“Think about it,” Chris Fisher said. “Even though they were suffering from the ravages of those diseases, for them to go and make that offering really underscores the importance” of the place where the cache was found, and the paramount meaning of the cache itself. “These places were ritually charged and remained that way forever.” And so it was until half a millennium later, when our little group stumbled over the cache—a tragic memorial to a once-great culture.

As it turned out, one of the answers to the mystery of the White City had been lying before us the whole time: The various myths of Ciudad Blanca, its abandonment and cursed nature, probably originated in this grim history. Viewed in the light of these pandemics, the White City legends are a fairly straightforward description of a city (or several) swept by disease and abandoned by its people—a place that, furthermore, may have remained a hot zone for some time afterward.

We have few accounts giving the native point of view of these pandemics. One of the most moving is a rare contemporary eyewitness description, called the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, which recalls the two worlds, before and after contact. It was written by an Indian in the Yucatec Mayan language:

There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; no stomach pains; no consumption… At that time people stood erect. But then the teules [foreigners] arrived and everything fell apart. They brought fear, and they came to wither the flowers.

CHAPTER 23

Four members of the expedition have become ill with the same symptoms.

In the weeks after our return from the jungle in February 2015, I and the other members of the expedition settled back into our everyday lives. The power of the experience stayed with us; I felt humbled and awed by the glimpse we’d had of a place completely outside the twenty-first century. We all shared a sense of relief, too, that we had emerged from the jungle unscathed.

A few days after our return from Honduras, Woody sent everyone a broadcast e-mail. It was part of his standard follow-up to any expedition he leads into the jungle, and it included this excerpt:

All, if you find anything at all, feel slightly unwell, develop a slight fever that goes away or any of your multitude of bites appear not to be healing I would advise seeking medical advice as soon as possible, explaining where you have been etc. Better safe than sorry.

At the time, I was completely covered, like everyone else, with bug bites that itched awfully, but that gradually began to fade. A month later, in March, I took a vacation with my wife to France, where we went skiing in the French Alps and visited friends in Paris. While walking around Paris, I began to feel a stiffness in my legs, as if they were sore from excessive exercise. At first I attributed it to the skiing, but over several days the stiffness grew worse, until I could hardly walk without becoming exhausted. When I developed a fever of 103, I went online to the website of the Centers for Disease Control, to check the incubation period for various tropical diseases I might have been exposed to. Thankfully, I was beyond the normal incubation period for chikungunya, Chagas’ disease, and dengue fever. But I was smack in the middle of it for malaria, and my symptoms matched those described at the CDC website. I was furious at myself for prematurely stopping my malaria medication. What the hell had I been thinking? But then I wondered how I could have gotten malaria, a disease transmitted between humans via mosquitoes, when the valley of T1 was uninhabited. Mosquitoes do not usually travel more than a few hundred yards in their entire lifetime, and the nearest humans potentially with malaria were many miles away.

My Parisian friends made some phone calls and found a hospital a short metro ride away with an infectious-disease lab that could test for malaria. I went that evening, they drew blood, and ninety minutes later I had the results: no malaria. The doctor thought I had a common virus, unrelated to the Honduran trip, and assured me it was nothing to worry about. My fever had vanished even while I awaited my test results. Two days later I had fully recovered.

Another month passed. The bug bites on my legs eventually faded away, along with the itching. But one bite did not go away. It was on my upper left arm, midway between elbow and shoulder, and it seemed to be getting redder and bigger. I didn’t worry about it at first because, unlike the other bites, it didn’t itch or bother me.

In April I had an outbreak of sores in my mouth and on my tongue, accompanied by another sudden fever. I went to the local emergency room in Santa Fe. The doctor who examined me thought it was herpes and gave me a prescription for an antiviral medication. I showed him the bug bite on my arm, which was getting uglier. He suggested I treat it with antibiotic ointment. That fever went away quickly and the mouth sores disappeared soon after. The antibiotic cream, however, did nothing for my arm.

Over the next few weeks, the bug bite expanded and developed a vile crust. I discussed it with Steve Elkins, and he said that Dave Yoder and Chris Fisher reported having similar bites that wouldn’t heal. Steve suggested that we all photograph our bites and e-mail the pictures around, to compare. Dave, who lived in Rome, sent me a picture of his bite, which was on the back of his leg. It looked like mine, only worse. Dave was frustrated: He had gone to the ER in Rome three times, and the doctors kept diagnosing it as an infection and giving him antibiotics, which didn’t work. “It doesn’t look like a normal infection,” he told me. “It looks like a miniature volcanic crater. It just won’t heal.”