The Lost City Of The Monkey God, Preston - B

                                               Rumors of the mysterious city in the deep jungle of what is now Honduras have existed since Cortez penned a letter about it in the 16th century. Over the years, various attempts have been made to find it, but usually the murderous jungle stopped all seekers. Deadly snakes, ants, flies and creatures of all sorts make the locale truly inhospitable to human inquiry. In the late 30's, an American claimed to have found the outer walls, but offered no proof and did not disclose the location. A Californian named Steve Elkins has been the motivating force behind the actual recent finding of the White City.
                                              Elkins took his first trip deep into the jungle in 1994. He realized that aimlessly hacking through the jungle was a pointless exercise. He hired the Jet Propulsion Lab to study satellite imagery and they found a walled-off valley that they labelled Target One, T1. A hurricane, which led to major economic and political failures in the banana republic, delayed action into the new century. Improvements in technology led to a LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) search in 2012 that concluded that not only at T1 but also at T3, there were hundreds of acres of now-covered man-made improvements. Three years later, assisted by the Honduran military a team consisting of archaeologists, a film crew, the author (working for 'New Yorker'), a 'National Geographic' photographer, three British SAS jungle specialists and various other support personnel, helicoptered into the T1 valley. It was a lost paradise that appeared to have not been visited by humans in eons.  They found a complex, sophisticated and unique city beneath the extensive foliage and, after the strong encouragement of the archaeologists, left everything untouched.  The first expedition had established T1 as an important site and a quick flyover of T3 pointed to an equally important and larger city a few miles north. The Honduran government vowed to protect the sites from looters and deforestation, while international conservation organizations volunteered to raise money. A handful of the Americans, two of the British and the majority of the Honduran explorers came down with leishmaniasis, a deadly and disfiguring tropical disease. The Americans were treated at the NIH and the author was one of the lucky ones, as his disease went into remission. Some of the others were permanently disabled by the disease. In the following years, 'Leish' affected almost all of the military teams assigned to protect the site. The Honduran state has committed resources to and has staked the nation's reputation on the proper archaeological exploration of T1. Indeed, in 2016, the Honduran president extracted the first pottery from the site and renamed the valley the City of the Jaguar.  It is expected to take centuries to fully explore the city assuming that disease doesn't prohibit man's ability to explore there. The author closes with the question of what happened to the original inhabitants. Since their desertion of the valley is traced to 1500, there is only one reasonable conclusion: like 90% of pre-Columbian America, they succumbed to western diseases.