Touching the hem of a lost world

First and most importantly, Hugh Thomson is a good thing. It takes a rare combination of scholarly focus and Boys’ Own derring-do to write books about adventuring in Peru (this is his third) which consistently rise above the level of backpackers’ companions, and convey not only Thomson’s great knowledge of the ancient civilisations of the Andes, but also the thrill of the chase for such knowledge. To a lay audience, academic archeologists are often dreadful communicators either of the excitement of discovery or of the human stories of the discoverers.

Indeed to the general public they regularly fail to communicate even the meaning of their discoveries. That we have recently come to understand that the history of civilisation in Ancient Peru goes back much, much further than had been thought (thousands of years before the Incas) is well-conveyed here. I must admit I had previously missed the news. Thomson brings it alive.

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We follow breathless in his wake as he scrambles through the cloud-forest near Machu-Picchu to discover not (as he keeps complaining the newspapers would have it) a ‘Lost City of the Incas’ but (as one American newspaper headlined it) a ‘Lost Suburb of the Incas’. Thomson complains about that headline too, but I think it was rather accurate. Nobody who walks the Inca Trail to Machu-Picchu should be without his chapters on this story. It is not enough to gawp: Thomson helps you understand. His researches at ground-level into the Nazca Lines are equally revealing.

The challenge Hugh Thomson bravely embraces is to marry, in print, methodical field research with light travel reading. Does he succeed? Fitfully; and when he does his writing is a delight. He takes his family to the Andes and puts his small children into a Peruvian school: I was fascinated by this and would like to have read more about their experiences.