Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  “Oh, absolutely,” Reinhard said, and proceeded to rattle off the names of the structures that John had described to the study-abroad kids atop Mount Machu Picchu. All of them, Reinhard said, were adjacent to the main trail and had been constructed near water sources. “Each site is so unique,” Reinhard said. “These are not standard Inca sites. They were built for a purpose. Where else in the Inca empire do you find a path leading to these sorts of sites?”

  “What does this mean in regard to understanding what Machu Picchu was?”

  “It means you can’t just take Machu Picchu in isolation—you have to see it in context of the sites leading up to it.”

  “So the Inca Trail isn’t just a pretty shortcut that Pachacutec took on his way to his summer home?”

  “Mark, you can’t finish the Inca Trail and not know that this was the end point of a pilgrimage.”

  FORTY-ONE

  What’s the Big Idea?

  New Haven

  Having achieved his dream of becoming a famous explorer, Hiram Bingham III remained as driven as ever. A log that he maintained in early 1913—let’s pause for a moment to wonder just how many people were using time-management strategies in 1913—shows that he spent precisely six hours each week on “class exercises” for his teaching work; twenty-four and a half hours on writing “books and articles”; eight hours on “walks and squash and tennis”; and five hours on “reading for fun.” A second log subdivided his reading by category.

  Bingham felt a growing urgency to determine once and for all what Machu Picchu had been. And he knew that he needed to figure it out relatively quickly. With both poles claimed and Machu Picchu’s discovery drawing the spotlight to the ancient wonders of South America, explorers were concentrating their efforts as never before on the once-neglected continent. William Farabee, whose map of his Harvard expeditions had helped guide Bingham to Machu Picchu, embarked on a three-year trip in and around Peru, during which he assembled a formidable collection of pre-Columbian artifacts for his new employers at the University of Pennsylvania. Bingham’s onetime companion through Venezuela and Colombia, Dr. Hamilton Rice, was exploring the jungles of the Amazon (and, according to press reports, performing emergency surgery on his own knee by lantern light). Even one of Bingham’s heroes, former president Theodore Roosevelt, embittered after his failure to retake the White House as a third-party candidate in 1912, departed the following year on a perilous adventure to navigate a mysterious Brazilian waterway known as the River of Doubt.

  For Bingham, the most jolting news coming out of South America emerged from the mouth of J. Campbell Besley, a dashing English mining magnate, equally famous as a world-class polo player and a soldier of fortune who’d fought with Lord Kitchener’s scouts in the savage Boer War. Stung by a broken engagement to one of Los Angeles’s leading debutantes, Besley departed for Lima at the head of what one newspaper called “a red blooded party in search of a lost expedition into the Peruvian wilderness.” (The missing persons were a pair of explorers from Chicago, who vanished while searching for Inca cities.) When Besley returned to New York City in February of 1914 (accompanied by a tiny, mischievous monkey named Changa), he claimed to have found something even grander: three lost Inca cities near Cusco. These Besley modestly judged “equal in conception and execution to anything that is to be seen at present in the world of civilization.” He had also brought back, according to one newspaper, “a valuable collection of cinematographic pictures of the lost capital of the Incas, Machu Picchu.” Bingham pooh-poohed Besley’s claims about the new ruins—and nothing approaching the immensity of Besley’s descriptions has ever been found—but he surely knew that more serious fame-seeking adventurers were to follow.

  “Somebody is going to solve the mystery connected with these ancient peoples,” Gilbert Grosvenor wrote to Bingham in early 1914. “Let us get there first.”

  Bingham’s competitive fires didn’t need much stoking. He was already planning his largest and most expensive expedition yet, one that would take two years to complete—one year of preparatory work by underlings and another of fieldwork under his supervision. In February, his chief Peruvian nemesis, President Guillermo Billinghurst, had been deposed, exiled and replaced by a military junta. Bingham dispatched an advance party to establish a new headquarters at Ollantaytambo, which was given the faux-Quechua name Yankihausi, or House of the Yankees. From this base they could continue mapping the region around Machu Picchu. Bingham planned to follow in 1915.

  The official handbook that Bingham assembled for the Peruvian Expedition of 1914–15, under the Auspices of the National Geographic Society and Yale University, was his masterpiece of micromanagement. Almost every conceivable subject and contingency was covered, from “Care of Rifles” to “Treatment of Snakebite” to “Instructions for the Care and Selection of Mules.” (“Avoid mules with extra long heads, also those with hollow or dish faces.”) Considering the level of detail that Bingham was willing to go into regarding minutiae, his plans for 1915 seemed uncharacteristically scattered. Whereas in past years Bingham had been diligent in drawing up bullet-pointed lists of objectives, he described the goals of the new expedition in vague, grandiose terms. As Bingham was departing, the Hartford Courant explained that his expedition’s mission was to “complete the work of uncovering the mysteries of Inca civilization.”

  A handwritten to-do list that Bingham scribbled inside his own copy of the 1914–15 handbook indicates that the one unifying thread of his plans was his desire to prove once and for all his theories of why Machu Picchu had been built. Under the heading “Must Be Done,” Bingham’s top priority was to examine Pacaritambo, a site near Cusco that was generally agreed to be the location of Tampu Tocco, the three-windowed hill believed to be the fountainhead of the Inca dynasty.

  In the February 1915 issue of National Geographic, published just before Bingham departed for Peru, the explorer made clear that he was no longer suggesting that Machu Picchu might be Tampu Tocco, the birthplace of the Inca civilization; he was all but convinced of it. Bingham’s growing certainty relied on a somewhat shaky foundation, a history of the Incas published in 1642 by a priest named Fernando de Montesinos.12

  Bingham’s argument boiled down to this: The first Incas, because of their small army (Montesinos estimated their number at five hundred), would have needed to live in a place with excellent natural defenses. Machu Picchu was, of course, almost inaccessible. Montesinos reported that one of the early Inca rulers banned the use of writing. Bingham thought that enigmatic stones with rounded edges (sort of like poker chips) that had been excavated at Machu Picchu in 1912 might have been used for record keeping in the place of letters.13 Tampu Tocco was believed to have contained a wall with three windows—just like the Temple of the Three Windows at Machu Picchu—and to have been situated near a cave. “It is well to remember that there is no cave, large or small, at Pacaritambo,” Bingham wrote. “At Machu Picchu there are several large caves, one of them lined with very beautiful masonry.” In other words, the Royal Mausoleum beneath the Torreon was the holiest spot in Tampu Tocco—the very place from which the founding Incas had emerged.

  It was a pretty far-out argument, even for a man described by one New York newspaper as “the foremost authority in this country on South America.” But Bingham wasn’t finished. The ruins of Machu Picchu were so impressive—might they not also constitute the elusive Vilcabamba, Manco’s jungle refuge, the true Lost City of the Incas? Going back into the Spanish friar Antonio de la Calancha’s Coronica Moralizada, the seventeenth-century book whose clues had led him to Vitcos, Bingham reviewed Calancha’s description of Vilcabamba and the “University of Idolatry” contained within its city limits. A century before Calancha put quill to parchment, two Spanish monks who wished to see this unholy place had traveled three days on foot from Puquiura, near Vitcos, to get there. According to the Coronica, Vilcabamba was a hidden city, situated so that the priests could be kept quartered just outside its limits for three wee
ks without ever catching a glimpse of the blasphemous rituals being conducted within. While the monks bided their time, the new Inca, the rebel Manco’s son Titu Cusi, sent out wave upon wave of beautiful women “to tempt and try the monks and to endeavor to make them break their vows of celibacy,” Bingham wrote. According to Calancha, among the ranks of these temptresses were some women from Peru’s coastal tribes, renowned for their beauty.

  When Pizarro and his gang of thugs arrived, Bingham explained in his 1915 National Geographic story, “the most precious objects” to be hidden away were not “the gold and silver images that the Spaniards craved, but the Sacred Virgins of the Sun.” (The sexy name was Calancha’s coinage.) These were the beautiful young women who “from their earliest childhood had been educated to the service of the temple and to ministering to the wants of the Inca.” Finding the hidden road by which Manco and these Virgins had fled to Vilcabamba from Cusco was #2 on Bingham’s hastily scrawled to-do list.

  Machu Picchu had certainly been laid out so that a pair of monks waiting at the base of its mountain would have had no idea what was happening in the clouds above. Could it be reached from Puquiura (and Vitcos) in “three days’ journey over rough country,” as the friars had described it? Bingham planned to find out (item #3). As for the Virgins, an analysis back at Yale of the human remains from Machu Picchu had led to an interesting discovery. “The large majority of the skeletons are female and some are coast types,” Bingham wrote, emphasizing what he saw as a key piece of evidence.

  One question had hounded Bingham from the moment he’d first run his fingers along the flawless stonework behind the Torreon: “What could this place be?” An answer was finally emerging from the mists—Machu Picchu was both Tampu Tocco and Vilcabamba, the Lost City of the Incas. It was as if some intrepid Bible scholar had located an interesting hill outside of Jerusalem and concluded that it was not only the Garden of Eden but also Mount Calvary, site of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. Such a sweeping theory would take an enormous effort to prove. The staff for the 1915 expedition was twice the size of 1911’s, and the budget had mushroomed five times, to more than $50,000. Hundreds of square miles of new territory would need to be mapped. Untold miles of trails would have to be blazed through knotted cloud forest in areas Bingham had labeled “unexplored” on his maps. New excavations were to be undertaken, and every ruin that had been mapped needed to be reviewed. Few archaeologists accomplish that much in their careers. Bingham hoped to get it done in six months.

  Gilbert Grosvenor, in a note marked “personal” from February 1915, seemed to recognize that he may have encouraged Bingham to spread himself too thin.

  On the strength of our friendship, I am going to take the liberty of giving you a friendly tip. . . . You are overworking yourself to an extent that is unwise; you are overdrawing your reserve in your enthusiasm for your researches. You’ve got a problem on your hands that will require years of study before the solution is gained.... Every year your reputation and the fame of your achievements will increase like a snowball, but remember that physical strength is limited. I fear you are getting reckless, working too much nights and worrying for too quick results.... I’ve seen a great many men in my work here in the past fifteen years, of whom some of the brightest passed to the great beyond and oblivion because they forgot that a man’s strength is limited and if overtaxed will break as easily and as quickly as a thread.

  Hiram Bingham wasn’t interested in slowing down, though. He had presented to the world his Grand Unified Theory of Machu Picchu. Now all he had to do was prove it.

  FORTY-TWO

  Second Chances

  Between New York and Lima

  John and I exchanged a few e-mails in the weeks after I got home, then he disappeared on one of his long excursions into the mountains. A couple of quiet winter months passed, during which the only communication I received from him was a short note saying he was spending a few weeks in Lima. This seemed a bit out of character as John wasn’t particularly fond of big cities. Then one morning my e-mail inbox pinged and there was a message from him, with the subject “TRIPLE CABG!”

  “Hi Mark,” the note began. “How are you? It’s now been a month since I had a major health trauma, i.e., serious problems with my left coronary artery.”

  Just after we’d parted, John had been walking up a flight of a few hundred stone steps in Cusco when he felt a dull pain behind his sternum. A few similar episodes followed while he was engaging in his usual strenuous recreational activities. It was during a four-hour cycling trip through the mountains of Suriname (riding a one-gear bike, naturally) that the pain spiked enough for John to realize he’d better get to a doctor. A cardiologist in Lima gave him a stress test. “The angiogram showed I had three serious blockages of my left coronary artery,” John wrote in his e-mail. “Two of the blockages were greater than 85 percent.” He went in for an eight-hour triple bypass operation a week later.

  “Those first couple days after the procedure were awful,” John told me on the phone the day after his e-mail. “I woke up with a tube down my throat, completely unable to move, coughing blood. There was a nun reading the Bible over my bed.”

  If John felt any just-happy-to-be-alive euphoria, it was fleeting. “What they don’t tell you about heart surgery is that you get depressed,” he said. “I was in bad shape for a month afterward, physically and mentally.” He still sounded a little blue. John was proud of his ability to defeat any physical challenge through effort and concentration; the heart trouble had obviously left him rattled. He’d been told his days of carrying eighty-pound packs uphill were likely over.

  “My surgeon says it’s genetic—not enough HDL cholesterol, the good stuff,” he told me. “All the sport and walking in the Andes that I’ve done might’ve been what saved me. My heart was stressed so hard when I was younger that whenever my problem started, my circulatory system began building new pathways to pump the blood through. As it is I’ll be taking five pills a day for the rest of my life.”

  John paused. “You know, my father died at fifty-seven, same age as me. He was always so busy, vice president of his firm, president of the Royal Perth Golf Club. I was twenty-four when it happened. I felt like I hardly knew him.

  “It’s funny, for the last five years, as I got closer to fifty-seven, that’s always been in the back of my head. You wonder if your heart is telling you, ‘I’m not working properly.’ I’m always aware of gut feelings. They usually mean something.”

  I’d never heard John sound so melancholy. “Did you have anyone to look after you in the hospital?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s a little hard with no family around. You really need someone there twenty-four hours a day for the first two or three weeks. I have one Peruvian friend who’s been a bit helpful. And Paolo’s been here in Lima, of course. He’s visited a few times.”

  Paolo was Paolo Greer, an old friend of John’s from the expat community in Cusco. He’d been the person who suggested I contact John about my original Bingham trip. Paolo was the retired Alaskan gold prospector and dogged amateur researcher who’d made a splash in 2008 when he published an article in the South American Explorer Magazine titled “Machu Picchu Before Bingham.” The story described Paolo’s discovery of a hand-drawn nineteenth-century map in the Library of Congress. The map wasn’t labeled, but appeared to be of the area near Machu Picchu. “It took me another twenty years to find out who had drawn the map and why,” Paolo explained in his article.

  The evidence that Paolo dug up over those two decades supported an accusation that people had been making for years—that the site Bingham identified as the Lost City of the Incas might not have been nearly as misplaced as he’d made it out to be. I had exchanged dozens of e-mails with Paolo and found him to be, by far, the best-informed expert on the subjects of Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu. Having seen his research twisted in the press, he was also suspicious. Whenever I inquired about visiting him in person to discuss Bingham’s role at Machu Picchu,
he seemed to vanish into his isolated cabin near Fairbanks, which had neither phone nor electricity. I’d come to understand that if I was ever going to meet Paolo, it would probably be easier to track him down during one of his long visits to Peru.

  “Is Paolo still in Lima?” I asked John.

  “No, he’s gone back to Cusco. But I think he’ll be back through Lima for a few days in June before he returns to Alaska. Says he’s very keen to have a chat with you.”

  The feeling was mutual, which gave me an idea. I’d made a small discovery of my own, one that seemed head-slappingly obvious once it sunk in. Somehow in all my reading I had failed to recognize that an ancient highway leading to Machu Picchu that Bingham uncovered in 1915, one that he was convinced proved his Vilcabamba theory, now went by a more familiar name. For it was on his last expedition to Peru that Bingham found the Inca Trail.

  “When do you think you’ll be ready for hiking again?” I asked John.

  “The doctors tell most people to avoid strenuous exercise after a procedure like this.”

  “Uh-huh. And you?”

  “Well, I have been doing some special exercises to close this hole in my chest. It’s supposed to take six to ten weeks to heal up, but I think I’ve been able to do it in five. I felt it seal—it was like plastic setting.”

  “You think you’d be up for doing the Inca Trail by June? I’ve been thinking that I’d really like to see what happens on the solstice.”

  “I haven’t done the trail in, it must be twelve years.”

  “Think it’s changed much?”

  “Oh yeah. And unlike most things in the world, for the better. It used to be a mess, porters carrying a hundred pounds of gear, people shitting everywhere, bugs from the cattle that roamed the farms next to the trail. All that’s gone now; they’ve got regulations. No more than five hundred people per day are allowed on the Trail, including guides and porters. Speaking of which, we’ll have to get you a Peruvian guide, licensed for Machu Picchu—I can’t take you by myself.”