Jungleland (17 page)

I could hear Pancho and Eladio only in bits over the cicadas.

“Chavez wants to bring communism here,” Pancho said.

“Yes, Mel is risking that,” Eladio admitted.

“And communism would ruin this country.”

“But we would all be poor. I think that is good.”

“But how would we make any money? You have to think about that.”

“It doesn’t matter as much to me, making money—but the millionaires will lose all their money. That’s what matters. That they are poor like us.”

Pancho cracked a smile. “Maybe that’s something good,” he replied. “I just don’t want a strongman telling us how to live. There are Castro and Chávez and Ortega. And those people there are poor and live under a strongman. No one wants another strongman here. It is good to be free.” To that, they agreed.

The radio played on, and Eladio looked at me and said, “You should go home.”

WE WENT TO
sleep early after a tasty dinner of rice, beans, and freshly made tortillas that Eladio’s wife prepared over a wood fire—what had become our daily diet. Chris had gone to bed hours before, feeling the return of his fever. It was about 8 p.m., and though it had been dark for little more than an hour it already felt like midnight.

Pancho helped me hang my hammock between two trees next to the house, tying the rope at each end into knots I’d never seen before. The only time I had ever been inside the hammock was back on my Brooklyn roof deck. When it’s hanging, it looks a lot like a pod, the bottom side a green stretchy vinyl, which grabs hold of you, and the top side tightly netted with a zippered opening.

I spent some time reading by headlamp while mosquitoes attacked the netting around me. I hoped the trees wouldn’t snap. I had changed into dry clothes, and even though I hadn’t slept more than twelve hours over the last three days, I couldn’t fall asleep. My feet were on fire. I imagined how quietly a jaguar might approach and what it would feel like to be attacked from below, all of a sudden. After an hour, I unzipped the hammock, grabbed the satellite phone from one of Chris’s bags on the porch, and headed into the ruins behind the hut.

The mound shone a pale green. I could see more stars than I knew existed and the bluish peaks and valleys on the moon, which shone against the pure black of night like a flashlight. Three times I followed the flickering tail of a shooting star.

I hadn’t used the phone until now because I had wanted to try to be as alone as possible and also because the technology seemed so incongruent to this place. But it was almost Sky’s birthday, and I needed to hear my family’s voices. Eventually I turned on the phone, pressed the numbers of my Brooklyn home, and then listened as the phone searched for a line. It rang three times before Amy picked up.

“Is that really you?” she asked.

She was two hours ahead of me and was cooking dinner. It was good to hear her voice.

I started to tell her about what was going on, but she cut me off. “We were attacked last night,” she said.

I wasn’t sure that I’d heard her right, so I asked her to say it again. “The phone is a little static-y,” I said.

“I woke up in the middle of the night to an animal pulling off the screen,” she said, her voice getting shaky. “It was trying to get in the house.”

“What do you mean attacked?”

“It had these huge yellow eyes and hands. A raccoon,” she said.

“A raccoon was trying to get into the house?”

I tried to make a joke about how it was me who was supposed to be talking about animal attacks, but she was really shaken up. She hated raccoons, was terrified of their black-masked eyes.

“It’s serious,” she said. “It had these huge ugly hands.”

She said it had fled when she jumped out of bed, but the screen had been mostly peeled away. “I might have rabies,” she said.

“How would you get rabies?”

“Maybe I got some of its saliva on me from the screen.”

I tried to calm her down. But she was speeding forward. She said that after she had closed the window and locked it, she had washed her hands with Lysol.

“Lysol?”

“I was scared,” she said. “I thought that would disinfect me.”

“You don’t have rabies,” I said. “You’re okay.”

“But it could come back. It was huge. It could easily come back.”

I told her that even if it did return it couldn’t break through the glass.

“You didn’t see these hands,” she said. “They were huge. They could break glass.”

We went back and forth about it before she said that she was now sleeping in Sky’s room and kept all the lights on in the house.

“It’s because you’re away,” she said finally. “I have to deal with this all by myself.”

A moment passed, and silence filled the line. I felt a terrible sadness ripple over me. I wished I could teleport myself back there and track down that damn raccoon. I started to tell her how sorry I was, but just then Sky came on the line. “Daddy,” she said. Her voice was a relief. It was so cheerful. I could see her on the other side, both of them sitting at the dining room table, Sky bouncing in her chair as she clutched the phone.

“How is the jungle?” she asked.

I told her it was hot and wet. Then we talked about the princess she’d drawn at camp and she wondered if I had seen any monkeys. “Do you wear socks in the jungle?” she asked. That made me laugh. Amy too.

“Are you excited for your birthday?” I asked.

She said, “Super, super excited,” and ticked off the friends who planned to come to the party.

“That sounds amazing,” I said.

We talked for a long time, the tension melting away. I told Sky, “Be good for Mommy, okay?” In the end, it was difficult to say good-bye. There is always more to say, of course. “I’m sorry that I’m not there,” I said.

“I’m just tired,” Amy answered before the line went dead.

Back in the hammock, I couldn’t find a Valium, so I just closed my eyes. My head was warm, and I began to worry that I had contracted whatever Chris was fighting off. I felt as though something inside was slowly coming undone. I thought about the raccoon ripping off the screen and imagined it as a metaphor for the shame I had felt in leaving and in framing the quest as a hunt for myself. It seemed like a kind of intruder trying to tear apart my family. How selfish was I? I kept hearing Amy say, “I’m just tired,” and worried about her. Were there costs to this trip that I had ignored or misread?

Before I’d left the city I hadn’t actually considered what it would mean to miss Sky’s birthday. I’d thought I’d make it up to her when I got home—she’d have one every year. But now I just felt sad and detached. When I finally slept, it was a restless sleep, with a string of weird malaria-medicine dreams, where soaring trees came to life and the buried American kept telling me that I’d stolen his gold. In the morning when I awoke, the pirates had already arrived.

“The Lost City of the Monkey God”

J
UST AS MORDE
was about to give up on the expedition, he spied something from the top of a small cliff.

The men had hiked for hours, if not days, macheteing through a morass of vines and brambles as the summer rain poured down. They were tired, starving, fighting off sickness, and thinking of calling it quits. Going home, as all the others had done.

But then there it was, “plainly visible below, protruding from the jungle,” as Morde wrote later in a cover story that appeared in the Hearst Sunday magazine the
American Weekly
.

What was Morde’s first response?

Perhaps he closed his eyes and then slowly opened them again, just to make sure that what he was seeing was real: the crumbling walls of a city, some as tall as he was or taller, and hills like carpets that looked haphazardly thrown over things. Or maybe, feeling so overwhelmed, feeling so grateful at the sight of the ruins, he knelt down on the soggy ground, his tired and battered body pulsing, and kissed it, to feel the old wet earth and know that it was still under him. Or perhaps he simply stood there and looked, wanting to keep it all within his gaze so it wouldn’t ever go away, so that he would always remember that moment.

Whatever he or Brown did, Morde never said.

Around them, the light was dim as a cellar, with only a few beams of sunlight splintering through. They probably had to squint. Water dripped from the high canopy. The site was blanketed in centuries of growth; mold, giant trees, and vines. It was easy to understand why the city had stayed concealed for so many decades. How would anyone have ever found it, unless by sheer chance?

They waded into the ruins. “With our machetes, we uncovered crude stone implements—broken pieces of ancient pottery and razor-like knives of volcanic glass.” They turned up crumbled rocks with carvings that suggested outlines of monkeys. Further on, “we found . . . walls upon which the green of the jungle had worked small damages and which had resisted the flood of vegetation.”

At least one embankment was twelve feet tall and about three feet wide—“a man-made stone wall, carefully set together stone on stone.” There Morde imagined that an ancient wall had probably risen to at least thirty feet and functioned as a protective barrier against the city’s enemies.

They followed the stone structures as far as possible, watching how they either disintegrated altogether or became engorged by grass and vines and disappeared under towering grassy mounds. The mounds, Morde believed, were old buildings covered up by jungle growth and by this measure evidence of once “great buildings,” an especially astounding concept considering that the inhabitants had had only their bare hands to build with. Who were they? he kept wondering. Ghosts of this land.

As they took all of it in, branches cracked loudly overhead. “Monkey faces peered inquisitively at us from the surrounding screen of dense foliage,” Morde wrote in the magazine article, as if they had been caught somewhere they were not supposed to be.

Farther on, he noticed adjoining ruins, suggesting that the city continued to unfold in all directions and for many acres. “There are indeed buildings beneath their age-old shroudings,” he wrote excitedly.

Morde wrestled with the fact that although the ancient people had built their civilization out of stone, the nearby tribes of Tawahka and Pech had preferred mud and wood. Was there a direct line of descent? he mused. And if so, why had the custom of building changed? The riddle of the place only deepened, made him more anxious to understand it. But at the same time it enlivened him, lit him up. After the many boat trips, the miles of grueling jungle walks, the sleepless nights, the jaguars, everything, he had found it—the place that almost four hundred years before, the conquistadors had likely sought. This was his discovery.

HE DUBBED IT
“The Lost City of the Monkey God,” not the White City, which was the name that had been used for centuries. For Morde, the new name reflected the lingering legend among the river tribes of the terrifying hairy men who inhabited the deepest parts of the forest. The name also seemed to suggest another motivation at play: it was sensational enough that people would take notice and, most important, remember.

MORDE NEVER ACTUALLY
noted the specific date of his finding, only that it had occurred at the very end of his journey, as the men were fleeing. He was also vague about the location of the ruins, perhaps influenced by the Heye Foundation’s desire to keep any big find initially out of the public view. In his notebooks Morde recorded neither a latitude nor longitude—maybe because he didn’t know them. But he did report opaquely that the site stood at the heads of the Paulaya and Plátano rivers, a nearly impassable area of hundreds of square miles in the eastern part of the country. “It was an ideal site for the city,” he reported in the
American Weekly
story. “Towering mountains formed the backdrop of the scene.”

That is where, perhaps, his expedition walking stick came in. On it, at some point, Morde carved out thirty-three sets of numbers and directional instructions—perhaps his route back to the city—down the four sides of the angled handle. Like any well-trained spy, Morde made sure the stick numbers were notably ambiguous—offering no specific starting or end point—so as to prevent others from using them.

There was no time, however, for the men to learn much more about the ruins. The sky darkened, as it always did, and they were forced to move on. “The rainy season,” Morde lamented, “put a stop to our labors.” The rain bearing down on them ruled out any efforts at excavation. Plus, he added, “We had no equipment to continue digging deeper into the ruins.” After a day or so of roaming the site, Morde wrote, with surprisingly little drama, that they had collected their things and left the lost city behind.

Our Time with the Pirates

T
HE PIRATE BOAT
glided up to where we were standing on the muddy shore. It was a narrow forty-foot mahogany dugout, equipped with a forty-horsepower Yamaha engine. Three men were on board, one at the bow and two at the stern. They looked as if they’d just been through a bar fight: their clothes were in shreds and stuck to their rain-soaked bodies; the tallest had a jagged scar across his cheek. All were armed with pistols tucked into their waistbands, and one leaned on a machete. Stepping ashore, the oldest man, who seemed to be in charge, tipped his white sombrero and said, “
Hola!
”

He was short and muscular with a closely shaved goatee. He wore white jeans tucked into rubber boots and a white dress shirt open enough at the chest to reveal a rosary necklace. His watch was gold, and so were his teeth. He asked if we wanted to go downriver. He spat into the water. Chris looked at me as if to ask, what do you think? But there was no other way.

“Two hundred dollars,” the leader grunted. Chris told him $50, but we settled on $75, passed over the cash, and climbed on.

I sat near the bowman with Chris and kept a machete at my feet; it was sharp enough to slice off a man’s fingers. “We have to be vigilant,” Chris whispered, looking up at the bowman, a toothless thug in a dragon-patterned tank top and military pants cut off at the knees. “These guys are some serious roughnecks.”