Authors: Christopher S. Stewart
Jungleland
JUNGLELAND
A MYSTERIOUS LOST CITY, A WWII SPY, AND A TRUE STORY OF DEADLY ADVENTURE
CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART
For Sky, Dash, and Amy, obviously.
You can believe what you like about those regions: no one has the authority to contradict you. You can postulate the existence in them of prehistoric monsters, of white Indians, of ruined cities, of enormous lakes.
—Peter Fleming,
Brazilian Adventure
To arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”
Contents
“Left for Dead but Too Mean to Die”
“Where There Grow Strange Large Flowers”
“Definitely on the Way at Last”
“The Equivalent of a State Secret”
“The Lost City of the Monkey God”
“The Jungle Does Not Seem Like It Wants Us to Go”
What We Learned from the Tawahkas
“I’m Having the Time of My Life”
“From Journalist and Explorer and Spy to a Father”
Also by Christopher S. Stewart
T
HE MAN CALLED
himself Rana, or Frog. A machete dangled off his leather belt, and he smoked a cigarette that I’d watched him roll. My three guides suspected that he, like the others who wandered far out here in the Honduran jungle, was a desperado, a convict, or some kind of trafficker. But all he wanted to talk about were the voices of the dead.
“There are people out there,” he said. “You can’t see them. You only hear them now. The ancient people.”
He pointed at his right ear, which glinted in the firelight with a silver stud earring, and his mouth extended into a sly smile, as if he possessed an old secret.
“They are dead, of course. These people.”
His cigarette smoke drifted around us in the moist night air. He shook his head. It was early July in the Mosquitia, rainy season, but the rain had stopped, and the two-room thatched hut was alive with noise—chirping, tweeting, burping, groaning.
I squinted through a cutout in the hut: nothing for miles and miles. The closest road was probably two days of walking, and my satellite phone wasn’t working.
Frog was probably in his late thirties, skinny and tough, in a red tank top emblazoned with dragons and ripped camouflage shorts, a scuffed cowboy hat cocked forward on his head. We had encountered him and two of his friends, all armed with rifles and machetes, earlier that day on a desolate stretch up the Río Cuyamel.
Frog said he was on the run but wouldn’t explain what he was running from or what he was doing now in this remote part of southeastern Honduras. We didn’t want to join him, but we had no choice; otherwise, we might have been stranded on the Cuyamel for days. I was on a quest.
For weeks I had been searching for the great lost city Ciudad Blanca. It is considered the El Dorado of Central America, and scores of explorers, adventurers, scientists, and government secret agents have pursued it for hundreds of years—all the way back to Christopher Columbus and the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Some died; many got sick or lost, or simply disappeared. Douglas Preston, writing in the
New Yorker
, once described the lost city as among “the unanswered mysteries of the world.” Paul Theroux, in his novel
The Mosquito Coast
, doesn’t mention it by name but refers to a “secret city” in the Honduran jungle, inhabited by a secluded and enigmatic tribe called the Munchies.
I’d never expected to come here. I’d heard the stories about how the vanished jungle metropolis might actually be the capital of a forgotten Mesoamerican civilization two thousand or more years old. I’d heard other equally archaic stories about ghostly spirits that protect the ruins, indigenous people with ancient secrets, murderous gold prospectors, and an American spy who had claimed in 1940 that he had found the sacred place, only to die unexpectedly before disclosing the location.
The last story ultimately pulled me into the jungle. The man’s name was Theodore Morde. I had spent months studying his yellowed expedition journals, logbooks, and letters that few had ever seen. Morde wrote of burial grounds in the jungle; of a bizarre Indian ritual called the Dance of the Dead Monkeys; of murderers, runaways, and lost souls; and of the weeks trekking into what he called the “forbidden region.” In time, I grew obsessed.
Now I had hiked more than a hundred miles in military-issue jungle boots with a forty-pound bag strapped to my back. Up mountains, through rivers, sometimes in propulsive rain, other times in burning sun, swinging a foot-and-a-half-long machete at thick vegetation. I was itchy from the bugs, aching everywhere, blistery, and wet. My boots were shot. My back hurt. I stank. I hadn’t slept in days, had run out of Valium the night before, and longed for my wife and three-year-old daughter, whose fourth birthday I was about to miss.
Every day came with mortal threats: lethal snakes hiding in the bush, airborne viruses, bullet ants, road bandits, river pirates. The country was in the throes of a military coup, and I had already seen two dead bodies: a motorcyclist lying in the middle of a dirt road and a boy floating facedown in a river. I had never felt so alone. My mind strayed constantly, and my brooding always led me to the same disturbing place: I felt as though I were disappearing. Or, worse yet, that I had disappeared.
“You’re a long way from home,” Frog said as the rain returned.
I laughed, but he didn’t even crack a smile.
“Are you lost?” he asked.
He looked me hard in the eye. He said it was easy to lose your way in the jungle. “Don’t follow the voices of the dead,” he warned. “That’s my advice for you.”
I said good night, retreated, and slumped into my hammock, the rain slapping the tarp over me. I looked out at the wet, impassable hell of the jungle and heard my wife’s voice over and over again from the day I left home. “What are you thinking? What are you really looking for? Why are you leaving?”
Morning was still hours away, but I couldn’t sleep.
R
EMEMBER THOSE DAYS
, I’d start to say to Amy, my wife, when I was feeling particularly old and melancholy. Remember when we decided one night we wanted to go to Paris and the next day we were on a plane? Remember when we stayed out all night and you broke your heel and we ate breakfast at that diner in the West Village? How many times did we do that? Remember when we lived in that $500 studio in Williamsburg with views of the city and we thought we had it made?
In our twenties, we’d bounced around from apartment to apartment. We’d go abroad at least three times a year, sometimes for Amy’s work—she’s a contemporary-art curator—other times for my freelance writing. My wanderlust had been born out of my largely sedentary childhood. I had grown up in a rigorously normal town of about 30,000 in upstate New York. We didn’t travel much, except for a family vacation every July when my brother, my parents, and I climbed into a Ford station wagon and drove to a beach in Delaware. There was a lake in my town, but with little horizon. The hills had no real vistas, and planes flew past overhead at 30,000 feet. Amy liked to joke that if it hadn’t been for her coaxing me into our first trip to Europe together, when we were twenty, I would have never left the States. We didn’t have much to worry about then. We made enough to get by. Now there was little time—or money.
I still traveled as a writer, stringing along interesting assignments—a couple weeks in Iran, where I hunted down rogue military shipments, another couple weeks in the Balkans to search out diamond thieves, and more in Russia chasing down mobsters—but those trips never lasted long enough for me to feel as if I was fully inhabiting another world, living out another life. The assignments provided only an approximation of a sustained adventure. By the time the stories came out in the magazines, I was already back to folding laundry and changing diapers.
Amy and I had been married for six years and had just moved with our three-year-old daughter, Sky, from the frantic crush of Manhattan to sleepier Brooklyn. Strapped with a mortgage and talking about having another child, we were settling down—or trying to. That stuff scared me, as I’m sure it does most young adults, especially those living in New York, where everything is so preposterously expensive. I was getting along in my thirties. I craved something more. Who isn’t charmed by the idea that there are still secrets left in the world?
I first learned about the lost city in the spring of 2008. At the time, I was reporting a magazine feature about the growing Honduran drug trade. The jungles and Caribbean shores of Honduras were considered major transshipment points for cocaine traveling from Colombia up to the United States, and the business had created a healthy underworld economy. I was interested in a particular drug king who had apparently made a business of killing off the Colombian traffickers at sea, pilfering the cocaine from their submarines or speedboats, then selling it back home. He was said to live on a fortified hilltop mansion above the sea.
