Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [45]
Bingham continued his sleuthing in Cusco. A businessman he’d befriended on his previous visit introduced the explorer to the owners of several nearby haciendas, the enormous farms that dominated the Peruvian countryside. One invited Bingham to stay at his family’s estate near Mandor Pampa, the spot where Albert Giesecke had suggested that Bingham stop. Another landowner, named Jose Pancorbo, assured Bingham that he would find significant ruins near a town called Puquiura. This news grabbed Bingham’s attention, for Puquiura was the name of the town that Father Calancha had mentioned in his Coronica as being a short distance from Vitcos.
Later, a chatty old prospector informed Bingham that he had seen ruins “finer than Choquequirau” at a place called Huayna Picchu. This name echoed one that Bingham had read in the famous French explorer Charles Wiener’s book Perou et Bolivie; Wiener had been told several decades earlier “that there were fine ruins down the Urubamba Valley at a place called ‘Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu,’” Bingham recalled.
Bingham’s departure from Cusco was briefly sidetracked when he and team geographer Isaiah Bowman stumbled across a human femur jutting out from a recently cut road outside of the city. Bowman convinced Bingham that the bones he found there were, in fact, evidence of “a man of the glacial epoch . . . probably 30,000 years old.” The discovery would have rocked the world of anthropology by pushing back the estimated arrival of Homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere by thousands of years. Such a find would have instantly made the expedition’s leader as well known as Othniel Charles Marsh, a professor during Bingham’s undergraduate years who was described upon his death in 1899 as “probably Yale’s most famous scholar.” Marsh catapulted to world renown as one of the founding fathers of paleontology (triceratops and stegosaurus were but two of the eighty dinosaur species he found and named). Bingham could barely contain his excitement. “You can easily imagine how pleased I am to have actually discovered the bones myself,” he wrote to Alfreda.
By the time he finally left Cusco on July 19, Bingham had cobbled together solid leads on three sets of Inca ruins, any one of which would be a major discovery. Multiple sources had suggested that there was something worth seeing on a ridge above Mandor Pampa, at a place that might be called Huaina-Picchu or Matcho-Picchu. He was confident that there were ruins close to the town of Puquiura—quite possibly those of Vitcos. Calancha’s Coronica had provided yet another tantalizing clue: “close to Vitcos . . . is a House of the Sun, and in it a white rock over a spring of water.” If Bingham could locate ruins that were near both Puquiura and this white rock, he would have solid proof of Manco’s capital in exile.
The location of Bingham’s third objective, the lost city of Vilcabamba, final sanctuary of the Incas, was somewhat murkier. Spanish chronicles indicated that it was situated northwest of Cusco and that the first checkpoint on the road to Vilcabamba was the ancient fort of Ollantaytambo, about forty winding miles from Cusco. On muleback, Bingham was able to reach the site in two days.
Ollantaytambo is one of the masterpieces of Inca architecture. Seventeen imposing terraces (which an awestruck Bingham wrote “will stand for ages to come as monuments to the energy and skill of a bygone race”) lead up to a fortress where six enormous rectangular granite slabs stand watch over the Urubamba River valley, like the world’s largest royal flush. Unlike Machu Picchu, about which next to nothing is known for certain, Ollantaytambo