Jungleland Read online

  hotstuffie92

  I WOKE WITH A jolt, immediately alert. A gray dawn seeped through the gauzy white curtains. I stared at the ceiling of my room in the Paris Hotel, the same hotel where Morde had stayed almost seventy years before, and I followed the cracks in the plaster as if they were lines of a maze. The night before, we’d arrived at La Ceiba from San Pedro Sula. On the dusty road into town, heavily armed patrols had blocked traffic, a tactic meant to deter anyone looking to cause trouble. At one point, gunshots had filled the soupy air, and I’d sunk low in my seat, expecting my door to be shot out. I sensed that I’d entered a Graham Greene novel, a world of intrigue where anything could happen. I was anxious and a little afraid, and I remembered that early on in his journey, Morde had been that way too.

  La Ceiba is now a city of more than 100,000 people, but the docks that once greeted the fruit ships that brought Morde and Brown here slid sadly into the sea years ago. La Ceiba has the typical trappings of a third-world city: ambitious structures from a bygone era crammed next to shacks with metal roofs. Armed guards protect the banks, and the American fast-food restaurants—Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Popeyes. The streets are noisy with traffic and littered with garbage. The buildings fronting the water are falling down or in various stages of salty decrepitude. Gates, wrapped in concertina wire or topped with broken glass, cordon off the miniature compounds of the wealthy.

  The window air conditioner thrummed, holding off the tropical heat, which is oppressive even before the sun comes up. Chris Begley, who had flown down the week before for the river trip, was snoring in the sagging twin bed next to me, unbothered by what loomed ahead. The two locals he had hired to help us on our journey would meet us later.

  It was 5 a.m. We would leave in six hours. Like Morde when he first arrived, I was hot and disoriented. I threw freezing faucet water on my face and sorted through my equipment, just to make sure everything was still there. All of my notebooks and maps and pills were packed in Ziploc bags to protect against humidity and rain—and against rivers when we would have no other way of crossing but by plunging in. With all of our food supplies—spaghetti, canned sausages, pancake mix, Tang, coffee grinds—my frame pack weighed about sixty pounds. Chris’s monster green army bag was about eighty pounds, jammed with everything I had in my pack, as well as American Geographical Society topographic maps, a GPS, and a bulky satellite phone with one backup battery. The satellite phone was for emergencies, and we hoped that its battery would last us for the full trip.

  As Chris slept, I went downstairs to send off some e-mails to family saying I’d made it to La Ceiba and that I wasn’t sure when they’d hear from me again. The hotel didn’t have many customers because of the overthrow, and the only people up at the time were two straight-faced men in uniforms carrying shotguns, a bored guy at the desk scribbling on a pad of paper, and a flabby black man in a Mets T-shirt and sweatpants plopped down in front of the lobby computer, the one I needed to use.

  The Men Without Hats song “Safety Dance” drifted quietly through the fake gray marble lobby. It made me think of a middle school dance, long in my past. A warm nostalgia pulsed through me; it was kind of comforting, an antidote for the loneliness that had already begun creeping in. I felt old again. Where did all those years go?

  When I came up behind the guy at the computer, I noticed a window open to a Web site for black singles in La Ceiba, and another window was open to a chat screen, featuring someone with the handle “hotstuffie92.” Slumped over the keyboard, he pecked at the keys in slow motion as if weighing very carefully every single letter.

  Eventually, he noticed that I was watching and turned. “Is there a problem?” he asked wheezily, moving his body in front of the screen. He appeared to be in his forties. I apologized for appearing intrusive and said I was just curious how long he’d be.

  “American,” he said, nodding; he clasped and unclasped his thick hands over the keyboard as if he was going to crack his knuckles but decided against it.

  He told me he was from Queens and seemed suddenly relieved to be talking to someone else from New York City. “I came to meet some girls,” he eventually confessed, pointing at the screen, where “hotstuffie92” awaited him.

  I joked that I’d thought single men went to Russia for that. No, he said, it’s cheaper to fly here—especially during a coup!—and he thought the women were nicer. He had family from Nicaragua. He’d been to Costa Rica a few times, but it was more expensive to travel there, he said, and “it’s like Florida with all those old people retiring there.”

  He’d been talking to hotstuffie92, a girl from a nearby village, for about a year now. She’d planned to meet him at the Paris, but the military kept blocking the roads, forcing her to turn around. He showed me a creased picture—it had obviously spent too much time in his back pocket—of a dark-skinned woman, slightly overweight, with a gap between her front teeth. She looked twenty-one years old at most.

  “Beautiful,” I said. He nodded appreciatively. He said that when she finally got there, he would take her out for a nice dinner. “Maybe Pizza Hut,” he said.

  He asked what I was doing, and I told him about the White City. Most people I would talk to down here knew about the legend. Locals would invariably refer to the hundreds of square miles in which the ruins were thought to be located as “way out there” or “far, far away,” as if the place were located on another planet altogether. The man hadn’t heard of the city. He giggled and told me he didn’t want to get anywhere near the jungle. He compared it to a kettle of boiling chicken. The closest he’d get to the jungle or any lost city was the pool out back, with the drooping potted flowers and palms.

  “I guess we both came here looking for treasure,” he joked.

  WHEN I FINALLY got on the computer, I opened my e-mail to see a note from Amy. She wondered if I had made it. “We miss you,” she wrote. As I sat there, I imagined them just finishing breakfast, bowls of cereal, and then heading off for the day—Sky to her summer camp at the school down the street and Amy to an art show.

  I replied that the coup wasn’t so bad as the papers were making it out to be and that the heat was killing me. I didn’t mention anything about the military or the gunshots the night before, but I began to feel sentimental and said that I’d kept thinking about them on the curb as I pulled away in the cab. I told her to tell Sky that an orange parrot lived in the hotel courtyard and that I would call her on her birthday, in about three weeks. “Don’t worry about me!” I wrote. As I hit “Send,” I realized that this would be the last time I’d have Internet access and thus it would be the last message home.

  “Where There Grow Strange Large Flowers”

  THE TRUJILLO THAT Morde and Brown found was no longer the center of the colonial Spanish Empire. A recent plague had wiped out the city’s surrounding banana crops and scattered local laborers to look for work elsewhere, making the place feel barren and remote. As the explorers stumbled off the boat, they walked the same beach that Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés had likely walked centuries before. They passed the crumbling Spanish fort, with its defunct cannon. The streets were overgrown with grass, and an eerie quiet suffused the summer air—a “ghost town,” Morde called it.

  At the top of a sharp hill, the men wandered past a graveyard, where they discovered the decaying tomb of an American bandit named William Walker who had been shot by a firing squad in 1860 for trying to take over the country. The site only made the men more eager to move on.

  The visit to Trujillo is really notable for only one reason: Morde’s mysterious encounter with a person who claimed to have information about the White City. In his journal, Morde doesn’t name the person or even say whether it was a man or a woman. There are no details about where the meeting took place or at what time of day. That person told him that the city was known for its “arenas blancas,” or white sands, which proved about as helpful to Morde as the myths Woodman had encountered. As for the city’s location, Morde wrote th
at it might be between the Wampú and Plátano rivers, “over high mountains, where there grow strange large flowers.” Under those flowers, this person warned the men, was a burial ground.

  THE MEN SLEPT uneasily that night, impatient to move on to the frontier. But the next morning brought them some trouble. As they drove to the harbor to find a boat, they accidentally struck and killed a rooster. The timing of the collision couldn’t have been worse. Three police officers happened to see it. Drawing rifles, the men stepped into the road and gestured for the explorers to pull over.

  The policemen shook their heads at the lifeless bird. “You need to come with us,” one of them said.

  Morde tried to apologize. The rooster had come out of nowhere, he said. It had surprised them. He wasn’t there and then he was. They were sorry.

  But sorry wasn’t enough. The policemen told Morde and Brown that they were going to jail. They hadn’t killed just any rooster; it happened to be the sheriff’s prized bird. For a moment, the explorers imagined the worst: the expedition ending in this dead-end town.

  At the ramshackle police station, Morde and Brown tried to reason with the sheriff, thinking that he was a reasonable man. But the sheriff just smiled dumbly. He was a big cake of a guy with heavy-lidded eyes. Sweat shone on his face. That was his best fighting cock, he told the explorers, and it had made him money. His hands went up in the air, palms open. What was he supposed to do now without his fighting bird? He wanted the men to make him an offer.

  He laughed, and the explorers laughed too. Morde dug into his bag, counted out several gold nuggets, and then dropped them on the sheriff’s desk. About $15 worth. That’s what it took to stay out of jail.

  They headed straight for their ship, the SS Cisne, moored at Trujillo harbor. She was eighty feet long with a strong but battered steel hull, marked up from years at sea. From there she would sail to the easternmost point on the Honduran coast, just north of Nic-aragua. Climbing on, there was a reason to be excited. The jungle finally beckoned.

  Snakes and Valium

  CHRIS BEGLEY SHUFFLED downstairs. Over eggs and toast in a leafy courtyard we pored over Morde’s notes, looked at our maps spread over the round table, and drew up a plan. We wouldn’t be following Morde’s initial entry by boat from the east, through the Caratasca Lagoon and overland to the Río Patuca. We would instead go along the seacoast, then cut west across the middle of the country on buses and trucks, and from there head by boat to look for Morde’s river camps, eventually ending up on the upper reaches of the Patuca, where Morde had been, and then proceed on foot into what Chris described as “the land of the lost cities.” Chris pointed to a green mountainous spot on the map in the middle of nowhere. “This is where we’ll be heading.”

  The last time he’d been out there, he said, bandits had kidnapped him. It was one of those moments when he was glad that his wife wasn’t watching the real-time movie that was his life in the wild. But he was fortunate. “I found out later that one of the guys had murdered someone and was hiding out.” He told the story with evident pride. He had sneaked off in the middle of the night while the men foraged for food. I laughed as if he were joking. He wasn’t.

  Meanwhile, as we sat there, I realized something disturbing: I’d forgotten my snake gaiters, the nylon puncture-proof polyurethane-coated guards that strapped onto my shins, back in Brooklyn. Snakes seemed to me more dangerous than bandits and even more worrisome than the weird airborne diseases. I hate snakes. Harmless garter snakes freak me out. I tried to get Chris to tell me not to worry. “I’m probably just being crazy about the snakes, right?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’re a very serious concern.”

  Chris can discuss poisonous snakes for hours, to the brink of madness. He’s seen most of them—from the hog-nosed viper to the coral snake. But the most feared is the fer-de-lance—one bite and your blood stops clotting, and you start bleeding from all your pores and orifices, including your eyes. When Chris gets going about the fer- de-lance, his face tightens. They hide in rocks, in trees, in the brush at your feet. Sometimes you see them every day out there. “Once I was climbing a cliff face, and just as I pulled myself up a level I was staring right at one on the rock. Inches from my face,” he said. Even with snakebite serum, he went on, you have about eighteen hours to get to a hospital for even a shot at survival. “That means you need a helicopter,” he said. And even if you do make it out in time, there’s no guarantee you’ll live. At the very least, you’ll probably lose the leg or the arm that took the bite.

  The fear that bolted through me is hard to describe. Before now, I had tried to block out the existence of snakes. Maybe that’s why I’d forgotten my gaiters. I had been to war zones and been confronted by mobsters and killers. But this was somehow different. The thought of a giant snake dropping out of a tree onto my neck or a snake chasing me through the jungle freaked me out—it seemed like bad fiction—and then bleeding from every bodily pore for nearly a day sounded worse than the most depraved kinds of torture. I did not want to die by snake.

  I asked Chris for ways to protect myself, and he said, “Just stay alert. Do not put your hands down in a bush.” Chris had encountered dozens of them over the years and had been lucky so far. But that’s all it was for him: luck. Unfortunately, there really was no bulletproof method of staying safe. “Pray,” Chris said. I popped my first Valium that afternoon, and, deciding that I wasn’t going to rely just on prayer, I bought some soccer shin guards at the local mall.

  “Definitely on the Way at Last”

  THE CISNE COULD sleep up to twelve, but the bunks smelled awful. Morde and Brown lay awake at night, worrying about the black clouds shadowing their wake.

  The winds grew, and mountainous swells buffeted the ship. The first night, a doctor on board warned that he had heard on the radio about a typhoid outbreak inland. He said that some people had already been evacuated. Be careful, he cautioned them.

  Sometimes Captain Cashman turned on his radio, and when the signal was clear enough, there was news of the war in Europe. It continued to unnerve Morde, but the farther he got from La Ceiba and Trujillo, the less interest he had in events across the Atlantic. The war, he said at one time, “seemed far away,” the distance of the conflict a relief. Meanwhile, he decided to let his beard grow and began taking quinine for malaria.

  When the ship drew within sight of the coastline, there was nothing much to see, just long stretches of white beach, then patches of green, then sandy beach again. No villages. No inhabitants. Here there would be no regular meals, no hotels or beds. All communication with the wider world would soon be cut off.

  On April 29, after two days at sea, the Cisne entered the Caratasca Lagoon, the first part of a swampy miasma of interconnected creeks, rivers, and lakes that reached twenty-five miles inland and stretched along the coast for nearly sixty miles. It was the gateway to the Mosquitia. The skies still dark, Cashman dropped anchor just off a small village built on stilts. While supplies were unloaded and delivered, the explorers killed time playing the harmonica and poring over maps. They practiced firing their guns, imagining the lethal world that lay ahead.

  That night, the Cisne sailed deeper into the lagoon, but the boat kept catching the bottom, and Cashman decided that it was too dangerous to risk venturing any farther. The weather would only get worse, and visibility was already nil. Morde contemplated going back up the coast with the ship and disembarking at another point closer to the mouth of the Patuca. At 1 a.m. he scanned the view from the deck. He could see nothing but swampy gloom. The moon was out of sight. There were only brown-black waters, filled with weeds and crocodiles, thick bush rising all around. It was Central America’s largest swamp, and it was easy to get lost out there. But if Morde and Brown continued on the Cisne, the storm might delay them further, and Cashman warned that there was no guarantee he would be able to dock anywhere along the coast in high seas. They decided to stay and find their own way to the Patuca.

>   Morde and Brown unloaded more than a thousand pounds of gear onto a stretch of beach and then said good-bye to the old sea captain. As the Cisne chugged away, the explorers watched their last connection to civilization fade away, eventually vanishing into the night. Fifteen minutes later, the sky opened up at last, and they shivered underneath a tarp as the rain drummed overhead. In his logbook, Morde wrote, “Horrible night—no sleep. Soaked to the skin.” But, he added, with a note of optimism, “Definitely on the way at last!”

  The Valley of the Princess

  WE CAME ACROSS the dead body a few hours into our road trip.

  Our rented Toyota SUV was loaded down with our gear. In Morde’s footsteps, we were headed east to Trujillo, to which the first rumors of the city had percolated. We planned to stay there the night before meeting the two guides who would take us into the jungle. On the road, we had passed shotgun shacks, gated houses, plantations with fenced-in fields of banana trees and palms, and trash heaps crawling with feral dogs. Soon the houses were fewer and poorer, nothing more than primitive huts dropped into a cutout piece of the greenery. Chris flipped through the Eagles and Bonnie Raitt on the radio while the roads alternated between pavement and dirt and then mostly dirt. At one point, I saw a boy on the side of a road trying to sell an iguana that was at least four feet long and secured on a leash. Every half hour the police or military stopped us, looking for drugs or armed supporters of President Mel.

  I had nearly drifted off when Chris pointed out that we were not far from the valley that Pedraza and the princess had gazed across. “There,” he said. “You see it?” He pointed at a flat, verdant stretch of land in front of us, covered in African oil palms, and mountains in the distance. I had read the story a hundred times, as it had been relayed in a letter to Spanish King Charles, parsing it for any clues that might help us. Of the earliest tales, Pedraza’s was most closely associated with the legend. He had been the first bishop of Honduras. Based in Trujillo, his religious mission had regularly taken him on overnight trips into untracked territories across the country. In his famous journey, a team of sixty “peaceful Indians” had traveled with him for three days and three nights through heavy jungle and swamp before he had reached the top of a mountain. There he had been met by a group of local Indian leaders, including three males and the daughter of a chief. Scholars debate where exactly Pedraza was when his expedition stopped, but most guess that he was between fifty and eighty miles west of the sea.