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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 weeks 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