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“See how all the llamas face north,” Julio pointed out as we walked down the hundreds of stairs that led to the terraces and out to a viewing platform that appeared to have been constructed from very old popsicle sticks. “We think that signifies the Inca conquest of the Antisuyu, the jungle.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” John mumbled to me. John believed that Inca sites like Choquequirao and Machu Picchu weren’t so much separate entities as parts of a vast Inca network. To illustrate his point, he dragged me and my aching feet up to a viewing spot at the very top of the ruins, at the crest of the ridge. As I sat down on a rock to rest, I instantly recognized it as the place where Bingham had experienced an epiphany in 1909. The view seemed to take in all of creation—mountains and glaciers and rivers and deep green valleys branching off forever to the distant horizon. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“That’s big, big country out there,” John said, pointing his bamboo walking stick like a field marshal. “Very few people have ever set foot on most of those peaks. But do you see how it’s all interconnected? This usnu links up with that trail. You’ve got apus there, and there, and there. Rivers below on both sides.” He seemed to be explaining why the Incas had chosen this impractical spot to build on, but all I saw was the postcard panorama.

Bingham had been equally enchanted by what he saw from this spot. “The whole range of the White Mountains or the Great Smokies of Tennessee and North Carolina could have been placed on the floor of this great valley and not come much more that halfway to the top,” he wrote in Lost City of the Incas. Looking into the immensity before him, Bingham was reminded of the most famous lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Explorer”:

Something hidden. Go and find it.

Go and look behind the Ranges—

Something lost behind the Ranges.

Lost and waiting for you. Go!

FOURTEEN

Kicking and Screaming

At Choquequirao, continued

Usually, when we arrived at camp at day’s end, Justo greeted us in his ankle-length apron with a shout: “Los aventureros!” This time, he was pacing back and forth outside the cook tent with his hands behind his back.

“Tenemos un poquito problema,” he said. We had a little problem. “Julián was kicked by a mule.”

Juvenal, who’d witnessed his share of such injuries over the years, said he’d had a look at Julián’s knee and didn’t like what he saw. John and I walked over to where Julián was sprawled out on the grass flat on his back. His face was the color of pea soup. He tried to roll his pant leg up for us to see what had happened, but his knee was swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and he couldn’t raise his ragged cuff over the hump. His lower leg was shiny and black from the patella down; he looked like he had frostbite of the shin.

An hour later, John weighed our options over dinner. “That knee looks bad,” he said. “I’m worried that Julián will try to prove how tough he is by walking all the way to Huancacalle and end up with permanent damage.”

A female voice rang out of the dark. “Tranquilo! I am doctor!”

While John and I had gone off to have a glacial meltwater shower (the water so cold that every person who stepped under the spray screamed in shock—“GAHHH!”—and then moaned— “huhuhuhuhuh”—through chattering teeth), Juvenal had canvassed the campsite and found Ana, a doctor visiting from Barcelona. She and John held a brief conversation in which Ana insisted on speaking imperfect English and he insisted on responding in imperfect Spanish. She went off to have a look at Julián’s knee.

Ten minutes later she returned. “I give the man the treatment. I think he will be having the recovery but he cannot walk on that leg, or he may be losing it. This is very, very important. I will return for the morning to see how goes the curing.”

I couldn’t sleep much that night. When morning came, I dragged myself into the cook tent around four-thirty. Juvenal and Justo were already up (they kept country