Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [84]
“What were the windows for?” I asked John. The tower had three of them. Two were small and perfectly rhomboid and faced, respectively, east and south. The other, a large portal, was dubbed the Enigmatic Window because of mysterious holes bored through the rocks at its base. “It is what archaeologists commonly call ‘problematical,’” Bingham wrote, in a rare instance of admitting that he was baffled.
“It’s said that the small window faces east toward the sun,” John said, somewhat dubiously. The Torreon was also known as the Sun Temple, both because of this alleged alignment with the sunrise and because of its uncanny resemblance to the Koricancha in Cusco. “Supposedly, on the winter solstice in June, the sun rises above a peak over there, to the east, and then shines through that window and casts a rectangle of light onto that big rock in the center of the circular building.”
“You mean like in Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
“Something like that. Now, I have read in a couple of places that the window doesn’t quite line up with the solstice, that it’s a few degrees off. That’s not really the sort of mistake the Incas would have made.”
“Huh. And what about the big window?”
“You might want to talk to Paolo about that.” Paolo was the researcher who lived alone in a cabin in Alaska and had yanked Bingham back into the news when he theorized that a German might have beaten the Yalie to Machu Picchu. “He’s been doing a lot of work on the subject. He thinks the Torreon might have been Pachacutec’s tomb. Paolo even thinks he might have figured out where Pachacutec is buried.”
It’s almost impossible to spend time at Machu Picchu without asking a question: was there an architectural visionary who can take credit for the city’s distinctive, harmonious look? The answer, probably, is yes—Pachacutec, the earth shaker who began the great expansion of the Inca empire. According to one Jesuit missionary’s recounting, Pachacutec handed off military responsibilities to one of his sons and turned his attention to building “magnificent temples and palaces and strong castles.” In addition to extending the roads of the Capac Ñan, overseeing the transformation of Cusco into a capital worthy of Tawantinsuyu (and the construction of the gold-plated Koricancha at the very center of that empire), Pachacutec apparently supervised the creation or renovation of most of the Incas’ greatest hits: Sacsahuaman, Ollantaytambo, and probably even Vitcos.9 We know that Machu Picchu belonged to Pachacutec because in the 1980s a notation was found in a Cusco archive, dated 1568, that registered a site called “Pichu” as belonging to his clan. Under Inca real estate law, old commanders in chief never died or faded away; because they were immortal, their mummified bodies retained all the benefits they had enjoyed while living, including their real estate holdings. If the Spaniards hadn’t arrived, Machu Picchu might still belong to Pachacutec.
The stonework at Machu Picchu is just the most conspicuous aspect of its brilliance. The citadel is also, in the words of the hydrologist Kenneth Wright, “a civil engineering marvel.” Someone had to have made the climb up to the ridge around 1450 A.D.—historians’ best guess—and decided that this remote saddle between two jagged peaks, with dizzying drops on two sides, could be cleared, leveled and made suitable for habitation and agriculture. Whoever planned Machu Picchu also had to construct a royal city that could withstand the sorts of Andean rainstorms and landslides that today are capable of wiping out train lines and entire villages. And let’s not forget about earthquakes; Machu Picchu sits atop not one but two fault lines.
Yet when Bingham arrived in 1911, after the tropics had reclaimed the site for the better part of four centuries, Machu Picchu wasn’t much worse for wear beneath all the bamboo and moss. Even the complex Inca water channels, with a little Roto-Rooter