We started in daylight along a trail leading from a corner of the main square of Cabanaconde, not the trail that hikers ordinarily take on their way down into the Colca Canyon - but there is no sign in the square, and it would be easy to start off at the wrong corner, in the right general direction, but on the wrong path.
Ever since we found out what happened to Asher, I have been imagining that wrong path, picturing it to myself, running after Asher and telling him he'd made a mistake.
For quite a while the trail was wide and nothing would indicate that it was the wrong one. It wound between low stone walls through small fields newly plowed and planted with corn. A few minutes along that path, we came to a junction, where you could turn off to the right and get onto the correct path down to the canyon. Again there was no clearly visible sign, but on a rock, where no one would notice it, on the near edge of the path, low toward the ground, someone had written "Oasis" - the name of the resort inside the canyon. When we saw that sign, we thought to ourselves: If only someone had written "Oasis" in large letters, with an arrow pointing to the right, on the wall facing the direction of the village, so that someone coming from there would have seen it, Asher might be alive now.
Robert led us past that point, along a path that was still well trodden. Farmers use it to get to their plots of land. We were five members of our family: Judith, Hannah, Boaz, Ofer, and I, accompanied by Robert and Cabezon. We reached the end of that path and walked across a small plot, and, as we looked out over the canyon, Robert presented his conclusions to us - an official police report.
In his opinion, Asher reached that point and then took a steep animal trail downward around prickly bushes that had since been burned off. He came to a series of two waterfalls and managed to negotiate the first. When he got to the foot of that waterfall, instead of continuing to the left, where the trail continued, he stepped back on the narrow ledge to take a picture of the waterfall and then fell backward, plunging about a hundred meters to his death.
The place from which he fell and the place where his body was found were more or less inaccessible from the point to which we'd been taken, and the following morning Ofer was planning to go there by a different, somewhat easier route with Diego and Benito, a member of the rescue unit. Robert strongly discouraged Hannah and Boaz from even considering going there, because the hike would be so demanding and dangerous.
After presenting his theory of how Asher had happened to fall, Robert described how they had recovered his body. The operation was extremely difficult, because the terrain was so steep. They wrapped the body and loaded it onto a kind of sled and pulled it up the cliffs with ropes. All the while rain was threatening, and if it had started to rain, they wouldn't have been able to continue. Robert said they were "praying to Asher" all the time, to keep it from raining, and the rain did hold off until the body was stowed safely on the rescue unit's white pickup truck - the vehicle we'd been riding around on since we'd reached Arequipa.
As I write these words, my eyes well up with tears.
After all the explanations, and after seeing the place, the story still made no sense. True, Asher was not an experienced hiker, but even an inexperienced hiker - or especially an inexperienced hiker - should have known that the path Robert showed us was not a well-worn path taken by hundreds of hikers down to a popular resort. It's hard to imagine that Asher wouldn't have reached that place, taken a look, and said to himself: I must have taken a wrong turn. I'll go back.
On our way back, darkness fell, and we all withdrew into ourselves and thought about what we'd seen.
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