The next morning, Hannah and Boaz walked down into the canyon, accompanied by one of the mountain rescue men, and Ofer went with Diego and Benito, another mountain rescue man, to see the place where Asher's body was found and the place from which he fell. Judith and I decided to spend a quiet day in Cabanaconde.
The Kunturwassi hotel is on a low hill a short distance away from the main square, which, as usual in Peru, has a church on one side and stores and restaurants on the other three sides. The hotel is a rambling assemblage of bungalows adjacent to the main building, which houses the reception desk and a restaurant on the upper floor, with a view down into the village and out to the mountains on the horizon. A little brook flows out of the rocks under the restaurant past the outdoor stairway leading from the reception desk down to the rooms. You can also climb up a flight of stairs from the restaurant to an observation tower on top of the hotel.
When Judith and I sat down to eat breakfast, the waitress, a motherly woman in her forties, spoke softly to us in simple Spanish that we could understand. Were we Asher's mama and papa? The whole village was worried about him and looking for him. She expressed deep sympathy and suggested that we should have a mass said in Asher's honor, but we explained that we weren't Catholics.
She accepted that news with no comment.
The day before, on our way to the kindergarten, we saw a sign that read "Mirador Achachihua, 500 m," and we decided to see what that was. The path continued onward past the kindergarten, as the village houses thinned out. We reached what looked like a half-constructed, reinforced concrete bull ring. At that point it wasn't clear where the path led, but we clambered over a low stone wall and continued in the direction of the canyon, finally reaching a promontory from which you could see all the way down to the Colca River in the bottom or the canyon, and at the peaks and cliffs in three directions. We were in sight of the place to which Robert had taken us the night before.
A local guide was there with a small group of young tourists, but they left after a while, and Judith and I decided to stay there. We could see down to the place Asher had presumably meant to reach and the general area where he fell. It was a good place to collect our thoughts and be alone with our feelings.
I sat down on a rock to write in my notebook.
The silence was nearly absolute. The sound of the rushing water of the river, more than a kilometer below us, came up to us faintly. Otherwise there were no sounds - no engines running, no human voices, no horns or sirens.
Soon afterward, we began to see large birds flying in the canyon below us: eagles. Then condors appeared, five of them, first soaring and wheeling at eye level over the canyon, then rising higher and circling in the air over our heads. They came so close to us that we could hear the wind rushing through their feathers. We could see their eyes, their beaks, the hugeness of their black, extended wings. They circled and circled, as if inspecting us. We moved so they wouldn't mistake us for carrion. We knew that condors don't attack live animals or people, but we couldn't help be frightened, they were so large and majestic.
I tried to take pictures of them with my point and shoot camera, totally unsuited to that. I only managed to capture a few blurry images.
I don't know how long the condors stayed in the air above us, circling, swooping, disappearing and returning, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.
Earlier I had thought - against every skeptical principle in my mind - that our mission in Peru was to free Asher's soul from the Colca Canyon. His body had been brought back and buried, but until people who loved him came to see the place where he fell, his sould would be stuck there.
The visit from the condors had a mystical quality to it, as if they were helping us free Asher's soul from that place. As if they knew why we were there.
As we left, heading back to the village, I began sobbing uncontrollably.
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