He rose, rinsed his hands, and finally spoke. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to move it. I had to wash the venom off right away.” (Later, he said he was “a bit concerned” when he felt the poison running into a cut on the back of his hand.)

He held up the headless snake by the tail, blood still dribbling from its neck. Nobody said a word. The snake’s muscles were still flexing slowly. Curious to touch it, I reached out and wrapped my hand around it, feeling the rhythmic writhing of muscles under its cool skin, a queer sensation indeed. The snake was about six feet long, its back displaying striking diamond patterns in colors of chocolate, mahogany, and creamed coffee. Everyone stared at it as the sounds of the night returned.

“Nothing like this to sort of concentrate your mind, is there?” Woody said. “Female. They get bigger than the males. This is one of the biggest fer-de-lances I’ve ever seen.” He casually slung the body over his arm. “We could eat it, they’re quite delicious. But I’ve another use for it. When the others arrive tomorrow, they’ll need to see this. Everyone needs to be fully aware of what they’re getting into here.”

He added quietly, “There’s rarely just one.”

When I retired that night to my hammock, I could not sleep. The jungle, reverberating with sound, was much noisier than in the daytime. Several times I heard large animals moving past me in the darkness, blundering clumsily through undergrowth, crackling twigs. I lay in the dark, listening to the cacophony of life, thinking about the lethal perfection of the snake and its natural dignity, sorry for what we had done but rattled by the close call. A bite from a snake like that, if you survived at all, would be a life-altering experience. In a strange way the encounter sharpened the experience of being here. It amazed me that a valley so primeval and unspoiled could still exist in the twenty-first century. It was truly a lost world, a place that did not want us and where we did not belong. We planned to enter the ruins the following day. What would we find? I couldn’t even begin to imagine it.

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.