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purposes or for members of the royal family, are famous for their jigsaw-puzzle masonry; the stones are held together without mortar, wedged so tightly that it is impossble to insert a knife blade between them. (It is equally impossible for a visitor to take a guided tour of Cusco during which this fact is not demonstrated.) How the Incas, who possessed no iron tools, no draft animals and no wheeled vehicles, carved and transported these stones is still something of a mystery.3 The likeliest explanation is that the Incas had an enormous, well-organized work force that employed different methods from those that developed in Europe. Where an artisan in Florence might have taken a chisel to a chunk of marble, his counterpart in Cusco chipped off bits of granite with an especially dense hammer stone until he achieved the exact shape he wanted. The interlocking stonework serves an engineering purpose in addition to an artistic one. During earthquakes, mortar crumbles, causing walls to topple. The interlocking stones in an Inca wall are said to “dance” during seismic turbulence before falling back into place. When a huge earthquake struck Cusco in 1950, many Spanish buildings collapsed, revealing intact Inca walls underneath.

Shortly after arriving, Bingham learned that word had been sent out from Lima that the American delegado to the scientific conference—a doctor from a prestigious institution—was to receive the warmest hospitality from local officials. This included a guided tour of Sacsahuaman, the extraordinary stone edifice that overlooks Cusco.

It’s safe to say that if it still looked as it did in the sixteenth century, Sacsahuaman, and not Machu Picchu, would be the most famous archaeological site in the Western Hemisphere. At its peak, historian John Hemming has suggested, the quarter-mile-long structure—a massive, three-tiered citadel with three towers at the center, constructed in the imperial-quality stonework that the Incas reserved for their most important buildings—would have resembled a gigantic granite battleship. Huge, perfectly carved boulders remain fixed in the original zigzag walls. One has been estimated to measure twenty-eight feet in height and to weigh more than three hundred tons. The blocks seem even more incredible in that when the Incas wanted to move something big, they pulled it themselves. Even after generations of local builders had carried off any stones not too large to budge, Bingham was stupefied by what he saw. “There are few sights in the world more impressive than these Cyclopean walls,” he wrote. “What remains is the most impressive spectacle of man’s handiwork that I have ever seen in America.” When I visited with Alex a hundred years later, it was hard to disagree.

Continuing with his itinerary, Bingham departed Cusco for Ayacucho, the site of Bolívar’s final crushing defeat of the Spanish forces in 1824. The road he followed had once been a major Inca thoroughfare; Francisco Pizarro, the wily Spanish conqueror of Peru, had endured its roller-coaster climbs and descents on his way to the Inca empire’s capital. As it often does near Cusco, the topography transformed almost immediately. “The trail, a rocky stairway not unlike the bed of a mountain torrent, led us rapidly into a warm tropical region whose dense foliage and tangled vines were grateful enough after the bleak mountain plateau,” Bingham wrote. “Parti-colored lantanas ran riot through a maze of agaves and hungry creepers. We had entered a new world.”

Four days out of Cusco, Bingham’s party was given an enthusiastic welcome in the town of Abancay. The local prefect, J. J. Nuñez, buttonholed the visitor and begged him to make a detour to Choquequirao—an old Inca fortress that clung to a steep ridge more than a mile above the roaring Apurimac River, a glacier-fed source of the mighty Amazon. The name Choquequirao means “cradle of gold” in Quechua. Nuñez had raised thousands of dollars to blaze a trail to the nearly inaccessible ruins and take part in what was—and still remains—one of the great Peruvian pastimes: searching