Turn Right at Machu Picchu Read online

  Thanks to his chasqui messengers, Atahualpa had known the Spaniards were approaching almost from the moment they landed on his coast. Preoccupied with having finally triumphed over his brother, the Inca had failed to recognize the bearded strangers as a serious threat. He’d already made plans for his guests, he said, to “take and breed their horses” and “sacrifice some of the Spaniards to the sun and castrate others for service in his household and in guarding his women.”

  Seated in the golden litter that carried him everywhere, Atahualpa arrived in the town square at Cajamarca for a meeting with Pizarro. Atahualpa’s thousands of attendants were unarmed. The Spaniards fired four cannons and launched a surprise attack. In the violence that followed, Pizarro pulled Atahualpa from his gilded chair and took him hostage. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Incas were slaughtered like sheep, Atahualpa’s nephew later said. The Spaniards suffered no losses.

  Atahualpa quickly figured out what the Spaniards wanted and made Pizarro one of the most extraordinary offers in history. In return for his freedom, the Inca told his captor, he would fill a twenty-two-byseventeen-foot room with treasure three times to a height of more than eight feet—once with gold and twice again with silver. When word of Atahualpa’s deal with Pizarro went out to his subjects, precious metals poured in from all over the kingdom. The capital of Cusco and the sacred Koricancha were stripped of their gold ornamentation. More than six tons of twenty-two-and-a-half-carat gold were melted down over the following months. Double that amount of silver was shipped out of Peru during that time.

  To show his thanks, Pizarro reneged on his promise and ordered Atahualpa garroted in the Cajamarca town square. When the new ruler of Peru rode his horse into the royal city of Cusco for the first time, he took for himself the finest palace. It’s now a restaurant loathed by John Leivers because it sells five-dollar bowls of chicken soup.

  Bingham wasn’t especially interested in the story of Pizarro and Atahualpa, which had been told many times before, most famously in William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru. Much more interesting to the explorer was the puppet ruler whom Pizarro installed to help keep peace with the natives.

  When Pizarro arrived in Peru, Manco Inca Yupanqui was just shy of twenty years old, the kid brother of Atahualpa and Huascar. (One of the many job benefits of being Sapa Inca was the right to take as many wives, and father as many children, as one wished.) Today, perhaps because Machu Picchu is so popular among the spiritually inclined, the Incas are sometimes portrayed as a peaceful race who graciously invited neighboring tribes to join their thriving territorial conglomerate. In reality, they could be as brutal as the conquistadors. Atahualpa in particular was not someone who’d make a good long-term houseguest. He often drank from a ceremonial cup crafted from the skull of a former enemy, and he ordered his army to find and slaughter the male members of his family who had opposed him in the civil war. Atahualpa’s men had been searching for Manco. Had he been found, he surely would have been killed in some unpleasant fashion.

  Francisco Pizarro named Manco the new Sapa Inca in 1533. The traditional boozy monthlong coronation ceremony in Cusco followed, at which the mummies of previous emperors were paraded around the square. Deceased Sapa Incas were not only treated as immortals; their mummies continued to live in their palaces with all of their worldly goods and a large staff of servants and advisors, who channeled the wishes of the former emperors when their advice was sought. So much chicha was guzzled during Manco’s investiture, one witness recorded, that the drains of the city “ran with urine throughout the day . . . as abundantly as if they were flowing springs.” Imagine a presidential inauguration held during Mardi Gras, at which the taxidermied remains of Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower were incorporated into float themes, and you’ll get some idea of the horrified reaction the Spaniards had to this spectacle.

  The good times rolled only briefly for Manco. The Spaniards who occupied Cusco—including Francisco Pizarro’s three younger brothers—treated his home like an ATM and demanded continuously that he bring them more treasure. The most hotheaded of the Pizarros, Gonzalo, seized Manco’s favorite wife, who also happened to be his half sister. (Like bigamy, incest wasn’t frowned upon by the Incas.) Spies overheard Manco giving a fiery speech at a secret meeting of Inca elders, and when he was caught trying to leave Cusco, he was chained around the neck and feet, struck repeatedly in the face and used as a urinal by his captors. Shortly thereafter, Manco convinced another Pizarro brother that if the Spaniard would just let him loose for a few days, he would bring back a life-sized gold statue of his father as a token of his gratitude. Instead, Manco was about to take command of a massive native army that had quietly assembled in the hills surrounding the city.

  The following months would see some of the most extraordinary battles in South American history. Manco’s army set Cusco afire, driving the occupying Spanish forces into just two buildings, which miraculously refused to burn. The Incas took control of Sacsahuaman, but were driven out by a daring Spanish attack. Bingham dispensed with all of this in his best-known book, Lost City of the Incas, in a single sentence, catapulting the story forward to the point where it attracted his interest: “In 1536, after several bloody encounters, Manco’s troops were routed and fled with him from the vicinity of Cusco down into the Urubamba Valley.” The Urubamba Valley was exactly where Bingham was headed next.

  SIXTEEN

  Distress Signals

  Somewhere in the Andes

  “We’ve got quite a walk today,” John told me at breakfast. To limber up we’d ascend about fifteen hundred feet just to cross the ridge on which Choquequirao sits, then plunge five thousand feet to the Yanama River for lunch, then up another four thousand feet to our campsite at the farm of a man named Valentin. It was like walking to the top of the Empire State Building and back four times in one day. The big payoff for our day’s effort was that we’d get to sleep in a barnyard. I had always assumed, based on Saturday morning cartoons, that roosters crowed at sunrise. I had learned from the birds strutting around the campsites at Octavio’s farm and Choquequirao that roosters were perfectly happy to belt one out at midnight, 3 A.M.—whenever the hell they felt like it. To make matters worse, Justo informed us, we would have to pass a man-eating devil goat that guarded the entrance to Valentin’s farm like a ruminant Cerberus.

  “He’s got giant horns like Satan!” Justo explained as he poured a quarter inch of corn oil into his skillet to scramble four eggs. “He’ll eat us alive! He’s already killed three men!”

  “Who told you all this?” John asked.

  “Don Juvenal! He’s seen it with his own eyes!”

  “I thought so,” John said to me, stirring his tea. “For whatever reason, Juvenal doesn’t want to camp at Valentin’s house. Must be bad blood between them. Of course it’d be far too easy to just come out and say it.”

  Outside the tent, Juvenal and Mateo were securing our bags to the mules with rawhide nets that looked like they’d been left over from one of Bingham’s expeditions. If Juvenal was the general, Mateo was his chief of staff. Juvenal checked and double-checked everything like an airplane mechanic, then wordlessly signaled to Mateo to go over everything one more time. Bearing loads is serious business in the Andes. According to the fascinating book The Languages of the Andes, Quechua includes a vast number of words to denote the act “to carry.” Distinct verbs have evolved to express carrying in the arms, holding in the lap, carrying with both hands, carrying on the back, holding in the mouth, carrying in a skirt, carrying among four people and so on. When he finished his inspection, Mateo adjusted his wool cap, smacked the lead mule on the haunches with a stick and yelled, “Vamanos!”

  Julián’s knee seemed to have almost completely healed. He was the quietest of the group, possibly because he was obviously the poorest. His clothes were dirty and torn, and his sandaled feet were coated in a thick layer of grime. Anytime I tried talk to him, he winced and mumbled, “bien, bien,” and hurried aw
ay. Today, Justo had told me, Julián’s teeth were bothering him, so he employed an old Andean folk remedy of gargling with his own urine.

  “Studies have shown that it actually works,” John said.

  He wasn’t joking. John wasn’t much for irony, I’d learned. Nor did he have more than the most tangential grasp of popular culture. Combined with my lack of knowledge about archaeology, rugby and mountaineering techniques, this rather limited our topics of conversation on the trail. At times, even the different dialects of American English and Australian English caused confusion. An hour or so out of camp, John paused and unslung his daypack.

  “I’m going to take a wee break here,” he said. I plopped down next to him and cracked open a bottle of water, delighted that John was already feeling tired, too.

  “Do you mind if I wee in privacy?” he said, reaching for his fly.

  Desperate for something to talk about during our twelve or more hours spent each day in each other’s company—including three face-to-face meals—I flipped through my mental Rolodex for topics before hitting on the canon of adventure literature. But even here we seemed to speak two different languages. I’d read stacks of entertaining manversus-wild tales for my work; John read them like instruction manuals. My favorites were classics like Wind, Sand and Stars, a dreamy existential memoir of piloting an open-cockpit plane over deserts and mountains, written by the author of The Little Prince. John was partial to books such as The Long Walk, in which an escapee from a Soviet prison camp wanders from Siberia to India, scavenging food and facing down death as he crosses the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas.

  “When I was driving across Africa, I was always calculating—time, water, diesel, daylight,” he told me at one snack break. “I knew that if something went wrong I had to fix it or I’d die. You always have to be ready for a survival situation. Always have your headlamp. Your poncho for shelter. A little bit of food and water.”

  Sometimes, to keep the conversational ball rolling, I slipped into reporter mode and asked rhetorical follow-up questions. John tended to stop, plant his bamboo pole, turn to look at me and then pause for about fifteen seconds, as if my query was so inane that he couldn’t walk and formulate a response to it at the same time. Eventually, he’d say, “Actually . . . no.” Then he’d wait a few more uncomfortable seconds before answering.

  “If you ran out of food, couldn’t you survive out here on edible plants?” I asked. I was fairly certain that I’d read something about this in one of the many “How to Survive Anything” stories I’d read. One thousand one, one thousand two . . .

  “Actually . . . no. Survival is a matter of self-discipline, Mark. There was a girl in a plane crash a few years ago, in the Amazon. She had lived in the jungle with her family, so she knew—you always follow the water and you never eat anything. And if you have to eat something, put a little on your arm and wait a couple hours for a reaction. If nothing happens, put some on your lips. Only then can you try to eat a tiny bit.”

  “What about drinking water?”

  “I learned a little survival trick when I was mountain climbing with some Russians. If you have no clean water, take some dirty water and filter out all the bits with one of your socks. Leave the bottle out in the sun for six hours, and the UV rays will kill all the bugs. I’ve used that one a couple of times.”

  Everywhere we walked in the mountains of Peru, we were surrounded by cold, running water—rivers and streams and springs and cascades. Almost none of it was safe to drink, thanks to the habit of livestock at all altitudes to use these picturesque sources as latrines. As we made the final climb to Valentin’s farm, I could feel some serious intestinal discomfort building, presumably a case of Atahualpa’s revenge. Every traveler to Cusco is warned not to drink the tap water or eat uncooked vegetables, and John, who had suffered from epic stomach troubles due to his travels, had even stricter regulations. “Always make sure you wash after shaking hands with Mateo,” he had told me sternly.

  When the sun goes down in the Andes, the temperature plummets. Afternoon was just sliding into evening when we arrived, soaked with sweat, at Valentin’s farm in the clouds. Valentin’s wife and daughter invited John and me to dry off inside their toasty home. “Mi papá no está,” the daughter explained—Valentin was away, working. The daughter served us each a gigantic tin mug of fresh-brewed café con canchitas, strong, sweet black coffee with roasted corn kernels floating on top. The house was built with mud-brick adobe and was a marvel of compactness and efficiency. It had two rooms, each about eight by ten. There were niches in the walls for storage, like those the Incas built into their walls to display idols.

  “There’s where you store your food,” John said, pointing over our heads. Removable bamboo ceiling panels allowed access to the space beneath the straw roof, which had been waterproofed by grease from the cooking fire. Guinea pigs—cuys—scurried about underfoot, eating any scraps that fell to the ground. (“Had I not been very hungry, I might never have known how delicious a roast guinea pig can be,” Bingham wrote of his introduction to this Andean delicacy. “The meat is not unlike squab.”) A cat curled up next to the wood fire, in what was evidently its regular spot. We sat in the warmth of the orange glow, smiling at Valentin’s wife, who spoke only Quechua. She sat at the doorway with stick in hand, swatting at chickens that tried to enter every couple of minutes.

  On our way back out into the chilly night, we crossed paths with the killer devil goat, who was about the size of a Labrador. Juvenal was guilty of exaggerating, not lying. “Give him a wide berth,” Valentin’s daughter explained. “He’s a little aggressive around strangers.”

  The coffee, unfortunately, had its usual peristaltic effects, and the contents of my abdomen churned like an industrial mixer from the moment I lay down. After staring at the ceiling of my tent for hours, I went out around midnight, opened the wooden gate that I had been told led to the designated zone for doing one’s business, and tiptoed along a mountainside trail in the dark. My headlamp revealed no discernible hole in the ground, so I finally dropped my pants and unburdened myself in what seemed to be an inconspicuous nook in the rock face. Directly in front of me was a one-thousand-foot drop. Miles off in the distance, the lights of the nearest town with electric power twinkled proudly like fireflies beneath the cloudless sky. It was a lovely view, and I was to appreciate it several times before dawn.

  At daybreak, it became obvious that I had been squatting not in some hidden crevice, but in the exact middle of the only trail that led north out of the farm—the direction in which we were departing after breakfast. Had I employed a compass and sextant, I doubt I could have calculated a more conspicuous spot. Small fistfuls of blindingly white toilet paper that I had tossed, imagining them drifting into the chasm, were arranged festively in the branches of a bush.

  Over breakfast tea—it seemed a good day to pass on the coffee—I told John about my trouble. He was immediately interested. He thought my problem was probably giardia that I’d picked up in Cusco. John had once suffered from a super strain of the parasite, and the episode appeared to have scarred him. “It’s highly contagious. Have your family tested when you get home.” He pulled out the medical kit and began removing various packets of pills.

  It was nice to have something in common.

  When we said good-bye at the wooden gate and settled the bill for camping, I slipped Valentin’s daughter an extra couple dollars and thanked her profusely for her warm hospitality. When she turned her back, I ran away.

  SEVENTEEN

  No Small Plans

  New Haven

  The Mitchells built a thirty-room Mediterranean-style mansion for their daughter on New Haven’s tony Prospect Street. Annie Mitchell, furious with what she saw as Hiram’s mismanagement of Alfreda’s money—he’d lost a bundle investing in the stock market—kept title to the house and insisted on approving its final plans. Her son-in-law was able to set aside a study as his sanctuary. The walls were lined with bookshelves, over which h
ung roll-up maps of South America. A portrait of Alfreda gazed down from above the fireplace, flanked by a Peruvian pot and a Gilbertese idol. This private lair contained a hidden bathroom, entered through a hinged bookcase, and was accessed via a ladderlike staircase that led from Hiram’s bedroom.

  When the 1910–11 edition of Who’s Who came out, Hiram Bingham’s name was listed for the first time. He chose to be identified as “Bingham, Hiram: Explorer.”

  Bingham’s elevated interest in adventure was no accident. The years preceding World War I have often been described as the Heroic Age of Exploration, and for young men seeking glory at the ends of the earth, it was a wonderful time to be plying one’s trade. The seaman Joshua Slocum completed the first one-man circumnavigation of the globe in 1898, and earned fame and fortune through his book Sailing Alone Around the World. A few years later the Norwegian Roald Amundsen made the first crossing of the frozen Northwest Passage, successfully navigating the arctic waters linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a sea route that mariners had sought since the fifteenth century. Mountaineers were taking aim at the world’s highest summits. In the first years of the new century, English teams that included the future occultist (and Led Zeppelin muse) Aleister Crowley reached unprecedented heights on the Himalayan peaks K2 and Kanchenjunga, the second and third tallest in the world. (Mount Everest would not be seriously attempted until the 1920s, because Nepal and Tibet refused access to foreign climbers.) Dr. Frederick Cook became a household name in 1906 after he reported having climbed Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the highest spot in the United States, though the claim was later disproved.

  Most celebrated of all were the polar explorers. Dr. Cook competed against naval officer Robert Peary to plant the first flag at the North Pole. Within a week of Peary’s sending the cable trumpeting his triumph in April 1909, the dashing (and doomed) Robert Falcon Scott announced a new expedition to grab the South Pole for Britain.