CHAPTER 15

All this terrain, everything you see here, has been entirely modified by human hands.

I lay awake most of the night in my hammock. It was a high-tech contraption, the underside made of thin nylon, with a top of insect netting and a rainfly above. You entered through a zippered seam in the side, but it left me feeling exposed, and it swayed with every movement I made. I had stopped taking my weekly dose of chloroquinone, an antimalarial drug, in a fruitless attempt to alleviate the insomnia it had been causing, a common side effect. I reasoned that there couldn’t be any malaria in an uninhabited place like this, cut off from the world.

The night clamor of the jungle was so loud I had to wear earplugs. Chris, on the other hand, confessed to me later that he recorded the night jungle on his iPhone and played it to himself back in Colorado to help calm him down when he was stressed or upset.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I got up to pee. I unzipped the hammock and peered out, probing the ground all around with my flashlight, looking for snakes. A cold and clammy mist had descended, and the forest was dripping with condensation. There were no snakes, but the entire forest floor was carpeted with glistening cockroaches—thousands of them rustling in frantic activity, looking like a greasy, jittering flow—along with dozens of motionless black spiders whose multiple eyes gleamed like pinpoints of green. I peed no more than two feet from the hammock and hastily climbed back in. But even in that brief moment it proved impossible to keep the sand flies from pouring into the hammock’s interior space. I spent a good fifteen minutes lying on my back, shining my light around, squishing sand flies as they drifted about or landed on the mosquito netting above me. After I had to get out and pee a second time, I damned the British habit of drinking tea before bedtime and swore I would not do so again.

What little sleep I did get ended for good at around five o’clock in the morning, at first light, when I was awoken by a roaring of howler monkeys, which reverberated through the forest like Godzilla on the march. When I emerged from the hammock, the forest was enveloped in fog, the treetops fading into the mist, water dripping everywhere. For a subtropical jungle it was surprisingly chilly. We ate a breakfast of freeze-dried scrambled eggs and weak tea (coffee had not arrived yet). Chris, who seemed to be prepared for everything, had brought caffeine pills for just such a contingency and popped a few. (I declined his offer to share.) The AStar couldn’t fly in until the fog lifted, which it finally did around midmorning. The first flight brought in Steve Elkins and two members of the film crew, Mark Adams and Josh Feezer.

I greeted Steve after the chopper took off. He was walking with a hiking pole and limping, due to chronic nerve damage in his foot.

“Nice,” he said, looking around. “Welcome to the Mosquitia Four Seasons.”

Alicia González, the expedition’s anthropologist, arrived in the second flight, along with Anna Cohen, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Washington, who was Chris Fisher’s field associate. I soon became friendly with Alicia, who was an amazing font of knowledge. With a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, Alicia was a small, cheerful, and imperturbable woman of sixty, formerly a senior curator in the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. Of Mexican, Jewish, and Native American ancestry, she was an authority on Mesoamerican trade routes and the indigenous people of Honduras.

The chopper also brought in Oscar Neil, chief of archaeology for the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). Neil was an authority on the ancient cultures of Mosquitia. We unloaded the chopper with the usual haste, throwing everything into a heap to be sorted and carried into camp later. The morning was spent moving supplies and equipment and organizing our campsites. I grabbed a tent and set it up next to my hammock, grateful to be on solid ground. The tent’s sewn-in waterproof ground cover would keep out the snakes, spiders, and cockroaches. I enlarged my campsite area with a machete, strung a clothesline, and claimed a folding chair from one of the loads, which I set up under my hammock. There, protected under the rainfly of the hammock, I could sit and write in my notebook. And I could store my clothes, books, camera, and journals in the hammock itself, which made a handy waterproof storage compartment.

As the day wore on, Chris Fisher became increasingly impatient, eager to begin our extraordinary task of entering the lost city. I found him down on the riverbank, in his straw cowboy hat, pacing back and forth with a Trimble GPS in his hand. Woody had forbidden anyone to leave camp without an escort, due to the danger of snakes and getting lost. “This is ridiculous,” Fisher said. “The site is just right there—two hundred yards away!” He showed me the LED screen on the Trimble, which displayed the lidar map and our position on it. I could see that the city was, indeed, right on the other side of the river, completely hidden in the screen of trees. “If Woody doesn’t free up someone to take us over there, I’m going by myself—screw the snakes.” Juan Carlos joined us at the streambank, hands on his hips, staring at the wall of trees on the far side. He, too, was eager to venture into the ruins. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. It was true: We had only ten potential days to explore the valley, our time being strictly limited by the rental period of the AStar helicopter from Corporate Helicopters in San Diego. Its pilot, Myles Elsing, had to fly it back to the States—a four-day journey—for another assignment.

“Someone’s got to talk to Woody,” said Fisher. “This is why we’re here”—he gestured across the river at the hidden city—“not boiling water for frigging tea.”

Finally, about three thirty in the afternoon, Woody agreed to lead a reconnaissance into the ancient city. He told us to be at the LZ in a half hour, with our packs fully loaded with the emergency overnight kit. We would have one hour in the ruins—no more.

At the appointed time, we gathered at the stream, stinking of DEET. There were eight of us in the group: myself, Woody, Chris Fisher with a machete in one hand and GPS in the other; Oscar Neil; Juan Carlos, also carrying a fearsome machete; Lucian Read, with a video camera; and Mark Adams, with a forty-pound field audio kit consisting of a wireless audio mic system, portable audio mixer/recorder, and a six-foot boom mic with windshield. I couldn’t believe Mark was going to hump all that through the jungle. Dave Yoder, burdened with heavy camera equipment, followed in watchful silence, ceaselessly shooting. Steve Elkins could not come; the nerve damage, caused by a deteriorating disk in his spine, gave him a condition known as drop foot, in which he was unable to control the position of his foot while walking. He felt the jungle was too thick and the hills too steep to take the risk of injury so early in the expedition. He did not want to be laid up, or worse, have to be evacuated. It was a bitter pill to swallow. “If you guys find anything,” he said, waving a two-way radio, “call me.”

Woody checked our packs to make sure we had all our emergency supplies, and we set off, wading across the stream. On the far side we encountered a thicket of heliconia that formed a virtually solid wall, but the fleshy stems were easily felled with the swipe of a machete. Woody carved and slashed his way through, one step at a time, the leaves and flowers showering down left and right. The cut vegetation lay so thickly on the ground that there was no possibility of seeing where we were putting our feet. Still shaken by my encounter with the fer-de-lance, I couldn’t help but think of all the snakes that must be hiding in that undergrowth. We crossed two muddy channels, sinking up to our thighs, struggling through the morass with sucking sounds.

The embankment beyond the floodplain was precipitous: close to forty degrees. We climbed hand and foot, grasping roots and vines and branches, pulling ourselves up, expecting at any moment to come face-to-face with a fer-de-lance. We could see little beyond a dozen feet in any direction. The embankment abruptly flattened out, and we arrived at a long ditch and mound that Chris and Oscar examined and felt were man-made. They appeared to mark the edge of the city.

And then we came to the base of the presumed earthen pyramid. The only indication that this was artificial was that the ground rose sharply in an unnatural change of slope. Until Chris and Oscar pointed it out to me, however, I would never have recognized it. We could see nothing but leaves. Here we were, at the edge of a lost city, and we had no sense of the layout or distribution of the mounds and plazas so crisply visible on the lidar maps. The jungle cloaked all.

We labored up the side of the suspected pyramid and reached the top. There, in front of us, were some odd depressions and linear features that Chris believed might be the remains of a structure, perhaps a small temple. Oscar knelt and, with a hand tool, dug a sondaje or test pit into the soil. He said he saw evidence of deliberate construction. I peered at the layers of earth he had exposed just below the surface, but my untrained eye could make out nothing.

Even at the top of the pyramid, the highest point of the lost city, we were immersed in a disorder of leaves, vines, flowers, and tree trunks. Chris held his GPS over his head, but he had trouble locating satellites because of the trees. I took many pictures with my Nikon, but they all ended up showing the same thing: leaves, leaves, and more leaves. Even Dave struggled to get photographs of something other than an endless green ocean of vegetation.

We descended the side of the pyramid into the first plaza of the city. The lidar images indicated that the plaza was surrounded on three sides by geometric mounds and terraces. As Fisher tried once again to get a GPS reading with his Trimble, in order to start ground-mapping, Oscar gave a shout. He knelt, brushing dirt and vines off the corner of a large stone, almost completely invisible in the riot of plants. The stone had a shaped surface. After pulling back and cutting away some of the vegetation, we began to uncover more such stones—a long row of them, all flat, resting on tripods of round, white-quartz boulders. They looked like altars. “We have to clean these stones,” Chris said, “to see if any have carvings, and we need to locate them on the GPS.” He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called Elkins, back in camp, to report the news.

They had an excited conversation that we all could hear through the walkie-talkie speaker. Elkins was ecstatic. “This proves,” he told Chris, “that they did use cut stone for building. It means this was an important site.”

The GPS finally located enough satellites for Fisher to begin establishing way points and mapping the city. He charged through the jungle, slashing his way, marking way points, keen and impatient to make the most of our limited time before we had to return to camp. We could hardly keep up. Beyond the altar stones, we reached the central plaza of the city, which had clearly been at one time a large public space. It was as flat as a soccer pitch and more open than elsewhere.

“These were probably once public buildings,” said Fisher, indicating the long mounds surrounding the plaza. “Perhaps reserved for an elite class or royalty. All this would have been open and very impressive. I imagine this area was where major ceremonies took place.”

Standing in the plaza, I finally began to have a sense of the size and scale of the city, if only barely. Chris cut his way across it, saying that there were three more plazas and a possible ball court farther on, along with a peculiar mound we had called “the bus” because it looked like one in the lidar image. These bus-shaped mounds were prominent in both T1 and T3, well defined, each a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifteen feet tall. I had also seen several at the site of Las Crucitas. They were a characteristic structure unique to this culture.

While the rest of the team stayed behind, clearing the vegetation from the stones, Woody and I followed Fisher northward, trying to keep him in sight. We came to more mounds and a steep ravine cutting through them. Glancing into the cut, I could see where the erosion had exposed what looked like stone paving forming an ancient surface. Fisher hurried on past the ravine, where the jungle became incredibly dense. I did not want to follow him into that frightful tangle, and neither did Woody. He called to Chris not to go any farther, that it was time to go back, but he didn’t seem to hear us. Moments later, we saw his white cowboy hat vanish into the forest. The rhythmic swiping of his machete died away into silence. “Bloody hell,” Woody muttered, and again called for him to come back. Silence. He called again. Minutes passed. While Woody was not one to express emotion, I could see a look of irritation and concern gathering on his face. Just when we were thinking Chris was gone, we heard his faint voice drifting through the trees and he emerged back out of the hole he’d cut in the vegetation.

“We were concerned you were lost,” said Woody in a clipped voice.

“Not with this,” he said, waving his GPS.

Woody called for a return. While we had been waiting for Chris, the others had come up to the ravine. Using his own GPS, Woody identified a more direct route back to camp, hiking down the ravine to the floodplain, where we encountered another barrier of heliconia, which Woody worked his way through, expertly wielding his machete, scattering flowers left and right. We had to cross three parallel channels of sucking mud, once again sinking to our thighs. When we reached the stream, coated with mud, we waded in, rinsing the mud off. While the others went back to camp, I stripped, wrung out my clothes and piled them on the pebble beach, and then I lay back in the cool water and floated on my back, letting the river carry me a ways downstream, watching the treetops lazily move past.

Back in camp, I found Steve on a cot outside his tent, which he had set up next to my camp on the other side of the spider-monkey tree. He was lying on his back, eating peanuts, and gazing straight up with binoculars at the troop of spider monkeys. They in turn were lined up on a limb fifty feet above, staring down at him and eating leaves. It was a funny sight, two curious primate species observing each other with fascination.

Steve was absolutely beaming over the discovery of the altar stones and full of self-reproach for not having gone with us. He asked questions about how tough the hike was, and I assured him that although it was steep and slippery, and the mudholes were appalling, it was only a few hundred yards and I was pretty sure he could do it if he took it slow.

“Screw the leg,” he said. “I’m going up there tomorrow, one way or another.”

That night, we sat around eating freeze-dried beans and rice to the light of a Coleman lantern. I avoided tea, although I did accept a “tot” of whisky from Woody, rationed out in a bottle cap.

Chris was elated. “It’s just as I thought,” he said. “All this terrain, everything you see here, has been entirely modified by human hands.” In one short reconnaissance, he had confirmed the accuracy of the lidar survey, verifying on the ground every feature seen in the images—along with a great deal more. The “ground truthing” had begun.

A rising wind breathed through the treetops. “That means rain,” said Woody. “In ten minutes.” Right on schedule the downpour thundered into the treetops. It took a good two or three minutes for the water to work its way down through the canopy and reach us on the ground—and then streams of water came cascading everywhere.