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that might have eluded us.
    I found five.
    The first was folded and wedged under a table, stopping it from wobbling.
    Another was jammed in a crack in a window, keeping out a draft.
    The third, fourth, and fifth were in the bathroom.
    They were on a shelf just to the side of the toilet, held in place by a stone. There was a roll of grubby toilet paper there too, but I suppose they kept the pages for emergencies. The nearest shop must be miles away.
    Great. That would be just our luck. There’s priceless treasure buried on an island, but we can’t find it because a Peruvian peasant wiped his butt with the directions.
    I came out of the bathroom and ran into the old man, who was carrying a bundle of sticks in his arms. He dumped his sticks by the fire, pointed at the papers in my hands, and said something that I couldn’t understand.
    â€œSorry,” I said. “Don’t speak Spanish.”
    He kept talking to me in the same lingo.
    â€œI don’t know what you’re saying,” I said. “But I guess there’s not much point in telling you that, because you don’t know what I’m saying either, do you?”
    He grabbed ahold of my sleeve and tugged me toward the door.
    I asked him what he was doing, but he just answered in Spanish. He obviously wanted me to follow him.
    I thought I might as well. Why not? What was the worst that could happen?
    We walked out of the house and up the field to an ancient barn.
    The old man pushed the door. It creaked open. There was a rancid stench of manure. We stepped inside.
    The floor of the barn was a mass of mud and straw. Junk was piled everywhere. The same family must have lived at this farm for years, and I could imagine that they had used this place to dump whatever they didn’t want but couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. My eyes rested on broken chairs and wooden ladders with missing rungs and various lengths of rope and an old bath and a sheep’s skull and a bicycle and rusty old pipes and a piece of paper. Scrunched and scrawled with words in black ink.
    I was just about to dart forward and pick it up when I noticed another. And another. And more of them; ten, twenty, fifty, trodden into the mud, buried under boxes, jumbled among everything.
    The old man was grinning.
    â€œDollars,” he said. “Dollars.”
    â€œYou want more dollars?”
    â€œ
Sí, sí.
Dollars.”
    â€œNo problem. You can have more dollars.”
    We went back to the house to find my uncle, who handed over another forty dollars, and everyone was happy.

12
    I allowed myself only a quick peek at each of the pages as I removed them from the barn. They were all covered with the same dense black handwriting, which was pretty much impossible to read. The spelling was crazy too. A teacher would have gone through the whole thing with a red pen.
    For instance:
The tayl snapt of in the myddle.
    Or:
In the nyght yt thundereth and rayneth but the after noone is fayr and hote and drye but clowdy.
    The pictures were nice, though. There was at least one on every page and sometimes two or three: a fish, a bird, a flower, a man’s face. The things that you’d see on a voyage up the coast of Peru, stopping every few days to go ashore and trade with the natives or gather fresh water. They were more like doodles than serious drawings. As if the writer had knocked off a little scribble whenever he was wondering what to write next.
    The final few pages were trampled into the mud or stuffed between bricks. Up in the rafters I could see a couple of white scraps. I fetched a ladder, jammed it against the wall, climbed the rickety rungs, and pulled out a single sheet of creased old paper. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten up there.
    I crept down to solid ground. Leaving the ladder propped against the wall, I walked out of the barn, unfolding the page. The sunshine blinded me for a moment, but then I noticed a funny little picture of a deer