Turn Right at Machu Picchu

After seven years of hideous fortune, Manco finally caught a break. The Spaniards who had chased him from Vilcabamba received word of bigger problems in Cusco and A abruptly abandoned their pursuit. Manco returned to his jungle capital in exile and entered his first period of relative calm since he’d fled Cusco. He was able to split his time between Vilcabamba and Vitcos undisturbed. Attacks on Spanish travelers resumed with surprising ease.

In Cusco, a civil war had broken out between the Pizarro brothers and Diego de Almagro, one of Francisco Pizarro’s two original business partners in the conquest of Peru. Almagro had arrived late to the bloodbath at Cajamarca and received only a small fraction of the bonanza from Atahualpa’s ransom; he also deeply resented the title that the king of Spain had bestowed upon his partner. In revenge, Almagro seized control of Cusco. The Pizarro brothers overran Almagro’s army in a battle outside of the city, after which Almagro was captured and executed in the Plaza de Armas. A group of surviving Almagristas retaliated by bursting into a dinner party at Francisco Pizarro’s house in Lima and chasing down the sixty-three-year-old conqueror of Peru. Pizarro killed two of his attackers before his own throat was cut. His last act, William Prescott wrote, was “tracing a cross with his finger on the bloody floor,” which he was bending over to kiss as he received a blow to the head that ended his life.

In an early example of the country’s magical realist politics, seven of Pizarro’s murderers sought asylum with Manco. The Inca allowed them to live in comfort at Vitcos, and in return they instructed their hosts in horsemanship, European weaponry and recreational games. While playing horseshoes in 1544, one of Manco’s guests pulled out a dagger and stabbed the emperor from behind. The Spaniards, who had plotted the regicide in the hope of ingratiating themselves with the new post-Pizarro regime in Cusco, crowded around the Inca and knifed him repeatedly. They mounted their horses and fled, but Manco’s men discovered them hiding in a thatched hut, which was set afire. The assassins were shot with arrows and clubbed to death as they attempted to flee. Three days after the attack, the great rebel Inca died at Vitcos of his wounds.

For the next two decades, Manco’s sons Sayri Tupac and Titu Cusi played political cat-and-mouse with the Spaniards, who in a radical strategic shift, tried to co-opt the native leaders rather than exterminate them. Sayri Tupac eventually accepted a Spanish offer to leave Vilcabamba in return for a grand estate; he later converted to Roman Catholicism. Titu Cusi took his interest in the conquerors’ religion further. He allowed priests to establish a church near Vitcos; when they burned down the White Rock temple, they left behind the clues—via their hagiographer Father Calancha—that ultimately started Bingham on his search for the Lost City of Incas.

The independent Inca state remained alive until Titu Cusi’s sudden death in 1571, when the title of Inca passed to a third son of Manco, named Tupac Amaru. The new Spanish viceroy in Cusco noted a chill in diplomatic relations with Vilcabamba and decided to resolve the ambiguous political situation. On the Sunday before Easter 1572, he declared a “war of fire and blood” against the rebel Inca state.

At a newly constructed fort called Huayna Pucará, built along the road that John and I were following to Espiritu Pampa, the natives again plotted to drop boulders on their enemies. This time, the Spaniards seized the high ground immediately. Tupac Amaru fled deeper into the jungle, to what was now the last city of the Incas.

“This is a trail almost like Bingham would have seen,” John said as we approached the onetime fort at Huayna Pucará. The cloud forest we walked through was thick with creatures: birds, lizards and lots of very big spiders with webs like hammocks. The path was just wide enough for two mules to pass each other. “Of course, Bingham would have had about half the clearance we’ve got. Imagine how daunting that was. To come into the forest and the clouds and the mist and think, Oh shit—where are we going?”

Walking briefly in the lead, I spotted a red snake with black and yellow stripes. I froze and quickly ran through the serpent-identification ditty that I’d learned researching a how-not-to-die-in-the-woods story a few years earlier:

If red touches black/You’re okay, Jack
If red touches yellow/You’re a dead fellow

The trail was a roller coaster; long, steep downhills broken up by sudden inclines. Bingham had raved about what wonderful agricultural country this was—he saw eighteen-foot stalks of corn—and I had equated that in my mind with the farms surrounding the land-grant universities of the Midwest. “I had sort of hoped things would level off by now,” I confessed to John.

We stopped outside the gate of a farm owned by the Condore family. The father sent for his son Samuel, who he said could lead us up to the top of Huayna Pucará. John had been here years ago and seen piles of boulders exactly as the Incas had left them before fleeing under fire from the Spaniards. “They’re like cannonballs, lined up along the ridge!” he told me excitedly. Personally, I’d have preferred to skip another thousand-foot climb and descent to see some rocks that Bingham hadn’t even known existed, but John kept staring up at the ridge in anticipation, so I kept quiet. As sweat seeped down to my knees, another Condore son stood close enough to us that I could feel his breath and told John four times, in a voice that I wouldn’t describe as friendly, how much he liked his watch and wanted to buy it.

Samuel arrived and led us up a hill with a near-vertical slope. The ridge had recently been cleared by fire, and the soil was the blackest I’d ever seen, with the crumbly consistency of coffee grounds. Irregular rows of corn were being weeded by hand; most of the weeds were ferns. I struggled on all fours, grabbing any available tree or, more often, burned-out tree stump, as Samuel raced ahead in his unfastened galoshes.

After what seemed to me the sort of climb that should end with a champagne toast, we reached the top. No boulders. John suggested we move over to a higher peak, where he was certain he’d seen heaps of rocks the last time he was here. Reading manuscripts at my desk in New York, I had often puzzled over the term “knife-edge ridge.” Now I could see clearly that it was the crest of a very, very steep hill where one had to walk as if on a balance beam. We ascended to the higher peak, but there was nothing there, either. “It looks like some kids pushed the rocks off,” John said, gazing over the edge. “They’re all gone.”

“Well, it’s possible,” he said, glancing sideways at the thick brush. Visibility down the hillside was about eighteen inches. “But it’s a lot easier and probably faster if I just lead you back.”

“It’s about time you had a go at this, Mark,” John said. He reached behind his shoulder, unsheathed his machete from its leather holster and held it up like Excalibur. Yes! I’d been begging him for a machete tutorial since we left Cusco. “All right, then. Make sure you strike the target at thirty degrees.” Here he unleashed a series of samurai strokes that sliced easily through inch-thick branches and vines. In seconds, a pile of vegetation lay at his feet.

Any trail that existed was invisible to me, but John, who saw corridors where most people would see impenetrable walls of bush, patiently nudged me in the right direction each time I got stumped. It will perhaps not come as a complete shock that I was not a natural with the machete. Mostly, I hacked branches four or five times before the sticks finally snapped under their own weight. Those times that I did hit the branch squarely, though, the feeling was electric—like hitting a perfect tee shot.

For about ten minutes we advanced a few feet at a time, Luke and Yoda slicing through the wilds of Dagobah. We reached a point where the trail seemed to fork higher in two directions. I chose left, stepped confidently onto what I quickly realized was not earth but three feet of grass-covered air, and did a perfect banana-peel pratfall onto my butt. The machete spun upward like a juggler’s bowling pin and landed about six inches from my thigh.

The foliage thickened as we moved lower. The grass was waist high and ferns towered a foot over my head. Bamboo had crept into every free inch of ground space. Vines reached out and grabbed me around the neck and ankles. After falling down for the eighth time, I stopped counting. Solid ground was still difficult to recognize, and I had to poke the earth with my walking stick ahead of each step. John stopped every few seconds to cut trail, switching hands with the machete occasionally. “Otherwise your arm gets tired,” he said.

Visibility may have been limited, but the cloud forest smelled wonderful. Herbal odors drifted through the air: wild mint, sage and thyme. At a brief clearing, John pointed out a waterfall across the valley, a thin stripe of white water cascading hundreds of feet down a hillside crammed with what looked like a million heads of broccoli. I wondered where all that water could possibly come fr—

John dropped his machete, covered one eye with his hand and rocked back and forth, moaning. He’d sliced through a skinny branch that whiplashed back at him. Between deep breaths he exhaled two words: “Sloppy work.”

John turned and brought his face close to mine, one eye clamped shut. His other eye had welled up with tears, and clear mucus was pouring out of his nose; he looked like he’d just been teargassed. He tilted his head back slightly and pried his eyelid open with two fingers. “How does it look? Any bleeding?”

The gash looked like the kind a kid gets on his elbow when he falls hard on the sidewalk, and then runs to his mother, who turns white and wonders if her son needs stitches. Like that—except it was in John’s eye. Just looking at it, a nauseating Swiss-cheese taste crept up the back of my throat.

Had it been me who had walked into the branch—which two minutes earlier would have seemed to both of us an infinitely more likely scenario—I suspect that I’d have been forcibly immobilized like a papoose and given an injection of morphine that William Burroughs might have waved off as too risky. John removed his backpack and rooted around for a moment. He pulled out a vintage black Guns N’ Roses bandanna and wrapped it over one eye, pirate-style.

For the first time on our trip, I considered the precariousness of the venture. We were still at least five hundred feet above the road, which was who knew how many miles—twenty? forty?—of hard walking from the nearest town in either direction. The trail down was steep and, from my perspective, utterly impenetrable. Dark clouds were rolling in. And John now had no depth perception.

“No, no, as long as the wound is clean we should be fine. Just pour a little water in it, would you?” He lay back, and I knelt behind him and dripped water from my bottle into his eye. I couldn’t help but notice we’d almost assumed the position of Michelangelo’s Pieta, with yours truly in the Virgin Mary role. John’s nose was still running from the pain. He winced as the water splashed into his eyeball, tilted his head up and blinked hard, then let his neck drop.

We walked on to our lunch rendezvous. Juvenal began to approach with his usual toothy grin but took one look at John, spun around and started to unpack the medical kit. John wanted the eyedrops, and I pulled out dozens of tiny boxes labeled in various languages searching for them. One was marked GOTAS OTICAS. Gotas, I knew from listening to bad Latin love songs in New York, were drops or tears. I remembered from my days working at a men’s fashion magazine that ottica was the Italian word for an eyewear shop. Italian and Spanish, as any professor of Romance languages can tell you, are pretty similar. Getting to my feet, I marveled at the human brain’s ability to pull together such disparate knowledge in moments of crisis.

We consumed our enormous lunch slowly. The four team members, who usually wandered off as we ate, sat nearby in a tight group, watchingus as they would a Ping-Pong match: John, Mark, John, Mark. They were trying to decide if Señor John was still up to leading the expedition, because if he wasn’t, Señor Mark was in charge by default. No one was very excited about that possibility.

Around one-thirty, the clouds that had bounced around the corners of the sky most of the day congealed and swelled. We put on our waterproof jackets and pack covers and waited for the deluge. It didn’t take long.

If I had to choose one word to describe the cloud forest in a rainstorm, it would be slippery. Dusty dirt trails swell into gooey mudslides. Rocks take on boot-repellant properties. Pretty log bridges over gurgling streams are transformed into menacing frictionless cylinders, plotting to hurl careless walkers into the white water below. The jungle’s warm breath fogs up eyeglasses and creeps underneath Gore-Tex jackets, creating portable steam rooms. Once everything is hecho una sopa—soaked like a soup—the temperature drops.

We stopped at a spot called Vista Alegre, which means “Happy View.” Everyone parked together under the roof of a three-walled hut, kidding ourselves that the rain might let up. The sky was the color of an anvil. John sat in the corner, head down, rubbing his forehead through the black bandanna. Justo, a man whose charms do not include subtlety, kept shooting glances at me as he babbled in Quechua, evidently explaining how I’d seen a man with bad eyes and neglected to take proper precautions. Overwhelmed by the musk of six unwashed men in close quarters, I wandered off to sit beneath the eaves of the only other structure within our not-entirely-happy view—a one-room wood shack. For a long time I watched the angry rain fall on the hills and listened to the drops clattering on the steel roof. We had no choice but to camp for the night.

John disappeared into his tent at three and didn’t reappear until six. This was a bad sign. Justo always served tea at four. John loved afternoon tea. I ate the equivalent of three large buckets of movie popcorn by myself as Justo walked in a circle inside the cook tent, wearing a tight smile, hands clasped behind his back. When John arrived for dinner, he looked ill. He had a ski cap pulled down over the bad eye.

“John, I’m only going to say this one more time and then I promise to drop it. If you’re not better in the morning, I don’t care if you have to ride a mule back to Puquiura or find a roadhead somewhere and flag down a taxi to Cusco, I want you to go to the doctor.”

“I have a thousand dollars in cash in my backpack to pay these guys,” I said, “and I’d imagine that for that kind of money we could hire someone to give you a piggyback ride to Lima. Juvenal probably knows a shortcut, right? I can survive out here for a few days without you, and I can keep Mateo and Julián occupied with engrossing anecdotes about the capricious New York real estate market.”

John fought back a smile, which looked like it hurt. “There really isn’t anywhere to go,” he said. “We’re two days from the nearest road. But thank you. I think I’ll be okay in the morning.”

The next morning, despite having one eye that, with its big red dot, looked like the planet Jupiter, John declared himself fit for action. “Keep these in your pocket, just in case,” he said, handing me the eyedrops. We never spoke of the incident again.