Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [106]
Bingham’s first project for 1915 was to investigate a trail that seemed to lead out of the south end of Machu Picchu. One of the expedition’s native assistants had found an old Inca road that might extend to the citadel from the opposite direction. The region in between was completely unexplored. From Patallacta, Bingham and a small team passed through “a picturesque primeval forest” and encountered the ancient stone highway.
The path climbed to an extraordinary height. At the crest of the ridge they found ahead of them “a lovely abandoned valley,” in which not a single creature stirred. As the group descended into this untouched paradise, Bingham spotted a circular ruin where, he wrote to Alfreda, “We pitched our tent . . . and enjoyed the lovely view, which the Incas had before us.”
The trail plunged precipitously the next day, briefly vanishing “in a maze of boulders and the remains of a fairly recent landslide.” Here the highway forked. The left branch ascended a set of steps to a rock outcrop like the prow of a ship. Atop this perch the Incas had constructed a labyrinth of stone buildings, including a bullet-shaped structure with nine windows. After a wet night and two hours of walking the following morning, Bingham recalled, “I at last came out on a ridge from which a great part of the grand canyon of the Urubamba was visible—and in the distance the familiar outlines of Machu Picchu Mountain—but oh so far below us!” Bingham then encountered a third striking set of unknown ruins. The impressive stonework—including five stone fountains—was crowned by an Inca overlook that took in Salcantay and most of the other important peaks near Machu Picchu. He sensed that he was getting close to his goal.
“We walked along the ridge by the old trail for a couple of hours until at last the ruins of Machu Picchu itself came into view,” Bingham wrote. Then, “within rifle shot of the city,” the trail vanished, buried by “rotting vegetable matter.” Bingham detoured down to the Intihuatana ranch (now the location of the Hidroeléctrica train station) and climbed to “dear old Machu Picchu” from the west. The explorer “nearly wept to see how it had gone back to jungle and brush” in just three years. “Even the Sacred Plaza was so dense we had to cut our way into it with a machete,” he wrote to Alfreda. Only one group of buildings was clear—“and that occupied by six pigs!”
To prove that his city in the clouds was indeed Manco Inca’s Vilcabamba, Bingham next needed to trace the route to Machu Picchu that Manco would have taken from Vitcos when the Spaniards surprised him there in 1537. As an Indian guide led them through the boggy no-man’s-land between Puquiura and Machu Picchu, the trail passed a large, dark green lake. Bingham inquired what its name was. “The answer gave me a thrill,” he remembered. The guide had said “Yanacocha”; Bingham convinced himself that he’d meant to say “Ungacacha.” (“They look so different on paper that it is somewhat difficult to realize how closely the Indian pronunciation of one approaches the other,” he later rationalized.) Ungacacha was the name of a lake that Father Calancha had reported his two friars passing on their way from near Vitcos to Vilcabamba, where they were assaulted by battalions of lovelies from the Peruvian coast. Bingham reasoned that it was the monks who had heard the name incorrectly, rather than he. When the trail ended at the familiar hacienda of Huadquiña, just a half day’s walk from Machu Picchu, Bingham was certain that he’d compiled enough evidence—the Inca highways from Cusco and Vitcos, the skeletal remains of the chosen women, the architectural splendor of Machu Picchu—to prove beyond the shadow