RETURN TO CUZCO

LANDING AGAIN AT CUZCO in 1999 was a shock. The population of the city had tripled since 1982. The old airport had been in an isolated field: the new improved one was already surrounded by fast growing suburbs.

My young taxi-driver Carlos was intrigued that I’d been away for so long (he couldn’t have been born long much before I left). ‘The city used to be chiquíssima,’ he said, using the affectionate diminutive, ‘now it’s grandota.’ But the heart of the city, the area around the Plaza de Armas, was much the same as ever, a mixture of stately colonial architecture and tourist opportunism. It was with some embarrassment that Carlos gave me his card, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Magical Mystery Tours’. ‘It’s just the name of the travel agency I work for,’ he explained, ‘nothing to do with the Beatles.’

The hotels had changed out of all recognition, as had my need to stay in the cheapest. I checked out a few. The El Dorado looked like something out of Las Vegas: in the entrance hall, the lift-shaft was completely freestanding and had been plastered to look like a tree rising up into a cavernous space – the corridors ran like branches off the ‘tree’ to bedrooms that were lit with startling neon pinks and reds. Soft new-age muzak was piped into every room. ‘Algo un poco diferente? A little different, isn’t it?’ murmured the porter who showed me around.

In The Royal Inka, a colonial building on Recogijo Square, there was an enormous mural stretching the length of the dining room which showed a sort of Body Shop fantasy of pre-Columbian life: dusky, bare-breasted maidens were bathing in an idyllic Amazonian paradise, probably using jojoba soap and surrounded by luxuriant greenery and compliant jungle animals; the only thing most were wearing was a pendant of vaguely Incaic design. The artist, for reasons of his own, had chosen to make them all extremely nubile young women and the effect, in an otherwise conventional dining room, was startling.

This was the way Cuzco now liked to sell itself, as an ecological gateway to the jungle resorts of Manu and the Madre de Dios, with a little bit of Inca Golden Age mythologising thrown in: a prelapsarian alternative to the evils of the fallen West. The small ads in the press offered tourists the services of ‘local shamen’ who could guide you to ‘places of fulfilment, on journeys of the spirit’.

Cuzco (or Qosqo, as the hippies liked to spell it) was traditionally thought to mean ‘navel of the world’ for the Incas, and ‘Qosqo: Navel of the World!’ was emblazoned on many a T-shirt for travellers to buy. Unfortunately this attractive idea had been undermined by an American anthropologist, Denise Arnold, who had shown after extensive research that Cuzco really meant ‘placenta of the world’, a slogan which had yet to make its way onto the T-shirts.

I had arrived in the middle of a four-day music festival, sponsored by Cuzqueña beer. All weekend the sound of amplified techno-cumbia echoed over the city. The purist European travellers in the Plaza de Armas, huddled over their pisco sours and listening to piped flute music, complained that it was a sign of things changing for the worse. But I enjoyed it and went back for two nights of the festival, which was playing to an audience of 20,000 or more in downtown Cuzco, way off the tourist loop.

There was a palpable feel-good quality to the crowd, which was new. Teenagers were wearing American clothes, with hip-hop style razored haircuts. The girls were showing a lot more leg. Hardly anyone was wearing the baggy alpaca sweaters which had been the unprepossessing youth uniform of the early eighties, despite the fact that it was the middle of winter and a cold night. The crowd were downing plastic mugs of Cristal by the gallon (drinking habits at least hadn’t changed) and girls were swaying on their boyfriends’ shoulders, copying what they felt was right from the self-perpetuating American concert films which MTV had brought to Peru. Scarves were being waved in time to the poppy stadium-rock music of one Pedro Suarez, a smooth-voiced lead singer with tight leather trousers and dark good looks – his guitarist henchman was even wearing a full-length glitter trench-coat, something I hadn’t seen since the heyday of Slade or The Sweet.

But Pedro was only the warm-up. The crowd had really come for La India, one of the most popular South American singers and an inheritor of Celia Cruz’s mantle as the Queen of Salsa. Like most salseras, she was a creature of the coast and no sooner had she launched into her first rumbustious vocal assault than the mountain altitude got too much for her. After a discreet word with backstage support, an oxygen bottle was rushed onstage and the show could go on, with La India taking big hits of gas between each song.

A Limeña woman I’d met had told me that this was becoming a common fashion accessory: now that Cuzco was a hip destination, city folk from Lima would fly up for the weekend and carry a little oxygen bottle with them to puff on when their unaccustomed lungs couldn’t take the altitude. Fortified by the oxygen and the roars of the crowd, La India belted out her next song about what she would do to ‘the other woman’.

I crossed town to the offices of COPESCO, the Peruvian state archaeological department, for an appointment with a man I was anxious to meet: Perci Paz, the archaeologist who had been working at Choquequirao in the years since I had first visited it.

At that time Choquequirao had been unexcavated and I could remember how intrigued I had been by the many unanswered questions it posed. There were some obvious similarities to Machu Picchu (the extraordinary position, the altitude) and also some less obvious ones, like its lack of extensive agricultural terracing or easy water supply. And again like Machu Picchu, there was no mention of it in any Spanish accounts of the Conquest, or in Inca chronicles such as Titu Cusi’s. Who had built it and was it still in occupation when the Spanish invaded, a hide-out for Manco Inca and his men?

It was dark by the time I arrived and Perci was waiting for me at the COPESCO reception. He was an enthusiastic, squarely built man in his late forties, wearing a brown donkey jacket and with black Brezhnevian eyebrows and hair swept back. He could hardly contain himself with excitement about Choquequirao, as he led me to his office. None of his findings had yet been published and, given the scale of his responsibilities at COPESCO, he was not sure when they would be.

Perci was an archaeologist who seemed genuinely to enjoy field-work (and surprisingly few senior archaeologists do). Between 1992 and 1996, as the Sendero problem died down, he had dug at Choquequirao every season. Now he was tied to a desk job in Cuzco and was envious of my planned journey down to Espiritu Pampa and the old city of Vilcabamba, the one site I had not reached and which he likewise had never been able to get to.

He was also fascinated by our pioneering early route to Choquequirao, and I described in detail to him the state of the roads (more used then than now, as the old Vittoria mine had still been active – it had been abandoned soon afterwards as the grip of the Senderos on the region increased). He was particularly interested in the little site we had discovered and measured on the last day before reaching Choquequirao, the site we had named Espa Unuyoc and which Perci had renamed Pinchiyoq Unu. I asked him about the unusual architectural details we’d noticed at the time.

‘Yes, it has some architectural aspects that are clearly not Inca but Chachapoyan. Rather than being upright, the stones are laid at geometric angles to one another,’ and he did a quick drawing of a herring-bone pattern, ‘what we call tejando con piedra, weaving with a stone – very clearly Chachapoyan, not Inca. And this would make sense, because I’m sure that the function of this site was to serve Choquequirao with satellite housing for workers, much as Machu Picchu had its satellite towns. So the Chachapoyans would have been imported as mitimaes labour to service the Inca nobility and priesthood who must have lived at Choquequirao.’

It was an exciting idea and I could immediately see the implications: ‘So whoever built Choquequirao presumably did so only after the Inca conquest of Chachapoyas – which was by Pachacuti’s son, Topa Inca?’

‘Exactly.’

If, as seems likely, Pachacuti built Machu Picchu, then his son Topa Inca might well have built Choquequirao as his own rival winter palace – one reason why Machu Picchu could have fallen into disuse. Choquequirao was very similar to Machu Picchu in so many ways – the staggering view, the elaborate and playful water-channelling, the ostentatiously impossible position – but a few architectural details, such as the profusion of double-recessed doorways, argued for a later construction.

The need for Topa Inca to duplicate his father’s building was simple. The Incas had an unusual habit of inheritance which largely accounted for the aggressive territorial expansion of each new Emperor. On the death of a Sapa Inca (an Emperor), his land and buildings would be kept intact and entailed to a group of relatives and retainers to look after in perpetuity – his panaca, or estate, where his mummified body could reside. Meanwhile the incoming Emperor had to start from scratch and acquire his own lands – a powerful motive to wage war. As Huascar so volubly complained, each new Emperor even had to build a new palace in Cuzco.

So on Pachacuti’s death, Machu Picchu would not necessarily have been Topa Inca’s to use anyway, particularly if its function was more as a private residence than a state or religious one – it would have become part of the ‘Pachacuti estate’ and would have faded away as his panaca found it more and more difficult to maintain such an ostentatious place without the revenues of power. This could also explain why Machu Picchu was abandoned before the Spanish arrived, a fate which would surely never have befallen it if the site had had the religious significance that it is sometimes given.

To build Choquequirao as a replacement, Topa Inca might well have imported labourers from Chachapoyas to help him (just as Pachacuti had forcibly imported the Colla from Lake Titicaca to build Ollantaytambo): having conquered their province with some difficulty, Topa would have been only too aware of the Chachapoyans’ astounding ability to construct sites in the remote mountains.

‘What did you find at Choquequirao itself?’ I asked Perci.

‘Look, there are three things we discovered about Choquequirao,’ he said, speaking in Spanish rapidly and lowly, almost as if we would be overheard by his colleagues at the other desks in the room, and leaning forward with great intensity. ‘The first is that the site was burnt and seems to have been abandoned after a battle. The lower walls are discoloured by burning and there are carbon deposits at ground level. We found several unburied skeletons with axes in their skulls and many more bodies that were left unburied. This is so unusual that we must assume that the site was completely abandoned and burnt after being taken in an attack.’

Before I had time to digest this astonishing information, Perci rolled on.

‘The second thing is that it was under construction at the time when it was abandoned, or at least they were expanding the andenes, the terraces. Because some terraces are half-built we can see how they made them – not least that they usually started with the bottom terrace and then built upwards. But there’s a curious discrepancy. Not only was it still being built at the time that it was abandoned, but they were making some very odd alterations to the original structure.’

He showed me a photo. A doorway constructed in conventional classic Inca style had been filled in with the quicker rough pirca stonework usually associated with lower-grade buildings, to turn the ground above into a terrace as well. It was as if a desperate attempt was being made to turn every available inch of land into an agriculturally useful resource – even what had been a residence. In architectural terms it was quite clearly a bodged job, and I recalled being surprised by the blocked doorways seventeen years before.

Perci paused. By now it was getting late and most of his colleagues had left. From his high office window we could see the sodium lights of Cuzco flickering below.

‘The third point is the pottery.’ Perci was presenting his evidence in a very deliberate way and I could sense that we were close to a summing-up. I remembered the shards of ceramics Roddy and I had seen lying everywhere on the surface of the uncleared ruins. ‘The design of the pottery is in the high aristocratic style of the Inca court at Cuzco, but manufactured using much coarser material – the clay which is only available locally in the Vilcabamba, with its grano grueso, coarse grain.’

Perci sat back and gave sentence. ‘So what we have, as a proposal, is that this, just like Machu Picchu, was originally a classic Inca site, built perhaps by Topa Inca, designed for the pleasure of the nobility with only a few terraces for select cultivation of crops – possibly coca, as the terraces are so narrow – and with quick access to lower heights to provide the Inca and his court with more jungle produce. It had its own town of servants at a discreet distance.’

‘But it does also look from our investigations as if the site was still being occupied in the last days of the rump Inca Empire as well, when they were on the run from the Spanish. This would explain why they were trying so hard to extend the terraces. What had once been luxury gardens for a court on holiday, used perhaps for a few months each year, had now to become subsistence terraces for a court permanently in exile – particularly a priesthood in exile, as my feeling is that this was used in the later stages as a religious centre.’

‘The pottery suggests that the later Incas, while wanting to use the same designs they were accustomed to, were now forced to make them with the local coarser clay that was all that was now available, rather than the finer material from back in Cuzco.’

I thought about this. Choquequirao makes up a rough triangle with Cuzco and Vitcos, and it is equally difficult to get to from both. It was perfectly conceivable that Manco and his successors, while nervous about using Machu Picchu, as it was too close to the Spanish at Cuzco, could still have used this other remote site above the Apurímac during the years of retreat. It might well have been a central focus for the revival of Incaic religious customs that seems to have occurred in the reign of Titu Cusi between 1560 and 1570, when the Vilcabamba became an isolationist state. There was a theory that the young Tupac Amaru, the last Emperor of all, might even have been brought up there: we know that he was made a priest in his early years and Choquequirao would have been a more suitable place to raise a future Inca than the jungle city of Old Vilcabamba.

‘What about the burning?’ I asked.

Perci gave the Gallic shrug common to all honest archaeologists. There was no written evidence of such an event ever having taken place (indeed, there was no contemporary written evidence relating to Choquequirao at all). The burning might have happened in the chaotic dissolution of the Empire. Who knew?

I had my instinctive supposition for this: towards the end of the Vilcabamba rump state, as the Spanish closed in on Tupac’s forces further north, the priests at Choquequirao must have become more and more isolated. The Chachapoyans in their service town of Pinchiyoq Unu could quite easily have revolted at having to service the Incas’ ritual centre, just as we knew that their fellow displaced countrymen had tried to attack Manco on his retreat from Ollantaytambo. In the rioting that followed, the priests would have been killed, left unburied (a final desecration), and the site torched before the Chachapoyans presumably returned to their native homelands. It would have been a final reprisal for the enforced slave labour they had endured for generations. The Spanish would have known nothing about the whole affair, and indeed would have had no reason to go near Choquequirao, as their military campaign took them much further north, into the forests of the deep Vilcabamba where they pursued Tupac Amaru.

After many years of puzzling over the mystery of Choquequirao, I felt that at last I had, if not an answer, at least a working hypothesis.

*

The Cross Keys was a peculiar location, not only because it was an English pub in the middle of Cuzco (its upper rooms looking out directly over the square) but because, as the owner Barry Walker said, it seemed to be a meeting-place for just about everyone on the planet. It felt a bit like the bar in Star Wars where intergalactic species cohabit the same space without actually talking to each other. Greek tour parties collided with American slackers, hip Limeños and study groups led by earnest European academics, mashed together by the noise from a huge television above the bar, copious drinks and the noise floating up from the Plaza de Armas below.

Barry had many of the traditional qualities of a British publican (thickset, bluff manner, ‘have another drink’), and many that weren’t, not least a passion for tropical birds that had made him one of the foremost experts on the Manu wildlife parks, where he led study groups. He was also a passionate Manchester United supporter in a country where this aroused less antipathy than at home – indeed, I had already been asked to give detailed descriptions of the winning of the Triple Crown to several interested Peruvians. Now I had to repeat it all for Barry.

Barry had heard of my earlier trips and we talked a little of them; he wanted me to meet a legendary traveller who was in the bar that night, the writer Tobias Schneebaum, with whom he had been making a film in the jungle.

I knew Schneebaum’s story, which was, to say the least, unusual. Tobias had travelled into the jungle in 1955. His experiences had been traumatic and it had taken him years to assimilate them, as so often with South American travellers. Only in 1969 did he finally publish what became a classic of jungle literature, Keep the River on your Right. In it he described how he had lived with a Peruvian jungle tribe called the Akarama for eight years, participating in homosexual and cannibalistic rites.

The book caused a sensation. It blew away any last vestige of romantic mysticism about the life-style of such Amazonian tribes, and Tobias’ delay in writing the book meant that he hit the 1969 zeitgeist spot on. A generation reared on the ethos of the sixties could immediately see both the appeal and the challenge: it was one thing to survive the tribal excesses of Woodstock or Monterey, but in the jungle the drugs were tougher, the nakedness perpetual and you could no longer spend weekends back with your parents to rest up. This was the logical extension of the hippy lifestyle and disillusioned travellers headed for the Amazon with Schneebaum’s book in their pocket, along with Castaneda’s books on Don Juan and plenty of Rizlas.

But Tobias himself had never returned to the Amazon – until now. Two enterprising New York film-makers, Laurie and David Shapiro, had persuaded him to go back, forty-five years after leaving. Barry had been their local guide (and enthusiastic fan – for Barry, as for so many, it had been Tobias’ book that lured him to the Amazon in the first place) and they had all just returned to Cuzco together. Barry pointed Tobias out to me, a small shrunken figure sitting hunched up like a toad on one of the benches, almost lost in the crowd of travellers in their loud fleeces.

We went over to join him. It was disconcerting to hear him speak. Tobias had lived in New York most of his life and had the manners and accent of an old Manhattan homosexual who had never left the Upper West Side. Just as Warhol used to do in old documentaries (and although I didn’t ask him if they had been friends, Tobias seemed to share much of the Warholian world-view and attitude), he would pronounce on things very slowly and without looking anyone in the eye. ‘William Burroughs came to see me once. [Long pause.] He said my book was the only book by another writer he had wished he had written himself. [Long pause.] But he was so boring … all he wanted to do was to talk about drugs.’ Tobias pronounced ‘drugs’ as ‘drergs’ with a long, contemptuous exhalation. Barry brought him another drink. ‘Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques? Of course it’s a great book. But Lévi-Strauss was never honest about his homosexuality. I was always honest about the boys I slept with in the jungle.’

Tobias had found the experience of going back to the village in the Peruvian Amazon unnerving. He had expected (indeed hoped) that no one would recognise him. But some of the people who had known him as a young man did indeed remember him when they came face to face and – the most mortifying detail of all for Tobias – told him that he had been a terrible hunter.

We talked of the Vilcabamba and of the Incas’ last refuge there. A girl who’d joined our group knew nothing of this final drawn-out penumbral stage in Inca history, with a court in exile in the mountains. ‘How sad,’ she said. Tobias sniffed loudly to get attention, then paused to give judgement. ‘Sad? Is it sad really? I don’t think it’s very sad.’ He lapsed into silence and seemed to sink back into himself, his neck almost visibly withdrawing. Not long after, saying that he was still shaky after his visit to the jungle, he went to bed.

Two memorable conversations in one evening, and a prodigious amount of pisco sours on the house had fired me up. I stayed up late into the night talking with Barry. He had first arrived in Peru around the same time as me, in 1984, and had stayed in Cuzco all through the lean terrorist years when hardly anyone wanted to come. But now business was booming. The tourists would swing in, take the train to Machu Picchu and then quickly head on out for the next stage of their South American whistle-stop experience. There was talk of building a cable-car up to Machu Picchu from the railway station to make the process even faster. A helicopter service was already in place, so it was technically possible to fly to Cuzco in the morning, see the ruins and leave within twenty-four hours. And with the new landscape-format cameras, the tourists could take the same identical shots that much faster. Martin Chambi would have turned in his grave.

But the sheer accessibility of Machu Picchu meant that virtually no one went any deeper into the Inca heartland. The whole area further downriver – the Santa Teresa valley, the Vilcabamba region – that I had explored before was still associated with terrorism and (just as much a deterrent) required quite a bit of work to get to. The excellent local guide-book, Exploring Cusco by Peter Frost, said of the route from Yanama to Choquequirao which we had taken years before that ‘The terrain is so rugged and the canyons are so infested with a vicious biting insect called pumahuacachi (‘makes the puma cry’) that it is not advisable to try.’ This reluctance to penetrate beyond Machu Picchu had been exacerbated by a terrible landslide the previous year, which had been far more devastating for the area than all the attentions of the Sendero Luminoso.

The landslide had happened in a tributary valley of the Urubamba, the Aobamba, the very same valley we had descended on that hallucinatory day when we had discovered Llactapata. I had always been struck by its beauty. But the valley-floor had not only been swept away – it had deposited itself in the body of the main Urubamba valley below to disastrous effect, causing an unwanted dam and a resulting flood, obliterating the hydroelectric station, where we ourselves had once been suspected of being terrorists, and destroying the town of Santa Teresa, where we had begun so many journeys.

It had also swept away the railway below Machu Picchu, cutting the lifeline of the peoples of the lowland who could no longer travel up and down from the jungle with their produce. Ironically, the landslide had neatly managed to avoid the profitable tourist section of railway between Cuzco and Machu Picchu, and cynics maintained that this was why the lower section would never now be rebuilt.

I later heard a graphic account from a schoolteacher of what had happened to the very last train to be travelling up from Quillabamba before the landslide struck. Apparently the driver saw that the river was drying out as the train ascended. Realising with great prescience what must have happened to cause the sudden drought, he stopped the train and got the passengers to climb as high as they could above the bank of the river, some passengers apparently complaining vociferously about the inconvenience. They were just in time to hear the Urubamba surmount the dam caused by the landslide higher up the valley, and with a roar, it sent a solid sheet of water crashing down below. The little red-and-orange train which I had travelled on so regularly up and down the line was swept away. The railway track was left twisted like a hosepipe. Not a single passenger died. I only hoped they’d given the driver a medal.

Luckily the same instincts (an ancient Andean reading of the signs of a landslide) had saved the people of Santa Teresa, who had also fled their homes for higher ground and survived the flood. Their houses had been destroyed. The government had initially promised them a rebuilding programme for their village and the return of the railway. President Fujimori had personally promised that ‘Peru would not be defeated by El Niño’ (for it was assumed, like many disasters that year, that the changing climatic conditions in the South Pacific were at fault).

However, all these good intentions had quickly evaporated. As I drew into Ollantaytambo on the train the next day, I saw the evacuated Santa Teresa villagers living in tents by the side of the track. It looked as if their exile was becoming a permanent one. They were completely lost in the higher climate of the Ollantaytambo valley, where they could no longer grow the crops they were accustomed to. It would never have happened under the Incas, for their system of mitamayo, of transporting peoples to different parts of the Empire, however brutal it might be, was at least always careful to put the mitimaes into a similar climate and altitude – a fact which had deeply impressed the Spanish chronicler Cieza de León. At Ollantaytambo I had a strange encounter on the station platform. I’d got in early that morning on the dawn train and was catching up with a late breakfast of tamales, boiled corn dumplings wrapped in leaves which came either duke or salado, sour or sweet, in a way that was impossible to tell until you bit into them, like dim sum. With some coffee from a thermos, they made a great breakfast and the morning sun was warming me up after a frosty start from Cuzco.

A man loomed up over me as I squatted on the platform. He had heard from a friend that I was coming and wanted to talk to me. In an American accent, he introduced himself as Paolo Greer and handed me his card, which said ‘Research and Exploration, Carabaya and Sandia provinces’ and gave both a Peruvian address and one in Alaska.

Paolo had spent years of his life chasing after possible old mine-workings in Peru, endlessly criss-crossing the land and applying the same prospecting techniques to look for old maps in libraries. He was a tall man in a baseball cap, with a disconcertingly firm gaze. He looked about the same age as Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas and reminded me a little of him, particularly the intense, very focused eyes and slightly wild presence.

Later he sent me an e-mail describing his wanderings: ‘It is as if I have been a year or two away from Lima, and perhaps a decade south of Alaska. My wanderings sometimes make me feel that I have lived some lives already, in this same ragged body.’

He had to take the train downriver later that same morning on some urgent prospecting business and so we only had a short while to talk. Paolo spoke in a compressed, elated way, pouring out information in such a condensed rush that I sometimes needed to go back through it all with him, which added to the urgency of his tone as he told me what he knew. It was clear that he badly wanted to tell someone who would listen and appreciate what he had found.

Paolo had searched through countless Peruvian and American libraries looking for the maps that old prospectors and mining companies might have left behind. He did this on a commercial basis to see if modern mining techniques might re-open deposits. One of these searches had led by chance to a radical new discovery concerning Machu Picchu.

Current orthodoxy held that the first mention of the names Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu had been by the Frenchman Charles Wiener in 1875, who put their names on the map without visiting them. Tantalisingly he wrote, ‘They [the local Peruvians] also spoke to me of other towns, of Huaina Picchu and of Matcho Picchu [sic], and I resolved to make a final expedition towards the East,’ but he never did and so has remained just a footnote in the history of exploration. Wiener’s report had helped Hiram Bingham make his ‘scientific discovery’ of the ruins of 1911. However, Paolo had come across evidence that the sites may have been known about earlier and that there had been considerable mining activity near them.

In 1872 an enterprising Cuzqueño from a good family, Baltasar de la Torre, had led an expedition through Paucartambo to try to find an easier passage from Cuzco to the Madre de Dios jungle. He died in the attempt, killed by thirty-five arrows in his body when he met with resistance from the local tribes. With him was a German engineer, Herman Göhring, who survived the expedition and published a book in 1874, Informe Supremo de Paucartambo, a book now so rare that even the descendants of the La Torre family had no copy.

Paolo had heard about the book from that same La Torre family, who still lived in Cuzco, and had immediately realised that it could contain interesting information about old mines. For many years he was unable to find it. Then one source led him to believe that the Biblioteca Nacional in Lima might have a copy. He went there: nothing was listed in the index. With typical persistence, he insisted on seeing the Director of the Library who, after lengthy consultation with his staff, denied that they had the book. Paolo went back to his original source, a bibliophile’s reference guide published by G. K. Hall, a set of xeroxed library cards which he had painstakingly combed for a reference.

This stated that the Library had both the Informe Supremo de Paucartambo and a set of manuscript letters from Göhring about his work. After days of searching, the Library finally found both. With staff assistants to either side of him, and wearing plastic gloves, Paolo was allowed to go through letters looking for references to mines, Göhring’s area of speciality. When he came to the book itself, he made an astonishing discovery.

At this point in his telling of the story, Paolo was almost hopping with excitement and he pulled out of a bag some copies of the maps in Göhring’s book which he always carried around with him. I could see at once that the map covered not only the area around Paucartambo but also the Urubamba valley and there, clearly marked above the river, were both Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, the first known mapped reference to either.

In a further bibliographical twist that Borges would have enjoyed (it was remarkably like an episode in his classic story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ about an imaginary country which only appears in a single 1902 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), Paolo later discovered that while a few other copies of the book were in existence, and while there had only been one edition, only a few copies actually contained the map.

It was no accident that Göhring had included the Urubamba area in his survey. For Paolo, fired up by this initial find, soon realised that the whole area around Machu Picchu had been much more heavily mined than had ever been imagined, and this was why it had attracted the interest of the German engineer.

Paolo discovered that the Torontoy hacienda estate which stretched almost from Ollantaytambo down to Machu Picchu had been owned for many years in the nineteenth century by one Augusto Berns. Berns had been convinced that there were possible mine-workings on his estate and in 1887 had formed an American company to try to exploit them, in the atmosphere favourable to foreign investment created after the War of the Pacific. Paolo had managed to track down the prospectus that Berns had issued to the company’s shareholders, entitled Prospecto de la Compañía Anónima Exploradora de las ‘Huacas Del Inca’ Limitada (Prospectus for the ‘Inca Stone’ Company Ltd). One of the stated aims of the company, in addition to exploiting old mine-workings, was to investigate old ruins as well (just as the Spanish after the Conquest had originally issued licences for the ‘mining’ of treasure from pre-Columbian sites).

On the map that Berns had issued to potential stockholders, a copy of which Paolo again showed me, the site of Machu Picchu was marked as ‘Point Huaca del Inca’, ‘Point of the Inca Stone’, possibly a reference to the stone now known as the Intihuatana at the centre of Machu Picchu site which is thought to have sacred significance: as such, long after the abandonment of the city itself, it could have continued to be a place of local veneration for the Indians of the valley, who rarely forgot a huaca. So important was it to Berns that he even named the company after it.

Even without the evidence of the map, it seems inconceivable that a local landowner, with the stated aim of excavating old ruins for treasure and who lived in the valley for many years, should not at some stage have been told about and found what it took Bingham a mere day to do – and while, for obvious reasons, Berns might not have wanted to publicise his exploitation of Machu Picchu to the Peruvian government (given that the melted-down proceeds were probably being exported back to the United States), he could easily have systematically stripped the ruins of their treasure.

This would certainly explain one striking fact noted by George Eaton in his description of the tombs he excavated in 1912 – that not a single object of gold or silver had been left, as might have been expected in a tomb, and that only objects which were of archaeological, not financial value were to be found – ceramics, plain tupus and of course the skeletons themselves, wrapped in cloth. It could also explain the occasional post-Columbian artefacts that were found in the caves – a fragment of bovine bone, a peach stone, a steel implement – which could have been left by Berns’ organised teams of huaqueros as they worked through the caves. (Those same Western fragments have often since confused the issue of whether the Spanish did or did not know of Machu Picchu at the time of the Conquest – the persistent rumours of the ancient remains of a horse found at the site are another contributory, probably misleading, factor in this argument.)

Paolo and I had been talking so intensely that two trains had come and gone down the valley. Now the final and slowest train arrived, the local, which he had to take if he was to get downriver that day. He left me copies of his maps and a breakfast that had grown cold around me as I listened in fascination to his story – a story I later confirmed by going back to the original sources.

The idea that this section of the Urubamba was a heavily mined one well up to the end of the nineteenth century was quite at variance with the picture Bingham had always conjured up of a sleepy farming community of just a few homesteads, an area ‘which the Spaniards never saw and which was inaccessible to explorers of the mid-nineteenth century’. When Bingham had arrived at the site that is now Aguas Calientes, directly below Machu Picchu, he noted the presence of some ‘large iron wheels’, which he presumed to be ‘parts of a machine destined never to overcome the difficulties of being transported all the way to a sugar estate in the lower valley’. The machine had even given the site its local name – ‘La Máquina’. However, judging from Berns’ description, far from being for a distant sugar plantation, it was almost certainly part of the smelting equipment that Berns had installed for his mining works directly below Machu Picchu. It was only the recession at the very end of the nineteenth century that had caused such mining activities to fade away.

As so often in the story of the Vilcabamba, nothing was quite as it originally seemed.

*

Why is change so much more shocking for the traveller than for the inhabitant? Partly because for the inhabitant changes to a place can seem gradual and imperceptible, but also because the traveller is uniquely vulnerable to the foibles of his own memory. To see a place again after an interval of years is reassurance that part of your past survives. But having a fixed point of that memory whipped out from under you, like a rug, is for the same reason peculiarly disorientating. The experiences of that long-ago summer (I thought of it as summer although it was a Peruvian winter) became yet more dream-like now that so many familiar landmarks of the valley had been washed away by the flood.

Going into the Ollantaytambo hostel, the albergue, where I had once performed magicians’ tricks, was equally disconcerting. Much had changed. Robert Randall had died in a terrible accident. He had been bitten by a neighbour’s dog and contracted rabies, an endemic curse of the mountains. His widow Wendy had been forced by their landlords to move the hostel to different and smaller premises, almost on the station platform.

Adela, who had been a teenager then, was now married with kids. She instantly knew who I was when I jokingly checked in as ‘El Mago’. Nathan, the five-year-old whose birthday-party it had been, and his younger brother Joaquin were now college students in the States, although as luck would have it, they had just come back to Cuzco for the vacation. They remembered the party well and brought out old photos to show me.

Indeed, the party had become something of a landmark for them all, perhaps because it harked back to a time when Randall was still alive. Wendy went through the photos with me: it was only seeing them that made me realise how much she herself had changed. Now she had short grey hair – in the photos she had black hair, worn loose and long in the style of the late seventies.

Nathan reminded me of some details about the party that, with a child’s intense vision, he had remembered better than I had: I had taken sweets out of his ear; the dove that flew out of the bowler hat had been white with a black streak on its wing. Most of the photos were naturally of the kids, not of me, but my hands were extended into the frame, either extracting or delivering sweets. In the background was the clown, who Wendy told me had died of Aids. ‘I’ve never known a community like the one we had around Ollantaytambo for so many deaths,’ said Wendy sadly, ‘or divorces and separations. Most of these couples are no longer together. But then I’ve never known such a community for births either.’

Ann Kendall had apparently also been in Ollantaytambo recently and her husband had also recently died. Over the years she had continued with the idea that had so impressed me at Cusichaca – the rebuilding of the Inca canal system. Now she had done the same in the hills above Ollantaytambo, but to a much more dramatic extent, re-irrigating some 160 hectares (around 400 acres) with restored pre-Columbian canals from the glacial melt-waters, and developing an extended scheme to help the local community – she had persuaded them, for instance, to use a simple form of plastic greenhouse, which at high altitudes could radically extend the growing season.

I learnt an astonishing statistic from this new project of hers: before the Conquest, Ollantaytambo had cultivated 6000 hectares of land, enough to feed 106,000 people, far more than its actual population of 10,000. With the resultant surplus, Ollantaytambo was able to be a very successful exporter of its produce. Yet today, while the town still had about the same size of population, it struggled to grow enough even to feed itself.

In her writings, Ann lamented the way in which the Spanish had been so obsessed with mining and lucrative coca plantations down in the jungle that they had neglected the careful Inca infrastructure of repair and administration that had kept the canals and terraces of the High Andes maintained – a problem exacerbated when so many of the Quechua Indians had died in the epidemics of Western disease or in those self-same mines. Almost 500 years after the Conquest, communities were still struggling to restore productivity to anything near Inca levels.

While other explorers and archaeologists had been concerned with putting flags on maps, preferably with their own names flapping from them, Ann had quietly and patiently spent decades building up working relationships with small communities to help them. It was a genuinely heroic achievement.

*

They seemed like a perfectly normal tour group, a little older in profile maybe (but then Machu Picchu often tends to get older, wealthier tour groups), and an amiable enough bunch to share a dinner with that evening at the Ollantaytambo albergue. We were sitting around at the end of the meal and the older men started talking in a way it was clear they did each night, taking turns to describe the emotions they had experienced on that day of their journey – how they had felt as they went around Machu Picchu, how hard going up a bit of the trail was for them, what they thought they were gaining from the experience. So far, so reasonable.

Then it was the turn of the guy with the beard. ‘I took an acid tab just as I went into the ruins,’ he said, ‘and immediately I realised that the entrance gate into the city is also a portal.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘It’s a portal to the crystal city which is below Machu Picchu.’

Everyone looked at him as if he was being completely serious.

The ascendancy of the New Age philosophies in the years since I had first been there has led to a huge growth in such thinking. This has been exacerbated, if unwittingly, by the notion of the Incas’ own sense of ‘sacred geography’, on which much scholarly work had been done – particularly on the idea of the ceques, the imaginary lines that the Incas thought radiated out from Cuzco and which passed through a set of huacas, or shrines. Each ceque was the responsibility of one of the panacas, the royal lineages, who would maintain the huacas along its length.

However, this very specific idea has been wilfully distorted by some New Age advocates, who like to superimpose on the Incas a spirituality that they feel the modern world has lost. No one has yet taken ley-line directions from Glastonbury to Machu Picchu, but only because the string isn’t long enough.

Machu Picchu is a deeply uplifting place and any personal spiritual fulfilment visitors find there is, of course, all to the good. The problem only arises when they assume that the Incas must have found Machu Picchu as purely spiritual a place as they do. It has become even more difficult to persuade such people that Machu Picchu was not principally a sacred place for the Incas, given that they have such a longing and hunger for it to be just that.

Yet in a conversation I had with Elva Torres Pino, an archaeologist who had been doing some limited excavations at Machu Picchu, she was at pains to describe the site both in terms of Pachacuti’s estate (the ‘winter quarters of the court’) and as ‘a political/administrative centre along a trade route down to the jungle’. She made no mention of religion.

Fernando de la Rosa and his wife Frances were also staying at the hostel. Fernando had helped mount one of the first exhibitions of Martin Chambi’s photos, and was himself a distinguished photographer and novelist. We played the old Peruvian game of sapo in the hostel’s back yard, where you try to throw coins from a decent distance into the mouth of a metal frog (the game was the subject of one of Chambi’s best-loved photos). Like such equally nonsensical games as petanque or shove-ha’penny, it was curiously addictive, particularly if one ever achieved the metallic slither of getting a coin down the frog’s throat.

Fernando was a big, shaggy man, full of enthusiasm for everything, from where to find the most authentic sort of ají, Peruvian garlic sauce, to the more obscure works of Roland Barthes. I told him about the psychic voyagers and their crystal city underneath Machu Picchu, and he amused me at once by describing how he and Frances had also been to Machu Picchu that day and had heard some strange chanting and music coming from behind a rock. On closer examination, it had turned out to be a group from the States. Some were lying down on the Inca stones trying to hug them (with difficulty, as Inca stonework is angular and not designed to be hugged), while others circled around playing maracas. Fernando had dubbed them ‘the Cult of the Maracas’.

Over trout from the local river that evening, he told another even better tale. It had begun when he was explaining a phenomenon I’d often wondered about in the High Andean villages – the preponderance of empty, abandoned houses. This was not due to depopulation. Rather it was because the Quechuans, on marriage, would always prefer to build a new house than occupy an old one, in the same way as the English dislike buying second-hand beds.

As a young man, Fernando had gone to live for three years in a remote village in the Valle Sagrado, not that far from where we were now. As an outsider, the same rules did not apply to him, and he was given his pick of the abandoned houses to live in.

One day, one of the village elders who spoke Spanish (Fernando had yet to learn Quechua) found Fernando by the stream doing his own washing. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, ‘it’s not our custom for men ever to do their own washing.’ A young girl was deputised to do the washing for him. That night she was also at the house to cook for him and it was clear, although she couldn’t speak Spanish, to sleep with him as well.

Fernando was embarrassed. He went back to the elder to explain that in his culture it was normal to be able to speak to a partner before developing a relationship. ‘What do you need to speak to her for?’ asked the village elder. ‘Just throw her on the bed and get on with it.’

For a while Fernando and the girl co-existed uneasily in the house, in separate bedrooms. Apart from their complete inability to communicate, she unnerved him by coming into his room each morning and waking him by savagely pulling his hair. It was clear she wanted sex. In the life of the village, it was considered shameful not to be fecund. The sooner the girl could become pregnant, the happier she would be.

Finally Fernando succumbed to this irresistible pressure (this was the way he put it). They lived together for three years. But to her mortification she never became pregnant. Fernando thought then that this was due to him, but found out later that this was not the case. ‘It was a terrible shame for her. I felt very sad about it.’

The time came when Fernando had to leave the village and return to Lima. For him, as for Tobias Schneebaum, the immersion in a completely different culture had been a crucial rite of passage – the moment, in Schneebaum’s words, ‘when my life began’. I asked Fernando if he, like Tobias, had ever been back.

‘Once I drove in my car to a place where I could see the village. I stopped the car and looked at it for a long while. But I didn’t want to set foot in it again.’ It reminded me of the final passage at the end of the Gormenghast trilogy when Titus Groan returns to within sight of his ancestral castle after his wanderings, just to reassure himself it is still there – but then leaves.

Fernando had written a book called El Camino del Mono (The Way of the Monkey). It was a picaresque account of a young orphaned Limeño who, after living the low life in Peru as a salesman and frequenter of prostitutes, then lights out for Finland: there he proceeds to live the high life, courtesy of a rich wife and a compliant bourgeoisie unready for the street-fighting business tactics of a Peruvian cholo. What struck me most on reading it was the restlessness it displayed – the need of the Peruvian intellectual to escape imaginatively from Peru.

A recent literary periodical to which Fernando had contributed consisted of nothing but replies by leading Peruvian artists and writers to one simple question: ‘Why have you left Peru?’ (Fernando himself now lived most of the year in the United States). The answer was rarely a political one – repression of intellectuals had never occurred in Peru in the same way as it had in Argentina and Chile – but seemed more born of a febrile dissatisfaction, like the Finnish salmon Fernando talked about that needed to head out of the safe fjords and into the ocean.