Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [43]
John was too excited to remain seated. He pulled an armful of gadgets out of his daypack and waded into the field of apachetas as if stepping onto a giant chessboard, taking photographs and video from all possible angles.
“How many times have you been through here?” I asked.
“Don’t know precisely. Eight, ten?” He held his yellow GPS in front of him like the handle of a fishing pole and scribbled notes furiously in his blue notebook, reeling in secrets.
The tiny oranges that Justo had packed seemed to have skins of Kevlar. I struggled with mine like it was a Rubik’s Cube. I finally hacked away enough peel to get to the edible center. Having massacred the fruit, I shoved the entire thing in my mouth, seeds and all, as juice ran down my face. I stacked my tiny bits of peel into an apacheta and made a wish of my own, begging the apus to spare my toes on the descent ahead.
Sure enough, within a few minutes we rounded a bend and entered Sound of Music country, snowy peaks framing deep green bowls. “Look how the valley has been perfectly rounded by glaciers,” John said, tracing the curve with the flat of his hand. “You go ahead, Mark, I’m going to take some more video.” Each time I looked back, John was raising and lowering his Handycam, gazing around at the panorama. “God, this is just a beautiful place, isn’t it?” he said when he caught up to me.
The rest of that afternoon we descended an Inca staircase, thirty-five hundred tall stone steps dropping almost a mile in elevation down toward Vitcos. With each long step down, the air seemed to warm a little more, and the alpine briskness gave way to Amazonian humidity. The ground off the trail was like a wet green washcloth, permanently soaked from the river that wound through the valley. John pointed out a pair of white birds. “Andean geese. Very territorial, one pair per valley. They mate for life. People eat almost any animal around here, but very few geese, out of respect.”
Signs of civilization slowly began to reappear. A small house. A campesino plowing his potato fields on a distant hill, bent over pushing a big stick. A log fence that some enterprising farmer had built across the trail, to keep people out of his crops. (“God, some of these farmers are assholes,” John muttered as we scrambled across.) Stone walls started to divide the small plots of land into a quilt of green and yellow rectangles. A motorcycle roared in the distance. Electrical wires materialized overhead. Stray dogs came out to give us a sniff. Finally, when we had walked through four seasons in one day, the trail ended abruptly. We’d arrived in Huancacalle.
TWENTY
Hunting for Clues
Cusco
The expedition that would make Hiram Bingham famous was nearly canceled at the last minute. In April, two months before his departure date, his father-in-law, Alfred Mitchell, fell gravely ill. Bingham accompanied Alfreda on the six-day sea journey to her father’s bedside at his estate in Jamaica. Alfred rebounded briefly. Bingham returned to New York. Alfred died and Bingham returned to Jamaica once more, for his father-in-law’s funeral. Alfreda joyfully scribbled “Plan given up!” in her diary. Her premature relief suggests she’d forgotten her husband’s love of solving logistical problems. Bingham again returned to New York, settled his hysterically grieving mother-in-law in a hospital and bid good-bye to his wife and sons. When the steamship Marta left New York Harbor on June 8, the expedition director was aboard.
Bingham kept track of an impressive number of particulars while preparing the 1911 expedition: begging friends for money, interrogating experts on the Incas about minor details, inspecting swatches of material from which tents were to be sewn. (Some one-hundred-year-old canvas samples were still in his files at Yale.) Bingham took immense pride in such control freakery. Just six paragraphs into