A real-life Indiana Jones? Long starter from nonfiction…

Talk about adventure! Here’s the beginning of a NONFICTION article, “The El Dorado Machine,” by Douglas Preston:

The rainforests of Mosquitia, which span more than thirty-two thousand square miles of Honduras and Nicaragua, are among the densest and most inhospitable in the world. “It’s mountainous,” Chas Begley, an archaeologist and expert on Honduras, told me recently. “There’s white water. There are jumping vipers, coral snakes, fer-de-lance, stinging plants, and biting insects. And then there are the illnesses–malaria, dengue fever, leishmaniasis, Chagas’.” Nevertheless, for nearly a century, archaeologists and adventurers have plunged into the region, in search of the ruins of an ancient city, built of white stone, called la Ciudad Blanca, the White City.

Rumors of the site’s existence date back at least to 1526, when, in a letter to the Spanish emperor, Charles V, the conquistador Hernan Cortes, reported hearing “reliable” information about a province in the interior of Honduras that “will exceed Mexico in riches, and equal it in the largeness of its towns and villages.” The claim was not an impossible one; the New World encountered by Europeans had wealthy cities and evidence of former splendor.

Later on in the article, we discover that through the use of technology and a flyover,

Instead of a lost city, we had found the expansive remains of an ancient civilization.

Try this:

So they found more than what they were looking for via a piece of technology that can “see” through the dense jungle and map out building sites of past civilizations. Now, tell the tale of the first group of explorers who put themselves into that jungle. Do your best Indiana Jones. What problems do they encounter? What treasures do they find? What surprises happen along the way?

Coming tomorrow: a coverup! What can you do with it?