Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [64]
“Jaguars and pumas are afraid of them because they attack,” John said. “When they sense an outsider, they form a group. They make the most awful scraping sound with their tusks as a warning, and you can smell them. They give off this unbelievable odor that cuts right through the jungle. This fellow and I had to climb up a tree and hide for an hour and keep completely silent until the peccaries left, or they would have rammed the tree down and gored us. God, that was great.”
We arrived at Concevidayoc and made camp on a slope above the river. Juvenal, who referred to this stretch of path as “my trail” because he had been walking the route since he was a boy, said that there had been some Inca ruins in this area but that they had been dismantled to build something, either the old school at the top of the hill or the new school down by the river. He wasn’t sure. Any signs of the savage potentate Saavedra—whose bloodthirsty Indian army Bingham had professed to worry about—had vanished as well. Juvenal said that his grandfather remembered Saavedra as an eccentric neighbor who’d moved out around 1930.
The rain started again shortly after we fell asleep, and intensified through the night, with thunder loud enough to wake me more than once. In the morning, the campsite was a bog. The mules splashed up and down the hillside in a single-file line, Julián splashing behind them. Juvenal and Mateo sat on sawed-off logs inside a decrepit shed, warming their hands over a pile of burning sticks. John and I ate breakfast by candlelight. My copy of Bingham’s Inca Land, which I’d absentmindedly left in an uncovered pocket at Vista Alegre, was soaked through—which seemed appropriate since in the pages describing his journey to Espiritu Pampa, rain followed Bingham like a shadow, drenching his weary party day after day and leaking into his tent at night.
“This is a real Amazon rain,” John said, tearing his stale bread in half and picking off bits of mold. “It’ll be snowing hard on Choquetacarpo Pass. Those bridges we crossed yesterday? We’d be going over them on our hands and knees today.”
According to his account in Inca Land, Bingham continued down the trail toward Saavedra’s house at Concevidayoc not knowing how he’d be greeted. He sent one of his porters ahead to announce the group’s arrival. After waiting a tense thirty minutes, he wrote, “we were startled by the crackling of twigs and the sound of a man running. We instinctively held our rifles a little tighter in readiness.” The approaching noisemaker was Saavedra’s son, who came to offer his father’s warmest invitation. “It was with a sigh of relief that we realized there was to be no shower of poisoned arrows from the impenetrable thickets,” Bingham recalled, adding an extra dollop of melodrama.
Saavedra assured his visitors that he could get them to the ruins at Espiritu Pampa, though they’d have to wait for the path to be cleared as the old Inca site was “some distance farther down the valley, to be reached only by a hard trail passable for barefooted savages, but scarcely available for us,” Bingham wrote.
For the time being, we weren’t going anywhere, either. Mateo, always optimistic, stuck his head in the cook tent to share his opinion that the trail should be okay, because it was mostly rock. This elicited a rare guffaw from John. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. That trail we were on yesterday has probably landslided since then because of the rain. If we’d left Huancacalle a day later we’d be waiting back there for a long time.” He dipped his coca tea bag into his plastic mug. “There are two problems with an expedition in weather like this. Number one, you can’t get dry, so you’re always cold and at risk of hypothermia. Number two, the soil has no integrity, so it cannot support any weight. Plus, everything gets fungus—your tents, your feet. It’ll wear you down, like it did to Bingham. It’s better to just wait it out.”
Since we were stuck, I thought I’d ask