Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [114]
The elemental facts covered in Lost City of the Incas differ little from Bingham’s previous works. What’s different is the tone. As the new title indicated, the book was much more a classic adventure tale than his earlier works. The reason was probably twofold. Bingham had passed seventy when he sat down to write the book, and knew that, despite his other achievements, he’d be remembered posthumously as the man who found Machu Picchu. As always, he wanted to have the last word. Bingham also, not unreasonably, would have wanted to sell some books. His previous full-length efforts to describe his work in Peru, Inca Land and the 1930’s more scholarly Machu Picchu: A Citadel of the Incas, were flops.
Anyone who has read James Hilton’s 1933 classic Lost Horizon (or, more likely, seen Frank Capra’s film adaptation) can’t help but notice that in Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu seems a little more like the fictional Shangri-La than it did in Bingham’s earlier attempts. Bingham may have seen something of himself in Lost Horizon’s diplomat Hugh Conway, whose plane crashes in the mountains of Tibet. (Conway’s first sight of Shangri-La: “It might have been a vision fluttering out of that solitary rhythm in which lack of oxygen had encompassed all his faculties. It was, indeed, a strange and half-incredible sight.”) In Lost City’s version of events, Bingham downplayed all the detective work he’d done; he ratcheted up the tension of a story whose ending was already known by making it seem as if he hadn’t expected to find anything on the abandoned mountaintop. From there he segued into language that the explorer-historian Hugh Thomson has aptly described as “hallucinogenic, spiraling”:
Suddenly, I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses.... It seemed like an unbelievable dream.... What could this place be? Why had no one given us any idea about it? . . . Surprise followed surprise in bewildering succession.... The sight held me spellbound.
A more telling editorial change from 1922 to 1948 is Bingham’s failure to share credit. The truth is that even Bingham admitted—for a while anyway—that he hadn’t been the first person to see Machu Picchu. Three families were living at the site when he arrived; it would have been ridiculous for him to argue otherwise. On his very first visit to Machu Picchu, he’d seen writing scrawled on the wall of the Temple of the Three Windows, the words “Lizarraga 1902.” I’d seen the words he penciled in his 1911 notebook the day after his famous encounter: “Agustin Lizarraga is discoverer of Machu Picchu.” (In his 1913 National Geographic account, Bingham complained—somewhat comically in light of the controversy that would follow—that it took two days to scrub the graffiti out of the temple.) Lizarraga lived at the Intihuatana ranch on the Urubamba River, where the explorer had paid him a visit. Later, in his 1922 book Inca Land, Bingham described seeing Lizarraga’s name and surmised that “some one must have visited Machu Picchu long before that; because in 1875 . . . the French explorer Charles Wiener heard in Ollantaytambo of there being ruins at ‘Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu.’” The same year Inca Land was published, in a letter to a schoolmaster in Honolulu, Bingham candidly admitted:
I suppose that in the same sense of the word as it is used in the expression “Columbus discovered America” it is fair to say that I discovered Machu Picchu. The Norsemen and the French fishermen undoubtedly visited North America long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. On the other hand it was Columbus who made America known to the civilized world. In the same sense of the word I “discovered” Machu Picchu—in that before my visit and report on it it was not known to the geographical and historical societies in Peru, nor to the Peruvian government.
Not that it really matters. No one has any idea how many people—whether they spoke Spanish,