Even at the top of the pyramid, the highest point of the lost city, we were immersed in a disorder of leaves, vines, flowers, and tree trunks. Chris held his GPS over his head, but he had trouble locating satellites because of the trees. I took many pictures with my Nikon, but they all ended up showing the same thing: leaves, leaves, and more leaves. Even Dave struggled to get photographs of something other than an endless green ocean of vegetation.

We descended the side of the pyramid into the first plaza of the city. The lidar images indicated that the plaza was surrounded on three sides by geometric mounds and terraces. As Fisher tried once again to get a GPS reading with his Trimble, in order to start ground-mapping, Oscar gave a shout. He knelt, brushing dirt and vines off the corner of a large stone, almost completely invisible in the riot of plants. The stone had a shaped surface. After pulling back and cutting away some of the vegetation, we began to uncover more such stones—a long row of them, all flat, resting on tripods of round, white-quartz boulders. They looked like altars. “We have to clean these stones,” Chris said, “to see if any have carvings, and we need to locate them on the GPS.” He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called Elkins, back in camp, to report the news.

They had an excited conversation that we all could hear through the walkie-talkie speaker. Elkins was ecstatic. “This proves,” he told Chris, “that they did use cut stone for building. It means this was an important site.”

The GPS finally located enough satellites for Fisher to begin establishing way points and mapping the city. He charged through the jungle, slashing his way, marking way points, keen and impatient to make the most of our limited time before we had to return to camp. We could hardly keep up. Beyond the altar stones, we reached the central plaza of the city, which had clearly been at one time a large public space. It was as flat as a soccer pitch and more open than elsewhere.

“These were probably once public buildings,” said Fisher, indicating the long mounds surrounding the plaza. “Perhaps reserved for an elite class or royalty. All this would have been open and very impressive. I imagine this area was where major ceremonies took place.”

Standing in the plaza, I finally began to have a sense of the size and scale of the city, if only barely. Chris cut his way across it, saying that there were three more plazas and a possible ball court farther on, along with a peculiar mound we had called “the bus” because it looked like one in the lidar image. These bus-shaped mounds were prominent in both T1 and T3, well defined, each a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifteen feet tall. I had also seen several at the site of Las Crucitas. They were a characteristic structure unique to this culture.

While the rest of the team stayed behind, clearing the vegetation from the stones, Woody and I followed Fisher northward, trying to keep him in sight. We came to more mounds and a steep ravine cutting through them. Glancing into the cut, I could see where the erosion had exposed what looked like stone paving forming an ancient surface. Fisher hurried on past the ravine, where the jungle became incredibly dense. I did not want to follow him into that frightful tangle, and neither did Woody. He called to Chris not to go any farther, that it was time to go back, but he didn’t seem to hear us. Moments later, we saw his white cowboy hat vanish into the forest. The rhythmic swiping of his machete died away into silence. “Bloody hell,” Woody muttered, and again called for him to come back. Silence. He called again. Minutes passed. While Woody was not one to express emotion, I could see a look of irritation and concern gathering on his face. Just when we were thinking Chris was gone, we heard his faint voice drifting through the trees and he emerged back out of the hole he’d cut in the vegetation.

“We were concerned you were lost,” said Woody in a clipped voice.

“Not with this,” he said, waving his GPS.

Woody called for a return. While we had been waiting for Chris, the others had come up to the ravine. Using his own GPS, Woody identified a more direct route back to camp, hiking down the ravine to the floodplain, where we encountered another barrier of heliconia, which Woody worked his way through, expertly wielding his machete, scattering flowers left and right. We had to cross three parallel channels of sucking mud, once again sinking to our thighs. When we reached the stream, coated with mud, we waded in, rinsing the mud off. While the others went back to camp, I stripped, wrung out my clothes and piled them on the pebble beach, and then I lay back in the cool water and floated on my back, letting the river carry me a ways downstream, watching the treetops lazily move past.

Back in camp, I found Steve on a cot outside his tent, which he had set up next to my camp on the other side of the spider-monkey tree. He was lying on his back, eating peanuts, and gazing straight up with binoculars at the troop of spider monkeys. They in turn were lined up on a limb fifty feet above, staring down at him and eating leaves. It was a funny sight, two curious primate species observing each other with fascination.

Steve was absolutely beaming over the discovery of the altar stones and full of self-reproach for not having gone with us. He asked questions about how tough the hike was, and I assured him that although it was steep and slippery, and the mudholes were appalling, it was only a few hundred yards and I was pretty sure he could do it if he took it slow.

“Screw the leg,” he said. “I’m going up there tomorrow, one way or another.”

That night, we sat around eating freeze-dried beans and rice to the light of a Coleman lantern. I avoided tea, although I did accept a “tot” of whisky from Woody, rationed out in a bottle cap.