Jungleland (20 page)

One reporter would describe Morde’s discovery as “romantic,” a welcome departure from the grim mood gripping the city. Having spread across Europe, World War II had seized the collective psyche of New York and the country at large. The
New York Times
was reporting the “scythe-like sweep” of Hitler’s German army. There was concern that once the führer finished with Britain he would sail his soldiers across the Atlantic to besiege the United States. National conscription was under consideration, and a city commission of engineers had been charged with fashioning defensive measures for possible gas attacks and bombings. Meanwhile, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia worked to fortify the spirits of a population suffering 15 percent unemployment.

“A big part of our job was charting rivers and streams which no white man had ever traversed before,” Morde told the crowd. “We spent weeks poling tediously up tangled jungle streams.” He paused, taking in all the eyes on him. “When we could go no further, we started hacking a path through the jungle. It was tough going. There was a type of tiger claw bamboo that was full of thorns, and we could hardly get near enough to cut the branches away.” He relished the attention as he recounted the wild’s daunting obstacles: “dangers of isolation, disease, rains, devastating floods, and venomous snakes.” He told of the wild pigs that had nearly killed him as well as the deadly fer-de-lance. He said, “We had to eat wild boar, deer, and dragon-like iguana lizards. Our only vegetable was wild banana—generally cooked green.” At one point, he reached into his suit pants and produced a gleaming vial of gold. It was a land of incredible riches, he said. He called Honduras an “oil-bearing land” with deposits of silver and platinum. About the gold, he said, “We picked this up with our own bare hands.”

The reporters wanted to know about the city, but Morde was cagey in his answers. He said that his expedition had returned with traces of an ancient kingdom dating back to “before Christ was born,” including several hundred artifacts, from pottery to a pitpan, which would be displayed at George Heye’s National Museum of the American Indian. He pronounced the capital city’s name for the scrum: the Lost City of the Monkey God. He had said the name many times to himself by now. It was a civilization, he said, “whose people had learned to build with stone and who worshipped monkeys as gods.”

Stepping toward the clamoring reporters, he told them that the city was a buried, distant place with a long, ancient wall disappearing into the centuries-old murk. Crude roads lined with stone buildings had once radiated outward through the verdure. “All that was left,” he went on, “were mounds of earth covering crumbling walls where houses once stood as stone foundations of what may have been majestic temples.”

He elaborated on his theory that the monkey capital had perhaps at one time been home to thousands of people—maybe up to thirty thousand—and that the inhabitants had likely been contemporaries of the Maya. “I saw a great jungle-covered mound which, when some day we excavate it, I believe may reveal a monkey deity,” he said. “I found a facial mask. . . . It looked like the face of a monkey. . . . On nearly everything we found was carved the likeness of the monkey—the monkey god. What it stood for, I don’t know, but some day they will be deciphered and we will know the whole story of this strange civilization.”

Morde wouldn’t go into details about the city’s location. He was afraid that people would plunder the site in his absence and disrupt a future excavation. As for the existence of the smelted gold goblets and dishes, like the Indian princess had mentioned to the Spanish bishop Pedraza in 1545, Morde didn’t talk about that either.

THE
NEW YORK TIMES
published two stories, highlighting “evidence of a thriving agricultural civilization” that had been “wiped out by some major catastrophe.” The other prominent daily, the
New York Sun
, reported how “the people of that almost inaccessible spot were highly developed and very likely representative of an advanced civilization,” an assertion that helped Morde’s case against the long-entrenched narrative that a major farming civilization could never flourish in a rain forest.

Morde was twenty-nine years old and that day walked away from the Biltmore a kind of legend: a man who had gone to a place where few men had dared to go before. Just as people around the world were feeling edgy and threatened, Morde gave them reason to dream again, to imagine going to a distant place and glimpsing the traces of another age. An op-ed in the
Standard Tribune
put it this way: “The world of ours has been pretty well explored since the days when map makers could show only the Mediterranean littoral and filled in the rest of their maps with pictures of sea monsters. Yet the fact that there are still things waiting to be discovered is brought home to us in Theodore Morde. . . . A discovery like his will add to mankind’s knowledge of the world’s past.”

Meanwhile, Manhattan high society feted him. What was it like there? they asked. Did the natives try to kill you? A monkey cult? How much gold did you find? Women gravitated to him, intrigued by his bravery, pulled in by his handsome movie-star looks. But none of them could pin him down. He reunited with his sponsor, George Heye, and presented him with hundreds of artifacts. There is no record of their conversation, but it likely entailed Heye’s favorite subject, “the great mystery of the origin of the prehistoric races of the Western Hemisphere.”

The mystery of the city was the subject of Morde’s lecture at the legendary Explorers Club, where other adventurers including Percy Fawcett and Charles Lindbergh had told their tales. He appeared on radio shows, on college campuses, and at the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, where he was photographed at the telephone exhibit with a pretty, dark-haired woman. Later, he published his
American Weekly
story. The Hearst publication boasted, ridiculously, 50 million readers. Titled “In the Lost City of Ancient America’s Monkey God,” the cover line was breathless: “Explorer Theodore Morde Finds in Honduras Jungles a Vanished Civilization’s Prehistoric Metropolis, Where Sacrifices Were Made to the Gigantic Idol of an Ape—and Describes the Weird ‘Dance of the Dead Monkeys’ Still Practiced by Natives in Whom Runs the Olden Blood.”

In his syndicated column, “New York Day by Day,” Charles B. Driscoll observed Morde’s “uncommonly handsome person.” “In white Palm Beach suit, immaculate white shirt and white shoes,” Driscoll continued, “he seemed to me the last person in the diningroom I’d have picked as the man who discovered the romantic City of the Monkey God, in Central American wilds.” In the same interview, Morde’s fellow explorer and mentor Captain Stuart Murray said he was impressed by his protégé’s superhuman abilities: “I hunted for that city for years. This fellow found it on his first try.”

MORDE RETURNED HOME
to New Bedford to see his family in the fall of 1940. It had been many years since he had first stood at the end of his block, near the harbor, and stared out at the ocean, wondering what the world held for him. He gave his sister two cups of gold that he had prospected from the rivers. The memory of Morde’s old life, who he was before he’d left on that cruise ship as a stowaway in his teens, before he’d left for the Spanish war, and then the jungle, all of that receded. It was hard for his family to keep up with him. In his absence, he had become a different person. He was now a grown man. He told his family stories about his travels. But it was impossible for him to explain everything. Many things were simply untranslatable. He said he was thinking of writing a book, but right now he didn’t have any time.

The
New Bedford Standard
, which had been following Morde’s traveling life over the years, interviewed him at length. After all the news stories recounting his adventures, Morde felt that he needed to clear something up. “Being interested in archaeology, as I naturally have been because of my travels to most of the famous ruins of the world, does not make me an archaeologist any more than my three months in Spain made me, as some interviewers described me, a war correspondent,” he said. “I think being termed an explorer would suffice.”

When the reporter inquired about his plans to return to the city, Morde replied that with the help of George Heye he had already been at work organizing an expedition for January 1941. In his travel notes, he had mapped out a flat place in the forest, in the eastern part of the country, where a landing strip could be chopped out. Planes would be able to fly in supplies and a larger team. A dam could be set up to provide drinking water. As for timing, he expected it to take years to uncover the site.

Later, on a radio show, he encouraged the mystery of his return and said he had so many questions. “What happened to the people who lived there?” he asked. “Why did they, a highly civilized race, vanish from the face of the earth? No one knows. But I hope soon to find out. I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.”

None of that happened, however. By winter, still a year before the United States was actually attacked, talk of war escalated. There was military draft legislation and rumors of rations. President Roosevelt supported Great Britain with arms, suggesting a tilt toward intervention, and, as men began preparing for service, the birthrate climbed. Then an urgent call came to Morde from Washington: a new clandestine government office needed his services for a special mission that would be just as mysterious as his trip to the lost city. Morde was about to disappear again, this time to become a spook.

What We Learned from the Tawahkas

T
HE FIRST CERTAIN
clue that we were finally onto Morde’s lost-city trail was the sight of Howler Monkey Mountain. The Tawahkas called it Quicungun. It stood at the confluence of the Patuca and Wampú rivers in the shape of a ruined temple—gigantic, engorged in trees, shrouded in mist. Howler monkeys growled from the shade. At no other point had I heard them so clearly, even though I could not see them. You could hear them for miles, disembodied, their guttural screams echoing off the water and the cliffs.

It was drizzling as we stood at the Tawahka village of Krautara, which Morde had likely passed through nearly seventy years before. In his notes, the explorer had written that the mountain appeared to be “rearing its bulk.” A floppy-haired Tawahka teenager named José told us that the mountain had once caught fire. “It burned orange and red for a week. Then it died out,” he said. “The elders said it was the spirits talking. But I don’t know.” He shrugged.

One thing I have noticed only in retrospect, mostly from reading other books about the jungle, was that we rarely, if ever, spoke about the beauty of the forest, like the misty green mountain in front of us. I was always too tired or too scared or too discombobulated to consider anything beyond my physical suffering and the purpose at hand.

The elder we had come to see about the lost city was off hunting, so José invited us to his hut on the hill to meet someone else while we waited. Krautara was one of the larger Tawahka settlements dotting the Patuca. There were two other towns on the lower stretches of the river—Wampusirpi and Krausirpi—and the only way to reach them was by boat; no roads or airstrips connected them to the outside world. In Krautara, about ten wood huts with thatched or metal roofs straddled a muddy path. Although it had been bigger by five or ten huts when Morde came, the village now had a concrete schoolhouse and a soccer field.

José’s house was one room with a porch that overlooked the river. We sat on wood benches opposite one another. José wore a yellow cotton vest opened at his bony chest and faded jeans, held up around his slender waist by a brass buckle the size of a playing card. He swept his wet black hair out of his face and in broken Spanish that Chris translated he asked where we were from.

“New York,” I said.

“Is that near Italy?”

“It’s in America,” I said.

“Can you walk to Italy from there?”

I explained that Italy was across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe. At that his face brightened. “Rambo!” he said and pulled at a cross hanging from his neck. “Rambo is in America? I love that movie.” He made the universal sign for a machine gun. “I watched that many times until our TV broke,” he said. That had been two or three years before.

Meanwhile, Pancho and Angel had wandered off to explore the surroundings. Angel seemed less anxious now that the pirates had departed. In the distance, I could hear him toying with his cell phone’s ringtones. His father, however, was somber. His radio had died, and he had no news of the coup to occupy him. Upon our arrival, he said he wasn’t convinced that the pirates had really left us behind and feared an ambush. He also seemed to be dwelling on his imminent return to his old village. Over the past few days I’d noticed him breaking off from us and walking away to stare at the river or a hole in the greenery, picking up a flower or gazing up at the bulk of a towering mahogany tree. Like he was reacquainting himself with the wilderness that had once expelled him and seeking its permission to return.

As the rain came down harder, pinging the metal roof, another man stopped in. He introduced himself as “the teacher” and said his name was Dixon. He was “around thirty-seven,” shirtless, with muscle-ripped arms and a buzz cut that made his head look like a hammer. Like José, he had been born in Krautara and had not traveled very far from the river. “I’ve never been to New York!” he said. But he wondered what it was like “out there.”

The Tawahka people continued to exist mainly as hunter-gatherers and traded a few crops and gold along the river. When I asked Dixon about his tribe’s history, he pointed at his shaved head, where the story of the Tawahkas resided. I remembered that the Tawahka chief had said the same thing to Morde. There were still no books, no archives. Chris smiled. “Like Homer,” he said.

Dixon said his ancestry stretched back thousands of years, but his tribe felt threatened. He mentioned the Spanish conquistadors—the beheadings, the enslavement, the murders of Indians. About that, there was a legend that had been passed down over the centuries. “There was a great earthquake after the Spanish came,” he said. “It destroyed one of the bigger cities. And in part of that city there was a great temple of gold.” He paused. “When the earthquake hit, there was a landslide. The mountain came down and covered the city. Now no one knows where it is.”