Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure

225 Pages·2013·8.24 MB·English

by  Christopher S. Stewart

JUNGLELAND
A MYSTERIOUS LOST CITY, A WWII SPY, AND A TRUE STORY OF
DEADLY ADVENTURE
CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART
Dedication
For Sky, Dash, and Amy, obviously.
Epigraphs
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
Dedication
Epigraphs

Prologue

Part I
A Professional Amateur
The Mountain That Cries
The Mystery Stick
“Treading on Dynamite”
My Lost-City Guide
“I Was Lost”
The Coup
“949 Miles to La Ceiba”
Good-bye

Part II
“Left for Dead but Too Mean to Die”
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“Where There Grow Strange Large Flowers”
Snakes and Valium
“Definitely on the Way at Last”
The Valley of the Princess
“Gold Fever”
Pancho
“The Last Outpost”
Bandit Alley
“The Equivalent of a State Secret”
Mortal Threats
Dance of the Dead Monkeys
Catacamas
“Green Hell”
Loco Men
“All Had Faded into Thin Air”

Part III
The Jungle That Disappeared
“Beyond Hope”
Looking for Camp Ulak
“No Trace of Ruins”
Calling Home
“The Lost City of the Monkey God”
Our Time with the Pirates
“The Jungle Does Not Seem Like It Wants Us to Go”
“Please Come Home”
“Ice in Our Glasses!”
Ernesto’s Story
“This Strange Civilization”
What We Learned from the Tawahkas

Part IV
Daisy
Gateway to the Lost Cities
“They Had Orders to Shoot”
My Lowest Low
“I’m Having the Time of My Life”
Journey to the Crosses
“From Journalist and Explorer and Spy to a Father”
The Morde Theory
The Lost City

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Photographic Insert
About the Author
Also by Christopher S. Stewart
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
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.