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By Root 401 0

in the shade of a stone hut with a thatched roof. It was supposed to approximate what buildings had looked like in Pachacutec’s day. It reminded me of Juvenal’s house. John was crabby. Neither of us had slept well. The live band that performed at the pizza joint across from our hostel had kept going well past midnight, and we’d awakened at 4 A.M. and stood in the rain for an hour. Plus, it was lunchtime and John had only consumed about fourteen hundred calories, starvation rations by his usual standards.

“Well, Mark, I think we’ve seen almost everything,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Except Mount Machu Picchu, of course.”

John had been pushing hard for climbing Mount Machu Picchu, arguing that because it was the other bookend of the site—it sits at the south end, opposite Huayna Picchu—the view from its peak was essential for understanding how Machu Picchu connected with other sites. For reasons I still don’t completely comprehend, people will line up before dawn to climb Huayna Picchu, but virtually no one who isn’t a professional photographer climbs Mount Machu Picchu, even though you’re allowed to do so whenever you feel like it. I suppose, for starters, it has something to do with its being more than twice as tall as Huayna Picchu, a steep sixteen hundred feet straight up. There are also no ruins to see along the route, save some granite steps and platforms. Personally, I had little interest in seeing some place that, as far as I could recall, had no special significance for Bingham. But it had turned out to be a beautiful day, and I was sitting in a place that I knew a million people dreamed of visiting but would never have the chance to.

“You know what? Let’s climb it,” I said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

On our way to the peak, we passed through the main site again, reviewing its most famous works as if preparing for a final exam. Shortly after starting our ascent, John lost his footing on some stone steps and stumbled. “Slippery here,” he said. “Wish I’d brought my walking stick. Hold on.” He stepped off the trail into the thick brush, found a dead stalk of bamboo and wrenched it free. The bamboo was about nine feet long.

“Just give me a minute to cut this down to size.” He reached into his bottomless daypack and rooted around for a minute. Then he stood back and scratched his head through his hat. “I must’ve forgotten my knife at the hotel.”

“Wait a sec,” I said, unzipping my pack. I dug around for a minute and then handed John my knife.

“That’s good preparation, Mark,” John said. “Nice sharp blade on it, too.” It was, I’m not ashamed to admit, one of the proudest moments of my life. He whittled his stick down to a manageable length and slapped the knife into my palm. We each took a swig of water and moved on.

The trail up had been built with viewing platforms every 150 feet or so, and we paused at each one to take in Machu Picchu from a new angle, the site growing a little smaller at each stop. “These platforms must’ve been like little stations of the cross,” John said. As we neared the summit, we encountered another Inca special effect. Each set of stairs appeared to reach the mountaintop, but then turned at the last minute to reveal another set of fifty or so stairs. Maybe Pachacutec was a practical joker. Or a sadist. It took us ninety minutes to reach the top. Every square inch of clothing I had on was sweated through, including my two pairs of socks, which squished as I walked.

“Looks like we’re the only ones up here today!” John shouted. The formula for making John happy could be expressed as (R + S) × E, or Ruins plus Solitude multiplied by Exertion. He was, therefore, ecstatic. A quarter mile beneath us, traffic on the staircase to the Intihuatana was stop-and-go. We crossed a short, knife-edged ridge to an usnu, where someone had planted the rainbow flag of Cusco, which is almost identical to the Gay Pride flag. The view was immense. We could see the Urubamba River coiling around Huayna Picchu, and Llactapata peeking out from the cloud forest across the valley. The ruins of the main site were minuscule.