It's the stuff of every explorer's dream - finding a legendary lost city deep in the Amazon forest using present day technology and the perseverance of a group of people who believed in a legend. That was the discovery chronicled in the New York Times bestselling novel "The Lost City of the Monkey God" by adventurer and writer Douglas Preston.

According to Science News, Douglas Preston recounts the legend in the book. About 500 years ago, a vast prosperous city made of white stone was thriving in the jungles of eastern Honduras. Then suddenly, all of the city's citizens disappeared and those who tried to enter the abandoned city were struck by a curse.

Preston also narrates further in his book about those before him who tried to find the lost city. He recounts the story of debonair adventurer Theodore Morde who in 1940, set out to find the lost city in the jungle, found it, came back with artifacts and announced it to the world. But faced with ridicule from critics, he committed suicide without revealing the location of the city, The Guardian reports.

The Morde story entranced so much later explorers that in the mid-1990s, film maker Steve Elkins decided to find also the lost city using modern technology of satellite imaging and Lidar. Lidar uses narrow laser beams shot from above, for instance from a plane, to map the topography of a terrain at very high resolutions.The result: the outlines of two cities emerged from the jungle.

With the blessing and assistance of the Honduran government, a group of scientists and Preston went to the Honduran jungle in the area indicated by the lidar maps and found an earthen pyramid, a plaza, canals - all the remains of a prosperous civilization.

But Preston and his team also didn't escape the curse. For when they got back into the city, they found out that they contracted a potentially fatal disease from the city - an indication that the curse is real.

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