Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [58]
The farther we traveled from Cusco, the more closely our movements mirrored Bingham’s hundred-year-old travelogue. “We crossed the flat, marshy bottom of an old glaciated valley,” he wrote, exactly describing our progress. “Fording the Vilcabamba River, which here is only a tiny brook, we climbed out of the valley and turned westward.” John and I walked uphill to the Kolpacasa Pass, where a galeforce wind whipped our sweaty shirts like flags. “This is the gateway to the jungle,” John shouted. I could barely hear him because my teeth were chattering so hard. John clambered atop a former usnu. I turned to look at the ground we’d covered that day. Far off in the distance we could see a row of snowy peaks, which turned out to be the Pumasillo Range. I could scarcely believe that this was the backside of one of the mountains that I’d seen from the top of the ruins at Choquequirao.
“There’s a whole series of platforms like this leading all the way down to Espiritu Pampa,” John shouted through the wind. “I’m sure Manco came up here and did his bit.” John believed that usnus like this one may have been plated with gold or silver, so that when the sun shone on them, a chain of brilliant explosions linked the countless valleys of the Inca empire, like a game of telephone. “Can you imagine the impact something like that would have on the subjects? They must have been completely awed.” His GPS readings showed that we were directly on the solstice line from Espiritu Pampa; on certain important days of the year, the usnus lined up directly with the point on the horizon where the sun rose—as well as with several important Inca sites, including the one to which we were headed. “It just blows my mind,” John said.
According to Bingham’s maps, when he reached the top of the Kolpacasa Pass, he should have been standing in the middle of the Apurimac River, the same one that flows beneath Choquequirao. In fact, the Apurimac is about twenty miles south of Kolpacasa. His later surveys showed that Bingham had entered “an unexplored region, 1,500 miles in extent, whose very existence had not been guessed before 1911.” It was as if the ghost of Manco Inca had whispered the words, “Open sesame.”
As John and I descended, the arid land became greener and haze clung to the hills. We stopped for lunch in an empty, marshy valley, where Justo and Juvenal were having a heated argument over what had been the largest fish ever spotted in a nearby river. Juvenal, as he always did with Justo, got the last word when he said, “One time I saw a fish bite a dog’s head off.”
The next day we entered the cloud forest, misty, mountainous terrain like that which surrounds Machu Picchu. We reached a suspension bridge, the kind that wobbles like Jell-O when you walk on it. The trick, John told me, was to move quickly rather than tiptoe across—a steady pace limited the shaking. “Once we cross this bridge, it’ll be out of the fridge and into the oven,” he said as we walked above the river. Bingham said essentially the same thing; he called the drop ahead of us “4,000 feet through the clouds by a very steep, zigzag path, to a hot tropical valley.”
On the far side of the river we were startled by the first person we’d seen in hours. He was an old campesino, so withered that his hands and feet curled like claws. He asked us the same two questions everyone around there did, and received an affirmative response to both: Yes, we knew Juvenal, and yes, he could have a pinch of our coca. As he reached into John’s plastic Baggie, I noticed that the farmer had raccoon circles around his eyes, which on closer inspection turned out to be coca leaves pasted around his sockets. “My eyes are in very bad shape,” he told us, before bowing his head in thanks and trudging across the bridge and into the mist.
When I mentioned the stranger with the bad eyes to Justo later, after we’d suffered some serious