![]() Next to him up front was the archaeologist Richard Hansen, the director and principal investigator of the Mirador Basin Project. It was a Sunday morning in northern Guatemala, late October. Mercifully, Itzamna, the supreme creator god of the ancient Maya, had favored us with a pilot named Guillermo Lozano, who was now easing his maroon-striped Bell helicopter into the air. Had we been traveling overland, it would have taken two or three days to get from the end of the road at Carmelita to El Mirador: long hours of punishing heat and drenching rain, of mud and mosquitoes, and the possibility that the jungle novice in our party (that would be me, not the biologists turned photographers Christian Ziegler and Claudio Contreras) might step on a lethal fer-de-lance or do some witless city thing to provoke a jaguar or arouse the ire of the army ants inhabiting the last great swath of subtropical rain forest in Mesoamerica. ![]() ![]() ![]() Now overgrown by jungle, the ancient site was once the thriving capital of the Maya civilization ![]()
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