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Maynor pointed out El Mirador, a shadowy peak which we could just make out with straining eyes. As we scrambled down in the fading light we heard the diabolic screams of howler monkeys - a noise so powerful and haunting that, had there not been locals to explain it, we would have been convinced that we had chanced upon a surviving group of predators from the Jurassic era. We soon got used to their twilight calls - a singularly effective warning to other primates, such as ourselves, not to encroach on their territory.

Dinner was chicken nuggets cooked over the camp fire. We sat uncomfortably cross-legged on sheets of canvas with our nuggets, and a few hearty jokes about man-eating jaguars were enough to bring out the gin.

The following day I was the first to be woken, by the cold, with the cloud cover gone leaving a beautiful starscape through the clearing, and an uncomfortable chill in the air.

The forest now looked properly like jungle. Only the meagrest of dappled light made it through the canopy, and the path was at times so narrow that vines brushed against us on both sides. Added to our list of wildlife encounters were parakeets, a sloth and a coati - an endearing and laconic mammal indigenous to the Central American isthmus, like a cuddly long-nosed raccoon in appearance.

By 4pm we found ourselves scrambling over larger ruined buildings in the forest. We were in El Mirador’s suburbs. Fifteen minutes more and we arrived at our camp. It was a very welcome sight, a much larger dynamite-cleared area boasting such unexpected amenities as a lavatory (of sorts) and an improvised dinner table. There was even a bone fide concrete building for the guards, who were posted to El Mirador 14 years ago, not to protect the tourists who visit it, but the site itself.

As one of the guards told us “El Mirador still holds all its riches”. The site boasts the largest buildings in the Mayan world and it is believed that it could cover an even greater area than Tikal (over 10 square miles have already been mapped).

However it’s setting deep in the jungle and it’s comparatively recent discovery has kept any large-scale excavation work of the sort undergone at Tikal a dream of the future. For the few tourists who trouble to make the journey, there waits for them a virtually untouched city, and one which they will probably have to themselves. It is not the architectural beauty

of El Mirador which impresses - the city reached its height 2,000 years ago, and the stonework which is visible through its forest cover doesn’t touch Tikal in terms of its sophistication. Rather it is the enormity of the structures which take the breath away, and the eerie feeling that there are now rarely more than a few dozen people within a day’s walk of this, once the most powerful and populous city in the Mayan world. What the Mayan’s called their city is not known, but El Mirador literally means ‘lookout’, so I climbed El Tigre, the second largest of the city’s temple structures to admire the view at sunset. The sound of the jungle’s birdlife and fauna reaching full crescendo beneath me, including two groups of howler monkeys calling several kilometres across the tree-tops at each other, provided an awesome concert.

More awesome still was the sight of the forest stretching out in every direction as far as the eye could see. Even the summits of El Mirador’s other temples, overgrown as they are, provide no break from the tree-cover. Unlike the crowded temple-tops in Tikal,

I had the view to myself. Click here to go to page 4

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