The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(44)

“Nobody goes past the tape,” he said, “but me, Oscar, and Anna.”

Steve, leaning on his walking stick, exhausted and in pain from the punishing hike up to the ruins, was astounded. “It’s amazing,” he said, “that there’s this place here, this jewel of a place, as pure as you could find, untouched for centuries!” The rain streamed down all around us, but nobody paid any attention. “When you’re here and see how overgrown it is,” he continued, “how much has been buried, you see how improbable it would be to stumble upon this. In a metaphysical sense it was like we were led here.”

Chris Fisher was also a bit stunned. “I expected to find a city,” he told me later, “but I didn’t expect this. The undisturbed context is rare. It may be an ofrenda, an offering or a cache. This is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects out of circulation.” He was especially impressed by the carved head of what, to him, might be a portrait of a “were-jaguar,” showing a shaman “in a spirit or transformed state.” Because the figure seemed to be wearing a helmet, he also wondered if it was connected to the ball game. “But this is all speculation: We just don’t know.” He suspected that much, much more lay below the surface.

And much more did, as later excavation would reveal. The cache was vast, containing over five hundred pieces, but more intriguing even than its size was its existence at all. This particular type of ritual collection of artifacts seems to be a special feature of these lost cities of ancient Mosquitia—they have not been seen in Maya culture or elsewhere—meaning that they could hold a key to what distinguishes the people of Mosquitia from their neighbors and defines their place in history. What was the purpose of these caches? Why were they left here? While similar caches had been reported in Mosquitia before, none had been found so fully intact, offering a rare opportunity for the spot to be systematically studied and excavated. The significance of this offering would prove to be the expedition’s greatest discovery so far, one that had important implications far beyond Mosquitia. But it would be a year before we understood the scope of those discoveries.

Even with the intense excitement and high spirits, the hike back to camp was grueling, as the steep hillsides were impossible to descend except in a semi-controlled sort of falling slide. In spite of Woody’s worries, the stream had not risen much and remained fordable. The rain abated; the sky began to clear; and we hoped the helicopter would soon be able to come in with more needed supplies for the camp, which was still only partly set up. We lacked food and water, generators to charge up laptops and batteries for the camera gear, and we needed to set up a medical tent and guest tents for scientists who were expected to arrive over the following days.

Back in camp, Chris declared he was now going to explore what appeared in the lidar images to be an earthwork behind our camp. His energy was impressive. We hiked back behind camp, passing through the soldiers’ encampment. They were building a communal house using one of our tarps, and paving the muddy floor with thick leaves. They had a fire burning—I had no idea how they managed it in the rain—and one soldier was returning from the hunt with a deer haunch thrown over his shoulder. The deer, it turned out later, was a threatened Central American red brocket deer; a week later, the military ordered the soldiers to stop hunting and began flying in MREs. The soldiers told us it had taken them almost five hours to make the journey to our camp on foot from the lower landing zone at the river junction, a distance of three miles. They had traveled in the river, wading upstream, easier and safer than slashing through the jungle.

Behind the soldiers’ camp, a steep slope thrust upward. This was the anomaly Chris wanted to explore. We climbed to the top and came down on the far side, finding ourselves in an oval area with a flat bottom, surrounded by what appeared to be dikes or man-made earthen banks. The area was open, with little understory. It looked like a large swimming pool, with a flat bottom and steep walls. A small outlet at one end led back down to the flat area where we were camped. On the other end, a swale that looked like an ancient road passed down the side of the hill. Chris concluded that these earthworks had probably been a reservoir for collecting water during the wet season, to be released during the dry season to irrigate crops in the area where we were camped. “That whole terrace we’re on was probably an agricultural area,” he said, that had been artificially leveled. Part of it may have been a cacao grove; Alicia González had identified what she believed were some small cacao trees growing near her campsite.

The dark clouds drifted off, and finally blue sky appeared in patches for the first time that day. A milky sun emerged, sending spears of sunlight through the misty canopy. An hour later we heard the thudding of the incoming chopper, rousing once again a furious chorus from the howler monkeys. We had two visitors: Lt. Col. Oseguera, who had come to check on the situation of his troops, and Virgilio Paredes, the IHAH chief. The colonel went to review his troops while Virgilio retired to the kitchen area and listened with interest as Steve and Chris described to him the discovery of the cache. It was too late in the evening to go back up, so Virgilio and the colonel decided to spend the night and visit the site the next day.

I had first met Virgilio in 2012 during the lidar survey. He was a tall, thoughtful man who, while not an archaeologist himself, asked probing questions and had taken pains to become thoroughly versed in the project. He spoke fluent English. He was descended from an ancient Sephardic Jewish family named Pardes, who left Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrated to Segovia, Spain, where the name was Hispanicized to Paredes. During the Fascist regime of Franco, his grandfather left Spain and went to Honduras. His father went to medical school in Honduras and became a biochemist and a businessman, but now, close to retirement, he was considering making aliyah and moving to Israel. Virgilio was raised Catholic, went to the American School in Tegucigalpa, got a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and lived and studied in diverse places in the world, from Germany to Trinidad and Tobago. He was working for the Ministry of Culture at the time of the 2009 coup, when the interim president asked him to head the IHAH. It was a big change: For the past sixty years the IHAH had been headed by an academic, but the new administration wanted a manager instead. Some archaeologists were unhappy. “The academics were fighting with the tourist sector,” Virgilio told me. “If you have the golden chicken, the archaeologists don’t want the chicken to produce any golden eggs, but the tourist guys, they want to cut it open to get all the eggs at once. There should be a balance.”