Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [67]
John’s good humor evaporated when he saw that the mule team had set up our tents in the official campground. At least two dozen vocal turkeys and chickens free-ranged all over our equipment. To me, the accommodations didn’t look too bad, and I’d long since given up hope of sleeping anyplace that didn’t sound (and smell) like Old Mac-Donald’s farm. There was a running spring to fetch water, an adobe brick shithouse and even a small chapel that didn’t look like it saw a lot of business. A territorial rooster hopped atop a rock and screamed its lungs out at us for about ten seconds, until Mateo, in one smooth motion, picked up a piece of packing rope, fashioned a lariat, lassoed the annoying bird around its skinny legs and gave it a quick spin through the air.
John had explicitly asked the muleteers to set up camp inside the compound reserved for INC workers, which was much closer to the ruins. Juvenal was prepared with a checklist of reasons why he couldn’t comply with John’s orders: “The INC wouldn’t allow it. The caretaker thinks that the mules will eat all the grass. There’s no water available at the other site.” He didn’t mention one more possibility for his choice: nostalgia. The Cobos family had once farmed the land we were on. The caretaker’s house directly behind us was Juvenal’s childhood home, now occupied by his cousin and his family.
John fumed. “I camped up there last time and it was fine. That does it. I’m tired of giving the INC everything and getting nothing in return. I’m not talking to anyone from the INC this time.” He went inside his tent and noisily unpacked his gear.
“It sounds like he’s fighting a llama in there,” Justo said to me.
“You think John is angry?”
“No, I think he’s crazy. But he’ll get over it.”
Thirty minutes later, John and I were standing inside the INC compound, encircled by a dozen young government workers who’d stopped scrubbing pottery shards to gawk at John’s photo album. His pictures were serious entertainment in a place with no phones, Internet, Xbox or electricity. (“We get a lot of sleep,” one fellow told me when I asked what they did for fun.) The commune, with its thatchroofed huts, looked like a remote Polynesian village, and was almost as isolated. Every worker was male, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, except for the boss, Javier, who looked about thirty. One guy was doing bicep curls with a barbell fashioned from a bamboo pole and soda bottles filled with water. Some budding entrepreneur had gathered a bumper crop of achiote leaves, which are sold as an herbal remedy for prostate problems, and spread them out on the ground to dry.
We stepped into Javier’s office, where he and his lieutenant, Paul, were piecing together an intricately carved wooden drinking vessel, a kero, the fragments of which had recently been dug up. John and Javier knew each other from a few years back when they’d crossed paths at an excavation near Machu Picchu. Javier and Paul were thrilled to have a chance to show off their work. “Here, you want to hold it?” Paul said to me, thrusting the fragile four-hundred-year-old artifact into my hands. The woodwork was exquisite, with geometric patterns overlaying one another so tightly they might have been woven. “Just think, an Inca drank out of that,” he said.
“Let’s take a look at the ruins,” Javier said.
Bingham had been escorted to Espiritu Pampa by “two adult savages we had met at Saavedra’s, accompanied by a cross-eyed friend, all wearing long tunics.” Juvenal had told me that these Indians were Campas, and that as a boy he’d seen them living in the ruins, still dressed like monks; they remained there until the Shining Path scared everyone away in the 1980s. Various subgroups of Campas still lived nearby, somewhere not far beyond the ranges, but the secretive tribe didn’t welcome outsiders. “Basically, they’re the same people that Bingham met,” John said.