The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(12)
One night, he exited his tent to go to the bathroom. The entire forest was glowing with millions of points of bioluminescence, caused by fungi that glow when the temperature and humidity are right. “It was like looking down at LA from thirty thousand feet,” he said. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Somewhere in the rainforest, they did find a scattering of broken stone sculptures, pottery, and tools. If there were mounds, it was impossible to tell, because the jungle was so thick. But either way, it was a small site and clearly not the White City. They finally gave up, exhausted and out of money.
Elkins was repeatedly shocked at Heinicke’s methods of getting things done in Honduras. After they reemerged from the jungle and were filming on Roatán Island in the Bay of Honduras, Elkins’s German producer got an emergency call on his satellite phone requiring his return to Hamburg immediately on business. They rushed to the airport to catch a flight out, but when they arrived they learned the plane was already full and on the runway. The next flight out wasn’t for several days. Heinicke huffed and puffed his way out on the tarmac, boarded the plane, pulled out a Colt .45 pistol, and inquired who was the last to board. He waved his pistol at the unfortunate passenger. “I need your fucking seat,” he said. “Get off.” The man stumbled off the plane in terror; Heinicke shoved the gun back into his waistband and said to the German producer, “Okay, you got your seat.”
Many years later, when Heinicke told me this story, he explained how he saw his role in the partnership: “See, Steve, he’s kind of dangerous to be with. He’ll tell me the good points he sees in someone, and I’ll say, ‘Fuck him, I don’t like him, I don’t trust him.’ That’s probably why we make a good partnership.”
Elkins, for his part, said, “Bruce is definitely the kind of guy you want to have on your side. And not the other way around.” He added, lowering his voice: “In order to make this happen, I had to dance with the devil at times.”
That first attempt to find the White City changed Elkins. He went in curious about the White City legend and returned having found his life’s mission. “I call it the ‘lost city virus,’” he told me later. “I became an addict. I was obsessed with the idea of trying to prove whether the lost city really existed.”
Elkins has an appealing streak of persistence and an indefatigable nature, which may very well come from his unconventional family. Originally from England and Russia, his great-grandparents arrived in the States through Ellis Island in the 1890s. His grandfather Jack Elkins was a jazz piano player who toured with Dixieland bands in the 1920s. Elkins’s father, Bud, went in an entirely different direction: into the army. He lied about his age to sign up at fifteen, but was caught during basic training and his mother had to come get him and drag him back home to finish high school. During World War II, Bud flew against the Japanese in the Aleutian Tigers squadron; after the war he went into the garment business, landing a contract to manufacture bunny outfits for Playboy clubs. He then went back into the army and took part in combat and intelligence-gathering missions in Vietnam, reaching the rank of colonel. His ultimate retirement dream was to own a Chicago-style kosher hot dog business; so after leaving the military he built a giant truck in the shape of a hot dog and drove it around LA selling dogs and Polish sausages before the business failed. Bud was a charmer and a ladies’ man, restless, with a yearning for adventure. Because of his philandering, Steve’s mother divorced him when Steve was eleven, and Steve grew up more or less fatherless in Chicago. “My mother was the salt of the earth and steady as a rock,” he said.
Elkins seems to have inherited his father’s wanderlust along with his mother’s pragmatic steadfastness, a mixture of traits that would serve him well in the search for the lost city.
Elkins attended Southern Illinois University. An avid hiker, he roamed the nearby Shawnee National Forest with friends who called him Over-the-Next-Ridge Elkins because he was always urging them on “to see what was over the next ridge.” On one of these jaunts he found a rock shelter on some bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. He camped out there with friends, and they began scratching around in the dirt, turning up arrowheads, spearpoints, bones, and broken pottery. He brought them back to the university. His archaeology professor arranged an excavation of the cave as a special studies program for the semester. In test excavations Elkins and the group uncovered human bones, carvings in shell, stone tools, and remains of food. Radiocarbon dating indicated the bottom layers were thousands of years old.
“That was the moment I became hooked on ancient history,” he told me. He spent many hours sitting in the shelter, looking out over the Mississippi River Valley and imagining what it would have been like to be born in the cave, grow up, raise children, get old, and die there—in the America of five thousand years ago.
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.
He delved deeply into the many stories of people who had looked for the White City, some of whom actually claimed to have found it. Most of these people were obvious cranks or otherwise untrustworthy, but there was one person who stood out. Steve Morgan had introduced Elkins to a man named Sam Glassmire, who said he had located and explored the White City. When Elkins met Glassmire, he found him to be a solid, respectable scientist with a surprisingly credible story—and in his living room were impressive stone sculptures he had allegedly carried out of the ruins. In 1997, Elkins and his video team interviewed Glassmire at his home in Santa Fe, and they captured his story on tape. (I first met Steve on this trip, as I lived in Santa Fe myself.)