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The good times rolled only briefly for Manco. The Spaniards who occupied Cusco—including Francisco Pizarro’s three younger brothers—treated his home like an ATM and demanded continuously that he bring them more treasure. The most hotheaded of the Pizarros, Gonzalo, seized Manco’s favorite wife, who also happened to be his half sister. (Like bigamy, incest wasn’t frowned upon by the Incas.) Spies overheard Manco giving a fiery speech at a secret meeting of Inca elders, and when he was caught trying to leave Cusco, he was chained around the neck and feet, struck repeatedly in the face and used as a urinal by his captors. Shortly thereafter, Manco convinced another Pizarro brother that if the Spaniard would just let him loose for a few days, he would bring back a life-sized gold statue of his father as a token of his gratitude. Instead, Manco was about to take command of a massive native army that had quietly assembled in the hills surrounding the city.

The following months would see some of the most extraordinary battles in South American history. Manco’s army set Cusco afire, driving the occupying Spanish forces into just two buildings, which miraculously refused to burn. The Incas took control of Sacsahuaman, but were driven out by a daring Spanish attack. Bingham dispensed with all of this in his best-known book, Lost City of the Incas, in a single sentence, catapulting the story forward to the point where it attracted his interest: “In 1536, after several bloody encounters, Manco’s troops were routed and fled with him from the vicinity of Cusco down into the Urubamba Valley.” The Urubamba Valley was exactly where Bingham was headed next.

SIXTEEN

Distress Signals

Somewhere in the Andes

“We’ve got quite a walk today,” John told me at breakfast. To limber up we’d ascend about fifteen hundred feet just to cross the ridge on which Choquequirao sits, then plunge five thousand feet to the Yanama River for lunch, then up another four thousand feet to our campsite at the farm of a man named Valentin. It was like walking to the top of the Empire State Building and back four times in one day. The big payoff for our day’s effort was that we’d get to sleep in a barnyard. I had always assumed, based on Saturday morning cartoons, that roosters crowed at sunrise. I had learned from the birds strutting around the campsites at Octavio’s farm and Choquequirao that roosters were perfectly happy to belt one out at midnight, 3 A.M.—whenever the hell they felt like it. To make matters worse, Justo informed us, we would have to pass a man-eating devil goat that guarded the entrance to Valentin’s farm like a ruminant Cerberus.

“He’s got giant horns like Satan!” Justo explained as he poured a quarter inch of corn oil into his skillet to scramble four eggs. “He’ll eat us alive! He’s already killed three men!”

“Who told you all this?” John asked.

“Don Juvenal! He’s seen it with his own eyes!”

“I thought so,” John said to me, stirring his tea. “For whatever reason, Juvenal doesn’t want to camp at Valentin’s house. Must be bad blood between them. Of course it’d be far too easy to just come out and say it.”

Outside the tent, Juvenal and Mateo were securing our bags to the mules with rawhide nets that looked like they’d been left over from one of Bingham’s expeditions. If Juvenal was the general, Mateo was his chief of staff. Juvenal checked and double-checked everything like an airplane mechanic, then wordlessly signaled to Mateo to go over everything one more time. Bearing loads is serious business in the Andes. According to the fascinating book The Languages of the Andes, Quechua includes a vast number of words to denote the act “to carry.” Distinct verbs have evolved to express carrying in the arms, holding in the lap, carrying with both hands, carrying on the back, holding in the mouth, carrying in a skirt, carrying among four people and so on. When he finished his inspection, Mateo adjusted his wool cap, smacked the lead mule on the haunches with a stick and yelled, “Vamanos!”

Julián’s knee seemed to have almost