Beyond the gap, the footing downstream got more treacherous, with waist-deep currents, hidden rocks, sunken limbs, and potholes. In places gigantic moss-covered tree trunks had fallen across the river, spanning the gap. Where the river got too swift, we scrambled up on the steep embankment. A faint animal path ran along the river, and the soldiers identified tapir dung and jaguar scat. The character of the river, now swiftly flowing between cliffs and overhung with trees, had become darker, mysterious, and unsettling. There were many boulders and ledges sticking out of the water, but we found no petroglyphs; the soldiers suspected the water had risen and submerged the rock carvings. We turned back when the river finally became too deep and the ravine walls too steep to continue. At several points I feared one of us might be swept away.

Indeed, once we’d returned to the gap, Bill was nearly carried off by the current while crossing a stretch of deep water. Steve rescued him by sticking out his foot, which Bill seized as a handhold. When I arrived, Steve ruefully handed me his iPhone, which was very hot. He had dropped it in the water and hadn’t completely clicked shut the waterproof flap over the charger port. As a result it had fried, and he’d lost all the photographs he had taken of the expedition he had spent twenty years bringing to fruition. (He would spend over a year working with Apple to recover the photos, to no avail; they were gone forever.)

We hiked back to the Honduran LZ, where the AStar picked us up and flew us back to camp. When we arrived, Woody told us that more bad weather was expected. Not wanting to risk anyone getting stranded, he had decided to begin extracting the team from the jungle a day early. He said he had scheduled me for a flight in one hour sharp; I should break down my camp, pack up, and be waiting with my gear at the LZ at that time. I was surprised and disappointed, but he said he’d worked out the evacuation on paper and this was the way it had to be. Even Steve had to come out that day. He clapped me on the shoulder: “Sorry, mate.”

The treetops were filling with golden light as the helicopter came in. It upset me that I had to leave when the weather had finally cleared, but I took a certain schadenfreude in the fact that torrential rains might soon be returning to torment those lucky enough to stay. I threw my pack in the basket, boarded, buckled in, and put on my headset; we were airborne in sixty seconds. As the chopper banked out of the LZ, sunlight caught the riffling stream, turning it for an instant into a shining scimitar as we accelerated upward, clearing the treetops, heading for the notch.

As we thundered through the gap, a feeling of melancholy settled over me at leaving the valley. It was no longer a terra incognita. T1 had finally joined the rest of the world in having been discovered, explored, mapped, measured, trod upon, and photographed—a forgotten place no more. Thrilled as I was to have been a member of this first lucky few, I had the sense that our exploration had diminished it, stripping it of its secrets. Soon, the clear-cut mountainsides came into view, along with ubiquitous plumes of smoke, farmsteads with glittering tin roofs, trails, roads, and pastures dotted with cattle. We had returned to “civilization.”

CHAPTER 19

These are our ancestral fathers.

We stepped out of the helicopter into dry heat shimmering off the tarmac. It was a blessed relief from the sticky jungle. The soldiers guarding the airstrip were surprised to see us wet and coated with mud because, they said, it hadn’t rained at all in Catacamas, seventy air miles away. Before allowing us in the van, they politely asked us to hose ourselves off. I picked and scraped the mud from my boots with a stick; even with the hose it took a good five minutes to get the sticky clay off. Back at the hotel I called my wife, took a shower, and donned a fresh outfit. I bundled my stinking clothes in a sack and dropped it off for the hotel laundry, feeling sorry for whoever was tasked with washing them. I lay back on the bed, hands behind my head, my glumness at having to leave T1 tempered by the glorious sensation of being dry for the first time in eight days, even if covered with bug bites.

Eventually I joined Steve by the pool, where we both sank into plastic chairs and ordered frosty bottles of Port Royal. He looked wrung out. “It’s a miracle we all got out of there safely,” he said, dabbing his brow with a napkin. “And nobody was bitten by a snake. But, my God, what an effort! I started with one simple objective: to prove or disprove the legend of Ciudad Blanca. That was the start, but it led to so much more. Maybe that’s what the monkey god wanted, to draw us in.”

“What do you think? Did you prove it?”

“Well, what we proved is that there was a large population in Mosquitia with a sophisticated culture that compares to anything in Central America. If we can work with Honduras to preserve this place, I’ll feel I’ve really accomplished something. It’s a work in progress. This’ll probably go on for the rest of my life.”

That evening, Virgilio joined us at dinner. I asked him about the clear-cutting that checkerboarded the jungle we had flown over. He was shocked and concerned by what he’d seen. He said we had found the site in the nick of time, before deforestation and looting reached it. He had discussed the issue with the president, who was determined to halt and even roll back the illegal deforestation. He spread his hands. “The Honduran government is committed to protecting this area, but it doesn’t have the money. We urgently need international support.”

That support would soon be coming. A year later, Conservation International would investigate the valley as a potential preservation project. The organization sent Trond Larsen, a biologist and director of CI’s Rapid Assessment Program, into T1 to investigate how biologically important the valley was and whether it was worthy of special protection. CI spearheads vital conservation efforts across the globe, working with governments and others to save areas of high ecological importance. It is one of the most effective conservation organizations in the world today, having helped protect 2.8 million square miles of inland, coastal, and marine areas across seventy-eight countries.