Jungleland Read Free Page A

nature unfurled along the Caribbean coast between Honduras and Nicaragua. The author Peter Keenagh, who traveled into the Mosquitia in the early twentieth century, described it as “one of the wildest parts of earth.”
    It is a place of savannas, rolling hills, cordilleras, and many, many swamps. But most of it is rain forest. The jungle is dank and buggy; mosquitoes teem. Trees stand as tall as office towers and in many places block out the daylight. Rivers meander into and out of the fertile gloom. The rain comes without warning, persistent and forceful, a harbinger of some bigger, more malign force that presides out of sight. In places, mountains climb as high as 4,000 feet, with steep intermingling hills packed close like bad teeth. The jungle generates fear. As Theroux put it in The Mosquito Coast , “Once you get in, you never get out.”
    Howler monkeys shriek around the clock, lending the jungle the weird sensation of attending a rock concert. Other strange sounds come and go, sourceless and spectral, without a face. Jaguars prowl, eyes black as asphalt, and bullet ants sting like a .22. The men who roam the forest aren’t any better: drug runners, lumber thieves, gold diggers, murderers, outlaws, treasure hunters.
    There are stories of downed planes never found again. The natives fear ghosts and jungle spirits that chatter loudly at night and sometimes send messages in gaudy white and purple lights. One of their stories tells of an ugly black witch who guards a pile of gold up a creek off the Río Blanco, in the western part of the country. She preys on men with her striking voice, like the sirens of the Odyssey . Sometimes she appears as a beautiful woman with flowing hair that is either blond or black.
     
    “I WAS SITTING in a bar in La Ceiba, Honduras, thinking what the hell am going to do?” the explorer Jim Woodman recalled to me one afternoon on the phone.
    It had taken me two weeks to track him down. Many of the phone numbers I had turned up online were switched off, and just as I had been about to give up he responded to one of the half-dozen e-mails I’d sent.
    “We started talking about the interior of the country with some locals,” he said. “From time to time, the Indians would come in with a piece of pottery and try to sell it. I kept hearing stories about this White City. No one went to Mosquitia. It was unexplored. And we thought, ‘Goddamn, let’s go out there and find this place.’ ”
    It was 1976 then, and Woodman was forty years old. He knew Theodore Morde’s story of finding the lost city and wondered if Morde’s sudden death had had something to do with the “jungle spirits.” He believed in that sort of thing.
    Back then, Woodman was still fit from his days as captain of the swim team at the University of New Mexico. Straight and lean as a surfboard, with a mop of brown hair, he was the son of an Illinois newspaperman, had served as a marine during the Korean War, and had then worked as a kind of scout after it had ended—“a destination consultant,” he said—for Pan American World Airways, jetting all over the globe in search of new markets for tourism. He married a girl from Rio, and together they had three children and settled in Miami. By the time he felt the pull of the White City, Woodman was a full-time travel writer and explorer who spent much of his time in Central America. He was loose in the world, a kind of hippie without the drugs, but contemptuous of social convention and of setting down roots in one place. He could never sit still.
    As he investigated the White City with Bill Spohrer, a Fulbright scholar and archaeologist, they found an old map of Honduras, charted by a local cartographer named Dr. Jesús Aguilar Paz in 1954. To make the map, Aguilar Paz did a lot of walking and talking to the jungle’s tribes: Tawahkas, Miskitos, and Pech. At some point, the cartographer met Morde, according to some news reports. His map is curious not for its numerous