Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [131]
It would be nice to say that witnessing the sunrise proved for certain that Machu Picchu had been built as the end of a pilgrimage, or that a ghostly image of Pachacutec’s gold statue appeared inside the Torreon and gave me a thumbs-up. But the truth is that Machu Picchu is always going to be something of a mystery. Which is, of course, part of its allure. Everyone who visits the citadel in the clouds inevitably follows in Bingham’s footsteps—not only by walking the same paths the explorer trod, but by projecting whatever vision it is they hope to see onto the lost city. As for me, the mental image of Machu Picchu that I’ll always keep is of John juggling handfuls of gadgets as he tried to capture the sunrise coming through the window, completely oblivious to Karl Marx patting him enthusiastically on the back.
Epilogue
New York
One year after my first visit to Cusco, I met John Leivers at the airport again. For once, I was the person who knew where we were going. John was en route to Australia for his mum’s ninetieth birthday celebration and wanted to see an exotic locale that he’d somehow missed in all his travels—New York City. His suitcase, which I offered to carry before I learned that it was filled with materials John was transferring to his master archive in Perth, weighed approximately ten thousand pounds.
When we arrived at my home north of the city, my five-year-old son Magnus, brimming with the confidence he’d gained in two full weeks of kindergarten, opened the front door and asked John, “Is it true you live in a tent?”
“Yes, it is,” John said.
“Why don’t you have a house like everybody else?”
John leaned in to meet Magnus’s dubious stare. “Because I endeavor to remain flexible.”
John was not a typical visitor to New York. He showed zero interest in fine dining, shopping or Broadway shows. Instead, he spent the week visiting museums and jotting down notes. He passed several hours at the Museum of Natural History, taking in an exhibition about the Capac Ñan, the royal Inca highway. He wasn’t the only out-of-town guest I’ve had who was put off by the high prices of everything and the long line for the Empire State Building observatory. But he was undoubtedly the first to complain about his inability to get a GPS signal at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
The only time I saw John act like a tourist was when we spent an afternoon walking through the fashionable winding streets of Greenwich Village and SoHo. John was dressed exactly like he did in Cusco. “It looks just like the movies here!” he said, snapping photos of brownstones and old tenement buildings with iron fire escapes. That evening, in an e-mail to a former colleague, I described my day: how I’d brought my Australian guide—who’d led me on an off-the-map backcountry adventure and was visiting New York for the first time—downtown to have lunch with my publisher. “You do realize that you’ve just given me a plot summary of Crocodile Dundee,” my friend wrote back. “He doesn’t carry a big knife, does he?”
I remembered John slashing through the cloud forest with his machete and thought, You have no idea.
Each night at our family dinner table, John updated me on what was happening in Peru. Justo, Juvenal and the rest of my pals in the travel business were hoping for a busy year to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Bingham’s 1911 expedition. Paolo was continuing, without success, to try to get the government to dig for Pachacutec’s mummy before his bones were forever entombed beneath a strip mall. Roxana Abril still hadn’t heard back about her ownership claim to Machu Picchu, though perhaps the return of the Yale artifacts would give her grounds for a new lawsuit. Eliane Karp-Toledo had been quiet of late—by her standards, anyway—but plenty of other politicians in Lima and Cusco were lining up to take credit for bringing