FORTY-NINE
The Who’s Who of Apus
At Phuyupatamarca
I got up around 4:30 A.M., feeling oddly refreshed. After I spent an hour reading and shoving things in my pack, the day’s first light started to glow weakly through the thin ceiling of the tent. I I stepped out onto my private terrace and, with the aid of my ridiculous wristwatch-altimeter-compass, looked roughly in the direction of Machu Picchu. Not much was visible in the obscurity. (Though I did notice that the barometric pressure was rising.) I ducked into the cook tent to grab a cup of coffee. After a few minutes the cloud cover began to lift. Dawn started to break somewhere behind the ranges. It seemed like a good moment to visit the observation platform where the mountain-averse idiots had eaten their dinner the night before. John would really love this, I thought, and momentarily considered waking him before I remembered his stomach troubles. With Nescafé in hand, I exchanged good mornings with the porters sitting outside and turned the corner around the big orange tent, watching my feet as I navigated the cords staked into the ground.
When I looked up, I was face-to-face with a white deity: Salcantay.
No wonder people had been talking about this mountain since forever. In the middle of some of the world’s tallest peaks, it completely dominated the skyline. I hurried up the path to the platform for a better look. The first thing I saw at the top was the back side of a familiar form, wearing a ski cap and videotaping everything in a slow semicircle.
“Best views in the world and no one’s here!” John shouted when he saw me. The panorama was staggering. Almost everything I’d seen in Peru in the last year was visible from this one spot.
“Look at this, Mark! It’s just sensational! There’s Salcantay, of course. You’ll notice a piece missing from that side. That’s the part that caused the alluvion when it fell into the Aobamba River and wiped out the railway.” It looked like someone had taken the tiniest nibble of a snow cone. “To the right is Pumasillo—you might just be able to make out the Choquetacarpo Pass that we crossed. Over there, behind that mountain, is Choquequirao. And if you come over here . . .” We turned to the right and walked to the edge of the platform. “Over there is Llactapata, and beyond that are Vitcos and Espiritu Pampa. And you might recognize that small, green pointy peak down there.”
I finally found the one he was trying to single out. “That one?”
“Recognize it? You’ve been up there. It’s Mount Machu Picchu!” It was like a Christmas tree lost in a stand of redwoods. “And if you follow that line along the ridge, that’s the Inca Trail leading to the Sun Gate. Just think, at this very moment people are dragging themselves up to the Sun Gate when they should be right here.”
Efrain arrived, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He took his hat off, faced Salcantay, and held it to his chest. “The older mountain men, sixty or seventy years old, do this when they see a mountain. It’s a way of giving respect to the apus.” He walked to the edge. “From here you can see everything—jungle, highland, the Andes. Everything. There’s no question about it—the Incas got to Machu Picchu and said, ‘This is a sacred center. We must build here.’”
The sun began to crest over the top of Mount Veronica to the east, a reminder that hundreds of people would also be standing above the Torreon at this moment, for today was the first day of the solstice.
We lingered past our usual departure hour, then moved on toward Machu Picchu, skirting the agricultural ruins of Inti Pata and passing through a tunnel carved through solid rock. We ate bag lunches at Wiñay Wayna, the last of the major sites along the Inca Trail. The massive convex ruins were so overgrown in Bingham’s time that he missed them altogether; they weren’t discovered until 1941.
As the three of us departed Wiñay Wayna, John bolted ahead; he was eager to get to Machu Picchu. Efrain fell back to chat with a fellow guide, a friend of his. And so on the final leg of the Inca Trail, I was left alone with my thoughts, which naturally turned to Bingham. After almost a year of stalking the man, I thought I’d figured him out.
Regardless of what he implied in Lost City of the Incas, Hiram Bingham was definitely not the discoverer of Machu Picchu. He may have been the “scientific discoverer,” as a plaque inside the entrance to the ruins credits him, but I never came around to that name. The polio vaccine was a scientific discovery. Radium was a scientific discovery. John was right. If you tried to understand Machu Picchu in isolation, from a purely secular viewpoint, you were bound to miss something important.
The truth about Bingham, perhaps the only thing Paolo Greer and Eliane Karp-Toledo would have agreed on, is that he did something less romantic but ultimately much more important than discovering Machu Picchu. He saw the ruins, quickly determined their importance (if not their origin) and popularized them to a degree that they couldn’t be blown up with dynamite or knocked over in the search for buried gold, as Vitcos had been. Would Machu Picchu exist if Hiram Bingham had never seen it? Of course. Would it be the same Machu Picchu we know today? Almost certainly not.
Similarly, if he’d never published Lost City of the Incas, would Bingham have been accused of stealing credit for the discovery? No. Was he the original Indiana Jones? Not exactly. But if he hadn’t published Lost City of the Incas, would the character of Indiana Jones ever have existed? Probably not, at least not in the form we know.
Did Bingham steal artifacts from Peru? Yes. If he were alive today, would he want the artifacts at the Peabody Museum to be returned to Peru? Almost certainly, yes. It was hard to argue with that 1916 note he’d written to Gilbert Grosvenor: “The objects do not belong to us, but to the Peruvian government.”
A few months later, in a move that took most observers completely by surprise, Yale finally agreed with its most swashbuckling alumnus. A new memo of understanding was signed between the university and the government of Peru, and the most eye-catching pieces on display at the Peabody Museum were packed up to be returned to Cusco in time to be put on display for the hundredth anniversary of Bingham’s achievement. The rest of the collection was scheduled to follow not long after, to be housed in a research facility open to Yale scholars as well as Peruvians. Lawsuits were dropped on both sides and everyone pretended that things had turned out exactly as they’d hoped all along. Bingham would have been pleased, both as an explorer and as a politician.
Late in the afternoon of our last day on the Inca Trail, John, Efrain and I passed through the control booth and entered the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary. The final stretch of stone trail undulated up and down until it reached a long set of white stairs extending toward the sky. At their summit stood a set of tall stone pillars.
“We call this the gringo killer,” Efrain said.
I reached the top of the stairs, winded, and looked around. I was standing in the Sun Gate. Below me stretched a long stone path (upon which a certain Australian was quickly disappearing, GPS in hand), sets of terraces and, at the far end, the familiar green rhino horn of Huayna Picchu. Nestled in between, in the jewelry box of the surrounding mountains, was the still-breathtaking citadel of Machu Picchu.