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But among the thousands of relics he carted home, two were especially notable: a small worn stone with eleven hieroglyphic characters chiseled into one side and a miniature sculpture of a monkey shielding his face with his front paws, as if blinded by some penetrating light. What were the makers of those objects saying? He didn’t know for certain, but thought that they might have come from the Chorotega, a pre-Columbian group thought to be contemporaries of the Maya. Very little was understood about them.
    So there was an obvious question for Murray: Why didn’t you go back? If you were so close, why not keep trying?
    Saddened, suddenly distant, Murray told Morde that he had always intended to return to the search, but—ahh—life had its way with him. He’d been swept away to other matters. Perhaps Morde would have better luck himself.
    When they landed in New York, Captain Murray introduced Morde to the man who had mostly paid for his expeditions. His name was George Heye, and it happened that he was looking for another explorer.

My Lost-City Guide
    W ON’T YOU BE lonely in the jungle?” my daughter, Sky, asked me one night before she went to sleep.
    “I’ll be fine,” I said.
    I could see her little eyes blinking in the darkness as we lay on her bed. “You’ll be all by yourself,” she said.
    “There are lots of animals,” I pointed out. “They’ll keep me company.”
    “But they might eat you up!” she said, sitting up.
    “That’s true,” I said. “They do have very sharp teeth.”
    That made her laugh. “Maybe the parrots will be your friends,” she said, thinking it through. “They’re pretty. They can sing.”
    “That would be nice,” I agreed, and we imagined that together.
    When buying my plane ticket to Honduras, I had considered going by myself. I thought maybe it would be more meaningful, that I would find myself. That sounded romantic, in theory, but I realized after some time that the notion of going out there alone wasn’t exactly practical. I didn’t speak Spanish very well, and there were no road maps for the rain forest. I wasn’t afraid of losing myself or being lonely; I was scared of walking in circles and never getting anywhere.
    I told Sky that I was hoping I could find a partner to go along with me. “I’ll go,” she volunteered.
    I laughed, said good night to her, and then returned to my computer, where I spent the next hour zooming the Google satellite over the Honduran jungle and firming up plans for my trip.
    I wasn’t lying about the partner. A few days later, the archaeologist Chris Begley offered to be my guide in the jungle. We had been talking on and off for weeks about the White City and Morde’s notes. When I mentioned on the phone that I had a ticket for early July, he said he was going to be there already, leading a river rafting tour. “I can take you through the jungle when I’m done,” he said. “No problem.”
    I got lucky.
    Chris had spent more than a decade of his life trekking through the Honduran wilds, living in tents and hammocks, studying the lore about ancient worlds that had been covered up and left behind. He was a forty-year-old from Tennessee, a “good ol’ boy” with a head on his shoulders—a PhD from the University of Chicago and a Fulbright scholar in El Salvador. The official Web page for him at Transylvania University, in Kentucky, where he teaches anthropology, describes him as the school’s “own Indiana Jones, navigating Central American jungles and searching for ancient cities lost to time.” No one knew Honduras better. Even the local scientists brought him inquiries of their buried and lost history.
    We met for the first time one winter night at a dive bar in Brooklyn. He was in New York now for an event for his fashion designer wife. Chris stood out among the skinny, sleep-deprived Brooklyn hipster kids in black with angular, mussed-up haircuts. In fact, he looked as though he’d just jumped out of the pages of