Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  At both sites, the nice views were important for aesthetic and religious reasons. The Incas were pantheists who worshipped nature, and the sun god, Inti, was near the top of the divine pecking order. The Sapa Inca’s right to rule over his theocracy, of course, stemmed from his putative status as the son of the sun. The benevolent Pachamama was (and still is) revered as the goddess of fertility. The largest apus were believed to possess various powers and, in some cases, individual personalities. An Inca priest would have had no shortage of apus to choose from at Choquequirao.

  “It’s said that the Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, but I disagree,” John said as we looked up at the ruins. “It’s this place that they never found. The cloud forest here”—thick, misty, high-altitude foliage—“grows over in about three years and can get up to forty feet high.” Indeed, what had looked from afar like grassy, rolling hills fit for a picnic were actually steep slopes crammed with lush, jungly vegetation. Some archaeologists think Choquequirao may be larger than Machu Picchu, though we won’t be sure for a while, since only 20 to 30 percent of Choquequirao has been uncovered. “When this is all cleared, it’ll be one of the most spectacular archaeological sites in the world,” John said.

  As is, it’s pretty impressive. The masonry at Choquequirao is not as jaw-dropping as at some Inca sites; the softer stone available in the area required the use of clay as mortar, so the igloo-like precision of the buildings at Cusco and Machu Picchu was impossible to replicate. As an example of location scouting and landscape architecture, though, Choquequirao is a masterpiece. I spent a few hours hobbling up and down the site behind John. Twice, we made the long hike up to the giant hilltop usnu platform that marks the western edge of Choquequirao. Usnus were used to conduct religious rituals. They were also a special interest of John’s. We were followed to this one by a stray puppy that either had a bad paw or was doing a pretty good impression of my Chaplinesque walk.

  “Notice how the usnu bisects those two peaks,” John said as he paced back and forth, GPS in hand, taking measurements. “Right down the middle, that’s the winter solstice line.” This particular usnu was also famous as the spot where former first lady Eliane Karp-Toledo’s helicopter landed on her visits to the site, which was a pet project of hers. (Though her husband was out of office and she had moved on to teach at Stanford, Karp-Toledo was still a favorite subject of wild rumors in Peru. One I heard repeatedly at Choquequirao was that she and “the French” were plotting to build a five-star hotel there.) There were perhaps five other visitors at the site, and guests were outnumbered at least two-to-one by the eager young workers from the INC.

  John had something of a love-hate relationship with the INC. In Cusco, he had ranted about how they politicized everything, lost important artifacts and allowed developers to destroy Inca ruins in the name of progress. By stringing together John’s various complaints, I was able to deduce that he had offered to share his research with the INC on more than one occasion, and that these offers had not been appreciated—or worse, hadn’t been acknowledged. At Choquequirao, he griped about how the INC had clumsily reconstructed some buildings. He had a point. While Inca engineers were far ahead of the rest of the world in many respects, it is safe to assume that they did not install the poured-concrete lintels that now held up a few doorways. In the most recently rebuilt section of the site, the stonework bore a striking resemblance to my grandmother’s flagstone fireplace.

  Still, each of the dozen or so times I saw John interact with an INC employee out in the field, the same thing happened. The INC worker would approach asking to check our ticket stubs, and within five minutes was asking John questions and staring at his photos, which he kept in a small plastic album with Snoopy on the cover. Inside were pictures of some of the wonders John had seen during his years of rambling: pre-Inca settlements, lost trails, sacred rock formations. He’d stashed several boxes of his little blue notebooks, each crammed with firsthand observations, measurements and GPS readings, along with more than one hundred thousand photographs and four hundred hours of videotape in a storage room he rented outside of Cusco. (He kept the rest of his collection at his mum’s house in Australia.) John had read virtually everything that had been published on the Incas and had formulated his own theories, seasoned with years of firsthand observations. These he freely shared.

  “Don’t you ever worry that someone’s going to steal your ideas?” I asked him.

  “I only do it so that maybe they’ll do something to save these Inca sites.”

  Word about John tended to spread quickly. Which is why, on our second day at Choquequirao, we were visited in our cook tent by Julio, the assistant chief archaeologist at the site. “Would you care to join me on a visit to the llamas?” he asked.

  The llama is the unofficial mascot of Peru, a camel-like fuzzball with a reputation for spitting and kicking. For the Incas, llamas were a one-stop shop, a source of wool as well as pack animals that could easily negotiate the vertical Andean terrain. Their dung was burned as fuel, and they were sacrificed in religious ceremonies. By one estimate, 95 percent of the meat consumed at Machu Picchu came from llamas or their close relative, the alpaca. All of which explains why llamas are a common theme in Inca artifacts. But no homage can equal the one found at Choquequirao in 2005. On the far side of the mountain ridge on which the ruins sit are row after row of agricultural terraces, staircasing hundreds of feet down toward the Yanama River like the side of a Babylonian ziggurat. Bricked into their gray stone faces are huge decorative mosaics of more than two dozen white llamas, most taller than a man. No one knows if more are hiding; the terraces are nowhere close to being fully excavated. I’d always assumed that nothing worth discovering remained hidden on the face of the earth. The llamas changed my mind.

  “See how all the llamas face north,” Julio pointed out as we walked down the hundreds of stairs that led to the terraces and out to a viewing platform that appeared to have been constructed from very old popsicle sticks. “We think that signifies the Inca conquest of the Antisuyu, the jungle.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” John mumbled to me. John believed that Inca sites like Choquequirao and Machu Picchu weren’t so much separate entities as parts of a vast Inca network. To illustrate his point, he dragged me and my aching feet up to a viewing spot at the very top of the ruins, at the crest of the ridge. As I sat down on a rock to rest, I instantly recognized it as the place where Bingham had experienced an epiphany in 1909. The view seemed to take in all of creation—mountains and glaciers and rivers and deep green valleys branching off forever to the distant horizon. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  “That’s big, big country out there,” John said, pointing his bamboo walking stick like a field marshal. “Very few people have ever set foot on most of those peaks. But do you see how it’s all interconnected? This usnu links up with that trail. You’ve got apus there, and there, and there. Rivers below on both sides.” He seemed to be explaining why the Incas had chosen this impractical spot to build on, but all I saw was the postcard panorama.

  Bingham had been equally enchanted by what he saw from this spot. “The whole range of the White Mountains or the Great Smokies of Tennessee and North Carolina could have been placed on the floor of this great valley and not come much more that halfway to the top,” he wrote in Lost City of the Incas. Looking into the immensity before him, Bingham was reminded of the most famous lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Explorer”:Something hidden. Go and find it.

  Go and look behind the Ranges—

  Something lost behind the Ranges.

  Lost and waiting for you. Go!

  FOURTEEN

  Kicking and Screaming

  At Choquequirao, continued

  Usually, when we arrived at camp at day’s end, Justo greeted us in his ankle-length apron with a shout: “Los aventureros!” This time, he was pacing back and forth outside the cook tent with his hands behind his back.

  “Tenemos un poquito
problema,” he said. We had a little problem. “Julián was kicked by a mule.”

  Juvenal, who’d witnessed his share of such injuries over the years, said he’d had a look at Julián’s knee and didn’t like what he saw. John and I walked over to where Julián was sprawled out on the grass flat on his back. His face was the color of pea soup. He tried to roll his pant leg up for us to see what had happened, but his knee was swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and he couldn’t raise his ragged cuff over the hump. His lower leg was shiny and black from the patella down; he looked like he had frostbite of the shin.

  An hour later, John weighed our options over dinner. “That knee looks bad,” he said. “I’m worried that Julián will try to prove how tough he is by walking all the way to Huancacalle and end up with permanent damage.”

  A female voice rang out of the dark. “Tranquilo! I am doctor!”

  While John and I had gone off to have a glacial meltwater shower (the water so cold that every person who stepped under the spray screamed in shock—“GAHHH!”—and then moaned— “huhuhuhuhuh”—through chattering teeth), Juvenal had canvassed the campsite and found Ana, a doctor visiting from Barcelona. She and John held a brief conversation in which Ana insisted on speaking imperfect English and he insisted on responding in imperfect Spanish. She went off to have a look at Julián’s knee.

  Ten minutes later she returned. “I give the man the treatment. I think he will be having the recovery but he cannot walk on that leg, or he may be losing it. This is very, very important. I will return for the morning to see how goes the curing.”

  I couldn’t sleep much that night. When morning came, I dragged myself into the cook tent around four-thirty. Juvenal and Justo were already up (they kept country hours and usually rose before four), jabbering in Quechua. My Spanish wasn’t great, but after ten years of on-and-off Spanish lessons, I could more or less make myself understood. Quechua, however, is a guttural tongue, like Russian, and sounded completely alien to my ears. (How alien? The makers of Star Wars chose Quechua when they needed a language for Greedo, the character who speaks gobbledygook before Han Solo blasts him in the cantina.) Quechua relies heavily on a “K” sound that bears more resemblance to the sound of a cracking walnut than to any English or Spanish consonant, which is one reason why place names in the Andes have so many spellings. Choquequirao also goes by Chokekiraw and a half dozen other variants; Cusco (formerly Cuzco) may soon be known officially as Q’osqo.

  Justo placed a red plastic mug in front of me and handed me the can of Nescafé powder. “Buenos días, Señor Mark. You don’t look like you slept well. Of course nobody did, because of Mateo’s snoring.”

  “The avioneta,” Juvenal said, rubbing his temples. The little airplane. The four men slept together in the cook tent at night, on top of sheepskins.

  I was going to explain that the chickens wandering the campsite and the occasional bloodcurdling scream from the showers had been more of a problem, but before I could speak, a homeless dog stuck its nose into the tent and Justo changed the subject.

  “Did you know that they eat dogs in Lima, Señor Mark?” He leaned out of the tent to toss some fruit peelings to the beggar and, without pausing to inhale, continued, “I never learned to read. Never got around to it. There was a Swiss lady once, she promised to teach me, but she went away and never came back. How about granola for breakfast?”

  Shortly after sunrise, Doctor Ana came by to look at Julián’s leg. “I used a combination of the traditional and the modern therapies,” she said, unwrapping his bandages. A minty smell rose from his knee. She had enveloped his wounded leg in coca leaves and Flexall cream. The swelling had completely vanished. Julián stood up and limped over to the cook tent, where Justo poured him his usual bowl of morning coffee, which he took with twelve spoonfuls of sugar.

  “But what about all the black stuff below Julián’s knee?” I asked Justo. “Can he really walk on that?”

  “That black stripe? That’s a scar from when he was a kid. Probably played too close to a fire. I’ve got six kids of my own, all healthy, all working good jobs, thanks be to God.” He folded his hands, raised his eyes to heaven and picked up his knife. “Señor Mark, did you know that on the Inca Trail, Brazilian women just strip naked wherever they want?”

  FIFTEEN

  A Deal with the Devil

  New Haven, CT, and Cajamarca, Peru

  When Bingham returned to Yale, he had already decided that contrary to what anyone in Peru thought, Choquequirao was not the last refuge of the Incas. Even if they blew the place sky-high with dynamite, no one was ever going to find treasure on its grounds. The notion of the Incas escaping to a final refuge intrigued him, though. And the more hours he spent in the university library researching the final days of the Inca empire, the more convinced he became that their lost city really did exist—except that it was called Vilcabamba.

  As for where one might start searching for Vilcabamba, Bingham thought back to the vast land “behind the Ranges” that he’d seen while looking north from the top of Choquequirao. “The clouds would occasionally break away and give us tantalizing glimpses of snowcovered mountains,” he recalled. “There seemed to be an unknown region . . . which might contain great possibilities. Our guides could tell us nothing about it. Little was to be found in books.” Perhaps the mysterious Inca capital “was hidden there.”

  Before 1532, the thought that Inca royalty could be chased into hiding would have been unfathomable. In one of history’s little scheduling ironies, the earth-shaking Pachacutec’s grandson Huayna Capac took charge of the empire at almost the same moment Christopher Columbus landed at what is now the Bahamas aboard the Santa Maria. (Colonialism fun fact: after Columbus returned home to report his discovery, Pope Alexander VI briefly set aside fathering children with his various mistresses to issue a papal bull dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal—which is one reason that most South Americans speak Spanish, but Brazilians speak Portuguese.) By 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa was crossing the Panamanian isthmus in search of gold when he spotted whitecaps instead, thus becoming famous as the first European to see the Pacific Ocean. Six years later, Hernán Cortés landed on the east coast of what is now Mexico. Within two years he had subdued the Aztec empire and its king, Montezuma, making himself impossibly rich in the process.

  Francisco Pizarro had served as a senior officer on Balboa’s expedition, a role that would have allowed a less ambitious man to live comfortably ever after in Panama as a landowner. Pizarro was illiterate and a bastard (in the genealogical sense, though he was no dream date as far as the Incas were concerned, either), a man who burned to overcome his humble beginnings. Like his ruthless role models Balboa and Cortés, he was a product of the Iberian peninsula’s Extremadura province, a harsh land that produced some of the Age of Discovery’s toughest explorers. After a 1522 expedition returned from what is now the southern coast of Colombia, a land believed to be called Birú (or Virú or Pirú), with reports of great riches, Pizarro formed a syndicate with two other men to explore the area. First and foremost they were entrepreneurs. Their business plan was to find the land of Birú—soon to be altered to Perú—and suck out its riches, just as Balboa and Cortés had done in Mexico.

  A first expedition failed miserably, but two later voyages turned up hints of an advanced civilization. In 1528, Pizarro landed at Tumbez in the northernmost part of Peru. He was greeted warmly at this impressive settlement by an Inca magistrate, who was as fascinated by the odd visitors’ chickens, pigs and shiny armor as the Spaniard was taken by the exquisite pottery, woven goods, and gold and silver objects that the Incas possessed. Pizarro returned to Spain and received permission to conquer this promising new land in the name of the crown.

  Pizarro sailed into Tumbez again in 1532. The city that he had visited a few years prior now lay in ruins. The cause of the destruction was a civil war that had broken out when the reigning Inca, Pachacutec’s grandson Huayna Capac, had died unexpectedly of a dis
ease, possibly smallpox, introduced to the New World by early Spanish explorers, that had swept through the kingdom. His son Huascar, who had a reputation as a playboy, assumed the title of Inca in Cusco. The Incas did not have a tradition of easy successions, however; a new emperor’s right to rule was often challenged by one or more of his brothers. In this instance the fierce Atahualpa, who led the empire’s strongest armies from a base in modern-day Ecuador, declared war on his half brother Huascar. A brutal campaign dragged on for a few years, decimating the empire and culminating in the capture of Huascar just days before Pizarro’s group of 168 Spaniards arrived at the Inca city of Cajamarca. There, Atahualpa was camped with his battle-hardened army of at least forty thousand soldiers.

  Pizarro had learned from the capture of Montezuma in Mexico that seizing the emperor would put him in a very advantageous bargaining position. To the Incas, Atahualpa was a god, the divine son of the sun. Though the Spaniards were grossly outnumbered, Pizarro did have a huge technological edge. His men had brought horses (which the Incas had never seen), harquebuses (an early form of long-barreled firearm more useful for noisy intimidation than sharpshooting) and, most importantly, swords forged from Toledo steel. The most feared army on the South American continent fought primarily with slingshots and clubs, literally using sticks and stones to break foes’ bones.