Cannibals. Human sacrifice. Have explorers finally found the fabled lost City of the Monkey God?

The headline in the New York Times was tantalisingly mysterious: ‘City of the Monkey God is believed located: expedition reports success in Honduras exploration’. If readers were a little puzzled as to the huge significance of this announcement, they were soon put right by the man who had made it. The date was July 12, 1940, and American explorer Theodore Morde had just emerged from the darkest jungles of Central America with an incredible story about what he’d found there.

Morde, a real-life Indiana Jones who later became a wartime U.S. spy, had been recruited by the founder of New York’s prestigious Museum of the American Indian to try to find a mythical lost ‘White City’ dripping in gold that had been founded by a mysterious civilisation as great as the Aztecs and the Mayans.

Adventurers had been searching for La Ciudad Blanca for centuries, ever since Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando Cortes conquered Central America in the early 16th century and heard rumours of its riches.

But it remained hidden for hundreds of years until Morde insisted he had found it deep in the rain forests of Mosquitia, more than 32,000 square miles of hellishly inhospitable wilderness in Honduras and Nicaragua.

He described how, armed only with a revolver and a machete, he and a companion named Lawrence

Villagers believed the apes stole virgin girls to mate with

Brown had spent four months hacking their way through ‘almost inaccessible’ jungle, swamps, rivers and mountains before coming upon a hidden valley that contained the remains of a white-stoned, walled city.

There, the local Indians told him, a long-vanished people, who were contemporaries of the Ancient Mayans, had once worshipped a strange Monkey God whose giant statue was still buried under centuries of vegetation. They made bloody human sacrifices to their simian deity, then ate the victims in an act of ritualised cannibalism.

Morde said that on his own brief visit he had himself seen a disturbing rite in which local natives ritually slaughtered and ate monkeys in a twisted hangover from the cult.

To back his astonishing claims, Morde — who was only 29 but had already sailed around the world five times — brought back several thousand artefacts to America such as stone utensils and tiny carved monkey masks.

He never revealed the precise location of the ruined city for fear it would be looted before he could go back. However, he never returned and died mysteriously in 1954, taking the secret of its location with him.

It remained a compelling mystery, seemingly lifted from the pages of H. Rider Haggard. Generations of adventurers plunged into the jungle to search for the city, and experts dismissed Morde’s discovery as a self-promoting fantasy.

explorers who reported glimpsing the tops of white buildings peeking through the forest canopy were told they were just limestone cliffs.

But now the sceptics may have to eat their words. A team of U.S. and Honduran archaeologists have just returned from La Mosquitia.

They have announced that — like Morde — they have discovered the remains of what they believe to be the City of the Monkey God, in a crater-shaped rainforest valley encircled by steep mountains.

According to the National Geographic magazine, which accompanied the expedition, the archaeologists have surveyed and mapped ‘ extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived 1,000 years ago, and then vanished’.

The team also discovered a breathtaking collection of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned. Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist from Colorado State University and team member, believes the sculptures — found at the base of the pyramid — may have been offerings to the Monkey God.

The team first found the ruins nearly three years ago during an aerial sur- vey using a high-tech scanner that was able to pierce the jungle canopy with laser light and reveal archaeological features. It showed ruins that stretched for more than a mile along a river through the valley.

The remote, rugged area is a major cocaine smuggling route and the scientists, who were ferried to the site by helicopter, were accompanied by Honduran special forces and former members of Britain’s SAS. Wild animals routinely wandered through their camp, clearly never having encountered humans before.

even without excavation, the scientists found 52 artefacts sticking out from the ground with many more clearly lying in the earth and vegetation beneath. They included stone ceremonial seats, and finely carved vessels decorated with snakes, vultures and animal-like figures.

The most arresting find was a viciously fanged stone head, partman and part-beast. Fisher believes it to be not a ‘were-wolf’ but a spirit-like ‘were-jaguar’— the giant cat still prowls the jungles — representing a priest in a transformed state.

The ancient culture that created the city, say the scientists, is so little known that it doesn’t even have a proper name — although Morde called its people the Chorotegans.

He was just one of many men to search for the ruins after the aviator Charles Lindbergh reportedly claimed that he saw the expansive white remains of an ‘amazing ancient metropolis’ when he flew over the region in 1927. In the Thirties, George Heye, multi-millionaire founder of New York’s Museum of the American Indian, paid for two expeditions to find it led by a pith-helmeted Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society named Capt R. Stuart Murray. He found nothing except dark rumours t hat t he natives were ‘ devil worshippers’ who spoke of a lost ‘City of the Monkey God’.

And there was another myth — that the Monkey God had produced off-

A shaman wore a necklace of baby monkey skulls

spring, a half-man and half-simian race dubbed the ‘ hairy people’. Locals believed apes from the jungle had long ago stolen virgins from their villages to produce the mongrel offspring; they also insisted the ruins were cursed.

Theodore Morde was the leader of Mr Heye’s third expedition and, as he explained later, after months of starvation, sickness and exhaustion, they were about to give up when he saw something from the top of a small cliff. It was the stone ruins of a walled ‘great city . . . that at its height must have held many thousands of inhabitants’, he wrote.

The jungle-choked city walls origi- nally would have risen, he estimated, to 30ft and on almost everything he found, said Morde, was carved the likeness of a monkey.

While they were there, he said, real spider monkeys peered curiously at the expedition’s team from the trees above. Although the vegetation was too thick to see much, local guides showed him a huge mound they said lay at the centre of the city.

Buried deep within was an enormous temple with a vast staircase leading to a ‘high stone dais on which was the statue of the Monkey God himself ’. This, they claimed, had been ‘the place of sacrifice’. As to what had been sacrificed, Morde and ethnologists he consulted were convinced the people had practised a barbaric tradition that was later adopted by the Aztecs.

every year, a physically perfect young man, usually a priest, would be selected to be the Monkey God f or t hat year. He would be worshipped, pampered and given the most beautiful girls.

But after 12 months, he would be ritually slaughtered at the top of the pyramid temple, his heart torn out and his body thrown down the steps where i t would be cut into pieces.

Priests would distribute it among the worshippers who would each take a small piece home to eat.

One night Morde watched a group of natives perform a morbid ritual dance in which each of them brandished a spear on which were impaled three spider monkeys. The monkeys were roasted over a fire in such a way that their limbs contracted and writhed in the flames as if still alive, and the whole tribe settled down later to eat them.

Officiating was the local shaman — the Dama Suk-ya Tara. Naked except for a loincloth and his body painted with white chalk, he made a blood- curdling spectacle with a necklace laced with the minute skulls of unborn monkeys, yellow human teeth and the poison sacs of lethal jungle snakes.

To his fingertips he had fixed alligator fangs. At one point he brandished a long arrow on which was impaled a large spider monkey.

At another, he stuck a hollow bamboo rod into the eye socket of each roasted monkey, ritually sucking out their brain fluid.

Was this monstrous man the spiritual successor to the chief priest of the Monkey God? The natives said the ceremony was a dance of revenge for the theft by monkeys of their virgins all those years ago.

Morde spent just two days at the ruins because the monsoon season started suddenly, forcing him to leave the place before conducting any excavations.

Only now, with this new expedition, does it look like his discovery may finally be verified. And if The White City really is cursed, as the natives had warned Morde, he may have paid the price. He later committed suicide in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained.