The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(79)

When I climbed the embankment, I was again shocked at the change to our former campsite. All the ground vegetation and small trees had been chopped down and cleared, leaving just the larger trees. It was sunny, open, hot, and trampled. The ineffable mystery of being immersed in the living, breathing rainforest was gone; the area felt shrunken and bedraggled. A year of continuous occupation had taken its toll. No longer were there individual tents and hammocks tucked here and there among the great gloomy trees, each camp hidden in its own glade. Instead, a tent city had been erected. The encampment of the Honduran soldiers stood naked and exposed in the hot sun, a series of green canvas huts and blue tarps erected on wooden poles, wreathed in the smoke of cooking fires. It was safer from snakes, but far less evocative. Walkways of cut bamboo and wooden pallets were laid over the muddy ground, and a generator blatted away. I felt distressed even as I understood these were unavoidable changes, the inevitable result of our expedition’s exploration of the valley. Even the sounds of the jungle were different; the cries and calls were more distant, the wildlife having retreated into the forest.

But at the edge of the clearing, I was happy to see the virgin wall of jungle still rising up on all sides, dark, unfathomable, muttering with animal sounds. Our camp was still but a tiny puncture wound in the great wilderness. As I entered the camp, I greeted Spud, who was in the kitchen area making coffee. He was the logistics manager of this expedition, as Woody and Sully were off on other projects. Major improvements had been made; the sea of sucking mud that almost drowned us last time was now being dealt with by elevated pathways and decking made of wooden pallets topped with heavy rubber matting.

I tried to pitch my tent as far away from the tent city as possible, but as I scouted out an area at the edge of the clearing a polite young soldier on patrol stopped me and ushered me back with gestures. “No, no, se?or,” he said. “Serpientes para allá. Snakes over there.”

Disgruntled, I set up my tent in an open spot in the midst of the tent city. I crawled inside, stripped, and smeared myself with 100 percent DEET for the second time that day. I sprayed my clothes and put them back on, the choking stench of bug spray filling the inside of the tent. I then grabbed my notebook and camera and hiked up to the lost city. A good trail had been cleared to it—no need for a machete-wielding escort and no possibility of getting lost. The day was lovely, the sky full of drifting cumulus.

I crossed the river via another single-log bridge and followed the trail. When I came to the steep slope below the pyramid, I found a gang of soldiers cutting a staircase in the earth, which they were shoring up with stakes and logs, for the president’s visit. A nylon rope served as a handrail. As I climbed the stairs and reached the base of the pyramid, the trail narrowed and once again I was back in mostly intact jungle, thankful to see it the same, except for a sign that read, in Spanish, NO SMOKING FROM HERE ON.

The site of the cache was mostly unchanged. Only a minimal amount of clearing had been done, just enough to give Anna, Chris, and the other archaeologists elbow room. Chris had taken the greatest care to keep it as undisturbed as possible.

I greeted Chris and Anna, who were working on a single square meter of ground, which held the artifacts the president would remove the next day. Anna was carefully brushing earth off a spectacular ritual vessel carved with vulture heads. I met the new archaeologists working on the site, both Honduran and North American.

The cache area had been cordoned off with yellow tape and gridded with string into one-meter-square units. In the few days since work had commenced, three of those squares had been opened up. Two were densely packed with breathtaking artifacts. A third square had been cut into the ground off to one side, beyond the cache, to determine the natural stratigraphy of the site—how the layers of earth were laid down without artifacts—as a control.

I was happy to see Dave Yoder, once again festooned with camera equipment, taking photos. He was covering the excavation for National Geographic, and he looked vastly better than the last time I saw him. I asked Dave about his leish. The good news was that, even with only two infusions, his disease had healed quickly and there had been no need for additional treatment. But his recovery from the drug ordeal had been agonizing. “I felt exhausted and tired for months afterward,” he told me. “I’m not sure I’ve really recovered yet, to be honest.”

How did he feel about going back to the jungle? Was he worried about his safety?

“I’m a photographer,” he said with a snort. “I don’t come to places like this to be safe.” And he wasn’t safe: Later in the month on that assignment, Dave had several close calls. One night, on his way to the latrine, he ran into what he described as a “totally pissed-off” four-foot coral snake crawling down a bamboo stalk. It reached the ground and headed straight into camp, even as Dave tried flashing it with his headlamp and stomping on the ground to scare it off. The Honduran soldiers ran a “snake patrol” at night, and they arrived just in time to chop the snake up with a machete. (“I felt bad about it, but it’s the middle of the night, you can’t transport it, what do you do?” He added drily, “At least it saved the lives of countless rodents.”)

Later that month, Dave and Spud, along with several of the archaeologists, were almost killed in a helicopter accident. They were flying out of the valley in the same chopper that had flown me in, an old Bell Huey gunship that had seen action in Vietnam and still had .50-caliber machine-gun door mounts. The door was open, a common practice so Dave could shoot photos unimpeded. But when Dave finished photographing and someone went to slide the door shut, it was sucked clear off the side of the helicopter. On its tumbling fall to the jungle it gouged holes in the fuselage and barely missed the tail rotor and stabilizing fins. If it had nicked either, there would have been eight body bags coming out of T1. Chris had been fanatical about trying to minimize the risk to his team, and he was extremely upset when he heard about the close call. The cause of the accident, I found out later, was that the doors on this kind of Bell Huey have to be shut in a specific way during flight to avoid creating a differential air pressure strong enough to blow a door off its hinges.