The chopper also brought in Oscar Neil, chief of archaeology for the Instituto Hondure?o de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). Neil was an authority on the ancient cultures of Mosquitia. We unloaded the chopper with the usual haste, throwing everything into a heap to be sorted and carried into camp later. The morning was spent moving supplies and equipment and organizing our campsites. I grabbed a tent and set it up next to my hammock, grateful to be on solid ground. The tent’s sewn-in waterproof ground cover would keep out the snakes, spiders, and cockroaches. I enlarged my campsite area with a machete, strung a clothesline, and claimed a folding chair from one of the loads, which I set up under my hammock. There, protected under the rainfly of the hammock, I could sit and write in my notebook. And I could store my clothes, books, camera, and journals in the hammock itself, which made a handy waterproof storage compartment.

As the day wore on, Chris Fisher became increasingly impatient, eager to begin our extraordinary task of entering the lost city. I found him down on the riverbank, in his straw cowboy hat, pacing back and forth with a Trimble GPS in his hand. Woody had forbidden anyone to leave camp without an escort, due to the danger of snakes and getting lost. “This is ridiculous,” Fisher said. “The site is just right there—two hundred yards away!” He showed me the LED screen on the Trimble, which displayed the lidar map and our position on it. I could see that the city was, indeed, right on the other side of the river, completely hidden in the screen of trees. “If Woody doesn’t free up someone to take us over there, I’m going by myself—screw the snakes.” Juan Carlos joined us at the streambank, hands on his hips, staring at the wall of trees on the far side. He, too, was eager to venture into the ruins. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. It was true: We had only ten potential days to explore the valley, our time being strictly limited by the rental period of the AStar helicopter from Corporate Helicopters in San Diego. Its pilot, Myles Elsing, had to fly it back to the States—a four-day journey—for another assignment.

“Someone’s got to talk to Woody,” said Fisher. “This is why we’re here”—he gestured across the river at the hidden city—“not boiling water for frigging tea.”

Finally, about three thirty in the afternoon, Woody agreed to lead a reconnaissance into the ancient city. He told us to be at the LZ in a half hour, with our packs fully loaded with the emergency overnight kit. We would have one hour in the ruins—no more.

At the appointed time, we gathered at the stream, stinking of DEET. There were eight of us in the group: myself, Woody, Chris Fisher with a machete in one hand and GPS in the other; Oscar Neil; Juan Carlos, also carrying a fearsome machete; Lucian Read, with a video camera; and Mark Adams, with a forty-pound field audio kit consisting of a wireless audio mic system, portable audio mixer/recorder, and a six-foot boom mic with windshield. I couldn’t believe Mark was going to hump all that through the jungle. Dave Yoder, burdened with heavy camera equipment, followed in watchful silence, ceaselessly shooting. Steve Elkins could not come; the nerve damage, caused by a deteriorating disk in his spine, gave him a condition known as drop foot, in which he was unable to control the position of his foot while walking. He felt the jungle was too thick and the hills too steep to take the risk of injury so early in the expedition. He did not want to be laid up, or worse, have to be evacuated. It was a bitter pill to swallow. “If you guys find anything,” he said, waving a two-way radio, “call me.”

Woody checked our packs to make sure we had all our emergency supplies, and we set off, wading across the stream. On the far side we encountered a thicket of heliconia that formed a virtually solid wall, but the fleshy stems were easily felled with the swipe of a machete. Woody carved and slashed his way through, one step at a time, the leaves and flowers showering down left and right. The cut vegetation lay so thickly on the ground that there was no possibility of seeing where we were putting our feet. Still shaken by my encounter with the fer-de-lance, I couldn’t help but think of all the snakes that must be hiding in that undergrowth. We crossed two muddy channels, sinking up to our thighs, struggling through the morass with sucking sounds.

The embankment beyond the floodplain was precipitous: close to forty degrees. We climbed hand and foot, grasping roots and vines and branches, pulling ourselves up, expecting at any moment to come face-to-face with a fer-de-lance. We could see little beyond a dozen feet in any direction. The embankment abruptly flattened out, and we arrived at a long ditch and mound that Chris and Oscar examined and felt were man-made. They appeared to mark the edge of the city.

And then we came to the base of the presumed earthen pyramid. The only indication that this was artificial was that the ground rose sharply in an unnatural change of slope. Until Chris and Oscar pointed it out to me, however, I would never have recognized it. We could see nothing but leaves. Here we were, at the edge of a lost city, and we had no sense of the layout or distribution of the mounds and plazas so crisply visible on the lidar maps. The jungle cloaked all.

We labored up the side of the suspected pyramid and reached the top. There, in front of us, were some odd depressions and linear features that Chris believed might be the remains of a structure, perhaps a small temple. Oscar knelt and, with a hand tool, dug a sondaje or test pit into the soil. He said he saw evidence of deliberate construction. I peered at the layers of earth he had exposed just below the surface, but my untrained eye could make out nothing.