• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Here, try this,” John said. He walked over to the perfectly rhomboid central doorway of the main building, walked through, turned around and came back. “Now you try.”

I tried. The portal narrowed as I entered. Then it narrowed as I exited. Wait a second, wasn’t that physically impossible? “How did they do that?” I asked.

“The Incas were big on special effects,” he said.

John and I ascended to the upper level of the site. Except for one young woman from the INC—Vitcos is so far off the main tourist trail that they don’t even bother charging admission—we had the entire place to ourselves. John whipped out his GPS and began to take readings.

On my first trip to Cusco, John had taken me to a bookstore and loaded my arms with reading material. Then we waited ninety minutes for the proprietor to return from “right next door” with one final volume. (At one point he called the shop to pass along the message that he was “in a taxi, two minutes away.”) The delay was worth it, for that book was Johan Reinhard’s Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center. In it, Reinhard suggests that trying to understand places like Machu Picchu and Vitcos as individual, self-contained sites misses a larger point. These monuments were built in relation to the sun, the stars, the mountains—and to one another. Trying to wrap my head around such an idea, sitting in the middle of Manhattan, was like trying to understand what the color red looks like based on its dictionary definition. Standing center stage at Vitcos, though, the Sacred Center theory started to make sense. Kind of.

“See that small fort on the hilltop ahead?” John said. “A straight line leads from that fort through the middle of the site here to”—he turned around—“Inca Tambo, a very important peak, which is almost exactly due north of here. The walls of the building up here are perfectly north-south east-west, but the main building below us is a slightly different angle. I’m wondering if . . .” He waited for his GPS readings to update. “Look at that. That building has perfect alignment to Choquequirao. Amazing. How did they do that?”

Bingham had his own puzzle to solve while standing up here. He needed to find Yurak Rumi, the White Rock. Calancha’s Coronica had pinpointed the White Rock’s location through the story of two Spanish friars, Marcos and Diego. This pair, having heard that Indians were communicating with Satan up at a gigantic rock on the other side of Vitcos, decided to put a stop to the diabolical practice. They collected some converts and firewood and marched up from Puquiura. Bingham, having spent his childhood watching firsthand the effects of uninvited missionaries cramming their beliefs down the throats of natives, must have found a tale of dogmatic Christian proselytizers butting heads with the Incas irresistible.

Next to the White Rock was a large and important sun temple; beneath the boulder was a spring of water in which the Devil himself had been reported to have appeared. Having decided that a full exorcism was in order, the friars raised a cross, piled the kindling around the rock and its adjacent buildings, “recited their orisions,” as Bingham put it, and torched the whole thing. Only the charred boulder remained intact. Calancha proudly recorded that “the cruel Devil never more returned to the rock nor to this district.” Nor, most likely, did the friars, since the Incas were not amused by an act that, had the roles been reversed, could have been equated with blowing up St. Paul’s Cathedral.

John and I followed a route down from Vitcos that wound around the mountain, dotted with the ruins of small Inca outbuildings. Most had deep holes burrowed in each corner. “Of course some of the huaqueros dug those,” John said. “There’s looted tombs everywhere here. They think it’s where the Incas would have buried some gold.”

We had seen almost nothing but blue skies since leaving Cachora, but today it was overcast gray with thick cottony clouds. “I think we’ll have a big rain tomorrow or the next day,” John said. The gray above contrasted with