Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [130]
“The bigger the crystal, the bigger the power,” Efrain told me.
“How’d you know that?”
“My other mom, from the orphanage, she was into that stuff. She was always trying to get us to talk about our chakras.” A guy with a beard like Karl Marx’s blew a horn and reminded the group to reconvene at ten sharp, so that they might “take advantage of the sacred energy.”
We walked down in front of the Royal Mausoleum cavern. “Bingham called this the Royal Tomb, but it wasn’t,” Efrain said. “It was a temple to the Pachamama, the Mother Earth. Caves are access points to the underground world.” The day’s first dim light had just begun to illuminate the cave’s surreal interior. “The Incas didn’t have one church—they had hundreds of places to worship.”
At about a quarter to seven, we took our places behind a chest-high stone wall directly above the Torreon, in a spot that faced due east. Below us, John was shooting video of the interior of the new tomb that Paolo had told me about. A minute later, he was next to us, triangulating the perfect position from which to decide once and for all if this sunbeam-through-the-window story had any merit to it. Over the next fifteen minutes, dozens of other people arrived, until we were crowded in like the first arrivals at a sold-out show.
“Looks like we picked a winner of a day, Mark,” John shouted from down the row of onlookers. “Nice clear sky.”
“We should start to see something right about . . . now,” Efrain said.
The day’s first illumination arrived to the south, shining like a spotlight on the Sun Gate. A throng of Inca Trail trekkers, who would never know how lucky they were to arrive under perfect conditions, raised their walking sticks and cheered.
At 7:07, the first rays began to appear above the peak known locally as Cerro San Gabriel, the sharply pointed mountain directly in front of us to the east. The luminescence hovered behind the peak for a few moments, then shot its first beams out from the left side of the mountain. For a few minutes, the sun continued to rise slowly, triggering an expanding burst of light from behind the top of San Gabriel, like the glow around Jesus’s head in a Renaissance painting.
At 7:15, to our far left, rays of light hit the green horn of Huayna Picchu. The leading edge of the sunlight rolled toward us through the main ruins like a wave.
“Keep your eye on the window,” Efrain said.
At 7:20, the sun emerged completely from behind San Gabriel, burning in place momentarily directly above its pinnacle. I concentrated on the window inside the Torreon. A faint rectangle of light appeared on the rock inside the curved wall. Seconds ticked by. The rectangle brightened until its four sides were clearly delineated on the rock, almost perfectly centered on the crack where Paolo thought the golden statue had stood.
“Pa-cha-cu-tec,” Efrain said quietly, to no one in particular.
The oldest description I’d been able to find of an Inti Raymi celebration to welcome back the sun was one that Manco oversaw in Cusco in 1535:
Magnificently robed orejones [nobles] wearing rich silver cloaks and tunics, with brightly-shining circlets and medallions of fine gold on their heads . . . formed up in pairs . . . and waited in deep silence for the sun to rise. As soon as the sunrise began they started to chant in splendid harmony and unison.
There was no chanting this time, but the crowd did, as one, let out a long “Whooooah!”
I shot a look at John, who was busy snapping pictures. Later that day, he showed me his photos on his laptop and explained excitedly how the window did in fact align with the sunrise—“look at that, no shadow at all!”—in part because Inca engineers had angled the sides of the window to funnel the sunlight onto the rock, another