"Parts of this book first appeared in New Yorker magazine and in National Geographic"--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-318) and index.

The gates of hell -- Somewhere in the Americas -- The devil had killed him -- A land of cruel jungles -- One of the few remaining mysteries -- The heart of darkness -- The fish that swallowed the whale -- Lasers in the jungle -- Something that nobody had done -- The most dangerous place on the planet -- Uncharted territory -- No coincidences -- Fer-de-Lance -- Don't pick the flowers -- Human hands -- "I'm going down" -- A bewitchment place -- Quagmire -- Controversy -- The cave of the glowing skulls -- The symbol of death -- They came to wither the flowers -- White leprosy -- The National Institutes of Health -- An isolated species -- La ciudad del jaguar -- We became orphans.

"Since the days of conquistador Hernan Cortes, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God - but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, they battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Douglas Preston is the author of 35 books, both fiction and nonfiction. Before becoming a writer he worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and was managing editor of CURATOR magazine. His first novel Relic launched the Pendergast series of novels. His recent nonfiction book is The Monster of Florence."--Provided by publisher.