Hiram Bingham had been in Cuzco for two-and-a-half weeks now, throwing open the windows of his room in the Hotel Central every morning to smile at the Plaza Regocijo and the house of Garcilaso de la Vega, the great Inca chronicler. He had spent his days haggling for mules, writing out itineraries for his men, and collecting rumors of ruins. He missed home, but he was increasingly convinced of the importance of his mission, especially now that it was about to begin. …
But there was one last key he needed for his quest: the help of the local Peruvians, mostly indigenous, who lived in these valleys beyond Cuzco. To guarantee their help, he stopped at the office of J.J. Nuñez, who … was Prefect of Cuzco. He told Nuñez where he was going: back over the altiplano to the sacred Yucay Valley, then north to Ollantaytambo, and up the Urubamba River to the valley of Vilcabamba. Nuñez nodded. The route was easy enough. Bingham would be following a road blasted in the 1890s to give Cuzco’s entrepreneurs access to the area’s rubber and haciendas. Still, Hiram had to be careful. Many of the peasants in the area had descended from those that fled with Manco almost four hundred years before; some had participated in the recent uprising against landowners and rubber collectors. To guarantee their cooperation and translate their Quechua into Spanish, Nuñez gave Bingham an armed military escort, one Sergeant Carrasco.
Bingham’s party began the climb above the red-tile roofs of Cuzco. The higher they got, the more Hiram’s spirits lifted. He was following Manco Inca into the geography of his resistance. The silvery hills rolled beneath them, the sky glowed above, and they soon stared down at the “world-beater” view of the Yucay Valley, threaded by the mighty Vilcanota River. That night, Urubamba’s tippling sub-prefect agreed to lend them an extra soldier for the expedition’s topographers.
Blue clouds hugged the hills when they awoke, and they shook off the cold to ride northwest along the Vilcanota, deeper into Manco’s story. Bingham was delighted to find the expedition camped under wispy trees beneath the massive fort of Ollantaytambo, in the very plain where Manco diverted the river to turn back the Spaniards. The next day, July 21, Bingham climbed the ruins. He found it breathtaking: “The greenness of the fields standing out in marked contrast to the rocky, cactus covered hillsides. The soft foliage of the willows and poplars contrasting strongly with the gray blocks of the famous fortress.” Although looters had pulled apart the ruins’ smaller buildings, the stronghold’s walls and the monolithic temple above would last for years. Ollantaytambo “deserves to be a place of pilgrimage” he wrote.
After Manco fended off his pursuers, he went downriver toward the Antisuyo, the Incas’ jungle realm. On July 22, Bingham, Foote, Erving, the surgeon, Sgt. Carrasco, their two muleteers and two porters took off in hot pursuit – much like the Spaniards’ expeditions had, nearly four centuries before. After a league or so, Bingham and his party faced a choice. Here, Manco had taken a road that climbed to the east, over the Panticalla Pass and into a parallel valley. But rather than be historically accurate as he had in Colombia, Bingham kept to the river, which here became the fast and twisting Urubamba. It was on the Urubamba that he had been told to look out for ruins.
It was the right choice. The Urubamba was magnificent. “[S]uch a Valley!” Bingham wrote. The elevation dropped, and the river began to roil and swerve. The vegetation grew thicker around them, and precipitous granite cliffs and snow-clad mountains hung above. It was better than the Alps, the Rockies, the Rhine, Bingham thought. It was also rife with evidence of a once-massive population. Abandoned agricultural terraces stepped down the mountainside like frozen waterfalls. Their porters pointed out Salapunco, a small fortress, and the ruins of a large town named Q’ente, or “humming bird.” Writing later, Bingham apologized for his enthusiasm. “We made slow progress, but we lived in wonderland.” …
The next day, Bingham and his party continued downriver. The cliffs closed in, and the green chasm of the valley stretched out above their heads. They were in “Real tropical jungle,” Bingham wrote excitedly in his journal. On the evening of July 23rd, they reached the little sandy plain named Mandor Pampa, just after the hacienda of Torontoy. It was here that he was supposed to ask for the ruins at Huayna Picchu.
As the muleteers made camp, Bingham and Carrasco walked over to a small house beside the road. In it, they found a man named Melchor Arteaga who sold supplies to travelers. Arteaga was drunk, but when Bingham asked him where the ruins were, he “pointed straight up to the top of the mountain,” to a ridge that connected a massive, thin peak to a much larger, more solid mountain. The peak was Huayna Picchu. The ruins were on the ridge. And the larger mountain’s name, Arteaga slurred to Carrasco, was Machu Picchu.
Machu Picchu. Bingham thought the name was “awful” at first, not hearing its sing-song charm.1 He may have read it before – it was mentioned in one of the books he had consulted, and the peak was on at least one of the maps in his saddlebags – but neither it, nor Huayna Picchu, were among the Inca names he had copied from the chronicles in Lima. Bingham may have considered riding on: they were too close to Cuzco to have reached the ruins of Vitcos and Vilcabamba, his true goals that year.
But Bingham had told himself that he would investigate every ruin he heard about, no matter how unpromising. ... Bingham hired Arteaga as a guide for the next day, in exchange for two Peruvian soles, or one silver American dollar. It would at least be a good warm-up.
July 24, 1911 dawned cold and rainy, and low clouds hid the ridge from view. Bingham tried to rouse Arteaga, but was waved off until the weather, and his hangover, improved. Just after ten, Arteaga emerged from his house, stretched, and strode off down the road towards Ollantaytambo, Bingham and Carrasco scurrying behind. To their regret, Foote and Erving decided to work in camp. At a quarter to eleven Arteaga left the path and cut through the brush to the river. He took off his shoes, and gingerly crept over a fragile bridge, made of four logs bound together by vine, followed by Carrasco. Bingham took a picture, then crawled across on his hands. He feared the water now.
They entered the jungle, and the river’s noise dropped to a dull roar. Orchids and hummingbirds broke the green darkness of liana-choked trees. The path grew steep and muddy, and leaves dripped onto their clothes. Arteaga picked his way around the rocks, using tree-trunks that he had notched like ladders. Bingham tried to keep up, panting. “A good part of the distance we went on all fours, sometimes holding on by our fingernails.” It was only somewhat of an exaggeration. Arteaga told him to be careful with his hands. Tree roots had a funny way of turning into vipers up here.
The higher they got, the more Hiram’s earth-bound worries fell away. The sun cleared the peaks to the east, burning off the clouds. The trees grew smaller and smaller, until he could see the valley twisting 2,000 feet beneath them, still in shadow. The slope began to level off, the brush giving way to waving grass. After an hour and a half of exertion, they collapsed into a peaceful clearing. And there, Bingham got a surprise: a single hut. And staring out of it, shocked at the intrusion, was a family of Indian farmers.
These were the Richartes, Arteaga explained. Twenty-four year-old Torvis and his family had left lands closer to Cuzco four years ago to farm on the rich terraces opened up by the new Urubamba road. There were good fertile lands on this ridge, 8,000 feet above sea level; the nightly mists kept crops watered, and the daily sun helped them grow. Their ten-by-fifteen-foot home was cozy enough – guinea pigs scurried underfoot – and with two neighboring families they harvested maize, potatoes, sugarcane, beans, peppers, tomatoes and berries. For the pleasure of living here, they hiked twelve Peruvian soles worth of produce a year – six dollars American –halfway to the river to leave for Arteaga. They hoped to one day have land of their own. To the many that would follow, this ridge would seem like paradise, but for the Richartes, who had escaped the abuse of working for a white landlord, it was home.
The arrival of the outside world that morning was worrisome. They knew Arteaga, but it was rarely good to see a soldier like Sgt. Carrasco – even one half out of uniform from the hot climb, like he was. Was he searching for instigators of the recent rebellion? Or to dragoon Torvis into the army? Their nervousness increased when they saw the third and final member of the party, Bingham – probably the tallest person they had ever seen, his long, alien legs tucked into tall leather boots and ballooning into baggy-hipped khaki jodhpurs. He was panting from the climb, and his hunting jacket and grey cardigan were likely tucked under his arm. A strange, rifle-like device was strapped to his back. Beneath a beaten and misshapen grey hat and a head of hair that was lightening in the sunshine, the gringo flashed his tight-lipped smile.
The tension melted away when Arteaga explained in Quechua that this strange foreigner simply wanted to see the ruins. The Richartes sat Bingham on a shaded wooden bench and brought him cold, refreshing water in a gourd, and delicious sweet potatoes for lunch. They “laughingly…admitted they enjoyed being free from undesirable visitors, officials looking for army ‘volunteers’ or collecting taxes.” Staring out at the enchanting view, Bingham understood their desire for solitude. This was a special place. To the east, the snow-capped range of dark cliffs tumbled through a cloak of green to the invisible, but still faintly audible Urubamba River two miles below. To the north, the jungle-covered ridge seemed to continue for a mile until it exploded upwards in the spiraling tooth of Huayna Picchu. And at his back, to the south, was impassive Machu Picchu.
It was as good a place for a lost city as any. Bingham stood up, ready to go. Arteaga was tired and passed the job off to Richarte and his forty-eight-year-old neighbor Anacleto Alvarez, who had lived on the mountain for eight years. They in turn passed it off to Richarte’s barefoot son, whose name may have been Pablito. He was no older than eight, and small. His hair was thick and black, and his skin was a rich brown, edging out from the cuffs of his rough pants and the sleeves of a thin white shirt. He wore a small, pancake-shaped hat and a woolen poncho, its thick colorful stripes meeting at the seam down his chest.
The Richarte boy began down the path, towards Huayna Picchu. “Sir, Come … I know where there are Incan houses, over there …I know the way,” the boy supposedly told Bingham and Carrasco. Bingham struggled to keep up, trying not to get his hopes up. … But it was impossible not to feel a small, mounting thrill: he was walking into new ruins that his fellow historians and anthropologists likely had not visited. Perhaps no outsider had stepped foot here since the Conquest.
Thorns tore at Bingham’s clothes, and he stooped low to avoid the branches and vines that the boy dodged easily. ... Finally, rounding a promontory, the boy gestured and Bingham looked up. His eyes caught the peak of Huayna Picchu first, large and impressive. But his gaze drifted down and then Hiram saw it: “a jungle-covered maze of small and large walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of white granite, most carefully cut and beautifully fitted together without cement. Surprise followed surprise until there came the realization that we were in the midst of as wonderful ruins as any ever found in Peru.”
Covered by a foam of “trees and moss and the growth of centuries,” the temples, fountains and palaces buildings seemed to rise and fall along the ridge until they crashed upon the base of Huayna Picchu like a wave. Bingham couldn’t be sure where the ruins ended and the mountain began. In one thicket, the Richarte boy showed him the day’s first architectural wonder, one of the finest pieces of stonework in all of the Americas: a cave that had been shaped, carved, and lined with beautiful, interlocking stones. A stone carved with four graceful steps edged its triangular entrance. An hourglass of blocks linked the cave’s outer lip to an adjacent boulder. The inside of the cave was lined with yet more carefully worked stones. Mysterious pegs protruded from the walls. Beneath them were “very large niches, the best and tallest that I have ever seen,” wrote Bingham. The Incas had once placed their golden icons, and, more importantly, the mallqis, or mummies of their dead emperors, in niches like these. Had this been a royal tomb, where emperors sat forever in state, their leathery skin still clad in the brightly colored tunics of Inca royalty, their ears still hanging with massive gold earplugs, their brows covered with the royal red fringe?
The boy pointed above the cave, where the stone thrust up into a curved, tower-like structure. Rounded walls were rare in Inca architecture, and were often features of sun temples. The most sacred point of the great Ccoricancha in Cuzco was its curved western wall, whose massive niche guarded a golden icon. By contrast, this wall had a single window facing east, which was surrounded by pegs carved gently from the rock. Had they been used to secure some other long-lost icon that blazed with the morning sun? Bingham followed the boy up a set of stairs and saw that the structure flowed into an even more stunning wall, made of regular, finely grained ashlars of pure white granite.
“Clearly, it was the work of a master artist,” he later wrote. “The interior surface of the wall was broken by niches and square stone-pegs. The exterior surface was perfectly simple and unadorned. The lower courses, of particularly large ashlars, gave it a look of solidity. The upper courses, diminishing in size towards the top, lent grace and delicacy to the structure. The flowing lines, the symmetrical arrangement of the ashlars, and the gradual gradation of the courses, combined to produce a wonderful effect, softer and more pleasing than that of the marble temples of the Old World. Owing to the absence of mortar, there were no ugly spaces between the rocks. They might have grown together. On account of the beauty of the white granite this structure surpassed in attractiveness the best Inca walls in Cuzco, which had caused visitors to marvel for four centuries. It seemed like an unbelievable dream. Dimly, I began to realize that this wall and its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world. It fairly took my breath away.”
The boy pulled Bingham up a stairway, past a series of dried-up fountains, and into an open space that suggested it was the site’s ceremonial heart, its scared plaza. The boy’s family had cleared it for a vegetable garden, and on its western side, the slope fell away, yielding a view of the mighty Urubamba River. Its other three sides, however, bore stone buildings. ... On the plaza’s northern side was a “truly megalithic” temple. It lacked a southern wall, but its other three sides were made of huge blocks of white granite, quarried from the mountain itself and “fitted together as a glass stopper is fitted to a bottle.” The largest block was over 14 feet long, and was carved like an altar. Here, an Inca priest once lifted gifts to the sun, or slit the throat of a llama, then stepped inside the temple to spread the viscera upon the altar.
On the plaza’s final edge was its most enchanting temple. It also lacked a wall to the plaza, though a single erect stone suggested a lost beam that would have supported a roof. It was wider than the others, and its main wall had three large, beautiful windows, three feet wide, over four feet high. The three windows overlooked a more public plaza, where the site’s attendants may have worshipped, and then beyond, to the “tumbled mass of gigantic forest-clad mountains, rising to snow-capped peaks” to the east. One felt pulled to these windows like a soul leaving a dying body, as if beyond them were a better world. They jogged something in Bingham’s memory – what, he couldn’t yet figure out.
The only false note in this poem of stone and jungle was a “rude scrawl” on the three-windowed temple, “Lizarraga 1902.” Bingham wrote it down, hoping it wasn’t another explorer. He had climbed up the hill expecting little, but his imagination was already soaring, writing the story he would tell [his wife] Alfreda and his readers at home. …
He set up his camera and began to take pictures. The boy motioned for Bingham to follow and the explorer carried the tripod up a steep set of stairs to the ruins’ highest point. Here was the site’s last mystery, at least for today: a large boulder carved into a two-tiered table, its smooth grey surface broken by a tall rectangular column, like the pommel on a saddle. It was an intihuatana, Bingham learned, a sort of religious sundial to mark the passage of seasons, harvests, and holy days. Bingham had read about them but never seen one. There had once been an intihuatana at Ollantaytambo, but like so many other native objects of worship, the Spanish had destroyed it. Another intihuatana above Pisaac, a town along the Vilcanota, had been defaced in the last century. That this one survived was cause for celebration, and a clue that the Spanish might never have sacked the site. Had they even known about it? Hiram had gone in search of the last cities of the Incas – but had he found something even older? What was this place?
Five days out of Cuzco, and Hiram had already discovered the great mystery of his life: the identity of Machu Picchu.
By Diana Terry-Azios is a freelance writer based in New York.
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