Jungleland Read Free Page B

blank spots—there are a lot of them—but for the tiny black question mark printed near the Pao, Plátano, and Paulaya rivers, next to the words “Ruinas Ciudad Blanca.”
    Aguilar Paz’s marking became the starting point for their adventure, Woodman said. They asked an old friend, Bill Earle, who owned a handful of planes that shuttled people around the country, to fly them out to look for it from the sky. Years before, Earle had left the United States to start a new life in Honduras. But he was afraid of the jungle.
    “You’re crazy,” he told the men. “You have no idea what you’re asking. It’s loco.”
    Woodman said he had laughed, not because he thought the response absurd but because he knew an honest warning when he heard one. Earle had already lost three planes to the jungle. Mountains jumped out of nowhere. You’d be flying through gobs of mist and then a piece of rock would appear. Winds shook you up like a soda can. Every trip was a risk, a roll of the dice. But Earle needed the work.
    They took his single-engine Cessna for a dozen flights in all. Buzzing over the high jungle canopy, the explorers scanned the sea of green for signs of white. Some days Earle dropped the plane down on a cleared piece of jungle, from which the men would make daylong hikes into the house-high bush. They circled outward from the spot they thought was Aguilar Paz’s mark.
    They didn’t find a thing. When their efforts with Earle failed, they hired a helicopter and traveled in dugout canoes through the winding brown rivers. They carried guns, dehydrated food, compasses, and an extra pair of clothes each. They covered hundreds of miles, though so slowly it felt like thousands, because walking anywhere involved slashing away thick growth with machetes, wall after wall, which occasionally revealed drug runners and lunatics. “We got lost a lot,” said Woodman.
    Death lurked in the verdure. They discovered two loggers hacked to death with machetes. Their helicopter pilot died in a crash. Occasionally, though, they found clues, reasons to believe that they were closing in on what they were looking for. Shards of ancient pottery with strange markings. Metates, or corn grinders, stuck in the mud. Carvings on jagged granite cliffs along the rivers, like signage on highways, urging them forward.
    Along the way, they consulted psychics, snake and jaguar hunters, grizzled prospectors who had logged enough time on the rivers for the rain to ruin their minds. A man who had once owned a rubber plantation on the Río Patuca told them he’d heard a lot of stories about the city, but the thought of actually discovering it frightened him. It’s haunted, he said. You’ll never come back. Another guy told them that he had been to the city and drunk from a golden mug. A few people told them that they should be looking not for a White City but for a White House. Casa Blanca . Or that the city’s outer walls, which one man said were as “tall as skyscrapers,” were white. Or that, in fact, those walls were simply the razor-edged mountains that rose all around the place.
    One year passed, and then a few more. When they weren’t working at their day jobs—Woodman as a tourist consultant, Spohrer as an airline operator—they returned to the search. But the more time they spent in the jungle, the bigger the jungle felt to them. They grew tired and dispirited. At one point, ABC filmed a few segments about their exploration. Like many of the explorers before them, they couldn’t find a trace.
    It was during one of those lean years that they met an old Tawahka Indian woman named Juana. She lived on the Patuca in a leaky wood hut amid a grove of coconut trees. Pigs roamed around her land at the edge of the river and helped keep away snakes. It was hard for the pair to guess her age. Her wrinkled face was a map of her hard life. There were few women like her left. She had never seen a lightbulb.
    The men set up camp at the confluence of the