Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [51]
“Well, the mules are easier to work with,” he said. “Back then the mules were much more wild and forceful. Now they’ve been bred to behave.”
I asked about a trick Bingham had boasted of using in this region—slipping a coin into the hand of Quechua farmers, which by custom required them to drop everything to work for his expedition, no matter how much they pleaded to be left behind and tend to their crops.
“You mean the obligatorio,” Juvenal said. “Oh yes, that was definitely true. It was the tradition that if someone gave you money, then you had to do what they asked.”
“It was a holdover from the Inca practice of mit’a,” John said. “You were obligated to give a certain number of weeks each year to the state—farming, or weaving, or fighting in the army—and in turn the state would make sure everyone was always clothed and fed. Of course the Spaniards exploited it.”
“Do you recall when you first started hearing about Machu Picchu?” I asked Juvenal.
“I think it was around 1940. My grandfather mentioned it around that time and it seemed like people had started talking about it. I visited Machu Picchu with my school in the early 1950s on what we called a ‘promotion,’ which was a group outing. What was it like? More or less the same as it is now, but more dangerous. There were no fences or anything back then, just straight drops two thousand feet down to the river. Guides used to tell stories all the time about people who took one step too far and—adios!”
“Bingham mentioned visiting a town called Tincochaca on his way to Vitcos. Any idea where that might have been?”
“We’re in Tincochaca now. It’s the same place as Huancacalle, just with a different name.”
“Really? In that case, have you ever heard of a Spanish ore-crushing mill?” Bingham saw one about five feet in diameter and took that as a sign he was nearing Puquiura—and therefore the White Rock. It seemed like the sort of thing that might have been big enough to stick around for a century. “Any guesses where it might have been?”
“I don’t know where it was then, but right now it’s in my cousin Jose’s backyard. Just knock on his door and tell him I sent you.”
I stopped by Jose’s house that afternoon, hoping to touch the stone that Bingham had, but no one was home. A neighbor assured me that he’d be back any minute, but I’d had enough waiting for one day. Rosa told me later that he wasn’t expected to return for another week.
TWENTY-THREE
The Haunted Hacienda
Huadquiña, Peru
The day after his mountaintop excursion with Melchor Arteaga, Bingham continued down the Urubamba Valley. He knew that he’d seen something spectacular on that ridge; he just wasn’t sure what he’d seen. It didn’t match the geographic descriptions he had for either Vitcos or Vilcabamba, and he had no time for a second look, since he was expected at the Huadquiña hacienda, a half day’s walk from Machu Picchu. On July 25, 1911, the day after Bingham made the discovery that would catapult his name into the pantheon of great explorers, the South Pole teams led by Amundsen and Scott were huddled in Antarctica, waiting out the austral winter’s months of darkness and monotony. (“This journey has beggared our language,” one of the survivors of Scott’s expedition later wrote. “No words could express its horror.”) Hiram Bingham was seated at the dining room table of “the finest sugar plantation and cattle ranch in this part of the valley,” sipping red wine and enjoying a dinner cooked especially for him.
Huadquiña was a two-hundred-square-mile plantation and “a splendid example of the ancient patriarchal system,” according to Bingham. The haciendas were holdovers from the earliest days of the Conquest, when Pizarro handed out large land holdings to his loyal supporters. When I’d asked Juvenal at lunch what he knew about the old estates in the area, he shrugged his broad shoulders and said, “There isn