The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(28)

This was the moment of truth: The images would show what was in the valley—if anything. It was almost one in the morning when Sartori finished creating the raw images of T1; Shrestha had finally gone to bed and the Internet connection on Roatán was down. Exhausted, Sartori went to bed without even looking at the images he had just created.

The next day was Saturday, May 5. Rising early, Sartori uploaded the raw images to a server in Houston, again without examining them. Immediately on receiving them, Shrestha forwarded them to NCALM’s chief scientist, William Carter, who was at his vacation home in West Virginia. Shrestha intended to review them soon, but Carter beat him to it.

At 8:30 a.m. on that quiet Saturday morning, the terrain images of T1 arrived in Carter’s in-box just as he was about to leave the house to run errands. He needed to buy a refrigerator. He hesitated and then told his wife that he wanted to have a quick look. 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 was kind of surprising how easy it was to find them.” He e-mailed the coordinates to Sartori and Shrestha.

Sartori pulled up the images and scanned them. In his excitement Carter had mistyped the coordinates, but it took Sartori only a moment to find the cluster of features on his own. He said, “My skepticism wasn’t easily broken,” but this was clear enough to convince the most resolute doubter. Sartori was chagrined. “I was mad at myself for not seeing it first, since I was the guy producing the images!” He rushed out the door to report it to Steve Elkins, but then had second thoughts. Was it real? Maybe it was just his imagination. “I was in and out the door about six different times,” Sartori said.

I was walking back from breakfast with Steve and some others when Sartori appeared along the quay, running madly in his flip-flops, waving his arms and shouting: “There’s something in the valley!” We were startled by this sudden behavioral change, the sober-minded skeptic transformed into a raving Christopher Lloyd.

When we asked what it was, he said, “I can’t describe it. I won’t describe it. You just have to see it yourself.”

There was pandemonium. Steve started to run, and then remembered he was a filmmaker, so he began shouting for his film crew to get their gear together and record the moment—cinema verité. With the cameras rolling, everyone crowded into Sartori’s room to look at the images on his laptop. The maps were in gray scale and a first iteration, but they were clear enough. In the valley of T1, above the confluence of the two streams, we could see rectangular features and long, pyramid-like mounds arranged in squares, which covered an area of hundreds of acres. Also visible, but impossible to interpret, were the two objects that looked like square pillars we had seen from the plane. As we examined the images, Sartori’s in-box was pinging continuously with e-mails from Carter and Shrestha, who were poring over the same maps, shooting off an e-mail with coordinates every time they found another feature.

I was stunned. 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?

I could see Sartori’s spiral-bound notebook lying open next to the laptop. In keeping with the methodical scientist he was, he had been jotting daily notes on his work. But underneath the entry for May 5, he had written two words only:


HOLY SHIT!



“When I saw those rectangles and squares,” Steve told me later, “my first feeling was one of vindication.” Benenson, who had been feverishly capturing the unfolding discovery on video, was happily stunned that the million-dollar spin of the roulette wheel had landed on his number. “I’m witnessing this,” he said, “but I’m not processing this very well. I have chills.”



Nobody dared wake up Bruce Heinicke to tell him the news. He finally emerged from his bungalow at 1:00 p.m. and listened with a frown on his face. He wondered why we were all so worked up—of course the White City was there. Who the fuck thought otherwise? He got on the phone to áfrico Madrid, the minister of the interior. áfrico said he would fly out to Roatán as soon as possible to review what we found and, if he was convinced it was real—and he had no reason to doubt it—he would convey the news to President Lobo, as well as to the president of the Honduran Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández. Meanwhile, the director of the Instituto Hondure?o de Antropología e Historia, Virgilio Paredes, flew to Roatán to take a first look at our findings. Later, he recalled that moment: “I saw that and I said ‘Wow!’ We know Mosquitia is full of archaeological sites, but to see real cities, a big population of people living there—that is amazing!”

The valley of T1 had been mapped, but the project was only 40 percent complete: T2 and T3 remained to be explored. Chuck and Juan Carlos had headed off early that Saturday morning to continue mapping T2, unaware of the uproar of discovery occurring back at the Parrot Tree. Once in the air, however, Juan Carlos discovered the lidar machine was dead. They returned to Roatán and tried to get the machine working while the plane was on the ground, with no success. At around nine that morning all three lidar engineers examined it and confirmed the machine was kaput.