Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [12]
Any hopes I had of returning to explore the 99.9 percent of South America that exists outside of Lima were sublimated into my work, assigning stories to writers and photographers who got to fly off to the ends of the earth. On paper, I was an adventure expert. My actual boots-on-the-ground experience was somewhat limited. I had never hunted or fished, didn’t own a mountain bike and couldn’t start a fire without matches if ordered to do so at gunpoint. Back when the Barbie backpack kid had waved his AK at me at Lake Titicaca, it had taken me a few seconds to understand that I even was at gunpoint.
And then, as it tends to do, life started sending gentle overdue notices. Turning forty is supposed to be the milestone that kindles a man’s urge to buy a Maserati and chase sorority girls. It was the approach of forty-one that got to me. An e-mail from an old boss arrived: a former coworker my age, who had the physique of a ten-thousand-meter champion, had collapsed on the subway when his heart stopped. His life was saved only through a million-to-one coincidence: An off-duty paramedic had been called in to work unexpectedly that day when a plane crash-landed after takeoff, was riding home in a car that happened to be delayed across the platform, stepped off her train to investigate why a crowd had gathered around my unconscious friend, and happened to know that they were in one of the few stations in the five boroughs that had a defibrillator.
A few weeks later my wife’s Peruvian cousin, who’d just sent us pictures of his adorable newborn daughter, dropped dead of a coronary in Lima, six days after his forty-first birthday.
On my fortieth birthday, it occurred to me that I was now the same age that my mother had been when she found a tumor in her mouth, the first sign of the cancer that took her life before she got around to doing all the things she’d planned to do once her five children finally left the house.
It was around this time that Hiram Bingham’s name turned up in the news and Machu Picchu started appearing in my dreams. This in itself wasn’t surprising, since I often dream about my work—nightmares about forgotten margarita orders haunted my sleep for years after I hung up my bar rag. I spent my days working in the offices of Adventure magazine, a publication that specialized in ambitious trips to far-off places and coverage of extreme expeditions to the earth’s remaining frontiers. In other words, the sort of job where someone could spend hours on the Internet indulging his new Machu Picchu obsession without attracting a lot of attention. The dreams continued for weeks and were strangely repetitive; in each one, I’d step onto an escalator in the subway or in a department store and step off onto Machu Picchu’s empty, mist-shrouded central plaza. We kept meeting in the strangest places, Machu Picchu and I, like the leads in a romantic comedy.
As piles of Bingham-related material accumulated on my computer’s desktop, I noticed that one crucial piece of information seemed to be missing. No one could say with confidence exactly why this extraordinary complex of stone buildings had been constructed in the first place. Was it a fortress? A sun temple? A really elaborate granary? A spiritual portal to the fourth dimension, constructed by extraterrestrial stonemasons? All of these ideas had been floated, but only one person seemed to have definitive answers: Bingham. After making three expeditions to the mountaintop citadel, the explorer was certain that he’d found the legendary Vilcabamba, famous as the Lost City of the Incas, which he described in his best-known book as the “magnificently built sanctuary” to which the surviving Incas escaped when their empire was invaded by Francisco Pizarro and his small army of ruthless Spaniards in 1532. “Here they were shut off from that part of Peru which was under the sway of Pizarro and the conquistadors by mighty precipices, passes three miles high, granite canyons more than a mile in depth, glaciers and tropical jungles, as well as by dangerous rapids.”
If there was