CHAPTER 6

We took canoes into the heart of darkness.

For three-quarters of a century, Morde’s tall tale, so rich in romance and adventure, has given impetus to the fable of the lost city. The White City or Monkey God legend became a part of the Honduran national psyche, a tale familiar even to schoolchildren. In 1960, the Honduran government drew a line around two thousand square miles of the largely unexplored interior of Mosquitia and called it the Ciudad Blanca Archaeological Reserve. In 1980, UNESCO named the area the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve and, two years later, declared this unique rainforest a World Heritage Site. Meanwhile, ambitious explorers continued to make dubious and unverified claims of having found the lost city, while many archaeologists suspected a city of that nature might exist, in some form, deep in the jungle, either near Morde’s claimed area or somewhere else. In 1994, the chief of archaeology for the Honduran government, George Hasemann, said in an interview that he believed all the large sites in Mosquitia may have been part of a single political system whose center, the White City, had not yet been found.

Steve Elkins first heard of the White City from an adventurer named Steve Morgan, who was a professional collector of legends and stories. Morgan had compiled a list of what he considered to be the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and he had boxes of files of research into various lost cities, pirate treasures, ancient tombs, and shipwrecks loaded with gold. Morgan engaged in marine salvage for a living and had actually found a number of shipwrecks. His house was full of stacks of Chinese porcelain and chests heaped with silver Spanish reals and pieces of eight. Elkins, who owned a business in LA renting camera equipment to television production crews, decided he wanted to go into television production himself, since he had the gear. He consulted Morgan and pored over his list of unsolved mysteries with fascination. Two mysteries attracted Elkins’s special attention: the legend of Ciudad Blanca and the Loot of Lima, also known as the Cocos Island treasure.

Elkins and Morgan teamed up, did some research into Ciudad Blanca, and identified an area in Mosquitia they thought might contain it. They organized an expedition, led by Morgan. Elkins sold the idea of a television show about the search to Spiegel TV in Germany.

Elkins, his German coproducer and correspondent, along with his California film crew, arrived in Honduras in 1994. They hired a local fixer, a man named Bruce Heinicke, to handle logistics. A childhood friend of Morgan’s, Heinicke was an American married to a Honduran. He’d been doing business in Honduras for many years as a gold prospector, drug smuggler, treasure hunter, and archaeological looter. While the choice of a man like Heinicke might have seemed eccentric, the expedition required someone who not only knew his way around Honduras but also had a keen understanding of when and how to bribe people (a delicate art), how to manage Honduran bureaucracy, how to intimidate and threaten, and how to deal with dangerous criminals without getting killed. Elkins recalled seeing Heinicke for the first time in the airport parking lot after their arrival. He was a big fat guy dressed in a pineapple shirt, pinky ring and gold watch, cigarette dangling from his mouth, with a wad of bills in his fist. He was barking orders in Spanish and passing out money. “We got a video of him,” said Elkins. “It’s hilarious.”

It would be the beginning of a long and complicated relationship.

The crew filmed in Copán and then took a bush flight to a little town called Palacios on the Mosquito Coast. From there they set off into the interior, with indigenous guides and a rough idea of where the lost city might be, based on their research and interviews.

“We took canoes into the heart of darkness,” Elkins remembered. Morgan led the expedition, hiring local informants who claimed to know of an area deep in the mountains where there were ruins. “To be honest,” Elkins said, “I just tagged along. I really didn’t know where the fuck we were going.”

The canoes were forty-foot dugouts, hollowed out of a single mahogany tree trunk, equipped with small outboard Evinrudes. Each could fit six people and a bunch of gear. “We went up some little river. I don’t even know the name of it.” Upstream the water became so shallow and full of sunken logs and mud bars that they had to raise the engines and propel themselves along by poling. They went miles and miles through endless swamps and up unknown tributaries, following wavering, uncertain maps. “We were constantly in and out of the canoes, in the muck. It got denser and denser and denser, until we were up high in the mountains.”

There was no sign of any lost cities, but they did make a discovery. “All of a sudden there was this big boulder in a stream,” Elkins said, “with a carving on it showing a guy with a fancy headdress planting seeds.” He had what he called an “epiphany”—here was proof, if more were needed, that a sophisticated and mysterious people had once lived and farmed in a land that today was deep, uninhabited jungle. Led by local Indian guides, Elkins and the group pushed on, forced to abandon their canoes and continue on foot, slashing their way through the jungle with machetes. On a hard day’s travel they were lucky to make one or two miles. Steve and his crew ate MREs, while the Indian guides ate iguanas. At one point the guides became agitated; taking out their weapons, they confided that the group was being tracked by jaguars. They frequently ran into venomous snakes and were assaulted day and night by insects. “After I came out,” Elkins recalled, “I had bites for six months.” He was grateful not to have been stricken with one of the many frightful tropical diseases common to the area.

One night, he exited his tent to go to the bathroom. The entire forest was glowing with millions of points of bioluminescence, caused by fungi that glow when the temperature and humidity are right. “It was like looking down at LA from thirty thousand feet,” he said. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Somewhere in the rainforest, they did find a scattering of broken stone sculptures, pottery, and tools. If there were mounds, it was impossible to tell, because the jungle was so thick. But either way, it was a small site and clearly not the White City. They finally gave up, exhausted and out of money.

Elkins was repeatedly shocked at Heinicke’s methods of getting things done in Honduras. After they reemerged from the jungle and were filming on Roatán Island in the Bay of Honduras, Elkins’s German producer got an emergency call on his satellite phone requiring his return to Hamburg immediately on business. They rushed to the airport to catch a flight out, but when they arrived they learned the plane was already full and on the runway. The next flight out wasn’t for several days. Heinicke huffed and puffed his way out on the tarmac, boarded the plane, pulled out a Colt .45 pistol, and inquired who was the last to board. He waved his pistol at the unfortunate passenger. “I need your fucking seat,” he said. “Get off.” The man stumbled off the plane in terror; Heinicke shoved the gun back into his waistband and said to the German producer, “Okay, you got your seat.”

Many years later, when Heinicke told me this story, he explained how he saw his role in the partnership: “See, Steve, he’s kind of dangerous to be with. He’ll tell me the good points he sees in someone, and I’ll say, ‘Fuck him, I don’t like him, I don’t trust him.’ That’s probably why we make a good partnership.”

Elkins, for his part, said, “Bruce is definitely the kind of guy you want to have on your side. And not the other way around.” He added, lowering his voice: “In order to make this happen, I had to dance with the devil at times.”

That first attempt to find the White City changed Elkins. He went in curious about the White City legend and returned having found his life’s mission. “I call it the ‘lost city virus,’” he told me later. “I became an addict. I was obsessed with the idea of trying to prove whether the lost city really existed.”

Elkins has an appealing streak of persistence and an indefatigable nature, which may very well come from his unconventional family. Originally from England and Russia, his great-grandparents arrived in the States through Ellis Island in the 1890s. His grandfather Jack Elkins was a jazz piano player who toured with Dixieland bands in the 1920s. Elkins’s father, Bud, went in an entirely different direction: into the army. He lied about his age to sign up at fifteen, but was caught during basic training and his mother had to come get him and drag him back home to finish high school. During World War II, Bud flew against the Japanese in the Aleutian Tigers squadron; after the war he went into the garment business, landing a contract to manufacture bunny outfits for Playboy clubs. He then went back into the army and took part in combat and intelligence-gathering missions in Vietnam, reaching the rank of colonel. His ultimate retirement dream was to own a Chicago-style kosher hot dog business; so after leaving the military he built a giant truck in the shape of a hot dog and drove it around LA selling dogs and Polish sausages before the business failed. Bud was a charmer and a ladies’ man, restless, with a yearning for adventure. Because of his philandering, Steve’s mother divorced him when Steve was eleven, and Steve grew up more or less fatherless in Chicago. “My mother was the salt of the earth and steady as a rock,” he said.

Elkins seems to have inherited his father’s wanderlust along with his mother’s pragmatic steadfastness, a mixture of traits that would serve him well in the search for the lost city.

Elkins attended Southern Illinois University. An avid hiker, he roamed the nearby Shawnee National Forest with friends who called him Over-the-Next-Ridge Elkins because he was always urging them on “to see what was over the next ridge.” On one of these jaunts he found a rock shelter on some bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. He camped out there with friends, and they began scratching around in the dirt, turning up arrowheads, spearpoints, bones, and broken pottery. He brought them back to the university. His archaeology professor arranged an excavation of the cave as a special studies program for the semester. In test excavations Elkins and the group uncovered human bones, carvings in shell, stone tools, and remains of food. Radiocarbon dating indicated the bottom layers were thousands of years old.

“That was the moment I became hooked on ancient history,” he told me. He spent many hours sitting in the shelter, looking out over the Mississippi River Valley and imagining what it would have been like to be born in the cave, grow up, raise children, get old, and die there—in the America of five thousand years ago.

Elkins’s first expedition into Mosquitia had impressed on him one brutally simple fact: “Walking aimlessly through the jungle is crazy. This is no way to find anything.”

He needed to address the problem in a more systematic way. He accomplished this with a two-pronged attack: historical research and space-age technology.

He delved deeply into the many stories of people who had looked for the White City, some of whom actually claimed to have found it. Most of these people were obvious cranks or otherwise untrustworthy, but there was one person who stood out. Steve Morgan had introduced Elkins to a man named Sam Glassmire, who said he had located and explored the White City. When Elkins met Glassmire, he found him to be a solid, respectable scientist with a surprisingly credible story—and in his living room were impressive stone sculptures he had allegedly carried out of the ruins. In 1997, Elkins and his video team interviewed Glassmire at his home in Santa Fe, and they captured his story on tape. (I first met Steve on this trip, as I lived in Santa Fe myself.)

In a twist on the Morde expedition, Glassmire, a geologist, had been hired to prospect for gold in Mosquitia and went looking for the lost city instead. He led three prospecting expeditions into Mosquitia in the late 1950s. A tough, weather-beaten man with a gravelly, slow-talking, New Mexico drawl, Glassmire had built a career as a respected scientist who had worked as an engineer for Los Alamos National Laboratory in the mid-fifties, when Los Alamos was still a closed city. He grew disenchanted with making nuclear bombs, so he moved to Santa Fe and set up a geological consulting firm.

In 1959, he had been hired by American mining interests to determine if there was placer gold along the gravel bars of the upper Patuca River and its tributaries. His employers had a lot of money: The budget for the first expedition alone was $40,000, and they would send Glassmire back twice more.

On that first expedition, Glassmire heard many rumors of the White City. “You hear about it as soon as you get in Honduras,” he recalled to Elkins.

As he explored the rivers looking for gold, he pestered his guides with questions. “I frequently heard natives mention the mysterious Ciudad Blanca,” he wrote in a 1960 article about his discovery in the Denver Post. “I asked my guide about it. He finally told me the men were afraid I planned to send the expedition up the Río Guampu [Wampu], toward Ciudad Blanca. If I did, he said, the men would desert.” When Glassmire asked why, the guide said that when the conquistadors arrived, Ciudad Blanca was a magnificent city. “Then came an unforeseen series of catastrophes. The people decided the gods were angry,” and so they abandoned the city, leaving all their belongings behind, and thereafter shunned it as a forbidden place.

On his third prospecting expedition into Honduras, Glassmire found placer beds along the Río Blanco and the Río Cuyamel—“gold beyond all my expectations”—in approximately the same area where Morde had struck gold. But Glassmire couldn’t get the lost city out of his mind. “When I got all through with my work,” he told Elkins, “I went off looking for it.” He selected ten men, including an old Sumu (Mayangna) Indian who said he had been to Ciudad Blanca as a boy and remembered where it was. “I had to bribe them pretty heavy with money to get them to go with me. We went far up a jungle river, what they call the Río Wampu, and then went off on a tributary called the Pao. We were in dugout canoes all this time. We ran out of stream and we had to take off on foot.” They slashed their way overland. “It’s one of the most terrific jungles in the world,” he recalled. “The area is very mountainous, very rough, and very steep… I don’t know of any more remote place in the world.”

After six days of brutal overland travel, on March 10, 1960, he saw an unusual mound “like a giant ice cream cone, overturned and covered with greenery.” In a small meadow they came across artifacts strewn over the ground, including what appeared to be a ceremonial seat or throne, decorated with an animal’s head. As they pushed forward, “Other mounds bulged out of the boundless jungle carpet… I also discerned elusive ash-gray specks sprinkled throughout the shimmering greenness. My nine-power binoculars exposed them for what they were—ruins of stone buildings!”

“I found it!” he cried out to his Indian guides. “I’ve found Ciudad Blanca!”

They hacked their way through and around the city for three days, but he estimated that their movement through the jungle was so slow that the entire exploration of the city amounted to no more than “a walk around the park.” He brought out a collection of beautiful stone carvings and other artifacts, saying he had to leave “tons” behind.

Glassmire tried to interest a foundation or a university in the discovery. The University of Pennsylvania expressed a desire to have his collection, he told Elkins, so he shipped off the majority of his artifacts, photographs, and maps, but still retained many sculptured heads and stone bowls. His daughter, Bonnie, still has the collection, which I have seen. It contains stone vessels, metates, and stone heads of fine workmanship, including a fabulous carving of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, identical to one in the Michael Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The artifacts alone suggest he found a major site, and a photograph taken of a cache of objects at the ruins shows a tremendous collection of sculptures that he had to leave behind. His hand-drawn map delineates previously unknown details of streams in the upper watershed of the Pao River, proving he did indeed penetrate that unexplored region. According to Glassmire’s interview, the university mounted an expedition, but instead of coming in from the sea and going up the rivers by canoe, it started in the town of Catacamas and they tried to take a “shortcut” over the mountains. “Three or four of them were killed,” he said, “two by snakes” and the others by disease. The expedition had to turn back.

I have been unable to confirm that this expedition ever took place, and the University of Pennsylvania insists they have no such collection. (I also checked with Penn State, in case he was confused.) But Glassmire’s daughter, Bonnie, is equally certain her father sent some of his materials to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Glassmire gave a copy of his map to Steve Elkins. It was not quite detailed enough to nail down the precise location, but it was accurate enough for Elkins to later identify a valley that probably contained Glassmire’s ruin. Elkins would name it “Target 4” in his aerial survey as we were looking for the White City many years later. Glassmire’s discovery was a major step forward: It gave Elkins a convincing report of at least one important, unknown ruin deep in the Mosquitia interior. He took it as strong evidence that the legends of lost cities were not fantasy.

The second prong of Elkins’s attack on the problem involved bringing the latest space-age technology to the search. For this, Elkins turned to Ron Blom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Elkins knew of Ron Blom’s successful quest to find the lost city of Ubar in the Rub’ al Khali Desert—the Empty Quarter—on the Arabian Peninsula. Ubar, also called Iram of the Pillars, had been mentioned in the Koran, which said the “Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment” for corruption, smiting the city and driving it into the sands. By scrutinizing images of the Empty Quarter desert from space, Blom and his team discovered a radiating pattern of ancient caravan trails, not visible on the ground, that converged at what was already known to be an ancient watering hole and caravanserai, a place where ancient camel caravans bedded down for the night. The satellite data indicated far more was there than a mere campsite. When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event.

Elkins called Blom and asked if he was interested in looking for another lost city. Blom said yes.

The problem, however, was that Mosquitia offered a far greater challenge than the Arabian Desert. The desert is an open book; synthetic aperture radar can peer fifteen feet or more into dry desert sands. The key is “dry”: Water molecules strongly absorb radar. For this reason, jungle foliage is far more difficult to see through with radar—a big leaf will block a radar beam that can penetrate several feet of dry sand. Undeterred by the challenge, Blom and his team started by analyzing scores of satellite images of Mosquitia taken in infrared and visual wavelengths of light. They looked at synthetic aperture radar images taken from the Space Shuttle. Blom combined images, crunched data, massaged and enhanced it. It took months of effort, but finally it seemed Blom hit the jackpot. He and his team identified an area that seemed to contain rectilinear and curvilinear shapes that were not natural. They termed both the valley and the unknown feature Target One, or T1.

On May 12, 1997, Elkins faxed one of his partners, Tom Weinberg, with the news:

THIS VALLEY IS COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY VERY STEEP MOUNTAINS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF ONE SMALL “CUT” THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS THAT ALLOWS ACCESS. THERE ARE TWO SMALL STREAMS THAT FLOW THROUGH THE VALLEY. IT IS A PERFECT SPOT FOR A SETTLEMENT… KIND OF REMINDS ME OF THE MOVIE, “SHANGRA LA”!

Excitedly, he noted at the end of the fax that Blom had identified a “RATHER LARGE (1800 FT. ACCORDING TO RON’S MEASUREMENT) L-SHAPED OBJECT.”

The valley itself was striking: a mysterious geological formation that looked like a crater or bowl, walled in by steep, encircling ridges, creating a natural fortress. It did indeed look very much like the descriptions of Shangri-la or, even more apposite, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “lost world.” The terrain inside the valley, watered by the two rivers, was gentle and friendly, consisting of hills, terraces, and floodplains, well suited for ancient farming and settlement. The satellite images showed no sign of human entry, occupation, or indigenous Indian use; it appeared to be pristine, untouched rainforest. Absolutely uninhabited areas of tropical rainforest are very rare in the world today; even the remotest reaches of the Amazon, for example, or the highlands of New Guinea, are used seasonally by indigenous people and have been at least minimally explored by scientists.

It was an exciting idea, but for now it was just an idea, a hypothesis. Even with intensive image processing, the immense, 150-foot, triple-canopy rainforest did not yield its secrets. Most of the unclassified satellite imagery at the end of the twentieth century had a coarse, ninety-foot ground resolution—in other words, the smallest thing that could be seen in the images was at least ninety feet on a side. The images showed blurred outlines that, if one stared at them long enough, looked unnatural, but it was far from definite proof. They were a bit like Rorschach blots—perhaps the mind was seeing things that weren’t there.

Eager to learn more, Elkins wondered if the valley had ever been explored. He and his partner Tom Weinberg scoured the world for people who had spent time in Mosquitia, and interviewed them on camera. He collected the stories of archaeologists, gold prospectors, drug smugglers, geologists, looters, and adventurers. He hired researchers who combed the archives in Honduras and elsewhere, piecing together which areas of Mosquitia had been explored and which had not.

After much research, he determined that T1 was truly unexplored. Virtually all expeditions into Mosquitia had gone up the big rivers and their navigable tributaries. Rivers are the traditional highways of the jungle; expeditions that departed from those rivers never got very far in the fierce, impassable mountains. But T1 had no navigable rivers and it was completely walled off by mountains.

In the end it was a gut feeling Elkins had about T1: “I just thought that if I were a king, this would be the perfect place to hide my kingdom.”