CHAPTER 2

I can tell you only that it is somewhere in the Americas.

I first heard the legend of the White City in 1996, when I was on assignment from National Geographic to write a story about the ancient temples of Cambodia. NASA had recently flown a DC-10 carrying an advanced radar system over various jungle areas of the world, to determine if the radar could penetrate the foliage to reveal what lay hidden beneath. The results were analyzed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, by a team of experts in remote sensing—that is, analyzing images of the earth taken from space. After crunching the data, the team found the ruins of a previously unknown, twelfth-century temple hidden in the Cambodian jungle. I met with the team’s leader, Ron Blom, to find out more.

Blom was not your stereotypical scientist: He was bearded, rugged, and fit, with aviator glasses and an Indiana Jones hat. He had gained international fame for discovering the lost city of Ubar in the Arabian Desert. When I asked Blom what other projects he was working on, he rattled off a number of missions: mapping the frankincense trade routes across the Arabian Desert, tracking the old Silk Road, and mapping Civil War sites in Virginia. He explained that by combining digitized images in different wavelengths of infrared light and radar, and then “beating up on the data” with computers, they were now able to see fifteen feet beneath desert sands, peer through jungle canopies, and even cancel out modern tracks and roads, revealing ancient trails.

Ancient trails were interesting, but I was particularly enthralled by the idea that this technology might be able to discover other lost cities like Ubar. When I asked him about that, Blom suddenly became evasive. “Let me just say we are looking at other sites.”

Scientists are terrible at deception: I knew immediately he was covering up something big. I pressed further, and finally he admitted that it “could be a very major site, but I can’t talk about it. I’m working for a private party. I’ve signed a nondisclosure agreement. It’s based on legends of a lost city. I can tell you only that it’s somewhere in the Americas. The legends suggested a general area, and we’re using satellite data to locate targets.”

“Have you found it?”

“I can’t say more than that.”

“Who are you working with?”

“I can’t reveal that information.”

Blom agreed to pass on my interest to his mysterious employer and ask him or her to call me. He couldn’t promise that the person would be in touch.

Inflamed with curiosity about the possible identity of this “lost city,” I called up several Central American archaeologists I knew, who offered their own speculations. David Stuart, then assistant director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program at Harvard’s Peabody Museum and one of those who contributed to the decipherment of Mayan glyphs, told me: “I know that area pretty well. Some of it is almost unexplored by archaeologists. Local people were always telling me about sites they’d see while hunting out in the forest—big ruins with sculptures. Most of these stories are true; these people have no reason to lie.” In Mayan texts themselves, he added, there are also tantalizing references to major cities and temples that are not correlated with any known sites. It is one of the last areas on earth where an actual pre-Columbian city could be hidden, untouched for centuries.

The Harvard Mayanist Gordon Willey (now deceased) immediately brought up the legend of the White City. “I remember when I was down in Honduras in 1970, there was talk of a place called Ciudad Blanca, the White City, back in there away from the coast. It was bar talk from the usual random bullshitters, and I thought it was probably some limestone cliffs.” Nevertheless, Willey was intrigued enough to want to check it out. “But I never could get a permit to go in there.” The Honduran government rarely issued archaeological permits to explore that backcountry jungle, because it is so perilous.

A week later, Blom’s employer did call me. His name was Steve Elkins and he described himself as a “cinematographer, a curious man, an adventurer.” He wanted to know why the hell I was interrogating Blom.

I said I wanted to do a short New Yorker piece about his search for this legendary lost city—whatever it was. He grudgingly agreed to talk, but only if I didn’t identify the site or the country it was in. Off the record, he finally admitted that they were, indeed, looking for Ciudad Blanca, the White City, also known as the Lost City of the Monkey God. But he didn’t want me to reveal any of this in my New Yorker piece until he’d had a chance to confirm it on the ground. “Just say it’s a lost city somewhere in Central America. Don’t say it’s in Honduras or we’re screwed.”

Elkins had heard the legends, both indigenous and European, about the White City that described an advanced and wealthy city with extensive trading networks, deep in the inaccessible mountains of Mosquitia, untouched for centuries, as pristine as the day it was abandoned; it would be an archaeological discovery of enormous significance. “We thought that by using space imagery we could locate a target area and identify promising sites” for later ground exploration, Elkins explained. Blom and his team had zeroed in on an area about a mile square, which he had labeled Target One or T1 for short, where there appeared to be large man-made structures. Elkins refused to elaborate.

“I can’t tell you any more, because this space-imaging data can be purchased by anybody. Anybody could do what we did and grab the credit. It could also be looted. All we have left to do is go there, which we plan to do this spring. By then,” he added, “we hope we’ll have something to announce to the world.”*