Jungleland (19 page)

He spent the day working with the sick people. “I made the rounds, feeling foreheads and pulses and watching to make sure the pills were taken. Several victims resisted and were made to swallow forcibly.”

When he turned to go, he was hopeful that he had done some good, that he had maybe even saved a life.

AFTER MORDE REUNITED
with Brown and Burke, they continued on as fast as they could for a week and a half. The mountains melted away into swamp, then savannas and cattle fields, then swamp again. Bugs attacked with such intensity and profusion that they sounded like the “engine of an airplane.” They encountered more rapids. Then one night, as they slept on a sandbar, they woke in a panic to see that the river had swept away their canoe, along with everything in it—their equipment, the journals, the map to the lost city. Four months of exploring gone. All night they searched the “black emptiness” that was the river. With no energy to go on, Morde battled thoughts of dying. He couldn’t walk anymore. He didn’t sleep. “The jungle does not seem like it wants us to go,” Morde wrote. It wasn’t until the next morning that he and Burke located the boat. Miraculously, it had been snagged on a bank a mile downstream. Although it was upright and everything was intact, Morde was still spooked. “It was a moment of utter despair,” he wrote. “One of the lowest of the trip.”

Twenty-five hours later, on June 26, they heard the softly thudding waves of the sea.

“Please Come Home”

T
HE TRIP HAD
long ago taken on the senseless logic of broken sleep, with no clear division between night and day. It felt a lot like those first months when Sky was a newborn, my brain so sleep deprived, it was hard to ever tell if I was awake or dreaming. We didn’t pay attention anymore to the time, only the sun as it came and went in the jungle. We were getting closer to the White City, or whatever Morde had found, but there were still days to go.

Pancho’s burbling radio provided a constant parallel narrative of the coup. The morning we woke up at Ernesto’s, there was more news of the exiled president forming a private army at the Nicaraguan border, about ten hours’ walk from us. Diplomatic talks had broken down. Meanwhile, the male announcer reported that the United States continued to reject the coup’s legitimacy and was calling for all humanitarian aid to be cut off.

Later, as we waited for the pirates to wake up, the news program morphed into a kind of personal message board, where the announcer read letters in a slow musical voice that exuded the feeling of a long sung poem. Pancho put his finger to his lips. It was the most popular show in the jungle region. For people who lived off the grid, without telephones, there was no more effective way to communicate with the world around you and beyond. Some messages were love letters; others were requests or notices.

A mother named Maria missed her son, who had moved to La Ceiba for work; a man named José announced the birth of a daughter; another man pleaded for a doctor; Reyes, a young man, said he was delayed in Tegucigalpa and would arrive home early the following week with a phone charger; another needed a boat to take his goods down the Río Negro; and a woman grieved the death of her mother the day before and urged her siblings to “Please come home.”

All of it reminded me that I needed to call Sky. It was her birthday. From Chris’s bag, I grabbed the satellite phone and flipped it on. It searched and searched for a signal, but it wouldn’t connect, even when I walked to the top of a hill and then down to the river edge. I didn’t even know what time it was. Were they still asleep? That reminded me of the raccoon. I imagined Amy the night before lying in Sky’s narrow bedroom, which was right next to ours, her eyes open, listening for any stray movements in the pitch dark. The thoughts of them at home and the way I waited and waited for the satellite phone to get through made the great distance between us seem maddeningly unbridgeable.

“Ice in Our Glasses!”

B
REWER’S LAGOON WAS
a rough-and-tumble pioneer town on the Mosquito Coast with a spattering of shabby wattle-and-daub huts topped with tin or leaves. An American named Frank Jones put the three men up for the night. In Morde’s description, Jones was “long, lean and nervous with pale eyes which smile so easily you wouldn’t take him for a killer.”

A friend of Burke, Jones was a hired gun for local companies. “I lived for years [in Honduras] only by the grace of a quick trigger finger,” he admitted as the men talked past midnight. “I’ve killed six men, but they had to be killed.”

The confession made Morde and Brown uneasy. They had escaped the jungle, and now they were crashing with a killer. But the two explorers were too weary to act on those concerns. “We were so tired,” Morde wrote, “that we would have slept in a den of snakes.”

SEVERAL DAYS LATER
, on July 4, Morde and Brown left the Coast of Lost Hope—a melancholic name that Burke had bestowed on the out-of-the-way place. They gave much of their equipment to Burke, as they’d promised. With them on board the La Ceiba–bound boat was their bird, Pete. As the ship sailed out to sea, Brown and Morde watched the land fade away until darkness eclipsed the whole scene. “We slept on a hatch under the stars all night,” he wrote in his last entry from that territory. Any sadness Morde felt looking back at the hundreds of miles they had traveled centered on Burke. “One regret is that Burke never even said thank you or goodbye,” Morde wrote. They would never see him again.

At 4 a.m., the men woke to their first glimpse of civilization—the lights of La Ceiba. The two friends returned to the Paris Hotel, where for the first time in more than three months they enjoyed the simple luxury of a bed and the clean smell of its soft, freshly laundered cotton sheets. There were other comforts too: “First got a coca cola, a barber shop shave . . . ice in our glasses!”

The days before their return to the United States were a blur of activity. Morde met with the U.S. consul and then traveled to Tegucigalpa, the dusty Honduran capital, where he visited with President Tiburcio Carías Andino and the cartographer Dr. Jesús Aguilar Paz. Fourteen years later, Aguilar Paz would produce the first official map of the country with its famous question mark, along with the notation “Ruinas Ciudad Blanca” stamped on a stretch of mostly unexplored territory in the eastern part of the country—above the Río Wampú.

Finally, on July 20, the men located a fruit ship, the
Patria
, heading to Tampa, Florida. They paid the captain $40 for two spots among the roughneck sailors and bade Honduras good-bye. After six nights at sea and four months of travel, Theodore Morde’s Honduran expedition was at last going home.

Ernesto’s Story

T
HEY GUARD IT
with their life. They war with others. They are not like they were. They war with themselves. They kill each other. It is a
secreto
. You know that?”

We were gliding along the river now, and Ernesto was telling us about the Tawahkas, the tribe that inhabited the banks of the Patuca.

Most of the Tawahkas are Catholic, as the tribe long ago fell under the spell of missionaries. Observers have lately described the tribe as “endangered,” like the nearby Pech, though the population was up from its low of 160 at the turn of the century. Tawahkas were leaving or marrying into other tribes and sometimes fighting one another.

Bloods mixed; traditions dimmed and were forgotten. In 1940, Morde had reported that there were fifteen full-blooded Tawahkas in one camp. Today, there are fewer than ten full-blooded Tawahkas in five villages. The government had passed laws protecting the tribes from the outside world pushing in, converting their land into a “biosphere reserve.” But the police and military were a long way away; hence the tribe’s need to be protective of their lives, what they own, the histories and traditions and legends they cling to.

The rain clouds had now dispersed, leaving behind twists of fog floating over the dimness. Howler monkeys groaned, their combined noises like a distant hurricane working up to force. Frog, in his muscle shirt, plied the engine. There were three of them, all packing their guns, and a young boy whom I had not seen the night before.

Ernesto had joined Chris and me in the bow. He knew what we were searching for. Ernesto’s man had told him about our conversation the night before.

“You must be careful about what Indians you talk to about that,” he said. “It’s a
secreto
.” Extracting a plastic lighter from his pocket, he lit a hand-rolled cigarette and then flapped his cigarette hand at the dense wall of woods around us as if he were waving off a mosquito cloud.

“I have a friend who heard some things from the Indians and went out there looking,” he said. He nudged close to us, his gold teeth glinting in the sun, which had just emerged from the mess of morning fog. “He had been walking for two days,” he said. “He started finding beautiful pottery. Grinding stones, pieces of things. There were drawings on rocks—monkeys and people and circles. These were signs.”

Ernesto paused while we took this in. On the left riverbank, I noticed a lonely hut on stilts, the first sign of habitation in many hours. Pancho and Angel stared off into the distance, listening to their radio, as Ernesto’s men watched us.

Just as Ernesto was about to go on, a tree limb slammed into the side of the boat. “You see that?” he asked.

“The tree?”

“No,” he said. “The jungle. It wasn’t just a tree.” He flicked away his dying cigarette and smiled at us as if we were suddenly in this trip together, a shift in mood from last night.

“The painted rocks,” he said, picking up his story. “He followed them for three more days. He said he felt close to the ruins.”

“What part of the jungle?” I asked.

“Out there,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where.” He put his hands around his neck and stuck out his tongue, which was blobby and black like the gunk from the bottom of the river.

“Whatever he heard from the Indians was wrong,” he said. “He grew sick. He could hardly walk.” He spat into the water before finishing. “The sickness was all over him. His head, stomach, feet. He had to turn back.”

Only then did the man start to feel better. After a day of walking away, Ernesto said, the sickness vanished and from that day forward he would never again venture into the jungle.

WHEN I’D SET
out, I had imagined writing a book that might show my daughter what kind of man I was, how I had grappled with the big questions of life—getting older, leaving youth behind, commitments, the importance of experience and discovery, and even love. Instead I was fumbling through the jungle, falling apart, nearly dying. It was the opposite of strong.

I grieved, in a way. I had gone from feeling lost at home to being literally lost in this jungleland. I wasn’t even sure there was anything to discover. What if Morde had been lying? What if the city didn’t exist? More and more the question crept into my mind. Even if it did exist, this jungle was a rabbit hole that opened up into scores of other rabbit holes. You could walk for months and months, slashing and hacking and climbing, and not see the same damn place twice. Except it all looked the same to me.

For a stretch I tried to jot down my thoughts, describe the sound of the river passing by, and it calmed my mind a bit. I wrote about Sky asking me about socks in the jungle and tried to hang on.

WITH NO BOTTLED
water, we relied on the river and iodine drops, which made everything taste like iron. We passed the first Tawahka camp, where Morde had likely stopped, back when the camp boasted about twenty-four huts and a school. Now there was only tall grass. In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch had struck the site and swept everything away. Farther downstream, Ernesto directed the boat into a Tawahka settlement known as Yapuwas. His men decided to follow us up the steep dirt path to the village. I had heard them whispering to one another as we got off the boat, which made me think that they were coming along for information we might turn up.

“This isn’t good,” I said to Chris.

“Let’s just see how it plays out. Watch.”

One carried a rifle, which he held with both hands, allowing for a quick shot. There was no one around, but it felt as if there were a hundred eyes staring out from the dozen or so huts. The huts straddled a dirt track. They were in various stages of decay, with rotting boards and thatched roofs that looked animal gnawed. Some appeared abandoned. The only sound was the loud buzzing of cicadas.

Ernesto called out with something like a birdcall, and after a considerable hiatus four women in old skirts emerged from behind one of the huts. Two young boys in cut-off jeans followed. Ernesto’s man steadied his gun. We said hello, and the women nodded, though their faces remained expressionless. When we asked if there was anyone here who could talk to us, they shook their heads. One woman said that the men were out in the fields and wouldn’t be back until nightfall.

When we mentioned Ciudad Blanca, there was a protracted silence. Then a young boy, wearing no shoes, stepped forward. “I know about it,” he said in Spanish, but the women stopped him, whispering something in their native tongue, and that was the end of our encounter.

We walked once through the small village, with the women watching us, before we decided to keep going. Ernesto and his men did the same. Any imaginings they’d had of secret information leading to stores of gold or buried artifacts ended. Before he left, Ernesto said, “Good luck,” with a chuckle. He hadn’t noticed Pancho speaking to the Indian boy, who’d said a man at the next Tawahka camp could help us. “He knows many things,” the boy said. He told us to ask simply for “the elder.”

“This Strange Civilization”

O
N THE MORNING
of August 2, 1940, Theodore Morde arrived at the Biltmore Hotel to tell his incredible story. The hotel was one of Manhattan’s stateliest, with two brick towers and a subterranean concourse opening to a platform for the luxury Chicago express 20th Century Limited train—“the world’s greatest,” according to the
New York Times
. A crowd of reporters turned out, eager to hear all about the lost city. Reporters were present from the
New York Times
, the
New York Herald Tribune
, the
New York Sun
, and the Associated Press. Morde, twenty-eight pounds lighter, had come by train from Tampa. In photographs, he wears a double-breasted khaki suit, his hair swept back and shiny with pomade and a slender mustache that makes him look a bit like Clark Gable. Standing in front of the flashing cameras that morning, he projected the air of a man who had just returned from another planet. The jungle had imbued him with a palpable mystery.