The night clamor of the jungle was so loud I had to wear earplugs. Chris, on the other hand, confessed to me later that he recorded the night jungle on his iPhone and played it to himself back in Colorado to help calm him down when he was stressed or upset.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I got up to pee. I unzipped the hammock and peered out, probing the ground all around with my flashlight, looking for snakes. A cold and clammy mist had descended, and the forest was dripping with condensation. There were no snakes, but the entire forest floor was carpeted with glistening cockroaches—thousands of them rustling in frantic activity, looking like a greasy, jittering flow—along with dozens of motionless black spiders whose multiple eyes gleamed like pinpoints of green. I peed no more than two feet from the hammock and hastily climbed back in. But even in that brief moment it proved impossible to keep the sand flies from pouring into the hammock’s interior space. I spent a good fifteen minutes lying on my back, shining my light around, squishing sand flies as they drifted about or landed on the mosquito netting above me. After I had to get out and pee a second time, I damned the British habit of drinking tea before bedtime and swore I would not do so again.
What little sleep I did get ended for good at around five o’clock in the morning, at first light, when I was awoken by a roaring of howler monkeys, which reverberated through the forest like Godzilla on the march. When I emerged from the hammock, the forest was enveloped in fog, the treetops fading into the mist, water dripping everywhere. For a subtropical jungle it was surprisingly chilly. We ate a breakfast of freeze-dried scrambled eggs and weak tea (coffee had not arrived yet). Chris, who seemed to be prepared for everything, had brought caffeine pills for just such a contingency and popped a few. (I declined his offer to share.) The AStar couldn’t fly in until the fog lifted, which it finally did around midmorning. The first flight brought in Steve Elkins and two members of the film crew, Mark Adams and Josh Feezer.
I greeted Steve after the chopper took off. He was walking with a hiking pole and limping, due to chronic nerve damage in his foot.
“Nice,” he said, looking around. “Welcome to the Mosquitia Four Seasons.”
Alicia González, the expedition’s anthropologist, arrived in the second flight, along with Anna Cohen, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Washington, who was Chris Fisher’s field associate. I soon became friendly with Alicia, who was an amazing font of knowledge. With a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, Alicia was a small, cheerful, and imperturbable woman of sixty, formerly a senior curator in the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian. Of Mexican, Jewish, and Native American ancestry, she was an authority on Mesoamerican trade routes and the indigenous people of Honduras.
The chopper also brought in Oscar Neil, chief of archaeology for the Instituto Hondure?o de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). Neil was an authority on the ancient cultures of Mosquitia. We unloaded the chopper with the usual haste, throwing everything into a heap to be sorted and carried into camp later. The morning was spent moving supplies and equipment and organizing our campsites. I grabbed a tent and set it up next to my hammock, grateful to be on solid ground. The tent’s sewn-in waterproof ground cover would keep out the snakes, spiders, and cockroaches. I enlarged my campsite area with a machete, strung a clothesline, and claimed a folding chair from one of the loads, which I set up under my hammock. There, protected under the rainfly of the hammock, I could sit and write in my notebook. And I could store my clothes, books, camera, and journals in the hammock itself, which made a handy waterproof storage compartment.
As the day wore on, Chris Fisher became increasingly impatient, eager to begin our extraordinary task of entering the lost city. I found him down on the riverbank, in his straw cowboy hat, pacing back and forth with a Trimble GPS in his hand. Woody had forbidden anyone to leave camp without an escort, due to the danger of snakes and getting lost. “This is ridiculous,” Fisher said. “The site is just right there—two hundred yards away!” He showed me the LED screen on the Trimble, which displayed the lidar map and our position on it. I could see that the city was, indeed, right on the other side of the river, completely hidden in the screen of trees. “If Woody doesn’t free up someone to take us over there, I’m going by myself—screw the snakes.” Juan Carlos joined us at the streambank, hands on his hips, staring at the wall of trees on the far side. He, too, was eager to venture into the ruins. “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. It was true: We had only ten potential days to explore the valley, our time being strictly limited by the rental period of the AStar helicopter from Corporate Helicopters in San Diego. Its pilot, Myles Elsing, had to fly it back to the States—a four-day journey—for another assignment.
“Someone’s got to talk to Woody,” said Fisher. “This is why we’re here”—he gestured across the river at the hidden city—“not boiling water for frigging tea.”
Finally, about three thirty in the afternoon, Woody agreed to lead a reconnaissance into the ancient city. He told us to be at the LZ in a half hour, with our packs fully loaded with the emergency overnight kit. We would have one hour in the ruins—no more.