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Because Bingham has been accused of exaggerating the details of his expeditions, I’d been a little suspicious when I read his description of the climb from the Apurimac to Choquequirao. “At times the trail was so steep that it was easier to go on all fours than to attempt to maintain an erect attitude,” he’d written. That one checked out. “Occasionally we crossed streams in front of waterfalls on slippery logs or treacherous little foot bridges.” Ditto. He recalled having to stop and rest approximately every thirty feet. I would have gladly taken that option had I not been so fixated on keeping up with John’s slow-but-steady pace. During one rest stop, he caught me pressing my fingers against my neck, checking my pulse.

“What’s your heart rate, Mark?”

“About . . . one thirty,” I said, subtracting ten beats.

“You’re joking.”

“Why? What’s yours?”

He touched his wrist. “About eighty.”

Probably the nicest thing I can say about the second day’s walk is that because it was the exact opposite of downhill, my toes were spared further damage. That’s all I can remember because every time I opened my notebook to jot something down, so much sweat dripped off the end of my nose that it blotted out whatever I’d written. (There has been talk of building a cable-car track up the far side of the Apurimac valley, to facilitate tourism at Choquequirao. I wish them the best of luck.) With each view backward, I saw the roaring river shrink farther until it was a slim white ribbon.

At the top of the ridge, the ground flattened out enough for some enterprising family to have carved out a tiny farm. Here, the mule team stopped to order some chicha, the sour home-brewed corn beer of the Andes. A bowlegged señora waddled out of the house, outfitted in the customary attire of the mountains: stovepipe Stetson, billowing skirt and a hand-made cardigan woven in colors that could stun a deer. She carried a plastic pitcher with a creamy-looking liquid in it. Before anyone could take the first sip, Justo grabbed the vessel and poured out a dribble onto the ground, “for the Pachamama!”—a salute to the Earth Mother.

I declined Justo’s offer of a swig and showed my respect for the Pachamama by lying down in the dirt and embracing her with every traumatized cell in my body.

THIRTEEN

Cradle of Gold

At Choquequirao

At the start of the twentieth century, the relatively new science of archaeology had men pondering the ancient wonders that might lie in the earth beneath their feet. No archaeological discovery was more romantic—or more likely to grab the public’s attention—than a lost city. The unearthing of Troy in 1868 and Knossos in 1900 had been inspired by ancient Greek tales. At the moment Bingham staggered into the abandoned citadel of Choquequirao, excavations were under way at the Mayan site of Chichen Itza and in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings that were expected to reveal some of the greatest treasures of antiquity. A frontpage story published in The New York Times in January 1911, six months before Bingham arrived at Machu Picchu, reflects the mania for vanished civilizations: GERMAN DISCOVERS ATLANTIS IN AFRICA.

The few explorers who had the fortitude to reach Choquequirao during the nineteenth century were driven less by dreams of finding what had come to be known as the Lost City of the Incas than they were by a desire to cash in on a potential mountaintop El Dorado—the legendary city of gold that the conquistadors had sought in vain. The Frenchman Léonce Angrand described hearing that “immense treasures were buried among the ruins when the last survivors of the race of the sun retired to this savage asylum.” J.J. Nuñez, the prefect who had pleaded with Bingham to visit the site, was hunting the treasure assumed to be hiding in the “cradle of gold,” buried beneath the vegetation high above the Apurimac River. The idea that ancient ruins constituted part of Peru’s proud patrimonio, or heritage, was still a few years