Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [81]
Inside the green tangle of vegetation, something caught Bingham’s attention. The boy had led them into “a maze of beautiful granite houses! The buildings were covered with trees and moss and the growth of centuries, but in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, could be seen, here and there, walls of white granite ashlars most carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together.”
Bingham had entered the area of Machu Picchu now known as the Eastern Urban Sector. He may have been exaggerating slightly about the overgrowth, since the tenant farmers had cleared much of the site to plant their crops. Then again, maybe not. Photographs Bingham took show adult trees growing not just inside and around those now-famous buildings, but on top of them as well. “Some walls were actually supporting trees ten and twelve inches in diameter,” he noted.
The boy pushed on ahead, ducking nimbly under bamboo and scrambling up terrace walls as Bingham struggled to follow. The explorer seems to have almost collided with his first important find, a cave that the boy pointed out. The cavern’s interior chamber was lined with exquisite stonework. At its center were four white stone steps, carved at slightly irregular angles so that they cast enigmatic shadows. Bingham, who over time named the features of Machu Picchu like Adam identifying every beast of the field in the book of Genesis, dubbed this opening the Royal Mausoleum.
Directly above the cave, the Incas had built a high, semicircular wall that formed a tower of sorts; its perfectly curved face contained two small windows. (Bingham named it the Semicircular Temple; it’s now commonly known as the Torreon, or Temple of the Sun.) Climbing an adjacent set of stairs, Bingham could see that the curved wall wrapped around until it straightened like the stem on a letter “P,” then turned ninety degrees to the left.
The masonry, like that of most Inca masterworks, tilted slightly inward and tapered as it went up. “Owing to the absence of mortar,” Bingham wrote, “there are no ugly spaces between the rocks. They might have grown together.” The use of white granite had given the walls a luminous beauty that surpassed anything Bingham had ever seen. “Dimly, I began to realize that this wall and its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world.... It fairly took my breath away.”
Bingham followed his guide up a granite staircase to a small clearing that the boy’s family had chosen for a vegetable patch. Standing watch over the Richarte family produce were “the ruins of two of the finest structures I have ever seen in Peru.” In contrast to the intricate granite brickwork of the Mausoleum wall, these buildings had been constructed from enormous blocks comparable in size to those at Sacsahuaman, some of them “ten feet in length, and higher than a man.” Both were three-sided temples. The temple facing south contained a fourteen-foot-long slab of waist-high granite, which sat beneath seven niches set high in the rear wall; Bingham surmised that this spot had been a “sacrificial altar.”
Ninety degrees to the right, the other temple seemed in particular to catch Bingham’s fancy. “Best windows I have ever seen,” he scribbled in his notebook. Three apertures, each measuring four feet by three feet, faced east “over the canyon to the rising sun.” The openings looked onto a large central plaza, and beyond to the Urubamba River flowing far below. Straight ahead in the distance, the triptych framed a panorama of skyscraping mountain peaks. Bingham lingered, puzzling over these “three conspicuously large windows, obviously too large to serve any useful purpose.” Clements Markham, he knew, had mentioned an important place in The Incas of Peru: “the hill with the three openings or windows.” Bingham sensed immediately that this structure had “peculiar significance.