Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [80]
The difficult climb up the eastern face of the mountain took about eighty minutes. Much of the journey was made on all fours, Bingham recalled, “sometimes holding on by our fingernails.” Bingham was now within the zone known as the ceja de selva, the eyebrow of the jungle, where the cloud forest was thick. Tree trunks cut with rough notches served as ladders in otherwise impassable spots. Arteaga warned his guests to watch out for vipers. As it typically does at Machu Picchu, the early cloud cover burned off and the gray day turned hot and humid. Just after noon, the three men arrived at the top of the slope.
The first structure Bingham encountered at Machu Picchu was a Quechua hut. This was the house of the Richarte family, one of Arteaga’s subtenants who had settled on the ridge between the peaks of Mount Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu. Introductions were awkward—the farmers, who had selected the site at least in part because it was an excellent place to elude nosy government officials, were surely rattled by the arrival of a six-feet-four white man with yellow hair and a military escort. Once Arteaga explained the reason for Bingham’s appearance, however, the Richartes laid a poncho across a wooden bench and invited the American to sit down. They offered their guest, who hadn’t packed a lunch, sweet potatoes and “dripping gourds full of cool delicious water.”
Like every first-time visitor to Machu Picchu, Bingham took a few moments to soak in one of the world’s most incredible natural settings:
Tremendous green precipices fell away to the white rapids of the Urubamba below. Immediately in front, on the north side of the valley, was a great granite cliff rising 2000 feet sheer. To the left was the solitary peak of Huayna Picchu, surrounded by seemingly inaccessible precipices. On all sides were rocky cliffs. Beyond them cloud-capped mountains rose thousands of feet above us.
Bingham took note of some well-preserved Inca terraces that the farmers had “cleared off and burned over” for planting, creating an ideal spot for growing tomatoes, peppers, corn and other crops. Decades later researchers would discover that the Inca builders had not only filled these terraces with a thick layer of topsoil, but had also employed granite chips left over from stone cutting to lay down an ingenious multilayered drainage system.
Once rehydrated, the explorer wanted to see the ruins. Arteaga begged off, saying he’d “been there once before” and wanted to hang back and chat with his tenants. The Richartes’s young son, never named or quoted in any of Bingham’s books but probably the first guide to lead a tour through the ruins of Machu Picchu, was deputized to take the strange guest and his military escort to have a look around.
(In any picture of Machu Picchu taken from its best-known angle, the buildings will fall roughly into two groups, on the left and right, separated by a grassy central plaza.8 At the rear of the photo will be the rocky green rhino horn of Huayna Picchu. Looking north, the major discoveries of Bingham’s July 24 visit took place on the left side, starting in the foreground and advancing toward Huayna Picchu.)
The trio began walking around the side of the mountain, until they reached “a great flight of beautifully constructed stone-face terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and 10 feet high.” Bingham was reminded of the terraces he’d just seen at Ollantaytambo, the same that Manco had once ridden his stolen horse atop. The ones before