by Mark Adams
I finally found the one he was trying to single out. “That one?”
“Recognize it? You’ve been up there. It’s Mount Machu Picchu!” It was like a Christmas tree lost in a stand of redwoods. “And if you follow that line along the ridge, that’s the Inca Trail leading to the Sun Gate. Just think, at this very moment people are dragging themselves up to the Sun Gate when they should be right here.”
Efrain arrived, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He took his hat off, faced Salcantay, and held it to his chest. “The older mountain men, sixty or seventy years old, do this when they see a mountain. It’s a way of giving respect to the apus.” He walked to the edge. “From here you can see everything—jungle, highland, the Andes. Everything. There’s no question about it—the Incas got to Machu Picchu and said, ‘This is a sacred center. We must build here.’”
The sun began to crest over the top of Mount Veronica to the east, a reminder that hundreds of people would also be standing above the Torreon at this moment, for today was the first day of the solstice.
We lingered past our usual departure hour, then moved on toward Machu Picchu, skirting the agricultural ruins of Inti Pata and passing through a tunnel carved through solid rock. We ate bag lunches at Wiñay Wayna, the last of the major sites along the Inca Trail. The massive convex ruins were so overgrown in Bingham’s time that he missed them altogether; they weren’t discovered until 1941.
As the three of us departed Wiñay Wayna, John bolted ahead; he was eager to get to Machu Picchu. Efrain fell back to chat with a fellow guide, a friend of his. And so on the final leg of the Inca Trail, I was left alone with my thoughts, which naturally turned to Bingham. After almost a year of stalking the man, I thought I’d figured him out.
Regardless of what he implied in Lost City of the Incas, Hiram Bingham was definitely not the discoverer of Machu Picchu. He may have been the “scientific discoverer,” as a plaque inside the entrance to the ruins credits him, but I never came around to that name. The polio vaccine was a scientific discovery. Radium was a scientific discovery. John was right. If you tried to understand Machu Picchu in isolation, from a purely secular viewpoint, you were bound to miss something important.
The truth about Bingham, perhaps the only thing Paolo Greer and Eliane Karp-Toledo would have agreed on, is that he did something less romantic but ultimately much more important than discovering Machu Picchu. He saw the ruins, quickly determined their importance (if not their origin) and popularized them to a degree that they couldn’t be blown up with dynamite or knocked over in the search for buried gold, as Vitcos had been. Would Machu Picchu exist if Hiram Bingham had never seen it? Of course. Would it be the same Machu Picchu we know today? Almost certainly not.
Similarly, if he’d never published Lost City of the Incas, would Bingham have been accused of stealing credit for the discovery? No. Was he the original Indiana Jones? Not exactly. But if he hadn’t published Lost City of the Incas, would the character of Indiana Jones ever have existed? Probably not, at least not in the form we know.
Did Bingham steal artifacts from Peru? Yes. If he were alive today, would he want the artifacts at the Peabody Museum to be returned to Peru? Almost certainly, yes. It was hard to argue with that 1916 note he’d written to Gilbert Grosvenor: “The objects do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government.”
A few months later, in a move that took most observers completely by surprise, Yale finally agreed with its most swashbuckling alumnus. A new memo of understanding was signed between the university and the government of Peru, and the most eye-catching pieces on display at the Peabody Museum were packed up to be returned to Cusco in time to be put on display for the hundredth anniversary of Bingham’s achievement. The rest of the collection was scheduled to follow not long after, to be housed in a research facility open to Yale scholars as well as Peruvians. Lawsuits were dropped on both sides and everyone pretended that things had turned out exactly as they’d hoped all along. Bingham would have been pleased, both as an explorer and as a politician.
Late in the afternoon of our last day on the Inca Trail, John, Efrain and I passed through the control booth and entered the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary. The final stretch of stone trail undulated up and down until it reached a long set of white stairs extending toward the sky. At their summit stood a set of tall stone pillars.
“We call this the gringo killer,” Efrain said.
I reached the top of the stairs, winded, and looked around. I was standing in the Sun Gate. Below me stretched a long stone path (upon which a certain Australian was quickly disappearing, GPS in hand), sets of terraces and, at the far end, the familiar green rhino horn of Huayna Picchu. Nestled in between, in the jewelry box of the surrounding mountains, was the still-breathtaking citadel of Machu Picchu.
FIFTY
The Sun Temple
At the Torreon, Machu Picchu
When Efrain and I paused at the Sun Gate to take a drink of water, a mistico in a plumed hat and a vest embroidered with astrological signs told us that the morning had been a major bummer. Hundreds of harmonically inclined people had assembled above the Torreon and counted down the minutes to sunrise. And then . . . nothing. The clouds never parted and no sunbeam shined.
The mistico wasn’t the only true believer left at Machu Picchu. John, Efrain and I arrived at the site the next morning before six. Aside from the college kids preparing to run up Huayna Picchu, the ruins were nearly empty. John slipped away by himself; Efrain and I walked up to the Temple of the Three Windows, outside of which a large group of people dressed in white robes stood in a circle, some holding enormous crystals.
“The bigger the crystal, the bigger the power,” Efrain told me.
“How’d you know that?”
“My other mom, from the orphanage, she was into that stuff. She was always trying to get us to talk about our chakras.” A guy with a beard like Karl Marx’s blew a horn and reminded the group to reconvene at ten sharp, so that they might “take advantage of the sacred energy.”
We walked down in front of the Royal Mausoleum cavern. “Bingham called this the Royal Tomb, but it wasn’t,” Efrain said. “It was a temple to the Pachamama, the Mother Earth. Caves are access points to the underground world.” The day’s first dim light had just begun to illuminate the cave’s surreal interior. “The Incas didn’t have one church—they had hundreds of places to worship.”
At about a quarter to seven, we took our places behind a chest-high stone wall directly above the Torreon, in a spot that faced due east. Below us, John was shooting video of the interior of the new tomb that Paolo had told me about. A minute later, he was next to us, triangulating the perfect position from which to decide once and for all if this sunbeam-through-the-window story had any merit to it. Over the next fifteen minutes, dozens of other people arrived, until we were crowded in like the first arrivals at a sold-out show.
“Looks like we picked a winner of a day, Mark,” John shouted from down the row of onlookers. “Nice clear sky.”
“We should start to see something right about . . . now,” Efrain said.
The day’s first illumination arrived to the south, shining like a spotlight on the Sun Gate. A throng of Inca Trail trekkers, who would never know how lucky they were to arrive under perfect conditions, raised their walking sticks and cheered.
At 7:07, the first rays began to appear above the peak known locally as Cerro San Gabriel, the sharply pointed mountain directly in front of us to the east. The luminescence hovered behind the peak for a few moments, then shot its first beams out from the left side of the mountain. For a few minutes, the sun continued to rise slowly, triggering an expanding burst of light from behind the top of San Gabriel, like the glow around Jesus’s head in a Renaissance painting.
At 7:15, to our far left, rays of light hit the green horn of Huayna Picchu. The leading edge of the sunlight rolled toward us through the main ruins like a wave.
“Keep your eye on the window,” Efrain
said.
At 7:20, the sun emerged completely from behind San Gabriel, burning in place momentarily directly above its pinnacle. I concentrated on the window inside the Torreon. A faint rectangle of light appeared on the rock inside the curved wall. Seconds ticked by. The rectangle brightened until its four sides were clearly delineated on the rock, almost perfectly centered on the crack where Paolo thought the golden statue had stood.
“Pa-cha-cu-tec,” Efrain said quietly, to no one in particular.
The oldest description I’d been able to find of an Inti Raymi celebration to welcome back the sun was one that Manco oversaw in Cusco in 1535:Magnificently robed orejones [nobles] wearing rich silver cloaks and tunics, with brightly-shining circlets and medallions of fine gold on their heads . . . formed up in pairs . . . and waited in deep silence for the sun to rise. As soon as the sunrise began they started to chant in splendid harmony and unison.
There was no chanting this time, but the crowd did, as one, let out a long “Whooooah!”
I shot a look at John, who was busy snapping pictures. Later that day, he showed me his photos on his laptop and explained excitedly how the window did in fact align with the sunrise—“look at that, no shadow at all!”—in part because Inca engineers had angled the sides of the window to funnel the sunlight onto the rock, another Inca special effect. “Further proof that you shouldn’t believe everything that you hear and read,” he told me. Once again, the experts were wrong, the Incas were right, and John couldn’t have been happier.
It would be nice to say that witnessing the sunrise proved for certain that Machu Picchu had been built as the end of a pilgrimage, or that a ghostly image of Pachacutec’s gold statue appeared inside the Torreon and gave me a thumbs-up. But the truth is that Machu Picchu is always going to be something of a mystery. Which is, of course, part of its allure. Everyone who visits the citadel in the clouds inevitably follows in Bingham’s footsteps—not only by walking the same paths the explorer trod, but by projecting whatever vision it is they hope to see onto the lost city. As for me, the mental image of Machu Picchu that I’ll always keep is of John juggling handfuls of gadgets as he tried to capture the sunrise coming through the window, completely oblivious to Karl Marx patting him enthusiastically on the back.
Epilogue
New York
One year after my first visit to Cusco, I met John Leivers at the airport again. For once, I was the person who knew where we were going. John was en route to Australia for his mum’s ninetieth birthday celebration and wanted to see an exotic locale that he’d somehow missed in all his travels—New York City. His suitcase, which I offered to carry before I learned that it was filled with materials John was transferring to his master archive in Perth, weighed approximately ten thousand pounds.
When we arrived at my home north of the city, my five-year-old son Magnus, brimming with the confidence he’d gained in two full weeks of kindergarten, opened the front door and asked John, “Is it true you live in a tent?”
“Yes, it is,” John said.
“Why don’t you have a house like everybody else?”
John leaned in to meet Magnus’s dubious stare. “Because I endeavor to remain flexible.”
John was not a typical visitor to New York. He showed zero interest in fine dining, shopping or Broadway shows. Instead, he spent the week visiting museums and jotting down notes. He passed several hours at the Museum of Natural History, taking in an exhibition about the Capac Ñan, the royal Inca highway. He wasn’t the only out-of-town guest I’ve had who was put off by the high prices of everything and the long line for the Empire State Building observatory. But he was undoubtedly the first to complain about his inability to get a GPS signal at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
The only time I saw John act like a tourist was when we spent an afternoon walking through the fashionable winding streets of Greenwich Village and SoHo. John was dressed exactly like he did in Cusco. “It looks just like the movies here!” he said, snapping photos of brownstones and old tenement buildings with iron fire escapes. That evening, in an e-mail to a former colleague, I described my day: how I’d brought my Australian guide—who’d led me on an off-the-map backcountry adventure and was visiting New York for the first time—downtown to have lunch with my publisher. “You do realize that you’ve just given me a plot summary of Crocodile Dundee,” my friend wrote back. “He doesn’t carry a big knife, does he?”
I remembered John slashing through the cloud forest with his machete and thought, You have no idea.
Each night at our family dinner table, John updated me on what was happening in Peru. Justo, Juvenal and the rest of my pals in the travel business were hoping for a busy year to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Bingham’s 1911 expedition. Paolo was continuing, without success, to try to get the government to dig for Pachacutec’s mummy before his bones were forever entombed beneath a strip mall. Roxana Abril still hadn’t heard back about her ownership claim to Machu Picchu, though perhaps the return of the Yale artifacts would give her grounds for a new lawsuit. Eliane Karp-Toledo had been quiet of late—by her standards, anyway—but plenty of other politicians in Lima and Cusco were lining up to take credit for bringing Bingham’s relics back home.
John’s ears had always perked up when I described my visits to the Yale library and the reams of unpublished—but neatly organized—information that Bingham had left behind for future historians. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when he managed to talk his way into the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room. He caught the train up to New Haven and spent a delirious afternoon reading Bingham’s papers, skipping right over the 1911 Machu Picchu materials to focus on his more obscure expedition journals from the later campaigns. I wondered if the librarians thought they’d seen the explorer’s ghost.
“There’s some fantastic stuff up there at Yale,” John told me excitedly that evening over his third bowl of nonfat yogurt. “After seeing those papers I’ve changed my mind. Bingham was a serious adventurer.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Everyone knows about Machu Picchu and, less so of course, places like Espiritu Pampa and Choquequirao. That’s because Bingham wrote about those things in his books. But he went to dozens of places, some that almost no one else has gone to since. He was dealing with corruption, thievery, people of dubious character—and he was under a lot of pressure. He still managed to complete those expeditions and record massive amounts of data and information. That took great courage and determination.”
For someone who’d recently had his heart rewired, John had some fairly ambitious plans of his own. Evidently, his days humping eighty-pound packs up steep mountainsides weren’t over after all. He mentioned an archaeological site deep in the cloud forest of northern Peru, in a region far more remote than anything I’d seen, that he was hoping to explore when he returned from Australia.
“God, I’d love to get in there,” he said. “Almost no one’s allowed in—there’s no tourists, no infrastructure, nothing. You have to petition personally to the local INC office in order to enter the ruins. Who knows how long that’ll take, assuming they respond at all.”
“You know, I’ve still got some contacts in the adventure travel business,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “Maybe I could make a few phone calls. I’m sure I know someone who knows someone.”
I reminded John that I was putting the story of our own peregrinations into a book. But it seemed a shame to hang up my hiking boots and return to the office life just because I’d managed to put my Bingham obsession to rest. Maybe there was some new parallel that I could latch on to to write another story—a story that would, naturally, require me to accompany John on his new expedition.
“I’ve got it!” I said. “Bingham started out as a martini explorer, and then turned out to be a real adventurer. I started out as a tourist, but then I turned out to be a real traveler, too. Right?”
“Actually . . .” John said, slowly scraping the
remnants of yogurt from his bowl. “You remember how things work in Peru, Mark. It all depends on who you ask.”
Hiram Bingham III, photographed during his 1911 search for Vilcabamba, the legendary Lost City of the Incas. He found Machu Picchu instead. (Courtesy of the National Geographic Society)
John Leivers, the author’s guide. He’d survived more than one brush with death while indulging his passion for exploring Peru’s forgotten ruins. (Courtesy of Paolo Greer)
Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conqueror of Peru. His shrewdness was exceeded only by his ruthlessness. (Library of Congress)
After Pizarro captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532, the prisoner offered one of the richest ransoms in history—a large room filled once with gold and twice again with silver. The entire Inca kingdom was mobilized to collect precious metals. (Author’s collection)
Pizarro executed Atahualpa, installing Manco Inca Yupanqui as puppet king of the Incas. Their friendly relations were short-lived—this early sixteenth-century illustration shows Manco attempting to burn a Spanish church. (The Royal Library, Denmark)
Many of Cusco’s ancient architectural wonders still stand, including the gargantuan walls of the Sacsahuaman complex. (Courtesy of John Leivers)
An example of the precise Inca stonework inside Cusco’s Koricancha sun temple. (Courtesy of Pierre Boucher/Wikimedia Commons)
The collision of Spanish and Andean cultures can be seen in this famous eighteenth-century Last Supper painting. Its centerpiece is the traditional mountain delicacy cuy, or guinea pig. (Antonio Zapata Guzmán/Wikimedia Commons)
