Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [77]
John and I descended for a few minutes on the far side of the ridge, passing several crumbling structures, until we reached a building that had stonework similar to what we’d seen at Choquequirao. In front of the building was a grassy plaza, and beyond that was a steep drop. Straight across the chasm, laid out like a diorama, was Machu Picchu. The entire complex was sandwiched between the two peaks that mark its north and south ends—it couldn’t have been framed any better with red velvet curtains. We sat for a few minutes munching on chocolate bars and trading peeks through John’s scope. Yep, that was Machu Picchu all right. We had Llactapata all to ourselves. Across the valley, busloads of tour groups were disembarking outside the main entrance.
John jerked his thumb back, then pointed forward. “There’s a direct solstice alignment from the temple here to the sun temple at Machu Picchu,” he said.
I started to nod, as I always did when John began talking about solstice alignments. Then I stopped myself. “I have a confession to make,” I said, wiping chocolate on my sweaty sleeve. “I know we’ve been talking about this stuff for two weeks, and I think I get it. More or less. But when you start using words like ‘solstice’ and ‘alignment,’ I still don’t really know what the hell you’re talking about.”
John jumped up and led me over to what had once been a long stone hallway of sorts, one that Bingham had mapped and measured in 1912. “For two weeks out of every year, the sun comes straight down this corridor,” John said, sweeping his gloved hands backward as if he were a matador ushering in the solar bull. “It’s right on the June solstice line, the point where the sun rises on the shortest day of the year. And it’s a straight shot to Machu Picchu. The Incas probably hung some sort of golden sheet or reflector at the end of it to reflect sunlight back to Machu Picchu. Can you imagine how spectacular that would have been? Machu Picchu would’ve still been dark, waiting for the sunrise, when the reflection would just shoot across the valley!
“And in that direction on the summer solstice in December,” he said, looking at his GPS and pointing northwest, “you get a near-perfect alignment from Machu Picchu to Espiritu Pampa.”
In layman’s terms, that meant that some Inca planner had taken the care to ascertain that this corridor would parallel the path of the rising sun—the father of the Sapa Inca himself—on one of the most important days of the year. He or someone like him also planned the locations of at least three important Inca sites—Machu Picchu, Llactapata and a carved rock shrine in the valley below that we were about to visit—to fall on an invisible line that bisected all three. I’d seen pictures of British oddballs dressed up like Druids at Stonehenge waiting for the sun to rise on the solstice, but that hardly compared to what John was talking about. The Incas had plotted these coordinates over thousands of square miles.
Up to now I had been thinking of these places as Bingham had when first starting out, as self-contained lost cities and holy sites, akin to abandoned medieval villages and churches. Trails were just lines on a map connecting the dots. But if John was right, the Incas had seen things very differently. These sites and trails were more like organs and vessels, the circulatory system in a living body. A very big living body.
“Llactapata was interconnected with Machu Picchu,” John said. “Count the trails!” He walked to the edge of the plaza and pointed across. “One, two, three, four, five, six. At least six Inca trails leading up to Machu Picchu. Everything was connected!”
We walked down the mountainside beneath Llactapata and crossed the Aobamba River—an important milestone, because we were now officially inside the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary. Technically, this zone is a haven not only for ruins but for the diverse flora and fauna of the region. (This is one of