Lost Cities – City Folk Become Savages

Lost cities in the jungle

The trekkers stood breathless. In the afternoon sun, they had come upon it suddenly.

Down in the ravine, it was like a place enchanted; so many towers and buildings grew out of the green jungle, all made of stone, gleaming white.

They were seized with wonder. After a long pause, one of them spoke. “It must be magic! Is this a fairytale? Am I dreaming?”

They were beholding things never heard or even dreamed about before.

In 1926 or 1927 an expedition led by a doctor from Hamburg travelled in canoes up a tributary of the Rio Negro, into the unknown border country of northwestern Brazil and southern Venezuela. They touched the territories of several tribes of wild Indians. Leaving behind the “green hell” of the jungle and the booming drums of natives they never saw, they began to ascend.

It was weeks later, when they reached a gorge from which they followed an ancient road tunnel through the cliff walls. On the other side, the paved way continued high above a tremendous valley, until they looked down into another large ravine.What they saw took their breath away: a dead city of towering palaces, splendid ruins, temples, carved pillars and pyramids, mostly swallowed in jungle. There were magnificent gardens with broken fountains, which once must have spouted cool water.

Further along the paved way, they ambushed and caught a dwarfish man, about four feet tall. He was almost naked except for a leather belt with buckles of pure gold. Later they met more of these men – all white-skinned. Their women, likewise nude, had long hair and beautiful classic features. They wore gold bracelets and gold necklets.

The party explored a massive pyramid-temple, whose interior fairly blazed with gold. Pillars, roof and walls were sheathed in it. Strange letters were engraved on the gold plates. Numerous utensils and chains of solid gold were marvellously chased and engraved, as by the finest goldsmiths.

On deep, blue-veined marble altars were traces of ancient blood, or rust(?); perhaps of ancient sacrifices of some horrible cult.

Most parts of the dead city were inaccessible. The intruders entered only the suburbs.

The white tribe had become degenerate, living on the outskirts either in tunnels, rooms in the rock, or little stone houses. Each carried a long, curved knife of pure gold. It was not valued here.

The heavy burden of gold carried out by the expedition led to the death at the hands of hostile Indians, of three-quarters of the party.

Lost Cities

Huge stone cities, very ancient, with paved streets and tall pyramids choked with forest, have been sighted in the Amazon jungle by several explorers in recent centuries.

Tantalised by the descriptions, many other explorers, including an entire military expedition, have vanished in the jungle without trace.

These mysterious cities were built when the climate in the Amazon basin was more temperate and the rivers drained a fertile area before the jungle took over.

Unfortunately, if much of Amazonia was covered by the Atlantic around 1200 B.C., as evidence suggests, we cannot expect to find significant ancient sites conveniently located along the river banks. Such sites will likely be in the “green hell” far from the present river courses.

Before the jungle grew

We know something of mankind’s early achievements in the Asia-Africa-Europe region. Little is heard about the Americas. This is a subject that could fill volumes.

Literally thousands of inscribed stones have been found in the unknown jungles, some of them giving directions to ancient mines now under virgin forest too thick to penetrate.

In the early days, when South America was still free of jungle, the human race had already settled and built a civilisation.

There were wonderful and elaborate cities. The citizens wall-papered their houses with thin sheets of beaten gold. (See my book Dead Men’s Secrets, pp.130,131,178) Nothing was so cheap, so common, so easy to get as gold and silver.

Recently a scientific pundit wrote, from his considerable throne in an ivory tower, that the Amazon jungle has been there for millions of years and that only primitive tribes had lived there. He was an “expert”, of course, properly trained and informed. And, he added, writing was unknown. Other “experts” gave much the same glib response.

Experts, I fear me, constitute near tragedy.

Little of what is known has found its way into textbooks. The theory of evolution is at risk if it gets out.

There is now overwhelming evidence that South America was well known in antiquity. It was resplendent with great cities. Mighty empires spanned the continent. And global communication in the distant past equalled that of modern times. (Ibid., pp.77-98)

It is abundantly clear that history needs to be rewritten.

Destruction of the cities

It was fire from heaven and the earth below that ruined many of the cities. When the earth shook and day turned to night, there came from yawning crevices in the paved roads, beside their splendid palaces and temples, volumes of deadly gases.

Blinded, asphyxiated, maddened by the appalling suddenness of the catastrophe, men and beautiful women, educated and sophisticated, fled out of the shining cities.

Everything was left behind. Bars of gold and silver were thrown to the ground, in panic haste, by men thinking only of how to save their lives.

They fled along paved roads, now cracked, fissured and overwhelmed by great boulders.

An empire of sophisticated people. All gone. We don’t even know their name.

Survivors degenerate

When the earthquakes rendered these huge stone cities uninhabitable, the climatic conditions were such that great reptiles, facing extinction in most other parts of the earth, moved in.

Before long, the green forest covered the whole landscape.

Traditions of this ancient race and their continent-wide empire are today crystallised in the oral history of primitive tribes.

Many ancient traditions survive of an advanced culture which flourished thousands of years ago to the north and west of the Brazilian highlands.

Their descendants are now scattered as primitive tribes throughout the jungle.

Primitive descendants retain legacy

The Tapuya, a native Indian race in eastern Brazil, are still skilful workers in precious stones and wear diamonds and jade ornaments.

Spanish missioners found that primitive Aymara Indians of Lake Titicaca could still write with a script identical to that found carved in a dead city (referred to below) in the Bahia region of Brazil.

Books of wonderfully executed paintings and hieroglyphics were found among naked Panos savages of the deep Peruvian forests near Ucayle, in the Amazon headwaters, in the early nineteenth century. The Indians explained that the books, handed down, contained a history of events in the days of their ancestors.

Modern discoveries

An amazing document, filed in the archives of the old royal public library of Rio de Janeiro, describes an ancient abandoned city accidentally discovered in 1753 by a party of 300 – led by a Portuguese bandeirista.

These early land-pirates reached places in the interior, 400 years ago, that white men, even today, have not penetrated and returned alive to tell the tale.

The manuscript has been badly mutilated by the copim insect. It recounts a trek in search of the famed silver mines of Moribecu. After almost ten years of wandering, the group came upon a mountain pass, from which they spied in the distance a great city on the plain. Cautiously descending, they found it to be uninhabited.

They entered under colossal arches, to paved streets flanked by statues and buildings of enormous size. There were mysterious inscriptions, which they copied down.

A great part of the city lay completely in ruins, dissected by almost “bottomless” crevices. It appeared to have been overthrown by an earthquake.

Once a metropolis of great wealth and grandeur, it was now home to swallows, bats, rats and foxes, not to mention swarms of hens and geese (descendants of poultry once raised by the citizens?).

This dead city lies in the unexplored hinterland of the Brazilian state of Bahia.

On March 23, 1773, the archives of the governor of Sao Paulo record a further accidental discovery of a dead city in the unexplored forest of the Rio Pequery.

Froy Pedro Cieza de Leon, a Spanish soldier-monk, who died in 1560, was one of the first to discover an ancient city with immense buildings in the Brazilian jungle. The local natives called it Guamanaga. It was located on the great Cordillera in Latitude 12o59′ S., Longitude 73o59′ W.

In 1913, former British Consul-General in Rio, Lieutenant-Colonel O’Sullivan, penetrated to the dead city of the bandeiristas – and survived.

In the following decade, the noted explorer-scientist Colonel P.A. Fawcett, while completing a thorough survey for the Royal Geographical Society of London of a disputed jungle region, entered this lost world. He came out claiming to have sighted such a city in the upper reaches of the Amazon, near the Brazilian border with Bolivia. He attempted a return to it, but vanished.

In 1925, veteran British surveyor, archeologist and explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett journeyed to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil with a small crew to search for a lost civilization – what he referred to as the ‘City of Z.’ Neither he nor any in his party ever returned.

Reported nearly two-hundred years earlier in a document penned by a Portuguese explorer, the lost City of Z, the suspected hub of an as of yet undiscovered large-scale civilization in what was assumed to always have been the sparsely populated inner Amazon region, was Fawcett’s passion and obsession. His adventures and disappearance became the stuff of legend, inspiring everything from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, to early Hollywood movies and in part, even the iconic adventures and person of Indiana Jones.

Peculiar pyramids, rounded at the top, are seen still, today, deep in the jungle. Native traditions speak of a light which was used, akin to our electric bulb.

Thousands of unexplored lost cities

From Mexico to Chile, literally thousands of ruined towns and cities, buried under dense jungle or desert sands, have never been explored.

Lost Cities of North America

Settlers came to North America on the first migration wave after the Flood. Surprisingly (?), what is now the United States once swarmed with populous cities. They were spread out from Florida, through the Mississippi and over into Arizona and New Mexico. There are traces still to be found if one knows where to look.

The Indians of Florida said a white civilisation was there when they arrived. (Examples of surviving white Indian tribes in North America are the Zuni of New Mexico and the Menominees.)

And there were the Mound Builders – who lived in cities and were agricultural. They enjoyed an enlightened system of government. No idols, known to be such, have been found. All traces of their architecture (wooden, thus impermanent) have disappeared.

According to Mexican and North American oral history, some of the North American cities were wiped out through fiery aerial warfare. (See Dead Men’s Secrets, pp.336,337,342)

Traces of a buried city appear to lie below 4 square miles of Rockwall County, Texas. Great stone walls, in places up to 49 feet high, are constructed in the manner a modern fine mason would build a wall. The walls are totally regular in appearance. In the 1920s Count Byron Kuhn de Porok, an archaeologist of some fame, noted that the walls resembled those of buried cities he had excavated in the Middle East and North Africa.

The stones, apparently bevelled around their edges, are joined by a mortarlike substance. Four large stones extracted from this underground wall appear to have been inscribed with some form of writing. (Brad Steiger, Mysteries of Time and Space. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, pp.52,53)

L. Taylor Hanson spent considerable time with Red Indian tribes. Dark Thunder, chief of the O’Chippewa people of Michigan, revealed to her:

“Once we had books, but those were times long distant in the past. Books are of such stuff which can be swept into oblivion. Since then we have placed our stories in the chants of our people.” (L.Taylor Hanson, He Walked The Americas. Amherst, Wisconsin: Amherst Press, 1964, p.70)

Certain Red Indian tribes chant the stories of long ago when they lived in cities, always near mighty rivers, avenues of ancient commerce. When war came, the people abandoned the cities and took to the forest. (Ibid., 48,69,78,82)

However, in subsequent climatic changes, the climate gradually became drier.

I am tempted to ask, if man evolved from beasts, then why is it that there existed among all of the peoples of all continents a long tradition of a Golden Age, instead of that of a savage past?

It’s time the truth was out. Here is evidence of men conscious of their civilised background, compelled to use all their technical skill in a savage and hostile environment; men able to make contact with other civilised people once, but afterwards isolated and forced to make use of crude implements for survival.

Speaking of primitive tribes people whose ancestors once lived in shining cities, Colonel Fawcett wrote in his notes:

“I have good reason to know that these original people still remain in a degenerate state… They use script.”