40 pages • 1 hour read
Douglas PrestonThe Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Something That Nobody Had Done”
Just as Elkins is thinking about searching for the White City again, Heinicke calls him. While in Honduras for a funeral, his wife Mabel managed to talk to President Porfirio Lobo Sosa about the White City. The president gave permission for the project to find the White City, and even offered help with getting the permits from a member of his cabinet. It will be a political win for the president as well as the country.
Elkins then convinces the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) at the University of Houston to take on the project. The project is risky for NCALM, as it typically uses lidar scanning on existing sites, such as Caracol, not to search for sites that may not exist. They choose three target areas: T1, T2, and T3. Target Four (T4), where Glassmire’s site may have been, is removed from the list due to recent illegal deforestation and, likely, looting. Elkins receives the permits for the lidar scanning project in October 2010.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Most Dangerous Place on the Planet”
Elkins convinces his friend, filmmaker Bill Benenson, to finance and codirect a documentary film about the Lost City project. Steve Elkins now brings Preston into the team, who is initially skeptical. The team of 10 people fly to the island of Roatán, Honduras, on April 28, 2012, and make their headquarters at a luxury hotel.
Preston introduces the team, starting with Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández Díaz, the chief lidar engineer and mission planner, and the team’s de facto ambassador to Honduran culture and politics. The team also includes a lidar technician, a data mapping scientist, the film crew, a photographer, and film co-producer Tom Weinberg.
Heinicke is also on the team and, throughout the rest of the chapter, he tells Preston stories of the dangers of Honduras and his history running drugs for a Colombian cartel, looting, and smuggling artifacts. He got shot in the knee during a drug deal, was nearly killed by two natives in the Mosquitia area, and once looted an underground room full of painted pottery, marble bowls, and a single golden statue.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Uncharted Territory”
The airplane carrying the lidar machine arrives, exciting the team, which has been anxiously awaiting the start of the mission. The pilot, Chuck Gross, has just returned from flying lidar missions for the US military in Iraq.
Preston explains that lidar works by “bouncing a laser beam off something, capturing the reflection, and measuring the round-trip time, thereby determining the distance” (90). This happens 125,000 times per second, providing detailed maps of the ground surface and the jungle canopy based on billions of points. The points that reflect off the canopy can later be removed digitally, leaving a high resolution map of the surface below. The technology is so advanced that the lidar machine is a “highly classified military device” (91).
The lidar flights over T1 are conducted over three days. Preston joins the third flight, describing the stunning view of the pristine valley. The next morning the initial map of the valley is ready, and the team finds a large archaeological site between the rivers, complete with pyramidal mounds, plazas, and possible square pillars. It is a massive ancient site.
Meanwhile, the lidar machine dies while flying over T2, creating a five-day delay. When T2 and T3 are finally mapped, an even larger ancient site is revealed in T3. Two large sites, perhaps cities, have been found in two valleys. It is now clear that there is no single Lost City of the Monkey God but rather multiple large archaeological sites belonging to a largely unknown civilization in Mosquitia.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
These chapters cover the narrative of Elkins’s 2012 lidar project. After the numerous failures recounted in previous chapters, Chapter 9 opens with a fortuitous coincidence when Heinicke calls Elkins with news that the Honduran president has approved the project, just as Elkins is considering using lidar to find the Lost City. The narrative moves quickly as Elkins convinces NCALM to take on the project and gets the permits. This increased pace and shift to a positive tone thrusts the reader into the narrative of Elkins’s lidar project and subsequent ground expedition, which form the major narrative of the book.
Preston also raises the stakes by reiterating the secrecy of the project. Because the White City is famous in Honduras and thought to hide “an immense treasure in gold” (81), the team has to lie to hide their true purpose to the locals. Moreover, the dangers of Honduras are reemphasized through Heinicke, who tells Preston that many in Honduras are “just looking for a chance to rob you and maybe kill you” (80). He tells Preston stories about smuggling drugs, looting archaeological sites, surviving a gunfight, and shooting a charging jaguar in the jungle. Preston uses each of these anecdotes to build anticipation and heighten expectations for the eventual discovery of the Lost City, although such dangerous encounters and extravagant finds are actually quite rare on archaeological sites.
In Chapter 11 the juxtaposition of the pristine valleys and the ugly but advanced technology used to scan them emphasizes the impenetrability of the Mosquitia environment and the mystery of the ancient civilization there. The discovery of two major sites reveals that the White City legend is not literally true. In fact, the legend is based on the reality of a largely unknown, remote civilization that included multiple large settlements. While the legend itself is not confirmed, Preston ends with questions about this mysterious civilization that engender even more anticipation for Elkins’s team as well as the reader.
While the book is not explicitly organized into larger parts or acts, the narrative is in some ways structurally divided into two parts. The first part involves the White City legend and the struggle of many to find it. This part begins to close with Chapter 11 and finally ends with Chapter 15. The second part of the book begins when the lidar data and ground expedition reveal that the legend is not true, but that they have actually found a civilization that is even more interesting. Preston then moves forward by gradually replacing the elements of the legend with the archaeological reality as they find it.
