Jungleland (25 page)

“Do you see it?” Chris asked now. He pointed across the upturned carpet of green wilderness. It was early afternoon. For the first time in days there weren’t any dark clouds in the sky. But the rain would come. It always did.

“What?” I asked.

He smiled. “The city,” he said.

“What city?” I didn’t see anything. Of course, I had been imagining great ruined white buildings, tall vine-strangled columns, spooky statues of giant monkey kings.

Chris chuckled. “You’re standing on it,” he said. “It’s all over.”

THE GREAT LOST
city sprawled across the jagged mountainside and along the Río Aner that rushed through the valley below. In Morde’s notes about his discovery, he wrote of “towering mountains . . . providing a backdrop to the scene” and “a rushing cataract.” He also noted that the ruins were “blanketed in centuries of growth.” We stumbled up and down, surveying the contours of the ground, the nubs of grass, and the rock formations. Chris noticed lots of things that I didn’t see. He pointed out clusters of twelve-foot-high man-made mounds—neighborhoods of the city’s elites or government buildings. There were more walls, where other structures would have been erected, more roads and open plazas. “This was once a big city,” he said.

At one point, he leaned over the face of a blackened boulder the size of a truck tire, which was etched with curious markings—dots, lines, squiggles, faces. “It’s a petroglyph,” he said.

“Does it mean anything?”

One arrow looked as though it was entering a body. I thought I saw a sun and a happy face.

Chris shook his head. “It could mean many things,” he said. He had lately begun using 3D technology to analyze the tiny eroded images on the stones, but he and his colleagues in the archaeological community were still a long way from any real understanding of language and meaning. The carvings, he said, could be astrological maps or directions to an important religious place, a route to the underworld or even to another city. They could also have been shamanic messages to the spirits. “We just don’t know,” he said.

I was going crazy inside. What was this place? “So is this Morde’s Lost City of the Monkey God?” I asked. In the distance I could hear the howler monkeys—Morde had worried about “monkey faces [that] peered inquisitively” in the forest. Pancho and Angel had lagged behind with the gunman, who kept looking over his shoulder, as if he was expecting company. When Pancho had said, “I can feel the mountain spirits here,” moments before, he had been only half joking.

Chris kept climbing. Near the top of the mountain, I noticed a dramatic pyramid-like rise in the earth, unlike any of the other man-made outcroppings we’d seen on our journey. It was blanketed in razor grass and trees—about four stories tall and as long as a football field. “This is amazing,” said Chris. It was a temple.

We stood in front of it for a long time, taking it in, the way you might stand frozen beside a found spaceship, not knowing what to do next. There were more mounds rising underneath us and around us, and slowly I began to see it. The city seemed to begin and end here, the nexus of this civilization. “These people laid out their cities in very complicated, symbolic ways,” Chris said. He said that the settlement had been built with beauty in mind but also with a sense of a specific cosmology, suggesting a more sophisticated civilization than the Spanish conquistadors had ever imagined. “They were more advanced than you’d think,” he added.

He said that the city represented a kind of microcosm of their living universe—the upper world, the middle world, and the underworld. “The temple is the connection to the upper world,” he said. “The plaza”—he made a gesture at the overgrown field where we were standing—“is the middle world, or our world.”

“What about the underworld?” I asked.

“Maybe there was a cave somewhere or something built under the river. Or there could have been some sort of substructure at the south end of the plaza.” (In many traditions in Mesoamerica, south symbolized down, while north was up.)

We trudged up the side of the temple. “You can see why they picked this place,” said Chris, waving his hand at the view. Miles of forest unfolded in front of us, dropping into the river and then rising up another mountainside, where the pockmarked land suggested more ruins. It did seem perfect, I thought. This had to be it.

“That assumption that there was little in the Mosquitia, that this was always pristine rain forest, uninhabited,” Chris said now, “you can see how that’s just wrong.” He seemed to take particular pleasure in the evidence undermining all the people who had challenged him over the years, those who had warned him he was wasting his time in the Mosquitia. Those people and their tired old arguments against a city ever existing in this rain forest. “Just look at this place!” he exclaimed.

I wanted to cry again, so many intense emotions were boiling up inside me. My knees wobbled.

Chris guessed that the greater city had been occupied sometime between AD 1000 and 1500 and that thousands of people, ancestors of the Tawahkas and Pech, had lived there. “This was probably the capital,” he said. “All those small villages we passed—the mounds—were politically connected to this one.”

“So what happened to the city?” I asked. Chris shrugged. He said a mass plague might have killed off the inhabitants. Or maybe there had been a war with a neighboring civilization. Or maybe they had died away slowly as the land or climate changed around them and the ones who remained abandoned the city. “It’s hard to know for certain,” he said. In his book
Collapse
, the scientist Jared Diamond argued that civilizations break down, fall into war, and end due largely to environmental issues, from deforestation and overfishing to soil loss and climate change. “A society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power,” he wrote.

“A ghost town,” I said, thinking of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had been left behind, the houses falling apart, the town centers in various states of decay.

In my mind, I could see Morde standing where I now stood: his overgrown beard, his emaciated body, the torn pants, the ruined boots. I thought of the extreme fatigue he must have felt during those four months in the wild, and then the awe and bliss of discovery at stumbling upon something that had been lost for so long. The romance of it.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked again, “Is this the city Morde found?”

Chris looked up at the sky, which was now turning dark with rain. He didn’t answer in a straightforward way. “I have a theory,” he said. “Do you want to hear it?

“I BET MORDE
came up the Patuca hearing stories about the lost city and also working from what he knew from Heye and Captain Murray. He asked everyone about the city until someone offered to help. We know he was probably a very convincing man. Of course, he was probably very lucky too, because other people had gone searching for the city. But let’s say he did get lucky.

“The first problem is time,” he said. “When on that calendar of his did he actually make his discovery? Because he never mentions the discovery on the calendar, and yet most of his time is accounted for.”

“The calendar was a red herring,” I suggested.

“Right,” he said. “It could have been off by a day or two. And in that time, he could have staged a trip from Ulak. But I bet he came here on his way home.”

“Why?”

“He said in his notes that he found it at the end of his trip. Maybe we can accept that. Ulak could be as many as three days from here, and as far as we know his Indian guides turned back. We can look at the Ulak days as time spent prospecting and collecting clues.”

Chris paused and gathered his thoughts. “But then you have to ask another question: why did Morde keep saying in the press that the city was between the Paulaya and the Plátano?”

Another diversion, I guessed.

“Maybe, but here’s another way to think about it. If you look at a map, this site, by longitude and latitude, is actually between the headwaters of those two rivers. There’s a lot of land between there. A lot. It’s just a very broad interpretation, which would allow him to tell the truth.” He stopped as I wrote this down. “The truth,” he said, “but not the whole truth.”

We munched Clif Bars and walked to the other end of the temple. “He probably would never have found this without a guide. That’s the last part. He would have had to convince someone not only to tell him but also to bring him here.” Chris paused. “Of course, he could also have totally stumbled into this place by pure luck.”

“Luck?”

“That’s how things are discovered sometimes. Luck.”

I wondered what this place would have looked like around seventy years ago, when Morde was here.

“It would have been completely covered in jungle. All those trails we walked would have been even more treacherous and muddy. This site would be almost impenetrable. But a guide could show him. That’s what I think happened.”

“What about the gold?”

Chris chuckled. “If there was any gold here, it was taken a long time ago.”

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
Morde’s walking stick remained a problem for us. What exactly did it mean?

No matter how much we toiled over the question, Chris and I kept hitting a snag: if the coordinates running down the four sides of the stick were supposed to be directions to a significant place, where was the starting point? We needed more information.

It would be only later, after leaving Honduras, that I’d get some answers from a man named Derek Parent. Parent had been thinking about the issue of the walking stick for a long time. A Canadian spatial analyst and cartographer specializing in mapping indigenous traditional knowledge, Parent was also the author of a technical guidebook and digital navigation maps of the Mosquitia region. In the decades that he had been obsessing over the White City legend, he had scoured old archives in Honduras, the University of Texas Institute of Latin American Studies library, and the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, as well as bushwhacked through the forest. “I did jungle excursions two or three times a year,” he told me on the phone one morning. “I walked in water up to my chest for six or seven hours a day. Many times I walked tens of kilometers at night under the moonlight to avoid the oppressive heat and humidity.” He said he was probably the first to ever kayak the entire Mosquito Coast. “Originally it was designed for the special forces of the British army,” he snickered. “The locals thought it was a submarine.”

Parent had also spent about ten years talking and theorizing with Morde’s nephew Dave in North Carolina. It was Dave who introduced us. Using Morde’s stick notations, Parent told me, he’d mapped more than a dozen different possibilities for the lost-city site. When we talked about that process, he called it “following the squiggle,” referring to the waving, doodling path that resulted from laying down the stick’s instructions—including bearings, as on a compass, and distance, as in a man’s stride—on one of his highly technical custom maps of the Honduran jungle.

As he saw it, the stick’s first instruction, NE 300, was straightforward: walk northeast 300 strides, followed by E 150, meaning you were to pivot to the east and trek for another 150 steps—and so on for the stick’s thirty-three moves. Interestingly, the stick also noted a couple topographical references, such as “
CREEK RIGHT
,” providing the seeker at least some vague sense of the landscape.

Parent superimposed the squiggle on his map scale along the many miles of the winding Patuca and then up near Morde’s Camp Ulak. Could the markings be a path to a gold-washing site? he wondered at one point. Still, no matter how many times he mapped the squiggle, none of the scenarios seemed exactly right. So he changed his approach. Maybe the numbers were not directions to or from a site but instead the measurements—in feet—of the site itself. He superimposed Morde’s stick coordinates on a map of the Las Crucitas ruins. “Now, that was interesting,” he told me. The stick coordinates traced some of the ancient wall structures protruding out of the jungle terrain. I said, “So Morde’s stick is Las Crucitas!” Parent liked the theory too. It would be the closest I would get to solving the riddle of the walking stick.

STILL A MYSTERY
remained—one of the questions that had launched this journey in the first place: was Las Crucitas actually the legendary lost city also known as Ciudad Blanca?

Chris took a minute before answering, leaning down to tie his boot. In the distance I could see the gunman readying his mule to go. I slugged down my water and looked back at Chris, who now shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not the White City.”

“What do you mean?” I’d had visions of coming home to cameras, press wanting to hear about my White City discovery. “What about what the Tawahkas said?” I asked. “Do you just discount all of those stories and the people who pointed us to this site as the place?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “This isn’t it.” His tone was now definitive. He knew, having walked the region for years and discovered more than a hundred sites. “It’s an amazing discovery. In Morde’s time it would have been huge. It’s probably the biggest site around here next to the Maya sites in the north.” He paused, wiped his forehead with a shirtsleeve. “But it’s not the White City.”

That should have been the end of my journey. We were running low on food. We were all tired. I reeked. My clothes were in tatters. I missed my family. It was time to get the hell out of there. I began to walk back to the gunman and the mule. Then I stopped. Some urgent impulse sprang up in me. “Where is the White City, then?” I asked.

His answer was oblique as usual. “You need to see something,” he said.

“What?”

“Trust me.”

He said what he wanted to show me was three days’ walking from here. Two days if we found a ride at some point. It had something to do with the riddle of the city. I tried to contemplate the trek but couldn’t. “It’s not what you expect,” he said. I had no idea what to expect now. And I shouldn’t have even thought of going farther. But I had to know, even though it was foolish.