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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

Andy took off running, wending his way through the villagers who were making their way back to their homes. He made it to the far side of the village and to the steep hill that made up the back side of the community.

“Oh my God!” Andy exclaimed.

He panned the camera over the steep back hill that had been cleared of underbrush and had terraces cuts into its sides. Long rows of food grew from each of the terraces. At the bottom of the hill, grazing behind a small fence were several animals.

Alpacas.

Andy turned at the sound of footsteps. A family was making their way to the small wooden house nearby. A man, a woman, and a small girl.

The girl was holding something in her hands.

It was red and corded.

Andy couldn’t believe his eyes.

It was a quipu.

Andy’s head was about to explode, when he heard a voice behind him. He turned.

“I hope you understand.”

Martin Lefbrevor was holding a spear, pointing it at Andy’s chest.

Andy gulped.

“You can’t show that footage to anyone,” Martin said. “These people’s lives will be destroyed. Researchers, historians—no one will ever leave them alone. They could contract diseases, just like they did five hundred years ago, and be wiped out for good.”

“So it’s true?” Andy said.

“Yes,” Martin said. “These are the last true Incans.”

Andy thought back to what he’d said in his interview with Libby.

Some people believe Paititi is a lost city of gold, while others think it’s simply the last refuge of the Incas after they were conquered by the Spanish. Others believe Paititi to be a lost people, the last pure ancestors of the Incas.

This was Paititi.

62

62

seattle
february 26, 11:53 a.m.

“What about over there?” Gina asked.

I said, “I thought we tried it over there.”

“No, we put the other end table there.”

Gina and I had been arranging—and rearranging—furniture for the past three hours.

I said, “It looks good where it is.”

Gina shook her head. “Look at my diagram again. It looks better on the computer.”

A few years earlier, such domestication would have driven me crazy, but now, in all honesty, I was enjoying it. Thinking about how much time and energy Gina put into where our new couch and our new end tables should go gave me that hot-cocoa-belly feeling.

It had been a little over six months since Gina and I nearly had our heads cut off in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

We’d stayed with the villagers that night, before heading back to base camp at first light—the villagers who, I would later learn from Andy, were the last true Incas.