Jungleland Read online

  “Where are we?” Juan asked as he looked out from under the hood. He had just poured our last bottle of water into the radiator.

  No one seemed to know how far we were from Catacamas. Every journey had these moments—times when you were completely adrift, feeling a bit helpless and more than a little terrified, with no clear notion about how a situation was going to play out. This wasn’t too far from how I’d felt the day I’d left Amy and Sky in Brooklyn.

  “Should I be worried?” I asked Chris.

  “Let’s not talk about it.” He said it without a laugh or a smile.

  “But should I?”

  “The Equivalent of a State Secret”

  IT IS THE equivalent of a state secret,” Morde wrote at one point about the lost place.

  As the expedition pushed farther into the rain forest, the men prepared to encounter the more remote tribes dotting the upper reaches of the Patuca. Those were the people Morde would have to befriend if he wanted to learn anything about the vast jungle around him.

  On the morning of May 15, the men paddled ashore to a Tawahka camp, where blank faces met them. The Tawahkas were one of the jungle’s two main indigenous groups—the other, known as the Pech, lived more often in the mountains.

  The Tawahkas looked at Morde like the stranger he was—a tall, rangy man visiting from another world. “All politely gazed down from their huts,” he wrote.

  It was as if the tribe was trying to decide whether to attack or retreat—no different from when the conquistadors had come asking questions. Some carried spears. The women wore threadbare dresses, and most of the men were in pants and T-shirts. The babies were mostly naked.

  It was a tense standoff until the chief of the village finally emerged from the brush. In his journals, Morde called him Nicolas; though he was fifty-five, he looked much older, with deep lines stretching across his face. His hair was straight and black. He was short and muscular from years of swinging machetes and paddling up and down the river.

  Just as the rain came, Nicolas invited the men up to his hut. His was one of the larger ones, about forty feet long by thirty feet wide, with five low-slung wooden beds inside. Bananas and plantains adorned the wood rafters. In a corner were fish spears, wood bows, and a trough of chichi, a homemade beer brewed from sugarcane and pineapple juice.

  The storm continued through the night, allowing the men to dry off next to a cooking fire at the center of the hut. They ate wabul, boiled and mashed plantain with coconut water. At first Nicolas was reticent, but then he began to open up. He said he had fifteen children, the youngest still an infant. Bringing up children in the jungle was a game of chance. He said his people married at twelve and became parents a year later. “We have many children, but many die and are buried in the ground,” Nicolas said.

  Anthropologists know little about the two tribes, except that they are Amerindian groups with linguistic ties to Panamanian and Colombian cultures. They speak languages in the Chibchan language family, which include speakers from as far south as Colombia. Culturally, the tribes are thought to be similar to people from South America, from whence they likely migrated some three thousand years ago, after war or disease forced them out. Some scholars believe their ancestors were the even more mysterious Chorotega. Before the Spanish invasion, the Chorotega were thought to have been dispersed across Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and they were either distantly related to the Maya and Aztecs or perhaps their contemporaries.

  Morde—and Captain Murray before him—believed that the Chorotega had once been part of the lost civilization he sought. “Whether they built the city, or conquered it from an older people and occupied it, is not known,” Morde would later write. But the lack of any extensive ruins associated with the group was baffling.

  Morde hoped to change that, but when he encountered Nicolas and the other tribesmen, the Indians were dying out as a people. Though their pre-Columbian population was thought to have been in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, Morde estimated that the two tribes now numbered in the thousands. Spanish missionaries had converted most of them to Christianity. Now after many generations, they were rapidly becoming exiles from their own land, pushed out of Eden, now on the lam.

  As they died out, their history died too. “They have no written language to record the exploits of their ancestral heroes,” Morde wrote the night he met with the Tawahka chief. Their entire life, the life that they remembered, was passed down orally. In time, stories became warped, blurred, twisted. There were few hard facts, especially because the Indians were fearful of telling their stories to strangers. Something Nicolas narrated as if it had happened yesterday might actually have happened a hundred years before—or not at all. For Morde, as they wandered up and down the shores of the river and into the surrounding forests, life quickly began to feel less real and more like a tropical romance.

  Mortal Threats

  THE RADIATOR COOLED, and we continued again—in vain. As we built speed and optimism, the Geo Prizm began falling apart. First, a low-hanging branch knocked off the driver-side mirror, and about twenty minutes later, as the rain came in sheets, I looked up to find a crack in the windshield. The road became a muddy stream. The car fishtailed back and forth, huffing up a hill, and a hubcap spun loose. Each time a part flew off, Juan stopped, climbed out, and examined the broken car. Soon he was soaking wet, his chest visible through his blue shirt. When one of the headlights cracked, he’d had enough. Something inside him snapped.

  He stepped out of the car, stooped down to the mud, and scooped up the piece of headlight. By now we had been driving for seven hours, and we still didn’t know where we were. This was clearly more than Juan had bargained for. Holding the car part up in his right hand, he stared out over the darkening wet valley, as if trying to decide whether to go forward or turn back.

  “This isn’t my car,” he finally said. Even though we were all standing around him in the rain, he didn’t seem to notice us. How would his boss react? He had just started the job. I felt sorry for him. I did not want to be responsible for his having to return to his lousy job at the bottling plant.

  But there was no time to dwell on such contingencies. “We need to get this car going,” Pancho urged. This was especially alarming because Pancho was not one to get excited or to make demands. “We don’t want to be out here at night.” He pointed at the valley, which was full of shadows. And then he made the universal sign for a gun, put it to his head, and pulled the phantom trigger. The bandits were out there.

  Soon Pancho had coaxed Juan back into the car and we were driving again. Night came. For the next hour or so, Pancho sat in the middle of the backseat, his neck craning left to right. He was eyeing the road in front of us as if he had special powers to see into the darkness.

  I wondered if Morde had ever considered quitting his trip. But in all of his journals I couldn’t remember any such passage. I couldn’t get my thoughts to straighten out, so I tried to focus on my daughter, as if the memory of Sky’s smiling face would protect me from whatever murderous impulse was out there. I thought of hugging her, the way her little arms just barely reached around my waist, how she held on so tight and sometimes said, “Bear hug, I’m giving you a bear hug.” I could use that now, her holding me up.

  I closed my eyes but it made me feel only more alone and vulnerable, as if whatever bad thing was going to happen to me was already in the works, fated now, and there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe I deserved to be attacked by masked men with machine guns and machetes.

  At the top of a mountain, at about 3,000 feet, a cell phone jingle broke my spiraling thoughts. It was Juan’s wife. She had been trying him nonstop after not hearing from him for the last three hours.

  At first Juan spoke quietly, and I figured he was trying to explain to her that he was with four men looking for the lost city. Then there was a long stretch where I could hear her clearly berating him. After he snapped his phone closed, he seemed exhausted. “She thinks
I’m crazy,” he said. I told him my wife thought the same thing about my decision to go on this trip. You don’t have to do this.

  Juan spoke dreamily of his own four-year-old daughter, and I thought dreamily of mine. “I’m going to die,” he whimpered.

  I had no chance to digest this notion or worry further about my own life because just then two shadows appeared in the road about fifty yards in front of us.

  “Watch out!” Pancho yelled.

  That was exactly how the bandits took down vehicles: they jumped in the road and set up a circle of guns.

  “Turn the car around!” I shouted.

  But there was no time to make a U-turn escape. If the bandits had trucks, they would chase us down in a matter of seconds. We discussed accelerating and driving right over them at high speed. Instead we kept creeping forward as if drawn by gravitational force. We were too close to change course now. If they were armed, they could start shooting at any time and we’d be goners. I put my head in my lap, bracing for gunfire.

  When I finally looked up, I saw that the shadows were two kids holding up a rope across the road. We stopped, expecting to have to beg for our lives. I said something that didn’t come out as anything comprehensible. I pictured the parrots that my daughter had thought might keep me company as I died in this ruined Geo Prizm.

  But when the two boys approached, no gunmen followed. Instead, the boys put out their hands. All they wanted was some change.

  Dance of the Dead Monkeys

  WHEN NIGHT CAME at the Tawahka camp, Morde witnessed “an utterly weird ceremony,” as he wrote in his journal.

  A fire as a high as a house had been lit. The Indians—about three dozen of them—were mostly naked, except for some rags tied around their waists and macaw feathers slung around their necks. All night, they had been drinking chichi, and each now carried the corpse of a spider monkey stuck onto a spear. In the flickering light, their coconut-oiled chests glistened as they danced around a medicine man who wore a necklace of crocodile teeth and baby monkey skulls. As the women and children swayed in the shadows, the men began to cry out along with a drumbeat, a constant tum-tum narrating the legend of the Hairy Men, known as Ulaks.

  The Indians told Morde that they believed the Ulaks, half men and half spirits, lived on the ground, walked upright, and had the appearance of apes. In his journal, Morde described the legend like this: “One day three Ulaks walked into an Indian village and carried off three of its most beautiful and pleasing maidens. They took the girls back in the caves high in the mountains to live with them and bear their children. From this union came, however, not human nor partly human children but the small Urus (the native word for monkey). And that is why these monkeys are called the ‘sons of the hairy men.’ ” The day before the dance, the Indians had been sent out to kill three monkeys, the equivalent of killing three hairy men. With them, the Indians carried only three arrows to make the three kills. Anything less than three kills in three shots was seen as failure. The dance, then, Morde went on, was “a rite of revenge for the abduction of the three virgins.”

  As the night wore on, Morde and Brown watched as the ceremony turned into a mass burning—the Dance of the Dead Monkeys. Though the sight of the flaming corpses repelled him, he couldn’t turn away. “Under the influence of the fire,” he wrote, “the body shakes and quivers as though alive: sometimes it sits bolt upright, or an arm will lift rigidly, a leg drawn up.”

  The ceremony ended when the last monkey was fully burned. Then a nightlong feast of monkey meat ensued, the tribe getting revenge for their lost ancestors. To Morde, the act recalled the ancient Aztecs, the man-eaters par excellence, who believed that the bodies of their human victims were necessary offerings to appease the gods and maintain the balance of the universe.

  What did all this have to do with the secret of the lost city? As Morde pressed the Indians, he began to suspect that the ritual was a “perverted memory” or a mistranslation of the traditions of a distant generation, long before Columbus had arrived. The monkey had perhaps once been a central deity—a monkey god who had a city built for him. Native elders told Morde that “the Monkey god has its priests . . . and perhaps human sacrifices”—but its history remained a mystery, as did the rise and fall of the monkey god’s followers.

  In parsing the myth, Morde subscribed to a premodern theory, in the mode of Christopher Columbus—that there could be a link between the more advanced ancient civilizations there and in the Far East, where he had once traveled. In the Far East, Hindus worshiped a deity called Hanuman, who was a general among the vanaras, the apelike forest dwellers whose fate it was to battle the demon king Ravana.

  What was intriguing to Morde was the notion that the Hanuman myth could have migrated to Honduras ten or fifteen thousand years ago—possibly along with tribes that trekked across the icy northern land bridge known as Beringia, linking present-day Siberia and Alaska.

  The idea of people migrating from the east in ancient times—connecting East to West—had a precedent in the so-called lost tribe theory of sixteenth-century Spanish friar Diego Durán. In his book The Aztecs, Durán suggested, without any sort of evidence, that Sargon, the king of Assyria in 721 BC, had excommunicated the Ten Tribes of Israel, who had ended up in various far-flung parts of the world, including the Americas. “I cannot help but believe that these Indians are the children of Israel,” Durán wrote.

  Closer to Morde’s own day, a scientist named Lewis Henry Morgan added a twist to the migration theory. In the 1850s, Morgan became famous in the United States and abroad (Charles Darwin cited him) for his social ideas involving the indigenous tribes of the United States. In his studies he claimed that some customs shared between people, no matter how many continents apart, indicated proof of genetic ties. Morde, for his part, thought he saw in the natives along the river “a trace of slanting Oriental eyes and the cheekbones of the Chinese and Hindu.”

  Few people, if any, these days dispute existence of an early land bridge; however, most scientists have moved away from the idea that cultures were invented in one place, such as Europe or Asia, and diffused to another place, such as the Americas. Every archaeologist now knows that civilizations such as those in Mesoamerica or Andean cultures in Peru, no matter how far-flung, no matter how isolated in the jungles, could spring up entirely alone, self-sufficiently, becoming sophisticated societies from within.

  WHEN MORDE AND BROWN awoke the next morning, they were surprised by how late they’d slept. The sun was already up, the fog mostly gone. Had the Indians cast a spell on them? Or was it all the chichi? “Why does it take us so long to get started?” Morde wondered.

  The explorers told Nicolas that they wanted to travel to the region of the “hairy men.” Some discussion about that followed, and the Indians shook their heads. The Tawahkas warned the explorers that the territory upriver was “to be avoided.” The Ulaks, they said, “live in caves high in the peaks.” They urged them not to go.

  Whether Morde and Brown voiced their excitement, they likely took the gloomy reaction as positive news: they were headed in the direction of the ancient White City. They asked Nicolas for a guide. Was there anyone who could show them the way? There was much reluctance, but eventually two stringy fifteen-year-olds stepped forward and offered to help. In Tawahka culture, they were already men. They knew the land as well as the elders did. They said they would take the explorers as far as what they called the “forbidden region.”

  Catacamas

  THE LAST COUPLE of hours on the road were silent. Only the sound of the creaking suspension ran beneath our thoughts. We waited for our luck to run out, but nothing happened. Even at the military checkpoint outside Catacamas, the tired soldiers did only a quick search before ducking back inside their trucks.

  It was around midnight, almost eleven hours after we’d started out, that we checked into a run-down concrete hotel in the center of town. By then the rain had resumed. As we stepped out, I noticed that one side of the roof of the ho
tel was warping and looked as if it might collapse in on itself at any moment. But I didn’t care about that—we had arrived safely, seemingly through some miracle.

  We would never get back the car’s hubcap. And though Juan didn’t make the return trip that night, I didn’t see him the next morning, and I will always wonder how he made it to La Ceiba—if he made it back at all.

  Chris and I were assigned a tiny windowless room on the second floor with two stone-hard single beds inches apart. Mine smelled of someone else’s body, but I appreciated it, if only for the fact that I needed to lie down. I closed my eyes. The dread was gone, oddly replaced by an invigorated, even emboldened spirit. I felt more alive than I had felt in years.

  “We made it, huh?” I said to Chris.

  “We did,” he said. “Now there’s tomorrow, and the next day and the next.”

  “It can’t get much worse than that.”

  Chris thought that was funny.

  That would be the final hotel, the final bed, and the final dry sheets of my journey.

  “Get some rest,” he said.

  “Green Hell”

  THE OLD PATUCA is a crafty enemy,” Morde wrote as the explorers fought their way upstream.

  Their two guides, Isidario and Julio, were taciturn as they worked the bow, fending off submerged jungle with their long wood poles, pushing off boulders, and calling out the rapids as they came. It was tough going and physically exhausting. This leg of the trip would last more than a week.

  The upper parts of the Patuca were a world abandoned—or never before inhabited. The river edges were bereft of encampments. There might have been people beyond the cliffs that rose steeply away into the tangle of trees and dangling vines, but the explorers didn’t see them as they paddled past. Beneath the tall trees and rock faces, the forty-foot pitpan felt like a toy. It made Morde feel insignificant before nature’s immensity. There were few vistas.