The last Inca bridge master

Nearly 500 years after the collapse of the largest empire in the Americas, a single bridge remains from the Inca's extraordinary road system – and it's rewoven every year from grass.

"I believe since the history of man, there has been no other account of such grandeur as is to be seen on this road, which passes over deep valleys and lofty mountains, by snowy heights, over falls of water, through the living rock and along the edges of tortuous torrents."

– Pedro Cieza de León, 1548

A blast from a conch shell cut through the canyon. Two men in white wool jackets and brightly coloured chullo caps placed a glistening llama foetus atop the glowing embers of a fire still feeding on a bloody sheep's heart. As they lifted their hands to the heavens in hopes the gods may accept the offering, Victoriano Arizapana slung a golden coil of rope over each shoulder and walked toward the edge of a cliff.

A hush fell over the sea of sombrero-clad men who parted as the 60-year-old slowly approached the abyss. With a deep breath, Arizapana carefully lowered himself onto four tightly braided cables spanning the 30m crevasse, each the circumference of a man's thigh, and straddled them with his bare feet dangling over the sides. He then poured a few drops of clear cañazo cane liquor on each cable, whispered the names of the four mountain spirits who would decide his fate and pushed himself off the end of the stone abutment into the gaping chasm.

Balancing precariously 22m over the rushing Apurimac River, Arizapana worked slowly. With each advancing scoot, he reached high above his head to grab the smaller ropes from the top of the handrails, tying them tightly to the outside cables to join them with the base as balusters. He then leaned forward so that his torso was parallel to the four braided cables he teetered on like a seesaw to pass the smaller ropes underneath, uniting the four bottom beams into a single, wobbling plank.

Sparrow hawks swooped under Arizapana's feet, darting back into their nests pocked into the sides of the rock face. It was 11C, and the last gasps of day painted the sky pink and dappled the Spanish moss drooping from the canyon's basalt wall. As the wind whipped up, the suspended structure began to sway back and forth like a giant hammock. Arizapana suddenly stopped working and gripped both handrails to balance himself, causing the unfastened ropes to fall from his hands and plunge into the foaming river below.

In Quechua, Apurimac means "the God who talks", and like all apus (mountain spirits), it's a living being that needs to be fed in order to keep the flame of life burning. Arizapana wouldn't be the first man to be swallowed up by the river, and he knew that one wrong move now could be the difference between life and death.

As the cables continued to tremble above the gorge, Arizapana remembered the words his father once told him: "Trust yourself, have faith in the apus, and don't look down." He reached over his head for a new rope, bending himself so far forward that his face touched the careening cables, and continued diligently fulfilling a duty that men in his family have maintained for more than 500 years: weaving the Q'eswachaka, the last suspended rope bridge from the Inca Empire.

Located on the western edge of South America, tucked between Earth's largest rainforest (the Amazon), its driest desert (the Atacama) and the tallest mountain range in the Western Hemisphere (the Andes), the Inca Empire was one of the world's most unique civilisations. They developed in near isolation, expanding their territory from Cusco, Peru, in the 1430s and ruling for just 100 years until the Spanish conquest of 1532. But through an ingenious system of engineering and strict organisation, they managed to create the largest empire ever seen in the Americas – a sprawling two-million-sq-km civilisation that extended across parts of modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina – encompassing as many as 12 million people and 100 languages. It was roughly 10 times the size of the Aztec Empire and had twice its population. Remarkably, the Inca managed to forge this vast society without the wheel, the arch, money, iron or steel tools, draft animals capable of ploughing fields or even a written language.

Instead, one of the keys to the Inca's rapid expansion was an extraordinary network of roads used for communication, trade and military campaigns known as the Qhapaq Ñan (The Royal Road). Considered one of the greatest engineering feats in the ancient world and rapturously proclaimed "the most stupendous and useful works ever executed by man" by 19th-Century geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, the Qhapaq Ñan extended for nearly 40,000km – roughly the circumference of the globe. It stretched from Quito, Ecuador, past Santiago, Chile, on two main north-south arteries, along with more than 20 smaller routes running east to west like a giant ladder.

Second in length only to the Roman road system, the Qhapaq Ñan was in many ways even more impressive, as it traversed some of the planet's most extreme geographical terrains. This historic highway linked the snowcapped peaks of the Andes at more than 6,000m with the continent's steamy rainforests, barren deserts and yawning canyons. To do this, the Inca bore massive tunnels through mountains, lined valleys with immaculate stone paths and carved spiral staircases up cliff faces. Where the earth abruptly ended, they used a brilliant system of suspension bridges to leap canyons and stitch their road network together. But the Inca didn't build their bridges out of metal or wood. They wove them from grass.

At the empire's height, it's estimated that some 200 suspension bridges spanned the cliffs along the Qhapaq Ñan, each one strong enough to support the weight of a marching army. Today, nearly 500 years after the collapse of the Inca Empire, only one bridge remains, and it dangles over the Apurimac River near the 500-person village of Huinchiri in Peru's southern highlands. In the past, each Inca bridge was overseen by a bridge master (chakacamayoc) who was responsible for guarding and repairing it. These days, the last Inca bridge is overseen by the last living Inca bridge master: Arizapana, the latest in an unbroken line of chakacamayocs that he says stretches back to the Inca, like braided rope.

Arizapana uses the same method to build and repair the Q'eswachaka as his forefathers did half a millennium ago, which means the bridge only lasts one year and needs to be constantly rebuilt to prevent it from collapsing. Weaving enough grass to make a 30m suspension bridge requires a lot of manpower. So, every year in the second week of June, 1,100 people from four surrounding communities living at more than 3,600m elevation come together to cut, braid and transform blades of straw-like ichu (Peruvian feathergrass) into golden coils as strong as steel. For three straight days, Arizapana oversees every aspect of the bridge's construction, from measuring the length of its cables and crossbeams to the thickness of its handrails. After the cables have been heaved to the edge of the rocky canyon and painstakingly pulled into place by teams working on opposite sides of the river, the villagers cut down the old, sagging bridge, letting the all-natural structure plummet into the Apurimac and slowly decompose.

Then, when the time is right, Arizapana murmurs a blessing to Pachamama (Mother Earth) and upholds this sacred expression of the Inca's bond with nature by taking a leap of faith that his ancestors, the community and the gods have commanded of him.

Eliot Stein is a journalist and editor at the BBC. This story is excerpted from his new book, Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive.

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