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National Geographic . He wore sand-colored fast-drying pants with multiple pockets and a white safari shirt. He is about six foot two, with muscular arms and brown hair turning gray and trimmed military-style. His metal-framed glasses looked hard to break.
    He apologized for being late, explaining that he had mistakenly climbed on an express subway that had sent him zooming right past his stop and leaving him three neighborhoods and thirty-three blocks away from the bar. But instead of taking the local train back a few stations, which is what I would have done, he’d gotten out and walked. Chris, I learned, is mostly everything I’m not: he loves camping, doesn’t mind being wet, and couldn’t care less about bugs. As he sipped a Bud Light, he said, “When I’m down there, it’s like two different movies are going on. The one there, with me out in the jungle, and the one at home, with my wife and kids doing their thing. In this one”—he pointed at us in the dim bar light, as if it were the first act of a Hollywood show—“you never know how it’s going to end.”
    When I asked why he had first gone to Honduras, he said that he had actually started his fieldwork in Bolivia. But the highlands there had already been too worked over by scientists. “I wanted a place where I could strike out on my own,” he explained. “I liked the idea of searching for the unknown, you know, and there’s a lot of that out there. The unknown.”
    When he says “out there,” Chris always means the jungle. About the jungle, he also likes to point out that facts are sometimes obscure. “It’s hard to know what is real or not real,” he said. “The standards of truth are different. Here it is ‘My grandfather told me this story,’ versus our sort of evidence.”
    Chris can talk for hours about earthen mounds, magnet sites (ancient capitals), and indigenous cosmology. Although he is skeptical of the existence of Ciudad Blanca and Morde’s story, he finds the legend to be one of the world’s great detective stories. Once he told me, a bit cryptically, that Ciudad Blanca “might be discovered only in being lost.”
    A couple decades ago his obsession with lost cities in Honduras was considered eccentric. “Just after I began my research, someone asked a friend of mine why I was working out here since there was nothing to be found,” he recalled, with a laugh. People believed the area was a waste of time. Chris ignored them. “For a long time people thought it was impossible to develop a civilization in a rain forest. But now we know better than that.” He smiled. “It is not the counterfeit paradise that everyone talked about.”
    He was referring to the archaeologist Betty Meggers’s argument in the 1960s that although the jungle seemed lush, it was actually a rainy, hot, mushy hell, with little opportunity to do the kind of farming necessary to support a large civilization. Meggers suggested that this unfriendly world could be inhabited only by tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, people who had little attachment to one place over another.
    In more recent years, however, archaeologists such as Clark Erickson, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Heckenberger (who appears in David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z ), of the University of Florida, have begun to refute that argument in the Amazon. In field research, the scientists discovered evidence of ancient life in the form of “black earth,” or fertilized land, suggesting that advanced farming was undertaken in these areas. Chris said it was that skepticism toward ancient life that persisted in debates he had about Honduras—until he began to document it in the early 1990s. “I did a lot of walking,” he said.
    Since then, he’s discovered hundreds of sites, many of them related, and mapped hundreds of others. He lived with the Pech tribe for five years, sleeping on a dirt floor, and has spent many more years mucking around the wilderness. By no means has