The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(20)

Elkins could find absolutely no archival evidence that anyone had ever explored T2, T3, or (aside from Glassmire) T4. With no record of human entry, they were blank, unknown to science. But were they also uninhabited? The archives wouldn’t document indigenous use of the areas for hunting and gathering.

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. But Elkins also knew that there were many big ruins in Mosquitia, known and unknown, any one of which might be the legendary White City, if it indeed existed in its described form, which was at the time an open question. Elkins eliminated T4 from the list.

Sadly, T4’s fate was far from unusual. The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Between 1990 and 2010, Honduras lost over 37 percent of its rainforest to clear-cutting. All of Elkins’s targets of interest lie within or close to the nominally protected Tawahka Asangni Biosphere and Río Plátano Biosphere Reserves, but protection and law enforcement are weak. The remoteness, the rugged mountains, and the hostility of the jungle are no match for the profits to be gained from logging and cattle grazing. Archaeology is in a race against deforestation; by the time archaeologists can reach a rainforest site to survey it, it may well be gone, fallen prey first to the logger’s ax and then the looter’s shovel.

The permits to lidar the Mosquitia rainforest were granted in October of 2010. They came with the blessing of the president and the minister of the interior and population, áfrico Madrid, along with the full support of the Instituto Hondure?o de Antropología e Historia (IHAH) and its chief, Virgilio Paredes. The new government of Honduras was squarely behind the search.

President “Pepe” Lobo was taking office after a contested election at one of the lowest points in Honduran history. The Honduran economy was the second poorest in the Americas. Large swaths of the countryside, towns, and parts of some large cities had been taken over by narcotraffickers. Gangs had sprouted up and were running brutal extortion and kidnapping rackets. The murder rate, already the highest in the world, was skyrocketing. Corruption was rampant. The judicial system and law enforcement were in collapse. The people were impoverished, adrift, cynical, and restive. The 2009 coup had left the country, including the archaeological community, bitterly fractured. Honduras was a country desperately in need of good news. The discovery of the White City, President Lobo told me later, would be that good news.





CHAPTER 10


I would never go back up that river. That’s the most dangerous place on the planet, that river.


With permits in hand, Elkins went out to raise money. He asked a friend, filmmaker Bill Benenson, to help him find investors for a film project documenting the search. Benenson knew a lot of money people. But after thinking about it for a while, Benenson decided to look for the money in his own pocket. This was too good an opportunity: He would finance the expedition himself. Eventually, Benenson and Elkins divided their filmmaking roles into being codirectors of the documentary film, with Benenson being the sole producer, and Tom Weinberg and Steve credited as coproducers.

Seventy-two years old at the time of the project, Benenson is a fit, handsome man with a close-clipped beard. He speaks with deliberation, weighing every word, and he does not look like a man who takes risks. He admitted that the project was an “amazing insanity” but he felt driven to take a chance on it. “I’m interested in this story. And also in this lost city and all the adventurers, liars, and crazy people who’ve been looking for it. If you’re going to be a gambler at all with a film project, I thought this was the one to put my money on. This was my number 17 on the roulette wheel.”

Benenson’s grandfather, Benjamin, came to America from Belarus in the late nineteenth century and settled in the Bronx, New York. He worked as a carpenter, initially building houses for other people, switched to building for himself, and today Benenson Capital Partners, of which Bill is a principal, is a major real estate company owning premier properties in Manhattan and elsewhere. But Benenson’s real love is film and its intersection with anthropology and archaeology. Out of college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Brazil, where he made his first film, Diamond Rivers, which aired on PBS. Today he has more than twenty feature films and documentaries to his credit. He was an executive producer of the documentary Beasts of No Nation, and he directed and produced The Hadza: Last of the First, about the last true remaining hunter-gatherer people of East Africa.

Benenson had a keen eye for offbeat projects, and he believed that even if nothing was found, the failure of yet another crazy search for the legendary city would actually make an engaging film. Elkins and Benenson, with other partners, created a company called UTL, LLC—“Under the Lidar”—to handle the details of the expedition and film.

With things finally turning a corner on his decades-old project, Elkins proceeded to put together a team. He and I had been in regular communication for years, and he asked if I’d write about the search for the New Yorker, for which I occasionally wrote archaeological pieces. I agreed, but only reluctantly. Truth be told, I was so skeptical about the outcome that I decided not to pitch the idea to the New Yorker at all until after the expedition was over—and only then if they found something. I didn’t want to risk looking like a bloody fool if the lidar survey came up empty, which I thought was likely, given that every attempt to find the lost city in the past five hundred years had ended in fraud or failure. When I confessed this to Steve, he said, “Well, if we draw a blank, at least you’ll get a vacation out of it.”