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hours and usually rose before four), jabbering in Quechua. My Spanish wasn’t great, but after ten years of on-and-off Spanish lessons, I could more or less make myself understood. Quechua, however, is a guttural tongue, like Russian, and sounded completely alien to my ears. (How alien? The makers of Star Wars chose Quechua when they needed a language for Greedo, the character who speaks gobbledygook before Han Solo blasts him in the cantina.) Quechua relies heavily on a “K” sound that bears more resemblance to the sound of a cracking walnut than to any English or Spanish consonant, which is one reason why place names in the Andes have so many spellings. Choquequirao also goes by Chokekiraw and a half dozen other variants; Cusco (formerly Cuzco) may soon be known officially as Q’osqo.

Justo placed a red plastic mug in front of me and handed me the can of Nescafé powder. “Buenos días, Señor Mark. You don’t look like you slept well. Of course nobody did, because of Mateo’s snoring.”

“The avioneta,” Juvenal said, rubbing his temples. The little airplane. The four men slept together in the cook tent at night, on top of sheepskins.

I was going to explain that the chickens wandering the campsite and the occasional bloodcurdling scream from the showers had been more of a problem, but before I could speak, a homeless dog stuck its nose into the tent and Justo changed the subject.

“Did you know that they eat dogs in Lima, Señor Mark?” He leaned out of the tent to toss some fruit peelings to the beggar and, without pausing to inhale, continued, “I never learned to read. Never got around to it. There was a Swiss lady once, she promised to teach me, but she went away and never came back. How about granola for breakfast?”

Shortly after sunrise, Doctor Ana came by to look at Julián’s leg. “I used a combination of the traditional and the modern therapies,” she said, unwrapping his bandages. A minty smell rose from his knee. She had enveloped his wounded leg in coca leaves and Flexall cream. The swelling had completely vanished. Julián stood up and limped over to the cook tent, where Justo poured him his usual bowl of morning coffee, which he took with twelve spoonfuls of sugar.

“But what about all the black stuff below Julián’s knee?” I asked Justo. “Can he really walk on that?”

“That black stripe? That’s a scar from when he was a kid. Probably played too close to a fire. I’ve got six kids of my own, all healthy, all working good jobs, thanks be to God.” He folded his hands, raised his eyes to heaven and picked up his knife. “Señor Mark, did you know that on the Inca Trail, Brazilian women just strip naked wherever they want?”

FIFTEEN

A Deal with the Devil

New Haven, CT, and Cajamarca, Peru

When Bingham returned to Yale, he had already decided that contrary to what anyone in Peru thought, Choquequirao was not the last refuge of the Incas. Even if they blew the place sky-high with dynamite, no one was ever going to find treasure on its grounds. The notion of the Incas escaping to a final refuge intrigued him, though. And the more hours he spent in the university library researching the final days of the Inca empire, the more convinced he became that their lost city really did exist—except that it was called Vilcabamba.

As for where one might start searching for Vilcabamba, Bingham thought back to the vast land “behind the Ranges” that he’d seen while looking north from the top of Choquequirao. “The clouds would occasionally break away and give us tantalizing glimpses of snowcovered mountains,” he recalled. “There seemed to be an unknown region . . . which might contain great possibilities. Our guides could tell us nothing about it. Little was to be found in books.” Perhaps the mysterious Inca capital “was hidden there.”

Before 1532, the thought that Inca royalty could be chased into hiding would have been unfathomable. In one of history’s little scheduling ironies, the earth-shaking Pachacutec’s grandson Huayna Capac took charge of the empire at almost the same moment Christopher Columbus landed at what is now the