Jungleland Read online

  As Pedraza stood on that mountaintop, the princess talked of a city farther out in the jungle. With a raised hand, she pointed over the valley, where the rolling green land met the blue sky. Over there, she said, is Tagusgualpa—the house where gold is smelted. In the bright sunlight, the golden place shimmered white like the mountains nearby—a white city. In my notes, I had wondered, was this the same place that Columbus and Cortés had talked about? In his letter, Pedraza didn’t attempt to estimate how many people lived in the land, nor did he mention the name of the girl’s particular city. When pressed for additional details, she said that it was a rich place where people “ate off gold plates,” suggesting the home of a civilized people, not savages.

  Pedraza’s story was particularly gripping to treasure hunters and explorers because he was a respectable priest, not an unreliable and self-inflating conquistador. It was also of interest because the suggestion of such a place complicated the prevailing view that the incoming Europeans were in fact more modern and advanced as a society than the Indians who had been there before. But Father Pedraza never went to the city; at least he never wrote home about it. He returned to Trujillo, leaving the lost city to other seekers.

  IN THE ROAD, a crowd of people stood in front of an empty school bus that had pulled off to the side. A country song I didn’t recognize was playing dimly through a tripartite door that sagged half open. Practically everyone was staring at the ground. We’d almost run them all down, but Chris had veered away and in the same breath told me not to look. He slammed the truck to a stop before we rolled down a swampy ditch. I looked.

  Chris stayed behind as I got out and pushed toward the center of the crowd, stepping over a single, carefully polished brown cowboy boot. Another step, and I met the front tire of a motorcycle keeled over on the dirt. Then the man’s body.

  My mind had trouble synthesizing the scene. The body was twisted up in ways that a body doesn’t naturally twist—arms bent back at the elbows, knees loosed from the sockets. Three brilliant white bones shot through the skin of the left and right arms. The man wore blue jeans and a red button-down shirt. His dark hair was wet with blood, and his face was so caked in dirt and stones and blood that it looked like ground beef. The school bus had collided with him head-on and was now parked about five yards up from the scene.

  One man stood directly over the body, rubbing his hands into a ball, his face as white as the dead man’s protruding bones. I took him to be the driver, a little older than I. The sun blasted down on us, and I thought I could smell the blood. I tasted vomit but managed to stop myself from a full-on retch. I felt dizzy, as if I was going to tip over. The crowd took my gringo stock but otherwise stood impassively, smoking and sipping soft drinks, talking in their familiar Spanish patter. Just as I was turning away, I heard someone say that the biker was only twenty-five, just a kid.

  I stumbled back to Chris waiting in the truck, the other Chris, I thought, imagining writing this very scene and going a little nuts. Over the next three days, I would see two more dead bodies, including those of a seven-year-old boy we found floating in a river and a man who had been shot at home. I would think more than once, “Pray.” Chris started the engine, and we drove off through a swamp to avoid a military blockade. We didn’t speak. Trujillo was some twenty miles away.

  O. HENRY, WHOSE real name was William Sydney Porter, wrote about Trujillo in his 1919 collection of short stories, Cabbages and Kings. In those stories he called Honduras “Anchuria,” the “land where anything goes,” and Trujillo became “Coralio,” “a little pearl on an emerald band.” Nearly three decades before the book was published, he actually lived in Trujillo for a period of time—another gringo looking for a way out. It was a rough spot in his life. He had been a clerk at a bank in Houston when he was charged with embezzlement, but a day before his trial, he had fled for New Orleans and then caught a boat for Honduras. “Those old days of life in the States,” he wrote, “seemed like an irritating dream.”

  It took two hours driving through the mud for Chris and me to arrive. Not much has changed in Trujillo since Morde’s visit—and probably little since O. Henry’s. The roads are stone or dirt or a mixture of the two, and you don’t have to endure much foot traffic. There are about 20,000 to 30,000 people scattered around the central town and the suburbs. The two- and three-story wood and concrete buildings are brightly painted—blues, greens, yellows. We found an entirely vacant hotel where an older woman received us as though our arrival was something of an event in the tiny place’s history. My room was on the second floor and smelled as though the door hadn’t been opened in a century. In one corner, an army of red ants swarmed the stray crumbs of something that had once been rather large, judging by the distance between the scattered remains. The top bedsheet was wrinkled in the shape of a body. A worn Spanish Bible lay on the desk, and there was a tiny television in the corner that didn’t work. In the wall, an air-conditioning unit sounded as though it was going to shake itself free, rumbling as loudly as the engine of an eighteen-wheeler.

  I tried to call Amy on the hotel phone, thinking that her voice would soothe me, but the machine picked up. It was just about five in the evening in New York, and my mind drifted to them: Sky on the monkey bars down the block, getting in a few final minutes of fun before dinnertime. Or were they on the roof, enjoying the late sun, watering our plants and flowers? I was in a serious daze. “I’m thinking of you guys,” I said before hanging up, feeling utterly alone.

  When we walked around that evening, most of the town was dark by 9 p.m., as if everyone had gone to sleep. Near the beach, loud country music filled the night air, and we followed it, lured to a pair of restaurants with dueling bass lines emanating from concert-style speakers. But no one was inside either one. Not even a waiter. We strolled past the Spanish fort, which now isn’t much more than some crumbling walls, a low-lying stone building, and a few cannon next to some fragrant mango trees. A statue of Christopher Columbus stood on the nearby cliff, pointing out at the dark sea before us. Up a long hill on the way back to the hotel, we ended up at Cementerio Viejo, where the outlaw William Walker is buried. Morde had been here seventy years ago.

  We got into a conversation with a woman wearing a loose white dress standing in front of a crumbling two-story building across the street. “Sometimes you see his ghost,” she said about Walker. She looked to be in her sixties. In 1860, Walker was captured in Honduras and executed in front of the Spanish fort. He was thirty-six years old. The woman made a gesture as if she was describing a skyscraper. “He is very, very tall,” she said about his ghost. “He comes out when the moon is right.”

  That night I had the shakes. I couldn’t get a thought out of my head: this was only my first day. I tried to pray but didn’t even know where to begin and fell asleep. When I woke, we were already late to meet our men.

  “Gold Fever”

  BOB BURKE CAME motoring up to Morde and Brown in a forty-foot pitpan, the sort of long, narrow wooden boat that locals used to get around the country’s interior. He was a white man but as wild-looking as the boggy foliage around them—scrawny and muscular, in ragged clothes, with a heavy beard and waist-long hair tied back, a blue bandanna wrapped around the crown of his head. He was barefoot. A .45-caliber pistol dangled from his belt like a warning.

  That morning, Morde and Brown had made their way up the Caratasca Lagoon to an encampment where natives transported pine out of the jungle. The huts were made of waja leaves, just temporary lodging, and the workers looked rough and frayed as though they’d spent the night brawling over a bottle of rum.

  Burke knew the camp owners and had come for supplies. He told Morde and Brown he was from Philadelphia but had been living in Honduras for almost two decades. He shared a hut in the jungle with his Indian wife and their four children about twenty miles inland. He pointed at the swamp. His hut was about five miles from the Río Patuca, and he was heading back there in the morning, if they wanted a ride.

  The men
spent the night on the beach, where they ate a turtle they had fished out of the water, and, seeing no other options, left with Burke when the sun came up on May 2. The rain held off. As they motored along, the mosquitoes swarmed the air like an aerosol and the foliage slowly came alive. They “saw white and black cranes as tall as man. Egrets by the dozens. White face monkeys in the trees, crocodiles in the creeks.” When night fell, the men watched the long inky bodies of crocodiles rise out of the gloom, eyes “gleaming red as rubies.”

  Burke, in the meantime, filled the silence with the unusual story of his life, which had much in common with the stories of many others who had fled the United States and disappeared into the edges of the jungle. He said he had left Philadelphia when he was nineteen, after an unpleasant stint in the navy. “Under what cloud he left the States, he never mentioned and we never asked,” Morde wrote in his journal, though he would later find out that Burke had killed someone over a woman. “He did admit however that he could never go back and that he can’t be extradited under Honduras law.”

  When he landed, Burke said he joined two revolutions in Honduras, smuggling guns from the United States. During the second, he told them, he had been jailed and tortured—machete whipped—over the location of a stash of weapons. That made him laugh. He had refused to tell where it was, and they had eventually released him. The war cache, meanwhile, was still buried in the jungle—because you never knew when another coup was going to flare up. He seemed to imply that the guns represented a kind of insurance policy.

  Soon afterward, he’d gone to work for one of the fruit companies, though that hadn’t lasted long, so he’d decided he’d rather be on his own. As he put it, he’d kept moving “further and further from civilization until I ended up in Mosquitia.”

  After marrying, he said, he had taken his family into the bush and treated the experience as an education. He knew the names of most species of trees and flowers—with the Latin designations—and could identify any snake. He said that he “had contempt for the slow fer de lance” and described himself now as an “adventurer and prospector” with a “gold fever that gnaws at the vitals.”

  It was late in the day when the men arrived at a stretch of hard earth that Morde called Tibalkan Landing, but they still had to trek another four miles through swamp grass and pine savanna to reach Burke’s thatched hut. There, Morde was shocked by what he saw. It was “indescribably filthy—pigs snorting around, chickens under foot, also two mangy dogs.” The remoteness of the place gave Morde the distinct impression of its being a hideout. But he was too tired and too sore to care; his feet were covered in blisters. He and Brown set up cots outside and slept “like dogs.”

  The next morning, eager to move on, they hired two horses and a crew of fifty Indians to transport their heavy gear five miles overland to the Río Patuca. When they were ready to go, Burke decided to join their adventure. Anything involving gold interested him. He certainly had the credentials for the mission. He had been up the Patuca, and he’d walked the many surrounding mountains and valleys. He spoke Spanish and every local Indian language, and some of the tribes upriver knew his face. If anyone could help find the lost city, it was Burke. Whether Morde thought twice about having a murderer along with them is impossible to say. But surely a violent streak had its virtues where they were headed. A brutal man like Burke, in other words, could be useful.

  Pancho

  CHRIS HAD ARRANGED for us to meet our two lost-city guides at a gas station not far from Trujillo. Pancho and his twenty-one-year-old son Angel had ridden all morning in the back of a battered pickup truck from their tiny village in the far eastern part of the country. When I saw them, at first I was a little confused. It struck me that they weren’t exactly dressed for a monthlong journey over mountains, through rain, and into the thick forest. They looked more as though they were headed to the mall. Both wore oversize jeans, leather shoes, and pressed dress shirts. Pancho favored a blue button-down that throughout the trip would always look as though it had just been ironed. He wore a sombrero, Angel a Diesel cap. And they each carried an overnight-size sack, not a giant pack. When I asked about his bag, Pancho just chuckled, as though I were the silly one.

  Pancho is solidly built, with a jet-black soap-bar mustache, probably in his late fifties, though Chris told me that he could outwalk both of us. Years before, he had worked with Chris on a dig. He could handle a gun and was a tracker too. “He’s a real pro,” Chris had said earlier that day. Pancho knew the difference between jaguar tracks and wild pig tracks, and he could calculate how much time had passed since they had been made.

  He was also incredibly superstitious. As Pancho climbed into the truck, he said, “Do you want to hear a story about Ciudad Blanca?” I would learn over time that Pancho was a man of few words. You had to listen when he spoke. He didn’t repeat himself.

  “I was out hunting where people talk about the lost city. It was very far out in the jungle,” he said from the backseat as Chris started up the truck. “I had been out there for days, but then I began to get very tired. I had slept but not very much. So I sat down in a clearing, and eventually I fell asleep.”

  How long he slept, he didn’t know. But when he woke up, it was nighttime and he saw a man. “His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face. But it was like he was always there. Like he was sleeping next to me,” he said.

  Pancho paused and looked out the window at the passing blur of banana plantations. “When I stood up, the man left. I never saw his face. He disappeared,” he said.

  So who was the man? I asked. Pancho didn’t know. “Maybe it was the jungle. The jungle has different forms. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman or even a child,” he said. But the man without a face was not his point. His point was that the place we were headed was deceptive. The jungle plays tricks on you. “Do you understand?” Pancho asked. “Strange things happen out there.”

  WHEN CHRIS HAD initially approached Pancho about the trip, he had been hesitant to join us. Not many knowledgeable locals wanted to go where we were going—and for so long. Pancho had other reasons to resist. He had spent a good part of his life in the jungle, and the jungle where we would begin and end our journey, a place known as Olancho, had damaged him. It had stolen many of his friends and family.

  Olancho is the largest territory in all of Honduras, about 15,000 square miles of rugged mountains and dense forest. It is larger than the entire neighboring country of El Salvador. For years, it was a place where you could get free farmland. It was too isolated, too buggy, too muddy, and too primitive to appeal to very many.

  Still, some like Pancho settled there. “Freedom,” he said. He went first with his parents and lived with his seven brothers in a two-room hut they built in two weeks out of pine and palm tree leaves. He fell in love with a woman from the area and soon married her. Later, he constructed his own house. He bought some cows; tilled the land; planted coffee, manioc, and corn, among other staples; and lived off the harvest. He had eight kids, and welcomed more of his relatives who followed his example. For a time things were good. But Pancho’s prosperity did not last long. Big ranchers, with their big trucks, moved in, and along with loggers they cut away the jungle. There was no military, no police. The law was fluid—which is still the case today.

  In time, two of Pancho’s brothers were shot dead. One was killed in a land feud. The motive behind the other’s demise is less clear. Pancho moved twice, trying to stay away from village wars and feuding neighbors. Along the way he buried two of his children, who fell sick and died before they could be carried the many miles through heavy jungle to a hospital.

  There was a saying about the region: Olancho es ancho para entrar, y angosto para salir—Olancho is easy to get into and hard to get out of.

  Pancho didn’t care to talk much about those days other than to say that it had been a good time and then a sad time. It was hard to leave, but eventually he did. His last home had been in a tiny village called Bonanza. When he moved away
for good, he left behind a dream of owning land, of being a farmer, a man with cattle and independent means.

  His new house is on the east coast, far from Olancho. Although it was a rental and much smaller, with a lot less land, there were no more greedy ranchers or crazy pioneers. It was a safer place. “I have six children now,” he said. “They’re all grown up.” He smiled at his son Angel, who, like the five others, drove four-wheel-drive trucks of merchandise and passengers up and down the coast.

  Over the years, Pancho had returned several times to Olancho, but he had mostly avoided the villages where he had lived. He had not visited most of those places in years. But Chris had persuaded him to come along. Now he headed back home.

  CHRIS EXPLAINED THE first leg of the trip to Pancho as we drove: we would take a truck straight across the country to the city of Catacamas and then drop down to the Río Blanco, where Morde had set up his main camp. Whereas Morde had made his way up to the Blanco by the Río Patuca, we were going to get there by land and then visit the Patuca later, on our way out. The one road across the territory was about 225 miles long, but it wasn’t so much a road as one long dusty creek bed through high, isolated mountains.