The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

For centuries, Mosquitia has been home to one of the world’s most persistent and tantalizing legends. Somewhere in this impassable wilderness, it is said, lies a “lost city” built of white stone. It is called Ciudad Blanca, the “White City,” also referred to as the “Lost City of the Monkey God.” Some have claimed the city is Maya, while others have said an unknown and now vanished people built it thousands of years ago.

So wonderful are the reports about this particular province, that even allowing largely for exaggeration, it will exceed Mexico in riches, and equal it in the largeness of its towns and villages, the density of its population, and the policy of its inhabitants.

The Maya realm, which stretched from southern Mexico to Honduras, seemed to end at Copán. The vast jungled mountains east of Copán, especially in Mosquitia, were so inhospitable and dangerous that very little exploration and even less archaeology took place. Glimpses of other, non-Maya, pre-Columbian cultures were being uncovered eastward of Copán, but these vanished societies also remained elusive and poorly studied. Just how far east and south of Copán the Maya influence stretched was also difficult to ascertain. In the vacuum, tantalizing rumors grew of even greater, wealthier cities—perhaps Maya, perhaps not—hidden in those impenetrable thickets, stories that fascinated archaeologists and treasure hunters alike.

What Strong realized right away was that these were not Maya cities: The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture.

Heye immediately began planning another expedition to Honduras with a new leader, this time wisely bypassing Mitchell-Hedges, perhaps because he had begun to suspect, belatedly, that the man was a con artist. The truth was, Mitchell-Hedges was a fraud on a spectacular scale. He did not discover Lubaantun, and the crystal skull was (much later) revealed as a fake.

Knowing that such an expansion effort would, regrettably, involve the displacement or even destruction of the indigenous Indians who still lived there—not unlike what had happened in the American West—the government and the National Museum were eager to document the Indians’ way of life before they vanished. An important goal of the expedition was, therefore, to do ethnographic as well as archaeological research.

Morde brought back a number of artifacts—figures of monkeys in stone and clay, his canoe, pots, and stone tools. Many of these are still in the collections of the Smithsonian. He vowed that he would return the following year “to commence excavation.” But World War II intervened. Morde went on to become an OSS spy and war correspondent, and his obituary alleges he was involved in a plot to kill Hitler. He never returned to Honduras. In 1954, Morde—sunken into alcoholism, his marriage failing—hanged himself in a shower stall at his parents’ summer house in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He never did reveal the location of the lost city.

The most recent search for Morde’s lost city took place in 2009. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Christopher S. Stewart, undertook an arduous journey into the heart of Mosquitia in an attempt to retrace Morde’s route.

Heye and the Museum of the American Indian, it seems, were conned, along with the American public. According to their own writings, Morde and Brown had a secret agenda. From the beginning, neither man had any intention of looking for a lost city.

The journals reveal they found in Mosquitia no ruins, no artifacts, no sites, no “Lost City of the Monkey God.” So what were Morde and Brown doing in Mosquitia, during those four months of silence, while Heye and the world held their breath? What were they after? Gold.

We do know this: For decades, many have wondered if Morde found a city. The general consensus up until now has been that he probably did find an archaeological site, perhaps even an important one. The journals, however, are proof that Morde found nothing, and his “discovery” was an out-and-out fraud.

The mystery of the walking stick remains unsolved. We now know, however, that it does not contain coded directions to the lost city.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are two major reasons why Honduras had such a difficult time getting back on its feet after the storm. The first was the land-tenure system it inherited from Spain, in which a small number of extremely wealthy families ended up controlling most of the land. But even more debilitating was the country’s unhealthy relationship with the United States, whose shortsighted policies and business interests had kept the country politically unstable for more than a century.

Originally from Asia, bananas had been grown in Central America for centuries since they had been brought there by the Spanish, but they were an exotic delicacy in the United States because of their scarcity and perishability.

Preston, Zemurray, and the fruit companies left a dark colonialist legacy that has hung like a miasma over Honduras ever since.

Effective antidrug policies and raids in Colombia in the 1990s pushed much of the drug trade from that country into Honduras. Traffickers turned Honduras into the premier drug-smuggling transshipment point for cocaine between South America and the United States, and Mosquitia was at the heart of it.

Also known as the Cocos Island treasure, the Loot of Lima was an alleged fortune in gold and gems—estimated to be worth around a billion dollars—that is believed to have been spirited out of Lima, Peru, in 1821, during the Peruvian War of Independence. The city of Lima was under siege, and the Spanish viceroy reportedly wanted to keep the city’s vast treasure out of the hands of the revolutionaries, should the city fall to the rebels.

Because the island, now a national park, had changed greatly over the years, many landmarks were gone. Elkins was keen to try out the latest technological advances in the remote sensing of metal buried under the ground.

Elkins read an article in Archaeology magazine entitled “Lasers in the Jungle.” The article described a powerful technology called lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, which had just been used to map the Maya city of Caracol, in Belize. The lidar mapping of Caracol was a watershed moment in archaeology. The article electrified him: He realized he might finally have the tool he needed to locate Ciudad Blanca.

Although lidar had been used for mapping the moon’s surface and doing large-scale terrestrial charting, only in the previous decade had it gained the resolution necessary to resolve fine-scale archaeological features. It had been used to map the ruins of Copán after the hurricane, but that was about the extent of its use in Central America.

The Chases joined forces with NASA and the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) at the University of Houston to map Caracol using airborne lidar, a technology many times more powerful than the radar and satellite data available to Blom. The best ground resolution Blom could obtain in the mid-nineties was about ninety feet; lidar promised a resolution of better than three feet even under the forest canopy.

In five days, lidar had accomplished seven times more than the Chases had achieved in twenty-five years.

At the end of 2009, Mabel returned to Tegucigalpa, without Bruce, to attend her father’s funeral. At the time, the country was recovering from a military coup. The coup had taken place earlier in the year, when the current leftist president, José Manuel Zelaya, had launched a heavy-handed effort to hold a referendum to rewrite the Constitution so that he could try to gain a second term of office. The Supreme Court ruled the attempt illegal; Zelaya defied the court; and the Honduran Congress ordered his arrest. Early on a Sunday morning, the military disarmed the presidential guard, rousted Zelaya from bed, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica, where, in the airport, he gave a fiery speech of defiance still wearing his pajamas.

NCALM is a joint project of the University of Houston and the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the National Science Foundation, and its mission is confined to academic and scientific research, not raw exploration for lost cities that probably don’t exist.

Lidar had never been used before as a tool of pure archaeological exploration—that is, to look for something nobody could be sure even existed.

T1 was only twenty square miles. In case T1 came up empty, Steve chose three other unexplored areas to survey. He called these T2, T3, and T4. T2 was a deep valley surrounded by white limestone cliffs that had also been rumored to contain the White City. T3 was an area like T1—difficult to get to, scientifically unexplored, a gentler landscape with large open areas, locked in by mountains. T4 was the valley where Elkins believed Sam Glassmire had found his ruin.

Over the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists had identified about two hundred archaeological sites in Mosquitia. This is almost nothing when compared to the many hundreds of thousands of sites recorded in the Maya region, or the 163,000 registered archaeological sites in my home state of New Mexico.

A century of archaeology in Mosquitia had produced few answers, and much that had been done was limited, superficial, or of poor quality. Archaeologists so far had not been able to answer some of the most basic questions of this culture—who they were, where they came from, how they lived, and what happened to them.

Elkins ordered the latest satellite imagery of the four target areas. When the imagery came in, he had a shock. The most recent satellite photography of T4, the valley containing Glassmire’s White City, showed that it was pockmarked with several recent clear-cuts from illegal deforestation. Deforestation and archaeological looting go hand in hand; Glassmire’s ruin, if it existed, would have been uncovered and quietly looted, its movable artifacts likely dispersed into the black market or hauled off by locals.

Gross mentioned he had a Cuban overflight number, which allowed him to fly through Cuban airspace. I asked him what would have happened if he’d had engine or weather trouble and had been forced to land in Cuba. After all, the plane carried classified military hardware, and relations with Cuba were at that time still in a deep freeze. “First, I would have torched the plane on the runway.” This was, he explained, the standard protocol with airborne lidar.

The technology of lidar was developed soon after the discovery of lasers in the early 1960s. Put simply, lidar works like radar, by bouncing a laser beam off something, capturing the reflection, and measuring the round-trip time, thereby determining the distance.

from 1996 to 2006, the Surveyor created a prodigiously accurate topographic map of the Martian surface, one of the supreme mapping projects of human history.

There are three types of lidar instruments: spaceborne, aerial, and terrestrial. On earth, aerial lidar has been used in agriculture, geology, mining, tracking glaciers and ice fields for global warming, urban planning, and surveying. It had numerous classified uses in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terrestrial lidar is currently being tested in self-driving vehicles and “intelligent” cruise control, which use lidar to map the ever-shifting environment around a car moving down a roadway, as well as to make detailed three-dimensional maps of rooms, tombs, sculptures, and buildings; it can re-create digitally, in incredibly fine detail, any three-dimensional object.

As the plane is flown in a lawnmower pattern over the jungle, the lidar device fires 125,000 infrared laser pulses a second into the jungle canopy below and records the reflections. (The laser pulses are harmless and invisible.) The time elapsed gives the exact distance from the plane to each reflection point. The lidar beam does not actually penetrate foliage. It does not “see through” anything in fact: The beam will bounce off every tiny leaf or twig. But even in the heaviest jungle cover, there are small holes in the canopy that allow a laser pulse to reach the ground and reflect back. If you lie down in the jungle and look up, you will always see flecks of sky here and there; the vast number of laser pulses allow lidar to find and exploit those little openings.

The resolution of the lidar image is only as good as how well you keep track of the position of the plane flying through space. This is the greatest technological challenge: In order to achieve high resolution, you need to track the plane’s position in three dimensions during every second of flight to within an inch. A standard GPS unit using satellite links can only locate the plane within about ten feet, useless for archaeological mapping. The resolution can be refined to about a foot by placing fixed GPS units on the ground underneath where the plane will be flying. But an airplane in flight is being bounced around by turbulence, subjected to roll, pitch, and yaw, which not even the finest GPS unit can track.

To solve this problem, the lidar machine contains within it a sealed instrument that looks like a coffee can. It contains a highly classified military device called an inertial measurement unit, or IMU. This is the same technology used in cruise missiles, allowing the missile to know where it is in space at all times as it heads toward its target.

Aerial lidar can achieve a resolution of about an inch, if there is no vegetative cover. But in the jungle, the canopy causes the resolution to drop precipitously, due to many fewer pulses reaching the ground. (The fewer the pulses, the lower the resolution.)

Sartori had hours of work ahead of him. He had to merge data from several sources: the lidar machine, the GPS ground stations, the GPS data from the aircraft itself, and the data from the IMU. Together, all this would create the point cloud, forming a three-dimensional picture of the rainforest and the underlying terrain.

He downloaded the data and displayed the maps on his computer screen. He was thunderstruck. “I don’t think it took me more than five minutes to see something that looked like a pyramid,” he told me later. “I looked across the river at a plaza area with what looked like buildings—clearly man-made objects. As I looked at that river valley, I saw more, as well as alterations to the terrain.

It sure as hell looked like a very large set of ruins, perhaps even a city. I had thought we would be fortunate to find any kind of site at all; I had not expected this. Was it possible that an entire lost city could still be found in the twenty-first century?

T3 contained an even larger set of ruins than T1.

In his quixotic search for the mythical White City, Elkins and his team had found not one large site but two, apparently built by the almost unknown civilization that once inhabited Mosquitia. But were they cities? And could one of these actually be the White City, the Lost City of the Monkey God?