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Bingham’s logical next move was to visit the cave near Pacaritambo, where he could refute once and for all the notion that Machu Picchu was not also Tampu Tocco. His victory march was halted by an unlikely culprit—an organizational screwup. Considering the size of the 1914–15 expedition and the unpleasant exit that Bingham had made in 1912, it seems obvious that someone should have secured permits to excavate before digging up two hundred skulls. Unfortunately, this was one detail that Bingham had delegated. When Bingham arrived back at Yankihausi on June 15, 1915, he was informed that he faced charges of excavating and exporting artifacts illegally. One of his accusers, the archaeologist and newspaper editor Luis Valcárcel, had published reports in his Cusco paper El Sol that the Bingham expedition was smuggling gold from Machu Picchu out of the country through Bolivia. Bingham rushed off to Cusco to attempt to clear his name and salvage his expedition. As if fulfilling Gilbert Grosvenor’s bleak prophecy, Bingham collapsed into a hotel bed, fevered and exhausted, unable to move for a week.

In Cusco, Bingham discovered that the Peruvian rumor mill had been working at full capacity. “Among other things,” Bingham wrote wearily to Grosvenor, “we were charged with having brought a steam shovel from Panama.” The expedition was more or less exonerated of the more serious charges, but Bingham was ordered not to undertake any new digging. And because the investigation was still open, government inspectors would be appointed to monitor any future work. Chief among Bingham’s new babysitters was his accuser, Luis Valcárcel. Bingham briefly worried that he might not be allowed to leave the country.

The irony of Bingham’s prosecution is that he really was smuggling artifacts out of the country, hundreds of them—just not those that Valcárcel had accused him of. The previous year, the historian Christopher Heaney has written, Bingham had negotiated the purchase of 366 Inca artifacts from Tomás Alvistur, the son-in-law of Huadquiña’s owners. After a bit of haggling, the antiquities were smuggled out of Peru and arrived in New Haven, where they outshone the pieces that Bingham had excavated at Machu Picchu. At the same time he was under suspicion of smuggling gold in 1915, Bingham purchased another collection in Lima and shipped the artifacts out under a false name.15

In the end, it was hard not to view the 1914–15 expedition as a near-complete failure. The year’s only bright spot was the old Inca highway that Bingham had blazed anew, along with the three sets of strange ruins that he had found en route to Machu Picchu. As far as Bingham was concerned, he had proven his theory. After exiting the legal circus in Cusco, he had returned to Ollantaytambo and retraced his steps along the now-completed Inca Trail. “I had the satisfaction of going into ‘Vilcabamba the Old’ over the very road used by the Virgins of the Sun when they fled here from Cusco and the conquistadors,” he later wrote. His work in Peru was finished.

FORTY-FOUR

My Dinner with Paolo

Lima

When I arrived in Lima in June, my first thought was how lucky John had been to have had his heart surgery during the sunny half of the city’s annual climate cycle. The same geological cacophony that wakes El Niño draws the garúa, a thick cloak of clouds over the capital city that blots out the sun for weeks at a time, creating near-perfect laboratory conditions for an epidemic of seasonal affective disorder. Visitors to what Herman Melville called “tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou cans’t see” search the skies for a cathartic storm that never comes. The clamminess is maddeningly consistent. When I’d checked the Lima weather report before leaving New York, the forecast was identical for each of the next seven days: high of 65, low of 63, cloudy and humid.

Counterbalancing the gloom was a ray of good news. Finally, after a year, I was going to meet Paolo Greer. In