The second prong of Elkins’s attack on the problem involved bringing the latest space-age technology to the search. For this, Elkins turned to Ron Blom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Elkins knew of Ron Blom’s successful quest to find the lost city of Ubar in the Rub’ al Khali Desert—the Empty Quarter—on the Arabian Peninsula. Ubar, also called Iram of the Pillars, had been mentioned in the Koran, which said the “Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment” for corruption, smiting the city and driving it into the sands. By scrutinizing images of the Empty Quarter desert from space, Blom and his team discovered a radiating pattern of ancient caravan trails, not visible on the ground, that converged at what was already known to be an ancient watering hole and caravanserai, a place where ancient camel caravans bedded down for the night. The satellite data indicated far more was there than a mere campsite. When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event.

Elkins called Blom and asked if he was interested in looking for another lost city. Blom said yes.

The problem, however, was that Mosquitia offered a far greater challenge than the Arabian Desert. The desert is an open book; synthetic aperture radar can peer fifteen feet or more into dry desert sands. The key is “dry”: Water molecules strongly absorb radar. For this reason, jungle foliage is far more difficult to see through with radar—a big leaf will block a radar beam that can penetrate several feet of dry sand. Undeterred by the challenge, Blom and his team started by analyzing scores of satellite images of Mosquitia taken in infrared and visual wavelengths of light. They looked at synthetic aperture radar images taken from the Space Shuttle. Blom combined images, crunched data, massaged and enhanced it. It took months of effort, but finally it seemed Blom hit the jackpot. He and his team identified an area that seemed to contain rectilinear and curvilinear shapes that were not natural. They termed both the valley and the unknown feature Target One, or T1.

On May 12, 1997, Elkins faxed one of his partners, Tom Weinberg, with the news:

THIS VALLEY IS COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY VERY STEEP MOUNTAINS WITH THE EXCEPTION OF ONE SMALL “CUT” THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS THAT ALLOWS ACCESS. THERE ARE TWO SMALL STREAMS THAT FLOW THROUGH THE VALLEY. IT IS A PERFECT SPOT FOR A SETTLEMENT… KIND OF REMINDS ME OF THE MOVIE, “SHANGRA LA”!

Excitedly, he noted at the end of the fax that Blom had identified a “RATHER LARGE (1800 FT. ACCORDING TO RON’S MEASUREMENT) L-SHAPED OBJECT.”

The valley itself was striking: a mysterious geological formation that looked like a crater or bowl, walled in by steep, encircling ridges, creating a natural fortress. It did indeed look very much like the descriptions of Shangri-la or, even more apposite, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “lost world.” The terrain inside the valley, watered by the two rivers, was gentle and friendly, consisting of hills, terraces, and floodplains, well suited for ancient farming and settlement. The satellite images showed no sign of human entry, occupation, or indigenous Indian use; it appeared to be pristine, untouched rainforest. Absolutely uninhabited areas of tropical rainforest are very rare in the world today; even the remotest reaches of the Amazon, for example, or the highlands of New Guinea, are used seasonally by indigenous people and have been at least minimally explored by scientists.

It was an exciting idea, but for now it was just an idea, a hypothesis. Even with intensive image processing, the immense, 150-foot, triple-canopy rainforest did not yield its secrets. Most of the unclassified satellite imagery at the end of the twentieth century had a coarse, ninety-foot ground resolution—in other words, the smallest thing that could be seen in the images was at least ninety feet on a side. The images showed blurred outlines that, if one stared at them long enough, looked unnatural, but it was far from definite proof. They were a bit like Rorschach blots—perhaps the mind was seeing things that weren’t there.

Eager to learn more, Elkins wondered if the valley had ever been explored. He and his partner Tom Weinberg scoured the world for people who had spent time in Mosquitia, and interviewed them on camera. He collected the stories of archaeologists, gold prospectors, drug smugglers, geologists, looters, and adventurers. He hired researchers who combed the archives in Honduras and elsewhere, piecing together which areas of Mosquitia had been explored and which had not.

After much research, he determined that T1 was truly unexplored. Virtually all expeditions into Mosquitia had gone up the big rivers and their navigable tributaries. Rivers are the traditional highways of the jungle; expeditions that departed from those rivers never got very far in the fierce, impassable mountains. But T1 had no navigable rivers and it was completely walled off by mountains.

In the end it was a gut feeling Elkins had about T1: “I just thought that if I were a king, this would be the perfect place to hide my kingdom.”

CHAPTER 7

The fish that swallowed the whale

Convinced he was on the verge of solving the mystery, Steve immediately began planning an expedition into T1. The logistics were a nightmare. The Honduran government bureaucracy that controlled the permits was erratic and dysfunctional. The factionalized political environment meant that if one politician agreed to help, the opposition blocked it. But with gentle persistence and cultivation of both sides, along with some well-placed funds, Elkins finally did get the permits to explore T1. During this entire time, he had carefully kept the location secret from the Honduran government, fearing the information might lead to possible looting—a high-level diplomatic balancing act. He successfully lined up six figures in financing. Hoping to avoid weeks of brutal overland travel, he planned to go in by helicopter.