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The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
Non-Fiction
4.5 Stars
From The Book:
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.
Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.
Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.
My Thoughts:
“There was once a great city in the mountains,” he writes, “struck down by a series of catastrophes, after which the people decided the gods were angry and left, leaving their possessions. Thereafter it was shunned as a cursed place, forbidden, visiting death on those who dared enter.”
It reads like a dark fairy tale…but in 2012, Douglas Preston was present as the expedition team attempted to use light detection and ranging technology to identify the city’s location in the uncharted wildernesses of Honduras; they shot billions of laser beams into a jungle that no human beings had entered for perhaps five hundred years....and with good reason. They succeeded in locating two large sites, apparently built by the civilization that once inhabited the Mosquiteria region. A return trip took place in 2015 to explore the sites on foot, an experience that was easier said than done but resulted in remarkable archaeological finds.
It’s not Douglas Preston's usual Agent Pendergast novel or one of his wonderful technological offerings …it’s a true adventure that the reader as well as the explorers may many times wonder if it may not have been best to just “let sleeping dogs lie.” An exceptional, entertaining, and educational read.
