Hundreds of years before Columbus and other Europeans discovered America, large civilizations flourished and died here. The Aztecs ruled in what is now Mexico. Before them, the Maya culture dominated southern Mexico with their own language, architecture and writing. And somewhere in that time period, another culture lived in eastern Honduras and countries to the south of it, with a language more similar to that of ancient Colombia. Rumors persisted of cities in the Honduran jungle, particularly one built of white stone. But few if any at all could claim to have seen it. That jungle — larger than the whole state of South Carolina—32 thousand square miles of it, with its mountains, dangerous animals, 10 feet of annual rain-fall and impenetrable forests, hid it well, even from aerial photography.

That is, until the coming of a specialized form of radar in the 1990’s, Lidar which can detect shapes even several feet underground. Aerial lidar located four target areas, deep in the jungle mountains, that suggested human construction.

On Feb. 15, 2015, writer Douglas Preston, working for National Geographic Magazine, joined an exploration team assembling in Catacamas, Honduras to helicopter into “Target 1.” The meeting, led by a British ex-soldier and expert in jungle survival, emphasized the dangers facing them. A drug cartel controlled the town they were now in; no one was to step outside the hotel without armed military escort. The jungle they would enter had thick thorny vegetation, hordes of fire ants, extremely poisonous snakes whose fangs could pierce thick leather boots. Various insects could transmit a host of diseases, including dengue fever, and leishmaniasis (nick-named “white leprosy” that can sometimes change one’s face into a gigantic ulcer).

“I listened,” said author Preston. “I really did.”

Cortés, conqueror of the Aztec realm in Mexico, wrote in 1526 of “trustworthy reports” of a far richer realm eight or ten days march from Trujillo Bay [on the north coast of Honduras.] In 1839 an American explorer and a British artist visited Copán, a small village in southwestern Honduras, where they saw a wall of cut stone and a square stone column bearing the figure of a richly dressed man on one side, and strange hieroglyphic writing — one of the first discoveries of the Mayan civilization. And gradually, explorers and archeologists became aware of a third culture somewhere in the unexplored jungles of Mosquitia, in northeastern Honduras — the forbidding White City — where all visitors died. Finding this city was the 2015 expedition’s goal. This book never pinpoints the location, to prevent looters. Readers only learn it is about two hours from Catacamas by military helicopter.

The newly elected president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, had several reasons for encouraging such an expedition. Drug cartels and corruption had made Honduras the murder capital of the world; the going price was 25 U.S. dollars. The economy was a disaster; and Hernandez hoped that a major archaeologic discovery would bring the tourists and the investors back.

The team included, besides the three jungle survival experts (each the British counterpart of black beret veterans), photographers, archeologists, anthropologists, a writer (author Preston), pilots, technicians, and Honduran soldiers, some of whom were of Mosquitian descent. Two landing zones were tentatively identified, one for the smaller helicopter close to the area of interest, and one for the larger military heli, several kilometers downstream, until a larger area could be cleared. The first eight to land were on their own that first night. Preston describes his hammock site, crawling with cockroaches, sand flies, and other assorted critters. Woody, the chief survivalist came to inspect. “You may want to choose another tree. The monkeys up there regard this one as their own. You’ll get a lot of monkey piss under this one.”

By the third day, they were able to explore several oddly shaped mounds across the small river. The archeologists soon found an area where a number of artifacts were buried, and marked out “no-step zones” until further exploration. Some were well-carved stone figures with seemingly half-human half-monkey features. Everything was obscured by the overgrowth of probably five hundred years or more. All seem to have been abandoned within a short period centuries ago — Why?

In a couple of weeks, President Hernandez and other officials visited the site, and two large carved artifacts were selected to put in the national museum. Heavy rain finally made them stop work until the next dry season. Now, three years later as you read this, Target Area 3 is also under exploration and appears to be a city three times the size of T-1. How many more are still hidden?

We now know of at least four highly developed nations that existed before the arrival of Columbus (and, as we Minnesota Scandinavians like to point out, even before Leif Eriksson.) How long will our present civilization survive in the atomic age?

Some speculate that disease conquered the Mayans and the Mosquitia, and perhaps the Incas in Peru as well. Several of the 2015 expedition members now have the beginning signs of leishmaniasis and are under treatment. This one-celled parasite can thrive in cats, dogs, and many other mammals as well as humans, and the sandfly vector that spreads it is gradually expanding its territory in southern USA…

Douglas Preston has written a well-researched and readable true story that is still going on.