Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [83]
“You might want to start with that one,” John said. He handed me a special all-Inca issue of a children’s science magazine.
There’s an old kitchen maxim that squid should either be cooked for two minutes or two hours. A similar rule could be applied to Machu Picchu. With a good guide—there are dozens of them lingering by the front entrance—a visitor who’s short on time can see the highlights of Machu Picchu in two hours. A visit of two days, though, allows enough time to take in the site’s full majesty. Our plan was to devote one day to retracing Bingham’s 1911 footsteps, and a second to seeing some parts of the site that most people never get to.
John and I nabbed the last two seats on a bus heading up to the ruins at seven-thirty. There were more people inside than we’d seen at Choquequirao, Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa combined. The ride up the serpentine Hiram Bingham Highway takes about twenty minutes, and the views almost justify the twelve bucks they squeeze you for. John did a final equipment check before we entered—“camera, video camera, notebooks, pens, batteries, snacks”—and cast an evil glance at the one public bathroom, which charged an entry fee of 35 cents. “I’m fairly certain that’s illegal according to the UN Human Rights Commission,” he said.
By eight o’clock we were walking along the same path Bingham had taken through the terraces, following a train of photogenic llamas reporting for duty. For whatever reason—our arrival before the big crowds from Cusco, my sense of having earned this visit over the previous weeks of walking, the absence of my sometimes sullen thirteen-year-old son—Machu Picchu was different this time. Even after witnessing the knee-buckling natural settings of Choquequirao and Vitcos, it was impossible not to see almost immediately that Machu Picchu beat them both. The distant peaks ringing the ruins like a necklace were higher; the nearby slopes were greener. And of course the city, laid out before the visitor like a LEGO metropolis atop a billiard table, is impossible to turn away from. For the first time since dropping out of graduate school, I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime. Nowadays, we throw around the word “sublime” to describe gooey desserts or overpriced handbags. In Kant’s epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver’s head hurt. Machu Picchu isn’t just beautiful, it’s sublime.
As we walked through the stone portal of the Main Gate, John pointed out the sort of detail that I had missed on my first visit. The gate was, essentially, the front door to Machu Picchu and was positioned so that the first thing a guest saw (perhaps as he dusted off his tunic and accepted a cup of chicha) was the green thumb of Huayna Picchu’s peak, perfectly framed by the portal. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.
In a couple of minutes, we were peering inside Bingham’s first discovery, the surrealist cave of the Royal Mausoleum. The cavern’s natural rock walls had been fortified with elaborate stonework. One hourglass-shaped section almost seemed to melt into the cave wall, as if in a Dalí painting. A four-step staircase, slightly off-kilter, had been carved out of a single piece of granite that grew from the earth near the cave’s entrance. It all obviously had some special significance, but no one could say what that had been.
“I’d guess those steps were probably for displaying idols of some sort,” John said. “And if you look up”—we took a step backward—“there’s the Torreon.”
The circular wall looming above us seemed to have swallowed the grotto below like the trunk of