First Sentence

"FOR several years Dr. Sylvanus G. Morley, of the Carnegie Institution, and myself had contemplated an expedition to the East Coast of Yucatan, one of the least known and most inaccessible parts of Central America, and the last place on the American continent where the poor remnant of the great Maya race, whose civilisation was the most ancient and highly developed in the New World 1,500 years before the coming of Europeans, still holds its own, unconquered and unsubdued, in the dense, impenetrable forests of the interior."