The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(29)
NCALM in Houston had a technical maintenance contract with a team in Toronto, Canada, where this lidar box had been designed and built. As it was a weekend, there was only a single tech-support person in Canada manning the phone. After he walked the lidar engineers through a plug-unplug sequence, trying to wake up the machine, they determined that a crucial part had failed. It was called a Position and Orientation System (POS) board, and it contained a GPS receiver and other components that “talked” to the IMU, exchanging data. There were only two POS boards in the world, both in Canada. The company would put a technician on a flight from Toronto to Roatán early Monday morning, transporting the $100,000 board in person in his carry-on bag. The part would have to clear customs twice, once in the United States and a second time in Honduras.
The engineer flying the part was Pakistani and, not having a US State Department export clearance for the POS board, he was worried about being stopped with it at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, where he had an overnight connection. Before boarding the plane in Toronto, he panicked and stuck the part in his checked luggage, thinking that it would be less likely to prompt a security challenge in the United States.
The airlines (of course!) lost his bags. The two bags included not only the POS board but all the tools the technician needed to install it. The fact that the part was insured meant little to the expedition, which was spending many thousands of dollars a day and only had use of the plane for a strictly limited period of time. The flustered engineer arrived in Roatán on Tuesday morning with little more than the clothes on his back.
Desperate and futile phone calls to United and TACA airlines took up all of Tuesday. They learned the bags had arrived in Dulles Airport but had failed to be transferred onto the flight to San Salvador and then Roatán. They seemed to have vanished in Dulles. Then, as the frenzy of phone calls continued into Wednesday afternoon, the bags unexpectedly arrived at the Roatán airport. Virgilio Paredes went with Steve to the airport to speed them through Honduran customs. He did a masterful job of intimidation, waving about the president’s official card, and the bags sailed through and were rushed to the Cessna at the far end of the airport tarmac. It took the technician and Juan Carlos two hours to install the part and get the lidar machine working again. As they arrived back at the Parrot Tree, elated that the expensive, five-day delay was over, United Airlines called to once again say that, despite a most diligent effort, they were terribly sorry but they had been unable to trace the lost bags.
The mission resumed the next morning, on Thursday, with overflights of T2 and T3. They went flawlessly. Once again we gathered in Michael Sartori’s bungalow to look over the images on his laptop. And once again we were absolutely floored: T3 contained an even larger set of ruins than T1. T2 also revealed enigmatic, man-made features that were harder to interpret. Some guessed they might be quarries or fortifications.
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? This, however, was the wrong question—it was clear to everyone by this point that the White City was a conflation of stories and probably did not exist in its described form. Like most legends, however, it was anchored in truth: The lidar discoveries had confirmed that Mosquitia had indeed been the territory of a great and mysterious civilization that built many large settlements before it disappeared. It was exactly as Cortés had written five centuries ago: This land had been home to “very extensive and rich provinces.” But what had caused it to vanish so suddenly and completely?
CHAPTER 12
There is a big city here.
On Friday, áfrico Madrid arrived in Roatán along with a group of Honduran officials. They crowded into Sartori’s room to examine the images on his screen. That evening, Madrid called President Lobo at home to report that he believed Ciudad Blanca had been found. When he heard the news, Lobo told me later, he was “completely speechless.” He said, “This finding will contribute to all of humanity, not just Honduras.” Just how important it was would have to await a ground expedition, but it was clearly one of the major archaeological discoveries of the new century.
Both men credited the hand of God; after all, Mabel Heinicke had approached them in church at the very moment when the new administration was being formally blessed. “There are no coincidences,” Madrid said to me. “I think that God has extraordinary plans for our country, and Ciudad Blanca could be one of them.” The discovery, he believed, was the beginning of a change in Honduras: “It will put Honduras on the map in terms of tourism, scientific research, history, and anthropology.”
A celebratory dinner was held at a long table set up on the beach, with flaming torches, speeches, and toasts.
After the mapping of T3, the two-week lidar expedition ended and Chuck Gross departed for Houston in the sturdy little Skymaster packed with all its classified technology. Steve and Juan Carlos were summoned to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to present the discovery at a cabinet meeting, which was televised live to the nation. A press conference followed on the palace steps. A press release, issued jointly by Elkins’s team and the Honduran government, announced the discovery of “what appears to be evidence of archaeological ruins in an area long rumored to contain the legendary lost city of Ciudad Blanca.” The careful qualification in the statement was lost on the popular press, which announced with huge fanfare that the actual Ciudad Blanca had been found.