The Lost City of the Monkey God

Rumors of a hidden city of vast wealth in the Honduran interior go back to the time of the conquistador Hernán Cortés. It goes by two names, the White City and the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes say their ancestors fled there to escape the Spanish, and they warn that anyone who enters the sacred place will sicken and die.

In 1940, the journalist Theodore Morde came out of the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and a claim that he had found it. He then took his own life without telling anyone where it lay. Some seventy-five years later, Douglas Preston joins a team of scientists on a new search.

This is narrative non-fiction, told by Preston in the first person as reporter and participant. In 2012 he flies in a rickety single-engine plane carrying lidar, a classified technology that can chart the ground below thick forest cover. The scans of an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains show the outline of a large city, and with it signs of a civilization nobody had recorded.

The team then goes in on foot to confirm what the scans show. They face torrential rain, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars and deadly snakes. The real cost comes after they leave: Preston and others learn they caught a serious, sometimes lethal and incurable disease in the ruins. The book mixes history, expedition reporting and medical aftermath, and it reads as an adventure with a warning attached.