by Mark Adams
I was a little nervous about visiting Machu Picchu. See, I’d already been to Machu Picchu once, when I’d brought my son Alex to Cusco. We did the typical day trip, which entails a long (three and a half hours each way), very expensive train ride from the outskirts of Cusco in a frigid car at dawn. After dropping another fifty bucks each on entry fees and bus transport, we arrived at one of the wonders of the world at midday to find it as hot and humid as a terrarium, overrun by plagues of stinging flies and Europeans on holiday. (It was August.) Having shelled out almost four hundred dollars just to get us there from Cusco, I was in no mood to spend another thirty dollars on a guide, which was a mistake since Machu Picchu has almost no explanatory signs. The buildings were impressive, but not much more so than what we’d already seen that week at Sacsahuaman and Ollantaytambo. I experienced a little of the deflation that other friends had felt when they arrived at the Great Pyramid and saw that the Sphinx could scratch itself against the skyscrapers of Cairo, or made the pilgrimage to Graceland and discovered that Elvis’s stately pleasure dome was no larger than a Memphis McMansion.
When I admitted this to John, he looked like he might slap me. “Your problem was that you and Alex only allowed yourselves four hours—four hours to see Machu Picchu!—and you didn’t have a strategy ,” he told me over an early breakfast. “You came at the most crowded part of the day, and like everyone on their first visit, you went straight to the most popular spots.” Out of his backpack he pulled a thick folder of photocopies, jammed with maps of Machu Picchu and articles about the site in English and Spanish. Even though he’d long since lost count of how many times he’d been here, John believed every visit to Machu Picchu was an important undertaking. We were going to squeeze in some last-minute research over our coffee and toast.
“You might want to start with that one,” John said. He handed me a special all-Inca issue of a children’s science magazine.
There’s an old kitchen maxim that squid should either be cooked for two minutes or two hours. A similar rule could be applied to Machu Picchu. With a good guide—there are dozens of them lingering by the front entrance—a visitor who’s short on time can see the highlights of Machu Picchu in two hours. A visit of two days, though, allows enough time to take in the site’s full majesty. Our plan was to devote one day to retracing Bingham’s 1911 footsteps, and a second to seeing some parts of the site that most people never get to.
John and I nabbed the last two seats on a bus heading up to the ruins at seven-thirty. There were more people inside than we’d seen at Choquequirao, Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa combined. The ride up the serpentine Hiram Bingham Highway takes about twenty minutes, and the views almost justify the twelve bucks they squeeze you for. John did a final equipment check before we entered—“camera, video camera, notebooks, pens, batteries, snacks”—and cast an evil glance at the one public bathroom, which charged an entry fee of 35 cents. “I’m fairly certain that’s illegal according to the UN Human Rights Commission,” he said.
By eight o’clock we were walking along the same path Bingham had taken through the terraces, following a train of photogenic llamas reporting for duty. For whatever reason—our arrival before the big crowds from Cusco, my sense of having earned this visit over the previous weeks of walking, the absence of my sometimes sullen thirteen-year-old son—Machu Picchu was different this time. Even after witnessing the knee-buckling natural settings of Choquequirao and Vitcos, it was impossible not to see almost immediately that Machu Picchu beat them both. The distant peaks ringing the ruins like a necklace were higher; the nearby slopes were greener. And of course the city, laid out before the visitor like a LEGO metropolis atop a billiard table, is impossible to turn away from. For the first time since dropping out of graduate school, I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime. Nowadays, we throw around the word “sublime” to describe gooey desserts or overpriced handbags. In Kant’s epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver’s head hurt. Machu Picchu isn’t just beautiful, it’s sublime.
As we walked through the stone portal of the Main Gate, John pointed out the sort of detail that I had missed on my first visit. The gate was, essentially, the front door to Machu Picchu and was positioned so that the first thing a guest saw (perhaps as he dusted off his tunic and accepted a cup of chicha) was the green thumb of Huayna Picchu’s peak, perfectly framed by the portal. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.
In a couple of minutes, we were peering inside Bingham’s first discovery, the surrealist cave of the Royal Mausoleum. The cavern’s natural rock walls had been fortified with elaborate stonework. One hourglass-shaped section almost seemed to melt into the cave wall, as if in a Dalí painting. A four-step staircase, slightly off-kilter, had been carved out of a single piece of granite that grew from the earth near the cave’s entrance. It all obviously had some special significance, but no one could say what that had been.
“I’d guess those steps were probably for displaying idols of some sort,” John said. “And if you look up”—we took a step backward—“there’s the Torreon.”
The circular wall looming above us seemed to have swallowed the grotto below like the trunk of a matapalo. At the center of the Torreon was a large, flattish rock with a groove cut into its top. The rock doubled as the roof of the Royal Mausoleum below.
“What were the windows for?” I asked John. The tower had three of them. Two were small and perfectly rhomboid and faced, respectively, east and south. The other, a large portal, was dubbed the Enigmatic Window because of mysterious holes bored through the rocks at its base. “It is what archaeologists commonly call ‘problematical,’” Bingham wrote, in a rare instance of admitting that he was baffled.
“It’s said that the small window faces east toward the sun,” John said, somewhat dubiously. The Torreon was also known as the Sun Temple, both because of this alleged alignment with the sunrise and because of its uncanny resemblance to the Koricancha in Cusco. “Supposedly, on the winter solstice in June, the sun rises above a peak over there, to the east, and then shines through that window and casts a rectangle of light onto that big rock in the center of the circular building.”
“You mean like in Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
“Something like that. Now, I have read in a couple of places that the window doesn’t quite line up with the solstice, that it’s a few degrees off. That’s not really the sort of mistake the Incas would have made.”
“Huh. And what about the big window?”
“You might want to talk to Paolo about that.” Paolo was the researcher who lived alone in a cabin in Alaska and had yanked Bingham back into the news when he theorized that a German might have beaten the Yalie to Machu Picchu. “He’s been doing a lot of work on the subject. He thinks the Torreon might have been Pachacutec’s tomb. Paolo even thinks he might have figured out where Pachacutec is buried.”
It’s almost impossible to spend time at Machu Picchu without asking a question: was there an architectural visionary who can take credit for the city’s distinctive, harmonious look? The answer, probably, is yes—Pachacutec, the earth shaker who began the great expansion of the Inca empire. According to one Jesuit missionary’s recounting, Pachacutec handed off military responsibilities to one of his sons and turned his attention to building “magnificent temples and palaces and strong castles.” In addition to extending the roads of the Capac Ñan, overseeing the transformation of Cusco into a capital worthy of Tawantinsuyu (and the construction of the gold-plated Koricancha at the very center of that empire), Pachacutec apparently supervised the creation or renovation of most of the Incas’ greatest hits: Sacsahuaman, Ollantaytambo, and probably even Vitcos.9 We know that Machu Picchu belonged to Pachacutec because in the 1980s a notation was found in a Cusco archive, dated 1568, that registered a site called “Pichu�
� as belonging to his clan. Under Inca real estate law, old commanders in chief never died or faded away; because they were immortal, their mummified bodies retained all the benefits they had enjoyed while living, including their real estate holdings. If the Spaniards hadn’t arrived, Machu Picchu might still belong to Pachacutec.
The stonework at Machu Picchu is just the most conspicuous aspect of its brilliance. The citadel is also, in the words of the hydrologist Kenneth Wright, “a civil engineering marvel.” Someone had to have made the climb up to the ridge around 1450 A.D.—historians’ best guess—and decided that this remote saddle between two jagged peaks, with dizzying drops on two sides, could be cleared, leveled and made suitable for habitation and agriculture. Whoever planned Machu Picchu also had to construct a royal city that could withstand the sorts of Andean rainstorms and landslides that today are capable of wiping out train lines and entire villages. And let’s not forget about earthquakes; Machu Picchu sits atop not one but two fault lines.
Yet when Bingham arrived in 1911, after the tropics had reclaimed the site for the better part of four centuries, Machu Picchu wasn’t much worse for wear beneath all the bamboo and moss. Even the complex Inca water channels, with a little Roto-Rooter work, functioned like they had in pre-Columbian times. A spring-fed chain of sixteen fountains was designed so that the Inca’s hands—or any other part of his sacred being—would be the first to touch the fresh water as it flowed down from a mountain spring. When John and I looked in, a teenage girl was rinsing her long hair in what had probably been Pachacutec’s bathtub.
After Bingham followed his boy guide through an old quarry to the Sacred Plaza, the explorer saw the temples that astonished him. The three-sided Principal Temple is the most monolithic structure at Machu Picchu. Constructed of gigantic precision-cut stones, it seems to have been built by an entirely different race of people from those who assembled the Torreon. The blocks are so heavy that one corner of the building, behind the massive stone altar, is slowly sinking into the ground. Just a few steps beyond its open side, terraces staircase steeply down the mountainside for a couple hundred feet before dropping off into an abyss. The power plant was down there somewhere, invisible. In The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara wrote about playing a freewheeling game of soccer when he arrived for a life-changing visit to Machu Picchu. It had sounded romantic when I read about it in my early twenties. As I looked over the edge, it seemed suicidal.
“Look at how the Incas built this up to the last possible inch, taking what appears to be unusable ground and making it usable,” John said, peering down at the terraces. “A place like Angkor Wat is fantastic,” he said, referring to the enormous twelfth-century temple complex in Cambodia. “But they didn’t have the problems there that the Incas did here. This place is a statement: look at how we can tame nature.”
We turned around and walked over to the Temple of the Three Windows. The view hadn’t changed much from the one that had intoxicated Bingham. A low ceiling of clouds hovered around the tops of the mountains straight ahead. John believed the spare stonework had once been dressed up in textiles and precious metals. “It’s fantastic now, but imagine this temple covered with gold and silver plate, and colored cloths,” John said. “Old Father Calancha would have shit himself.”
Noon to three are the busiest hours at Machu Picchu, rush hour for day trippers from Cusco. John led me off to some of the out-of-the-way parts of the complex. “Look at that,” he said, as we sat in the shade beneath a spot that Bingham named the Funerary Rock. “There’s a trail going off into the bush. It has to lead somewhere, right? Makes you wonder how much there is of this place that we don’t know yet.”
We munched on quinoa energy bars and watched the parade pass below: American retirees in matching T-shirts; Spanish-speaking men in sport coats and ascots; Japanese tourists proceeding silently, single file, each one carrying a Prada bag; five groovy women dressed like the Rolling Stone fact-checking department circa Frampton Comes Alive!, walking in a tight group and stopping frequently to stuff herbs into cracks between the stones as they whispered incantations. A collegeage couple, with nervous smiles and dilated pupils, tried to look in all directions at once. Four male trekkers arrived from the Inca Trail, speaking German. One of them was wearing a candy-striped cycling cap, red vinyl sleeveless vest unzipped to the navel and blue satin short shorts. Father Calancha would have shit himself.
Over the next couple of hours we made the long walk out to the Sun Gate, the entry point from the Inca Trail, then made another loop around the full site, stopping occasionally at a particularly beautiful building, like the Temple of the Condor. A light rain began to fall, which hastened the daily three o’clock exodus by an hour. Tour groups wearing cheap plastic ponchos gravitated toward the exit like jellyfish attacking a swimmer. John and I returned to the now-empty Sacred Plaza and climbed a few flights of stone steps to the highest point in the main site of Machu Picchu, stopping halfway, while a woman with an unmistakable Long Island accent called her mother on her cell phone.
“Oy gevalt, Mom, I’m calling from nine thousand feet. I can barely breathe. Hold on, I want you to say hi to our guide, Juan.” Her pronunciation of WAAAAAAHHHAAAN could have summoned a flock of mallards. We slipped behind Juan, who seemed a little surprised to be connected to Nassau County, and continued to the top. A crowd was milling around the enigmatic carved rock that had been Bingham’s final discovery that July day.
Bingham gave this sculptured stone the name Intihuatana,10 and it almost surely has something to do with the sun. It’s also clearly related to the Sacred Plaza right beneath it—the winding staircase up from the Principal Temple ascends to one of those archetypal Inca ta-da! moments as the mysterious stone is revealed. Today the rock seemed to be operating as a magnet, pulling toward it the dozen or so mystical tourists who hadn’t left with the rain.
“Watch this,” John said. “Their guide’s going to tell them to hold their hands out to feel the cosmic energy emanating from the rock.”
Several sets of hands reached out toward the Intihuatana. After a second or two, the mystics turned toward each other excitedly.
“I feel warmth,” said one.
“Me too,” said another.
“It’s a rock that sits in the sun all day,” John said, loud enough to be heard in Cusco. “Of course it feels warm.”
I smiled condescendingly to show John that I was with him one hundred percent—what’s with these weirdos?—and we started to head for the stairs down toward the bus. But first I pretended I’d dropped something next to the Intihuatana, and, when John wasn’t looking, held my hand out to touch it. I couldn’t say for sure if it was charged with Pachamama power. I’ll say this, though—it was definitely warm.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Big Picture
High Above Machu Picchu
At four forty-five the next morning, John and I were standing in line, in the dark, in a monsoon. Only the first four hundred of the three to four thousand visitors who sign in at Machu Picchu’s main entrance each day are allowed to climb to the top of Huayna Picchu, the green peak that anchors its north end. This exclusivity, among a crowd of people who’ve often waited years to see Machu Picchu and traveled from around the world to get there, makes the idea of queuing for a bus in the predawn darkness seem almost alluring, even when rainwater has leapt the curb and flooded the sidewalk and the feet of all those standing on it. I was exhausted after weeks of fitful sleep at altitude, but excited, too. John had assured me that climbing Huayna Picchu not only provided a gorgeous overview of the site, it also would be the best illustration yet of how Machu Picchu had connected with the rest of the Inca empire. The first bus was scheduled to depart at 5 A.M. The bus drivers began arriving at five-forty.
When the gate to Huayna Picchu was opened a couple of hours later, a number of fit young men were waiting impatiently at the sentry hut, fiddling with their digital watches. Everyone making the climb must sign a waiver relieving the INC of any li
ability should they fall off; Justo had told me that a Russian with multiple piercings had attracted a lightning bolt recently and taken a nasty fall. Evidently a rumor had swept through the bars of Aguas Calientes the previous night that the record for ascending the peak was twenty minutes. One after another, competitors took off in a sprint. “The real record’s probably more like twelve minutes,” John said as we signed in. “No need to tell those lads that, though.”
From afar, and in photographs, it’s difficult to see that Huayna Picchu is covered in stonework, temples and terraces that cling to the slope like baby monkeys. A recent soil analysis revealed that some of its highest terraces were used to grow mate, the nasty caffeinated beverage that people suck through metal straws on the east coast of South America. Sets of granite steps wound like a DNA helix several hundred feet to the summit. Most climbers turned right near the top. John went to the left, where we clambered alone up a final set of stairs angled like a stepladder.
At the top, we waited. And waited. Machu Picchu is cloudy in the morning, and we could only catch glimpses of the city below between the mist. John pointed to the far end of the site, where groups of Inca Trail hikers who’d awakened at four to meet the sunrise at the Sun Gate—virtually every tour company uses this supposedly magical moment as a selling point—were waiting impatiently for their first glimpse of the city.
“The Sun Gate at sunrise is a complete waste of time,” John said as we looked south. “The sun doesn’t actually arrive at Machu Picchu at the sunrise. And when it does rise everything’s covered in mist. All my clients used to insist on doing it because they’d been brainwashed. And then everyone always used to say, ‘That’s it? I wish I’d slept in.’”
Directly above us, at the very top of Huayna Picchu, a gaggle of college kids sprawled across a pile of enormous boulders, arguing about who had made it up the fastest and napping away hangovers. Most of the bars in Aguas Calientes, I’d noticed, offered a four-for-one pisco sour special. John prowled the peak, taking GPS measurements as I chatted with a mother and son from Düsseldorf. They thought it was absolutely vital that I know that the Hellmann’s mayonnaise in Europe is inferior to the stuff we can buy in the States. “Ours is more bitter,” the mother told me, then lowered her head as if she’d unburdened a dark secret.
