Turn Right at Machu Picchu

The morning of July 24, 1911, was a rainy one, and like any serious firewater aficionado, tavernkeeper Melchor Arteaga was in no hurry to seize the day. Bingham dangled a silver dollar reward if Arteaga would guide him to the ruins that he’d boasted about the night before. When Arteaga agreed, Bingham inquired where, exactly, they were going. Arteaga “pointed straight up at the top of the mountain.” Bingham’s expedition companions from Yale decided to stay behind.

Arteaga, Bingham and his military escort, Sergeant Carrasco, departed Mandor Pampa at 10:07 A.M. About forty minutes later, the trio arrived at a primitive bridge much like those John and I had crossed en route to Espiritu Pampa: “four tree trunks” that had been “bound together with vines” and stretched “only a few inches above the roaring rapids.” The Peruvians crossed barefoot, Bingham later recalled, “using their somewhat prehensile toes to keep from slipping,” a description that managed to compliment their bravery while not-so-subtly comparing them to monkeys. Bingham crawled across.

The difficult climb up the eastern face of the mountain took about eighty minutes. Much of the journey was made on all fours, Bingham recalled, “sometimes holding on by our fingernails.” Bingham was now within the zone known as the ceja de selva, the eyebrow of the jungle, where the cloud forest was thick. Tree trunks cut with rough notches served as ladders in otherwise impassable spots. Arteaga warned his guests to watch out for vipers. As it typically does at Machu Picchu, the early cloud cover burned off and the gray day turned hot and humid. Just after noon, the three men arrived at the top of the slope.

The first structure Bingham encountered at Machu Picchu was a Quechua hut. This was the house of the Richarte family, one of Arteaga’s subtenants who had settled on the ridge between the peaks of Mount Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu. Introductions were awkward—the farmers, who had selected the site at least in part because it was an excellent place to elude nosy government officials, were surely rattled by the arrival of a six-feet-four white man with yellow hair and a military escort. Once Arteaga explained the reason for Bingham’s appearance, however, the Richartes laid a poncho across a wooden bench and invited the American to sit down. They offered their guest, who hadn’t packed a lunch, sweet potatoes and “dripping gourds full of cool delicious water.”

Like every first-time visitor to Machu Picchu, Bingham took a few moments to soak in one of the world’s most incredible natural settings:

Tremendous green precipices fell away to the white rapids of the Urubamba below. Immediately in front, on the north side of the valley, was a great granite cliff rising 2000 feet sheer. To the left was the solitary peak of Huayna Picchu, surrounded by seemingly inaccessible precipices. On all sides were rocky cliffs. Beyond them cloud-capped mountains rose thousands of feet above us.

Bingham took note of some well-preserved Inca terraces that the farmers had “cleared off and burned over” for planting, creating an ideal spot for growing tomatoes, peppers, corn and other crops. Decades later researchers would discover that the Inca builders had not only filled these terraces with a thick layer of topsoil, but had also employed granite chips left over from stone cutting to lay down an ingenious multilayered drainage system.

Once rehydrated, the explorer wanted to see the ruins. Arteaga begged off, saying he’d “been there once before” and wanted to hang back and chat with his tenants. The Richartes’s young son, never named or quoted in any of Bingham’s books but probably the first guide to lead a tour through the ruins of Machu Picchu, was deputized to take the strange guest and his military escort to have a look around.

(In any picture of Machu Picchu taken from its best-known angle, the buildings will fall roughly into two groups, on the left and right, separated by a grassy central plaza.⁸ At the rear of the photo will be the rocky green rhino horn of Huayna Picchu. Looking north, the major discoveries of Bingham’s July 24 visit took place on the left side, starting in the foreground and advancing toward Huayna Picchu.)

The trio began walking around the side of the mountain, until they reached “a great flight of beautifully constructed stone-face terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and 10 feet high.” Bingham was reminded of the terraces he’d just seen at Ollantaytambo, the same that Manco had once ridden his stolen horse atop. The ones before him were handsome but “nothing to be excited about.” Using one of the widest terraces as their path, sidestepping charred tree trunks, the three moved ahead into the “untouched forest beyond.”

Inside the green tangle of vegetation, something caught Bingham’s attention. The boy had led them into “a maze of beautiful granite houses! The buildings were covered with trees and moss and the growth of centuries, but in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, could be seen, here and there, walls of white granite ashlars most carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together.”

Bingham had entered the area of Machu Picchu now known as the Eastern Urban Sector. He may have been exaggerating slightly about the overgrowth, since the tenant farmers had cleared much of the site to plant their crops. Then again, maybe not. Photographs Bingham took show adult trees growing not just inside and around those now-famous buildings, but on top of them as well. “Some walls were actually supporting trees ten and twelve inches in diameter,” he noted.

The boy pushed on ahead, ducking nimbly under bamboo and scrambling up terrace walls as Bingham struggled to follow. The explorer seems to have almost collided with his first important find, a cave that the boy pointed out. The cavern’s interior chamber was lined with exquisite stonework. At its center were four white stone steps, carved at slightly irregular angles so that they cast enigmatic shadows. Bingham, who over time named the features of Machu Picchu like Adam identifying every beast of the field in the book of Genesis, dubbed this opening the Royal Mausoleum.

Directly above the cave, the Incas had built a high, semicircular wall that formed a tower of sorts; its perfectly curved face contained two small windows. (Bingham named it the Semicircular Temple; it’s now commonly known as the Torreon, or Temple of the Sun.) Climbing an adjacent set of stairs, Bingham could see that the curved wall wrapped around until it straightened like the stem on a letter “P,” then turned ninety degrees to the left.

The masonry, like that of most Inca masterworks, tilted slightly inward and tapered as it went up. “Owing to the absence of mortar,” Bingham wrote, “there are no ugly spaces between the rocks. They might have grown together.” The use of white granite had given the walls a luminous beauty that surpassed anything Bingham had ever seen. “Dimly, I began to realize that this wall and its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave were as fine as the finest stonework in the world.... It fairly took my breath away.”

Bingham followed his guide up a granite staircase to a small clearing that the boy’s family had chosen for a vegetable patch. Standing watch over the Richarte family produce were “the ruins of two of the finest structures I have ever seen in Peru.” In contrast to the intricate granite brickwork of the Mausoleum wall, these buildings had been constructed from enormous blocks comparable in size to those at Sacsahuaman, some of them “ten feet in length, and higher than a man.” Both were three-sided temples. The temple facing south contained a fourteen-foot-long slab of waist-high granite, which sat beneath seven niches set high in the rear wall; Bingham surmised that this spot had been a “sacrificial altar.”

Ninety degrees to the right, the other temple seemed in particular to catch Bingham’s fancy. “Best windows I have ever seen,” he scribbled in his notebook. Three apertures, each measuring four feet by three feet, faced east “over the canyon to the rising sun.” The openings looked onto a large central plaza, and beyond to the Urubamba River flowing far below. Straight ahead in the distance, the triptych framed a panorama of skyscraping mountain peaks. Bingham lingered, puzzling over these “three conspicuously large windows, obviously too large to serve any useful purpose.” Clements Markham, he knew, had mentioned an important place in The Incas of Peru: “the hill with the three openings or windows.” Bingham sensed immediately that this structure had “peculiar significance.”

Once again, Bingham followed almost to the letter the Royal Geographical Society’s Hints to Travellers three-step process for “obtaining a record of monument.” (Draw a floor plan; shoot pictures; and take copious measurements and descriptive notes.) The explorer sketched the three-windowed building into his small leather-covered notebook. Then he pulled out his camera and tripod and began to document his find, taking care to jot down the details of each shot. While inspecting the temple’s interior, he noticed that something had been scrawled on one of the walls: “Lizarraga 1902.” Lizarraga, he later learned, was a farmer who rented land farther down the Urubamba Valley.

As the sun began its downward descent, Bingham tried to digest everything he’d taken in. The boy had one more surprise, though. At the site’s very highest point—a spot that Bingham would learn the next day was, incredibly, visible from the very mule road that he had been following—stood a large rock carved like a sundial. It had a wide base and a squarish twenty-inch-tall gnomon, shaped like a flat-topped obelisk. Such an Inca carving, Bingham knew from Markham’s writings, must be an intihuatana. Bingham stationed Sergeant Carrasco and the boy guide next to the carved rock and snapped a photograph, the template for a century’s worth of souvenir photos.

With darkness coming on quickly, Bingham returned to the Richarte hut to collect Arteaga and make the descent to Mandor Pampa. The first recorded visit to Machu Picchu lasted less than five hours.