A new year, a new batch of books. I’m particularly excited to have signed Christopher S. Stewart’s book about a lost city in the jungles of Honduras (PJ Mark sold world rights).

Q&A with Christopher S. Stewart:

Chris S. Stewart is The Deputy Editor of the New York Observer. His magazine work has appeared in GQ, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Wired, among others.

1) What is your book about?

The epic search for a lost city buried somewhere deep in the jungles of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. The city is called Ciudad Blanca, or the White City, and explorers as far back as the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes tried to find it – with no luck. Some of the men never came out of the jungle; they died or disappeared. Others got lost. It’s one of the biggest and wildest and most impenetrable jungles in the world – known as the little Amazon. But in 1939, one man claimed he located the El Dorado-like city and this is where the book begins.

Theodore Morde was an American explorer and World War II spy. His story is as layered and enigmatic as the White City. But here’s the twist: he died under strange circumstances before disclosing the city’s location. There are people who actually believe that the spirits of the lost city killed him.

But to this day, the mystery remains: What’s out there? What was it that drew in these explorers, and at such terrific risk? This is ultimately a detective story. And some of the answers began to come when I tracked down Morde’s secret journals in North Carolina and then set out with them on my own journey to find this lost place.

2) Broadly speaking, what is considered to be a “lost city”?

Well, a lost city begins with a rumor – that there’s some spectacular and ancient world that vanished at some point in time and is waiting to be found. The city persists in legend and myth, stories passed along over the decades. Its size doesn’t matter much. But it’s likely encased in some impressive and mysterious history. There are lots of incredible lost city

tales: Atlantis, El Dorado, Z. And with these stories, there’s the ubiquitous riddle – if these in fact cities existed, what happened to them and where did their inhabitants go? I heard many end-of-the-world scenarios for the White City. Among them was the story that a volcano covered it up, another was that it was destroyed by an evil army.

But in many ways, a lost city refuses to be discovered. As I stumbled through the jungle and talked to people, the place I was looking for was always around the next corner, up the next river, over the next mountain.

For some of the indigenous people I met, the city wasn’t even meant to be found. They said it would continue to elude because the White City was a spiritual place, and that, like a specter, it constantly migrated from one unreachable location to another.

Oh yeah. Once I hit the jungle, there was no cell coverage anywhere. Even the satellite phone was unpredictable – to use it, I had to wait for a break in the near-constant rain and then find a hole in the sprawling sea of forest overhead. That kind of isolation, that being unable to reach the outside world was more than a little unsettling at times. I kept thinking, what if something goes wrong? I’m not a backpacker or a trekker. The last time I slept in a tent was in my parents backyard when I was 10. I live in New York City, so being in the the rain forest, for me, is a lot like being on Jupiter. I fretted about the deadly snakes, the airborne viruses, the bandits and river pirates. Even though I traveled with three others — two natives and an American archeologist — there were moments where all of my fears and the remoteness of the jungle overwhelmed me and I felt completely and utterly alone, like the rest of the world ceased to exist.

4) Did you have any Heart of Darkness moments down in the jungle?

Many. I walked for hours every day, up mountains, across rivers, with a fifty-plus-pound bag on my back and uncomfortable combat boots on my feet.

Sometimes in driving rain, sometimes using a machete to slash through thick jungle. I was never completely dry, not even at night. Almost every day, I heard warnings about wily forest spirits or gun-toting settlers or the smugglers coming up from Columbia. The military coup that dethroned the Honduran president while I was out there only made things more worrisome.

Twice, I saw dead men. It was one constant green nightmare. But the most frightening moment for me was the day I got into a dugout canoe with three armed men and headed down a river that felt like it was flowing towards the end of the world.

I remember Marlow describing his terrifying river experience as a “peculiar blackness.” These guys I met were rough, dressed in rags, chewed cigarettes dangling from their jaws. They said they’d been moving wood up the river, which was another way of saying that they were involved in trafficking of some sort. I was sick and tired and having malaria dreams at night. A couple hours down the river, the men said that the price we’d negotiated was no longer enough. And then they decided that they were going to stop for the night before they took us the rest of the way. There was nothing around us, but black jungle that shut out the sky and their little pirate hut on a cliff. Monkeys and invisible creatures provided a constant, eerie soundtrack. That night, I didn’t sleep. I worried that these men would kill me. And who would know where to look?

5) What drives people to explore?

Generally, I think it’s the sense that there’s still stuff out there that we don’t know about. It’s a romantic notion that there could be a richer world somewhere, perhaps hidden in a distant wilderness, or buried in the shadow of a remote mountain peak, or submerged in the deepest ocean. And that’s what I think propels the explorer — the possibility of discovering something lost or unknown. Is it really out there? They want to believe it is — because maybe it would actually overturn some important notions about our world. So they search.