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Karp-Toledo pinched the hem and pulled it down so I could get a good look. It wasn’t El Che. It was a picture of an ancient Peruvian warrior framed by the words INCA POWER. “Do you know who that is?” she asked, smiling.

“Pachacutec?”

She shook her head no. “It’s him,” she said, and pointed at her husband, who was still huddled with his associates. Inca. Power. The next day I would read that he was running again for president.

Karp-Toledo insisted that I take a muffin for the road.

THIRTY-NINE

Action Hero

Within the Pages of National Geographic

Bingham sailed again into New York Harbor almost a year to the day after his triumphant return in 1911. This time, in lieu of swashbuckling tales of lost cities and conquered mountain peaks, he came bearing excuses, grudges and thirteen-year-old Juan Leguia, the son of the former president, whose toxically unpopular father was shipping him off to military school in Virginia. According to the version of events that Bingham chose to tell reporters, Yale’s concession had been all but forced upon him by the elder Leguia. The sudden opposition to his expedition removing artifacts had been stoked by “men who were in the business of exporting and buying archaeological things.” The officials who handed down the decree allowing him to depart with his boxes had been “as insulting to us as they possibly could be.” The whole affair had left Bingham bitter. “I can now say freely that we don’t propose to go to Peru in the near future,” he said.

Down in Washington, D.C., Gilbert Grosvenor evidently saw things a little differently. After viewing Bingham’s photographs from Machu Picchu, the editor decided immediately that National Geographic would devote an entire issue to the story, the first time in the magazine’s history that it would do so. Grosvenor also arranged the seating chart for the society’s annual dinner, held in January 1913, so that Bingham dined at the head table. There he was joined by the evening’s main attractions: toastmaster and North Pole hero Robert E. Peary, who told the assembled attendees that Bingham’s discoveries had “astounded the scientists of the world,” and the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, recipient of the year’s Explorers Gold Medal for winning the race to the South Pole. (The world was still a few weeks from hearing the news that the frozen body of Amundsen’s rival Captain Scott had been discovered.11) Dressed formally in white tie and tails, Bingham delivered a brief speech that focused on the triumphs of 1911, not the disappointments of 1912. “Buried in the jungle, we found a city called Machu Picchu,” he told the evening’s six hundred distinguished guests. “That is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering.”

“I do not think even you realize the sensation that the article will make,” Grosvenor wrote to Bingham shortly before the Machu Picchu issue appeared that spring. (Readers’ expectations may not have been especially high. The lead story from the previous edition had been “Oysters: The World’s Most Valuable Water Crop,” by Hugh M. Smith, who’d previously penned “Making the Fur Seal Abundant” and “Brittany, the Land of the Sardine.”) Anyone picking up the April 1913 National Geographic edition would have seen immediately that it was something special. The entire magazine consisted of one long article, catchily titled “In the Wonderland of Peru.” A brief introductory editor’s note set the tone: “What an extraordinary people the builders of Machu Picchu must have been to have constructed, without steel implements, and using only stone hammers and wedges, the wonderful city of refuge on the mountain top.” The story and its accompanying photographs—including a panoramic view of the entire site, printed as a foldout—conveyed a romantic tale of exploration and discovery that would endure for almost a century: an intrepid young American professor, searching for the capital of a vanished kingdom, discovers an immense city in the clouds, lost to the jungle for untold centuries.

As always, Bingham’s storytelling tended toward