Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [127]
At dinner, everyone was wiped out. After all the day’s ups and downs, we were still at about twelve thousand feet. The water for pasta took thirty minutes to boil. I asked Efrain how long it had taken him to get used to sleeping in a tent. He shook his head. “There’s nothing like your own bed at home,” he said.
“I’ll come by and wake you up after sunrise,” he told me as he stood up to leave. “If it’s clear, the view should be very good. Maybe you’ll even see Salcantay.”
John popped his last pill of the day. “We’ll be at Machu Picchu by this time tomorrow.”
“Yep. Pachacutec’s country estate.”
“Oh, come on, Mark. That theory is fine—and probably correct as far as it goes—but you know it doesn’t do justice to what Pachacutec was trying to do here. Machu Picchu was like Mecca, like the cathedral at the end of a pilgrimage.” That word again. “These experts all have the same problem Bingham had.”
“What’s that?”
“Failure of imagination. Too many people think like scientists—mechanically. We’ve barely scratched the surface here. To really understand Machu Picchu I think you’d need to be someone who could come in with a completely open mind—someone more spiritual and religious. Maybe even arty.”
John wasn’t alone in thinking this. As I’d been packing to leave New York for Cusco this time, I came across a new theory attempting to explain why Machu Picchu had been built. Giulio Magli, a professor of archaeoastronomy at the Polytechnic Institute in Milan, Italy, had just published a paper that expanded on Johan Reinhard’s sacred center theory. Magli argued that the Inca Trail wasn’t just a special VIP access road to Machu Picchu; the two were designed as a single work—a pilgrimage route. This sacred passage had been constructed as a replica of another mythical journey, the one which the very first Incas had made from the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca. According to this story, these forefathers had been created on the island and had traveled through a subterranean void, emerging at the far end of their journey at a place called Tampu Tocco.
Having walked most of the Inca Trail, I found Magli’s case compelling. As Reinhard had pointed out, the sites along the trail are so different, and so obviously oriented toward watching the sun and stars, that it seems impossible that they didn’t have some important ritual use. Magli believed that the trail likely prepared pilgrims for the most important part of the journey, which took place inside Machu Picchu. Curiously, the final leg of this pilgrimage roughly mimicked another famous journey, Hiram Bingham’s first visit to Machu Picchu in 1911. In both cases, one entered through the main gate, which faced due north to Huayna Picchu (and where Bingham found his rounded stones—which Magli thought had possibly been offerings), walked up past a quarry more symbolic than functional (representing the Pachamama and the journey underground), through the Sacred Plaza, where the Temple of the Three Windows was erected as a tribute to the cave at Tampu Tocco, and up to the Intihuatana, the end point of the pilgrimage, which Reinhard has demonstrated aligns with apus in the cardinal directions.
By Magli’s reasoning—and he admitted that due to the lack of hard evidence at Machu Picchu, we’re never going to be able to make more than an educated guess about this stuff—Bingham’s Tampu Tocco theory was wrong. The way I saw it, though, Bingham had also sort of been right. Blinded by ambition, he might have mistaken a handsome three-windowed copy of Tampu Tocco for the real thing. Bingham seems to have made the identical mistake with the Torreon. “If my theory about Tampu Tocco is correct,” he’d written in Lost City of the Incas, the Koricancha in Cusco “had been built during the reign of the Incas as an echo, on a large scale, of the semicircular temple at Machu Picchu.” In his haste to tie up all loose ends, he’d gotten things exactly backward. It was as if he’d seen the