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Peru’s political history, too, reads like something that might have flowed from the pen of a Nobel laureate, and not just because Vargas Llosa nearly won the presidency not long ago. Let’s just look at the last quarter-century, a period of relative stability in Peru. Alan Garcia, a young, handsome Kennedyesque liberal, was elected to lead the nation when he was just thirty-six. It’s difficult to pinpoint which dubious achievement Garcia was subsequently most loathed for: allowing the inflation rate to soar to over 20,000 percent annually; failing to halt the growth of the Shining Path terrorist movement; or turning a blind eye toward corruption, the most public example of which was the $300 million spent on his Train to Nowhere, an elevated railway project whose ghostly concrete pillars still haunt the medians of some of Lima’s nicest avenues. Everyone assumed that the dashing Vargas Llosa would be elected in 1990. He lost out to Alberto Fujimori, the nerdy son of Japanese immigrants. Fujimori essentially declared himself dictator and crushed both the Shining Path and inflation by whatever violent methods worked. (Aurita remembers watching an announcement on Peruvian television that effective immediately, gasoline prices were increasing twentyfold; the next morning, in place of the swirling pandemonium of Lima traffic, one could hear the sound of birds singing and children playing in the empty streets.) When the head of the national intelligence service was found to have videotaped thousands of politicians, judges and journalists accepting bribes, Fujimori escaped to Japan, where he faxed in his resignation. He’s now back in Peru—in prison.

Alejandro Toledo, a former shoeshine boy and Peru’s first indigenous president, was elected in 2001 as an anticorruption candidate despite reports that he had been spotted with prostitutes and had tested positive for cocaine. (He had an unassailable defense: he’d been kidnapped and drugged by Fujimori’s henchmen.) Meanwhile, Toledo’s French wife, Eliane Karp-Toledo, almost single-handedly blew up an agreement that Yale had reached with Peru’s government to return artifacts that Bingham had taken to New Haven. The most recent election, in 2006, came down to a two-man race: a retired army officer, under investigation for murder, who vowed to nationalize foreign businesses, versus a reasonable-sounding elder statesman, back from a long trip abroad with at least one hundred extra pishtaco-tempting pounds packed onto his frame. Alan Garcia was back, running on a platform that boiled down to “I was an idiot last time.” Garcia won. A few years later, he announced new plans to build an elevated train system in Lima.

It’s possible that all this craziness is just geography as destiny. Peru’s borders contain some of the world’s most varied topography and climate. Measured in square miles, the country is not especially large. On a globe it looks like a swollen California. Within that space, though, are twenty-thousand-foot peaks, the world’s deepest canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), unmapped Amazon jungle and the driest desert on earth. Peru is an equatorial country that depends on glaciers for drinking water. It’s one of the world’s hot spots for seismic and volcanic activity. (Both Lima and Cusco have been leveled by earthquakes; the country’s second-largest city, Arequipa, sits beneath a smoking peak that could blow its top at any time.) Scientists have calculated that there are thirty-four types of climatic zones on the face of the earth. Peru has twenty of them. “In Inca Land one may pass from glaciers to tree ferns within a few hours,” Bingham wrote, still astonished years after arriving. I was about to see for myself.

TEN

Peruvian Standard Time

Cusco

Six weeks after my first meeting with John Leivers, I was sitting in the Cusco offices of the adventure outfitter Amazonas Explorer, drinking my fourth cup of instant coffee and waiting for Juvenal Cobos to arrive. One of the things about Peru that I’d found it hardest