and pointed at the ground. “He’s buried somewhere here,” he said. “The gringo.”

There was a mossy rock the size of a small headstone embedded in the jungle floor, and I pictured the bones of the dead man buried beneath.

“What if that’s MacDonald?” I asked.

No one responded. The hissing green was loud in my head. An unexpected sadness came over me. Here was a man who had come to Honduras with dreams of striking it rich. He had left behind a small world to chase the potential of a bigger one. His quest had ended badly, and he had never made it home. Did he have a wife or children? Did anyone back home ever learn that he died? Or did they think he’d just run away?

The man’s story reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s blackly comic novel
A Handful of Dust
. The hero, Tony Last, gets lost in the Amazon on an expedition looking for El Dorado, only to be imprisoned by a crazy man who, unknown to anyone, forces him to read Charles Dickens out loud for the rest of his life. Whatever the circumstances of the dead man’s disappearance, he was here and no one knew about him, except for the old settler along the river—and now me.

I got a bad feeling in my head. I hoped at that second that Amy and Sky didn’t think that I was running away from them. I recalled the time not long before when Sky had actually asked why I went away so much. “Why do you always leave us?” The question had stunned me at first. I thought for a second and then told her that it was my job to go away. But that hadn’t satisfied her. “So why don’t you get another job, Daddy?”

Amy and I had debated my freelance life incessantly, particularly how there was nothing steady about it: paychecks were erratic, health insurance was nonexistent, overseas trips came up at the last minute. The conversations, which happened mostly late at night, sometimes after a couple drinks or while we were lying in bed with the lights out, had been minimal when it was just Amy and me, but they had grown after we’d had Sky and bought a place.

It wasn’t that Amy wanted our family to be like everyone else’s family, just that we make a home that had some consistency, some predictability to it. Part of me understood that, but the other part—the part that enjoyed the romance of being out in the world—kept thinking that I would wait just another year before making some changes.

Sky, however, had her own ideas. One afternoon, as we walked past the local firehouse, she said, “You should be a fireman, Daddy. Then you wouldn’t need to go anywhere.” I smiled, because l loved how she could make sense of a world that was so complicated to me.