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“What do you make of the whole mystical energy thing, with the crystals and all that?”

Efrain shrugged his shoulders. “There’s energy in everything, Mark. Remember, you can’t find everything in a book.”

We stopped at the first of Bingham’s 1915 discoveries, Runcu Raccay, which looked like a rounded TV dinner tray, with two side-dish compartments surrounding a circular entrée spot. Efrain stepped inside and tapped the dirt floor with my walking stick. It thudded hollow. “After Bingham came through here, lots of people followed—both Peruvian and not Peruvian—looking for gold.”

We walked on, and the day grew hot. I looked back occasionally to see how John was faring, but he’d fallen out of view. Almost imperceptibly, the terrain turned to cloud forest. Efrain pointed out curiosities from the plant kingdom. The world’s smallest variety of orchid. A type of moss used as a coagulant in World War II. A poisonous fungus that I told Efrain looked like day-old tripe. He grabbed my forearm. “Please don’t eat that, Mark,” he said.

Around two o’clock, the trail forked. To the right the road continued. To the left it diverted up a set of steps to what from a distance looked like the Rhine castle of an especially antisocial count, perched on a rock outcrop. The building seemed to levitate, as if the Incas had constructed a granite hovercraft. “Sayacmarca,” Efrain said. “The name means ‘inaccessible town.’”

We ascended the staircase and found ourselves standing inside an elliptical building, open on one end. Contrary to Bingham’s interpretation—that it was a fortress—Sayacmarca seems to have been designed for two types of viewing. On the far end, a large platform—perfect for an alpaca-and-chicha barbecue—took in the Aobamba Valley and snowcapped mountains beyond. The horseshoe-shaped building we’d entered at the top of the staircase was configured toward the south and west. “Its windows face to the sunset, for the solstice and equinoxes,” Efrain said.

John arrived at the top of the stairs, shuffling slowly and grunting. His face reminded me of construction workers I’d seen waiting in emergency rooms with their hands wrapped in towels. “Very important site, this,” he said through his teeth.

After lunch, Efrain and I walked ahead again, passing two small lakes. “You want to see something that probably looks a lot like what Hiram Bingham saw?” Efrain asked. We took a detour through an unspectacular crack in the rock face. This led to a slippery white stone trail that we followed for about five minutes, splashing through a few mud puddles and pushing aside vines and branches. “This place must have been pretty important,” Efrain said when we stopped. “Take a look.”

We stepped into a two-chambered room carved into a hollow in the mountain. The exquisite stonework had been cut to join seamlessly with a huge overhanging rock like an open clamshell. It was like a slightly less fancy version of the Royal Mausoleum. Niches for holding sacred artifacts were recessed into one wall; the cut-granite stones from another wall had toppled over into a pile. Everything was coated with a thick layer of green moss. A shaft of sunlight shined through a large crack where the roof had once been. Efrain was right. It looked just like one of the buildings in the photographs Bingham had taken in 1911.

“What was this place?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Efrain said. “A friend of mine told me he found it when he was looking for somewhere to sneak off and smoke marijuana.”

Our final campsite was at Phuyupatamarca, which was Bingham’s last discovery in 1915. The name, given by the anthropologist Paul Fejos, means “town above the clouds.” The porters had set up my tent in what may be the greatest sleeping spot on the Inca Trail—a small ledge just large enough for one person, with a 180-degree view of mist-shrouded peaks. The cold air was heavy with moisture. John arrived about twenty minutes behind us, grumbling about a group of hikers who had set up their dinner tables on the viewing platform directly above us. “Not only