A few days later, some of the soldiers took Alicia to Wampusirpi in the military helicopter, to meet their families. Alicia showed them pictures on her cell phone that she had taken of the deforestation northeast of Catacamas. “They were astounded,” she said, and deeply troubled. “They said, ‘No wonder the rivers are drying up, the animals are going, the fish are dying!’”

Wampusirpi has an organic cacao cooperative, which produced blocks of pure chocolate, shipped downriver to market. It is said by chocolate aficionados to be some of the finest single-source chocolate in the world. Some of the cacao pods are harvested from wild cacao trees growing in the Biosphere Reserve forests surrounding the town. The men harvest the pods and the women ferment and toast them. Alicia toured the cooperative and they gave her a four-pound brick of pure, bitter chocolate.

In response to her questions about Ciudad Blanca, or Casa Blanca (White House) as the Pech call it, she was introduced to a man in his eighties. He told about it as the children gathered around. “He said the gringos came a long time ago and took all the gold and desecrated Casa Blanca. He said Casa Blanca is way up in the mountains; it’s where the sukia went, the shamans, and it’s controlled by the shamans. This is a very ancient place, a bewitchment place, they say, inhabited by people before the Pech.”

The morning of the twenty-first arrived as usual—foggy, dripping, and dank. I had now been in the jungle four days, and it seemed like the time was passing much too fast. At 8:00 a.m. we hiked a quarter mile upriver to look at the L-shaped feature that was so prominent on the lidar images. We walked in the river itself, easier and safer than trying to push through the jungle on either embankment.

The L feature was clearly man-made, a large geometric earthen platform raised about ten feet above the floodplain. Enormous trees grew around and on top of it. One of the trees was truly monstrous, with a trunk at least twenty feet in diameter. I took a slew of photographs of it, some with Steve, and Steve took some of me. According to Chris, the platform probably supported a neighborhood of tightly packed houses, raised above the seasonal flood zone, with cultivated fields on the floodplain below. On the way out, struggling down a steep embankment, I tumbled into the river. I was fine but my Nikon camera didn’t survive. Luckily, I was able to recover all the photographs from the card after I returned to civilization. I had my cell phone with its camera flown in the next day.

We hiked downriver about half a mile to a large series of plazas that were prominent in the lidar images. As we journeyed along, the unnamed river revealed itself as one of the loveliest I had ever seen, crystal-clear water running over a cobbled bed, with gravel bars, sunny patches thick with flowers, riffles and pools, and every once in a while a little waterfall. In places, huge trees and other vegetation leaned over the river, turning it into a furtive green tunnel haunted by the sound of water. Every bend disclosed something new—a shimmering rapid, a fern-draped tree trunk, a deep pool flashing with silvery fish, scarlet macaws and snowy egrets rising from the treetops. I regretted not having a camera to record these images.

According to our lidar maps, the river made an extreme hairpin bend about halfway to our goal. Woody decided we could save time with a shortcut straight across. The route plunged us into thick jungle, every inch forward won only with the blade of a machete. We crossed a ridge and came down into a ravine, which we followed back to the river. After an hour, we stopped to rest on a gravel bar opposite the presumed ruins, and we ate lunch.

We talked about how difficult, if not impossible, it would have been to explore the valley and its ruins before the advent of GPS and lidar. Without the lidar maps, we could have walked through the middle of the T1 ruins and not even realized they existed. Only with lidar maps and GPS did we know where to look for features otherwise cloaked in vegetation. The wall of trees on the far side of the river, across a meadow, gave no hint whatsoever of the mounds and plazas we knew were there.

After lunch we waded across the river and pushed into a field of dense, chest-high grass, the idea of snakes never far from our thoughts, as there was no way to see where we were putting our feet. We entered the forest with relief and came upon the first sharp mound, another bus. Parallel mounds extended from it on either side. Chris suggested this site was an extension of the upper city, but Oscar believed it to be a separate settlement entirely. This was not a trivial disagreement. The lidar images showed that there were nineteen major sites strung along the valley, all close together. Were they part of the same polity—the same economic and political unit—a single city? Or were they separate villages, each with its own governance? So far, the evidence suggests that most but not all of them were part of an extended city, but the question remains unresolved.

We explored the site for several hours. It was very much like the first set of plazas, only smaller. We climbed a nearby hill hoping it might be another earthen pyramid, but at the summit Chris and Oscar concluded it was just a naturally conical hill. We found more rows of flat altar-like stones, several leveled plaza areas, and bus-like mounds. On the way out, at the very edge of one of the mounds, we all traipsed, unawares, past a huge fer-de-lance. Lucian (again at the rear) spied it. We had each walked within two feet of it, so close that one of us could easily have stepped on it or brushed it. The snake remained peacefully asleep, its head tucked into its chocolate-colored coils. It was virtually invisible in the forest litter, although it looked to be five or six feet long, almost as big as the one we killed the first night.