Douglas Preston is best known for the Agent Pendergast novels he has written with Lincoln Child for decades, but he has also penned nonfiction books on a variety of topics, including one — “The Monster of Florence” — that delved into true crime and forced him to flee Italy. (You'll have to read the book to find out why.)
He and Child are among the best thriller writers working today. Their individual novels aren't as good as the ones they write together, but they're both at the top of their craft.
Preston's latest solo effort is a best-selling nonfiction book with the pulp title of “The Lost City of the Monkey God.” The name calls to mind H. Rider Haggard, Indiana Jones, the 1980s TV show “Tales of the Gold Monkey” and real life adventurers such as Percival Fawcett, whose tragic search for El Dorado, the City of Gold, was spelled out in David Grann's popular “The Lost City of Z” a few years back. (Grann entered the same Amazonian jungles as Fawcett, trying to find traces of the explorer or locate the city himself.)
The “Monkey God” title is fraught with expectations, especially since the author is best known for writing thrillers. The book only partially fulfills its promise.
So here's the nutshell version: For 500 years, tales have circulated about Ciudad Blanca, the White City, a fabulous civilization said to have vanished around the time of the conquistadors. Fiction writers, in particular, like to say that such cultures “disappear without warning,” despite the fact that they were susceptible to drought, disease and war — things that could easily decimate a population in the space of a few years. These cultures, Preston notes, aren't the equivalent of the Marie Celeste, the “ghost ship” found in perfect condition but with no one aboard. Instead, they show evidence of rapid but not immediate depletion that has more in common with “The War of the Worlds” than any great mystery.
Folks from the Old World who tramped through the jungle looking for treasure brought with them a host of diseases, including the measles and smallpox, that New World populations had never encountered and to which they had never developed antibodies. Disease swept through the tribes and cities, sometimes outpacing the actual arrival of the Spanish in each new province. Combine that with drought conditions, and civilizations shriveled up. Some diseases were estimated to be 90 percent fatal.
The White City, then, was only one of a variety of cultures that collapsed in the midst of disease … if, in fact, it was ever one actual city to begin with. The White City also was known as the City of the Monkey God, and although several people claimed over time to have found it, they lacked scientific evidence and “ground truth,” an archaeological method of proving out a claim by visiting and mapping the site. Legends abounded about a cursed city in Honduras, but even the most convincing evidence was tainted by a lack of provenance. One fellow brought a collection of artifacts with him from what he said was the White City, but he killed himself soon after, without telling anyone precisely where he'd been.
The big break in the White City case came not from on-the-ground explorers but from scientists using lidar, a surveying system that operates similarly to radar, except instead of bouncing sound off objects, lidar bounces laser beams off the ground. The airborne laser system is capable even of penetrating dense jungle foliage, and what it revealed were several sites in eastern Honduras that appeared to be old villages or cities.
In 2012, Preston joined an archaeological expedition to one of the sites. He writes of various hardships he endured, many of which were truly horrible. The area had not recently been visited by humans, and the animals betrayed no fear of them. The expedition members, however, feared spiders and bugs and monkeys … but especially the long, powerful fer-de-lance vipers, whose venom is deadly. At one point, Preston describes lying down in his tent only to feel the earth moving beneath him; countless bugs squirmed beneath the tent, adding to the misery of bites from flying insects.
The team soon came upon something extraordinary: a field of statues and other icons, all of them broken and positioned carefully in something like a grid. Most of the buildings were buried beneath dirt and growth, but it seemed the group had truly found a lost city. Or more than one. Was it the White City? Well …
Legends grow from kernels of truth. Sometimes those legends diverge wildly from reality; other times they hold close to the facts. You should read the book yourself to see what Preston thinks and to determine what you believe.
The final fourth of the book reads like something out of Michael Crichton's fiction. It's even scarier because it's real.
After leaving Honduras, the party split up, and people tried to settle back into their normal lives. Within a few days, though, some of them fell ill. They'd all returned covered with insect bites, but some of the bites wouldn't heal. In fact, they got worse over weeks and months, turning into bigger, uglier wounds. At first, doctors prescribed antibiotic creams, but when those didn't work, Preston and the others tried to find their own explanation. Eventually the doctors agreed: They all had a disease known as leishmaniasis.
You've probably never heard of that illness before, since it tends to affect poor people living in the tropics. The potentially fatal disease probably dates back to the dinosaurs, though, or to the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea. The most common form, Preston writes, is cutaneous leishmaniasis, which, as the name suggests, affects the skin. Indeed, recent cases have been reported in Texas — and Oklahoma. Preston's research indicates the disease, transmitted by insects, will spread rapidly in North America in the coming years.
Preston and friends seem to have contracted a different, and much worse, strain of the parasitic disease, one that could eat away their faces and bones, disfiguring them with ulcers.
Therein lies the moral I took from this book: Some places aren't meant for human habitation. Adventure fantasies rarely include mud, muck, torrential rains, predators, poisonous snakes, parasites and life-changing diseases. Real adventures in the jungle do.
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