Hidden harmony of the Q'ero: high in the Peruvian Andes, this isolated Indian community tenaciously preserves traditions that reflect its spiritual union with the natural surroundings.

• Author: Englebert, Victor

A taxi left us next to a lonely house at the edge of a hairpin turn on the Puerto Maldonado road. The eight-hour eastward ride from Cuzco had been as spectacularly beautiful as it had been bumpy. It was late in August, winter in the southern hemisphere. We unloaded from the car several hundred pounds of luggage--largely rice, oatmeal, sugar, and coca leaves we were bringing to a number of Q'ero Indians whose lives my friends and I would share during the next nine days; then we bade our driver good-bye.

Five hundred years ago, the Q'ero had fled the conquistadors to hide high in steep, pathless mountains. They have remained isolated ever since, retaining better than any other Andean Indians the purity of Inca tradition, culture, and language. They claim direct descendence from Inkari, the mythical first Inca. They believe that he founded Jatun Q'eros, a village where they do not live but gather occasionally to discuss tribal concerns. What sets them apart most is their mysticism, their profound communion with the natural world.

Our Q'ero group, five men and a twelve-year-old boy, had been waiting for us with twelve horses and a black sheepdog. A Cuzco radio station had informed them of our coming. Luckily, the single radio owner of Charcapata, the hamlet where we were headed, had heard at least one. The reception the Q'ero gave us boded well for our party. They threw themselves in our arms and patted us on our backs like long-lost friends.

In spite of their slight build, the Q'ero easily lifted our hundred-pound bags on their small shaggy horses. One man impressed us much. About five feet tall, he had a bad right leg that made his body swing widely from side to side as he walked, but a smile always illuminated his good-looking face. In spite of his infirmity he lifted the heaviest bags and ran around the most. Even in the following days he would work harder than anyone else. He would look after the three of us as his personal responsibility during our stay. His name was Modesto Q'espi.

Once ready, we set out to climb higher into the mountains, some of us on horseback, I walking ahead, camera in hand, and the Indians bringing up the rear on foot.

An hour and a half into the trill, the sun having set, we stopped at the house of a C'oline Indian to spend the night. Our host gave us, three visitors, a room's dirt floor to sleep on. The Q'ero stayed outside, pressing together against a stone corral under a couple of blankets. I don't think they slept. I got up twice during the night, and each time heard them joking and laughing. They may have been too cold to shut their eyes.

Next morning the ground outside was white with ice, and fluffy white alpacas in the stone corral huddled together for warmth. Leonidas, our host, gave us a breakfast of unpeeled, pockmarked, ping-pong-sized potatoes, no doubt similar to the ones the Inca ate long before the rest of the world adopted them and selectively enlarged and smoothed them down a bit. Then we helped the Q'ero load the horses, and half an hour later resumed our march inland. While the valley still lay in deep-blue shade, a bright yellow light slowly rose behind the wall of mountains to the east.

We climbed steadily, sometimes along a...