Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [46]
The Spaniards were dumbfounded by what they saw when the sun rose: Manco Inca, holding a spear and issuing commands to his troops as he rode a stolen horse atop Ollantaytambo’s highest terrace. In an instant, the historian William Prescott wrote, “the air was darkened with innumerable missiles, stones, javelins and arrows, which fell like a hurricane on the troops, and the mountains rang to the wild warwhoop of the enemy.”
Anyone who’s hiked the Inca Trail also knows Ollantaytambo as a place where one can hop off the train to reach the starting point of the four- or five-day trek. Whether one continues west on foot or by rail, it’s impossible not to be struck by how quickly the landscape changes. The desolate, mountainous terrain that has held steady since Cusco segues rapidly into tropical forest dotted with orchids—the beginnings of the Amazon basin. Virtually every explorer who came before Bingham had been required, at this point, to choose between two grueling mountain passes—both “higher than the top of Pikes Peak,” Bingham noted—to move farther west beyond the well-mapped environs of the Sacred Valley near Cusco. Luckily for Bingham, a new mule road had been blasted out along the riverbank in 1895, to allow plantation owners an easier route for transporting their goods. Bingham was exaggerating only slightly when he claimed the new road allowed him access to a “mountainous wilderness” between the two routes that “had been inaccessible for almost four centuries.”
Bingham continued down the riverside, accompanied by two expedition members and a soldier known only as Sergeant Carrasco. His services had been provided on the orders of President Leguia, and Carrasco’s ability to speak Quechua would prove invaluable. On July 23, three Yale men dressed like Connecticut deer hunters, with a military escort in his brass-buttoned uniform and a few anonymous Andean muleteers and porters, arrived at a small hut known as La Maquina. It had been named after a large piece of machinery, rusted beyond recognition, that sat nearby. Bingham guessed that the iron wheels had once been intended for a sugar farm down the valley.
The road began to narrow, so the men found a place to camp along the riverbank. “Opposite us, beyond the huge granite boulders which interfered with the progress of the surging stream, was a steep mountain clothed with thick jungle,” Bingham later recalled. He had arrived at Mandor Pampa. The group was soon sought out by Melchor Arteaga, the man whom Albert Giesecke said had told him about the possible ruins. Bingham explained through Sergeant Carrasco what they had come searching for. Arteaga replied that “there were some very good ruins in this vicinity,” according to Bingham, “in fact, some excellent ones on top of the opposite mountain, called Huayna Picchu, and also on a ridge called Machu Picchu.”
This sounded promising. They made a plan to take a look in the morning.
In his books recounting the story of Machu Picchu, Bingham paused the action here and addressed readers directly. “Suffice it to say that the ruins he showed me were not near a ‘great white rock over a spring of water’ and that there was no evidence that this was Vitcos, Manco’s capital for which we were looking,” Bingham wrote. Instead of chronicling what happened next on July 24, he skipped ahead a couple days, fast-forwarding past the most important twenty-four hours of his life, a narrative trick that allowed him to save the juiciest part of his tale for the end.
John and I were following Bingham by the book. Which is why we, too, were about