At the appointed time, we gathered at the stream, stinking of DEET. There were eight of us in the group: myself, Woody, Chris Fisher with a machete in one hand and GPS in the other; Oscar Neil; Juan Carlos, also carrying a fearsome machete; Lucian Read, with a video camera; and Mark Adams, with a forty-pound field audio kit consisting of a wireless audio mic system, portable audio mixer/recorder, and a six-foot boom mic with windshield. I couldn’t believe Mark was going to hump all that through the jungle. Dave Yoder, burdened with heavy camera equipment, followed in watchful silence, ceaselessly shooting. Steve Elkins could not come; the nerve damage, caused by a deteriorating disk in his spine, gave him a condition known as drop foot, in which he was unable to control the position of his foot while walking. He felt the jungle was too thick and the hills too steep to take the risk of injury so early in the expedition. He did not want to be laid up, or worse, have to be evacuated. It was a bitter pill to swallow. “If you guys find anything,” he said, waving a two-way radio, “call me.”
Woody checked our packs to make sure we had all our emergency supplies, and we set off, wading across the stream. On the far side we encountered a thicket of heliconia that formed a virtually solid wall, but the fleshy stems were easily felled with the swipe of a machete. Woody carved and slashed his way through, one step at a time, the leaves and flowers showering down left and right. The cut vegetation lay so thickly on the ground that there was no possibility of seeing where we were putting our feet. Still shaken by my encounter with the fer-de-lance, I couldn’t help but think of all the snakes that must be hiding in that undergrowth. We crossed two muddy channels, sinking up to our thighs, struggling through the morass with sucking sounds.
The embankment beyond the floodplain was precipitous: close to forty degrees. We climbed hand and foot, grasping roots and vines and branches, pulling ourselves up, expecting at any moment to come face-to-face with a fer-de-lance. We could see little beyond a dozen feet in any direction. The embankment abruptly flattened out, and we arrived at a long ditch and mound that Chris and Oscar examined and felt were man-made. They appeared to mark the edge of the city.
And then we came to the base of the presumed earthen pyramid. The only indication that this was artificial was that the ground rose sharply in an unnatural change of slope. Until Chris and Oscar pointed it out to me, however, I would never have recognized it. We could see nothing but leaves. Here we were, at the edge of a lost city, and we had no sense of the layout or distribution of the mounds and plazas so crisply visible on the lidar maps. The jungle cloaked all.
We labored up the side of the suspected pyramid and reached the top. There, in front of us, were some odd depressions and linear features that Chris believed might be the remains of a structure, perhaps a small temple. Oscar knelt and, with a hand tool, dug a sondaje or test pit into the soil. He said he saw evidence of deliberate construction. I peered at the layers of earth he had exposed just below the surface, but my untrained eye could make out nothing.
Even at the top of the pyramid, the highest point of the lost city, we were immersed in a disorder of leaves, vines, flowers, and tree trunks. Chris held his GPS over his head, but he had trouble locating satellites because of the trees. I took many pictures with my Nikon, but they all ended up showing the same thing: leaves, leaves, and more leaves. Even Dave struggled to get photographs of something other than an endless green ocean of vegetation.
We descended the side of the pyramid into the first plaza of the city. The lidar images indicated that the plaza was surrounded on three sides by geometric mounds and terraces. As Fisher tried once again to get a GPS reading with his Trimble, in order to start ground-mapping, Oscar gave a shout. He knelt, brushing dirt and vines off the corner of a large stone, almost completely invisible in the riot of plants. The stone had a shaped surface. After pulling back and cutting away some of the vegetation, we began to uncover more such stones—a long row of them, all flat, resting on tripods of round, white-quartz boulders. They looked like altars. “We have to clean these stones,” Chris said, “to see if any have carvings, and we need to locate them on the GPS.” He pulled out his walkie-talkie and called Elkins, back in camp, to report the news.
They had an excited conversation that we all could hear through the walkie-talkie speaker. Elkins was ecstatic. “This proves,” he told Chris, “that they did use cut stone for building. It means this was an important site.”
The GPS finally located enough satellites for Fisher to begin establishing way points and mapping the city. He charged through the jungle, slashing his way, marking way points, keen and impatient to make the most of our limited time before we had to return to camp. We could hardly keep up. Beyond the altar stones, we reached the central plaza of the city, which had clearly been at one time a large public space. It was as flat as a soccer pitch and more open than elsewhere.
“These were probably once public buildings,” said Fisher, indicating the long mounds surrounding the plaza. “Perhaps reserved for an elite class or royalty. All this would have been open and very impressive. I imagine this area was where major ceremonies took place.”
Standing in the plaza, I finally began to have a sense of the size and scale of the city, if only barely. Chris cut his way across it, saying that there were three more plazas and a possible ball court farther on, along with a peculiar mound we had called “the bus” because it looked like one in the lidar image. These bus-shaped mounds were prominent in both T1 and T3, well defined, each a hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifteen feet tall. I had also seen several at the site of Las Crucitas. They were a characteristic structure unique to this culture.
While the rest of the team stayed behind, clearing the vegetation from the stones, Woody and I followed Fisher northward, trying to keep him in sight. We came to more mounds and a steep ravine cutting through them. Glancing into the cut, I could see where the erosion had exposed what looked like stone paving forming an ancient surface. Fisher hurried on past the ravine, where the jungle became incredibly dense. I did not want to follow him into that frightful tangle, and neither did Woody. He called to Chris not to go any farther, that it was time to go back, but he didn’t seem to hear us. Moments later, we saw his white cowboy hat vanish into the forest. The rhythmic swiping of his machete died away into silence. “Bloody hell,” Woody muttered, and again called for him to come back. Silence. He called again. Minutes passed. While Woody was not one to express emotion, I could see a look of irritation and concern gathering on his face. Just when we were thinking Chris was gone, we heard his faint voice drifting through the trees and he emerged back out of the hole he’d cut in the vegetation.
“We were concerned you were lost,” said Woody in a clipped voice.
“Not with this,” he said, waving his GPS.