Machu-Picchu: Stone Enigma
of the Americas¹

Crowning a hill of steep and rugged slopes, 2,800 meters above sea level and 400 above the fast-flowing River Urubamba that bathes three sides of this peak, is the ancient city in stone that, by extension, has been given the name of the place that is its bastion: Machu-Picchu.

Is this its original name? No. In Quechua, Machu-Picchu means ““Old Mountain,” as opposed to Huaina-Picchu, the rocky needle rising just a few meters from the settlement, which means Young Mountain. They are simply physical descriptions of the topographical features of the place. What would its real name be then? Let us diverge for a moment and travel back to the past.

The 16th century of our age was a tragic time for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The bearded invader flooded the continent and the great indigenous empires were reduced to rubble. In the center of South America, the internecine struggle for power between the two candidates to inherit the crown of the deceased Huaina Capac, Atahualpa and Huascar, made the business of destroying the greatest empire of the continent even easier.

In order to contain the human mass approaching perilously close to Cuzco, one of Huascar’s nephews, the youthful Manco II, was placed on the throne by Spain. This maneuver had an unexpected consequence: although the indigenous people now had a visible head, bestowed with all the formalities of Inca law still possible under the Spanish yoke, the monarch was not as easy to control as the Spaniards wished. He disappeared one night with his leading chiefs, bearing with him the great disc of gold, symbol of the sun, and from that day onward, there was no peace in the old capital of the empire.

There was no security, moving from one place to another was not safe. Armed bands used the ancient, impressive and now-destroyed Sacsahuamán as their base, the fortress guarding Cuzco. They roamed the territory and even moved in on the city.

It was 1536.

This large-scale revolt failed, the siege of Cuzco had to be abandoned, and another major battle at Ollantaitambo, the walled city on the banks of the River Urubamba, was lost by the troops of the indigenous monarch. The threat of the guerrilla war, which had been a considerable thorn in the side of Spanish might, was definitively reduced. One day, in a drunken outburst, one of the conquistador soldiers, a deserter who had been brought to the indigenous court along with six of his companions, killed the Inca sovereign. He and his unfortunate compatriots were put to a horrible death by the indigenous subjects, who displayed their severed heads on their spears as both punishment and challenge. The sovereign’s three sons, Sairy Túpac, Tito Cusi and Túpac Amaru, reigned consecutively and died while in power. With the third, however, something more than a monarch passed into death: it was the final demise of the Inca empire.

The forceful and inflexible viceroy, Francisco Toledo, took this last sovereign as his prisoner and had him executed in Cuzco’s parade ground in 1572. The Inca king, whose life—secluded in the temple of the sun virgins, with a brief parenthesis as sovereign— ended so tragically, addressed his people in his final hour. His potent speech roused them from their former torpor and meant that his name would be taken up again by the precursor of the independence of the Americas: José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Túpac Amaru II.

The danger to the representatives of the Spanish crown had been extinguished and nobody thought to seek out the old operational base of the Incas, the well-concealed city of Vilcapampa, whose last sovereign had left before being taken prisoner. Thus began a period of three centuries in which total silence reigned over the city. When an Italian man of science, Antonio Raimondi, devoted 19 years of his life to traveling all over the country in the second half of the 19th century, Peru was a land still largely untouched by the European. Although it is true Raimondi was not a professional archaeologist, his profound erudition and scientific skills gave an enormous impetus to the study of the country’s Inca past. Generations of Peruvian students now turned their eyes to the heart of a country they did not know, guided by the monumental work El Perú, while scientists from all over the world once again recovered their enthusiasm for investigating the history of a once great people.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a US historian, Professor Bingham, who had come to Peru to study the route taken by [Simón] Bolívar, was captivated by the extraordinary beauty of the regions he visited and tempted by the provocative questions raised by Inca culture. Professor Bingham, satisfying both the historian and the adventurer within him, set out in search of the lost city, the operational base of the insurgent monarchs.

Bingham knew, from the chronicles of Father Calancha and others, that the Incas had a political and military capital they named Vitcos, and a more distant sanctuary called Vilcapampa, the city where no white person had ever set foot. Armed with this information, he set out on his search.

Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the region will not be unaware of the magnitude of the task he had set himself. In mountainous terrain, covered with dense, subtropical forest, crisscrossed by rivers that were more like highly dangerous torrents, not knowing the psychology or even the language of its inhabitants, Bingham set off with three powerful weapons: an indomitable zest for adventure, keen intuition and a healthy fistful of dollars.

Patiently, paying a price in gold for each secret or piece of information he could extract, he penetrated the heartland of the extinct civilization. One day in 1911, after years of arduous labor, routinely following an Indian who was selling an unusual set of stones, Bingham, unaccompanied by any other white man, found himself marveling alone at the impressive ruins that, surrounded and almost submerged in undergrowth, were there to welcome him.

There is a sad side to this story. The undergrowth was cleared from the ruins, which were then studied and perfectly described… and totally stripped of whatever objects that were uncovered. Researchers triumphantly bore off to their country more than 200 crates of archaeological treasures that were both invaluable and, let us be clear about this, worth a great deal of money. Bingham is, objectively speaking, not specifically guilty of this and neither are the citizens of North America guilty in general. Nor can anyone blame a government without the resources to support an expedition on a scale comparable to that of the discovery of Machu-Picchu. Is no one guilty then? Let us just accept the fact that the answer to the question of where one might study or admire the treasures of the indigenous city is obvious: in the museums of North America.

Machu-Picchu was not just any old discovery for Bingham. It was the triumphant crowning of an overgrown child’s limpid dreams—like the dreams of almost every amateur in this area of science. A long series of triumphs and failures culminated there, and the city of gray stone encompassed all his fantasies and his visions, propelling him into comparison and conjecture that was at times far removed from careful and empirical demonstration. The years of exploration and those that followed his success made an erudite archaeologist of the formerly itinerant historian; many of his assertions, backed by the formidable experience acquired in his travels, were taken as gospel truth in scientific circles.

In Bingham’s view, Machu-Picchu was the ancient abode of the Quechua people and the center from which they expanded before founding Cuzco. He delved into Inca mythology and identified three windows of a ruined temple as those from which the Ayllus brothers, characters in Inca mythology, had emerged. He found conclusive similarities between a circular tower in the newly revealed city and the Cuzco sun temple. He identified skeletons that had been found in the ruins, almost all of them female, as being those of the sun virgins. Finally, after carefully analyzing all the possibilities, he came to the following conclusion: The city he had discovered had been named Vilcapampa more than three centuries earlier. This, he said, had been the sanctuary of the rebel monarchs, and had previously served as a refuge for the vanquished followers of the Inca leader Pachacuti (whose body lay in the city) from the time of their defeat by Chincha troops until the resurgence of the empire. But the reason this city had in both cases been the refuge of vanquished warriors was because this was Tampu-Toco, sacred place and initial nucleus, located here and not at Pacaru-Tampu, near Cuzco, as Indian notables told the historian Sarmiento de Gamboa, who interrogated them on the orders of Viceroy Toledo.

Modern researchers have disagreed on many points with the archaeologist from North America, but they have nothing conclusive to say about the significance of Machu-Picchu.

After several hours the train, an asthmatic thing, almost a toy, that runs first along a small river to continue later along the banks of the Urubamba, passing the stately ruins of Ollantaitambo, eventually comes to the bridge crossing the river. A winding track of some eight kilometers climbs 400 meters above the torrent, bringing us to the hotel in the ruins, which is run by a Señor Soto. He is a man of extraordinary knowledge in Inca matters, and a good singer, who, in the delicious tropical evenings, contributes to enhancing the suggestive charms of the ruined city.

Machu-Picchu is constructed on the top of a mountain, covering an area of some two kilometers in perimeter. It is basically divided into three sections: that of the two temples, another for the main residences and an area for the common people.

In the section reserved for religious activities are the ruins of a magnificent temple made of great blocks of white granite, with the three windows that gave rise to Bingham’s mythological speculations. Adorning a series of beautifully constructed buildings is the Intiwatana, where the sun is moored: a stone finger some 60 centimeters high, the basis of indigenous rites and one of few such pieces still standing since the Spaniards were careful to destroy this symbol upon conquering any Inca fortress.

The buildings that housed the nobility show examples of extraordinary artistic value, for example the circular tower I have already mentioned, the sequence of bridges and canals cut into the stone and the many residences that are notable for the execution of their stonemasonry.

In the dwellings presumably occupied by the plebeians, one notes a great difference in the rough finish of the rock. They are separated from the religious part of the complex by a small square, or flat area, where the main water reservoirs—now dried up—were located, this supposedly being one of the main reasons for abandoning the place as a permanent residence.

Machu-Picchu is a city of steps with almost all of its constructions on different levels, united by stairways, some of exquisitely carved rock, and others of stones aligned without much aesthetic zeal. But all of them, like the city as a whole, were capable of standing up to the rigors of the weather, and lost only their roofs made of tree trunks and straw, unable to resist the assault of the elements.

Dietary needs were satisfied by vegetables planted in the terraces that are still perfectly conserved.

It was very easy to defend, surrounded on two sides by almost vertical slopes, a third passable only along readily defendable tracks, while the fourth faces Huaina-Picchu. This peak towers some 200 meters over its brother. It is difficult to climb, and would be almost impossible for the tourist, were it not for the remains of the Inca paving enabling one to edge to its peak along sheer precipices. The place seems to have been more for observation than anything else, since there are no major constructions. The Urubamba River encircles the two peaks almost completely, so they are almost impossible for attacking forces to conquer.

I have already noted that the archaeological meaning of Machu Picchu is disputed, but the origin of the city is not the vital thing and, in any case, it is best to leave the debate to specialists.

Most important and irrefutable is that here we have found the pure expression of the most powerful indigenous civilization in the Americas—still untainted by contact with conquering armies and replete with immensely evocative treasures between its walls that have deteriorated from the tedium of having no life among them. The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins aimlessly; Yankee tourists, bound by their practical worldview, might place those members of the disintegrating tribes they encounter in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance that separates them, because the subtle difference can only be grasped by the semi-indigenous spirit of the Latin American.

Let us agree, for the moment, to give the city two possible meanings: one for the fighter, pursuing what is today described as a chimera, with an arm reaching toward the future and a stone voice crying out to be heard all over the continent: “Citizens of Indo-America, reconquer the past!” And for others, those who with a desire to be “far from the madding crowd,” there are some appropriate words jotted down by a British subject in the hotel visitors’ book, conveying all the bitterness of imperial yearning: “I am lucky to find a place without Coca-Cola propaganda.”2

Published in the weekly supplement to Siete (Panama), December 12, 1953.

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1. This article was written after Ernesto revisited the historic Inca site of Machu-Picchu in 1953.

2. Written in English in the original.