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for treasures left behind by the Incas.4 It was from Nuñez that Bingham first heard a legend that had grown around Choquequirao: that it was the final refuge of the Incas, thousands of whom were thought to have escaped to this hidden citadel in the clouds when the Spaniards invaded in 1532. With them, according to the tale, the Incas had carried the most spectacular treasures of the empire, “instead of letting it fall into the hands of Pizarro,” Bingham wrote. Supposedly, when the last Incas had died out in their mountain sanctuary, the secret location of this ancient loot was forgotten as the buildings of Choquequirao were enveloped by the mountain’s fast-growing vegetation.

Bingham was unconvinced by either the story or Nuñez’s pleas until the prefect played two aces: first, he claimed that Choquequirao had never been visited by a white man. (“A statement that I later found to be incorrect,” Bingham subsequently grumbled.) Second, Nuñez stressed that Peruvian president Augusto Leguia had personally requested that all excavation work at Choquequirao be put on hold until the esteemed Dr. Bingham from the scientific congress could have a look and give his opinion of the site’s archaeological worth.

Bingham and Hay left Cusco on February 1, at the peak of the rainy season in the Peruvian Andes. (Crazy weather is an annual feature of Peru’s austral summer. Storms near the end of January in 2010 washed away the train line to Machu Picchu; the Inca Trail is closed altogether every February.) This particular rainy season was the heaviest in twenty-five years, and the group encountered “well-nigh impassible bogs, swollen torrents” and “avalanches of boulders and trees.” Within hours of departing Abancay, they could hear the Apurimac River roaring thousands of feet below them. The route down to their riverside campsite corkscrewed back and forth, each segment about twenty feet long. After sunset the group continued on “the tortuous trail” in complete darkness.

About three hundred feet from the bottom, the mule Bingham was riding pulled up abruptly at a small waterfall that sliced through the path. The scientific delegate got off and weighed his options. “As I could not see the other side of the chasm, I did not dare to jump alone, but remounted my mule, held my breath, and gave him both spurs at once.”

It was a leap of faith that would set him on the road to Machu Picchu.

NINE

Beware of Fat-Suckers

Lima, Peru

Peru is a wonderful place. It is also wonderfully weird. The first time I visited, in 1997, several people I met in Lima warned me to take extra care when driving, because local thieves had perfected an ingenious new robbery technique. Near isolated intersections, street urchins heated discarded spark plugs over fifty-five-gallon drum fires. When a car stopped at a traffic light, the young thieves pressed a white-hot plug against its passenger-side window, causing it to shatter. Before the driver realized what was happening, a live rat was tossed into his or her lap. During the ensuing wrestling match with the (presumably agitated) rodent, the thief helped himself to handbags or anything else that looked inviting. If the driver understandably chose to exit the vehicle, the thief hopped in and drove off with his bewhiskered accomplice.

Peruvians have an insatiable appetite for such stories. The autumn that I arrived in Cusco, exactly a hundred years after Hiram Bingham first heard the legend of the Cradle of Gold, the news was dominated by reports that police had busted a ring of killers. The criminals had murdered sixty people and siphoned out their fat in order to sell it by the liter to shadowy international cosmetics manufacturers. A couple of frantic weeks passed before the police realized that no one had actually been reported missing in the area where the homicides had supposedly taken place. It sounded like something out of a Mario Vargas Llosa novel. Actually, it was something out of a Vargas Llosa novel. In Death in the Andes, Indian villagers blame pishtacos, a breed of adipose tissue–sucking