CHAPTER 17

This is a very ancient place, a bewitchment place, they say.

The morning of our third day in the jungle, we hiked to the site of the cache with Virgilio, the colonel, and four soldiers. Even with the fixed ropes that Sully and Woody had strung up, it was tough getting up the hill. Chris asked Anna Cohen to take charge of clearing the cache site of vegetation, marking each object, inventorying, recording, and sketching them all in situ. The soldiers would help her. Chris, Woody, Steve, and I set off to explore the city to the north. With Chris leading, we crossed plaza 1, climbed in and out of the ravine to plaza 2. We chopped our way through tangles of bamboo, vines, and plants. Fisher had a long checklist of features seen in lidar that he wanted to visit on the ground, and his GPS took us into some fiercely dense jungle. In places it was like digging a tunnel through green. We visited more mounds, the remains of principal houses and ceremonial structures, two more bus-like features, and several terraces. We came to a break in the canopy, where the collapse of a tall tree had brought down a dozen others with it and created an opening to the sky. The understory had run riot in this sudden wealth of sunlight, massing into an impenetrable thicket of bamboo and catclaw vines that we skirted. Visibility in the undergrowth was so limited that Woody, Chris, and I often kept track of each other by sound, not sight, even though we were no more than a dozen feet apart.

When we returned to the cache after a long circuit of the city, we found the company again in a minor uproar. As the soldiers were clearing the area and Anna began to sketch, an annoyed fer-de-lance had shot out from under a log in the midst of everyone, causing panic. It hung around long enough to get itself thoroughly photographed, the video crew delighted to have an unexpected extra on set; but when Sully tried to capture and move it, it escaped back under the log, where it remained, thoroughly irritated. As a result, nobody would go into the area behind the log, which we could see was packed with artifacts.

Virgilio, Steve, Woody, and I continued back to camp. Virgilio flew out on the chopper, anxious to brief the president on the cache discovery. In the meantime, the AStar, which had continued flying in supplies, was nearly brought down by a vulture that afternoon. The pilot had swerved to avoid the bird but it hit one of the rotor blades and its guts were sucked into the transmission space at the base of the shaft. The rotting contents of its final meal created a hideous mess in the transmission and filled the cabin with a frightful odor. The near accident reminded us of how acutely dependent we were on the two helicopters, our only connection to the outside world. If we were stranded, evacuation would have involved an overland journey of weeks, with limited supplies.

While we had been up in the ruins, Alicia had spent the day talking with the Special Forces soldiers in their camp behind ours, and I was curious to hear what anthropological insights she’d learned. Many of the Special Forces soldiers taking part in Operación Bosque were from indigenous Indian groups in Honduras. Some came from Wampusirpi, the closest indigenous town, on the Patuca River about twenty-five air miles away, an isolated village normally accessible only by water. What did the soldiers think of all this?

“It was pretty wonderful,” Alicia told me. “They said they’d never seen anything like this place, and they said it with such joy. They felt like they were in the middle of a paradise. Of course, some of them just want to get back to their girlfriends. But most are thrilled to be here.” Some felt that the fortress-like nature of the valley made it a kind of sacred place. She had persuaded one of the soldiers, who was Pech, to flag the cacao trees so she could map them and see if they were in fact the remains of an ancient, cultivated grove. Chocolate was sacred to the Maya, who treasured cacao and considered it the food of the gods. It was reserved for warriors and the ruling elite, and the pods were sometimes used as money. Chocolate was also involved in the ritual of human sacrifice. Cacao trees and the chocolate trade very likely played an important role in ancient Mosquitia; it would have been a valuable commodity that was traded with the Maya. “He says it’s a very ancient variety with small pods,” Alicia said. “Mosquitia is full of cacao.” (Some doubt was raised in retrospect, never resolved, as to whether these were actually cacao trees or a related species.)

A few days later, some of the soldiers took Alicia to Wampusirpi in the military helicopter, to meet their families. Alicia showed them pictures on her cell phone that she had taken of the deforestation northeast of Catacamas. “They were astounded,” she said, and deeply troubled. “They said, ‘No wonder the rivers are drying up, the animals are going, the fish are dying!’”

Wampusirpi has an organic cacao cooperative, which produced blocks of pure chocolate, shipped downriver to market. It is said by chocolate aficionados to be some of the finest single-source chocolate in the world. Some of the cacao pods are harvested from wild cacao trees growing in the Biosphere Reserve forests surrounding the town. The men harvest the pods and the women ferment and toast them. Alicia toured the cooperative and they gave her a four-pound brick of pure, bitter chocolate.

In response to her questions about Ciudad Blanca, or Casa Blanca (White House) as the Pech call it, she was introduced to a man in his eighties. He told about it as the children gathered around. “He said the gringos came a long time ago and took all the gold and desecrated Casa Blanca. He said Casa Blanca is way up in the mountains; it’s where the sukia went, the shamans, and it’s controlled by the shamans. This is a very ancient place, a bewitchment place, they say, inhabited by people before the Pech.”

The morning of the twenty-first arrived as usual—foggy, dripping, and dank. I had now been in the jungle four days, and it seemed like the time was passing much too fast. At 8:00 a.m. we hiked a quarter mile upriver to look at the L-shaped feature that was so prominent on the lidar images. We walked in the river itself, easier and safer than trying to push through the jungle on either embankment.

The L feature was clearly man-made, a large geometric earthen platform raised about ten feet above the floodplain. Enormous trees grew around and on top of it. One of the trees was truly monstrous, with a trunk at least twenty feet in diameter. I took a slew of photographs of it, some with Steve, and Steve took some of me. According to Chris, the platform probably supported a neighborhood of tightly packed houses, raised above the seasonal flood zone, with cultivated fields on the floodplain below. On the way out, struggling down a steep embankment, I tumbled into the river. I was fine but my Nikon camera didn’t survive. Luckily, I was able to recover all the photographs from the card after I returned to civilization. I had my cell phone with its camera flown in the next day.

We hiked downriver about half a mile to a large series of plazas that were prominent in the lidar images. As we journeyed along, the unnamed river revealed itself as one of the loveliest I had ever seen, crystal-clear water running over a cobbled bed, with gravel bars, sunny patches thick with flowers, riffles and pools, and every once in a while a little waterfall. In places, huge trees and other vegetation leaned over the river, turning it into a furtive green tunnel haunted by the sound of water. Every bend disclosed something new—a shimmering rapid, a fern-draped tree trunk, a deep pool flashing with silvery fish, scarlet macaws and snowy egrets rising from the treetops. I regretted not having a camera to record these images.

According to our lidar maps, the river made an extreme hairpin bend about halfway to our goal. Woody decided we could save time with a shortcut straight across. The route plunged us into thick jungle, every inch forward won only with the blade of a machete. We crossed a ridge and came down into a ravine, which we followed back to the river. After an hour, we stopped to rest on a gravel bar opposite the presumed ruins, and we ate lunch.

We talked about how difficult, if not impossible, it would have been to explore the valley and its ruins before the advent of GPS and lidar. Without the lidar maps, we could have walked through the middle of the T1 ruins and not even realized they existed. Only with lidar maps and GPS did we know where to look for features otherwise cloaked in vegetation. The wall of trees on the far side of the river, across a meadow, gave no hint whatsoever of the mounds and plazas we knew were there.

After lunch we waded across the river and pushed into a field of dense, chest-high grass, the idea of snakes never far from our thoughts, as there was no way to see where we were putting our feet. We entered the forest with relief and came upon the first sharp mound, another bus. Parallel mounds extended from it on either side. Chris suggested this site was an extension of the upper city, but Oscar believed it to be a separate settlement entirely. This was not a trivial disagreement. The lidar images showed that there were nineteen major sites strung along the valley, all close together. Were they part of the same polity—the same economic and political unit—a single city? Or were they separate villages, each with its own governance? So far, the evidence suggests that most but not all of them were part of an extended city, but the question remains unresolved.

We explored the site for several hours. It was very much like the first set of plazas, only smaller. We climbed a nearby hill hoping it might be another earthen pyramid, but at the summit Chris and Oscar concluded it was just a naturally conical hill. We found more rows of flat altar-like stones, several leveled plaza areas, and bus-like mounds. On the way out, at the very edge of one of the mounds, we all traipsed, unawares, past a huge fer-de-lance. Lucian (again at the rear) spied it. We had each walked within two feet of it, so close that one of us could easily have stepped on it or brushed it. The snake remained peacefully asleep, its head tucked into its chocolate-colored coils. It was virtually invisible in the forest litter, although it looked to be five or six feet long, almost as big as the one we killed the first night.

When we returned to camp, more visitors had arrived. Tom Lutz, a writer, literary critic, and founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books, was covering the expedition as a freelancer for the New York Times. Bill Benenson, the expedition coleader and financial backer, arrived with him.

The rain started again—a massive downpour—and I huddled under my hammock, writing in my journal, before rejoining the group under the kitchen tarp. The atmosphere was one of focused work: Dave Yoder was downloading massive numbers of photographs onto hard drives, while Lucian Read and the film crew fussed with their equipment, cleaning it and working to keep it dry—a never-ending job—and charging batteries with the newly arrived generators. The ex-SAS crew was busy cutting bamboo to lay down paths over the deepening mud. The entire camp area was flooding, and as the mud rose it came oozing in under the tarps.

The rain continued all afternoon. That evening, after the usual freeze-dried dinner, we remained under the tarps, the day’s work finally done. Woody tried to light a fire by digging a hole in the ground, soaking a roll of paper towels in gasoline, piling wet wood on top, and lighting it. But the accumulating water soon reached the hole and flooded it, putting out the wretched fire.

A disagreement had flared up that morning about what to do about the cache of artifacts. Steve called a general meeting that evening. We gathered in a semicircle of chairs by the light of the lanterns, stinking of DEET and mildew, drinking tea or coffee and slapping insects, while the steady thrum of rain sounded on the sheltering tarps.

Steve opened the discussion by explaining that the site was in grave danger of being looted. Even if we hadn’t found it, he pointed out, deforestation was less than ten miles from the valley’s entrance and rapidly approaching. In that sense we had saved it from destruction, but only temporarily. Virgilio had estimated the illegal logging would reach the valley in eight years or less, which would result in the immediate looting of the cache, worth possibly millions of dollars. Even more ominous, the Honduran soldiers had reported a narcotrafficking airstrip being carved out of the jungle beyond the entrance to the valley. Enough people now knew the location of T1, Steve said, that the cat was out of the bag; the narcos had the money and planes; they would loot the site as soon as we left. He felt the team should remove one artifact—to prove what we had found and to use it to raise money for a swift excavation of the site. “We’ve opened Pandora’s box,” he said, and now we had a responsibility to protect the artifacts.

Bill Benenson agreed, arguing that the removal of a few objects would not harm the context, that it was a kind of salvage archaeology, and that bringing out a gorgeous item would be an effective fund-raising tool to interest donors in preserving the valley and ruins. And if the site were looted, which seemed possible, at least one artifact would be saved.

After this, Chris Fisher spoke. He was uncompromising. “The whole world will be watching what we do here,” he said, his voice raised. He was adamantly opposed to a hasty excavation of even one object. First, he pointed out, we had no excavation permit. Second, and most important, the value of the objects was in their context, not in the individual pieces. There were pieces like this already in museum collections, but no cache had ever been excavated in situ. A careful, legal excavation by qualified archaeologists might reveal a tremendous amount about this culture. Chemical analyses could show, for example, if the vessels held offerings of food, like chocolate or maize. There might be royal burials underneath, and those had to be treated with care and dignity. He said that if anyone dug up anything right now, he would immediately resign from the project, as it went against all his professional ethics.

And what if, three weeks from now, the cache was looted? asked Benenson.

“So be it,” said Chris. He said we could not engage in unethical behavior in anticipation of the illegal behavior of others. We must not do anything that would be viewed as unprofessional by the archaeological community. And besides, he said, it wasn’t our decision; this wasn’t our country; this was the national patrimony of Honduras. It was their site and their decision whether or not to excavate. But he hoped to God the Hondurans wouldn’t make the wrong decision, because to excavate hastily, right now, would not only turn the archaeological community against the project but would destroy the primary value of this discovery.

Chris turned to Oscar Neil and asked him in Spanish: “What do you think?”

So far, Oscar had been listening silently. As Honduras’s chief of archaeology, the decision to excavate would be his, in consultation with Virgilio Paredes. Replying in Spanish, he strongly agreed with Chris. He pointed out that the same narcotraffickers Steve had mentioned as a threat would actually keep looters at bay—because they didn’t want looters on their turf. “The narcos are the owners of the outlying territory here,” he said. The impenetrable forest itself was protection; the artifacts had been there for perhaps eight hundred years, and as long as the forest remained intact they would be naturally safeguarded. The saqueadores (looters) were interested in more accessible sites—and there were sites far easier to get to than this one. The narcos wouldn’t bother looting it; they had their own much more profitable business. Finally, he said, the Honduran military was already discussing plans to come in, patrol the valley, and establish Honduran government power in what was essentially an area beyond sovereign control.*

Oscar’s and Chris’s arguments prevailed, and it was decided to leave everything in situ, untouched for now, to await careful and proper excavation.

After the meeting, Sully touched my arm and spoke to me, lowering his voice: “I know soldiers. I was a soldier. I can tell you that the danger isn’t from some narcotraffickers or outside looters—it’s from right there.” He nodded to the soldiers’ camp in the dark behind us. “They’re already planning how to do it. Up there, they were marking every site with GPS. Downriver they’re enlarging their LZ. The military isn’t going to let looters in here because they are the looters. After you leave, it will be gone in a week. I’ve seen this kind of corruption all over the world—believe me, that’s what’s going to happen.”

He said this to me as an aside, and while I worried he might be right, the decision had been made: The cache would be left untouched. Sully kept his opinion private, and did not share it with Chris and Oscar.

By now, the trails in the campsite had been churned into soupy mud so deep it slopped up to our ankles. I stripped outside my tent, hung up my clothes, and crawled inside. There I picked off the chiggers and stabbed them on my book and squashed the sand flies that had gotten inside. I lay in the dark, miserably wet, listening to the usual nighttime beasts tromping around my tent and thinking that maybe the SAS guys hadn’t exaggerated the challenges of this place after all.