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By Root 390 0

a roundabout way, Paolo’s investigations had launched my Peruvian odyssey by dragging Bingham back into the news fifty years after his death. Paolo had been extremely helpful in my own research. There was something vaguely unsettling about him, though. Maybe it was the mildly combative tone of his e-mails—more than once he challenged me to “call his bluff” with a list of tough questions that I think he was expecting me to spring on him, 60 Minutes–style. He believed that he’d made powerful, shadowy enemies in the Peruvian bureaucracy. I couldn’t figure out if his choice to live alone in the woods had more in common with Thoreau’s desire to commune with nature or the Unabomber’s need to wall himself off from society. And then there was Paolo’s photo, which I found on a Web site devoted to Inca history. In it he faced the camera defiantly, as if he were about to challenge the photographer to a knife fight.

So when I arrived outside the high metal gate of the South American Explorers Club around five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon and saw that no lights were on inside, a small part of me hoped that Paolo had skipped town. I walked around the side of the building, searching for an after-hours bell. Then I heard someone call, in English, “Hey, Mark, is that you?”

The front gate of the clubhouse creaked open and out stepped someone who was not at all what I’d been expecting. In his frayed windbreaker and rumpled plaid shirt, Paolo looked more like an absentminded classics professor who’d misplaced his Seneca than a sociopathic street fighter. He pressed a DVD into my hand and started talking as if he’d been waiting for someone, anyone, to listen to his story.

“That DVD’s got two hundred and sixty books and articles about Machu Picchu on it, stuff that’s hard to come by in Peru. Both in English and Spanish.” He turned his head and leaned an ear in my direction. “If you want me to hear what you’re saying, you’ll have to speak up—I’m half-deaf. I read lips.” He removed his ball cap for a second, ran his fingers through his short salt-and-pepper hair and looked me straight in the eyes. “So, you want to go sit down somewhere and talk about Bingham?”

As we walked through the crowded sidewalks of Lima’s fancy Miraflores neighborhood, searching for a café, Paolo explained how a retired Alaska pipeline laborer and gold prospecting hobbyist had become the most controversial scholar in Machu Picchu studies. He’d spent twenty-seven years working on the pipeline. (“When I went in for my physical before starting, the doctor asked me, ‘You know you’ve got TB, tuberculosis?’ Now when I go to the doctor in Peru they ask me, ‘You know you’ve got holes in your liver?’”) Like John, he had never married or had children, which left plenty of time to root around in libraries and archives. He actually lived in three cabins outside of Fairbanks, one of them devoted to “nothing but papers and maps and books.” He lived only a short drive from a University of Alaska campus and spent a lot of time taking adult education courses. Whenever he built up a “grubstake,” Paolo said, he’d head off to the Peruvian Andes to have a long look around.

“Never filed a claim, though,” he told me as we finally found a place to sit down, an arty-looking coffeehouse filled with college students. “It’s all about the prospect. After twenty years of looking for lost gold mines, researching Machu Picchu was a piece of cake.”

In 1978, while doing some research at the Library of Congress, Paolo came across an intriguing prospecting map drawn by hand in the 1870s. He recognized that the sketch, which was untitled but labeled in English, was of the area around Machu Picchu. The spot where Aguas Calientes now sits was identified as “Saw Mill.”

“Of course the name had changed by the time Bingham got there,” Paolo said.

Over the next twenty years, Paolo pieced together clues in libraries on two continents. The map had been drawn by an associate of Augusto Berns, a German mining prospector who’d purchased a ten-mile stretch of land across the Urubamba River from Machu Picchu