After the meeting, Sully touched my arm and spoke to me, lowering his voice: “I know soldiers. I was a soldier. I can tell you that the danger isn’t from some narcotraffickers or outside looters—it’s from right there.” He nodded to the soldiers’ camp in the dark behind us. “They’re already planning how to do it. Up there, they were marking every site with GPS. Downriver they’re enlarging their LZ. The military isn’t going to let looters in here because they are the looters. After you leave, it will be gone in a week. I’ve seen this kind of corruption all over the world—believe me, that’s what’s going to happen.”

He said this to me as an aside, and while I worried he might be right, the decision had been made: The cache would be left untouched. Sully kept his opinion private, and did not share it with Chris and Oscar.

By now, the trails in the campsite had been churned into soupy mud so deep it slopped up to our ankles. I stripped outside my tent, hung up my clothes, and crawled inside. There I picked off the chiggers and stabbed them on my book and squashed the sand flies that had gotten inside. I lay in the dark, miserably wet, listening to the usual nighttime beasts tromping around my tent and thinking that maybe the SAS guys hadn’t exaggerated the challenges of this place after all.

CHAPTER 18

This was a forgotten place—but it ain’t forgotten anymore!

As usual, it poured all night, sometimes with deafening ferocity, and it was still raining when we awoke to the howler-monkey alarm clock.

As I crawled out of my tent and drew on my sodden clothes, Steve next door was looking up at the spider monkeys, who seemed as miserable as we were. He wondered how they could stand the rain, day in and day out. This was supposed to be the dry season in Honduras, but in this remote area a crazy sort of microclimate seemed to prevail.

At breakfast, the discussion turned to T3. The bad weather would prevent the air reconnaissance of T3 planned for that day. The other city lay about twenty miles to the north, and Chris was passionately eager to see a glimpse of it, at least from the air, if only the weather would break.

We waited for a pause in the rain. When it came, the AStar showed up with two more expedition members: Mark Plotkin, the noted ethnobotanist, president of the Amazon Conservation Team, and author of the bestselling book Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice; and his colleague Prof. Luis Poveda, an ethnobotanist from the National University of Costa Rica. Their hope was to record and study the botany of the T1 valley, especially in relation to its ancient inhabitants; they planned to inventory any legacy plants that might remain from pre-Columbian times, as well as identify biologically useful trees and medicinal plants. Almost immediately after the helicopter left, the rains came again. We packed up for another hike into the ruins. This time Juan Carlos carried a huge plastic suitcase strapped to his back. Inside was a $120,000 terrestrial lidar unit, a machine on a tripod, with which he intended to scan the sculpture cache.

While ascending the fixed ropes up the slippery trail, Prof. Poveda, who was in his early seventies, fell and rolled down the hill, pulling a muscle in his leg. He had to be carried back to camp and later evacuated by helicopter. At the cache it was pouring so hard that Juan Carlos had to wait an hour before he dared remove the lidar machine from its box. He set it up on the bottom slope of the pyramid just above the cluster of sculptures. Kneeling in the mud, with a tarp draped over his head, he fiddled with his MacBook Pro, jacked into the lidar unit as a controller. It seemed doubtful his equipment would survive the ordeal. Finally, hours later, the rain let up enough for him to uncover the machine and do an eleven-minute scan of the site. His intention was to do six scans, at different angles, to complete a three-dimensional picture, but a fresh downpour caused a delay and finally shut him down for the day. He left the equipment up there, well tarped, to complete the scans the next day. It poured again all night, and I awoke to the now familiar hammering of rain on the tent fly. My entire tent was now sunken in mud, and water was coming in and starting to pool.

At breakfast, Oscar passed around his cell phone with a picture he had taken that morning from his hammock. Just as he was putting his foot out to step onto the ground, he said, “I had a funny feeling.” He withdrew his bare foot and poked his head out of the hammock, peering at the ground below. Directly underneath him, crawling along at a leisurely pace, was a fer-de-lance as long as his hammock. When it passed by, he climbed down and got dressed.

Sully glanced at the picture. “Lovely way to start the day, mate,” he said, passing it along.

I spent the morning under the kitchen tarp, writing in my notebook, thinking how fast the days had gone by. We only had a few more before we would have to break down the camp, pack up, and fly everything out. I felt a sense almost of panic that we had hardly scratched the surface. Exploring the city was clearly an undertaking that would take years.

Meanwhile, the camp had turned into a quagmire, the mud six inches deep or more, except where there were ponds of water. The bamboo poles laid down as corrugation over the worst spots sank out of sight as soon as they were trod upon, and disappeared into the muck. Spud would cut more to lay on top, and they, too, would be swallowed.

That afternoon, the weather broke long enough for a quick reconnaissance of T3. Steve joined the flight, along with Dave and Chris. I wanted to go but there wasn’t room. The AStar took off in the early afternoon and returned a few hours later.