• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Sorry?”

“You like cooked food?” John asked. I admitted that I did, in fact, have a weakness for victuals prepared over heat.

“Right. When I travel solo, I usually prepare my own cereal mix and carry that with me. Fantastic stuff—all the nutrition you need. You’re going to need a lot of calories out there, maybe twice as many as usual, because the body starts breaking down after three days.” John was a serious clean-your-plate man; he’d finished his enormous breakfast, polished off the toast that Alex and I couldn’t get down, scraped the remaining yogurt out of everyone’s serving dishes and poured all the leftover dairy products into his coffee before downing it.

“So let’s say we bring a cook. Shouldn’t be too expensive. We’ll need maybe four mules to carry the food and gear. Now, do you need a toilet, or can you go in the bush?”

“You go to the bathroom in a bush?” Alex asked, his attention suddenly diverted from CNN’s World Business Today, the first television he’d seen in a week.

“No, in the bush,” John said. “Like the forest.”

“Oh man, that’s gross,” Alex said.

I sensed that this was not the correct answer.

“No, no. I can go outside,” I said.

Alex’s facial expression made clear that this, alternative was no less gross.

“Good! Because a toilet means an extra mule and chemicals sloshing around all over the place. How’s your health? Any history of heart trouble, or stroke? People think if you get into trouble out there that you can just pull out the satellite phone and call in a helicopter. They’re kidding themselves. That’s tough, tough country. You break a leg, even two days from the nearest hospital, and you’re walking out.”

I assured him that other than a little thickness around the midsection and occasional sore knees, my health was fine.

“You’ve got about six weeks between now and the time we leave. You’ve got to exercise. Focus on your core, your upper back and your joints. Your body’s going to take a lot of abuse on this trip.”

When John excused himself for a minute, I turned to Alex. “What do you think of John?”

“I guess he’s a little intense. But I like him. And he sure knows a lot more about Peru than you do.”

On the way back to the hotel, John dictated a long list of equipment that I needed to buy for our excursion: drip-dry clothing for day, warm clothing for night, walking stick, rain gear, headlamp, sleeping bag liner, rip-proof daypack, waterproof cover for daypack. My pen ran out of ink. We stopped at a stationery store off the plaza to buy a new one. The shopkeeper, standing over a glass display case holding copies of Lost City of the Incas, stared at John—dressed, as I soon learned he always was, in full explorer garb—as if she’d seen him before.

“You know who your friend looks like?” she asked me as I handed over my money. “Hiram Bingham.”

THREE

The Three Hirams

Honolulu, Hawaii

History’s greatest discoveries have usually resulted from explorers’ bravery and endurance. Neil Armstrong had to ride a gigantic flaming can of Sterno through the earth’s atmosphere before taking his one small step onto the moon; Marco Polo not only walked to China but waited twenty-four years to carry his tales of Kublai Khan’s empire back to Venice. Bingham employed a different set of abilities in finding Machu Picchu: organizational skill, careerist ambition and impatience. At a moment when young men were rushing to find the globe’s last great places, risk be damned, Bingham outpaced almost all of them by writing up formidable to-do lists and checking off their items at a furious pace.

Bingham’s three most important expeditions to Peru—which he managed to squeeze into four years between 1911 and 1915, while raising seven young sons and holding down a teaching job at Yale—coincided with the heyday of Frederick Taylor’s new field of “scientific management,” the Progressive Era push to make the world a better place through the gospel of efficiency. Bingham’s files from that period—which are themselves a marvel of organization