CHAPTER 16

I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down.

After night fell, I crawled in my tent, glad to be on solid ground and out of the dreaded hammock. I read my Dover edition of John Lloyd Stephens by flashlight as the rain drummed down. Despite the rain, snakes, mud, and insects, I felt exhilarated, not just by the lost city, but by the feral perfection of the valley. I had been in many wilderness areas, but never in a place as purely untrammeled as this. The hostility of the environment only added to the feeling of being the first to explore and discover an unknown place.

I awoke at five to the roar of howler monkeys rising above the pounding of rain. It was a morning so dark it didn’t seem as if daytime had arrived at all. The forest was wrapped in a twilight gloom, cloaked in mist. Chris was up and as usual impatient to the point of zeal to continue his work. The camp kitchen and gathering area had now been partly erected. We assembled under blue tarps strung up over several plastic folding tables. One camp stove was boiling water and the other heating a pot of coffee, now that the supply of coffee had finally arrived. Outside, the rain was turning the jungle floor into greasy mud that seemed to deepen with every passing hour. The water collected in the hollows of the tarp, which periodically had to be pushed up with poles to dump the puddles of water off the edges.

At breakfast, several people reported having heard a jaguar prowling about the edges of the camp in the dead of night, making a rumbling, purring noise. Woody assured us that jaguars almost never attack humans, although I wondered about that, given Bruce Heinicke’s story. Others were concerned that the large animals heard stumbling about might blunder into a tent, but Woody dismissed that as unlikely, explaining that the animals that came out at night could see quite well in the dark.

“There are four more plazas I want to look at,” Chris said, gulping his coffee. “Upriver is a weird L-shaped mound. I want to see that. And about a kilometer downriver is another set of plazas I want to see. There’s a lot to do—let’s get going.”

I had donned my raincoat, but the rain was so heavy that water began to trickle in anyway, and wearing it made me sticky and hot. I noticed none of Woody’s team were wearing rain gear; they were going about their business completely and cheerfully soaked. “Take it off,” Woody said to me. “Best to get it over with all at once. Trust me: Once you’re thoroughly wet, you’ll be more comfortable.”

As soon as I did, I was quickly drenched—and discovered Woody was right.

After breakfast, with the rain still falling, the full expedition team assembled on the riverbank, and we set out for our second exploration of the site. Despite his injured leg, Steve Elkins joined the group, carrying a blue hiking pole. Also included were Alicia González and Anna Cohen. We waded the river and went along the trail cut the previous day. When we reached the second mudhole, Alicia struggled to walk through the muck, got stuck, and—as we watched, aghast—began to sink.

“I can’t move,” she said with remarkable calmness, even as she was sinking. “I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down. Really, folks, I’m going down.” The mud was already at her waist, and the more she struggled, the more it gurgled up around her. It was like something straight out of a B horror film. Woody and Sully jumped in and seized her arms and slowly worked her out. Once she was safe on hard ground, the mud draining off of her, it became clear what had happened: The mud had filled up her snake gaiters as she tried to wade through, creating an instant pair of cement overshoes, which were inexorably dragging her under with every movement she made. “For a moment there,” she said afterward, “I thought I was going to be having tea with the snakes.”

Elkins, for his part, made it through the mudhole with his hiking pole as a balance and managed to climb up the slippery embankment, using roots and small tree trunks as handholds.

“We’ll get fixed ropes in here tomorrow,” said Sully.

As we skirted the base of the pyramid, happy shouts and singing echoed from across the river. Sully called Spud in camp on his walkie-talkie and learned that the Honduran Special Forces soldiers, sent to guard the expedition team, had just arrived in good spirits after a hike upstream from the river junction. They had brought nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their backs; they intended to establish camp behind ours and live off the forest, building their shelters from poles and leaves, hunting their food and drinking from the river.

“Give them a tarp,” said Sully. “And also some water purification tablets. I don’t want a bunch of soldiers with the runs camped near us.”

When we reached the altar stones, Elkins knelt and began clearing leaves and debris away from them, running his hand over their carved surfaces. One of the stones had a peculiar quartz vein running through it, which looked like it had been chiseled around to enhance it. It ran due north. Elkins felt this was highly significant, and someone else suggested it might have been used to channel blood from human sacrifices. Chris rolled his eyes. “Let’s not get out of hand with the speculation here, folks. We don’t have any idea what these are. They could be foundation stones, altar stones, or something else entirely.” Chris asked Anna to clear the area and survey the stones while he went northward to explore the four plazas. Alicia González and Tom Weinberg remained behind to work with Anna. Dave Yoder, his gear wrapped up in plastic, stayed back to photograph, along with the film crew, who were also struggling to keep their equipment from getting soaked in the rain. The crew posed Elkins next to the stones, clipped a lavalier mic on him, and rolled an interview.

Chris forged ahead, once again charging through the forest like a maniac, his machete flashing. All the machetes we carried had strips of Day-Glo pink tape on their blades, so they could be seen and avoided. The vegetation was so thick that it was easy to see how someone could get sliced open by a machete-wielding neighbor, and even with the Day-Glo tape there were a couple of close calls. Woody, Juan Carlos, and I tried to keep up with Chris. Beyond the ravine, we explored a second plaza, twice as large as the first, also delineated by mounds, berms, and raised earthwork platforms. On the far side, too, were two low, parallel mounds with a flat area in between, which Fisher mapped out with his GPS. He believed it might have been a Mesoamerican ball court, having a similar geometry and size. This was especially interesting, as it indicated a possible link between this culture and its powerful Maya neighbors to the west and north. Far more than the casual recreation we think of when it comes to games of skill, in Mesoamerican cultures the ball game was a sacred ritual that reenacted the struggle between the forces of good and evil. It might also have been a way for groups to avoid warfare by solving conflicts through a match instead, one that occasionally ended with human sacrifice, including the decapitation of the losing team or its captain.

I followed Chris and Juan Carlos around as they hacked this way and that through the jungle, surveying and mapping the plaza. I was especially intrigued to see the famous “bus” mound, which was so striking on the lidar images. In reality it was a perplexing earthen construction, with a sharply defined base and steep walls.

“What the heck is it?” I asked Chris, as he poked around it, marking way points on his GPS.

“I think it’s the foundation of a raised public building or temple,” he said, explaining it was situated at the far end of what had once been a big plaza, where it would have been prominently visible. “There was something on top that’s gone now, built out of perishable materials.”

The rain ceased, but the trees continued shedding millions of drops. The light filtered down, cloudy green, as though passing through pond water. I stood breathing in the rich odor of life, marveling at the silent mounds, the immense trees choked by strangler figs, the mats of hanging vines, the cries of birds and animals, the flowers nodding under the burden of water. The connection to the present world dissolved, and I felt we had somehow passed into a realm beyond time and space.

Soon enough, the peace was broken by another downpour. We continued exploring. It was exhausting, soaking work, pushing through the jungle, unable to see where we were putting our feet, the ground as slippery as ice. We climbed up and down steep ravines and hillsides, made treacherous by mud. I learned the hard way not to grab hold of a stick of bamboo, because it would sometimes shatter into sharp, cutting pieces and dump on me a load of rank water that had accumulated in its hollow stem. Other potential handholds sported vicious thorns or swarms of venomous red ants. Downpour after downpour came and went, like someone turning a tap on and off. Around one o’clock, Woody became concerned that the river might be rising, preventing our ability to cross back to camp, so we returned to where Anna, Alicia, and Tom were working on the row of stones. As they cleared the area, they had discovered, in the corner of the plaza, a stone staircase that went down into the earth, partially buried by slumping mounds. We paused in the rain while Woody passed around a thermos of hot, sweet, milky tea. Everyone was talking excitedly. Even with the minimal amount of clearing, I had a better feeling for what this tiny corner of the city was like, with its row of stones propped upon boulders. They certainly looked like altars, but were they places of sacrifice, or seats for important people, or some other thing? And the stone staircase that went nowhere was another puzzle. Where did it go down to—some underground tomb or chamber? Or did it lead up to something that had washed away?

Too soon we had to leave. We set off in single file, back to camp, again skirting the base of the pyramid. It was a route we had taken several times before without noticing anything special. But suddenly Lucian Read, in the back of the line, called out, “Hey! Some weird stones over here!”

We returned to look, and all mayhem broke out.

In a broad hollow area, just poking out of the ground, were the tops of dozens of extraordinary carved stone sculptures. The objects, glimpsed among leaves and vines, and carpeted with moss, took shape in the forest twilight. The first thing I saw was the snarling head of a jaguar sticking out of the forest floor, then the rim of a vessel decorated with a vulture’s head and more large stone jars carved with snakes; next to them was a cluster of objects that looked like thrones or tables, some with carvings along the rims and legs that, at first glance, appeared to be inscriptions or glyphs. They were all almost entirely buried, with only the tops visible, like stone icebergs. I was astounded. These sculptures were in beautiful condition and had probably been lying here undisturbed since they had been left centuries ago—until we stumbled across them. This was proof, if we needed it, that this valley had not been explored in modern times.

The crew crowded into the area, jostling each other and exclaiming in astonishment. The camera team was shooting and Dave Yoder was in there, too, photographing like a madman, while I also had my Nikon out, taking pictures in the rain. Chris, the archaeologist, began yelling for everyone to get back, dammit, don’t touch anything, quit stomping around, watch your feet for chrissakes! Cursing and driving people out, he finally roped off the area with Spanish crime-scene tape that spelled out CUIDADO, “warning,” which he had been carrying (with remarkable foresight) in his backpack.

“Nobody goes past the tape,” he said, “but me, Oscar, and Anna.”

Steve, leaning on his walking stick, exhausted and in pain from the punishing hike up to the ruins, was astounded. “It’s amazing,” he said, “that there’s this place here, this jewel of a place, as pure as you could find, untouched for centuries!” The rain streamed down all around us, but nobody paid any attention. “When you’re here and see how overgrown it is,” he continued, “how much has been buried, you see how improbable it would be to stumble upon this. In a metaphysical sense it was like we were led here.”

Chris Fisher was also a bit stunned. “I expected to find a city,” he told me later, “but I didn’t expect this. The undisturbed context is rare. It may be an ofrenda, an offering or a cache. This is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects out of circulation.” He was especially impressed by the carved head of what, to him, might be a portrait of a “were-jaguar,” showing a shaman “in a spirit or transformed state.” Because the figure seemed to be wearing a helmet, he also wondered if it was connected to the ball game. “But this is all speculation: We just don’t know.” He suspected that much, much more lay below the surface.

And much more did, as later excavation would reveal. The cache was vast, containing over five hundred pieces, but more intriguing even than its size was its existence at all. This particular type of ritual collection of artifacts seems to be a special feature of these lost cities of ancient Mosquitia—they have not been seen in Maya culture or elsewhere—meaning that they could hold a key to what distinguishes the people of Mosquitia from their neighbors and defines their place in history. What was the purpose of these caches? Why were they left here? While similar caches had been reported in Mosquitia before, none had been found so fully intact, offering a rare opportunity for the spot to be systematically studied and excavated. The significance of this offering would prove to be the expedition’s greatest discovery so far, one that had important implications far beyond Mosquitia. But it would be a year before we understood the scope of those discoveries.

Even with the intense excitement and high spirits, the hike back to camp was grueling, as the steep hillsides were impossible to descend except in a semi-controlled sort of falling slide. In spite of Woody’s worries, the stream had not risen much and remained fordable. The rain abated; the sky began to clear; and we hoped the helicopter would soon be able to come in with more needed supplies for the camp, which was still only partly set up. We lacked food and water, generators to charge up laptops and batteries for the camera gear, and we needed to set up a medical tent and guest tents for scientists who were expected to arrive over the following days.

Back in camp, Chris declared he was now going to explore what appeared in the lidar images to be an earthwork behind our camp. His energy was impressive. We hiked back behind camp, passing through the soldiers’ encampment. They were building a communal house using one of our tarps, and paving the muddy floor with thick leaves. They had a fire burning—I had no idea how they managed it in the rain—and one soldier was returning from the hunt with a deer haunch thrown over his shoulder. The deer, it turned out later, was a threatened Central American red brocket deer; a week later, the military ordered the soldiers to stop hunting and began flying in MREs. The soldiers told us it had taken them almost five hours to make the journey to our camp on foot from the lower landing zone at the river junction, a distance of three miles. They had traveled in the river, wading upstream, easier and safer than slashing through the jungle.

Behind the soldiers’ camp, a steep slope thrust upward. This was the anomaly Chris wanted to explore. We climbed to the top and came down on the far side, finding ourselves in an oval area with a flat bottom, surrounded by what appeared to be dikes or man-made earthen banks. The area was open, with little understory. It looked like a large swimming pool, with a flat bottom and steep walls. A small outlet at one end led back down to the flat area where we were camped. On the other end, a swale that looked like an ancient road passed down the side of the hill. Chris concluded that these earthworks had probably been a reservoir for collecting water during the wet season, to be released during the dry season to irrigate crops in the area where we were camped. “That whole terrace we’re on was probably an agricultural area,” he said, that had been artificially leveled. Part of it may have been a cacao grove; Alicia González had identified what she believed were some small cacao trees growing near her campsite.

The dark clouds drifted off, and finally blue sky appeared in patches for the first time that day. A milky sun emerged, sending spears of sunlight through the misty canopy. An hour later we heard the thudding of the incoming chopper, rousing once again a furious chorus from the howler monkeys. We had two visitors: Lt. Col. Oseguera, who had come to check on the situation of his troops, and Virgilio Paredes, the IHAH chief. The colonel went to review his troops while Virgilio retired to the kitchen area and listened with interest as Steve and Chris described to him the discovery of the cache. It was too late in the evening to go back up, so Virgilio and the colonel decided to spend the night and visit the site the next day.

I had first met Virgilio in 2012 during the lidar survey. He was a tall, thoughtful man who, while not an archaeologist himself, asked probing questions and had taken pains to become thoroughly versed in the project. He spoke fluent English. He was descended from an ancient Sephardic Jewish family named Pardes, who left Jerusalem in the nineteenth century and emigrated to Segovia, Spain, where the name was Hispanicized to Paredes. During the Fascist regime of Franco, his grandfather left Spain and went to Honduras. His father went to medical school in Honduras and became a biochemist and a businessman, but now, close to retirement, he was considering making aliyah and moving to Israel. Virgilio was raised Catholic, went to the American School in Tegucigalpa, got a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and lived and studied in diverse places in the world, from Germany to Trinidad and Tobago. He was working for the Ministry of Culture at the time of the 2009 coup, when the interim president asked him to head the IHAH. It was a big change: For the past sixty years the IHAH had been headed by an academic, but the new administration wanted a manager instead. Some archaeologists were unhappy. “The academics were fighting with the tourist sector,” Virgilio told me. “If you have the golden chicken, the archaeologists don’t want the chicken to produce any golden eggs, but the tourist guys, they want to cut it open to get all the eggs at once. There should be a balance.”

He had known the story of the White City since he was a boy. When he first heard that Steve’s group was looking for it, he thought the whole project was “mumbo jumbo.” Since taking the job, a steady stream of crazy people had been coming through his office or sending him e-mails about Atlantis or legendary shipwrecks with millions in gold. He thought Steve was in that same category. “I said, ‘Tell me another story!’” But when Steve described lidar and how it had the potential to bare the secrets of Mosquitia, Paredes got interested: This was a serious technology and Steve and his team impressed him as capable people.

The rain started again. After dinner and another tot, I retired to my campsite, stripped off my muddy clothes, hung them on the clothesline for the rain to rinse clean, and crawled into my tent. My camp—and everywhere else—was now a sea of mud. Taking a cue from the soldiers, I tried to pave the mud in front of my tent with waxy leaves, a failing strategy. Inside, the mud had worked its way under the tent, and my waterproof floor was squishy like a water bed.

As I settled into my sleeping bag, I could feel insects crawling on me. They must have been on me all along without me realizing it until I stopped moving. With a yelp I unzipped my bag and turned on the flashlight. I was covered with ugly red welts and patches, hundreds of them—but where were the actual bugs? I felt something biting me and pinched it off; it was a chigger the size of a grain of sand, almost too small to see. I tried to crush it but the shell was too hard, so I carefully placed it on the cover of my John Lloyd Stephens book and stabbed it with the tip of my knife, making a satisfying crunch. To my horror I soon discovered more chiggers, not just on my skin but also some that had dropped off inside my bag. I spent a half hour collecting them, placing them on the execution block, and stabbing them. But the tiny creatures were nearly invisible in my bed, so I covered myself with DEET and resigned myself to sleeping with chiggers. By the end of the trip, the book’s cover was so full of stab marks that I threw it away.

At breakfast Alicia reported another jaguar as well as hearing a faint, whispery noise creeping alongside her tent that she was sure was a very large snake.