CHAPTER 14

Don’t pick the flowers!

On February 16, at dawn, the advance team piled into a van and drove to El Aguacate airport, a shabby jungle airstrip built by the CIA during the Contra war. It was located near the base of the mountains about ten miles east of Catacamas. The two helicopters were waiting: the AStar, brightly painted in candy-apple red and white, which had been flown down from Albuquerque, and a Honduran Bell 412 painted in combat gray. This first flight was to be a visual reconnaissance only, to scout out the two possible landing zones: one below the archaeological site, the other at the junction of the two rivers. There would be no landing in T1 on this aerial mission.

I rode in the Honduran chopper with Dave Yoder, while Elkins rode in the AStar. We took off at 9:45 a.m., heading northeastward, under the agreement that the two birds would stay in visual contact with each other at all times.

The Honduran helicopter I was in had trouble getting off the ground and then immediately began flying erratically, with a tilt. As we flew, various red lights and an alarm went off on the console, and then we turned around and headed back to Aguacate, where the helicopter made a crooked, skidding landing. It turned out a computer controller had gone bad. I’d been in sketchy aircraft before, but a helicopter is another level of concern, because if the engine fails there is no glide; the pilot must try to execute an “unpowered descent,” which is a euphemism for dropping out of the sky like a stone. Because helicopters are very expensive to fly and require much maintenance, the Honduran military can’t afford to give its helicopter pilots the same number of flying hours that, for example, USAF pilots have. Even less reassuring was the fact that these helicopters were old and had cycled through the air assets of several foreign countries before being acquired by Honduras.

As we waited at the airstrip, the AStar finally returned. Despite the agreement to stick together, the AStar had gone ahead anyway. Elkins bounded out. “Bingo,” he said, raising his thumb with a grin. “We can land right at the site! But you can’t see the ruins at all—it’s so thick.”

The Honduran Air Force brought in a replacement Bell, and both choppers made a second reconnaissance later in the day into the valley of T1. This time, the AStar pilot wanted to hover over the potential landing zone and scout it out more thoroughly. The military chopper, on the other hand, would be examining the bigger landing zone downriver, to see if it could accommodate its larger size. As the two LZs were only a few miles apart, the two birds would fly in together and maintain visual contact throughout.

Once again I flew in the military chopper. For half an hour we were flying over steep terrain, but vast areas of the mountainsides had been cleared, even on slopes of forty to fifty degrees. This was all new territory to me: In 2012, we had flown in from the northwest; now we were flying in from the southwest. I could see that the clearing was not for timbering; it appeared that few if any trees had been taken out, and were left lying on the ground to dry out and be burned, as evidenced by the plumes of smoke rising everywhere. The ultimate goal, I could see, was to turn the land into grazing for cattle—which dotted even the steepest hillsides.*

Finally we left the clear-cuts behind and were flying over a virgin carpet of jungle-cloaked peaks.

Once again I had the strong feeling, when flying into the valley, that I was leaving the twenty-first century entirely. A precipitous ridge loomed ahead, marking the southern boundary of T1. The pilot headed for a V notch in it. When we cleared the gap, the valley opened up in a rolling landscape of emerald and gold, dappled with the shadows of clouds. The two sinuous rivers ran through it, clear and bright, the sunlight flashing off their riffled waters as the chopper banked. I remembered it from the lidar flight three years earlier, but now it looked even more splendid. Towering rainforest trees, draped in vines and flowers, carpeted the hills, giving way to sunny glades along the riverbanks. Flocks of egrets flew below, white dots drifting against the green, and the treetops thrashed with the movement of unseen monkeys. As had been true in 2012, there was no sign of human life—not a road, trail, or wisp of smoke.

In the larger Bell, we followed the winding path of the river. The AStar was ahead and below us, and as we closed in to the upper LZ, the one near the ruins, the AStar went into a hover over an area along the riverbank covered with thick vegetation. We spent twenty minutes circling this LZ and then circled the second one downriver, which was larger and more open. With both landing zones now firmly identified—one for the Bell and the other for the AStar—we headed back to Aguacate.

The next morning, on February 17, we arrived back at Aguacate at dawn for our flight into the valley, where we hoped to land and establish base camp. The airstrip terminal, a shabby, one-room concrete building, its ceiling tiles falling down, was now full of gear: portable generators, stacks of water bottles, toilet paper, plastic bins packed with Mountain House freeze-dried food, tarps, Coleman lanterns, folding tables, tents, chairs, cots, parachute cord, and other necessities.

The AStar took off with Woody, Sully, and Spud, equipped with machetes and a chainsaw to clear the landing zone near the ruins. The chopper returned two hours later, having successfully dropped them into an area alongside the stream where there were only a few trees, with a plant cover six to nine feet deep, which could be easily cleared with machetes. Only a few small trees would have to be cut.

All was going according to plan. It would probably take them four hours to clear it. We would not have to rope down from a hover after all; the chopper would be able to land firmly on the ground.

Chris Fisher, Dave Yoder, and Lucian Read went in the next flight. Two hours later, the chopper returned and refueled, and then Juan Carlos and I walked out onto the hot tarmac to get in. We each had backpacks with all our essential gear, including food and water for two days, as the camp would not be fully stocked for at least forty-eight hours. We would have to be self-sufficient for those first few days. Because the LZ at the site was so small, and the AStar unable to carry more than a tiny amount of equipment, most of it would be ferried into the valley on the Bell, offloaded at the downstream LZ, and from there shuttled in by the AStar in many back-and-forth trips.

Juan Carlos and I stowed our two backpacks in a basket attached to the port side of the helicopter, since there wasn’t room inside. Steve Elkins brought out his iPhone, and he taped me as I gave a ten-second video farewell to my wife, Christine, since I would be out of contact for the next nine or ten days. It was strange to think about what might happen before I was next in touch with her. Steve promised to e-mail the video to her when he got back to Catacamas.

Just before we lifted off, I had a chance to chat with our copilot, Rolando Zuniga Bode, a lieutenant in the Honduran Air Force. “My grandmother used to talk about Ciudad Blanca all the time,” he said. “She had a lot of stories.”

“What stories?”

Rolando dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “You know, the usual old superstitions. She said the conquistadors found the White City and went in there. But they made a mistake: They picked the flowers—and they all died.” He laughed and wagged his finger. “Don’t pick the flowers!”

Juan Carlos and I donned our helmets and buckled in. He was excited. “When I first saw the images with the buildings, the dimensions of those things—they are big—I had ten thousand questions. Now we’re about to find the answers.”

After the helicopter took off, we fell silent, taking pictures of the amazingly green and rugged landscape unfurling below.

“There’s Las Crucitas,” Juan Carlos said. “I asked the pilot to take us this way.”

I looked down at the remote archaeological site, the largest that had ever been found in Mosquitia before the identification of T1 and T3. In an open, grassy area, I could see a series of sharp mounds, earthworks, and plazas, situated on both sides of the Río Aner. Many had speculated that this was Morde’s Lost City of the Monkey God, but of course now we know Morde had found no such thing—and had never even entered this region of Mosquitia.

“It looks a lot like T1, don’t you think?” Juan Carlos said.

I agreed. From the air it looked strikingly similar to the lidar images—the same bus-like mounds, same plazas, same parallel embankments.

Beyond Las Crucitas the serious mountains loomed up, some almost a mile high. As we maneuvered our way through them, the clear-cuts gave way to unbroken cover. At one point, with Rolando at the helm, the chopper swerved violently.

“Sorry. I dodged a vulture,” he said.

Finally the telltale notch into T1 loomed up ahead, and in a moment we had cleared it and were inside the valley. Two scarlet macaws glided below us as we followed the line of the river. Pressed to the window, I took pictures with my Nikon. In a few minutes the landing zone came into view, a green patch littered with cut vegetation; the chopper turned, slowed, and descended. Woody knelt at the edge of the LZ, signaling the pilot as he came down. The trees and bushes around us thrashed with prop wash as we descended, the river surface whipped into a froth of white water.

And then we were on the ground. We’d been ordered to grab our gear and get clear of the LZ as fast as possible, keeping our heads down. We jumped out and seized our stuff, while Woody and Sully ran to the chopper and unloaded gear and supplies from the basket, throwing them into a pile at the edge of the LZ; in three minutes the chopper was back in the air.

I watched it rise above the trees, pivot, and disappear. Silence descended, soon filled by a strange, loud roaring from the forest. It sounded like some giant machine or dynamo had been started and was cranking up to full speed.

“Howler monkeys,” said Woody. “They begin calling every time the helicopter comes in and out. They seem to respond to the noise.” The landing zone had been macheted from a thick stand of “lobster claw” heliconia plants, also known as false bird of paradise, their fleshy stumps oozing white sap. The red-and-yellow flowers and dark green leaves were strewn everywhere, carpeting much of the LZ. We hadn’t just picked the flowers; we’d massacred them. A part of me hoped that Rolando hadn’t seen this as we landed.

Woody turned to us. “Grab your kit, get a machete, pick out a campsite, and get yourself fixed up.” He nodded toward the impenetrable wall of jungle. A small dark hole, like a cave, had been cut into it, offering a path in. I hoisted my pack; Juan Carlos did the same; and I followed him into the green cave. Three logs had been laid across a pool of mud, and beyond that the freshly cut trail went up a five-foot embankment. We came out in a deep, gloomy forest, with trees rising like giant cathedral columns into the unseen canopy. Their trunks, ten to fifteen feet in diameter, were braced with massive buttresses and knees. Many were wreathed in strangler figs, called matapalos (“tree killers”). The howler monkeys continued roaring as my eyes adjusted to the dimness. The air carried a thick, heady scent of earth, flowers, spice, and rotten decay. Here, among the big trees, the understory was relatively open and the ground was flat.

Chris Fisher, the archaeologist, appeared, wearing a white straw cowboy hat that shone like a beacon in the gloom. “Hey, you guys, welcome!”

I looked around. “So… what do we do now?” Woody and the other two SAS men were busy arranging supplies.

“You need to find a place to string your hammock. Two trees, about this far apart. Let me show you.” I followed him through the trees to his campsite, where he had a green hammock set up, with a rainfly and mosquito netting. He was lashing together a small table from cut pieces of bamboo and had strung up a tarp to sit under in case it rained. It was a very good camp, efficient and well organized.

I walked fifty yards into the forest, hoping the distance would preserve my privacy after everyone else arrived. (In the jungle fifty yards is a long way.) I found a pleasant area with two small trees the right distance apart. Fisher loaned me his machete, helped me cut a small clearing, and showed me how to hang the hammock. As we worked, we heard a commotion in the treetops. A troop of spider monkeys had collected in the branches above, and they were unhappy. They screeched and hooted, coming down lower, hanging by their tails while shaking branches at us in a rage. After a good half hour of protest they settled down on a limb, chattering and staring down at me as if I were a freak of nature.

An hour later, Woody came by to check on my camp. He found my hammock job wanting and made some adjustments. He paused to watch the monkeys. “This is their tree,” he said, sniffing a couple of times. “Smell that? Monkey piss.”

But it was getting late and I didn’t want to go to the trouble of moving my camp. I was beyond the fringes of the group, and concerned that after dark I would need a good trail so as not to lose my way. I walked back to the LZ, clearing a better trail with the machete, losing my way several times, having to backtrack by following the cut plants. I found Juan Carlos in his newly set-up camp. Along with Chris we went down to the bank of the stream and stared across the river at the wall of trees. It mounted up, tier after tier, a barricade of green and brown, dotted with flowers and screeching birds. Beyond that, no more than two hundred yards away, began the edge of the lost city and the possible earthen pyramid we had seen on the lidar images. They were cloaked in rainforest, completely invisible. It was about five o’clock in the evening. A soft yellow sun spilled into the rainforest, breaking into rays and flecks of gold, scattering coins on the forest floor. A few fluffy clouds drifted past. The stream, about three feet deep and fifteen feet wide, was crystal clear, the limpid water burbling over a pebbled bed. All around us, the rainforest chattered with the calls of birds, frogs, and other animals, the sounds mingling together into a pleasing susurrus, punctuated by the call and response of two scarlet macaws, one in a nearby tree, the other distant and invisible. The temperature was seventy degrees, the air clear, fresh, and not humid, perfumed with the sweet smell of flowers and greenery.

“Have you noticed?” said Chris, holding up his hands and smiling. “There aren’t any insects.”

It was true. The fearful clouds of bloodsucking insects we had been warned about were nowhere to be seen.

As I looked around, I thought to myself that I had been right and this was not at all the scary place it had been made out to be; it felt instead like Eden. The sense of danger and unease that I had been carrying as an unconscious weight since Woody’s lecture subsided. The SAS team had, naturally, tried to prepare us for the worst, but they had overdone it.

As dusk fell, Woody invited us into his little bivouac area, where he had a tiny stove going with a pot of boiling water for tea and for hydrating our evening’s freeze-dried dinners. I opened a packet of chicken tetrazzini, poured in boiling water, and then, when it had absorbed the water, spooned it from the bag into my mouth. I washed it down with a cup of tea, and we stood around listening to Woody, Spud, and Sully tell stories of their adventures in the jungle.

Within minutes, night dropped like the shutting of a door—absolute blackness fell upon us. The sounds of the day morphed into something deeper and mysterious, with trills and scratchings and boomings and calls like the cries of the damned. Now the insects began to make their appearance, starting with the mosquitoes.

There was no fire. Woody lit a Coleman lantern that forced back the darkness a little, and we huddled in its pool of light in the great forest while large animals tramped, heard but unseen, in the jungle around us.

Woody said he had spent a large part of his life in jungles all over the world, from Asia and Africa to South and Central America. He said he had never been in one like this, so apparently untouched. As he was setting up camp, before we arrived, a quail came right up to him, pecking in the dirt. And a wild pig also wandered through, unconcerned by the presence of humans. The spider monkeys, he said, were another sign of an uninhabited area, as they normally flee at the first sight of humans, unless they are in a protected zone. He concluded, “I don’t think the animals here have ever seen people before.”

All three of the ex-SAS team were absurdly bundled up against the insects, covered from head to toe with insect-proof clothing, which included a hood and a head net.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked.

“I’ve had dengue fever twice,” Woody said, and launched into a shockingly graphic description of the disease, which had almost killed him the second time. It is called “breakbone fever,” he said, because it is so painful you feel like your bones are breaking.

After his tale was over, I noticed everyone quietly applying more DEET. I did the same. Then, as night deepened, the sand flies came out—in numbers. Much smaller than mosquitoes, they looked like white motes drifting in the light of the lantern, so small that they made no noise, and you normally don’t feel them biting, unlike mosquitoes. The more the night deepened, the more sand flies collected around us.

Eager to record some of the stories being told, I hurried back to my hammock on the other side of camp to fetch my notebook. My new headlamp was defective, so Juan Carlos loaned me a crank flashlight. I made my way back without difficulty. But on my return, everything looked different in the dark; I halted, hemmed in by dense vegetation, realizing I had somehow veered off my rudimentary trail. The nighttime rainforest was black and alive with noise, the air thick and sweet, the leaves like a wall surrounding me. My flashlight’s feeble beam was fading. I took a minute to frantically crank it up to a greater brightness, and then I played it carefully over the ground, looking for my tracks in the forest litter, or any sign of the trail I’d hacked with my machete earlier in the day.

Thinking I saw tracks, I moved in that direction, walking quickly, pushing aside the undergrowth with a growing sense of relief—only to be blocked by a mammoth tree trunk. I had never seen this tree before. Disoriented, I had stumbled deeper into the jungle. I took a moment to catch my breath and get my heart rate down. I could neither hear my companions nor see the light from where they were gathered. I thought of calling out to them, asking Woody to come get me, but decided not to expose myself as an idiot this early in the expedition. After intently examining the ground and cranking the light up several more times, I finally found my real tracks and retraced them, bent over and peering at the forest floor, each time waiting to advance until I located the next scuffmark or depression. A few minutes later, I spied a freshly cut leaf lying on the ground, its stem oozing sap, and then another. I was back on the trail.

Following the slashed leaves and vines like bread crumbs, I retraced the trail to the center of camp, where I gratefully recognized Juan Carlos’s hammock. Thrilled to be safely back in camp, I circled the hammock, probing the wall of forest with my light for the path that would take me to where the rest of the group was chatting. That would be easy: I could now hear the murmur of voices and see the light of the Coleman lantern peeking through the vegetation.

On my second circle of the hammock, I froze as my beam passed over a huge snake. It was coiled up on the ground, just to one side of Juan Carlos’s hammock, three feet away from where I stood. Impossible to miss, the snake was the opposite of camouflaged: Even in the dim flashlight beam it looked practically aglow, the patterns on its scaly back brilliantly etched against the gloomy night, its eyes two bright points. It was staring at me, in striking position, its head swaying back and forth, its tongue flicking in and out. I had walked right past it—twice. It seemed mesmerized by the flashlight beam, which was already starting to fade. I hastily cranked it back up into brightness.

I backed up slowly until I was out of the snake’s range, which I figured might be more than six feet—some snakes are able to strike their entire body length. I have had many encounters with venomous snakes—I’ve been struck at several times and hit once (a rattler that bounced off the toe of my boot)—but I had never in my life faced a snake like this: so fully aroused, so keenly focused, so disturbingly intelligent. If he decided to come at me, I’d not be able to escape.

“Hey, guys?” I called out, trying to keep my voice steady. “There’s a giant snake here.”

Woody responded, “Get back. But keep the light on it.”

The snake remained motionless, its gleaming eyes fixed on me. The forest had fallen silent. Woody arrived seconds later, with the rest of the group in tow, their headlamp beams swinging wildly through the murk.

“Jesus Christ,” someone said loudly.

Woody said quietly: “Everyone stay back, but keep your torches on him. It’s a fer-de-lance.”

He pulled his machete from its scabbard and, with a few strokes, transformed an adjacent sapling into a seven-foot snake stick, a long pole with a narrow, forked end.

“I’m going to move him.”

He advanced toward the snake and, in a sudden thrusting motion, pinned its body to the ground with the forked end of the stick. The snake exploded into furious action, uncoiling, twisting, thrashing, and striking in every direction, spraying venom. Now we saw just how large it really was. Woody worked the forked stick up its body to its neck as the snake continued to whip about. Its tail was vibrating furiously, making a low humming sound. Keeping the neck pinned with the stick and his left hand, Woody crouched and seized it behind the head with his right hand. The snake’s body, thick as his arm, slammed against his legs, its dazzling snow-white mouth gaping wide, unsheathing inch-and-a-quarter-long fangs that pumped out streams of pale yellow liquid. As its head lashed back and forth, straining to sink its fangs into Woody’s fist, it expelled poison all over the back of his hand, causing his skin to bubble. Woody wrestled the snake to the ground and pinned its squirming body with his knees. He pulled a knife from his belt and with his left hand, never releasing the snake with his right, neatly sliced off the head. He impaled the snake’s head firmly to the ground by driving the knife through it, and only then released the snake. The head, along with its three inches of remaining neck, wiggled and struggled, while the headless snake also began to crawl off, and Woody had to pull it back into the pool of light to prevent its escape into the brush. Through the whole struggle, he never uttered a word. The rest of us had been stunned into silence as well.

He rose, rinsed his hands, and finally spoke. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to move it. I had to wash the venom off right away.” (Later, he said he was “a bit concerned” when he felt the poison running into a cut on the back of his hand.)

He held up the headless snake by the tail, blood still dribbling from its neck. Nobody said a word. The snake’s muscles were still flexing slowly. Curious to touch it, I reached out and wrapped my hand around it, feeling the rhythmic writhing of muscles under its cool skin, a queer sensation indeed. The snake was about six feet long, its back displaying striking diamond patterns in colors of chocolate, mahogany, and creamed coffee. Everyone stared at it as the sounds of the night returned.

“Nothing like this to sort of concentrate your mind, is there?” Woody said. “Female. They get bigger than the males. This is one of the biggest fer-de-lances I’ve ever seen.” He casually slung the body over his arm. “We could eat it, they’re quite delicious. But I’ve another use for it. When the others arrive tomorrow, they’ll need to see this. Everyone needs to be fully aware of what they’re getting into here.”

He added quietly, “There’s rarely just one.”

When I retired that night to my hammock, I could not sleep. The jungle, reverberating with sound, was much noisier than in the daytime. Several times I heard large animals moving past me in the darkness, blundering clumsily through undergrowth, crackling twigs. I lay in the dark, listening to the cacophony of life, thinking about the lethal perfection of the snake and its natural dignity, sorry for what we had done but rattled by the close call. A bite from a snake like that, if you survived at all, would be a life-altering experience. In a strange way the encounter sharpened the experience of being here. It amazed me that a valley so primeval and unspoiled could still exist in the twenty-first century. It was truly a lost world, a place that did not want us and where we did not belong. We planned to enter the ruins the following day. What would we find? I couldn’t even begin to imagine it.