While I was at language school in Peru, a friend gave me a book with information about the trek to the lost ruins of Vilcabamba. I'd been reading about Inca history, and the former jungle capital seemed an ideal thing to do with a week. I should've known better when I asked my Cusco-based host family about going there and they said, "where?" And then when I explained where to them, they said, "why?" I should've also known better when I went to the Cusco-based South American Explorers Club, and they had just given away their last map and also had a quote on the wall that suggested that I'd need mules and seven days, and that money was less important than items for barter. Anyway, I didn't know any better. Here's the story of my death hike to Espiritu Pampa, Peru, the jungle-buried Plain of Spirits.

It was a tale worthy of Indiana Jones: A lost Inca capital with a bloody history of war and Shakesepearean treachery; an unvisited ruin buried in the jungle, several days walk from the nearest village, in a place called "plain of spirits"; a quest to find it that hinged on a 400-year-old Spanish document that surfaced in the mid-20th century in a library belonging to the Duke of Wellington. These are the lures that catch 24-year-old travelers' imaginations, and mine was no exception. Within weeks of first hearing about Vilcabamba, Peru, I was wobbling at the start of the trail leading to it, looking up at the cracked, snow-covered peaks separating the pastoral Andean village of Huancacalle from the descent into the jungle. My body already weak from food poisoning a day before, my stomach unsettled by malaria medication, my confidence shaken by a map marked by tortuous river bends and huge swaths of white labeled "insufficient data," I waited for my guide to arrive and ruminated on the wisdom of acting on imagination's wild impulses.

Marcos Aragon Cervantes had a lined, wrinkled face that seemed to be all cheeks, with thick eyebrows and matted black hair that spiraled in a flattened curl over his forehead. He soon proved to be a man of few words, none of them sympathetic. He wished me good morning. He shouldered his small pack. He dug his worn leather sandals into the dust. He nodded curtly at the trail, and he started to walk.

	Present-day Huancacalle.

Five hundred years ago, a beleaguered Inca emperor named Manco led his people on the same trek. Manco had rebelled against the Spanish occupation of Cusco, the capital of an empire that once stretched from Colombia to Chile, and his forces had been slaughtered. His retreat took him to Vitcos, a palace on the edge of the jungle near present-day Huancacalle, a two-day trip by bus and small van from Cusco.

The Spanish reached Vitcos quickly. Conquistadores caught Manco unaware and sacked the palace, and only their greed for treasure kept them from snatching the emperor, who had only one escape: A long trail leading from Vitcos into the heart of the jungle of Vilcabamba. Amidst the pillaging, Manco slipped away and fled.

The trail started with a climb, through spongy green meadows partitioned by stone walls and stocked with grazing cows, and past fields of taro and fresh mud blocks recently cut and set out to dry for building. It was a brilliant, warm morning. A creek burbled along next to the road and giant clouds soared off the tops of the green mountains, puffs of cotton in front of a perfectly blue sky. Birds chirped and kids laughed as they hiked to what was presumably a very small school. Behind us the snaky contours of the Vilcabamba River coiled up into imposing ridges and ruffles that tripped the clouds heading east toward Machu Picchu.

	My guide, Marcos Aragon Cervantes, stopping for a potato picnic with a Quechua-speaking friend.

Cervantes and I hurried up the hill, with reason. The trail was one-way and ended seven miles past the ruins in a village called Chaunquiri. A truck left Chaunquiri for the outside world once a week, on Sunday, and it was now Thursday. We would either have to hike the entire 37 miles in two-and-a-half days, or we would miss the truck. No one seemed quite sure what would happen then, although it was agreed it would mean either more hiking or a long wait -- and so I had elected to do the hike quickly. Cervantes looked pleased with the decision; as he well knew, he wasn’t going to be the one suffering from exhaustion.

Two hours out and 2,000 feet above Huancacalle, a pass cut through the grassy shoulder of a rocky peak and opened into dark green river basin. The pass was once the site of an Inca plaza -- now just a flattened down spot near the trail -- and we paused briefly to let the icy breeze dry the sweat of our morning's work. Soon after we had crossed into the river valley, the vegetation started to change. Tough clover crept over the ground in place of grass and we started to see spade-shaped, waxy green plants and the occasional fern, and then finally thick, vine-covered trees. The dirt changed from a dusty, sand-colored powder to a dark mud, streaked with red and orange. Gurgling streams and rushing waterfalls filled the air with the sounds of water until it seemed even the solid ground was leaking, and I started to catch the sweet scent of flowers. Wooden bridges in varying conditions joined opposite sides of fast-flowing creeks, and clustered around the banks we'd see hundreds of butterflies, flitting in and out of the trees and giving the forest a moving feel. They'd pull up and rest on the banks of the streams, laying their wings out and creating a mosaic of neon blue and orange and pink on the gray gravel.

For the mountain-born Incas, this was a foreign world, and they fled with the desperation of a people nearly hunted to extinction. The conquistadors pursued them all the way to Vilcabamba, but the elusive Manco Inca slipped away in the undergrowth. After two failed invasions in pursuit of the Inca, the Spanish turned briefly to diplomacy.

Manco ruled in Vilcabamba until he was betrayed by a group of Spaniards to whom he had given refuge, who assassinated him at Vitcos in 1544. His brother, Sayri Tupac, negotiated with the Spanish to secure a comfortable life for himself near Cusco, and in 1557 Manco's son, Titu Cusi, took over in Vilcabamba. For 15 years, Titu Cusi kept the Spanish at bay through deft negotiation. Then, in 1572, Titu Cusi died of a mysterious illness. The Incas blamed a Spanish friar for poisoning Titu Cusi, and an incensed mob murdered the holy man, infuriating a tough new Spanish viceroy who had already been planning the end of the Incas.

The Spanish invaded, this time determined to finish the job. They captured the new ruler, Tupac Amaru, dragged him back to Cusco, converted him to Christianity and killed him in the central square. The Inca, the empire and Vilcabamba died with the executioner's sword.

	Group of kids at the Vista Alegre campsite.

The Spanish made a few attempts at settling in Vilcabamba, but most had left the area by the mid-1600s. We passed the scattered huts of local subsistence farmers who had lived there ever since, and stopped for the evening in one of the larger settlements, Vista Alegre. This wide, flat meadow, on the gravely banks of the river and with a view up the undulating walls of the Pampaconas River valley, was one of the places the Spanish camped in 1572. There was a tiny group of stick houses perched on a bend in the river, and five small children out playing some kind of game where they tried to lasso each other with an old worn rope. When we arrived, they broke off the game and solemnly formed a line to shake our hands and say buenos tardes. They watched me intently, out of curiosity and the hope that I would have treats or money for them. When I pulled out my camera to take some pictures of the sunset, they gathered in a semi-circle in front of me, knowing that gringos with cameras meant payment.

We had walked for eight hours and four minutes, covering enough ground to keep our goal of reaching Vilcabamba on the second day. Already, though, I was exhausted; legs burning, sweat pouring off my face, feeling like there were rodents gnawing on my hips and shoulders. Weakly, I asked Cervantes how much time it would take us to do the hike the next day.

"About the same," he said.

American explorer Hiram Bingham camped in Vista Alegre in 1911, when Vilcabamba was a legend only -- a city mentioned in a few scattered accounts whose real location was unknown. The Yale professor had already discovered one candidate in the magnificent lost city at Machu Picchu. He had heard reports that there was one more large ruin down the valley beyond Vitcos, and so he cut his way to Espíritu Pampa, the "Plain of Spirits," where a local farmer pointed him to the old city.

A diary from the conquest identified the old city of Vilcabamba as a long two days hike from Vitcos, the only ruin Bingham could positively identify. Unfortunately for him, Machu Picchu, Espiritu Pampa and a third ruin called Choquequirao all lay two long days walk from Vitcos. Faced with the choice, Bingham decided that the Incas' last city was Machu Picchu; it was after all a glamorous location, more befitting a capital than the small complex he had found buried in the jungle.

Such was Bingham's reputation that this assertion went essentially unchallenged until the 1960s. In 1964, another American explorer, Gene Savoy, further excavated the ruins at Espiritu Pampa, showing that the city was much larger than Bingham had originally thought.

	A trail marker pointing toward the Espiritu Pampa valley.

The final, most conclusive clue had not been discovered until well after Bingham made his decision. In 1945, an ancestor of the Duke of Wellington discovered Martin de Marua’s "General History of Peru," a document written based on eyewitness accounts from the 1500s and buried in a Spanish library until 1813, when it was removed by Napoleon Bonaparte's brother Joseph as he fled Wellington's invasion. Bonaparte's coach was captured, and the Duke of Wellington came into possession of the history. In 1962, the manuscript was published.

Savoy and others matched Marua's account with what they found and made the final pronouncement: Vilcabamba had been found.

The afternoon had grown late when we cornered a ridge and gazed down across Espiritu Pampa. We were overlooking the narrow end of a lush valley that shimmered in the haze as the sun dropped behind it. We could squint into the glare to pick out the exit route -- a few silvery roofs glinting in the distance at the other end of the plain, pointing out the path to Chaunquiri and its weekly truck connection.

We descended into the valley at a half-jog, down the cracked, broken ruins of an Inca staircase, through red dirt and low ferns and into thick, coffee-brown mud and dense jungle at the bottom. More than seven hours after we had left Vista Alegre, we crossed a stream and entered the small farming settlement just below the ruins.

A group of workers was repairing the trail leading into the ruins, clearing brush around the stairs, widening the path and smoothing it out. As we arrived, they went down to the creek to wash off the day's grime, then grabbed a mud-encrusted soccer ball and headed for a large flat field where they could play. They waved as they walked by our campsite.

That night I lay out in the grass, looking up at the incredible, brilliant majesty of the Milky Way and the night sky, trying to conjure up the spirits of the Incas, an endeavor not helped by a pig the size of a bulldozer that spent the evening chewing the grass next to our tent.

	Welcome sign at Vilcabamba ruins.

I woke up with the first light of the morning, just as the roosters had finally gone silent. Pale gray was seeping over the mountains to the east, although the sky directly overhead was still deep blue. Scattered clouds hung over the horizon, almost like a net, and they soon turned bright pink with the sunrise.

While Cervantes slept in, I knocked on the door of one of the settlement's shacks and found the ruin caretaker, Amerigo, who had said he would show me around. Bleary-eyed, he tripped out the door in a pair of sweatpants, grabbed his machete, and led me into the jungle, disconcertingly whacking random objects with the machete as he walked.

We hiked in silence through the hushed, dark forest, arriving after 15 minutes at a football-field size clearing, backlit by the pink morning sky that flickered behind the leafy canopy. Tall, straight trees grew out of the ankle-high brown grass, which was pocked with piles of weeds and stumps cleared from the land. Amerigo flicked the machete, turned and said, "Bienvenidos."

We walked slowly through the plaza and up a series of stairs carved into a waist-high wall, now crumbling and mossy. Everywhere, there were building stones with grass and trees growing on them. We hiked into the jungle, Amerigo cutting a path through the mud and vines. After a few minutes of hacking we entered a large, canopy-shaded clearing, bounded by a wall that seemed to grow out of the roots of a large tree.

	Part of the ruins at Vilcabamba.

The site, called Eromboni Pampa, was a palace or temple complex, and the finely constructed walls that evidenced its importance now slouched and crumbled into the trees. Mosses and grasses grew on top, like spiky green hair, and the forest had claimed most of the inside space. In the darkness of the morning, the ruins took on a funereal look, and I found myself treading quietly and not speaking, like I was in a cemetery.

It was stiflingly quiet in that jungle, no birds, no crickets, just Amerigo and I crunching over sticks and leaves and the background rush of the river, a uniform whoosh that seemed to come from every direction, split by sharp cracks as machete met wood. We hacked our way away from Eromboni Pampa toward another palace structure, following a narrow path through increasingly dense and hanging jungle. I stayed back a bit, to avoid the machete, since Amerigo didn't seem to be too concerned with where it landed. My decision was justified a few minutes later when he started to hack violently at a tree -- to get water out of it, he explained between whacks. After four or five giant slashes, a steady stream came pouring out -- much more than I would have expected -- and we both took a refreshing drink, which tasted somewhat like coconut water.

A few days later, when I was back and had written a bit about the trip, a friend emailed me and said, "Eric, you drank out of a tree. Yesterday I internally griped about the cafeteria guy not using a clean knife to spread cream cheese on my bagel ... Damn. I've been put in my place."

I've always liked that email. It makes me feel much better about what happened next, when we left the ruins.

While I had been out exploring, Cervantes had purchased a chicken, which he carried with him, tucked under his arm, for the rest of the day. When it got particularly bored, it would chirp cadence for us.

The long and winding road meandered along the river for two pleasant hours, passing isolated orange and coffee plantations and small, friendly villages, until I realized that every minute on pleasant flat ground was one less minute of climbing, at which point we immediately crossed the river and began the most horrendous climb of my life.

	Cervantes, with his chicken (in the box), sitting in the coffee truck out of the jungle. Those are my feet.

For 45 minutes, I crawled through the mud, so exhausted I could no longer stand, begging for water that I didn't have and, because my iodine pills took half an hour to work, couldn't obtain, croaking at the receding silhouette of Cervantes in front of me, "Rest!" Each bend and turn in the trail seemed to promise the ridge, and around each bend we found only steeper and more grueling ascents. I began to indulge in every-deeper fantasies of food and bathing, until Cervantes forced me to lift up my head and said, "We're there."

And so we were. Fifteen minutess after noon there were three trucks waiting in the plaza, which seemed, in three days of hiking through mountains, jungles and rivers, the most glorious thing I'd seen. We collapsed into the shade of the only bar in town, where a man came by and asked if we would like to take his truck to Quillabamba, the jungle capital. We climbed into the back, on top of a thick bedding of coffee beans headed for the market. It was quite nice when we started rattling along, a bit like riding on an old wooden roller coaster -- the wind in my face, a good view, nice scenery -- although whenever I got absorbed in the scenery, the part of it hanging over the road would slap me on the cheeks. We drove past lots of brilliantly neon blue morpho butterflies and I saw some toucans and the marvelously yellow crested oropendola, with nests that resemble a giant glob of brown spit dripping down from the tree branch.

As evening fell we rode triumphantly into the sunset: The clouds lit up over the valley, then faded and turned gray, and the first stars came out, and we drove for four hours in the dark with the headlights of the truck silhouetting the jungle against a backdrop of millions of stars.