Jungleland Read online

  IN ALL, THE explorers spent about a month at Ulak, settling into a rhythm of river prospecting and hunting for signs of the city in the jungle around them. In photographs of those weeks at the edge of the world, Morde comes to look ragged. His gabardine pants are snipped off at the knees, and his brown safari shirt, rolled to the elbow, is streaked with dirt and wrinkled. His hair is greasy and pushed back, unwashed for weeks, his jaw chiseled into a look of determination, legs skinny as a boy’s, though corded with muscle and strapped into tall black boots.

  Their supplies, though, had thinned. They ate beans and smoked the stems of tobacco leaves. Sometimes Burke surprised them with dishes from the jungle. One night, they ate two toucans, chucking the colored feathers away. “Good eating, being all dark meat,” Morde wrote of the cuisine. “More highly flavored than most similar small jungle birds.” They ate wari when they could run them down, an occasional fish, something they called a “guinea pig like animal,” and other birds. Burke became quite adept at making yellowtail pie.

  As May turned to June, the rain came daily. The rivers continued to climb; the creek in front of their camp was only about eight feet from them now, which was cause for concern. “This afternoon at about 4 o’clock, a regular cloud burst descended on camp and drenched about everything,” Morde wrote on June 8. They were grateful for the smaller showers that rinsed off their dirty bodies and washed their even dirtier clothes. When the rain came in torrents, however, the grounds around them turned to a mush that swallowed their feet, and tiny rivers guttered through the earth. There was nothing to do but wait for it to stop, the way hostages wait to be freed. Yet the stress of the rainy season only focused their obsession on finding the ruins.

  In the day, roars like those of lions startled them. They stopped and stared up at the spears of daylight shooting through the canopy of trees. Other noises came to seem vaguely human, as if the jungle were attempting conversation. White-faced monkeys regularly ganged up on the three men, pitching branches and fruit down on them.

  Burke identified rare birds. One day, they encountered a bird that he called a “Margarita,” which he claimed was sacred to the Aztecs, as well as to the local Pech, who believed that the species descended from a beautiful woman who had been exiled into the mountains by a spurned lover. Each wing looked like a rising sun—a blaze of yellow offset by brown and black wing tips.

  In what seemed like a fit of sentimentality for the lives they had left behind, the men decided to keep it as a pet and built it a cage out of bamboo. They called it Pete and hoped that it would act as a kind of watchdog for the camp. The hairy beasts, thankfully, remained elusive. “We found no traces of the legendary half human great apes,” Morde reported.

  Much of the details of the expedition’s search parties for the lost city out of Camp Ulak are missing or vaguely sketched in the journal. There were some days when either Burke and Brown took to the pages and mentioned Morde going off on treks alone, taking along only his rifle and walking stick. What he did out there is unclear. No one ever says.

  Maybe there was another journal, where those details were recorded. There was the chance, of course, that Morde’s evasiveness was only boredom, that he didn’t actually have anything to report and didn’t want to engage any darker thoughts swirling in his mind. Such as, did the lost city even exist? Although he never wrote about his doubts, Morde surely worried deep down that he might never find anything in this endless jungle. You could walk for days and see nothing but trees and vines and rain, until it all started blurring together. But how could he live with that possibility? How would he muster the energy to go on? And what would he tell the world when he returned to New York? That he had spent four months in the jungle and discovered nothing?

  Part III

  The Jungle That Disappeared

  THIS IS WHERE Morde’s world begins,” Chris announced as we stumbled up a hillside. He flipped open his GPS and pointed over the lush valley. “Río Blanco should be over there.”

  “Should?” I asked.

  “I could be wrong.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we should hope that we didn’t walk too far away from where we have to go.”

  Pancho now took the lead, going off Alberto’s directions to the river. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, but we had already been walking for three hours and my feet were sore and soggy. Rain squalls blew up and vanished minutes later, leaving behind fizzing soil and blasting sun. The effects of Alberto’s ten-sugar coffee had long worn off, and I was tired after a sleepless night on the ground, where I couldn’t shake the thought that the snorting pigs around the hut might eat us. We had cut a curve through hillsides and over landscapes thick with creeping bushes and trees, ledges and drop-offs that gave way to flat swamplands swathed in high grass and fields where cattle milled beside clouds of mosquitoes.

  Both my feet now had blisters, which had ripped open and turned into a pulp of purple and black, forcing me to walk on the front of my feet to reduce the pressure. At one point, Angel stopped to watch me limp by and snickered.

  We passed small huts and saw men and women sitting on tiny porches or working patches of the cut jungle, and I wondered what they thought of our crew, outfitted with our combat boots, rip-resistant pants, quick-dry shirts, and giant backpacks. Some didn’t seem to notice, while others watched us closely, observing the white dudes trekking through the jungle.

  Soon there was no one but cattle and cut-down trees, dozens and dozens of blackened stumps in a wide-open space the size of probably six football fields. I was stunned and a little terrified. The impenetrable, supernatural-seeming mass of green that I had imagined had been completely and utterly slashed and burned. “So this is the jungle,” I said sarcastically. It didn’t exactly feel like Morde’s dense malarial wilderness.

  “It used to be,” said Chris. “It was different in Morde’s day.”

  Now the area looked like a giant lawn of ashes. Settlers, loggers, and ranchers had been clearing the jungle for years, illegally in many cases. “This is the colonization front,” Chris said. Jungle clearing was a problem all over Honduras. The colonizers took the land for houses or pasture, or just for the wood. Many times they didn’t replant anything.

  In the last decade, the country had lost about 7 million acres (about 10,000 square miles) of forestland—an area the size of the combined Hawaiian Islands. Some of the timber ended up in products sold in the United States. The U.S. embassy has reported that the clearing continues at a rate of about 3 percent a year, further shrinking Central America’s largest rain forest and everything—birds, beasts, bugs, and all manner of flora that double as herbal medicine for the local people—within.

  As I traveled deeper into the jungle, I heard stories of bustling timber hubs hidden from the view of passing planes. Pancho told me about secret jungle trails wide enough for tractor-trailers to pass into and out of the deeper parts of the bush, clandestine sawmills and their shadowy overlords, or chemiseros. Sometimes the timber smugglers and even the ranchers worked with the narcos, who flew small planes into hacked-out landing strips. The absence of law enforcement contributed to the mayhem. Violence was always percolating. When the police did venture in, they were sometimes on the wrong side; they became protectors of the underworld, even hit men.

  In 2006, a timber gang executed an environmentalist in the ragged mountains that climbed above the Río Patuca. He had been mapping the boundaries of a forest preserve near Olancho. The assassin was never found. A year later, to keep the family quiet, the gang returned in masks and murdered the dead man’s brother, who was the sole witness, as well as his father-in-law and mother-in-law, who’d happened to be with him when the Mafia arrived to settle its score. No one was ever arrested.

  That same year, around the same area, two more environmentalists were killed. That time, four policemen thought to be working with chemiseros did the work. They pulled the two men over as they traveled by car from Gualaco to Silca. I’d driven on
the same forlorn dirt road on my way to Catacamas. Maybe the men thought at first that it was just a security stop. Maybe they thought, hey, it’s no big deal, it’s just the police. But they also might have known that they were in trouble. They were part of a prominent NGO called Environmental Movement of Olancho (MAO), and, like others who lobbied to save the diminishing jungle, they had been warned to stop bothering the loggers. Don’t protest. Don’t talk to the media. Keep your mouth shut, or else. But they hadn’t listened. It was the life they had chosen. It was their land. The police told the men to get out of the car. One was forty-nine, the other twenty-nine. I heard the story at least three times. The police marched them to the center of the nearby town of Guarizama and stood them in front of a municipal building, as if to make a point to anyone who needed a lesson. You see this? Never cross us. We own this place. Some forty shots rang out, and the two bodies slumped to the ground.

  Meanwhile, Pancho pointed at dark clouds piling up in the sky. There was no time to dwell on the burned land. He turned and began to walk. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I asked. Pancho didn’t look back, which I took to be his way of saying that he was in control and we had already wasted enough of the day there.

  It was almost noon when we spotted the Río Blanco, just as Alberto had said. From a high cliff, the river below stretched out like a gray scribble. We hurried down as the rain came, stumbling over rocks and vines, and came across a thatched hut. Pancho flipped off his cowboy hat and asked the old man inside for directions. Nodding, he invited us to sit on a wood bench. He said he knew the way to Ulak but warned us not to go.

  “Beyond Hope”

  WITHOUT EVIDENCE OF the ancient city, Morde turned again to rumor. The first story of Ciudad Blanca came from a man named Timoteo Rosales. When he encountered Rosales, however, is unknown; no date was recorded in Morde’s journals. What is known is that Rosales worked as a rubber cutter, spending weeks wandering around the unmapped parts of the region, extracting from tree trunks the gummy white fluid known as latex. That fluid, after Rosales humped it to a river, was later turned into chewing gum and tires, among other things. He told Morde that it was in 1905, during a trek from the Río Paulaya to the Río Plátano—in the middle of the forest, far from any settlements—he looked up and saw stone “columns.” He believed it was the lost city, though he hadn’t stopped to linger over it. At another point in his travels, Morde met a man who claimed to have stumbled upon the ruins in 1898, at the place where the heads of the Plátano, Paulaya, and Wampú rivers come together. The man called the ruins “the White City”—the first and only mention of the name in Morde’s logbooks. That was a big clue, but the area at the river heads covered more than a hundred square miles. They needed more to go on.

  In time, they did discover traces of the ancient people who had dwelled there. From under dirt and rocks, they dug up six stone flutes, numerous razor blades, and stone household items such as pots, spoons, and grinding slabs. They also uncovered tiny religious idols, with faces contorted by weather and time, and small masks resembling monkey faces. All of it made them wonder: could the people who made these things have inhabited the lost city?

  Most amazingly, they encountered earth-covered mounds, rising like small, toppled buildings. Indians they met described the ancient people who lived in these deep parts as master stone builders. Because of this, Morde wrote of the city, “the [Indians] insisted, much had been preserved.” He also heard about a long-staired approach to the center, paved in bleached stones and flanked by “larger than life statues of frogs, crocodiles and monkeys.”

  The dramatic description echoed other outlandish accounts of lost cities. In his search for El Dorado in 1542, the conquistador Francisco de Orellana wrote of “one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house,” and he observed “many roads here that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways.” He recalled too “very large cities that glistened in white.”

  The most shocking thing Morde heard during those weeks was a detail of the White City’s center. “At the heart of the place was a temple,” an Indian told him, “with a high stone platform on top of which rose the towering the statue of the Monkey God himself.”

  The city might be around any bend, over any hill. But as Morde and the others drew closer, the jungle seemed to grow more aggressive in its efforts to thwart their mission. “We have met our match in the jungle,” he wrote. One day, rain blew the roof off the camp’s sleeping hut; snakes and termites invaded; the water continued to rise, threatening to flood the living quarters and muddying the creek waters, making any further prospecting impossible; the dam broke once and for all. It was, as the Spanish put it, the chubasco, the squall. “The rain is incessant,” Morde went on. “Tempers are easily ruffled, the camp is damp and messy and the creek is beyond hope.” Another time, he added, “We often think . . . how infinitesimal we three white men are here in the green vastness.”

  On June 11, they woke to Pete the bird’s frantic chattering. When they stepped outside to see what it was all about, they noticed the tracks of an adult jaguar. It had circled the camp, emerging from the depths of the jungle as if to mark its territory.

  Burke, Brown, and Morde peered at the perimeter of their camp, where they heard voices. The brush disgorged five men. Four were Indians, and the fifth was a white man who introduced himself as William A. MacDonald. MacDonald was from San Francisco but worked as a mining scout for a Toronto company. By his looks, he was middle-aged. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that the buzzing jungle made it hard for the explorers to hear him. MacDonald said he’d been paddling upriver for three weeks and was now camped out on the Blanco, a few miles back. He asked about their prospecting.

  Who is this man? Morde wondered. Was he also searching for the lost city? Would he try to steal from them? “He caused us great queasiness by his question of gold,” Morde wrote. Terror seized them. They steered the conversation away from their own activities in the jungle and pressed MacDonald for news of the war. The Americans, MacDonald said, were getting closer to entering the battle, which made the explorers only more uneasy about the world that awaited them upon their return to New York.

  MacDonald and his men stayed for three hours before a rainstorm hit and they fled, worrying that the creek was about to flood. Even then, the encounter lingered with Morde and Brown. They felt suspicious of the scout, and they resolved to move out. “The best course is to wind down our affairs here, as hastily as possibly,” Morde wrote. “We will be able to get a line on MacDonald from our friends on the Patuca, who will possibly be able to give us some hint as to his plans.” They couldn’t risk MacDonald following them. Decamping was the only way to protect what they already knew.

  Looking for Camp Ulak

  THERE’S A WOMAN who lives up there,” the old man said to us in Spanish. “She’s a witch. We call her La Sucia.” The dirty woman.

  The man wore dusty black sandals, ragged shorts, and a white T-shirt. He was probably in his eighties. His fingers were grimy, and his hands coarse and callused. The Río Blanco roared from behind his hut. I noticed insects sneaking in through cracks in the damp walls—millipedes, fat shiny flies. Ants made their way in a vein across the smooth dirt floor, vanishing under the raised board that served, with a couple of neatly folded blankets on top, as his bed.

  He told us that he had prospected the region’s rivers for decades. He had found some gold but not enough to make him rich. About thirty years ago, he had decided to move here from Catacamas and build a hut, a few miles up the Blanco. Now about half a dozen other mud huts dotted a grassy path. But even though they’d created this place here, if the village decided to leave one day, it would not be very long before everything would simply melt away into the surrounding greenery. The man called his hut “far away from things,” and the slow, quiet way he talked, along with the rain coming down, imbued his words with the mysticism of fairy tales.

  “The witch protects the
gold at Ulak,” he said. “There is gold there, and when men go, they see her.” He paused and opened his eyes very wide, as if imagining the sight. “She is a pretty woman with black hair. You might see her washing her clothes in the creek.”

  I asked if he had seen her. He clucked as though that was a stupid question.

  “The men who see her don’t leave,” he said.

  I knew that this was only a legend, just as the monkey men were merely legends, though he seemed very serious about the story. Later, I would find out that it was a common story throughout Central America. The witch was called dirty because she never left the forest. She used her beauty to lure men into her hideout. Sometimes she sang, and her voice sounded like a waterfall or a mountain breeze, depending on who told the story. I almost laughed it away until the old man mentioned the dead American.

  “It was a long, long time ago,” he said. “The gringo was looking for gold around Ulak. And then he got a fever.”

  I told him the story of Morde, hoping to stir some distant memory, but he didn’t know the name. I mentioned the San Francisco miner MacDonald, who had traveled up this way almost seventy years before. I knew it was a long time ago, but I wondered if the dead man he was talking about might be MacDonald. In Morde’s notes, there is no further mention of the miner. He didn’t see him on the Río Blanco as he left Ulak, and he heard nothing about him from the Indians or the Germans on the Patuca. It seemed as though he had evaporated.