We finished mapping T1 with enough fuel left over to fly a few lines over T2, twenty miles distant. The route took us over the Patuca River, Heinicke’s “most dangerous place on the planet,” a brown snake of water winding through the jungle. T2 was magnificent and dramatic, a deep, hidden valley shut in by sheer, thousand-foot limestone cliffs, draped with vines and riddled with caves. But recent deforestation—only weeks old—had reached the mouth of the T2 valley. As we flew over, I could see the freshly cut trees lying on the ground to dry out so they could be burned, leaving a hideous brown scar.
At the end of the day, we flew to La Ceiba, on the mainland, to refuel. Chuck had pushed the envelope and we landed with less than twenty gallons of aviation fuel remaining, about forty minutes of flight. But the airport had no fuel and nobody could locate the tanker bringing the resupply. Airport officials feared the tanker had been hijacked by drug smugglers. Juan Carlos called Elkins in Roatán. Elkins put Bruce Heinicke on the problem. After calling around, Bruce learned the truck was still en route, delayed by a blowout.
We couldn’t leave the Cessna unguarded, especially if the fuel didn’t arrive and the plane had to stay overnight in La Ceiba. Juan Carlos and Chuck debated sleeping in the plane, but that wasn’t ideal, since they were unarmed. They finally decided that, if fuel didn’t arrive, they would go to the US Air Force base in La Ceiba and ask the soldiers to stand guard for the night. Meanwhile, Michael Sartori was desperate to get the data and finish mapping T1, so it was agreed I’d head back to the island on my own. Fernández gave me the two hard drives with the data, and I went to the airport desk to see if I could get a commercial flight from La Ceiba to Roatán. There was a flight to Roatán that afternoon but it was already full. For $37 I was able to hitch a ride in the copilot’s seat. The plane looked even less reliable than the Cessna, and as I boarded, Juan Carlos joked about what a pity it would be to lose all that precious data in a plane crash after their hard work collecting it.
I landed in Roatán at sunset and gave the hard drives to Sartori, who snatched them up and disappeared into his bungalow, emerging only once to chow down a couple of lobster tails at dinner. He now had all the data he needed to map T1. Late that night Juan Carlos and Chuck Gross finally landed back in Roatán, exhausted but relieved. The fuel truck had arrived at the last minute.
Sartori had hours of work ahead of him. He had to merge data from several sources: the lidar machine, the GPS ground stations, the GPS data from the aircraft itself, and the data from the IMU. Together, all this would create the point cloud, forming a three-dimensional picture of the rainforest and the underlying terrain. First, he had to wait for Mango to retrieve the USB stick from the GPS unit in Culmi and bring it to Catacamas to upload to the server in Houston; Sartori then had to download the data from Houston. The lights in Sartori’s bungalow were still burning at midnight when I went to bed. Ramesh Shrestha, back at NCALM in Houston, remained awake, pressing him for updates.
This was the moment of truth: The images would show what was in the valley—if anything. It was almost one in the morning when Sartori finished creating the raw images of T1; Shrestha had finally gone to bed and the Internet connection on Roatán was down. Exhausted, Sartori went to bed without even looking at the images he had just created.
The next day was Saturday, May 5. Rising early, Sartori uploaded the raw images to a server in Houston, again without examining them. Immediately on receiving them, Shrestha forwarded them to NCALM’s chief scientist, William Carter, who was at his vacation home in West Virginia. Shrestha intended to review them soon, but Carter beat him to it.
At 8:30 a.m. on that quiet Saturday morning, the terrain images of T1 arrived in Carter’s in-box just as he was about to leave the house to run errands. He needed to buy a refrigerator. He hesitated and then told his wife that he wanted to have a quick look. He downloaded the data and displayed the maps on his computer screen. He was thunderstruck. “I don’t think it took me more than five minutes to see something that looked like a pyramid,” he told me later. “I looked across the river at a plaza area with what looked like buildings—clearly man-made objects. As I looked at that river valley, I saw more, as well as alterations to the terrain. It was kind of surprising how easy it was to find them.” He e-mailed the coordinates to Sartori and Shrestha.
Sartori pulled up the images and scanned them. In his excitement Carter had mistyped the coordinates, but it took Sartori only a moment to find the cluster of features on his own. He said, “My skepticism wasn’t easily broken,” but this was clear enough to convince the most resolute doubter. Sartori was chagrined. “I was mad at myself for not seeing it first, since I was the guy producing the images!” He rushed out the door to report it to Steve Elkins, but then had second thoughts. Was it real? Maybe it was just his imagination. “I was in and out the door about six different times,” Sartori said.
I was walking back from breakfast with Steve and some others when Sartori appeared along the quay, running madly in his flip-flops, waving his arms and shouting: “There’s something in the valley!” We were startled by this sudden behavioral change, the sober-minded skeptic transformed into a raving Christopher Lloyd.
When we asked what it was, he said, “I can’t describe it. I won’t describe it. You just have to see it yourself.”
There was pandemonium. Steve started to run, and then remembered he was a filmmaker, so he began shouting for his film crew to get their gear together and record the moment—cinema verité. With the cameras rolling, everyone crowded into Sartori’s room to look at the images on his laptop. The maps were in gray scale and a first iteration, but they were clear enough. In the valley of T1, above the confluence of the two streams, we could see rectangular features and long, pyramid-like mounds arranged in squares, which covered an area of hundreds of acres. Also visible, but impossible to interpret, were the two objects that looked like square pillars we had seen from the plane. As we examined the images, Sartori’s in-box was pinging continuously with e-mails from Carter and Shrestha, who were poring over the same maps, shooting off an e-mail with coordinates every time they found another feature.
I was stunned. It sure as hell looked like a very large set of ruins, perhaps even a city. I had thought we would be fortunate to find any kind of site at all; I had not expected this. Was it possible that an entire lost city could still be found in the twenty-first century?
I could see Sartori’s spiral-bound notebook lying open next to the laptop. In keeping with the methodical scientist he was, he had been jotting daily notes on his work. But underneath the entry for May 5, he had written two words only:
HOLY SHIT!
“When I saw those rectangles and squares,” Steve told me later, “my first feeling was one of vindication.” Benenson, who had been feverishly capturing the unfolding discovery on video, was happily stunned that the million-dollar spin of the roulette wheel had landed on his number. “I’m witnessing this,” he said, “but I’m not processing this very well. I have chills.”