Modifying autoconf to properly locate header

Modifying autoconf to properly locate header

The situation is that I am trying to get code I got off the Internet
(http://findingscience.com/pymur/) to compile and I DO NOT HAVE SUDO
PERMISSIONS on the machines I'm working on.
I've traced the problem down to one line in configure.ac that goes:
AC_CHECK_HEADER([indri/Index.hpp],,[
AC_MSG_ERROR([Could not find lemur's header files.])
])
Because I'm getting error messages from ./configure that say:
checking indri/Index.hpp usability... no
checking indri/Index.hpp presence... no
checking for indri/Index.hpp... no
configure: error: Could not find lemur's header files.
I have tried directly modifying it such that indri/Index.hpp has hard
coded path like /path/to/indri/Index.hpp which doesn't seem to help.
Any solution that gets the code to compile without me needing to modify
directories such as /usr (since I don't have root privileges) would be
appreciated.