They exchanged e-mail addresses.

As Mabel was leaving, she saw the president getting into his car and rushed over to him, asking to have a selfie taken with him on her cell phone. He obliged and then asked for the phone, saying he wanted to speak to her husband. She gave it to him and he called Bruce Heinicke in the States.

“I’m sitting in St. Louis, and here comes this call,” Heinicke said to me. “It’s the president of Honduras on the phone. He asks me, ‘You really know where it’s at?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I want to do this. It will be good for the country.’”

The president hung up the phone and gave it back to Mabel, saying, “Now can I go?”

“Yes, Pepe,” she said, “you can go.” Mabel recalled: “He took off like I was going to chase him down and ask for something else!”

Elkins was astounded and skeptical when he heard this bizarre story, which happened to coincide with his reading the article on lidar. But when he followed up with Bruce and the new Honduran government, he discovered it was true. President Lobo was enthusiastic about the project, seeing the advantages such a discovery would offer his country as well as its potential to bolster his own shaky popularity.

With the president’s blessing and his permits assured, Elkins flew to Houston to meet with the staff at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, which had mapped Caracol, to try to persuade them to take on his scheme. NCALM is a joint project of the University of Houston and the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the National Science Foundation, and its mission is confined to academic and scientific research, not raw exploration for lost cities that probably don’t exist. The co–principal investigator and chief scientist at NCALM is a man named William Carter, one of the fathers of lidar. As a graduate student, Carter had worked on the Apollo missions and helped design and operate one of the first lunar laser ranging stations, able to measure the earth–moon distance to an accuracy of a few centimeters.

Elkins spent the day trying to convince Carter and Ramesh Shrestha, director of NCALM, and their team to join in the search for the lost city. It was an eccentric proposal, unlike anything NCALM had done in the past. With Caracol, they were mapping a world-renowned site with guaranteed results; Elkins’s project was a crapshoot that might be a waste of time and a scientific embarrassment. Lidar had never been used before as a tool of pure archaeological exploration—that is, to look for something nobody could be sure even existed.

“We don’t really know if there’s anything there,” Shrestha said. “The question is: Can we find anything at all?” But Carter was impressed that Elkins had earlier enlisted NASA in the hunt for the city. He looked over Ron Blom’s images of T1 and felt there was enough there to take a chance.

It was a risky project on many levels. Shrestha remembered their debate. “It was something that nobody had done. It had the potential to find something and have a significant impact in the archaeological field. I said explicitly to Steve: ‘Look, this is an experimental project. We will do the best we can. We can’t promise it will work—and we can’t take the blame if it doesn’t!’” Shrestha and Carter were both, however, attracted to the challenge of trying to map terrain under the densest rainforest on earth. If lidar worked in Mosquitia it would work anywhere. It would be the ultimate test of the technology.

A few members of the NCALM team were more skeptical. “There were some on my staff,” said Shrestha, “who said we cannot do this” because the rainforest is too thick. “‘Without trying it,’ I said, ‘you can’t tell me it’s not doable.’”

Others were troubled that no archaeologists were involved. “Steve Elkins is a film guy,” Michael Sartori, the chief mapping scientist at NCALM, said to me later. “Many times, I told my coworkers that this was a bad idea, that this is not the kind of project we should be doing. This is not the normal mode of supplying quality data to academics in the field of archaeology.”

Elkins first proposed to NCALM that they survey all of Mosquitia with lidar. But when he learned it would cost millions of dollars, he whittled down the search area to about fifty square miles. Mapping that would run to about a quarter million dollars in direct costs and a similar amount in supporting costs.

T1 was only twenty square miles. In case T1 came up empty, Steve chose three other unexplored areas to survey. He called these T2, T3, and T4. T2 was a deep valley surrounded by white limestone cliffs that had also been rumored to contain the White City. T3 was an area like T1—difficult to get to, scientifically unexplored, a gentler landscape with large open areas, locked in by mountains. T4 was the valley where Elkins believed Sam Glassmire had found his ruin.

Elkins did intensive research into the four target areas to see if any recent exploration had been done, archaeological or otherwise. He pulled together the latest maps of all the known archaeological sites in Mosquitia. He combed the archives of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History looking for unpublished reports, and he searched the official Honduran register of archaeological sites.

Over the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists had identified about two hundred archaeological sites in Mosquitia. This is almost nothing when compared to the many hundreds of thousands of sites recorded in the Maya region, or the 163,000 registered archaeological sites in my home state of New Mexico. These two hundred Mosquitia sites ranged from some large settlements with massive earthworks to many smaller sites, cave burials, rock art, and artifact scatters that all appeared to belong to the same widespread culture. Many of these sites, unlike in the Maya area, were simply dots on a map that had never been accurately surveyed, and virtually none had been fully excavated. A century of archaeology in Mosquitia had produced few answers, and much that had been done was limited, superficial, or of poor quality. Archaeologists so far had not been able to answer some of the most basic questions of this culture—who they were, where they came from, how they lived, and what happened to them. Without doubt, Mosquitia harbored many, many undiscovered sites that would yield essential secrets.