He had known the story of the White City since he was a boy. When he first heard that Steve’s group was looking for it, he thought the whole project was “mumbo jumbo.” Since taking the job, a steady stream of crazy people had been coming through his office or sending him e-mails about Atlantis or legendary shipwrecks with millions in gold. He thought Steve was in that same category. “I said, ‘Tell me another story!’” But when Steve described lidar and how it had the potential to bare the secrets of Mosquitia, Paredes got interested: This was a serious technology and Steve and his team impressed him as capable people.

The rain started again. After dinner and another tot, I retired to my campsite, stripped off my muddy clothes, hung them on the clothesline for the rain to rinse clean, and crawled into my tent. My camp—and everywhere else—was now a sea of mud. Taking a cue from the soldiers, I tried to pave the mud in front of my tent with waxy leaves, a failing strategy. Inside, the mud had worked its way under the tent, and my waterproof floor was squishy like a water bed.

As I settled into my sleeping bag, I could feel insects crawling on me. They must have been on me all along without me realizing it until I stopped moving. With a yelp I unzipped my bag and turned on the flashlight. I was covered with ugly red welts and patches, hundreds of them—but where were the actual bugs? I felt something biting me and pinched it off; it was a chigger the size of a grain of sand, almost too small to see. I tried to crush it but the shell was too hard, so I carefully placed it on the cover of my John Lloyd Stephens book and stabbed it with the tip of my knife, making a satisfying crunch. To my horror I soon discovered more chiggers, not just on my skin but also some that had dropped off inside my bag. I spent a half hour collecting them, placing them on the execution block, and stabbing them. But the tiny creatures were nearly invisible in my bed, so I covered myself with DEET and resigned myself to sleeping with chiggers. By the end of the trip, the book’s cover was so full of stab marks that I threw it away.

At breakfast Alicia reported another jaguar as well as hearing a faint, whispery noise creeping alongside her tent that she was sure was a very large snake.

CHAPTER 17

This is a very ancient place, a bewitchment place, they say.

The morning of our third day in the jungle, we hiked to the site of the cache with Virgilio, the colonel, and four soldiers. Even with the fixed ropes that Sully and Woody had strung up, it was tough getting up the hill. Chris asked Anna Cohen to take charge of clearing the cache site of vegetation, marking each object, inventorying, recording, and sketching them all in situ. The soldiers would help her. Chris, Woody, Steve, and I set off to explore the city to the north. With Chris leading, we crossed plaza 1, climbed in and out of the ravine to plaza 2. We chopped our way through tangles of bamboo, vines, and plants. Fisher had a long checklist of features seen in lidar that he wanted to visit on the ground, and his GPS took us into some fiercely dense jungle. In places it was like digging a tunnel through green. We visited more mounds, the remains of principal houses and ceremonial structures, two more bus-like features, and several terraces. We came to a break in the canopy, where the collapse of a tall tree had brought down a dozen others with it and created an opening to the sky. The understory had run riot in this sudden wealth of sunlight, massing into an impenetrable thicket of bamboo and catclaw vines that we skirted. Visibility in the undergrowth was so limited that Woody, Chris, and I often kept track of each other by sound, not sight, even though we were no more than a dozen feet apart.

When we returned to the cache after a long circuit of the city, we found the company again in a minor uproar. As the soldiers were clearing the area and Anna began to sketch, an annoyed fer-de-lance had shot out from under a log in the midst of everyone, causing panic. It hung around long enough to get itself thoroughly photographed, the video crew delighted to have an unexpected extra on set; but when Sully tried to capture and move it, it escaped back under the log, where it remained, thoroughly irritated. As a result, nobody would go into the area behind the log, which we could see was packed with artifacts.

Virgilio, Steve, Woody, and I continued back to camp. Virgilio flew out on the chopper, anxious to brief the president on the cache discovery. In the meantime, the AStar, which had continued flying in supplies, was nearly brought down by a vulture that afternoon. The pilot had swerved to avoid the bird but it hit one of the rotor blades and its guts were sucked into the transmission space at the base of the shaft. The rotting contents of its final meal created a hideous mess in the transmission and filled the cabin with a frightful odor. The near accident reminded us of how acutely dependent we were on the two helicopters, our only connection to the outside world. If we were stranded, evacuation would have involved an overland journey of weeks, with limited supplies.

While we had been up in the ruins, Alicia had spent the day talking with the Special Forces soldiers in their camp behind ours, and I was curious to hear what anthropological insights she’d learned. Many of the Special Forces soldiers taking part in Operación Bosque were from indigenous Indian groups in Honduras. Some came from Wampusirpi, the closest indigenous town, on the Patuca River about twenty-five air miles away, an isolated village normally accessible only by water. What did the soldiers think of all this?

“It was pretty wonderful,” Alicia told me. “They said they’d never seen anything like this place, and they said it with such joy. They felt like they were in the middle of a paradise. Of course, some of them just want to get back to their girlfriends. But most are thrilled to be here.” Some felt that the fortress-like nature of the valley made it a kind of sacred place. She had persuaded one of the soldiers, who was Pech, to flag the cacao trees so she could map them and see if they were in fact the remains of an ancient, cultivated grove. Chocolate was sacred to the Maya, who treasured cacao and considered it the food of the gods. It was reserved for warriors and the ruling elite, and the pods were sometimes used as money. Chocolate was also involved in the ritual of human sacrifice. Cacao trees and the chocolate trade very likely played an important role in ancient Mosquitia; it would have been a valuable commodity that was traded with the Maya. “He says it’s a very ancient variety with small pods,” Alicia said. “Mosquitia is full of cacao.” (Some doubt was raised in retrospect, never resolved, as to whether these were actually cacao trees or a related species.)