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the dry side, his narrative weighed down by lists of maladies suffered by expedition members and tedious details about building a temporary bridge. (Incredibly, his first draft of the article seems to have skipped over the details of the 1911 discovery; Bingham added them only after Grosvenor gently pointed out that “our readers will want to know how you found it.”) The photographs, however—250 in all—were astonishing. Bingham managed to capture the vastness of the Andes and the precision of Inca masonry; his black-and-white images of the new mule road through the Urubamba Valley have the spellbinding etched-mirror allure of Ansel Adams’s work. The before-and-after pictures of the ruins as they were transformed from an overgrown ghost town to the mystical city known today make clear, in a way that Bingham’s stiff prose never managed to, how it was possible for such a set of buildings to simply disappear into the jungle.

If the reaction of the press had been enthusiastic in December 1911, Bingham’s visual aids now pushed writers to hyperbolic new heights. In a long story titled “The Greatest Architectural Discovery of the Age,” The New York Times Magazine was particularly effusive:

Just now, when we thought there was practically no portion of the Earth’s surface still unknown, when the discovery of a single lake or mountain, or the charting of a remote strip of coast line was enough to give a man fame as an explorer, one member of the daredevil explorers’ craft has “struck it rich,” struck it so dazzlingly rich, indeed, that all his confrères may be pardoned if they gnash their teeth in chagrin and turn green with envy.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about that extraordinary sentence is that it happened to be true.

FORTY

The Sacred Center

Between New York and the Appalachians

One morning I was sitting with John Leivers in a Cusco café, nibbling on coca cookies and watching a parade sponsored by the Peru-Cuba Alliance. Less than twenty-four hours later, I’d been sucked through the CUZ > LIM > JFK pneumatic tube and found myself in midtown Manhattan, standing bewildered amid the scurry of commuters in Grand Central Terminal. My cell phone, after weeks of homesick scanning for a signal, recognized where it was and vibrated to life in my pocket. I called Aurita and went straight to voice mail. Without really thinking, I bought a coffee and a bagel and hopped on the 9:37 local train home. When my car emerged from underground, I noticed that the trees had lost their leaves while I was away.

Aside from a lingering tendency to walk down stairs splayfooted, I lapsed into my old routine within a day or two. I drove the boys to school, took long shopping trips to the supermarket and stopped glazing my hands with sanitizer every ten minutes. To my former colleagues I bragged a little about the trip—“of course you’ve got to be careful traveling with mules at high altitude”—but the satisfaction was ephemeral. For a few weeks my wandering mind seemed to tune in intermittently to a staticky Andean radio station; at stoplights, random thoughts of devil goats and intihuatanas popped into my head. Whenever I started to wonder if my memory was playing tricks on me, I pulled out two souvenirs I’d brought home as reminders that Peru was simply a different world. One was a ten-sol note, Peru’s equivalent of a five-dollar bill. On the flip side, where the august Lincoln Memorial would be printed on a sawbuck, was a picture of a Peruvian war ace flying his plane. Upside down. The other memento was a postcard of Cusco’s most famous painting, which hangs in a cathedral on the central plaza. In it, Jesus and the twelve disciples are seated at the Last Supper. At the center of the table, paws up, is a roasted guinea pig. Of course, having been raised Catholic, I immediately felt guilty for seeing humor in a painting that others saw as holy. Even if it was pretty funny.

My ambivalence toward supernatural matters wasn’t particularly helpful when I sat down to untangle everything John had told me about why Machu Picchu had