Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  Which is not to say that Yale’s stewardship had been flawless. Bingham sent boxes of remains from his 1914–15 Expedition back to Peru without any documentation, making them almost useless to researchers. When Burger and Salazar first saw the Bingham collection in the 1980s, much of it was deteriorating after decades of neglect. Karp-Toledo had no doubts. “It’s absolutely certain that Peru can take care of these artifacts.”

  The latest chatter I’d heard in Lima was that Karp-Toledo was pushing the conflict over the Bingham pieces to keep her husband’s name in the news as he contemplated another run for the presidency. I asked as diplomatically as possible if perhaps Bingham was being used as the whipping boy for other interests.

  “He has been demonized by some specialists—fairly,” Karp-Toledo said, but declined to name any names.

  In that case, could she think of anything nice to say about Bingham?

  “I think the politician in him ate the adventurer in him. That’s too bad. If I were to give Bingham credit for one thing, it was that he brought knowledge of Machu Picchu to the world.”

  We stood to leave. I noticed that her military T-shirt had writing on it. “What does it say?” I asked.

  Karp-Toledo pinched the hem and pulled it down so I could get a good look. It wasn’t El Che. It was a picture of an ancient Peruvian warrior framed by the words INCA POWER. “Do you know who that is?” she asked, smiling.

  “Pachacutec?”

  She shook her head no. “It’s him,” she said, and pointed at her husband, who was still huddled with his associates. Inca. Power. The next day I would read that he was running again for president.

  Karp-Toledo insisted that I take a muffin for the road.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Action Hero

  Within the Pages of National Geographic

  Bingham sailed again into New York Harbor almost a year to the day after his triumphant return in 1911. This time, in lieu of swashbuckling tales of lost cities and conquered mountain peaks, he came bearing excuses, grudges and thirteen-year-old Juan Leguia, the son of the former president, whose toxically unpopular father was shipping him off to military school in Virginia. According to the version of events that Bingham chose to tell reporters, Yale’s concession had been all but forced upon him by the elder Leguia. The sudden opposition to his expedition removing artifacts had been stoked by “men who were in the business of exporting and buying archaeological things.” The officials who handed down the decree allowing him to depart with his boxes had been “as insulting to us as they possibly could be.” The whole affair had left Bingham bitter. “I can now say freely that we don’t propose to go to Peru in the near future,” he said.

  Down in Washington, D.C., Gilbert Grosvenor evidently saw things a little differently. After viewing Bingham’s photographs from Machu Picchu, the editor decided immediately that National Geographic would devote an entire issue to the story, the first time in the magazine’s history that it would do so. Grosvenor also arranged the seating chart for the society’s annual dinner, held in January 1913, so that Bingham dined at the head table. There he was joined by the evening’s main attractions: toastmaster and North Pole hero Robert E. Peary, who told the assembled attendees that Bingham’s discoveries had “astounded the scientists of the world,” and the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, recipient of the year’s Explorers Gold Medal for winning the race to the South Pole. (The world was still a few weeks from hearing the news that the frozen body of Amundsen’s rival Captain Scott had been discovered.11) Dressed formally in white tie and tails, Bingham delivered a brief speech that focused on the triumphs of 1911, not the disappointments of 1912. “Buried in the jungle, we found a city called Machu Picchu,” he told the evening’s six hundred distinguished guests. “That is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering.”

  “I do not think even you realize the sensation that the article will make,” Grosvenor wrote to Bingham shortly before the Machu Picchu issue appeared that spring. (Readers’ expectations may not have been especially high. The lead story from the previous edition had been “Oysters: The World’s Most Valuable Water Crop,” by Hugh M. Smith, who’d previously penned “Making the Fur Seal Abundant” and “Brittany, the Land of the Sardine.”) Anyone picking up the April 1913 National Geographic edition would have seen immediately that it was something special. The entire magazine consisted of one long article, catchily titled “In the Wonderland of Peru.” A brief introductory editor’s note set the tone: “What an extraordinary people the builders of Machu Picchu must have been to have constructed, without steel implements, and using only stone hammers and wedges, the wonderful city of refuge on the mountain top.” The story and its accompanying photographs—including a panoramic view of the entire site, printed as a foldout—conveyed a romantic tale of exploration and discovery that would endure for almost a century: an intrepid young American professor, searching for the capital of a vanished kingdom, discovers an immense city in the clouds, lost to the jungle for untold centuries.

  As always, Bingham’s storytelling tended toward the dry side, his narrative weighed down by lists of maladies suffered by expedition members and tedious details about building a temporary bridge. (Incredibly, his first draft of the article seems to have skipped over the details of the 1911 discovery; Bingham added them only after Grosvenor gently pointed out that “our readers will want to know how you found it.”) The photographs, however—250 in all—were astonishing. Bingham managed to capture the vastness of the Andes and the precision of Inca masonry; his black-and-white images of the new mule road through the Urubamba Valley have the spellbinding etched-mirror allure of Ansel Adams’s work. The before-and-after pictures of the ruins as they were transformed from an overgrown ghost town to the mystical city known today make clear, in a way that Bingham’s stiff prose never managed to, how it was possible for such a set of buildings to simply disappear into the jungle.

  If the reaction of the press had been enthusiastic in December 1911, Bingham’s visual aids now pushed writers to hyperbolic new heights. In a long story titled “The Greatest Architectural Discovery of the Age,” The New York Times Magazine was particularly effusive:Just now, when we thought there was practically no portion of the Earth’s surface still unknown, when the discovery of a single lake or mountain, or the charting of a remote strip of coast line was enough to give a man fame as an explorer, one member of the daredevil explorers’ craft has “struck it rich,” struck it so dazzlingly rich, indeed, that all his confrères may be pardoned if they gnash their teeth in chagrin and turn green with envy.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about that extraordinary sentence is that it happened to be true.

  FORTY

  The Sacred Center

  Between New York and the Appalachians

  One morning I was sitting with John Leivers in a Cusco café, nibbling on coca cookies and watching a parade sponsored by the Peru-Cuba Alliance. Less than twenty-four hours later, I’d been sucked through the CUZ > LIM > JFK pneumatic tube and found myself in midtown Manhattan, standing bewildered amid the scurry of commuters in Grand Central Terminal. My cell phone, after weeks of homesick scanning for a signal, recognized where it was and vibrated to life in my pocket. I called Aurita and went straight to voice mail. Without really thinking, I bought a coffee and a bagel and hopped on the 9:37 local train home. When my car emerged from underground, I noticed that the trees had lost their leaves while I was away.

  Aside from a lingering tendency to walk down stairs splayfooted, I lapsed into my old routine within a day or two. I drove the boys to school, took long shopping trips to the supermarket and stopped glazing my hands with sanitizer every ten minutes. To my former colleagues I bragged a little about the trip—“of course you’ve got to be careful traveling with mules at high altitude”—but the satisfaction was ephemeral. For a few weeks my wandering mind seemed to tune in intermittently to a staticky Andean radio station; at stoplights, random thoughts of devil goats and intihuata
nas popped into my head. Whenever I started to wonder if my memory was playing tricks on me, I pulled out two souvenirs I’d brought home as reminders that Peru was simply a different world. One was a ten-sol note, Peru’s equivalent of a five-dollar bill. On the flip side, where the august Lincoln Memorial would be printed on a sawbuck, was a picture of a Peruvian war ace flying his plane. Upside down. The other memento was a postcard of Cusco’s most famous painting, which hangs in a cathedral on the central plaza. In it, Jesus and the twelve disciples are seated at the Last Supper. At the center of the table, paws up, is a roasted guinea pig. Of course, having been raised Catholic, I immediately felt guilty for seeing humor in a painting that others saw as holy. Even if it was pretty funny.

  My ambivalence toward supernatural matters wasn’t particularly helpful when I sat down to untangle everything John had told me about why Machu Picchu had been built where it was—all the alignments and solstices and the worship of the sun and the mountains. When editing adventure travel magazines, I had always rolled my eyes at press releases that crossed my desk promising “healing excursions” or “sacred getaways” to Machu Picchu; a never-ending parade of New Age kooks always seemed to be marching through the site, waving crystals and absorbing the positive vibrations. Through most of my trip with John, a quote from Shirley MacLaine, patron saint of pop occultism, had been stuck in my head like a bad fast-food jingle:I went to Machu Picchu in Peru with a man who said he had had a love affair with an extraterrestrial. He said he was still being guided by her and could call on that guidance anytime. He proceeded to do just that.

  Still, I had to admit that when I stood atop Mount Machu Picchu and saw how the site aligned with the natural features surrounding it, I’d felt a twinge of . . . something. Awe? Transcendence? I felt ridiculous even trying to think in such terms.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t know any extraterrestrials who’d have sex with me, but there was one obvious way to find some of the answers I was seeking. I called Johan Reinhard.

  Reinhard is the author of Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center, the book that had sent John searching for alignments all over Peru (and which had kept me waiting for over an hour at a Cusco bookstore). He also happens to be an explorer who has summitted more than a hundred seventeen-thousand-foot peaks. He’s probably best known for finding the Ice Maiden, the mummy of an adolescent girl who had been left hundreds of years ago atop Peru’s 20,700-foot Mount Ampato as a human sacrifice to the all-powerful mountain gods. Reinhard had been searching for Inca ruins amid the apus south of Cusco when he realized that the heat from a volcano erupting nearby might have revealed new artifacts beneath Ampato’s ancient snowcap. When he and his climbing partner, Miguel Zárate, scaled the mountain, they found the frozen body of a young woman, laid out on a burial platform and surrounded by unbroken ceramics and gold and silver figurines of humans and animals. She wore a feather headdress. Reinhard intuited immediately what they had found. “We were looking straight into the face of an Inca,” he later recalled.

  In addition to Reinhard’s mountaineering and academic credentials—he has a PhD in anthropology—he specializes in the emerging field of sacred geography. This is but one of many disciplines grouped together under the umbrella term “archaeoastronomy,” or the study of how ancient peoples incorporated the sun, moon and stars into their daily lives. (Amateur practitioners devote a lot of time to trying to prove that the Mayas predicted the world would end in 2012.) Reinhard has spent much of his life in South America and Asia studying how mountain peoples integrate the landscape in which they live into their spiritual beliefs. He drew on this experience to formulate his sacred center theory.

  “The Western idea is that you look at something like a mountain and you see a physical object,” Reinhard told me when I reached him at his home in West Virginia. (I’d assumed that anyone named Johan Reinhard would speak like Henry Kissinger; as it turned out, Reinhard had grown up outside Chicago, like me.) “Among traditional peoples—in the Andes, in China, in the Himalayas—we’ve found that certain features of the landscape—mountains, rivers, lakes, caves—are seen as physical, but they’re also imbued with sacred power in one way or another. For example, a mountain might be the place where their ancestors originated, or the place where the dead go. A mountain might be perceived as the deity that controls fertility in all its different aspects, everything from the welfare of animals to the fertility of humans and, of course, the fertility of crops.” Which makes sense on a purely phenomenological level—in the Andes, Reinhard said, elements such as rain, snow, thunder and lightning all seem to originate in the mountains. The effect is multiplied by Peru’s insane weather. “I was in the Sacred Valley in 1983 when a hailstorm knocked out ninety percent of the corn crop in fifteen minutes,” he said. “So if your perception is that the mountains control weather, you’re going to try to make those mountains happy.”

  If there were a Geiger counter for geographic sacredness, the topographically rich site of Machu Picchu would bury the needle. Mountain worship was one of the cornerstones of Inca religion. Among the pantheon of apus scattered throughout the Andes, the Incas revered two peaks above all others. One was Ausangate, which stands above Cusco and the glaciers of which are the source of the sacred Urubamba River. “The Urubamba does a very unusual thing at Machu Picchu,” Reinhard said. “It loops around the promontory that the site is built on.” The other key apu is Salcantay, which not only overlooks Machu Picchu but is directly linked to it by a long ridge, like the tip of a root on an old oak tree. Salcantay’s glaciers are the source of the sacred Aobamba River—which unites with the Urubamba near where it folds itself around Machu Picchu. “Wherever you have water coming out of a mountain slope, people perceive it as coming out of the mountain’s own body,” Reinhard said. Machu Picchu was also “situated in the transition zone between the highlands and the Amazon jungle,” which heightened its importance.

  All of these natural convergences would have made Machu Picchu’s site “especially powerful,” says Reinhard, but the Incas also, of course, worshipped the sun. The Sapa Inca—“not only a secular ruler but also the head of the state religion,” according to Reinhard—relied on his status as the son of the sun to support his claim to power. For this reason, the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) were crucial to Inca beliefs, according to the Spanish chronicles. “The particularly unusual thing about Machu Picchu,” Reinhard explained, “is that in all the cardinal directions, you had sacred mountains.” I’d seen this when I’d climbed Huayna Picchu with John. Because Huayna Picchu was due north of the city, an Inca priest standing atop its peak would have faced south toward the major apu of Salcantay. Similar important peaks stood directly to the east and west of the city.

  The night sky above Machu Picchu held even more clues. The Southern Cross, one of the most important constellations in the Incas’ religion, appears directly above Salcantay on the December solstice—the longest day of the year and the start of the rainy season. The Milky Way was a celestial river mirrored by its earthbound counterpart, the winding Urubamba. Or as Reinhard put it to me, “Machu Picchu is sort of like the Inca cosmos written on the landscape.”

  Looked at through the telescopic lens of archaeoastronomy, the question isn’t why Pachacutec chose to build Machu Picchu where it is, but rather how he could have placed it anywhere else.

  The structures and carvings at Machu Picchu, too, were designed to complement all this sacred geography. The Intihuatana stone, carved out of solid granite attached to the Salcantay massif, connects Huayna Picchu to the main peak of Salcantay. Bingham’s Temple of the Three Windows looks due east toward the rising sun. The building that intrigued me most was the Torreon. The upper curved part seems to have been modeled on the Koricancha sun temple, the most sacred building in the city of Cusco. The cave below, with its psychedelic stonework and carved stone stepladder, faces the sunrise on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. One small east-facing window is positioned perf
ectly to observe the Pleiades cluster of stars, whose appearance heralded the turning of a new agricultural year. This was the same window that I’d been told cast a beam of light onto the carved rock within. (Reinhard had also heard of this phenomenon, but hadn’t witnessed it.) It occurred to me that making a return trip to Machu Picchu to see that solstice alignment—visible for only a few days in June—might be my one chance to see the sacred center theory in action.

  Our discussion of the infinite mysteries of space reminded me of another universal law: when people speak to a writer for the first time, they must ask him where he gets his ideas. Naturally, I asked Reinhard if he recalled how he’d come up with the sacred center theory.

  “I was trekking in on the Inca Trail on a brilliant day,” he said, “and I pulled out my compass and it all started coming together.”

  “The Inca Trail?” It seemed a little soft for a man who’d carried a ninety-pound mummy down from the peak of a twenty-thousand-foot mountain on his back.