An hour later, Woody came by to check on my camp. He found my hammock job wanting and made some adjustments. He paused to watch the monkeys. “This is their tree,” he said, sniffing a couple of times. “Smell that? Monkey piss.”
But it was getting late and I didn’t want to go to the trouble of moving my camp. I was beyond the fringes of the group, and concerned that after dark I would need a good trail so as not to lose my way. I walked back to the LZ, clearing a better trail with the machete, losing my way several times, having to backtrack by following the cut plants. I found Juan Carlos in his newly set-up camp. Along with Chris we went down to the bank of the stream and stared across the river at the wall of trees. It mounted up, tier after tier, a barricade of green and brown, dotted with flowers and screeching birds. Beyond that, no more than two hundred yards away, began the edge of the lost city and the possible earthen pyramid we had seen on the lidar images. They were cloaked in rainforest, completely invisible. It was about five o’clock in the evening. A soft yellow sun spilled into the rainforest, breaking into rays and flecks of gold, scattering coins on the forest floor. A few fluffy clouds drifted past. The stream, about three feet deep and fifteen feet wide, was crystal clear, the limpid water burbling over a pebbled bed. All around us, the rainforest chattered with the calls of birds, frogs, and other animals, the sounds mingling together into a pleasing susurrus, punctuated by the call and response of two scarlet macaws, one in a nearby tree, the other distant and invisible. The temperature was seventy degrees, the air clear, fresh, and not humid, perfumed with the sweet smell of flowers and greenery.
“Have you noticed?” said Chris, holding up his hands and smiling. “There aren’t any insects.”
It was true. The fearful clouds of bloodsucking insects we had been warned about were nowhere to be seen.
As I looked around, I thought to myself that I had been right and this was not at all the scary place it had been made out to be; it felt instead like Eden. The sense of danger and unease that I had been carrying as an unconscious weight since Woody’s lecture subsided. The SAS team had, naturally, tried to prepare us for the worst, but they had overdone it.
As dusk fell, Woody invited us into his little bivouac area, where he had a tiny stove going with a pot of boiling water for tea and for hydrating our evening’s freeze-dried dinners. I opened a packet of chicken tetrazzini, poured in boiling water, and then, when it had absorbed the water, spooned it from the bag into my mouth. I washed it down with a cup of tea, and we stood around listening to Woody, Spud, and Sully tell stories of their adventures in the jungle.
Within minutes, night dropped like the shutting of a door—absolute blackness fell upon us. The sounds of the day morphed into something deeper and mysterious, with trills and scratchings and boomings and calls like the cries of the damned. Now the insects began to make their appearance, starting with the mosquitoes.
There was no fire. Woody lit a Coleman lantern that forced back the darkness a little, and we huddled in its pool of light in the great forest while large animals tramped, heard but unseen, in the jungle around us.
Woody said he had spent a large part of his life in jungles all over the world, from Asia and Africa to South and Central America. He said he had never been in one like this, so apparently untouched. As he was setting up camp, before we arrived, a quail came right up to him, pecking in the dirt. And a wild pig also wandered through, unconcerned by the presence of humans. The spider monkeys, he said, were another sign of an uninhabited area, as they normally flee at the first sight of humans, unless they are in a protected zone. He concluded, “I don’t think the animals here have ever seen people before.”
All three of the ex-SAS team were absurdly bundled up against the insects, covered from head to toe with insect-proof clothing, which included a hood and a head net.
“Is that really necessary?” I asked.
“I’ve had dengue fever twice,” Woody said, and launched into a shockingly graphic description of the disease, which had almost killed him the second time. It is called “breakbone fever,” he said, because it is so painful you feel like your bones are breaking.
After his tale was over, I noticed everyone quietly applying more DEET. I did the same. Then, as night deepened, the sand flies came out—in numbers. Much smaller than mosquitoes, they looked like white motes drifting in the light of the lantern, so small that they made no noise, and you normally don’t feel them biting, unlike mosquitoes. The more the night deepened, the more sand flies collected around us.
Eager to record some of the stories being told, I hurried back to my hammock on the other side of camp to fetch my notebook. My new headlamp was defective, so Juan Carlos loaned me a crank flashlight. I made my way back without difficulty. But on my return, everything looked different in the dark; I halted, hemmed in by dense vegetation, realizing I had somehow veered off my rudimentary trail. The nighttime rainforest was black and alive with noise, the air thick and sweet, the leaves like a wall surrounding me. My flashlight’s feeble beam was fading. I took a minute to frantically crank it up to a greater brightness, and then I played it carefully over the ground, looking for my tracks in the forest litter, or any sign of the trail I’d hacked with my machete earlier in the day.
Thinking I saw tracks, I moved in that direction, walking quickly, pushing aside the undergrowth with a growing sense of relief—only to be blocked by a mammoth tree trunk. I had never seen this tree before. Disoriented, I had stumbled deeper into the jungle. I took a moment to catch my breath and get my heart rate down. I could neither hear my companions nor see the light from where they were gathered. I thought of calling out to them, asking Woody to come get me, but decided not to expose myself as an idiot this early in the expedition. After intently examining the ground and cranking the light up several more times, I finally found my real tracks and retraced them, bent over and peering at the forest floor, each time waiting to advance until I located the next scuffmark or depression. A few minutes later, I spied a freshly cut leaf lying on the ground, its stem oozing sap, and then another. I was back on the trail.