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TWO

Navel Intelligence

Cusco, continued

John and I agreed to meet the next day for breakfast to coordinate our schedules. He had tentative plans to spend several weeks hiking out to someplace that sounded like it was on the dark side of the moon, and I had commitments of my own. As I was starting to stand up to leave, I felt one of those commitments place a hand on my head. I looked up to see my thirteen-year-old son, Alex, standing over me. This trip to Cusco was both a reconnaissance mission and a father-son adventure. Though we’d both been to Peru many times because Alex’s mother is Peruvian (and I suppose by the law of matrilineal descent, so is he), we’d never been to the famous capital of the Inca empire.

“I thought you were going to be down here for half an hour,” he said. “That was two hours ago. I’m starving.”

We walked down to the Plaza de Armas, which had once been the center of pre-Columbian Cusco. The name of the Incas’ holiest city translates as “navel of the world.” From the plaza four roads led out toward the four regions of Tawantinsuyu—literally, “four parts together”—as the Incas called their empire. At its height from 1438 to 1532, Cusco had been the heart of a kingdom that ruled ten million subjects and stretched twenty-five hundred miles up and down the Andes. In this city so sacred that commoners were expelled each night had stood the Koricancha, the gold-plated temple of the sun. The great nineteenth-century historian William Prescott called it “the most magnificent structure in the New World, and unsurpassed, probably, in the costliness of its decorations by any building in the Old.” The absolute ruler of it all was the Sapa Inca, a hereditary monarch whose power derived not only from his parentage but from his religious status as the son of Inti, the sun god. So divine was the Inca’s person that everything he touched—whether the clothing he wore only once or the bones of meat he’d consumed—was ritualistically burned each year. Any stray hair that fell from his head was swallowed by one of his beautiful female attendants. Being a god, the Sapa Inca was considered immortal. When he died, his body was mummified, and he continued to reside in the palaces he’d inhabited while alive, providing imperial guidance through special interpreters when needed.

Visitors to Machu Picchu are advised to spend a day or two in Cusco to adjust to the altitude, but it’s also a good place to acclimatize to the strangeness of the Andes. Like Hong Kong or Beirut, Cusco is an in-between city where cultures have collided, in this case those of the Incas and the Spaniards. Several epochs now clashed in the plaza where the Incas had once celebrated their military victories by stepping on the necks of their vanquished foes. Vintage VW Beetles cruised the square, passing in front of a McDonald’s advertising lattes and Wi-Fi, next to a seventeenth-century Spanish church built with stones cut by Inca masons before Spain existed. (Two blocks away the Koricancha sun temple was now the Santo Domingo monastery.) Small packs of stray dogs jogged through the tight alleyways of an ancient street grid, appearing and disappearing like ghosts. The only certainty was that no matter what restaurant, café, taxi or pharmacy Alex and I entered, some awful song from the 1980s would be playing. When we heard Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” for the third time, Alex turned to me with a pained look and asked, “Is this really what music used to sound like?”

We met John early the following day at a fake English pub.

His “martini explorer” comment had unnerved me a little—compared to Bingham, I was a white-wine spritzer explorer—so before committing to anything, I thought I should mention that it had been a while since I had slept outdoors. What came out of my mouth instead was “I might not be completely up-to-date on the latest tent-erecting methods.”

“That’s all right,” John said. “We’ll need mules for a trip like this and the