I see their world as the gods would, for I’m shining a sun on it. Men and women in a village of small-windowed houses with pitched, tiled roofs are digging, sowing, harvesting. They fill baskets, load mules, weave and cook. They’re not only rubbing shoulders; they’re tumbling over one another. It would never be allowed in my world, where, since July 4, though we’ve been able to meet in groups of two households, indoors as well as out, we’re still being advised to keep our distance. But then their world, with all of its life, is etched on a conical gourd about three inches tall and two-and-three-quarter inches at its widest. I’m holding it in my hand, and training on it a pocket magnifier with a built-in LED light. The gourd rattles when I shake it; there are still seeds inside.

  I’ve had it since 2003, when I brought it back from my first trip to Peru, but my appreciation of the craft that went into it, as with my appreciation of so many things, has deepened recently. Thanks to the LED magnifier, I’ve spotted something on the gourd I hadn’t seen before. The villagers are bringing on new life in more ways than one: in the midst of the throng, there’s a woman who is clearly pregnant. A lovely flourish from the man whose name appears at the base of the gourd: “JULIO SEGUIL RIOS”.

  I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but I’ve recently learnt a little more about the craft of which he is such a talented exponent, and which has been practised in Peru for more than 4,000 years. It’s known locally as mate burilado, from the Quechua word mate — which is the fruit of the bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria — and the burin, the chisel-like tool used for engraving. The gourds come in various shapes and sizes, some bulbous but many times the size of mine; others, big and small, shaped more like a bowl or a skittle. 

  They were of practical use first, serving (once the seeds had been scraped from inside) as cups, plates, bottles and even ceremonial vessels or (with the interior intact) as rattles, musical instruments and fishing floats. It could be that in pre-Hispanic days only those owned by the upper classes were extensively worked, and those used by the rest of the population were much simpler, but decoration has long been a feature, the etchings incorporating work and play, religious ceremonies and beliefs, prehistoric motifs and contemporary politics.

  Techniques vary as well as designs. In Ayacucho, for example, a gourd might be carved with a burin and then rubbed with charcoal to reveal the design. In Huancayo, the gourd is often scorched first and then carved. Mine, perhaps, was made with the latter approach, for though I bought it in Cusco, where Julio — I see from social media — now lives, he is originally from Huancayo. Its peaceful, bucolic scenes serve as a counterpoint to stories I heard on the ground: stories of what my guide called “the terrorism time”. 

  Ayacucho and Huancayo are in the central highlands, which was both initial recruiting ground and battlefield for a Maoist revolutionary organisation that, for two decades from 1970, sought to seize control of the countryside and, ultimately, wipe out the Peruvian state. It called itself the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, after the maxim of the founder of the country’s first communist party, José Carlos Mariátegui: “El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución” (“Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution”). In the fighting between the Senderistas, a smaller revolutionary movement, Túpac Amaru, and the state forces, nearly 70,000 people are estimated to have died.

  That struggle is at the centre of Death in the Andes, a novel by the Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa* that I opened on the plane to Lima in 2003. Given where I was headed, it wasn’t the most comforting in-flight read. It begins with two civil guards looking into the disappearance of a man from his mountain village, the third such case in three weeks. A dozen pages in, a bus is held up by peasants with guns, machetes and sticks, some of them no more than children. They stone one passenger to death. Then they turn their attention elsewhere: to two French tourists…**

* * * 

Maria offered me the beer, the single bottle on the marble shelf where I was resting my right elbow, but it didn’t seem right to take it. It was her husband’s, after all; there was nothing the doctor liked better than a cold bottle of Pilsen after a hard day in his surgery treating the ills and sprains of the people of Huanta. And I couldn’t deprive him of it now — not even if he was incapable of drink; not even if he could raise no objection because he himself was behind that same shelf, in the coffin where Maria had laid him to rest 21 months earlier.

    The Peruvian department of Ayacucho is a place of old bones. Fifteen miles from the city of Ayacucho, in a cave at Pikimachay, archaeologists found evidence of the oldest known culture in South America, reaching back perhaps 20,000 years. On the cratered road from the city to Huanta, with my guide Marisol and her husband Ricardo, I had stopped off at Huari, the first urban walled centre in the Andes and hub of a civilisation that preceded the Incas. Here, amid a forest of prickly-pear cactus, we wandered above the tombs of nobles who had lived a thousand years ago. All of that had been on the itinerary. What I hadn’t expected was to find myself in the tomb of a man who had died less than two years earlier.

   We had stopped for lunch and a stroll in Huanta, a town where most of the houses in the centre were painted emerald — hence its nickname of Esmeralda de Los Andes — and most of those on the outskirts daubed with political slogans, sometimes without the permission of their owners. Go to bed with a neatly painted facade, and you could wake in the morning to find your front wall bellowing its support in letters four feet high for a political party or a mayoral candidate: “Vota ASI!”; “Dr Carlos — Alcalde!”

   As we left, Marisol asked if I would like to see the cemetery, where the coffins, in the Spanish way, are slid into recesses in a series of buildings, like packages into pigeonholes, or else interred underground in elaborate marble shrines. It was while we were reading an inscription on one of the latter that Maria shot up its steps, giggled at the fright she had given us, and then led us below to admire the comforts with which she had surrounded her husband: the flowers, the candles, the cards from his family in the United States, and the bottle of his favourite beer. Then, brushing invisible dust from her black top and black trousers, she invited us to her home to see his surgery, now being used by a son who had followed him into medicine, and to drink a shot of her home-made liqueur. “Salud!” she toasted me. “And thank you for coming to Ayacucho.”

  It was good to meet a widow who, if not merry, was certainly cheerful. That was something else I hadn’t expected. Not here.

  I had come to Ayacucho partly because I feared that Machu Picchu and Cusco might be a letdown. As this was my first trip to Peru, those two, the Lost City of the Incas and the adopted city of the backpackers, were almost obligatory stops. But I also wanted to see a part of the highlands that had been less worn by the tramp of tourist feet, where the indigenous Quechua would not be outnumbered by the youth of Sydney and Seattle. Ayacucho was an obvious choice.

  Until the 1980s, the city was best known — among Peruvians at least — as the scene of the most elaborate Holy Week processions in the whole country. Then came the Sendero Luminoso and its “anti-feudal, anti-imperial” revolution, supposedly on behalf of the peasantry. The war was a savage one — bombings and stonings employed by one side, death squads by the other — and one in every two victims of the Senderistas was in the department of Ayacucho. Ten years on from the end of the fighting, Holy Week in Ayacucho city was still not the draw it had once been for Peruvians, let alone for foreigners.

  From the moment she met me at Ayacucho airport, 29-year-old Marisol was frank about all this. She was a cheerful woman, her dark Quechua face opened often by a broad smile, but she had stories, too, of “the terrorism time”;  stories which made me grateful once again that, in the part of Northern Ireland where I grew up, the Troubles had been background hum rather than constant din. Marisol’s siblings had been taken out of Ayacucho University and sent to Lima by parents who feared they were being fed revolutionary propaganda. One distant cousin of hers had been stoned to death by the Senderistas; another cousin had disappeared, leaving a note saying he was “following his heart,” which meant, his family believed, that he had joined the terrucos. 

  Before Marisol herself was sent away to Lima, she witnessed a bombing, someone’s limbs flying through the air. The victim turned out to have been a boy of 10; the Senderistas had given him a box to place in a cafe frequented by the police; he was too shy, too slow.

  “It happened just over there,” Marisol said, as we walked at six o’clock one evening across the main square. This time 10 years earlier the square would have been empty, everyone with any sense cowering at home behind barred doors. Now there were bank staff lounging at the corners, children playing tag, Quechua women struggling home under rainbow-wrapped bundles. “Yes,” Marisol said, “it was a hard time — but we’re still here.”

  Ayacucho is not short of the things that usually interest visitors to Peru, from colonial churches — there are more than 30 — to craftwork — there are great displays of the retablo, a box with shutters, shelves and figures that is used to depict everything from fiesta to earthquake. But time and again, and not always at my prompting, I found the talk turning to the war.

  In the Barrio Santa Ana, a district of galleries and workshops, I saw it reflected in the work of Edwin Sulca***, a member of the third generation of a family of weavers. Edwin’s wife, Carmine, and her sister showed us around and explained the significance of some of the symbols used in the rugs. One, depicting in almost 3-D a carpet in folds, as if about to be shaken down a staircase, was titled “Folding up the Past”; a printout in English I was handed said: “In the centre, a long woven cloth is constantly folded, representing the way that we store the past. All that did happen is behind us, and I say, Let us forget wars between brothers, between the Shining Path and the Army… Let us cry out to the world for peace, for love, for hope…”

  Marisol and I talked about this later, over a coffee in a café off the main square. It was full of people coming and going, dawdling, chewing the fat. There was a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder, and the rain began lashing down. The cafe quickly filled. Marisol was telling me how, during “the terrorism time” her mother, the night before her birthday, had gone out to have her hair done. Shortly afterwards, the city was blacked out; bombs went off near the hairdresser’s. Her mother didn’t return that night, and the family had given her up for dead. She arrived home at ten the next morning, hair newly styled. She and the other women had locked themselves in the salon when the attack began and then, when the police told them it was safe to move, spent the night in a nearby house.

  As if on cue, the lights in the café went out. A waitress fumbled for a torch and sent its thin beam searching around the counter. What was this, I wanted to ask, and without suggesting I was worried. But before I could open my mouth, Marisol said: “It’s OK. Look — the lights are on everywhere else. They’ve only gone off here.” Just for a moment, I had been regretting my status as the only gringo in Ayacucho.

* * * 

There’s no chance, whatever time of year you arrive, of being the only gringo in Cusco. To the Incas, this was “the navel of the world”, a place of obligatory pilgrimage. On the 21st-century tourist it exerts a similar pull, thanks to its combination of man-made and natural wonders: Inca stone below, Spanish stone above, soaring peaks all round. Wherever you wander, wherever you pause, there will be someone not far from your elbow snapping a picture, or fumbling under a T-shirt for the pouch in which he has secreted his dollars, or telling her companion, “Hey, Paul, wouldn’t this Sun God guy look real neat in the den?”

  Yet somehow, as the mountains that encircle it soar heavenwards, so the city rises above both the commerce and the hype. I had seen countless references to the quality of the mortarless Inca stonework to be found in the Temple of the Sun, on top of which the Spanish built the church of Santo Domingo. “So close are these stones,” I had read, “that the blade of a knife can not be inserted between them.” And I had snorted. But it was true. As Carlos put it, in his customary echo of every banal comment of mine, it was “amazing”.

   Carlos was a Quechua, 10 years older than Marisol, and with none of her diffidence. His manner suggested we were not so much guide and customer as master and student: “Well, Michael, this part of class is over. Chop, chop.”

  We chop-chopped through Santo Domingo and the cathedral and the hilltop sanctuary of Sacsayhuaman. I had thought that after a few nights in Ayacucho I had got acclimatised to the Andean air, but three hours in I had the pounding headache symptomatic of what the locals call soroche: altitude sickness. I told Carlos I needed a coca tea and a lie-down.

  He got his own back next morning on the six o’clock train to Machu Picchu. No sooner had the staff served tea and wiped the condensation from our picture window than Carlos went to sleep, waking, as if by alarm, only as we entered the Sacred Valley of the River Urubamba. Meanwhile I goggled at the snow-caps and striated rock, wondered how Scottish broom and Australian eucalyptus had made such inroads into the Andes, and peered unashamedly into the adobe homes that the smallholders had built so conveniently close to the track.

  The train journey from Cusco to Aguas Calientes, the town below Machu Picchu, takes four hours. From there it’s another half hour or so by bus up a switchback road (a road so sinuous that people looking at my photos have taken it for a river). You arrive, then, towards the middle of the day, with the sun almost directly overhead. 

  Not the ideal conditions for contemplation of a sanctuary, or, indeed, for haring after a fleet-footed guide and taking notes on history. But Carlos, unlike me, was not spending the night at the lodge just outside the ruins; he was going back on the 3.30 train. So off we went, up and down the stone steps: to the Temple of the Three Windows, the Caretaker’s Dwelling, the Temple of the Sun, the Royal Tomb. Carlos knew as much as most scholars did about Machu Picchu and its makers, but that, as he readily admitted, didn’t amount to much. Time and again I had pen poised to note a definitive statement, only to hear him add “possibly’, or “probably” or “apparently”. “We know only 20 to 25 per cent of our history,” he said. “The rest is enigmatic.”

  Before the teach-in, of course, there was the moment of pure tourism. The Inca masons (or their restoration team) were well aware of the effect of a pleasure delayed, and so on your entry to the ruins you glimpse parts rather than the whole. Down and up and down you go on a winding path, bushes obscuring your view, until, after a few minutes, you come into a clearing, to a platform… and there, the peak of Huayna Picchu behind, the Urubamba river below, is the most fabled lost city in the world.

   All those postcards, all those coffee-table books, all those television programmes — they had prepared me for, and, inevitably, slightly diminished the impact of, The View. What they hadn’t prepared me for (had I been dozing in front of the Discovery Channel?) was the fact that Machu Picchu is a sanctuary of nature as much as of stones. In my mind I had seen the Inca Trail as a corridor of mud and leeches and darkness, with lianas overhead and snakes underfoot. Exciting rather than beautiful; a trial to be endured for the prize at the end. And here were paths lined with orchids and snapdragons and forget-me-nots, rockfaces red with bromeliads. Swifts and swallows darted in and out of Inca arches. Finches bounced along on the steps at my feet.

   It got better later: with four Americans from New Mexico who had been trekking the trail, I watched the sun set, the ruins below it so quiet that we could hear, 10 yards away, the llamas cropping grass on the terraces.

  It was better still the following morning. Returning from a walk to the Inca Bridge, a construction straight out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that ran across a sheer rock face, I glimpsed a couple of spectacled bears. The first, a baby, was 10 yards ahead. I pulled out my camera and tried to get a picture, but my shaky hands — I saw later — had produced a blur rather than a bear. Hearing me and the Canadian couple behind me, it slipped over the side of the path and disappeared into the bushes. Then we heard a scrabbling above our heads and looked up to see, maybe 30 yards away, what we assumed was the bear’s mother. We were in between them, so we didn’t stick around to check.

   The bears — a “very lucky’” sighting, according to one guide — were a bonus, but the highlight had come three-and-a-half hours earlier when I entered the ruins for the sunrise. Having Machu Picchu to yourself was a privilege I thought you could secure only if you had the clout of the Peruvian president or the dollars of Bill Gates, but for 15 glorious minutes, until the first sweating hikers came towards me from the Inca Trail, I was lord of all I surveyed.   

  I sat on a flat, lichened rock. The only sounds were the dull roar of the Urubamba, far below, and the twittering of birds. The only light was on a range of distant peaks, burning pinkish-red like coals. I snapped a few pictures, and then, knowing that film would be a poor substitute for reality, put the camera down and trusted to memory. I shifted on the rock, feeling about, and a hold — round, apparently shaped — fell to each hand, as if someone had sat enjoying this same view and decided to make the seat more comfortable. It was easy to believe it had been some Inca mason.

   When the anthropologists arrive, so the saying goes, the gods depart. Science, in explaining myths, strips away magic. That hasn’t yet happened in the highlands of Peru. Anthropologists and archaeologists have been crawling over the country for years, and still they have more questions than answers. The magic endures.****

* Vargas Llosa died on April 13 this year (2025).

** Shortly after I returned home, the Shining Path took hostage 70 workers building a gas pipeline. Though all were later freed, the incident was a reminder that the organisation wasn’t a spent force. 

*** Looking recently for mentions online of Edwin Sulca, I found a report on the website of the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in New Hampshire, where one of his tapestries hangs, saying that he had died in May 2021 — of Covid. 

**** Finding a quiet spot in Machu Picchu was much harder by 2017, and that year the Peruvian government, under pressure from Unesco, introduced measures to control visitor numbers.