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By Root 404 0

effect was not unlike walking through the canyons of midtown Manhattan on a cloudy winter day. The ground was covered with moss and sickly scrub grass. Boulders the size of large cars and small houses were strewn about. At the far end of the gorge a blinding white glacier seemed to seal off any exit at the spot where John had said Choquetacarpo Pass would be. A shaggy wild mule wandered out of a cave, looking for food. Finding none, he disappeared into another cave. Where he’d come from originally I couldn’t begin to guess. There were no homes here, no farms, not even a rooster, just us and the rocks and Pachacutec’s trail. Two hours earlier we’d been sweating through Southern California; now we were freezing in northern Scotland.

The only colorful spot in this landlocked fjord was our orange cook tent, dwarfed by rocks on three sides. As John and I approached, a tiny red dot also came into view—I half expected it to be the beacon of a UFO or Doctor Who’s phone booth, but it was Justo bundled up against the chill in an ancient maraschino-cherry skiwear ensemble that Jean-Claude Killy might have worn as a boy. “Look out, Señor Mark, that guy is watching you,” he said when I arrived for tea, pointing up toward a rock formation directly above us. It was shaped exactly like a giant Easter Island head.

I woke up in the dark the next morning. It was four-thirty. Frost covered the ground under my tent.

“Got to get going early today,” John said. Once humidity from the jungle crept up the valley—we watched a cloud of mist drift slowly toward our camp like a puff of cigar smoke—and hit Choquetacarpo Pass at mid-morning, the collision of hot and cold air could dump enough snow to cancel school in Buffalo. “I’ve seen it get ten feet deep up there,” John said. We all grabbed an extra ration of coca and were off by five-thirty.

“I’ve got a small suggestion, Mark,” John said. “This time, chew your coca thoroughly for a few minutes and then give it another chew occasionally. It’s supposed to dissolve in your mouth.”

Well, hey. The day before, the coca had kept soroche at bay. Today it gave me a small buzz, a slight tingling in the mouth followed by a lovely clearheadedness. Approaching fifteen thousand feet, I felt like I’d had a nap and downed a double espresso.

“This may be the finest stretch of original Inca trail left in all Peru,” John said as we crossed a small rise, looking down onto a path that snaked ahead of us like a miniature Great Wall of China. The road was beautifully engineered. The surface was elevated and paved with white stones. Masoned retaining walls on both sides protected the causeway from flooding. In the few spots where the trail had worn through, the deep and intricate foundation work laid down five centuries ago was evident. We were walking on a work of art.

Choquetacarpo is two miles higher than the famed Khyber Pass, taller than the Space Needle stacked on top of Mount Rainier. When it became obvious that we wouldn’t be hit by any snowstorms—there was hardly a cloud in the sky—we slackened to a strenuous stroll. Fifteen-thousand feet was almost certainly the highest I would ever stand on earth, and I wanted to savor it.

The canyon we’d walked through was beautifully desolate, a brown badlands hemmed in by two sets of sharp, rocky incisors. The top of the pass was crowded with dozens of apachetas, towers of rocks stacked on top of each other. Nati had explained these to me once. Local people who come through a mountain pass create a new apacheta or add a stone to an old one, asking for a favor from the apus or hoping for good luck on a journey. The piles reminded me of the votive candles my mother used to light in church. John checked his watch. “Two and a half hours to the top, not bad,” he said.

We sat down to dig into our bags of snacks. “Did Bingham ever write about the scenery?” John asked. I assured him that Bingham had referred to the green basin into which we were about to descend as “a veritable American Switzerland.”

“That’s right! The valley down below here is beautiful. Almost perfectly