Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [2]
“You’re kidding!” I said, a little too loudly. I had already checked my e-mail at an Internet café twice that morning. The last time I’d slept in a tent was in 1978, when my father brought an imitation teepee home from Sears and set it up in our backyard.
And that, more or less, was why I was in Cusco. After years of sitting at a computer in New York and sending writers off on assignment to Kilimanjaro and Katmandu—places John knew firsthand—I wanted an adventure of my own. I figured that my near-total lack of outdoor experience was a subject that John and I could discuss once I’d decided whether to go through with this.
“So what sort of trip did you have in mind?” John asked. “Paolo says you’re thinking about going after Bingham.”
“Yeah, I think so. Something like that.”
For most of his life and many decades after his death in 1956, Hiram Bingham III was known as the discoverer of Machu Picchu. The story he told in his adventure classic Lost City of the Incas—knockoff editions of which were available in most of the stores that catered to tourists (even on Sundays) in the center of Cusco—was one of the most famous in the annals of exploration. Bingham was a Yale University history lecturer who happened to be passing through Cusco in 1909 when he learned of a four-hundred-year-old unsolved mystery. When the Spanish conquistadors had invaded in the sixteenth century, a group of Incas withdrew to a hidden city high in Peru’s impenetrable cloud forest, carrying with them the sacred treasures of their empire. This city and its inhabitants had vanished so long ago that as far as most serious scholars were concerned, legends of its existence were about as credible as tales of Atlantis. Bingham thought the experts were wrong, and he scoured obscure texts and maps for clues to its location. In the dramatic climax of Lost City of the Incas, he was on the hunt for this final Inca refuge on July 24, 1911, when he stumbled across the geometric splendor of Machu Picchu instead. The ruins he discovered were so unexpected, so incredible that he wondered, “Will anyone believe what I have found?”
As the hundredth anniversary of Bingham’s achievement approached, the explorer was suddenly back in the news. I’d been introduced to John via e-mail through his friend Paolo Greer, an obsessive amateur researcher with an encyclopedic knowledge of Inca history. Paolo also happened to be a retired Alaskan pipeline worker who lived alone in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods outside of Fairbanks. He had found what he claimed was a rare map indicating that someone may have beaten Bingham to the top of Machu Picchu by forty years or more. Just months after Paolo’s map made headlines around the globe, Bingham’s name began popping up again. The former first lady of Peru had ignited an international incident by demanding that Yale return artifacts that Bingham had excavated at Machu Picchu, on the grounds that the explorer—she preferred the term “grave robber”—and his employer had violated a legal agreement. Yale and Peru had originally planned to jointly open a new museum in Cusco to celebrate the centennial of Bingham’s feat. As the hundred-year mark approached, they were suing each other in U.S. courts instead.
In the avalanche of news coverage that followed the filing of Peru’s lawsuit, questions kept popping up: Had Bingham lied about discovering Machu Picchu? Had he smuggled artifacts out of the country illegally? A woman in Cusco was even claiming that her family still owned the land on which Machu Picchu sits; was it possible that both Yale and the government of Peru were wrong?
As a magazine editor, I knew the revised version of Bingham’s tale had the makings of a great story: hero adventurer exposed as villainous fraud. To get a clearer idea of what had really happened on that mountaintop in 1911, I took a day off and rode the train up to Yale. I spent hours in the library, leafing through Bingham’s diaries and expedition journals. While holding the little leather-covered notebook in which Bingham had penciled his first