Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [128]
FORTY-NINE
The Who’s Who of Apus
At Phuyupatamarca
I got up around 4:30 A.M., feeling oddly refreshed. After I spent an hour reading and shoving things in my pack, the day’s first light started to glow weakly through the thin ceiling of the tent. I I stepped out onto my private terrace and, with the aid of my ridiculous wristwatch-altimeter-compass, looked roughly in the direction of Machu Picchu. Not much was visible in the obscurity. (Though I did notice that the barometric pressure was rising.) I ducked into the cook tent to grab a cup of coffee. After a few minutes the cloud cover began to lift. Dawn started to break somewhere behind the ranges. It seemed like a good moment to visit the observation platform where the mountain-averse idiots had eaten their dinner the night before. John would really love this, I thought, and momentarily considered waking him before I remembered his stomach troubles. With Nescafé in hand, I exchanged good mornings with the porters sitting outside and turned the corner around the big orange tent, watching my feet as I navigated the cords staked into the ground.
When I looked up, I was face-to-face with a white deity: Salcantay.
No wonder people had been talking about this mountain since forever. In the middle of some of the world’s tallest peaks, it completely dominated the skyline. I hurried up the path to the platform for a better look. The first thing I saw at the top was the back side of a familiar form, wearing a ski cap and videotaping everything in a slow semicircle.
“Best views in the world and no one’s here!” John shouted when he saw me. The panorama was staggering. Almost everything I’d seen in Peru in the last year was visible from this one spot.
“Look at this, Mark! It’s just sensational! There’s Salcantay, of course. You’ll notice a piece missing from that side. That’s the part that caused the alluvion when it fell into the Aobamba River and wiped out the railway.” It looked like someone had taken the tiniest nibble of a snow cone. “To the right is Pumasillo—you might just be able to make out the Choquetacarpo Pass that we crossed. Over there, behind that mountain, is Choquequirao. And if you come over here . . .” We turned to the right and walked to the edge of the platform. “Over there is Llactapata, and beyond that are Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa. And you might recognize that small, green pointy peak down there.”
I finally found the one he was trying to single out. “That one?”
“Recognize it? You’ve been up there. It’s Mount Machu Picchu!” It was like a Christmas tree lost in a stand of redwoods. “And if you follow that line along the ridge, that’s the Inca Trail leading to the Sun Gate. Just think, at this very moment people are dragging themselves up to the Sun Gate when they should be right here.”
Efrain arrived, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He took his hat off, faced Salcantay, and held it to his chest. “The older mountain men, sixty or seventy years old, do this when they see a mountain. It’s a way of giving respect to the apus.” He walked to the edge. “From here you can see everything—jungle, highland, the Andes. Everything. There’s no question about it—the Incas got to Machu Picchu and said, ‘This is a sacred center. We must build here.’”
The sun began to crest over the top of Mount Veronica to the east, a reminder that hundreds of people would also be standing above the Torreon at this moment, for today was the first day of the solstice.
We lingered past our usual departure hour, then moved on toward Machu Picchu, skirting the agricultural ruins of Inti Pata and passing through a tunnel carved through solid rock. We ate bag lunches at Wiñay Wayna, the last of the major sites along the Inca Trail. The massive convex ruins were so overgrown in Bingham’s time that he missed them altogether; they weren’t discovered until 1941.
As the three of us departed Wiñay Wayna, John bolted ahead;