Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [101]
“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.
“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