Free Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart

information about the White City. In his journal, Morde doesn’t name the person or even say whether it was a man or a woman. There are no details about where the meeting took place or at what time of day. That person told him that the city was known for its “ arenas blancas ,” or white sands, which proved about as helpful to Morde as the myths Woodman had encountered. As for the city’s location, Morde wrote that it might be between the Wampú and Plátano rivers, “over high mountains, where there grow strange large flowers.” Under those flowers, this person warned the men, was a burial ground.
     
    THE MEN SLEPT uneasily that night, impatient to move on to the frontier. But the next morning brought them some trouble. As they drove to the harbor to find a boat, they accidentally struck and killed a rooster. The timing of the collision couldn’t have been worse. Three police officers happened to see it. Drawing rifles, the men stepped into the road and gestured for the explorers to pull over.
    The policemen shook their heads at the lifeless bird. “You need to come with us,” one of them said.
    Morde tried to apologize. The rooster had come out of nowhere, he said. It had surprised them. He wasn’t there and then he was. They were sorry.
    But sorry wasn’t enough. The policemen told Morde and Brown that they were going to jail. They hadn’t killed just any rooster; it happened to be the sheriff’s prized bird. For a moment, the explorers imagined the worst: the expedition ending in this dead-end town.
    At the ramshackle police station, Morde and Brown tried to reason with the sheriff, thinking that he was a reasonable man. But the sheriff just smiled dumbly. He was a big cake of a guy with heavy-lidded eyes. Sweat shone on his face. That was his best fighting cock, he told the explorers, and it had made him money. His hands went up in the air, palms open. What was he supposed to do now without his fighting bird? He wanted the men to make him an offer.
    He laughed, and the explorers laughed too. Morde dug into his bag, counted out several gold nuggets, and then dropped them on the sheriff’s desk. About $15 worth. That’s what it took to stay out of jail.
    They headed straight for their ship, the SS Cisne , moored at Trujillo harbor. She was eighty feet long with a strong but battered steel hull, marked up from years at sea. From there she would sail to the easternmost point on the Honduran coast, just north of Nic-aragua. Climbing on, there was a reason to be excited. The jungle finally beckoned.

Snakes and Valium
    C HRIS BEGLEY SHUFFLED downstairs. Over eggs and toast in a leafy courtyard we pored over Morde’s notes, looked at our maps spread over the round table, and drew up a plan. We wouldn’t be following Morde’s initial entry by boat from the east, through the Caratasca Lagoon and overland to the Río Patuca. We would instead go along the seacoast, then cut west across the middle of the country on buses and trucks, and from there head by boat to look for Morde’s river camps, eventually ending up on the upper reaches of the Patuca, where Morde had been, and then proceed on foot into what Chris described as “the land of the lost cities.” Chris pointed to a green mountainous spot on the map in the middle of nowhere. “This is where we’ll be heading.”
    The last time he’d been out there, he said, bandits had kidnapped him. It was one of those moments when he was glad that his wife wasn’t watching the real-time movie that was his life in the wild. But he was fortunate. “I found out later that one of the guys had murdered someone and was hiding out.” He told the story with evident pride. He had sneaked off in the middle of the night while the men foraged for food. I laughed as if he were joking. He wasn’t.
    Meanwhile, as we sat there, I realized something disturbing: I’d forgotten my snake gaiters, the nylon puncture-proof polyurethane-coated guards that strapped onto my shins,