Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [63]
John disappeared into his tent at three and didn’t reappear until six. This was a bad sign. Justo always served tea at four. John loved afternoon tea. I ate the equivalent of three large buckets of movie popcorn by myself as Justo walked in a circle inside the cook tent, wearing a tight smile, hands clasped behind his back. When John arrived for dinner, he looked ill. He had a ski cap pulled down over the bad eye.
“How’s the eye?” I asked.
“It’s spasming.”
We ate in silence until Justo brought our pudding for dessert.
“John, I’m only going to say this one more time and then I promise to drop it. If you’re not better in the morning, I don’t care if you have to ride a mule back to Puquiura or find a roadhead somewhere and flag down a taxi to Cusco, I want you to go to the doctor.”
John concentrated on his pudding.
“I have a thousand dollars in cash in my backpack to pay these guys,” I said, “and I’d imagine that for that kind of money we could hire someone to give you a piggyback ride to Lima. Juvenal probably knows a shortcut, right? I can survive out here for a few days without you, and I can keep Mateo and Julián occupied with engrossing anecdotes about the capricious New York real estate market.”
John fought back a smile, which looked like it hurt. “There really isn’t anywhere to go,” he said. “We’re two days from the nearest road. But thank you. I think I’ll be okay in the morning.”
The next morning, despite having one eye that, with its big red dot, looked like the planet Jupiter, John declared himself fit for action. “Keep these in your pocket, just in case,” he said, handing me the eyedrops. We never spoke of the incident again.
TWENTY-EIGHT
When It Rains
Concevidayoc
Our morning celebration of John’s recovery was, by necessity, brief. The rain had continued through much of the night, and John and Juvenal’s readings of the cloud cover O agreed that much more might be in store for us once the temperature rose. The sidewinding trail we followed was a narrow slot canyon carved from reddish mud, its walls sometimes eight feet high, and we traced its contours like pinballs sliding down chutes. The Spaniards had abandoned their mounts nearby before invading Vilcabamba. Bingham had left his pack animals behind shortly before reaching Vista Alegre. Our mules carved spaghetti slalom tracks in the mud. It looked like a mini ski team had passed through before us.
With each looping turn in the path, new signs appeared, signaling that we were about to enter the rain forest. John pointed to a plant with enormous spade-shaped leaves, like a giant violet. “Elephant ears,” he said. “The locals pick them to use as umbrellas.” A little farther on, John stopped suddenly and aimed his walking stick at a tree branch twenty yards into the forest. “Look, Mark! It’s the Cock of the Rock—tunki in Quechua—Peru’s national bird!” A bird with a bulbous reddish-orange head and black-and-white body appeared to be having an epileptic seizure. “He’s doing his male thing, dancing to attract a female,” John said. We watched the tunki vibrate for a few minutes, but no ladies responded.
“The Peruvian rain forest is the sharp end of the evolutionary stick. See that plant there? It’s a vine that wraps itself around a tree and sucks the life out of it until all that’s left is a hole where the tree was.” John motioned toward another plant with fronds like those my sisters and I used to weave into baskets during interminable Palm Sunday masses. “That one there has spines—if you touch them it’ll burn for hours. The lower we go, the more careful you’ll have to be about what you touch.”
The drop in altitude made John nostalgic for rain forest excursions past. One time he had taken a helicopter trip into the demilitarized zone along the Peru-Ecuador border with a guy who traveled with nothing but a machete—he foraged food along the way and chopped his own shelter out of foliage each night. One day they ran into