Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [85]
After Bingham followed his boy guide through an old quarry to the Sacred Plaza, the explorer saw the temples that astonished him. The three-sided Principal Temple is the most monolithic structure at Machu Picchu. Constructed of gigantic precision-cut stones, it seems to have been built by an entirely different race of people from those who assembled the Torreon. The blocks are so heavy that one corner of the building, behind the massive stone altar, is slowly sinking into the ground. Just a few steps beyond its open side, terraces staircase steeply down the mountainside for a couple hundred feet before dropping off into an abyss. The power plant was down there somewhere, invisible. In The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara wrote about playing a freewheeling game of soccer when he arrived for a life-changing visit to Machu Picchu. It had sounded romantic when I read about it in my early twenties. As I looked over the edge, it seemed suicidal.
“Look at how the Incas built this up to the last possible inch, taking what appears to be unusable ground and making it usable,” John said, peering down at the terraces. “A place like Angkor Wat is fantastic,” he said, referring to the enormous twelfth-century temple complex in Cambodia. “But they didn’t have the problems there that the Incas did here. This place is a statement: look at how we can tame nature.”
We turned around and walked over to the Temple of the Three Windows. The view hadn’t changed much from the one that had intoxicated Bingham. A low ceiling of clouds hovered around the tops of the mountains straight ahead. John believed the spare stonework had once been dressed up in textiles and precious metals. “It’s fantastic now, but imagine this temple covered with gold and silver plate, and colored cloths,” John said. “Old Father Calancha would have shit himself.”
Noon to three are the busiest hours at Machu Picchu, rush hour for day trippers from Cusco. John led me off to some of the out-of-the-way parts of the complex. “Look at that,” he said, as we sat in the shade beneath a spot that Bingham named the Funerary Rock. “There’s a trail going off into the bush. It has to lead somewhere, right? Makes you wonder how much there is of this place that we don’t know yet.”
We munched on quinoa energy bars and watched the parade pass below: American retirees in matching T-shirts; Spanish-speaking men in sport coats and ascots; Japanese tourists proceeding silently, single file, each one carrying a Prada bag; five groovy women dressed like the Rolling Stone fact-checking department circa Frampton Comes Alive!, walking in a tight group and stopping frequently to stuff herbs into cracks between the stones as they whispered incantations. A collegeage couple, with nervous smiles and dilated pupils, tried to look in all directions at once. Four male trekkers arrived from the Inca Trail, speaking German. One of them was wearing a candy-striped cycling cap, red vinyl sleeveless vest unzipped to the navel and blue satin short shorts. Father Calancha would have shit himself.
Over the next couple of hours we made the long walk out to the Sun Gate, the entry point from the Inca Trail, then made another loop around the full site, stopping occasionally at a particularly beautiful building, like the Temple of the Condor. A light rain began to fall, which hastened the daily three o’clock exodus by an hour. Tour groups wearing cheap plastic ponchos gravitated toward the exit like jellyfish attacking a swimmer. John and I returned to the now-empty Sacred Plaza and climbed a few flights of stone steps to the highest point in the main site of Machu Picchu, stopping halfway, while a woman with an unmistakable Long Island accent called