Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  “So what happened to the gold statue?” I asked.

  “It was brought up to Cajamarca for Atahualpa’s ransom.”

  The circular part of the Torreon had been built to wrap around a large rock with what appears to be a chunk chiseled out of its center. This rock has befuddled archaeologists for a hundred years. Bingham was the first to note that it looked burned. “At some time or another a really extraordinary amount of heat must have been applied,” he wrote. The prevailing theory, according to Paolo, was that the rock had been struck by lightning.

  “It wasn’t done by lightning,” Paolo told me, shaking his head. “I was just up inside there. Granite doesn’t conduct lightning that well, and it’s cracked as hell on the inside. Atahualpa’s people came in to get that golden statue. They filled the entire place up with firewood and they torched it.” The intense heat would have had a similar effect to a lightning bolt, cracking the rock quickly. “Apparently they were in a hurry,” Paolo said.

  Paolo’s not the only one who thinks this, incidentally. Luis Lumbreras, one of the most respected archaeologists in Peru, has argued that the Torreon and the cave underneath were probably Pachacutec’s royal crypt.

  “It’s all right there if you examine it,” Paolo said. “Play Sherlock Holmes. It all fits together really well.”

  Now we were getting somewhere: Maybe the Inca Trail had been a pilgrimage, leading to gold statue of Pachacutec—which was illuminated by the rising sun on the holiest day of the year! I asked Paolo what he thought of the sunlight-through-the-window theory.

  “That little window doesn’t mean shit,” he said. A friend of his had taken a digital compass reading that indicated the position of the window didn’t quite align with the angle of the solstice; it was off by a few degrees.

  “Oh.” Admittedly, this took a little wind out of my sails. Paolo must have noticed my disappointment.

  “Well, who cares if it does or it doesn’t? Let’s go eat.”

  We moved on to dinner at an Italian restaurant, where Paolo explained a way to prove his theory. Berns wrote that the Indians near Machu Picchu possessed a “large stone statue of an Inca,” which later vanished. Paolo thought the statue was buried in some terraces on the back side of Machu Picchu, beneath a rounded wall that he insisted was “the best wall in Machu Picchu.”

  But, assuming the statue was found, how could we possibly know it was the Earth Shaker? Paolo had that covered, too. “Find the mummy.”

  According to one Spanish chronicler, the mummies of at least three Incas, including Pachacutec, were transported to the San Andrés Hospital in Lima in 1560. The last person to report having seen them was Bingham’s old pal Father Calancha, in 1638. A few attempts have been made to search for the mummies, none successful.

  “Did I tell you how I found Pachacutec? That’s a weird story.” Paolo looked at me across his gnocchi to see if I was prepared. I wasn’t, but since I had flown in on the red-eye and had downed a glass of wine, at this point I was pretty much defenseless. “One day a friend of mine confided in me; she said, ‘You know, Paolo, I’m a dowser.’”

  “You mean like someone who searches for water with a stick?”

  “You can dowse for anything. I gave her a new map I had of Machu Picchu, a good map, and told her I was looking for a stone statue of Pachacutec. When she dowsed it, she picked the same spot I did.”

  The look on my face must not have conveyed complete credulousness, because Paolo immediately added, “I’m a skeptic. I like details.” When his friend next came up to Lima, Paolo arranged for them to visit the old hospital grounds. “She starts sensing things, and she zeroes in on the patio. Then she pulls out this special dowsing thing. I gave her a piece of chalk and said, ‘Mark the ground.’ She starts making marks, x x x x x x x. Then she says, ‘This must be wrong—it’s a shape about a meter long. How can he be a meter tall?’ I said, ‘Incas were mummified in a sitting position.’” They found three possible mummies, one of whom Paolo surmised had been cremated. Paolo took a photo of the three sites and then the two of them marked up the patio with fifteen more body shapes with chalk x’s to hide their discovery. “It looked like the crime scene for a mass murder.” He was concerned that time might be running out—the charity that administered the hospital grounds had begun leasing out lots for commercial purposes.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. On the one hand, I’d always found Paolo to be unimpeachably well informed about Machu Picchu. On the other, well, as far as I know, Emily Post never addressed the subject of how to keep the conversational ball rolling when your dinner guest starts talking about dowsing for mummies. So I asked Paolo if he’d like dessert. Over crème brûlée, I tried to get a fix on what he thought of the trouble Bingham had stirred up between Yale and Peru. “Frankly, Bingham didn’t find shit. He bought the Alvistur stuff.” This was the collection of 366 artifacts from the son-in-law of Huadquiña’s owner.

  “Machu Picchu was completely sacked before Bingham was born. Far and away the best stuff that Bingham got out of Machu Picchu he didn’t find—he bought. The funny thing was, Bingham snuck that stuff out and they wanted to keep it a dirty secret. But that stuff legally they can keep. It’s the other stuff that has to come back.”

  Earlier in the evening, Paolo had described his skill at reading satellite images for signs of undiscovered ruins. “Do you think there’s anything else left to find near Machu Picchu?” I asked.

  “Plateriayoc, the lost city of Machu Picchu,” he said without hesitation. The name sounded familiar. Bingham’s polo-playing rival Captain J. Campbell Besley had reported finding a phenomenal city by that name. Plateriayoc means “place of the silver” and is sort of shorthand for the El Dorado of the Andes. In other words, Plateriayoc is a myth.

  “There are other Plateriayocs,” Paolo explained. “No one knows about this one. Berns was there. I was close three weeks ago. I had a hell of a time getting there. There’s a wall over a thousand meters long—Berns called it ‘steps’ but it’s not that. It’s covered over now, big-time; the ruins are buried in the jungle.”

  Every explorer I’d spoken with in Peru had one secret site that he was hoping to find someday. Paolo was the only one who willingly shared what he was looking for. Why?

  “I have to assume that grave robbers are already there. Bingham was no hero, but what he did which was good was that he stopped for a short time the huaqueando—the grave robbing—till the INC took over. Now I’m bugging the shit out of the INC trying to get them to protect Plateriayoc.”

  “And you think you’ll get there?”

  “I can show you where Plateriayoc is.”

  Later on, he did just that, showing me how the thousand-meter wall aligned almost perfectly with two famous Inca landmarks. And for just a moment, I felt the itch that Bingham—and Paolo, and John—knew well: the urge to drop everything, set off and find something lost and waiting behind the ranges.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Major Revisions

  All Over the Map

  Hiram Bingham’s career as a professor-cum-explorer burned brilliantly but extinguished its fuel in less than a decade. The fall 1916 semester was his last teaching at Yale. He struggled to finish a third big article for Gilbert Grosvenor, who was understandably eager to publish another adventure tale from his magazine’s star correspondent; National Geographic’s circulation had more than doubled again in the wake of Bingham’s 1913 Machu Picchu story. The editor was appalled by the quality of Bingham’s initial efforts. “You can do such fine writing when you want to but I am at a loss to understand the present heterogeneous collection of scraps,” he wrote after reading a first draft. National Geographic’s half a million subscribers “would murder me if I gave them anything as irrational as this story.”

  Bingham was probably preoccupied with his new passion: politics. Encouraged by one U.S. president, his conservative mentor Theodore Roosevelt, and motivated by his antipathy toward the sitting White House occupant, his former Princeto
n boss Woodrow Wilson, Bingham lobbied successfully for a role as an alternate delegate to the 1916 Republican National Convention in Chicago. As war raged in Europe, he channeled his organizational skills into the “preparedness” movement, urging the United States military to be ready to join the battle against Germany. At age forty-one, he volunteered to join the Yale Corps of the Connecticut National Guard, which he hoped would pursue the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who’d attacked an American cavalry unit in New Mexico. Instead, Major Hiram Bingham put his new pilot’s license to use starting in April 1917, when he was deputized to organize flight schools to train America’s first generation of military airmen. By Armistice Day in 1918, eight thousand men were under his command in France.

  After the war, Bingham endured a forced health sabbatical like the one that had led him to South America in 1906. He was struck by the great Spanish flu epidemic, then was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and then underwent an operation for gallstones. “Some of these symptoms must have been psychosomatic, aggravated, if not caused, by anxiety and self-doubt at a turning point in his life,” his son Alfred later guessed. During a recuperative visit to his mother-in-law Annie Mitchell’s estate in Miami in the first part of 1922, the retired explorer finished his first book about his discoveries in Peru, Inca Land.

  Bingham claimed to his publishers, Houghton Mifflin, that he’d written “a new kind of travel book—a combination of adventure, exploration and historical research.” In truth, he’d baked an unremarkable casserole from the leftovers of his stories for National Geographic, Harper’s , and various other periodicals. Reviews were tepid, as were sales. A planned sequel was scrapped.

  Less than two weeks after Inca Land appeared in bookstores, Bingham began the third act of his remarkable career. He had long cultivated the powerful Republican Party chairman of his conservative home state of Connecticut. His wooing paid off in November of 1922, when Bingham was elected lieutenant governor. Two years later, he was tapped to run for governor. Bingham’s Yale credentials and fame as a man of action made him unbeatable in 1924, a very good year for Republicans’ Calvin Coolidge–led ticket. Before Bingham could occupy the governor’s mansion in Hartford, however, Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator committed suicide. Party bosses chose the governor-elect to run in a special election for the Senate seat. Bingham won again. He was sworn in as governor on January 7, 1925, and over the next twenty-four hours gave what was described as “the longest inaugural address in the history of the state”; appeared in a parade with full military escort; and hosted a governor’s ball at which he made his entrance flanked by two columns of men standing at attention, as a band played “Hail to the Chief.” So as not to be forgotten, he had commissioned the biggest portrait of a Connecticut governor ever to hang in the state’s official gallery. On the second morning of the Bingham administration, the governor resigned, and as one reporter recalled, “was off to Washington, his jaw set in broad self-satisfaction.”

  Bingham’s eight years in the capital, during which the press dubbed him “the Flying Senator,” would have provided the raw material for an excellent March of Time newsreel. Here comes the handsome, silverhaired senator, landing on the steps of the Capitol in a blimp. There he goes, from almost the same spot, folding his six-feet-four frame into an autogiro—a sort of hybrid airplane/helicopter equipped with both rotors and a propeller—taking a recess from senatorial duty, golf clubs looped over one shoulder. Moments after sitting down for lunch at the exclusive Metropolitan Club, the senator from Connecticut hears the hum of the airship Graf Zeppelin; he hails a taxi to the nearest naval air base, changes into a flying suit, hops behind the controls of a plane and races to greet the first commercial transatlantic flight before the craft lands in New Jersey. When the chairman of the National Aeronautics Administration weds in Washington, D.C., best man Hiram Bingham is matched by an equally famous matron of honor—Amelia Earhart.

  Such activities made Bingham wildly popular with reporters. Senior Senate colleagues who’d had their Spanish pronunciation corrected or received long lectures on aviation were less enamored of the Flying Senator. So when Bingham was caught secretly placing a lobbyist for the Connecticut Manufacturer’s Association on his Senate payroll, his fellow senators “fell upon him with a malevolent enthusiasm which can only be explained as a compensation for their own unhappy inferiority,” The American Mercury reported. Goaded by his colleagues to admit wrongdoing, Bingham refused, saying, “I have nothing to apologize for.” The other senators voted overwhelmingly to censure him, the first time the body had used such harsh punishment in twenty-seven years, since the two members of South Carolina’s delegation had physically attacked each other in 1902. His reputation blackened, Bingham was voted out during the FDR landslide of 1933.

  Machu Picchu’s fame grew a bit more slowly than that of the man credited as its discoverer. For almost twenty years after Bingham’s last visit, the site was left untended yet again, until the Peruvian government ordered one final clearing in the 1930s. In 1939, the American songwriter Cole Porter, smitten by a story about the ruins that he’d seen in National Geographic, made the journey up to the location on horseback. “When they reached the top, a ‘hotel’ with three rooms and no bathroom was the only facility,” wrote one Porter biographer. Guests washed themselves with bowls of water and heeded nature’s call in the forest. Dinner was a chicken killed and cooked by their guide, “which when they ate it was still partly unplucked.”

  Foreign interest in Machu Picchu—especially American interest—began to grow somewhat faster after 1948, when Hiram Bingham published a revised account of his adventures, Lost City of the Incas. To reshape what would become the most famous version of the story, Bingham wisely edited out the least interesting bits of Inca Land. Gone were the long-winded soliloquies on the deficiencies of canned goods and two entire chapters about climbing Coropuna. In their place was a narrative with three parts: an explanation of who the Incas had been, a description of Bingham’s search for their lost city, and a summation of the discovery of Machu Picchu and Bingham’s attempts to explain its significance.

  The elemental facts covered in Lost City of the Incas differ little from Bingham’s previous works. What’s different is the tone. As the new title indicated, the book was much more a classic adventure tale than his earlier works. The reason was probably twofold. Bingham had passed seventy when he sat down to write the book, and knew that, despite his other achievements, he’d be remembered posthumously as the man who found Machu Picchu. As always, he wanted to have the last word. Bingham also, not unreasonably, would have wanted to sell some books. His previous full-length efforts to describe his work in Peru, Inca Land and the 1930’s more scholarly Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas, were flops.

  Anyone who has read James Hilton’s 1933 classic Lost Horizon (or, more likely, seen Frank Capra’s film adaptation) can’t help but notice that in Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu seems a little more like the fictional Shangri-La than it did in Bingham’s earlier attempts. Bingham may have seen something of himself in Lost Horizon’s diplomat Hugh Conway, whose plane crashes in the mountains of Tibet. (Conway’s first sight of Shangri-La: “It might have been a vision fluttering out of that solitary rhythm in which lack of oxygen had encompassed all his faculties. It was, indeed, a strange and half-incredible sight.”) In Lost City’s version of events, Bingham downplayed all the detective work he’d done; he ratcheted up the tension of a story whose ending was already known by making it seem as if he hadn’t expected to find anything on the abandoned mountaintop. From there he segued into language that the explorer-historian Hugh Thomson has aptly described as “hallucinogenic, spiraling”:Suddenly, I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses.... It seemed like an unbelievable dream.... What could this place be? Why had no one given us any idea about it? . . . Surprise followed surprise in bewildering succession.... The sight held me spellbound.

  A more telling editorial change from 1922 to 1948 is
Bingham’s failure to share credit. The truth is that even Bingham admitted—for a while anyway—that he hadn’t been the first person to see Machu Picchu. Three families were living at the site when he arrived; it would have been ridiculous for him to argue otherwise. On his very first visit to Machu Picchu, he’d seen writing scrawled on the wall of the Temple of the Three Windows, the words “Lizarraga 1902.” I’d seen the words he penciled in his 1911 notebook the day after his famous encounter: “Agustin Lizarraga is discoverer of Machu Picchu.” (In his 1913 National Geographic account, Bingham complained—somewhat comically in light of the controversy that would follow—that it took two days to scrub the graffiti out of the temple.) Lizarraga lived at the Intihuatana ranch on the Urubamba River, where the explorer had paid him a visit. Later, in his 1922 book Inca Land, Bingham described seeing Lizarraga’s name and surmised that “some one must have visited Machu Picchu long before that; because in 1875 . . . the French explorer Charles Wiener heard in Ollantaytambo of there being ruins at ‘Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu.’” The same year Inca Land was published, in a letter to a schoolmaster in Honolulu, Bingham candidly admitted:I suppose that in the same sense of the word as it is used in the expression “Columbus discovered America” it is fair to say that I discovered Machu Picchu. The Norsemen and the French fishermen undoubtedly visited North America long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. On the other hand it was Columbus who made America known to the civilized world. In the same sense of the word I “discovered” Machu Picchu—in that before my visit and report on it it was not known to the geographical and historical societies in Peru, nor to the Peruvian government.