by Mark Adams
I should have asked them if there was a twelve-syllable German word meaning “even more sublime.” When the fog finally lifted and we could see Machu Picchu stretching out below, the chatter atop Huayna Picchu stopped. From this vantage point it seemed entirely credible that the city had been lost to the outside world for centuries, and that more wonders might be hiding in the cloud forest. Evidently the Incas were fond of the view from Huayna Picchu, too, because several temples and a large usnu had been built near the top.
“You’ll notice that the temple here looks straight onto Llactapata,” John said, pointing west with his right hand. His left was pointed south, so that his arms formed an L shape. “The Intihuatana is due south of here, and Salcantay”—a twenty-thousand-foot peak and one of the Incas’ two most sacred apus—“is due south of the Intihuatana.” I had to take his word for it. Due to low clouds and smog from the seasonal fires, I hadn’t caught a single glimpse of Salcantay. On a map, a line connecting the two peaks and the carved rock could be drawn with a ruler. The Incas, leaving nothing to chance, had carved a wedge of rock on the peak of Huayna Picchu that aimed like a compass point due south directly at a wedge-shaped hollow carved into the base of the Intihuatana, which in turn pointed at Salcantay.
The anthropologist Johan Reinhard has observed that the Intihuatana stone may actually be an abstract rendering of Huayna Picchu mountain. If viewed from the correct angle, he says, the shadows cast by the sharp edges of the Intihuatana mirror those that move across the face of Huayna Picchu. Thus the Intihuatana may have been several things at once: a link between two sacred peaks; a sculptural homage to one of those peaks; and a sundial, though not one that marked the hour according to the angle of the shadow it cast. Rather, in the age-old Andean tradition, the time of day could be assessed by reading the shadows on a mountain’s face (or a smaller, carved model of the mountain’s face)—just as my friend Nati had learned to do in her village as a girl. There were any number of buildings at Machu Picchu that were designed with such multiple uses in mind. And John and I hadn’t even discussed how certain buildings were also astronomical observatories by night.
John kept pointing out alignments, but when I tried to imagine all the solstices and trails intersecting with Machu Picchu, the only picture I could conjure in my head was a web of lines intersecting like a gigantic cat’s cradle. I felt an overwhelming desire to sit.
By early afternoon, John and I were back down at the main site, resting in the shade of a stone hut with a thatched roof. It was supposed to approximate what buildings had looked like in Pachacutec’s day. It reminded me of Juvenal’s house. John was crabby. Neither of us had slept well. The live band that performed at the pizza joint across from our hostel had kept going well past midnight, and we’d awakened at 4 A.M. and stood in the rain for an hour. Plus, it was lunchtime and John had only consumed about fourteen hundred calories, starvation rations by his usual standards.
“Well, Mark, I think we’ve seen almost everything,” he said, staring straight ahead. “Except Mount Machu Picchu, of course.”
John had been pushing hard for climbing Mount Machu Picchu, arguing that because it was the other bookend of the site—it sits at the south end, opposite Huayna Picchu—the view from its peak was essential for understanding how Machu Picchu connected with other sites. For reasons I still don’t completely comprehend, people will line up before dawn to climb Huayna Picchu, but virtually no one who isn’t a professional photographer climbs Mount Machu Picchu, even though you’re allowed to do so whenever you feel like it. I suppose, for starters, it has something to do with its being more than twice as tall as Huayna Picchu, a steep sixteen hundred feet straight up. There are also no ruins to see along the route, save some granite steps and platforms. Personally, I had little interest in seeing some place that, as far as I could recall, had no special significance for Bingham. But it had turned out to be a beautiful day, and I was sitting in a place that I knew a million people dreamed of visiting but would never have the chance to.
“You know what? Let’s climb it,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
On our way to the peak, we passed through the main site again, reviewing its most famous works as if preparing for a final exam. Shortly after starting our ascent, John lost his footing on some stone steps and stumbled. “Slippery here,” he said. “Wish I’d brought my walking stick. Hold on.” He stepped off the trail into the thick brush, found a dead stalk of bamboo and wrenched it free. The bamboo was about nine feet long.
“Just give me a minute to cut this down to size.” He reached into his bottomless daypack and rooted around for a minute. Then he stood back and scratched his head through his hat. “I must’ve forgotten my knife at the hotel.”
“Wait a sec,” I said, unzipping my pack. I dug around for a minute and then handed John my knife.
“That’s good preparation, Mark,” John said. “Nice sharp blade on it, too.” It was, I’m not ashamed to admit, one of the proudest moments of my life. He whittled his stick down to a manageable length and slapped the knife into my palm. We each took a swig of water and moved on.
The trail up had been built with viewing platforms every 150 feet or so, and we paused at each one to take in Machu Picchu from a new angle, the site growing a little smaller at each stop. “These platforms must’ve been like little stations of the cross,” John said. As we neared the summit, we encountered another Inca special effect. Each set of stairs appeared to reach the mountaintop, but then turned at the last minute to reveal another set of fifty or so stairs. Maybe Pachacutec was a practical joker. Or a sadist. It took us ninety minutes to reach the top. Every square inch of clothing I had on was sweated through, including my two pairs of socks, which squished as I walked.
“Looks like we’re the only ones up here today!” John shouted. The formula for making John happy could be expressed as (R + S) × E, or Ruins plus Solitude multiplied by Exertion. He was, therefore, ecstatic. A quarter mile beneath us, traffic on the staircase to the Intihuatana was stop-and-go. We crossed a short, knife-edged ridge to an usnu, where someone had planted the rainbow flag of Cusco, which is almost identical to the Gay Pride flag. The view was immense. We could see the Urubamba River coiling around Huayna Picchu, and Llactapata peeking out from the cloud forest across the valley. The ruins of the main site were minuscule. When the high-altitude clouds parted, hints of sacred mountains were visible in the distance. Trails branched out in all directions like the flagellating arms of a deep-sea creature.
We heard singing. Americans singing. Pairs of students from a study-abroad program began to arrive. I worried that they were going to spoil John’s afternoon. The opposite happened. These kids were perfect ambassadors for the U.S.A.—multiethnic, well scrubbed, extremely polite, completely uncynical and very curious. They latched on to John almost instantly and peppered him with questions.
“What’s the tallest mountain you’ve ever climbed?”
“Why does the Inca flag look like the Gay Pride flag?”
“Is there really treasure hiding out there or is that just in the movies?”
“Would you like half an orange?”
Mostly, they wanted to hear about the Inca Trail. What was it like? Was walking it hard? Was it the most awesome thing ever?
“It’s too bad you don’t like the Inca Trail,” I said to John.
He turned to me, confused. “I never said I didn’t like the Inca Trail. The Inca Trail is fantastic.”
I thought about this for a moment. John was right. I was the one who’d decided that I didn’t want to hike the Inca Trail because . . . why, exactly? Oh right, because it wasn’t hard-core enough for a serious adventurer like me.
“You can see how the Inca Trail leads out through the Sun Gate,” John told his audience. “Up there is Wiñay Wayna—that’s a tambo where the Inca himself stayed on his way to Machu Picchu. Absolutely brilliant. And beyond that is Phuyupatamarca, some fantastic stuff there.”
As I watched John excitedly sketch out the highlights of the trail for the study-abroad kids, I realized that I’d learned just enough on this trip to know how much I didn’t know. It was true that unlike 99.9 percent of the people who come to Peru, I’d taken the time to see not just Machu Picchu but several other wonders of Inca architecture. I’d carried a real man’s backpack long enough to know that I never needed to do it again. As someone with Bingham-like tendencies of my own, who strove to clear his desk at the end of every workday, I’d even developed a fondness for the put-it-up-and-break-it-down rhythms of camping.
At the same time, after walking through the Inca landscape and seeing how their architectural wonders connected to the natural environment—and to one another—I wasn’t any closer to understanding Machu Picchu. Anyone who has ever studied string theory in physics may have some idea of how I felt. You walk into class one day confident that you live in a three-dimensional world. An hour later you walk out with only the faintest grasp of the concept that there are actually nine or ten dimensions and, quite possibly, parallel universes on top of our own.
The cheerful gathering atop Mount Machu Picchu broke up. John and I caught a late afternoon bus back down the Hiram Bingham Highway. We hopped off at the point nearest to the new Machu Picchu museum, housed in a handsome building that almost no one visits because it’s a half mile from Aguas Calientes, at the end of a shadowy dirt road. I was curious to see how the official history would credit Bingham’s achievement.
It doesn’t. Not directly, anyway. Amid the typical museum displays (what the Incas ate; their metallurgical techniques) were two dedicated to undermining any claims that what Bingham had accomplished on July 24, 1911, was in any way special. The one nearest the entrance, labeled MACHU PICCHU: KNOWN TO SOME, explained how plenty of local people had known about the ruins before you-knowwho showed up with his camera. This was indisputable, of course— there were people living at Machu Picchu when he arrived. I did find it a little odd, however, that the brief explanation on the wall referred to the Yale explorer by the single name Bingham, as if he were Pelé or Cher. Or Mussolini.
In the next room hung six portraits of men who had influenced the history of Machu Picchu over the last hundred years. One of the men featured was Albert Giesecke, the University of Cusco administrator who suggested Bingham stop and see Melchor Arteaga at Mandor Pampa. Beneath the framed picture was a quote from Giesecke about how he and Bingham had often discussed the likelihood of finding ruins down the Urubamba Valley.
Something seemed to be missing. I looked around the room, and then made two circuits of the museum. Strangely, of the hundreds of photos on display, not a single one was of Bingham. The first man to photograph Machu Picchu had been airbrushed out of its official visual history.
When I returned to Giesecke’s smiling face, I noticed a display beneath that delved into some “highly irregular” dealings that Bingham had gotten involved in when he became fixated on solving the mystery of what Machu Picchu had been. Apparently, it wasn’t what Bingham did in 1911 that pissed people off; it was what he did when he returned the next year.
I was starting to think I might need another visit, too.
THIRTY-SIX
A Star Is Born
New York and Washington, D.C.
Bingham’s arrival in New York City aboard the steamship Metapan on December 21, 1911, could not have been better timed. Newspaper reporters were awaiting word of a victor in the Scott-versus-Amundsen race to the pole and had spent months whetting the public’s appetite for adventure stories. Bingham had cleverly churned the waters with the interviews he’d given prior to departing, promising lost cities. He had also telegraphed news of the Coropuna triumph at the first possible moment. His peers in the Royal Geographical Society received a sneak preview of his discoveries, with photographs, which Clements Markham published in the society’s December Geographical Journal, along with the encouraging comment, “I trust that [this] is the forerunner of a fuller topographical description of the Vilcabamba region.”
Though Bingham could, and did, boast about the expedition’s many achievements—the Cusco bones, the proof of Vitcos, the Coropuna climb—the news angle that received the most play in newspapers from Oshkosh to Topeka was his encounter at the lost city of Machu Picchu. The New York Sun’s headline was typical: EXPLORERS FIND CITY THAT WAS: WHITE-WALLED TOWN OF THE INCAS DISCOVERED IN PERU SNUGGLED UNDER CORNFIELDS. YALE PROFESSOR ASTOUNDED AT BEAUTY OF ARCHITECTURE. Had the explorer returned with any samples of this incredible stonework? “Nothing would have suited us better than to have brought specimens of the architecture home with us,” Bingham assured the mob. “This could not be done, however, as the Peruvian Government expressly forbids it.”
Bingham’s discovery immediately raised a number of questions: Who among the Incas built this palace in the sky? What was the significance of the unusual buildings? Why did the Incas choose such a dramatic location? And how had Machu Picchu been lost for centuries? Bingham seems to have been pondering the answers to some of these questions on the way home. The London Observer offered one possible answer. Bingham had found “what are believed to be the ruins of the Peruvian town referred to in the writings Sir Clements Markham as ‘the hill of the three-windowed temples.’”
In Markham’s book The Incas of Peru, which surveyed more than fifty years of study and had deeply influenced Bingham’s plans for the 1911 expedition, the former RGS president had recounted the story of Tampu Tocco—the Incas’ creation myth. “The legend relates that out of a hill with three openings for windows there came three tribes,” Bingham wrote in an article for Harper’s, his first attempt to explain Machu Picchu’s significance to the American public. “These tribes eventually settled at Cusco and founded the Inca empire.” At Machu Picchu, of course, Bingham had been transfixed by the building he named the Temple of the Three Windows. Since the structure was so extraordinary, and since no archaeologist had yet found the ruins of Tampu Tocco, then perhaps, just maybe, Machu Picchu and Tampu Tocco were one and the same. “It seems to me that there is a possibility that . . . Machu Picchu is the original Tampu Tocco, although this is contrary to the accepted location,” he wrote. The site was generally believed to have existed a few miles from Cusco and nowhere near Machu Picchu. “I may be wholly mistaken in this,” Bingham stressed near the end of his Harper’s story, “and I shall await with interest the discovery of any other place that fits as well the description of Tampu Tocco, whence came the Incas.”
Among the persons most intrigued by Bingham’s reports on Machu Picchu was Gilbert Grosvenor, the head of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Grosvenor, a little man with a tidy mustache and big plans, had been handpicked at the boy-wonder age of twenty-three by the society’s founder, the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. His assignment was to transform National Geographic from a dry, scholarly periodical into a general-interest magazine that would deliver information about science and the natural world to a wide audience. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Grosvenor succeeded brilliantly, growing the circulation from one thousand to more than eighty thousand. He possessed the rare editor’s genius at divining popular tastes—in 1910, after much trial and error, he gave National Geographic the eye-catching yellow border that is still instantly recognizable a hundred years later.
Grosvenor had made his magazine a success largely by pursuing two strategies. First, after making a study of famous travel narratives (such as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast), he began to emphasize stories about heroes and their triumphs; the society helped to sponsor Robert Peary’s successful ride to the North Pole. Grosvenor’s second editorial innovation was to devote more pages to photography. A 1905 photo essay about the hidden mystical city of Lhasa, Tibet, had helped kickstart the magazine’s growth spurt. Grosvenor was now considering throwing a third innovation into the editorial mix. The relatively new science of archaeology was becoming popular and National Geograp
hic’s editor saw potential in adding to the magazine tales of ancient cultures rediscovered.
Grosvenor had politely declined earlier inquiries from Bingham asking the society to sponsor his South American peregrinations in 1906 and 1908. After reading about Machu Picchu, however, Grosvenor immediately sensed that Bingham’s story was perfect for his magazine. Within days of Bingham’s return, Grosvenor had solicited a long story from the explorer about his adventures in Peru, with plenty of photographs. The project would require a return expedition, which the National Geographic Society would help fund. Bingham had hardly returned from Peru before he was planning another, bigger trip back.
This time, no Mitchell family money would be required. Back in New Haven, Bingham the junior faculty member found that the 1911 expedition had improved his status on campus as well. A column in The Wall Street Journal predicted that the bones found near Cusco would provide a “new chapter” in the paleontological work begun by Bingham’s fellow Yale scholar Othniel Marsh. In January, Bingham presented his findings before a meeting of the members of the Yale Corporation, a group that included President Taft. Bingham must have been convincing, because Yale agreed to split the costs of a new expedition with the National Geographic Society. By May 1912, Bingham was once again steaming southward to Peru.
THIRTY-SEVEN
