Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [66]
Eventually, John left Encounter. “Hardest decision I ever made,” he said. A couple of years later the company went bankrupt, taking most of John’s savings (and those of his colleagues) with it. Since then, he’d been making his way around Peru, notebook and cameras in hand, documenting what was left of the prehispanic culture. “No one followed up on Bingham’s work for years,” he said. “Maybe we could have saved more of these Inca sites. I’m trying to nut it all out, put it all together before it’s all gone. There’s Espiritu Pampa, Vitcos, Choquequirao and Machu Picchu. Everything else is being torn to pieces. Look around here. There’s nothing left here from Inca Concevidayoc. History is just fading away without being recorded.”
We stirred our steaming drinks and stared out at a wet dog that searched fruitlessly for a spot to dry off, circling past the tent opening every few minutes to see if we’d changed our minds about letting him in. Its paws were six inches deep in mud.
“Think we’d better wear our wellies today,” John said.
TWENTY-NINE
The Plain of Ghosts
At Espiritu Pampa
Eventually, the downpour slackened enough for us to start walking. Almost instantly, the scenery and climate changed once again, as if we’d pushed open the door to the tropical wildlife room at the Central Park Zoo. “Epiphytes, bromeliads, mosses! This is high rain forest!” John exulted, raising his arms. “Up there are the Andes. Down there is the Amazon.” He turned around. “Watch out, Mark, those leaves there will cut your hand like a razor if you touch them.”
After two days of waiting in Concevidayoc, Bingham’s party departed on Saavedra’s newly cut trail. A few hours of walking brought them to “the ruin of a small, rectangular building of rough stone, once probably an Inca watch-tower. From here to Espiritu Pampa our trail followed an ancient stone stairway, about four feet in width and nearly a third of a mile long.”
After a few hours of downhill walking we arrived at the same platform and scrambled up on top. Below us, we could see the long stairway that curved down into the thicket below. “Obviously, this is a very important usnu,” John said, pulling out his GPS. “Manco came up here. His sons, too, after he died. It connected down the valley, up the valley, and straight down into Espiritu Pampa. Imagine how impressive it must’ve been to look down from here onto hundreds of buildings. Of course Bingham saw none of that—it would’ve been a mat of dark green down there.” It still was.
Our slow walk down the winding staircase felt like descending into a forgotten world. The sound of moving water had followed us all the way from Vitcos, but the heavy tropical air here was still and quiet. I half expected to hear the roar of a Tyrannosaurus or the shriek of a pterodactyl. It was obvious why Manco had thought he’d be safe hiding here. In the 1980s this dense jungle had also been a stronghold of the Shining Path, the ruthless Maoist paramilitary organization that sought to ignite a revolution by executing thousands of their fellow Peruvians—rich and poor; men, women and children—often for no obvious purpose other than to incite fear. The group’s reign of terror came to an abrupt end in 1992 when its charismatic leader, who went by the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo, was discovered living above a ballet studio in Lima. “There was a long period of time when guys like Mateo and Julián had to work on their farms during the day and hide in the bush at night,” John said. “The Shining Path moved after dark and it wasn’t safe to be caught sleeping in your house.” John had heard that pockets of militants were still based in the area, trafficking cocaine.
John and I signed in at the Espiritu Pampa welcome hut. I scanned the register and calculated that outsiders had been trickling in at a rate