Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [60]
Walking briefly in the lead, I spotted a red snake with black and yellow stripes. I froze and quickly ran through the serpent-identification ditty that I’d learned researching a how-not-to-die-in-the-woods story a few years earlier:
If red touches black/You’re okay, Jack
If red touches yellow/You’re a dead fellow
“S’dead, Mark,” said John. He walked up and flipped the stiffening body with his bamboo stick. “Looks like a false coral snake. Completely harmless.”
The trail was a roller coaster; long, steep downhills broken up by sudden inclines. Bingham had raved about what wonderful agricultural country this was—he saw eighteen-foot stalks of corn—and I had equated that in my mind with the farms surrounding the land-grant universities of the Midwest. “I had sort of hoped things would level off by now,” I confessed to John.
“You’d think the terrain would flatten as you get lower,” he said. “Actually, the opposite is true.”
We stopped outside the gate of a farm owned by the Condore family. The father sent for his son Samuel, who he said could lead us up to the top of Huayna Pucará. John had been here years ago and seen piles of boulders exactly as the Incas had left them before fleeing under fire from the Spaniards. “They’re like cannonballs, lined up along the ridge!” he told me excitedly. Personally, I’d have preferred to skip another thousand-foot climb and descent to see some rocks that Bingham hadn’t even known existed, but John kept staring up at the ridge in anticipation, so I kept quiet. As sweat seeped down to my knees, another Condore son stood close enough to us that I could feel his breath and told John four times, in a voice that I wouldn’t describe as friendly, how much he liked his watch and wanted to buy it.
Samuel arrived and led us up a hill with a near-vertical slope. The ridge had recently been cleared by fire, and the soil was the blackest I’d ever seen, with the crumbly consistency of coffee grounds. Irregular rows of corn were being weeded by hand; most of the weeds were ferns. I struggled on all fours, grabbing any available tree or, more often, burned-out tree stump, as Samuel raced ahead in his unfastened galoshes.
After what seemed to me the sort of climb that should end with a champagne toast, we reached the top. No boulders. John suggested we move over to a higher peak, where he was certain he’d seen heaps of rocks the last time he was here. Reading manuscripts at my desk in New York, I had often puzzled over the term “knife-edge ridge.” Now I could see clearly that it was the crest of a very, very steep hill where one had to walk as if on a balance beam. We ascended to the higher peak, but there was nothing there, either. “It looks like some kids pushed the rocks off,” John said, gazing over the edge. “They’re all gone.”
For a moment, he looked like a child who’d dropped his ice cream cone. “Well, I tell you what. Let’s have a bit of fun on the way down.”
We gave Samuel a tip and asked if there was a route down that would let us keep moving forward toward the main trail rather than doubling back past his farm.
“Well, it’s possible,” he said, glancing sideways at the thick brush. Visibility down the hillside was about eighteen inches. “But it’s a lot easier and probably faster if I just lead you back.”
“Don’t worry about us, we’ll take care of ourselves,” John said. Samuel, obviously relieved, waved good-bye, turned and vanished before we could change our minds.
“It’s about time you had a go at this, Mark,” John said. He reached behind his shoulder, unsheathed his machete from its leather holster and held it up like Excalibur. Yes! I’d been begging him for a machete tutorial since we left Cusco. “All right, then. Make sure you strike the target at thirty degrees.”