The Vilcabamba Expedition

In 1938, James Holroyd — a cashiered British army surveyor with a blacklisted name and no good reason to be careful with his life — is hired off the bottom of a short list by the Royal Geographical Society. The job: lead a small, deniable expedition into the eastern Cordillera Vilcabamba in Peru, find a city sealed under snow on the lee face of an unnamed peak, and return with a defensible account of what is there. The city appears in three Spanish missionary documents from the 1570s and nowhere after. Nobody official believes in it. An Ahnenerbe team led by a Munich-trained mountaineer named…