"This book is about two men (Claude Joseph Désiré Charnay (France 1828-1915) and Mexican engineer Lorenzo Pérez Castro) whose destinies were intertwined in a celebrated archaeological adventure of the 19th century known as the Franco-American expedition. Te expedition traversed thousands of miles in Mexico and was led by the French explorer, photographer, and writer Désiré Charnay, famous for his spectacular photographic images and illustrated books. Accompanying him was Lorenzo Pérez Castro, a highly decorated military engineer, who was assigned to the mission by the government of Mexico as an inspector. Pérez Castro's exceptional career, and life, would end with a bullet in the back. In the pages that follow I tell the inspector's story from the perspective of an oficial diary he made of his travels with Charnay, a document nestled in an archival in Mexico that is a vivid testament to the Franco-American expedition of 1880-1881" --Page 9.