Journalist's quest to find fabled lost city

Journalist's quest to find fabled lost city

While reporting a story on the Honduran drug trade, Brooklyn journalist Christopher S. Stewart learned of a fabled lost city, Ciudad Blanca, said to be deep in the inhospitable jungle. With an almost reckless hunger for adventure, he set out to find it. “Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure,” details Stewart's journey into the wilds in the company of archeologist Chris Begley and guides Pancho and Angel.

BY CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART

It wasn't even nine o’clock, but we had already been walking for three hours and my feet were sore and soggy. Rain squalls blew up and vanished minutes later, leaving behind fizzing soil and blasting sun. I was tired after a sleepless night on the ground, where I couldn’t shake the thought that the snorting pigs around the hut might eat us. We had cut a curve through hillsides and over landscapes thick with creeping bushes and trees, ledges and drop-offs that gave way to flat swamplands swathed in high grass and fields where cattle milled beside clouds of mosquitoes.

Both my feet now had blisters, which had ripped open and turned into a pulp of purple and black, forcing me to walk on the front of my feet to reduce the pressure. At one point, Angel stopped to watch me limp by and snickered.

We passed small huts and saw men and women sitting on tiny porches or working patches of the cut jungle, and I wondered what they thought of our crew, outfitted with our combat boots, rip-resistant pants, quick-dry shirts, and giant backpacks. Some didn’t seem to notice, while others watched closely, observing the white dudes trekking through the jungle.

After a couple more hours, I realized that Chris had dropped behind. By now we had probably walked eight or nine miles and had come upon some formidable hills. I waited for him to catch up and saw that his face had gone pale. “Something bit me,” he said, shaking his head. He pulled off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m burning up with a fever. I’m freezing.” His blue shirt was drenched in sweat.

“Should we stop?” I asked.

“We gotta keep going,” he said. “Night’s coming.”

I worried selfishly that we’d have to turn back and get him to a hospital, which would mean days of backtracking. It was hard for me even to imagine the energy it would take to walk back to Catacamas.

We slipped down a cliff face and traversed the Blanco on a narrow mahogany pitpan that was lying abandoned on the mucky shore. I could tell Chris was struggling by the slow and labored manner of his speech and the way he kept staring off into the buzzing morass, probably dreaming of being somewhere else. We followed the mule guide up the hill and into some of the densest foliage we had yet encountered. Trees rose high around us, eclipsing the sun.

“I have to get into the water,” he said abruptly. The mule guide attempted to intervene.

“Don’t get in the river. There are crocodiles.”

Chris shook his head. “I’ll be fine.”

“There are big crocodiles. They eat people here.”

But Chris wasn’t hearing any of it. He didn’t even bother taking off his clothes or his combat boots. He looked at me through his glasses, blinked, and then stepped through a hole in the verdure, which dropped down a steep hill that fell away into the river.

For a moment I stared at the jungle that swallowed him, and then Pancho said we had to move on. Staggering forward, I caught glimpses of the rushing river but saw no sign of Chris, and I worried briefly that he might not make it back. Rain came and went, and the strange green noises of the jungle played with my head.

Half an hour passed before we stumbled down a rock face to the river edge and there he was â€" drenched, his shirt and pants sticking to him, his wire-rimmed glasses fogged up. “I made it!” he yelled over the noise of the river. The color on his face had been mostly restored. His voice was strong. Seeing him soaking there, I thought, this is why his students call him Indiana Jones. He was a little out of his mind.

“Ahhh,” he said, dripping. “That was great!”

* * *

The voice saved me.

“You okay?” It was Chris. He had doubled back. I looked at him. How much time had passed was hard to say. His face was a mess of mud, and his glasses were fogged.

“I hate this,” I said and enumerated. I hated the walking. I hated the beans and rice. I hated my two sets of clothes. I hated carrying my backpack. I hated Pancho’s radio that gave us only bad news about the coup and dead people. I hated the acrid iodine-infused water. I hated the malarial fog in my head. I hated the jungle. I hated the g------ lost city.

Chris nodded. “I know. It’s rough.”

I felt an urge to punch him.

I stood up, and for a moment we remained there. Angel and Pancho returned. Chris had been telling me were headed in the wrong direction, and finally Pancho had figured out that we had been actually circling the mountain for hours instead of climbing it.

“We have to keep moving,” Chris said now. “It’s getting dark.”

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, trying to suppress the hate, and forced myself to go on. We slogged for another five or six hours through miles of up-and-down muddiness, keeping an eye out, as ever, for snakes and jaguars.

Night came. At one point I begged to stop, but Pancho began worrying about bandits.

Feeling the hate coming back again, I tried to imagine myself somewhere else â€" on a beach or a lake or just on the couch at home, comfortable, settled, living a conventional life. But the jungle kept intruding, like an enemy that won’t let you go even when you are dying and long past saving. On one steep descent through a canyon, my pant leg snagged on a tree trunk and ripped up the seam. I nearly lost my pants. Two minutes later, I stepped into a bog and toppled over. I had warm mud in my nose, mouth, down my underwear, up my shirt, dripping from my beard, my hair. I felt the smooth carapace of a sizable insect and tasted bug. Standing, I took two more steps and fell again, the hate pouring back into me.

“You gonna make it?” Chris yelled.

The mud had by now infiltrated every pore of my body. I had nothing left inside of me. I couldn’t laugh or cry if I wanted to. I didn’t think I could move.

Then I felt something on my neck. It was Pancho, in his perfectly pressed blue button-down shirt, his hand lifting me out.

I don’t really know how I made it. I wrapped a piece of string around my leg to keep my ripped pants together and went on.

* * *

We walked for hours in the blazing sun before we found the ruins. It was August 1, about a month from the day I had arrived in Honduras. Around us, the forest alternated with land that had been burned and cut, where copper-red shapes of mahogany stumps stood out of islands of second-growth grass and vines. The bandits had captured Chris close to this area, but we didn’t talk about that.

Steadily, we pushed forward. We had paid a man to come along with us. He had a pistol pushed into his belt and a rifle on the mule that high-stepped through the brush. We saw the large mounds that the settlers had mentioned the night before. Some as high as ten feet and in groupings of twos and threes, they were larger than the mounds we’d spotted along the river. “They’re everywhere!,” exclaimed Chris, a bit stunned. I had the feeling I was walking through a graveyard. Pancho, who had been quiet most of the way, started to complain of stomach pains and blamed it on the evil mountain spirits.

“We must be getting close to the city,” he said.

Chris scrambled ahead until he stopped again at an open expanse where two large stone walls protruded from the grassy earth. Several feet tall, rounded off at the top, with decades of creepers and weeds engorging them, the walls extended for many yards, like giant serpents, before disappearing into the horizon.

“Do you see it?” Chris asked now. He pointed across the upturned carpet of green wilderness. It was early afternoon. For the first time in days there weren’t any dark clouds in the sky. But the rains would come. It always did.

“What?” I asked.

He smiled, “The city,” he said.

“What city?” I didn’t see anything. Of course, I had been imagining great ruined white buildings, tall vine-strangled columns, spooky statues of giant white monkey kings.

Chris chuckled. “You’re standing on it,” he said. “It’s all over.”