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“You go into Machu Picchu and you sit down in front of the Torreon and it clicks,” Paolo said. The Torreon, Paolo believes, was designed to represent the Koricancha sun temple in Cusco, the holiest building in the most important city in the empire. According to Betanzos, after Pachacutec’s death, the emperor “was taken to a town . . . where he had ordered some houses built in which his body was to be entombed.” In addition, he “ordered that a golden image made to resemble him be placed on top of his tomb . . . to be worshiped in place of him by the people who went there.”

The very idea was straight out of Indiana Jones—a gold statue of the greatest of all Incas, standing inside a temple devoted to the sun, which possibly aligned with the sunrise on the most important day of the Inca calendar. A recent excavation inside the Torreon had revealed another possible clue: a tomb with beautiful stonework was located just outside the circular wall. Paolo had pictures of himself down in the hole.

“You know what it is?” he asked. “It’s Pachacutec’s tomb!”

I was reminded of the two small windows in the Torreon, one of which was believed by some to face the solstice. The third window in the tower is the larger, oddly shaped opening that faces north, which Bingham named the Enigmatic Window. Paolo thought that this opening was the important one, and that it was used to give offerings to the golden statue of Pachacutec. “On both sides of the Enigmatic Window are secret stones that pull out of the wall. The chief archaeologist just showed me this. The Incas had something inside, something that tightened up and turned. I’ve got pictures!”

“So what happened to the gold statue?” I asked.

“It was brought up to Cajamarca for Atahualpa’s ransom.”

The circular part of the Torreon had been built to wrap around a large rock with what appears to be a chunk chiseled out of its center. This rock has befuddled archaeologists for a hundred years. Bingham was the first to note that it looked burned. “At some time or another a really extraordinary amount of heat must have been applied,” he wrote. The prevailing theory, according to Paolo, was that the rock had been struck by lightning.

“It wasn’t done by lightning,” Paolo told me, shaking his head. “I was just up inside there. Granite doesn’t conduct lightning that well, and it’s cracked as hell on the inside. Atahualpa’s people came in to get that golden statue. They filled the entire place up with firewood and they torched it.” The intense heat would have had a similar effect to a lightning bolt, cracking the rock quickly. “Apparently they were in a hurry,” Paolo said.

Paolo’s not the only one who thinks this, incidentally. Luis Lumbreras, one of the most respected archaeologists in Peru, has argued that the Torreon and the cave underneath were probably Pachacutec’s royal crypt.

“It’s all right there if you examine it,” Paolo said. “Play Sherlock Holmes. It all fits together really well.”

Now we were getting somewhere: Maybe the Inca Trail had been a pilgrimage, leading to gold statue of Pachacutec—which was illuminated by the rising sun on the holiest day of the year! I asked Paolo what he thought of the sunlight-through-the-window theory.

“That little window doesn’t mean shit,” he said. A friend of his had taken a digital compass reading that indicated the position of the window didn’t quite align with the angle of the solstice; it was off by a few degrees.

“Oh.” Admittedly, this took a little wind out of my sails. Paolo must have noticed my disappointment.

“Well, who cares if it does or it doesn’t? Let’s go eat.”

We moved on to dinner at an Italian restaurant, where Paolo explained a way to prove his theory. Berns wrote that the Indians near Machu Picchu possessed a “large stone statue of an Inca,” which later vanished. Paolo thought the statue was buried in some terraces on the back side of Machu Picchu, beneath a rounded wall that he insisted was “the best wall in Machu Picchu.”

But, assuming the statue