Jungleland Read online

  The old settler contemplated what I told him. He said that sometimes he found “ancient things” in the ground in the forest—broken pottery and stone slabs. But he knew of no ruins around there. He had heard of men looking for them but didn’t know if MacDonald was the dead man. It was just a story. “You can go to his grave. You’ll see it. He’s buried near Ulak in a shade of trees.”

  Pancho asked the settler where to find a mule to haul our things for a bit, and soon a young man from the settlement appeared. He had a rifle slung over one shoulder. His hair stuck up in every direction, and his smile, under a wisp of a mustache, revealed a set of blackened teeth. The rain had ceased, and the sun was back. We threw our things onto his animal, which was already huffing in the heat, and the man pointed at the shin guards fastened to my legs. He mumbled something that I didn’t understand. Chris interpreted: “He wants to know if you’re playing in a soccer game out here.”

  FOR A FEW hours, we made our way along the twisting Río Blanco toward Morde’s camp. I complained about my blistered feet, but no one seemed to care. The Blanco was a fast-flowing river, about fifty yards across in some stretches. The heat got worse as the day sank into late afternoon. It rose in waves off the high grass, which I watched for snakes. At one point, Pancho bent over and picked something out of the grass. “.357,” he said, holding in the cup of his hand an empty bullet casing that didn’t look very old. He scanned the mostly flat landscape around us, blurry with sun, but there was no one else in sight.

  My mind wandered a lot as we walked through these boring stretches of flatness. A million totally random thoughts rattled around inside my head like a pop song that was impossible to shake.

  Sky does such a good cannonball; What’s that line from T. S. Eliot about the return of a journey is the beginning?; Man, I’d love a cheeseburger—with relish!; She’s going to be in preschool; Where did all that time go? Where will we end up?; That biker actually died; I can’t do this; Snakes!; Amy’s right; She’s got a journey too; Where are we?; You’re a complete idiot; What’s that line?; You return to the place you started and know it for the first time.

  After a couple more hours, I realized that Chris had dropped behind us. By now we had probably walked eight or nine miles and had come upon some formidable hills. I waited for him to catch up and saw that his face had gone pale. “Something bit me,” he said, shaking his head. He pulled off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m burning up with a fever. I’m freezing.” His blue shirt was drenched in sweat.

  “Should we stop?” I asked.

  “We gotta keep going,” he said. “Night’s coming.” He wanted to make it to Ulak. Then he would rest.

  I worried selfishly that we’d have to turn around and get him to a hospital, which would mean days of backtracking. It was hard for me even to imagine the energy it would take to walk back to Catacamas.

  We slipped down a cliff face and traversed the Blanco on a narrow mahogany pitpan that was lying abandoned on the mucky shore. As we crossed, Chris said, “Morde probably prospected for gold here. We can’t be far from his camp.” I could tell he was struggling by the slow and labored manner of his speech and the way he kept staring off into the buzzing morass, probably dreaming of being somewhere else. That was not the film that he wanted his wife to be watching.

  On the other side, the mule guide declared, “It’s up here.”

  We followed him up the hill and into some of the densest foliage we had yet encountered. Trees rose high around us, eclipsing the sun. Pancho stopped and pointed at the ground. “He’s buried somewhere here,” he said. “The gringo.”

  There was a mossy rock the size of a small headstone embedded in the jungle floor, and I pictured the bones of the dead man buried beneath.

  “What if that’s MacDonald?” I asked.

  No one responded. The hissing green was loud in my head. An unexpected sadness came over me. Here was a man who had come to Honduras with dreams of striking it rich. He had left behind a small world to chase the potential of a bigger one. His quest had ended badly, and he had never made it home. Did he have a wife or children? Did anyone back home ever learn that he died? Or did they think he’d just run away?

  The man’s story reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s blackly comic novel A Handful of Dust. The hero, Tony Last, gets lost in the Amazon on an expedition looking for El Dorado, only to be imprisoned by a crazy man who, unknown to anyone, forces him to read Charles Dickens out loud for the rest of his life. Whatever the circumstances of the dead man’s disappearance, he was here and no one knew about him, except for the old settler along the river—and now me.

  I got a bad feeling in my head. I hoped at that second that Amy and Sky didn’t think that I was running away from them. I recalled the time not long before when Sky had actually asked why I went away so much. “Why do you always leave us?” The question had stunned me at first. I thought for a second and then told her that it was my job to go away. But that hadn’t satisfied her. “So why don’t you get another job, Daddy?”

  Amy and I had debated my freelance life incessantly, particularly how there was nothing steady about it: paychecks were erratic, health insurance was nonexistent, overseas trips came up at the last minute. The conversations, which happened mostly late at night, sometimes after a couple drinks or while we were lying in bed with the lights out, had been minimal when it was just Amy and me, but they had grown after we’d had Sky and bought a place.

  It wasn’t that Amy wanted our family to be like everyone else’s family, just that we make a home that had some consistency, some predictability to it. Part of me understood that, but the other part—the part that enjoyed the romance of being out in the world—kept thinking that I would wait just another year before making some changes.

  Sky, however, had her own ideas. One afternoon, as we walked past the local firehouse, she said, “You should be a fireman, Daddy. Then you wouldn’t need to go anywhere.” I smiled, because l loved how she could make sense of a world that was so complicated to me.

  Chris was too sick to care. “I have to get into the water,” he said abruptly. The mule guide attempted to intervene.

  “Don’t get in the river. There are crocodiles.”

  Chris shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”

  “There are big crocodiles. They eat people here.”

  But Chris wasn’t hearing any of it. He didn’t even bother taking off his clothes or his combat boots. He looked at me through his glasses, blinked, and then stepped through a hole in the verdure, which dropped down a steep hill that fell away into the river.

  For a moment I stared at the jungle that swallowed him, and then Pancho said we had to move on. Staggering forward, I caught glimpses of the rushing river but saw no sign of Chris, and I worried briefly that he would not make it back. I remembered Morde describing the beady red eyes of dozens of crocodiles lurking on the riverbanks. I felt guilty for being more concerned about my trip than about Chris’s sickness. Rain came and went, and the strange green noises played with my head.

  Half an hour passed before we stumbled down a rock face to the river edge and there he was—drenched, his shirt and pants sticking to him, his wire-rimmed glasses fogged up. “I made it!” he yelled over the noise of the river. The color in his face had been mostly restored. His voice was strong. Seeing him soaking there, I thought, This is why his students call him Indiana Jones. He was a little out of his mind. “Ahhh,” he said, dripping. “That was great!” Then his eyes widened a bit more and he pointed at a narrow creek emerging from the wilderness. “That must be Ulak.”

  THIS WAS WHERE, Morde had said, “no white man has been before.” But there didn’t seem to be anything left of his camp. Trees and brush had reclaimed the area where the three huts had likely once stood. Vines dangled over the mossy green waters of the Ulak, which stretched about thirty feet across. I stared for a moment at the overgrown creekside, trying to envision Morde on the site almost seventy years before—his daily
comings and goings in his cutoff pants, the makeshift wood table he constructed to compose his journals, the talk of the lost city at night as Burke or Brown played harmonica, and later MacDonald emerging from the brush to the queasy astonishment of the explorers. But I couldn’t see any of it. The jungle had obliterated him and the entire scene.

  “This way,” said Chris. “Let’s see if we can find anything else.” The strong rapids fought us as we stumbled through the waist-deep water. On the other side of the creek, we used our machetes to hack up a hill that Morde had probably hacked through dozens of times when he went out hunting or to pee. Just as a squall hit, the leafage fell away and we stepped into a pasture of chest-high grass, where a lone hut of wood and thatch stood. Farther off three emaciated cows grazed. It wasn’t more than a two-minute walk from the creek. At least five acres of trees had been cleared, all jungle when Morde was there.

  We went to the hut and found two women stirring a tub of caujada, a local cheese, made of curdled milk boiled for hours and fruit juices. The women wore loose dresses and looked frightened at our sudden presence. They couldn’t have been older than twenty, with long black hair knotted down their backs. The hut was only a single room with floors of raked dirt. The thatched roof shifted in the rain as water dripped through cracks and made puddles on the floor. When I asked how long the girls had been here, they hesitated before saying, “About a year.” What they were doing there, though, they didn’t say. I got the feeling that before our coming they had had other encounters with less friendly sorts and were anxious about what we were up to.

  We said good-bye, spent an hour walking around the pasture, and made one long sweep of the Ulak. We didn’t see the hairy men or discover any evidence of Morde’s visit. “It’s gone. There’s nothing here,” Chris said. “We should go.”

  The Tawahkas were two or three days’ travel by river, the last living connection to Morde’s expedition and the lost White City. Only they would know where to go.

  “No Trace of Ruins”

  WE FOUND DANGER at almost every bend,” Morde wrote as the expedition raced downstream to the Tawahka outpost, eager to move on and to defend against the snooping MacDonald, if necessary. The dugout canoe shot through the Río Blanco and then the Cuyamel. In places, the current surged to twelve miles per hour, sending up thrashing armies of waves. Brown was at the stern while Burke steered at the bow and looked for smoother channels. Morde worked an eight-foot wooden pole at the center and bailed out incoming water. “If any of us were thrown into the river, we wouldn’t have a chance,” he worried. “Knife-like rocks would rip our bodies apart.”

  They had Pete the bird with them, and he cried all day, as if warning the explorers of something they had overlooked. It was June 15, almost three months from the day they had arrived in the country. With their heavy, knotted beards, Morde, Burke, and Brown looked like primitive men. Their clothes were ratty and hung loose on their rail-thin frames. Their boots were junk. Morde wrote of the bugs that attacked their bodies. Deer flies swarmed the muggy air, and sand flies “by the millions came . . . and ate us alive.”

  The force of the river kept growing with every turn. One stretch of the Cuyamel that had taken eight hours to navigate upstream took forty-eight minutes down. They shot over a five-foot precipice and at another turn smashed into a rock, nearly splitting the boat in half, then tumbled over another small waterfall.

  In placid spots the men caught their breath and took in a passing landscape that they no longer fully recognized. They had traveled these waters for almost a month now, and the last few days of rain had transformed the riverbanks. Sandbars were gone. Tall trees had been swept away. The churning river had turned from murky green to the frothy light brown of overcreamed coffee. The men had worried that the river would eventually turn on them and now it had.

  “As we swept around curves, the cat-claw and thorns snatched at us. Many times we lay supine in the bottom of the pitpan as the current ahead sent us under the hungry vines,” Morde wrote like a soldier who was suddenly on a fast retreat. “Our landmarks were gone,” he continued. “Monkeys howled and barked at our passage.” He knew there was not much time left for them before the rains rendered the jungle unnavigable.

  They aimed to make the Patuca by nightfall but fell short. “We decided to gamble and push on,” Morde wrote toward the middle of the afternoon that day. “But as always, we lost. The skies darkened and opened up.” The storm forced them to land the boat. Soaking wet, they cut away enough vegetation for a place to lie down and raised a protective roof of waja leaves. Through the wet night they huddled there, waiting out the squall and trying to recoup their energy. “Minutes dragged like hours, as the night wore on,” Morde wrote. “We smoked, talked twisted and scratched and stayed awake. Sleep was impossible. . . . Our feet stuck out in the rain.”

  The next morning the light was dim. The men ate crackers that tasted of the flies that had been buzzing around them the day before. The specter of the miner MacDonald lingered in their daydreams. They reached the Patuca, which was running as fast as the Cuyamel. Morde’s shoulders throbbed from working the pole. His body was bruised and scratched. Mosquitoes had drawn blood. The last day and a half of river travel felt like the last stage of a very long battle.

  When they finally emerged from the rapids, Brown fell sick. His body convulsed with chills, and Morde wrapped him in blankets and took his spot at the stern. There was concern that the expedition was coming apart. After a few more hours on the river, they finally arrived at the Tawahkas’ settlement. But they were too tired to talk. “We didn’t bother to eat. We set up cots and slept.”

  When Morde awoke the next morning, he had a conversation with the tribal elder about the lost city. The two men had apparently become friends; Morde, it seemed, had turned the chief into a kind of informant. “Nicolas stated positively there was no trace of ruins up the Wampu,” he wrote. “We are convinced no great civilization ever existed up there and that there are no archaeological discoveries of importance to be made.”

  Calling Home

  HOW MUCH FARTHER?” I asked Chris.

  He kept swinging his machete at the lush green in front of him, ignoring me because I had asked the question half a dozen times already.

  The Tawahka camp was at least thirty more miles away, with no direct route, and we had been walking with the mule guide for five hours straight, without resting more than fifteen minutes for a Clif Bar. I tried to think of anything but of the next step forward and the pain it would cause. Our goal seemed so far. Thirty miles? That was like walking from Brooklyn out to Westchester.

  “Maybe we should just stop here for the night,” I suggested, pointing at a conveniently located cut in the forest that looked as though it had been created for us.

  “You sound like my kids,” Chris said finally.

  “But I’m not gonna make it.”

  “Stop thinking about it and you will.”

  I couldn’t believe Chris was even standing up after his river dunking. He still looked a little pale, and I could hear him breathing harder on the hills. I told him it would help me to know about how much farther we had to go.

  “You really want to know?”

  I said I did.

  “I don’t know.”

  I tried to jot down notes when it wasn’t raining, but the vicious mud kept grabbing my boots and putting unbearable pressure on my blisters, and I couldn’t gather enough strength to stop and write. Because of the heat, I drank about three or four gallons of water a day, but the sun sucked almost all of it out of me.

  The forest grew denser, and our progress slowed. At one point it took an hour just to hack through the length of a football field, and then we hit a cliff face and were forced to turn around. On two occasions, military helicopters swooped by overhead, searching for something that wasn’t there. What were we searching for? At times I forgot.

  At the Río Cuyamel, which ran wider and swifter than the Blanco, with an electric green color
that in places resembled Palm-olive dish soap, we glanced up and saw a dark wall of mountains towering over us like the prow of an incoming freighter ship. Pancho warned against crossing the mountains, swinging his machete at the fog-encased peaks. “It could take us two or three days to get to the other side.”

  Chris and Pancho discussed building a raft out of balsa trees, but our mule guide said that the strong rapids would destroy a makeshift boat within the first mile. He made a gesture with his hands of snapping wood. I wanted to float down the river, even if it meant on a stick of wood—anything not to walk another step. I closed my eyes, stood still in the late-July sun, and felt the jungle pressing in on my hurting body, toying with my thoughts. Its rains and rivers and beasts of prey, the endless shadows. When I opened my eyes, Pancho called out from ahead that he saw a house on a hill above the river. Maybe, I thought, the people there could help get us out.

  A MIDDLE-AGED MAN named Eladio lived there with his wife and two young girls. At first he was a bit skeptical of our group. “Gringos?” he said. “Americano?”

  Chris told him in Spanish that we were from the United States, even though we looked as though we’d just climbed out of a beaver hole—hair matted down and greasy, clothes a muddy mess, Chris’s face looking pale again from the tropical sickness. The two girls whispered and laughed. Eladio bit his lip. “Are you military?” He pointed at Chris’s and my combat boots. “Those look like they’re army.”

  The man was short and muscular and wore an unbuttoned white short-sleeve dress shirt and pleather sandals. “The American army used to be out here,” he said. He made a capacious gesture at the sky, as though he were describing a gigantic bird. “They would come in big helicopters that you could hear from far away.”