by Mark Adams
“Anybody you’d suggest?”
“There’s one fellow I know from Amazonas Explorer named Efrain—he’s very, very good. Speaks Quechua and English, knows his history. I’ll see if we can get him.” I heard the click of a ballpoint pen. “We’ll need porters . . . and a cook. Might be a little tricky.”
“Is there a problem?”
“It’s my new diet. I don’t know how I’ll ever explain low-fat cooking to one of these guys.”
I asked John if he’d like anything special from the States.
“Actually, yes. A good heart rate monitor.”
FORTY-THREE
The Last Crusade
Far Down the Urubamba Valley
When we’d been sitting out the rainstorm en route to Espiritu Pampa, John had explained to me what might be called Leivers’s Law of Expedition Entropy: “The bigger the expedition, the greater the chance of something going catastrophically wrong.” Bingham’s 1915 expedition offered an excellent case study. Things began well enough at Patallacta, 14 a site of “half-moon terraces” that had been located on the 1912 trip. Bingham’s team had collected two hundred skulls in the area. Many showed signs of trepanation, the medical practice of punching holes in the cranium, often to relieve pressure on the brain. In an extraordinary photograph published the following year in National Geographic, one expedition member appears to be wading through a pond filled with white bowling balls.
Bingham’s first project for 1915 was to investigate a trail that seemed to lead out of the south end of Machu Picchu. One of the expedition’s native assistants had found an old Inca road that might extend to the citadel from the opposite direction. The region in between was completely unexplored. From Patallacta, Bingham and a small team passed through “a picturesque primeval forest” and encountered the ancient stone highway.
The path climbed to an extraordinary height. At the crest of the ridge they found ahead of them “a lovely abandoned valley,” in which not a single creature stirred. As the group descended into this untouched paradise, Bingham spotted a circular ruin where, he wrote to Alfreda, “We pitched our tent . . . and enjoyed the lovely view, which the Incas had before us.”
The trail plunged precipitously the next day, briefly vanishing “in a maze of boulders and the remains of a fairly recent landslide.” Here the highway forked. The left branch ascended a set of steps to a rock outcrop like the prow of a ship. Atop this perch the Incas had constructed a labyrinth of stone buildings, including a bullet-shaped structure with nine windows. After a wet night and two hours of walking the following morning, Bingham recalled, “I at last came out on a ridge from which a great part of the grand canyon of the Urubamba was visible—and in the distance the familiar outlines of Machu Picchu Mountain—but oh so far below us!” Bingham then encountered a third striking set of unknown ruins. The impressive stonework—including five stone fountains—was crowned by an Inca overlook that took in Salcantay and most of the other important peaks near Machu Picchu. He sensed that he was getting close to his goal.
“We walked along the ridge by the old trail for a couple of hours until at last the ruins of Machu Picchu itself came into view,” Bingham wrote. Then, “within rifle shot of the city,” the trail vanished, buried by “rotting vegetable matter.” Bingham detoured down to the Intihuatana ranch (now the location of the Hidroeléctrica train station) and climbed to “dear old Machu Picchu” from the west. The explorer “nearly wept to see how it had gone back to jungle and brush” in just three years. “Even the Sacred Plaza was so dense we had to cut our way into it with a machete,” he wrote to Alfreda. Only one group of buildings was clear—“and that occupied by six pigs!”
To prove that his city in the clouds was indeed Manco Inca’s Vilcabamba, Bingham next needed to trace the route to Machu Picchu that Manco would have taken from Vitcos when the Spaniards surprised him there in 1537. As an Indian guide led them through the boggy no-man’s-land between Puquiura and Machu Picchu, the trail passed a large, dark green lake. Bingham inquired what its name was. “The answer gave me a thrill,” he remembered. The guide had said “Yanacocha”; Bingham convinced himself that he’d meant to say “Ungacacha.” (“They look so different on paper that it is somewhat difficult to realize how closely the Indian pronunciation of one approaches the other,” he later rationalized.) Ungacacha was the name of a lake that Father Calancha had reported his two friars passing on their way from near Vitcos to Vilcabamba, where they were assaulted by battalions of lovelies from the Peruvian coast. Bingham reasoned that it was the monks who had heard the name incorrectly, rather than he. When the trail ended at the familiar hacienda of Huadquiña, just a half day’s walk from Machu Picchu, Bingham was certain that he’d compiled enough evidence—the Inca highways from Cusco and Vitcos, the skeletal remains of the chosen women, the architectural splendor of Machu Picchu—to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the city he’d found in 1911 was indeed Vilcabamba, the Lost City of the Incas.
Bingham’s logical next move was to visit the cave near Pacaritambo, where he could refute once and for all the notion that Machu Picchu was not also Tampu Tocco. His victory march was halted by an unlikely culprit—an organizational screwup. Considering the size of the 1914–15 expedition and the unpleasant exit that Bingham had made in 1912, it seems obvious that someone should have secured permits to excavate before digging up two hundred skulls. Unfortunately, this was one detail that Bingham had delegated. When Bingham arrived back at Yankihausi on June 15, 1915, he was informed that he faced charges of excavating and exporting artifacts illegally. One of his accusers, the archaeologist and newspaper editor Luis Valcárcel, had published reports in his Cusco paper El Sol that the Bingham expedition was smuggling gold from Machu Picchu out of the country through Bolivia. Bingham rushed off to Cusco to attempt to clear his name and salvage his expedition. As if fulfilling Gilbert Grosvenor’s bleak prophecy, Bingham collapsed into a hotel bed, fevered and exhausted, unable to move for a week.
In Cusco, Bingham discovered that the Peruvian rumor mill had been working at full capacity. “Among other things,” Bingham wrote wearily to Grosvenor, “we were charged with having brought a steam shovel from Panama.” The expedition was more or less exonerated of the more serious charges, but Bingham was ordered not to undertake any new digging. And because the investigation was still open, government inspectors would be appointed to monitor any future work. Chief among Bingham’s new babysitters was his accuser, Luis Valcárcel. Bingham briefly worried that he might not be allowed to leave the country.
The irony of Bingham’s prosecution is that he really was smuggling artifacts out of the country, hundreds of them—just not those that Valcárcel had accused him of. The previous year, the historian Christopher Heaney has written, Bingham had negotiated the purchase of 366 Inca artifacts from Tomás Alvistur, the son-in-law of Huadquiña’s owners. After a bit of haggling, the antiquities were smuggled out of Peru and arrived in New Haven, where they outshone the pieces that Bingham had excavated at Machu Picchu. At the same time he was under suspicion of smuggling gold in 1915, Bingham purchased another collection in Lima and shipped the artifacts out under a false name.15
In the end, it was hard not to view the 1914–15 expedition as a near-complete failure. The year’s only bright spot was the old Inca highway that Bingham had blazed anew, along with the three sets of strange ruins that he had found en route to Machu Picchu. As far as Bingham was concerned, he had proven his theory. After exiting the legal circus in Cusco, he had returned to Ollantaytambo and retraced his steps along the now-completed Inca Trail. “I had the satisfaction of going into ‘Vilcabamba the Old’ over the very road used by the Virgins of the Sun when they fled here from Cusco and the conquistadors,” he later wrote. His work in Peru was finished.
FORTY-FOUR
My Dinner with Paolo
Lima
When I arrived in Lima in June, my first thought was how lucky John had been to have had his heart surgery during the sunny
half of the city’s annual climate cycle. The same geological cacophony that wakes El Niño draws the garúa, a thick cloak of clouds over the capital city that blots out the sun for weeks at a time, creating near-perfect laboratory conditions for an epidemic of seasonal affective disorder. Visitors to what Herman Melville called “tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou cans’t see” search the skies for a cathartic storm that never comes. The clamminess is maddeningly consistent. When I’d checked the Lima weather report before leaving New York, the forecast was identical for each of the next seven days: high of 65, low of 63, cloudy and humid.
Counterbalancing the gloom was a ray of good news. Finally, after a year, I was going to meet Paolo Greer. In a roundabout way, Paolo’s investigations had launched my Peruvian odyssey by dragging Bingham back into the news fifty years after his death. Paolo had been extremely helpful in my own research. There was something vaguely unsettling about him, though. Maybe it was the mildly combative tone of his e-mails—more than once he challenged me to “call his bluff” with a list of tough questions that I think he was expecting me to spring on him, 60 Minutes–style. He believed that he’d made powerful, shadowy enemies in the Peruvian bureaucracy. I couldn’t figure out if his choice to live alone in the woods had more in common with Thoreau’s desire to commune with nature or the Unabomber’s need to wall himself off from society. And then there was Paolo’s photo, which I found on a Web site devoted to Inca history. In it he faced the camera defiantly, as if he were about to challenge the photographer to a knife fight.
So when I arrived outside the high metal gate of the South American Explorers Club around five o’clock on a gray Sunday afternoon and saw that no lights were on inside, a small part of me hoped that Paolo had skipped town. I walked around the side of the building, searching for an after-hours bell. Then I heard someone call, in English, “Hey, Mark, is that you?”
The front gate of the clubhouse creaked open and out stepped someone who was not at all what I’d been expecting. In his frayed windbreaker and rumpled plaid shirt, Paolo looked more like an absentminded classics professor who’d misplaced his Seneca than a sociopathic street fighter. He pressed a DVD into my hand and started talking as if he’d been waiting for someone, anyone, to listen to his story.
“That DVD’s got two hundred and sixty books and articles about Machu Picchu on it, stuff that’s hard to come by in Peru. Both in English and Spanish.” He turned his head and leaned an ear in my direction. “If you want me to hear what you’re saying, you’ll have to speak up—I’m half-deaf. I read lips.” He removed his ball cap for a second, ran his fingers through his short salt-and-pepper hair and looked me straight in the eyes. “So, you want to go sit down somewhere and talk about Bingham?”
As we walked through the crowded sidewalks of Lima’s fancy Miraflores neighborhood, searching for a café, Paolo explained how a retired Alaska pipeline laborer and gold prospecting hobbyist had become the most controversial scholar in Machu Picchu studies. He’d spent twenty-seven years working on the pipeline. (“When I went in for my physical before starting, the doctor asked me, ‘You know you’ve got TB, tuberculosis?’ Now when I go to the doctor in Peru they ask me, ‘You know you’ve got holes in your liver?’”) Like John, he had never married or had children, which left plenty of time to root around in libraries and archives. He actually lived in three cabins outside of Fairbanks, one of them devoted to “nothing but papers and maps and books.” He lived only a short drive from a University of Alaska campus and spent a lot of time taking adult education courses. Whenever he built up a “grubstake,” Paolo said, he’d head off to the Peruvian Andes to have a long look around.
“Never filed a claim, though,” he told me as we finally found a place to sit down, an arty-looking coffeehouse filled with college students. “It’s all about the prospect. After twenty years of looking for lost gold mines, researching Machu Picchu was a piece of cake.”
In 1978, while doing some research at the Library of Congress, Paolo came across an intriguing prospecting map drawn by hand in the 1870s. He recognized that the sketch, which was untitled but labeled in English, was of the area around Machu Picchu. The spot where Aguas Calientes now sits was identified as “Saw Mill.”
“Of course the name had changed by the time Bingham got there,” Paolo said.
Over the next twenty years, Paolo pieced together clues in libraries on two continents. The map had been drawn by an associate of Augusto Berns, a German mining prospector who’d purchased a ten-mile stretch of land across the Urubamba River from Machu Picchu in 1867. The diagram Paolo had found was actually the inset to a larger map that Berns himself had prepared, on which he’d labeled the area of Machu Picchu—land he didn’t own—as “Inaccessible.”
“In other words, he was saying ‘Don’t even try to cross the river,’” Paolo said. Keep out. The spot marked “Saw Mill” appears on later maps as “Maquina,” the rusted piece of machinery that Bingham had seen near Melchor Arteaga’s hut at Mandor Pampa. Paolo believed that the machine in question was a sawmill that Berns had planned to use to make railroad ties.
“What you have to remember is that Berns was an estafador, a scammer,” Paolo said. After failing to scare up investors for his dubious claims of silver and gold, Berns changed his strategy. He established a company to loot the huacas, or holy places, of the Incas, where he could unearth their priceless relics. “Helped by my professional knowledge and casual circumstances,” Berns wrote in a prospectus sent to would-be investors in 1887 (about a year before Hiram Bingham III made his first attempt to escape Hawaii), he had been able “to discover the existence of significant rustic buildings and underground structures that had been closed with stones, some of them carefully carved, which will undoubtedly contain objects of great value, and form part of those treasures of the Incas.”
To Paolo, the inference was obvious. “Berns was a crook. He lived across the river from Machu Picchu pretty much constantly for four years, from 1867 on. He knew where every family lived on the opposite side of the river—all twenty-four huts are on that map. He searched for ruins, specifically to loot them, using locals as guides.”
For years, Paolo shared his theory with anyone who would listen. Professional academics mostly condescended to him. Then he published his Bingham story in 2008.
“And suddenly you were famous as the guy who proved that Bingham hadn’t discovered Machu Picchu,” I said.
Paolo got agitated and spilled his coffee. “I don’t give a shit about fame!” he said, mopping up the mess with napkins. “All these newspapers said that I said that Berns discovered Machu Picchu. I don’t like that word.”
“What word?”
“Discovered. No gringo discovered Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was never forgotten.”
Paolo talked for a while about various persons in Peru who were trying to steal credit for his research, but a jazz combo started tuning up and Paolo couldn’t hear a word I was saying. We walked back through the damp night to the South American Explorers clubhouse. The building was a converted home. We sat down in easy chairs, beneath an enormous map of Peru, in what had been the living room.
Like Bingham himself, Paolo had moved on from asking lots of little questions about Machu Picchu to trying to answer the Big One—what had Machu Picchu actually been? And like Bingham, he thought he might have found the solution to this riddle in the writings of a Spanish chronicler with an unusual personal history. Juan de Betanzos was considered the Spaniards’ finest interpreter of Quechua and married an extremely well-connected widow named Doña Angelina Yupanqui. She had been the child bride of the emperor Atahualpa and was with the Inca before and after he was captured at Cajamarca. After his execution, she later became the mistress of the man who ordered his death, Francisco Pizarro, with whom she had two sons. So when Betanzos wrote his comprehensive history Narrative of the Incas, published in 1557, he had pillow-talk access to inside information. Most of Betanzos’s work was unknown to Bingham; a cop
y of the last forty-six of the Narrative’s sixty-four chapters turned up in a private collection on the Mediterranean island of Palma de Mallorca, in 1987.
What’s fascinating about the new Betanzos information, in conjunction with the discovery that Machu Picchu was likely part of Pachacutec’s estate, is that Betanzos’s work may shed some light on why Pachacutec might have ordered Machu Picchu’s construction. Paolo had just spent several weeks out at Machu Picchu as the guest of the chief INC archaeologist. He was so excited about what he’d seen that he could barely stay in his seat.
“You go into Machu Picchu and you sit down in front of the Torreon and it clicks,” Paolo said. The Torreon, Paolo believes, was designed to represent the Koricancha sun temple in Cusco, the holiest building in the most important city in the empire. According to Betanzos, after Pachacutec’s death, the emperor “was taken to a town . . . where he had ordered some houses built in which his body was to be entombed.” In addition, he “ordered that a golden image made to resemble him be placed on top of his tomb . . . to be worshiped in place of him by the people who went there.”
The very idea was straight out of Indiana Jones—a gold statue of the greatest of all Incas, standing inside a temple devoted to the sun, which possibly aligned with the sunrise on the most important day of the Inca calendar. A recent excavation inside the Torreon had revealed another possible clue: a tomb with beautiful stonework was located just outside the circular wall. Paolo had pictures of himself down in the hole.
“You know what it is?” he asked. “It’s Pachacutec’s tomb!”
I was reminded of the two small windows in the Torreon, one of which was believed by some to face the solstice. The third window in the tower is the larger, oddly shaped opening that faces north, which Bingham named the Enigmatic Window. Paolo thought that this opening was the important one, and that it was used to give offerings to the golden statue of Pachacutec. “On both sides of the Enigmatic Window are secret stones that pull out of the wall. The chief archaeologist just showed me this. The Incas had something inside, something that tightened up and turned. I’ve got pictures!”