Woody called for a return. While we had been waiting for Chris, the others had come up to the ravine. Using his own GPS, Woody identified a more direct route back to camp, hiking down the ravine to the floodplain, where we encountered another barrier of heliconia, which Woody worked his way through, expertly wielding his machete, scattering flowers left and right. We had to cross three parallel channels of sucking mud, once again sinking to our thighs. When we reached the stream, coated with mud, we waded in, rinsing the mud off. While the others went back to camp, I stripped, wrung out my clothes and piled them on the pebble beach, and then I lay back in the cool water and floated on my back, letting the river carry me a ways downstream, watching the treetops lazily move past.
Back in camp, I found Steve on a cot outside his tent, which he had set up next to my camp on the other side of the spider-monkey tree. He was lying on his back, eating peanuts, and gazing straight up with binoculars at the troop of spider monkeys. They in turn were lined up on a limb fifty feet above, staring down at him and eating leaves. It was a funny sight, two curious primate species observing each other with fascination.
Steve was absolutely beaming over the discovery of the altar stones and full of self-reproach for not having gone with us. He asked questions about how tough the hike was, and I assured him that although it was steep and slippery, and the mudholes were appalling, it was only a few hundred yards and I was pretty sure he could do it if he took it slow.
“Screw the leg,” he said. “I’m going up there tomorrow, one way or another.”
That night, we sat around eating freeze-dried beans and rice to the light of a Coleman lantern. I avoided tea, although I did accept a “tot” of whisky from Woody, rationed out in a bottle cap.
Chris was elated. “It’s just as I thought,” he said. “All this terrain, everything you see here, has been entirely modified by human hands.” In one short reconnaissance, he had confirmed the accuracy of the lidar survey, verifying on the ground every feature seen in the images—along with a great deal more. The “ground truthing” had begun.
A rising wind breathed through the treetops. “That means rain,” said Woody. “In ten minutes.” Right on schedule the downpour thundered into the treetops. It took a good two or three minutes for the water to work its way down through the canopy and reach us on the ground—and then streams of water came cascading everywhere.
CHAPTER 16
I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down.
After night fell, I crawled in my tent, glad to be on solid ground and out of the dreaded hammock. I read my Dover edition of John Lloyd Stephens by flashlight as the rain drummed down. Despite the rain, snakes, mud, and insects, I felt exhilarated, not just by the lost city, but by the feral perfection of the valley. I had been in many wilderness areas, but never in a place as purely untrammeled as this. The hostility of the environment only added to the feeling of being the first to explore and discover an unknown place.
I awoke at five to the roar of howler monkeys rising above the pounding of rain. It was a morning so dark it didn’t seem as if daytime had arrived at all. The forest was wrapped in a twilight gloom, cloaked in mist. Chris was up and as usual impatient to the point of zeal to continue his work. The camp kitchen and gathering area had now been partly erected. We assembled under blue tarps strung up over several plastic folding tables. One camp stove was boiling water and the other heating a pot of coffee, now that the supply of coffee had finally arrived. Outside, the rain was turning the jungle floor into greasy mud that seemed to deepen with every passing hour. The water collected in the hollows of the tarp, which periodically had to be pushed up with poles to dump the puddles of water off the edges.
At breakfast, several people reported having heard a jaguar prowling about the edges of the camp in the dead of night, making a rumbling, purring noise. Woody assured us that jaguars almost never attack humans, although I wondered about that, given Bruce Heinicke’s story. Others were concerned that the large animals heard stumbling about might blunder into a tent, but Woody dismissed that as unlikely, explaining that the animals that came out at night could see quite well in the dark.
“There are four more plazas I want to look at,” Chris said, gulping his coffee. “Upriver is a weird L-shaped mound. I want to see that. And about a kilometer downriver is another set of plazas I want to see. There’s a lot to do—let’s get going.”
I had donned my raincoat, but the rain was so heavy that water began to trickle in anyway, and wearing it made me sticky and hot. I noticed none of Woody’s team were wearing rain gear; they were going about their business completely and cheerfully soaked. “Take it off,” Woody said to me. “Best to get it over with all at once. Trust me: Once you’re thoroughly wet, you’ll be more comfortable.”
As soon as I did, I was quickly drenched—and discovered Woody was right.
After breakfast, with the rain still falling, the full expedition team assembled on the riverbank, and we set out for our second exploration of the site. Despite his injured leg, Steve Elkins joined the group, carrying a blue hiking pole. Also included were Alicia González and Anna Cohen. We waded the river and went along the trail cut the previous day. When we reached the second mudhole, Alicia struggled to walk through the muck, got stuck, and—as we watched, aghast—began to sink.
“I can’t move,” she said with remarkable calmness, even as she was sinking. “I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down. Really, folks, I’m going down.” The mud was already at her waist, and the more she struggled, the more it gurgled up around her. It was like something straight out of a B horror film. Woody and Sully jumped in and seized her arms and slowly worked her out. Once she was safe on hard ground, the mud draining off of her, it became clear what had happened: The mud had filled up her snake gaiters as she tried to wade through, creating an instant pair of cement overshoes, which were inexorably dragging her under with every movement she made. “For a moment there,” she said afterward, “I thought I was going to be having tea with the snakes.”
Elkins, for his part, made it through the mudhole with his hiking pole as a balance and managed to climb up the slippery embankment, using roots and small tree trunks as handholds.
“We’ll get fixed ropes in here tomorrow,” said Sully.
As we skirted the base of the pyramid, happy shouts and singing echoed from across the river. Sully called Spud in camp on his walkie-talkie and learned that the Honduran Special Forces soldiers, sent to guard the expedition team, had just arrived in good spirits after a hike upstream from the river junction. They had brought nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their backs; they intended to establish camp behind ours and live off the forest, building their shelters from poles and leaves, hunting their food and drinking from the river.