The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

But he had also intentionally overthrown a government to achieve his own financial ends.

The fruit companies’ effect on Honduras’s development was deeply pernicious. Though Honduras did eventually emerge from under their yoke, this legacy of instability and corporate bullying lives on in political dysfunction, underdeveloped national institutions, and cozy relationships among powerful families, business interests, government, and the military. This weakness magnified the disastrous effects of Hurricane Mitch.

In five days, lidar had accomplished seven times more than the Chases had achieved in twenty-five years. Their paper declared lidar a “scientific revolution,” and an “archaeological paradigm shift.” It was, they said, the greatest archaeological advance since carbon-14 dating.

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.

After I had to get out and pee a second time, I damned the British habit of drinking tea before bedtime and swore I would not do so again.

But the Maya and these unknown people, Brady said, did seem to share a similar cosmological view. In both cultures, “there is a focus on the sacred, animate earth, which is the most important force in the universe.” In contrast to the Old World idea that the dead live on in the heavens, in Mesoamerican belief the dead live within the earth and mountains. Caves are sacred, as they are a direct connection to that underground spiritual world. The ancestors living underground continue to take care of the living, watching over them. The living can contact the dead by going deep into the caves, leaving offerings, conducting rituals, and praying. The cave is a church, in essence, a place where the living come to petition their ancestors for favor and protection.

(If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)

“Having these garden spaces embedded within urban areas,” said Fisher, “is one characteristic of New World cities that made them sustainable and livable.”

Unlike most other viruses, smallpox can survive and remain virulent for months or years outside the body in clothing, blankets, and sickrooms.

overall, the Spanish (and Columbus personally) were deeply dismayed by the vast die-offs; the deaths of so many Indians interfered with their slaving businesses, killed their servants, and emptied their plantations and mines of forced labor. When smallpox arrived, the Indians often responded with panic and flight, abandoning towns and cities, leaving behind the sick and dead. And while the Spanish were less susceptible to these epidemics, they were not immune, and many also died in the general conflagration.

I called the VA hospital hoping to speak to him. An hour later, after multiple phone calls and a mind-boggling number of transfers from one wrong office to another, after being told that no such doctor existed, that the doctor worked there but didn’t take patients, that I wasn’t allowed to speak to his office without a referral, and that the doctor did not take referrals, I gave up.

parasitology was “the backwater of science, no one was interested, and no one would work with you.” Because most people who get parasites are poor, and because infectious-disease medicine is not usually fee-based, parasitology is one of the lower-paying of all the medical specialties. To go into the field, you have to truly care about helping people. Your extremely expensive, ten-year medical education gives you the privilege of working long hours for modest pay among the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, encountering a staggering amount of misery and death. Your reward is to relieve a small bit of that suffering. It takes a rare kind of human being to become a parasitologist.

The parasite, while it can devastate a human being, generally does not “cost” the host animal very much, although some host mammals get lesions on their noses. A good guest does not burn down the house he’s staying in; leishmania wants its host animal to live long and prosper, spreading as much disease as possible.

The protocols for animal research try as much as possible to avoid inhumane treatment; the suffering of the mice involved in the research, while mitigated as much as possible, is necessary in order to study and combat the disease. There are no alternatives to live research.

not one major parasitic disease has a reliable vaccine yet.

As is too often true, the biggest hurdle is money. Vaccines cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, test, and bring to market. Human trials involve thousands of subjects. “It’s difficult to get companies to partner in trials,” Sacks told me. “They don’t see any market in it, because the people who have leishmaniasis have no money.”

When I asked Virgilio about the letter, he said the government was well aware of it, had long been expecting it, and would handle it. (As far as I could ascertain, the government handled it by ignoring it.)

Indeed, I had noticed that when people entered the T1 valley, a place so completely cut off from the world, distinctions and hierarchical divisions seemed to fall away.

People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future. That is why the legend of the White City runs so deep in the Honduran national psyche: It’s a direct connection to a pre-Columbian past that was rich, complex, and worthy of remembrance.

Statistics are mere numbers; they need to be translated into human experience. What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to the survivors and their society? The Black Death in Europe at its worst carried off 30 to 60 percent of the population. That was devastating enough. But the mortality rate wasn’t high enough to destroy European civilization. A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.

Pathogens have no boundaries; they are the ultimate travelers; they go wherever there’s human fuel.

Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.

Archaeology contains many cautionary tales for us to ponder in the twenty-first century, not just about disease but also about human success and failure. It teaches us lessons in environmental degradation, income inequality, war, violence, class division, exploitation, social upheaval, and religious fanaticism. But archaeology also teaches us how cultures have thrived and endured, overcoming the challenges of the environment and the darker side of human nature.

No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.