Turn Right at Machu Picchu

Like Bingham, the rebel king Manco Inca had thought long and hard about the location of Vitcos. In the middle of 1537, he realized that with Spanish reinforcements constantly pouring into the former Inca empire, he couldn’t hold out for long at the fortress of Ollantaytambo. He called his chiefs together and delivered a rousing thank-you speech, concluding with what sounded like the imperial equivalent of resigning to spend more time with one’s family. Manco informed his audience that he would be departing Ollantaytambo for an extended visit to the Antis, a jungle tribe that had been conquered by his great-grandfather, Pachacutec. The Antis lived in the Antisuyu, the easternmost of the four quarters of Tawantinsuyu. The land of the Antis was where the mountains collided with the Amazon jungle—the Spaniards are believed to have begun using the name Andes based on the name of the tribe.

On its well-fortified mountaintop, Vitcos was a good choice for a new headquarters. The move must have been planned as a permanent one. Manco brought along the mummies of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was joined by his queen and favorite wife, Cura Ocllo, who had escaped from her captivity in Cusco. As they withdrew, Inca soldiers attempted to destroy the trails behind them, as if to slam the door on any Spaniards who came sniffing around. Manco’s respite was a short one, however. Just weeks after the Inca left Ollantaytambo, a Spaniard named Rodrigo Orgoñez led a team of three hundred men toward the Antisuyu. The army stampeded into Vitcos, where one of the Incas’ heavy drinking festivals was under way. The conquistadors found riches worthy of a king: glittering housewares forged from gold and silver; a golden sun idol; jewels; fine cloths; thousands of llamas and alpacas; several suits of stolen Spanish armor. Orgoñez even captured Manco’s five-year-old son and the mummies of his royal predecessors. Mesmerized by these treasures, the Spaniards didn’t notice Manco escaping with Cura Ocllo.

When Bingham followed Mogrovejo to the top of the ridge at Rosaspata, he took note of the mountain panorama, which seemed to match one Spaniard’s description of views that encompassed “a great part of the province of Vilcabamba.” On the far end of the bluff he spied the remains of an enormous building, which also squared with written accounts he’d read. The lintels of its doors were “beautifully finished,” as would befit a royal residence, and the stonework was of a higher quality than he had seen at Choquequirao. Between the masonry and the site’s proximity to Puquiura, Bingham was almost certain that he’d found a match. “If only we could find in this vicinity that Temple of the Sun which Calancha said was ‘near’ Vitcos,” he knew, “all doubts would be at an end.”

Once you’ve reached Huancacalle, it’s a bit easier to find Vitcos these days. John and I walked there in under an hour from Sixpac Manco. We entered along a narrow crest that widens into a main plaza, like the stem of a wineglass expanding into the bowl. Row upon row of mountains unfolded in all directions, like the pews in an enormous natural cathedral. Crossing over to the plaza reminded me of my days as an altar boy, waiting nervously in the church vestibule for the organist to begin playing. Justo had tried to explain the apus to me while we sat in Puquiura munching popcorn. “They’re sort of like God, Señor Mark. They watch over things. But it’s like faith—you have to believe in them. If you don’t believe in them, they don’t exist.”

“You’ll notice that Vitcos, Choquequirao and Machu Picchu are all at the junction of rivers or have rivers winding around them,” John said, tracing his gloved hand in a semicircle. “That’s no coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that Machu Picchu and Espiritu Pampa”—the modern name for Bingham’s Vilcabamba—“are almost equidistant from this exact spot.”

John pulled out a notebook and sketched a diagram of the trails that led from Vitcos in Manco’s time. It looked like a child’s drawing of the sun, with lines shooting out in all directions. “Everything had to be interconnected for the Incas. Vitcos is a hub of the Inca trail system. There were four major trails to Vitcos, branching into maybe twenty others, which branched off into others. It all connected, like it was, er, Minneapolis.” He paused to let his unexpected analogy sink in. “You could have walked from the south of Colombia to the center of Chile. Look over there—that’s the trail that Bingham took to Espiritu Pampa.”

The main building at Vitcos was enormous, much larger than anything at Machu Picchu—like a Walmart built with stone. When Bingham saw it, it was largely in ruins, torn apart by Spanish religious fanatics infuriated by Inca paganism and generations of Andean treasure seekers looking for Inca gold. (Harvard’s Farabee had warned him: “Any good find ought to be thoroughly explored before leaving it or it will be destroyed by the natives.”) Vitcos has since been rebuilt by the INC, but even as rubble a hundred years ago, its suitability for the Sapa Inca must have been obvious. “It is 245 feet by 43 feet,” Bingham wrote, awestruck by the dimensions. “There were no windows, but it was lighted by thirty doorways, fifteen in front and the same in back. It contained ten large rooms, plus three hallways running from front to rear.... The principal entrances, namely, those leading to each hall, are particularly well made.”

John and I ascended to the upper level of the site. Except for one young woman from the INC—Vitcos is so far off the main tourist trail that they don’t even bother charging admission—we had the entire place to ourselves. John whipped out his GPS and began to take readings.

On my first trip to Cusco, John had taken me to a bookstore and loaded my arms with reading material. Then we waited ninety minutes for the proprietor to return from “right next door” with one final volume. (At one point he called the shop to pass along the message that he was “in a taxi, two minutes away.”) The delay was worth it, for that book was Johan Reinhard’s Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center. In it, Reinhard suggests that trying to understand places like Machu Picchu and Vitcos as individual, self-contained sites misses a larger point. These monuments were built in relation to the sun, the stars, the mountains—and to one another. Trying to wrap my head around such an idea, sitting in the middle of Manhattan, was like trying to understand what the color red looks like based on its dictionary definition. Standing center stage at Vitcos, though, the Sacred Center theory started to make sense. Kind of.

“See that small fort on the hilltop ahead?” John said. “A straight line leads from that fort through the middle of the site here to”—he turned around—“Inca Tambo, a very important peak, which is almost exactly due north of here. The walls of the building up here are perfectly north-south east-west, but the main building below us is a slightly different angle. I’m wondering if . . .” He waited for his GPS readings to update. “Look at that. That building has perfect alignment to Choquequirao. Amazing. How did they do that?”

Bingham had his own puzzle to solve while standing up here. He needed to find Yurak Rumi, the White Rock. Calancha’s Coronica had pinpointed the White Rock’s location through the story of two Spanish friars, Marcos and Diego. This pair, having heard that Indians were communicating with Satan up at a gigantic rock on the other side of Vitcos, decided to put a stop to the diabolical practice. They collected some converts and firewood and marched up from Puquiura. Bingham, having spent his childhood watching firsthand the effects of uninvited missionaries cramming their beliefs down the throats of natives, must have found a tale of dogmatic Christian proselytizers butting heads with the Incas irresistible.

Next to the White Rock was a large and important sun temple; beneath the boulder was a spring of water in which the Devil himself had been reported to have appeared. Having decided that a full exorcism was in order, the friars raised a cross, piled the kindling around the rock and its adjacent buildings, “recited their orisions,” as Bingham put it, and torched the whole thing. Only the charred boulder remained intact. Calancha proudly recorded that “the cruel Devil never more returned to the rock nor to this district.” Nor, most likely, did the friars, since the Incas were not amused by an act that, had the roles been reversed, could have been equated with blowing up St. Paul’s Cathedral.

John and I followed a route down from Vitcos that wound around the mountain, dotted with the ruins of small Inca outbuildings. Most had deep holes burrowed in each corner. “Of course some of the huaqueros dug those,” John said. “There’s looted tombs everywhere here. They think it’s where the Incas would have buried some gold.”

We had seen almost nothing but blue skies since leaving Cachora, but today it was overcast gray with thick cottony clouds. “I think we’ll have a big rain tomorrow or the next day,” John said. The gray above contrasted with the lush green meadow we came to at the bottom of the trail. This field is known as the Andenes, Spanish for “terraces.” The Incas landscaped the gentle slope into tiers, like the gardens of an English duke’s country home. Scattered about were rounded granite boulders of various sizes. Several had geometric shapes carved into their faces; others had been cut into sofa-like banquettes. Many had flattened tops as smooth as if they’d been power-sanded. At least one rock had been chiseled into a perfect scale model of the hill right behind it. None that I could see, however, seemed to fit the description that Bingham had taken from Calancha.

Moments later, we came around the hill, and there it was—a gigantic boulder, fifty feet long and twenty-five feet high, a giant abstract sculpture that, when I squinted, looked like a large tugboat had been dropped into the middle of the Andes.

Once completely white, the rock was now coated with gray lichen. A wide horizontal stripe was carved into the side facing us, from which cube-shaped pegs protruded. (“It is significant that these stones are on the northeast face of the rock, where they are exposed to the rising sun and cause striking shadows at sunrise,” Bingham wrote.) The spring beneath the rock had long ago dried up. Underneath, though, were some beautifully carved niches, possibly seats of some sort. John bent underneath for a closer look.

“I think that’s where the princesses—the ñustas—sat,” he said. “The top of the rock was for llama sacrifices.” Bingham shared this opinion and noted that a small channel ran down from the flat top, possibly a gutter that carried away the blood from sacrifices. One spot was still white, a splotch at the very top of the rock. It looked familiar. I opened one of Bingham’s books and compared the photo he had taken. “Look at this,” I said to John. “The spot hasn’t changed in a hundred years.”