For a week or so, it is true, there was competitive dancing. They were a strange looking bunch, short and squat, stomping around in their striped blankets and vaudeville bowlers, men and women, some even cloaked in the full skin of a llama performing their Andean flash dances, but in the end we had to do the right thing, and cede the turf to them. They claimed to be the indigenous stock, the true Canaanites from time immemorial. I wasn’t about to argue with them. Who is an Inca? Who is a Jew? If you say you’re an Inca, fine by me, you’re an Inca, as long as in return you respect my right to be whatever I decide I am, even the extraterrestrial who built these walls. Because up on that hill, there was no question that in their minds, we were the aliens come back to stake our claim on the rocks.

Still, there was no profit in fighting it. Under the circumstances, for practical reasons alone, it was obvious that in this instance we were the ones who must yield. I don’t blame those so-called Incas, Shmelke said, everyone has to make a living, they just couldn’t deal with the competition. I still regard Cusco as one of the best places we visited. I would recommend it with five stars if I were writing a guidebook, but I was in flight, I had no time for such indulgences, I was not a tourist, I was running for my life, and so I mounted my steed, my trusty wheelchair, and I led my flock down the hill to our next station, whatever it might be, taking along as a convert their best panpipe player, renamed Yehuda Puma. Even now, didi, he is busking in the street outside Kali’s temple, collecting rupees for our cause. The music penetrates my soul, my spirit, my anima, my neshama, you can feel within it the breath of life, struggling.

On the other hand, the worst place we stayed was our final stop in Africa—Western Sahara, not even a country, as far as I know, a territory ruled by Morocco, at least the part of it that our spaceship touched down on bearing our rocks. Thank God the good old reliable Mottel Patel stood out to receive us like a beacon even there, perched in the distance on those miles and miles of sand as far as the eye could see. Other than that, there was nothing there. Nothing! Gurnischt mit gurnischt, I’m telling you. Some tents, a few nomads shuffling around scratching their balls, Bedouins, Berbers—who knows what?—and camels. All the time my wheelchair was getting stuck in the camel hoo-ha. The only positive thing about the place, didi, was that it was like a frontier town in the old West from the cowboy shows, lawless. They never even heard the word extradition, they had no diplomatic relations with anyone, nobody bothered to even recognize them, there was no chance they would ever hand me over. But the place was so inhospitable to human habitation, like the landscape of that distant planet from which we Jews were said to have hauled down the stones of Sacsayhuamán, that at times I even considered turning myself in. Expatriate me, please, I’m begging you, turn me in, get me out of here. Anything is better than this. Think of all the treasure you can acquire from the Israelis to stuff into the carpet saddlebags of your camels in exchange for this old cripple with a long white beard stuck in an antiquated wheelchair. They didn’t know much about the world, these tribals, but one thing they did know for a fact: flip a Jew upside down and shake him, and the coins pour out of every hole, enough to adorn all the wives of Arabia.