The last Inca bridge.

• Author: McIntyre, Loren
• Position: Latitudes

I first saw a film replica of the Apurimac bridge in a 1929 movie starring Ramon Navarro and Lily Damita: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Later I discovered the 1927 novel on which the film was based. It gripped me from the very first sentence: "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below."

The story of "Why did this happen to those five?" precipitated its author, New Jersey schoolteacher Thorton Wilder, into the mainstream of world literature. The characters in The Bridge--an allegory about the invincibility of the human spirit--spoke to me so eloquently that I became sure I would travel someday to Peru and even to the site of the span. And I did. In 1973, while preparing an article as well as my book, The Incredible Incas--for the National Geographic Society, I learned that one hundred years ago a masonry arch was built across the river and the great suspension bridge was left to rot. It collapsed about 1895. I set out to look for the site.

When I descended into the suddenly hot and heavy air at the bottom of the gorge, beset with sharp cacti and blood-sucking sand flies, I found that landslides had destroyed the approaches. I decided then to search for one of the lesser Apurimac bridges described in the yellowing pages of histories about civil wars among the conquistadors--even though the leading historians mid archaeologists insisted that no such span remained.

I chartered a plane and flew up the narrow gorge of the Apurimac from jungle to source, photographing suspension bridges from the air. Back on the ground I traveled to several sites only to discover after arduous descents that steel cables had replaced fiber ropes, which villagers kept renewing long after Inca times. Finally I got wind of all abandoned keshwa chaca, a grass-rope bridge, far up the Apurimac in Canas Province some eleven thousand feet above sea level. I made one last trek and found it still hanging sixty feet above the river, gleaming like Inca gold in the afternoon sun.

As I clawed down a cliff to reach it, a voice cautioned, "Don't cross! The bridge is dying!" All Indian appeared, Luis Choqueneira, who wore clusters of wildflowers in his hat, as most of the Canas peasants do, said he was one of the chaca camayocs...