Jungleland

by Christopher S. Stewart

  Later, on a radio show, he encouraged the mystery of his return and said he had so many questions. “What happened to the people who lived there?” he asked. “Why did they, a highly civilized race, vanish from the face of the earth? No one knows. But I hope soon to find out. I’m going back to the City of the Monkey God, to try to solve one of the few remaining mysteries of the Western World.”

  None of that happened, however. By winter, still a year before the United States was actually attacked, talk of war escalated. There was military draft legislation and rumors of rations. President Roosevelt supported Great Britain with arms, suggesting a tilt toward intervention, and, as men began preparing for service, the birthrate climbed. Then an urgent call came to Morde from Washington: a new clandestine government office needed his services for a special mission that would be just as mysterious as his trip to the lost city. Morde was about to disappear again, this time to become a spook.

  What We Learned from the Tawahkas

  THE FIRST CERTAIN clue that we were finally onto Morde’s lost-city trail was the sight of Howler Monkey Mountain. The Tawahkas called it Quicungun. It stood at the confluence of the Patuca and Wampú rivers in the shape of a ruined temple—gigantic, engorged in trees, shrouded in mist. Howler monkeys growled from the shade. At no other point had I heard them so clearly, even though I could not see them. You could hear them for miles, disembodied, their guttural screams echoing off the water and the cliffs.

  It was drizzling as we stood at the Tawahka village of Krautara, which Morde had likely passed through nearly seventy years before. In his notes, the explorer had written that the mountain appeared to be “rearing its bulk.” A floppy-haired Tawahka teenager named José told us that the mountain had once caught fire. “It burned orange and red for a week. Then it died out,” he said. “The elders said it was the spirits talking. But I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  One thing I have noticed only in retrospect, mostly from reading other books about the jungle, was that we rarely, if ever, spoke about the beauty of the forest, like the misty green mountain in front of us. I was always too tired or too scared or too discombobulated to consider anything beyond my physical suffering and the purpose at hand.

  The elder we had come to see about the lost city was off hunting, so José invited us to his hut on the hill to meet someone else while we waited. Krautara was one of the larger Tawahka settlements dotting the Patuca. There were two other towns on the lower stretches of the river—Wampusirpi and Krausirpi—and the only way to reach them was by boat; no roads or airstrips connected them to the outside world. In Krautara, about ten wood huts with thatched or metal roofs straddled a muddy path. Although it had been bigger by five or ten huts when Morde came, the village now had a concrete schoolhouse and a soccer field.

  José’s house was one room with a porch that overlooked the river. We sat on wood benches opposite one another. José wore a yellow cotton vest opened at his bony chest and faded jeans, held up around his slender waist by a brass buckle the size of a playing card. He swept his wet black hair out of his face and in broken Spanish that Chris translated he asked where we were from.

  “New York,” I said.

  “Is that near Italy?”

  “It’s in America,” I said.

  “Can you walk to Italy from there?”

  I explained that Italy was across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe. At that his face brightened. “Rambo!” he said and pulled at a cross hanging from his neck. “Rambo is in America? I love that movie.” He made the universal sign for a machine gun. “I watched that many times until our TV broke,” he said. That had been two or three years before.

  Meanwhile, Pancho and Angel had wandered off to explore the surroundings. Angel seemed less anxious now that the pirates had departed. In the distance, I could hear him toying with his cell phone’s ringtones. His father, however, was somber. His radio had died, and he had no news of the coup to occupy him. Upon our arrival, he said he wasn’t convinced that the pirates had really left us behind and feared an ambush. He also seemed to be dwelling on his imminent return to his old village. Over the past few days I’d noticed him breaking off from us and walking away to stare at the river or a hole in the greenery, picking up a flower or gazing up at the bulk of a towering mahogany tree. Like he was reacquainting himself with the wilderness that had once expelled him and seeking its permission to return.

  As the rain came down harder, pinging the metal roof, another man stopped in. He introduced himself as “the teacher” and said his name was Dixon. He was “around thirty-seven,” shirtless, with muscle-ripped arms and a buzz cut that made his head look like a hammer. Like José, he had been born in Krautara and had not traveled very far from the river. “I’ve never been to New York!” he said. But he wondered what it was like “out there.”

  The Tawahka people continued to exist mainly as hunter-gatherers and traded a few crops and gold along the river. When I asked Dixon about his tribe’s history, he pointed at his shaved head, where the story of the Tawahkas resided. I remembered that the Tawahka chief had said the same thing to Morde. There were still no books, no archives. Chris smiled. “Like Homer,” he said.

  Dixon said his ancestry stretched back thousands of years, but his tribe felt threatened. He mentioned the Spanish conquistadors—the beheadings, the enslavement, the murders of Indians. About that, there was a legend that had been passed down over the centuries. “There was a great earthquake after the Spanish came,” he said. “It destroyed one of the bigger cities. And in part of that city there was a great temple of gold.” He paused. “When the earthquake hit, there was a landslide. The mountain came down and covered the city. Now no one knows where it is.”

  I asked him how many of his tribe remained. “We were once a very large city along the river.” he said. “We were almost five thousand. Now we are all spread out, and there are less than a thousand.”

  Lately, heavily armed settlers and ranchers were terrorizing them. “Bad, bad,” he said, pointing at the swirling clouds overhead, as if to suggest that violence had settled into their territory like a storm front. “They take everything.”

  WE ATE A dinner of beans and tortillas with an unrecognizable white meat in a hut belonging to a woman who lived at the center of the village. In a corner, a fire warmed the cool night air. Not long afterward, the old man we were looking for returned, the wooden grip of a knife sticking out of his belt. He nodded at us. He was soaked from the storm. His white button-down stuck to his chest. His jeans were falling off his waist, and his tall rubber boots were thick with miles of mud. His face was embedded with wrinkles, and a tuft of white hair sprouted off his chin. His name was Marcos, but people referred to him as the chief, or cacique.

  We walked over to his hut, which was elevated on stilts. The interior was unadorned. There was a bed made of tree branches, some clothes folded neatly on the floor, and a framed black-and-white picture of his deceased mother and father that a photographer had taken many years before.

  After he changed into dry clothes, Marcos sat on a wood chair and showed me the blackened tooth around his neck. “It is from a jaguar I killed a long time ago,” he said in Spanish. He laughed, as if the thought of his younger days amused him. He said he was one of the oldest living Indians there and thought he had been born in 1929. “But I don’t know for certain.” He smiled, no teeth, as a middle-aged woman arrived with a tray of steaming sweet coffee.

  “It was a good time then,” he reminisced about his boyhood as rain struck the metal roof. “There were many animals. Tapirs, jaguars, pigs.” He stretched his arms as far as he could to show the size of the fish he’d caught, sometimes with his bare hands, other times with a spear. “You could go out and hunt or fish and always come back with something,” he said, as if describing a grocery store. “But now it is much harder to find the animals.” That day he’d caught nothing, but he was planning to go back out the next day.

  I told him about Theodore Morde and asked if he had an
y memory of the expedition. Marcos would have been about eleven years old then. He thought for a moment but said he wasn’t sure. “I’ve seen many gringos looking for things,” he said with a smile. He remembered the Germans whom Morde had visited on the Patuca and their barge. “They’re gone, and so is their banana plantation,” he said. He remembered the American exile Brayton too. He’d vanished. “Gone,” he said.

  When I asked if there were any large ancient ruins in the area, Marcos stared at me, as if trying to determine my intention. He said there were old cities, but he stayed away from them. “People do not go there.” Just then thunder struck and the old man lifted his eyes skyward. I mentioned Ciudad Blanca, and he took a sip of his coffee. “I will tell you what my parents told me,” he said after some time. “Our ancestors used to live there. But bad people came, and they began killing each other. The bad people expelled our people. They had special powers—arrows that could be shot in the air and would hit whatever they wanted to hit. They could look at birds, and they would die.”

  Marcos set his cup down on the wood plank floor, which had been ground down over time to have the smooth surface of a bowling ball, and he sucked in the wet air. He said that the city was “beautiful.” When I brought up Morde’s description of a monkey dance, he shook his head. He remembered nothing like that. Later, however, another Tawahka man would say that there had once been a ritual of the sort, though he couldn’t recall specific details, except that monkeys were eaten. The second Tawahka had also heard stories from his grandfather that there were three different types of fierce monkeys that inhabited the forest around Ciudad Blanca and protected what was inside its walls. “They don’t allow anyone to get close to it,” he said, wagging a withered finger. “And there is also a jaguar bigger than you’ve ever seen.” He also warned us to stay away.

  As the night wound down, I asked Marcos if he knew the location of the lost city. Slowly he unfolded himself from the chair and stood up. “There are many ancient things in the jungle,” he reiterated. “But we don’t touch them.” I recalled the Indians who had abandoned Morde deep in the forest. Marcos inhaled deeply as he stared off toward Howler Monkey Mountain, now buried in darkness. I worried that I had offended him. He spoke the city’s name. “It is up the Wampú,” he finally said. “That is the place where my parents used to talk about.” I repeated what he’d said. This was a crucial moment. “Up the Wampú,” he said again, nodding toward the river. “It was the most sacred place.”

  “A FAKE-OUT,” I said to Chris later that night. We were lying in our hammocks, which were tied to railings outside the schoolhouse. The rain continued, and there was no moon. The darkness was of the sort you glimpse at the back of a cave. The satellite phone still didn’t work. I’d missed Sky’s fourth birthday without even speaking to her. Now she was probably in bed, asleep after all the sugar.

  “That’s what it looks like,” he said.

  In his notes, Morde had written that there was “no great civilization up the Wampu.” But he had also noted that he was aware of ancient metate rolling stones (the rolling pin–like stones used to grind corn) discovered over a mountain range “far in from the Wampu and closer to the Plátano.”

  The two statements seemed odd together. There were artifacts scattered about the jungle above the Wampú, suggesting habitation and perhaps even an advanced people; it was up the Wampú where Captain Murray, Morde’s predecessor, had heard tales of ruins.

  But for some unknown reason Morde had declared that he wouldn’t be going up the river to investigate. At least that is what he seemed to want any unwelcome readers of his journal to believe.

  “Morde was lying,” I said. “Just not in the way we thought.”

  Part IV

  Daisy

  IN 1943, THE city of Istanbul was a zone of intrigue for both Allied and Axis actors—a hive of spies, double-crossers, hit men, and resistance groups. Turkey, at the nexus of two continents, was neutral in the war. The war took a turn that year. Hitler had just been driven out of Africa, Benito Mussolini’s regime was in tatters, and the Soviets had retaken Stalingrad. Roosevelt promised the Allies an additional 10 million soldiers. In July, the Allies unleashed the largest aerial assault yet on the Third Reich, nearly leveling the city of Hamburg and killing 42,000 people. Winston Churchill declared that the goal was “to set Europe ablaze.”

  During that phase of the war, in the fall, Theodore Morde was making his way toward Istanbul “under the disguise,” as he termed it in classified reports, “of a correspondent.” For whom he didn’t say, but sometimes he told people that he worked for Reader’s Digest, which may or may not have been true. The magazine, with its numerous international bureaus, was rumored to provide cover for spies.

  By now, Morde’s jungle scruff was gone, and he had regained the weight he’d lost on the expedition. As a secret agent, he had to blend in wherever he went. He wore fitted suits and shiny shoes, sometimes with a thin, manicured mustache. There was another thing: in the field, he was no longer Theodore Morde. His code name was Daisy.

  Thirty-two years old, Morde was three years out of the jungle and again loose in the world. He had spent the last few years bouncing from one undercover war assignment to another—Gibraltar, China, Syria, “the length and breadth of Africa.” Although the war was meant to be only a hiatus from the search for the lost city, it became an extension of it too—a continuation of his adventuring self.

  The year before he had been named to Who’s Who in America, along with Bob Hope, and in New York, he was inducted into the Explorers Club, among other members like the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and Charles Lindbergh. Sporadically, he had lived in a houseboat on the Nile in Cairo.

  But tracking him after he left Honduras in any kind of detailed way is difficult, if not out of the question. According to his classified personnel file, Morde was in “charge of many cases of espionage-sabotage.” In his line of business, a paper trail was almost nonexistent, except for his field reports, which he sent by coded wire to Washington or to the local bureaus.

  It was October when Morde finally landed in Istanbul. He had spent the last couple of months chasing shadowy links to Nazi Germany: through Algiers, Egypt, Syria, and now Turkey, where he believed that he had finally identified a contact with a supposedly firm tie to Adolf Hitler’s inner circle. Morde’s goal: to use this man to help with the assassination or capture of the führer. What was probably the most secretive assignment of his life began with an agent known only as Snapdragon.

  MORDE MET SNAPDRAGON at a nondescript office building perched on the shimmering Golden Horn. It was still early in the morning. He knew almost nothing about the agent. The man could be an enemy, and he wouldn’t even know.

  Standing in the mostly empty lobby of the building, he introduced himself as Daisy. Morde wore a dark gray pin-striped suit and a white button-down, projecting the image of an “all-American” from the “Ivy League,” as the scene was recalled in Anthony Cave Brown’s book Wild Bill Donovan about the pre-CIA spy outfit known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

  At the outset, Snapdragon was shocked that Morde wanted to get in touch with one of Germany’s most powerful men: Franz von Papen, the country’s ambassador to Turkey. “It shouldn’t surprise you,” Snapdragon said, “that I’m not in the habit of arranging meetings for total strangers who wish to fraternize with the enemy.”

  Morde handed the agent a sheet of thin tissue with a typewritten list of details about a covert scheme involving the help of German turncoats to assassinate Hitler and force the Axis powers to surrender to the Allies. It was special paper—a splash of water or spit could disintegrate it, erasing all evidence of the encounter. Holding it in his hands, Snapdragon seemed confused. “Who in the hell,” he asked, “sent you on this goddamn fool’s errand?”

  “It’s no fool’s errand,” said Morde, holding his ground. “I was sent here by FDR.” He then produced a letter from a high-level OSS agent, urging Snapdra
gon “to hold nothing back” from Morde, and eventually Snapdragon backed down. He agreed to put Morde in touch with the enemy but told him that he could not predict what would happen. He told Morde to be very careful, and then he was gone.

  FEW PEOPLE KNEW exactly when and how Morde joined the intelligence ranks. Officially, it was December 1940, before the OSS was born, but it could have been much earlier. Some suggested that George Heye, rumored to have connections to spy circles, had recruited him. Later, another of Heye’s museum employees would join the black operatives. It is also possible that Morde had been working informally in some intelligence role as far back as the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and even through his time searching for the lost city.

  Whatever the truth, Morde was one of the first. The ranks of the OSS seemed to be a natural place for an adventurer like him. As a Washington Times-Herald columnist once put it, the agency had recruited “ex–polo players, millionaires, Russian princes, society gambol boys, scientists and dilettante detectives. . . . And the girls? The prettiest, best-born, snappiest girls.” Some of the spies and spy staffers would later become famous, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to future Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg and the movie director John Ford, as well as Julia Child.

  Formed after Pearl Harbor, in 1941, the agency was run by the quixotic ex–army colonel William Donovan. Donovan was known as “Wild Bill,” a moniker he had earned during World War I when he had stood in the middle of a battlefield and, as all of his men crouched in fear behind a bunker, charged the enemy alone—and taken machine-gun fire to his leg.

  Donovan called the OSS a “league of gentlemen”; later it would become the CIA. Early on, the agency was chaotic but also a bit idyllic for its operatives—“our springtime years,” as one former OSS agent called them. Although Donovan considered the agency’s main functions to be mining secrets from behind enemy lines and recruiting resistance forces, the colonel placed few limitations on his spies. “In a global and totalitarian war,” he once said, “intelligence must be global and totalitarian.” There were assassination attempts and kooky plots to promote uprisings (air-dropping pictures of succulent food into starved German villages, for instance), as well as even more far-fetched attempts to alter the brains and bodies of foreign leaders (injecting Hitler’s food with female hormones, for example).