Turn Right at Machu Picchu

by Mark Adams

  Not that it really matters. No one has any idea how many people—whether they spoke Spanish, French, English or any other non-Quechua tongue—beat Bingham to the top of Machu Picchu. Almost from the moment he announced his discovery, a handful of other claimants—most notably an English missionary and a pair of German explorers—emerged to say they’d been there first. They were almost certainly wrong.

  What had been a general impression that Bingham hadn’t strained especially hard to disprove became cemented into presumed fact when Bingham published Lost City of the Incas in 1948. In this final version, Lizarraga was written out of the story. The long description of Charles Wiener’s “detailed map” was cut and replaced by the claim that Bingham didn’t even know of its existence until after his return to New Haven. The tip from Albert Giesecke, the University of Cusco administrator who urged Bingham to pay a visit to Melchor Arteaga, wasn’t mentioned. Instead, Bingham inserted a condescending note that when he arrived in 1911, “the professors in the University of Cusco knew nothing of any ruins down the valley.”

  The unanswerable question is why? Bingham was already rich and famous. Was it simple mendacity? An editing oversight? Perhaps as good an explanation as any can be found in a stanza near the end of Kipling’s “Explorer,” the same poem that sent Bingham marching off to search for the lost city “behind the ranges” forty years earlier:Well I know who’ll take the credit—all the clever chaps that

  followed

  Came, a dozen men together—never knew my desert-fears

  Tracked me by the camps I’d quitted, used the water-holes I’d

  hollowed.

  They’ll go back and do the talking. They’ll be called the

  Pioneers!

  Though Bingham’s Grand Unified Theory didn’t go uncontested during his lifetime, Time magazine was correct in stating, five years after Bingham’s death in 1956, that he had compiled “the best known—and most romantic—history of Machu Picchu.” And so it remained until 1964, when another handsome young explorer, Gene Savoy, arrived in Peru determined to prove Bingham wrong. Savoy was convinced that the Lost City of the Incas had actually existed at Espiritu Pampa, not Machu Picchu. Like Bingham half a century before him, Savoy had reviewed all the clues in the old Spanish chronicles as to the whereabouts of Vilcabamba, and like Bingham he had no special training as an archaeologist. He did have some advantages over his predecessor, though. He had the aid of the Cobos family, which owned a farm next to the ruins. He had plenty of time and money; in the kitchen of the Sixpac Manco hostel, Juvenal Cobos told me that Savoy had hired forty macheteros to cut through the jungle at Espiritu Pampa. And he had a colossal ego that dwarfed even Bingham’s. After retiring from exploring, Savoy founded his own religion.

  On his very first day at Espiritu Pampa, led by Juvenal’s older brothers Benjamin and Flavio, Savoy was able to see everything that Bingham had seen during his visit, including the strange ceramic tiles that had baffled the Yale man. Over the coming days, the macheteros hacked through vines and matapalos trees to find one new structure after another: houses, temples, storage facilities and fountains. The discovery of a giant stone like the White Rock near Vitcos, he wrote, “suggests we are inside an important ancient Inca community; for such stones were used for oracles.”

  When Savoy found clay tiles, he made a connection that Bingham had not. They were evidence that Manco Inca’s guests at Vitcos, the Spanish refugees who later stabbed him in the back (literally), had taught the Incas an improved form of roofing technology, which they had employed in building their new capital. Savoy believed that he’d found Vilcabamba, but his thesis wasn’t confirmed until the historian John Hemming linked the evidence of the tiles to documentary sources that had come to light since Bingham’s exploring prime. The architect-adventurer Vince Lee made several trips to Espiritu Pampa in the 1980s—often with the help of Juvenal Cobos—and returned with evidence that not only had this been the site of Manco’s Vilcabamba, but that it had been a thriving metropolis with thousands of residents. Bingham had been there and missed it all.

  The final load-bearing beam of Bingham’s Vilcabamba theory collapsed when John Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, reexamined the bones that had been exhumed in 1912. Contrary to Yale’s original findings, the ratio of men to women was roughly even, and many of the female skeletons showed evidence of childbirth. Thus the mythical Virgins of the Sun vanished once again, this time probably for good.

  As for Bingham’s Tampu Tocco theory, it relied on the assumption that Machu Picchu had been constructed by the Incas’ predecessors, perhaps a thousand years before Pizarro’s arrival. Further excavations and comparisons to other masterpieces of Inca architecture indicate that a more probable date for its construction was around 1450. Such a date would place its founding squarely in Pachacutec’s reign. Most experts now agree that the likeliest location of Tampu Tocco is Pacaritambo, the spot near Cusco that Bingham had been keen on visiting in 1915 before his expedition imploded. The evidence here is thinner than it is for Vilcabamba. John Leivers told me he’d visited Pacaritambo but didn’t see any proof that it had been Tampu Tocco. Locals who lived in the vicinity told him that they knew of no cave nearby.

  The artifacts that Bingham had sent back from Machu Picchu in 1912 sat gathering dust in the Peabody Museum until 1981, when the Andean specialists Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar arrived at Yale. The pair thoroughly reexamined the Bingham collection and, largely based on that research, decided that Machu Picchu, “far from being the Inca birthplace, was merely one of a number of personal royal estates built by an Inca king in the remote countryside,” Salazar later wrote. Burger has described the site more succinctly: “It was Pachacutec’s Camp David.” As for all the temples and such, that stuff just came with the job. “The Inca was considered descended from the sun, so there would have to be a religious component,” Burger told Time magazine. “But the Incas probably spent just as much time hunting or drinking corn beer on the plaza.” From Bingham’s lofty romantic vision of Vilcabamba, Machu Picchu had now sunk to the level of a sportsman’s lodge, the lost tap room of the Incas.

  Even before the controversies sent Bingham’s reputation as a hero into steep decline, his role as America’s greatest swashbuckling explorer had been superseded by an even more indelible adventurer: Indiana Jones. There have been any number of attempts to prove that Bingham’s life was the source material for the movie hero: both are university professors who dabble in archaeology, both search the blank spots of the map, looking for important relics, both wear fedoras. The opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Indy outruns a gigantic rolling boulder, takes place in a part of Peru that looks like it could be within walking distance of Machu Picchu.

  The most direct connection between Indy and Bingham is a 1954 B-movie titled Secret of the Incas. The movie features two good-looking stars: Charlton Heston, who plays Harry Steele, a hard-boiled treasure hunter based out of Cusco; and Machu Picchu, playing itself. Deborah Nadoolman Landis, who designed the costumes for Raiders, has said that she and her team watched Secret of the Incas multiple times and based Indy’s look on Harry Steele’s; both treasure hunters have a weakness for earth tones, leather jackets and, of course, fedoras. The most obvious connection between the two films, however, is Raiders’ famous map-room scene, in which Indy holds the staff of Ra and catches a beam of sunlight to reveal the location of the Ark of the Covenant on a scale model of the lost city of Tanis. In Secret, Steele consults a tabletop reproduction of Machu Picchu—for which, much like Indiana Jones, he happens to possess the key missing piece—then employs an ancient Inca reflector to direct a shaft of light to the spot where the coveted golden sunburst is hidden.

  The link from Indy to Harry Steele is obvious—the beam-of-light trick in Raiders is pretty clearly a winking homage to the earlier film, the sort of thing Quentin Tarantino fans applaud in their favorite auteur. This hasn’t prevented cinema conspiracy buffs from pointing out t
hat Secret and Raiders were both produced by Paramount and that Secret has never been released on DVD. (Producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg have always maintained that Indy was inspired by innumerable old adventure movies, a claim that is largely backed up by the transcript of the meetings in which they, along with screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, hashed out the film’s plot.)

  The leap from Harry Steele to Hiram Bingham is a little harder to make. What puzzled me the first time I watched Secret of the Incas was that it was loaded with slightly off-key references from actual Inca history, remnants from a not-quite-erased earlier story peeking through like a palimpsest. The American archaeologists’ Quechua helper is named Pachacutec; the foreigners are excavating at Machu Picchu in hopes of finding the tomb of Manco Inca; everyone in the movie is searching for the sun disk, the holiest relic from the Koricancha, which supposedly has been buried at Machu Picchu. Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas would have been far and away the most accessible source of this information. (From LCI, chapter nine: “The great golden image of the Sun which had been one of the chief ornaments of the temple in Cusco was probably kept here at Machu Picchu after Manco escaped from Cusco.”) The screenwriter Sydney Boehm, however, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he got the idea for Secret after meeting the Peruvian-born chanteuse Yma Sumac, who also appeared in the film, at a party.

  The full story is a bit more complicated than that. Buried in Beverly Hills amid the hundreds of thousands of files in the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are the production notes of Secret of the Incas. In late 1951, Boehm (who had just written the screenplay for the noir classic The Big Heat) and a partner submitted three loose ideas to the head of production at Paramount. One of them was titled “Lost City of the Incas.” The film was planned as an adventure yarn set in Peru. Bingham’s widely publicized book of the same name had been published less than three years earlier. In another memo written a few months later, Boehm’s lead character had been fleshed out. Stanley Moore was a Yale-trained archaeologist, “a tall, slender man with an abstracted face” who was carrying out excavations at Machu Picchu.

  By 1953, for whatever reason—a potential lawsuit from Bingham doesn’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility—Boehm’s story emerged from the Hollywood sausage grinder with a new title and a new lead character, the rough-edged Harry Steele. Stanley Moore was stripped of his Yale credentials and relegated to a supporting role as the sap that doesn’t get the girl.16

  So in a roundabout way, Indiana Jones almost certainly had been inspired by Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu. Unlike Bingham, however, Indy knew his archaeoastronomy.

  FORTY-SIX

  Roxana Begs to Differ

  Cusco

  Should you find yourself in Cusco en route to Machu Picchu, I highly recommend that you stop for a drink at the Cross Keys Pub. Not only is it the best place to get a beer in town, but just inside the second-floor entrance, to the right, are some old scrapbooks that are well worth a look. In one of them is pasted a photograph of a handsome man in his early forties, athletically built, with a gigantic stogie clenched between his teeth. The beverage awaiting him on the bar appears not to be his first of the evening.

  “Thought you might enjoy seeing that one, Mark,” the man in the photograph said to me as we flipped through the album.

  This was the second interesting set of plastic-covered photos that John Leivers had shown me since meeting me at the airport. Earlier, he’d pulled out a four-by-six laminated card that was illustrated on both sides. On the front was a color snapshot of his cracked-open chest, heart beating within; on the other was a black-and-white line drawing that looked like an electrician’s diagram for rewiring a rather lumpy circuit breaker; little arrows explained just how the triple-bypass worked. In the flesh, John was a little bit thinner than when I’d last seen him. He looked more like Hiram Bingham than ever.

  “I think that photo was taken not long after I walked the Inca Trail for the first time. Did I tell you about that? That must have been the first time I did it in bare feet, too.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Inca Trail covered in rocks?”

  “Oh, it’s not too bad if you’ve trained your feet for it. Feels good to have your soles in contact with the earth. All the porters kept complimenting me for being connected to the Pachamama, the Mother Earth.” For the record, John had walked it twice in bare feet and four times in flip-flops. He was planning to wear boots this time.

  We strolled down the cobblestones of Triunfo Street, through the Plaza de Armas, where the annual Inti Raymi festivities were in full swing. This celebration, which dates back to the Incas, originally honored the bond between the sun and his son the Inca. It also marked the new year. Every street surrounding the main square was filled with garishly dressed marching bands, girls in traditional costumes and boys wearing ukuku masks, which look like ski masks with clown faces knitted onto them. It was as if the Colorblind Junior Majorette Society of Greater Cusco had scheduled a social mixer with the Future Bank Robbers of Southern Peru.

  Our plan was to start the Inca Trail on June 18, arrive at Machu Picchu on the twenty-first, and ride up to the ruins early on the twenty-second to see the sunrise over the sacred peak and, with any luck, the light beam shooting into the Torreon. (The solstice lasts from the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth.) I’d read everything I could find on the subject but hadn’t encountered anything conclusive. John had checked his personal archives and confirmed that while various anecdotal reports testified to something interesting happening at the Torreon on those mornings, digital compass readings indicated the window didn’t align with the same solstice angle—roughly sixty-five degrees—that shot straight through the center of Machu Picchu to the riverside Intihuatana shrine and the corridor at Llactapata. And the Incas, I’d been told repeatedly, simply didn’t make engineering mistakes.

  There was one potential hitch in our plan. A group of farmers outside of Cusco, angered by the price of cooking gas, was calling for a paro, or general strike, on the day we were scheduled to leave town. In New York, the word “strike” conjures up a picture of people with picket signs parading in front of an office building, slightly inconveniencing any smokers who stepped outside to light up. If things get serious, the strikers might bring along a giant inflatable rat to express their displeasure with nonunion laborers. Evidently the word has a somewhat stronger meaning in Peru. All roads inside and outside of Cusco were blockaded by farmers, who rolled rocks into every throughway wider than a mule path and then sat sentry over those barricades, fortifying their political convictions by drinking heavily all day. Schools were closed during general strikes. All trains, including those to Machu Picchu, were canceled. Attempts to sneak through a checkpoint were generally frowned upon. “You really don’t want to drive through one of these blockades,” John told me over a vegetarian lunch. “Every time there’s a strike, you see pictures in the next day’s newspaper of cars and buses burning.”

  One of the most famous strikes in Cusco had taken place in 1999, in reaction to a government plan to build a cable car to Machu Picchu. Theoretically, the number of persons admitted to the site each day is limited to twenty-five hundred, though I’ve never heard of anyone being turned away. The planned funicular would have allowed as many as five thousand daily visitors. Several years ago, UNESCO recommended that to limit damage, no more than seventeen hundred sightseers should be allowed at Machu Picchu each day. The number of annual visitors had doubled in the last decade, from about four hundred thousand to more than eight hundred thousand, though entry tickets had more than quadrupled in price during that time.

  The 1999 strikes were successful, in part because local protesters were able to frame the proposed construction as a violation of their cultural and religious heritage. The strikes did not, however, halt the stream of crazy ideas to maximize traffic to the site. One recent proposal suggested installing an elevator that would convey passengers u
p sixteen hundred feet to Machu Picchu’s central plaza. Another recommended placing a dome over the citadel, around which would be constructed a catwalk from which tour groups could look down onto the Intihuatana and the Sacred Plaza as if watching the trained seals jump through hoops at an aquarium.

  Such plans are based on the assumption that in the future the government of Peru will still own Machu Picchu. At least one person in Cusco was working hard to challenge that assumption. As it turned out, Yale was not the only party suing Peru over Machu Picchu.

  Roxana Abril was a curator at Cusco’s Museo Inka. We met at the fountain in the Plaza de Armas, cut through the revelers and took seats at a second-floor café. It was an arctic day by Cusco standards, about sixty degrees, and after Roxana unwrapped herself from a thick red wool coat, I asked her to explain why, exactly, she was the rightful owner of Machu Picchu.

  “Okay, let’s start at the beginning,” she said, and gave me a sad halfsmile, as if to say she’d told this story before and didn’t always get the response she hoped for.

  According to Roxana, her great-grandfather started buying up properties on the left side of the Urubamba River, where Machu Picchu sits, in the years before Bingham arrived. He eventually accumulated a parcel that included all of Machu Picchu and much of the Inca Trail. Bingham struck a deal to give the landowner one third of any treasures that he found on his property. Since Machu Picchu had long since been picked over by grave robbers—and Bingham snuck out his teammates’ few valuable finds—Roxana’s great-grandfather wound up with nothing from the dig. After Bingham left, interest in Machu Picchu subsided and the site became overgrown again, an attraction only to huaqueros who almost surely went home empty-handed.