Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (4 page)

So by the time he wrote of the ‘Discovery’ (as he came to capitalize it) in this book, he had told the tale many times before and knew precisely how to present it to maximum effect. The original terse phrases he had jotted down in his notebook – ‘Houses, streets, stairs. Finely cut stone.’ – were now expanded into a theatrical sequence of architectural wonder, in which each new building was applauded at its entrance.

In the early
National Geographic
account, he had kept to a more prosaic description:

Even in this, one can already see how Bingham was beginning to apply hindsight to his own perceptions at the time: the shift to what was really a discovery in retrospect was already starting. Did he really believe when he found it that this was ‘the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America’?

In
Lost City of the Incas
, this early paragraph becomes a whole chapter in itself, and his account of the discovery of the ruins is full of elaborate sleight of hand and literary devices: the bridge that they manage to cross even though it was swept away a few days later; the snake they never see but which would have sprung at them if they had; his companions who decide not to accompany him and the guide who has to be persuaded that it will be worth his while; the trailed suggestion that, in a country where ‘one can never tell whether a report is worthy of credence’, he may well be the victim of a loose rumour. One masterful moment occurs when Bingham is offered ‘cool, delicious water’ at a hut, and contemplates abandoning what may be a pointless quest for the delights of the view and a siesta (lesser men, he quietly implies, would have done just that). But he presses on to the discovery itself.

And here he makes the most of the contrast between the local guide, who cannot appreciate the glories he is revealing, and Bingham himself, who immediately does. It has the effect of
making Bingham seem to be the only person present as these architectural glories are unveiled to him, a private audience for both explorer and reader, and he tells the story in a masterful and compelling way, given the static nature of his subject. The word ‘suddenly’ is repeated no less than three times over as many paragraphs. The language is hallucinogenic, spiralling: ‘It seemed like an unbelievable dream … it fairly took my breath away … surprise followed surprise in bewildering succession … the sight held me spellbound …’

This is his literary re-invention of the discovery – it is what he thinks it should have been like for him. In the process some inconvenient facts are suppressed, as his son Alfred has pointed out in his candid memoir: in reality the ruins had already been cleared by Indian farmers living there, as Bingham’s own first photographs reveal, whereas in
Lost City of the Incas
they are described as being covered by the overgrowth of a tropical forest. But Bingham is merely doing what almost all explorers do. Excavation and archaeological evaluation is a slow process, and rather than describe paint drying, Bingham has merely compressed his slow realization of Machu Picchu’s importance, which took some years, into the heady euphoria of a single afternoon.

Bingham’s account also needs to be appreciated within a literary as well as an archaeological context. Conan Doyle published
The Lost World
in the same year that Bingham excavated at Machu Picchu, and
Lost City of the Incas
was written with a clear sense of what the public expected from a work of adventure, right down to the similarity in titles. This, after all, was a continent where, as Conan Doyle put it, ‘the more you knew of South America, the more you would understand that anything was possible – anything.’

There was a well-known canon of adventure novels which gave Bingham his literary tropes, from Jules Verne’s
La Jangada
, an account of the descent of the Amazon, to the works of Rider Haggard: trusty companions, unreliable natives and clues given by some ancient chronicle. (The relationship between writers and explorers was a symbiotic one – Conan Doyle had, in his
turn, based
The Lost World
narrative on recent accounts of the Mato Grosso by the British explorer Colonel Fawcett.)

It is not surprising that Bingham quoted from Kipling’s poem ‘The Explorer’ when talking of the lure of the Vilcabamba – ‘Something hidden! Go and find it!/ Go and look behind the ranges –/ Something lost behind the ranges –/ Lost and waiting for you. Go!’ – for that virile Edwardian literary style was precisely what he aspired to.

In
Lost City of the Incas
, rivers are always raging, paths treacherous and mountains precipitous. A good example comes early on, in the journey to Choquequirao, when Bingham, as so often, uses the literary construction ‘it seemed as though …’: ‘it seemed as though our heavily laden mules must surely lose their footing and roll down the fifteen hundred feet to the raging Apurímac river below.’ Anyone who has travelled in this area knows that human travellers are more likely to lose their footing than mules, but no matter. Likewise at the bridge below on the Apurímac: ‘to cross it seemed like certain death.’

Yet along with his occasional hyperbole, Bingham has an eye for the sublimities of the landscape he is passing through – his descriptions of the fecundity and drama of the Vilcabamba are unsurpassed. The engaging candour he has already shown with the admission that his initial interest in Inca ruins was accidental continues throughout the book. He is good too on the minutiae of an explorer’s life, which a more academic account might leave out – the gnats, the rain and the continual uncertainties.

Above all Bingham has an admirably catholic approach to exploration. In the manner of Humboldt a century earlier, he is intrigued by a whole range of phenomena, from geology to etymology and the living conditions of the Quechua Indians he encounters.

No one would ever call him a specialist archaeologist, as he is happy to reveal in the text – an admission that academic archaeologists have patronized him for ever since, even as they excavate the sites he found for them.

Such is the fame of Machu Picchu that it is easy to overlook
Bingham’s very substantial achievement in making his next discovery. For with some careful detective work, he succeeded in his original purpose – to find the site of the old Inca capital, Vitcos, and the nearby temple of Chuquipalta, or ‘Ñusta Isppana, the White Rock’, as Bingham called it.

It may be less impressive architecturally, but Vitcos has a historical resonance that Machu Picchu does not: here Manco Inca, the great guerrilla leader of the last Incas, ruled and died, assassinated by treacherous Spanish guests in the plaza. Bingham’s discovery of it was a model of the conscientious use of source material, and no one has ever contested his identification of the site. The White Rock was a similarly evocative discovery.

Nor did Bingham stop there. He carried on over a high pass into genuinely wild and untravelled country, descending towards the Amazon. This was what he enjoyed most – the chase for ruins. As anyone who has ever followed Bingham’s footsteps can verify, this called for real tenacity of purpose – no mountain range seems to have been too high for him, no jungle too uninviting.

Travelling with just the Yale companion he found most congenial, Harry Foote, Bingham discovered more buildings at a place called Espíritu Pampa, or, as he translates it, ‘the Plain of Ghosts’. This settlement was covered by such dense rainforest that Bingham only uncovered a small portion and remained unaware of its full extent. Indeed, so large is the plaza at Espíritu Pampa that when Bingham crossed it and found houses on either side, he assumed that he had found a scattered settlement of isolated buildings with little in between, rather than the central civic space of a city. This was a natural mistake to make. Not until 1964 was the full extent of the site at Espíritu Pampa revealed by a later American explorer, Gene Savoy.

Even from the few buildings that Bingham did find, logic dictated that this must have been the final refuge of the Incas, the ‘city of Vilcabamba’ which the chroniclers mentioned after the Spanish had driven them from Vitcos. In his journal notes from the time, Bingham admitted this logic to himself. But he also
yearned to explain Machu Picchu. Perhaps it could have been ‘the place of last retreat’?

By twisting the kaleidoscope of geographical and historical references to the ‘city of Vilcabamba’, Bingham was later able to argue, if tortuously, for such an attribution. It is not one that any modern scholar would agree with, as John Hemming has conclusively argued in his book
The Conquest of the Incas
. Additional source material discovered since Bingham’s time confirms the identification of Espíritu Pampa as ‘the old Vilcabamba’ of the chronicles, near to which the Spanish captured the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, and took him back to Cuzco for execution.

Nor does Bingham’s other theory, that Machu Picchu was the birthplace of the Incas, have any champions. Yet his description of the actual buildings of Machu Picchu is thorough and astute, and he brought real intelligence to bear on problems such as the Inca use of roofs and doors. His impulse to assign a central role to Machu Picchu in Inca history was a natural result of his appreciation of the virtuosity of the architecture, even if the conclusions he reached were wrong. Compared to some of the wild theories that were to follow, his speculations seem tame.

So what was the function of Machu Picchu? To discuss that question at length is beyond the scope of this introduction, but the short answer currently favoured by many experts, based on a document discovered in 1983, is that it was probably built by the greatest of all the Incas, Pachacuti, who began the explosive expansion of the Empire in the mid-fifteenth century. A further supposition is that he may have used it as a magnificent country estate, when he wanted to retreat from Cuzco to warmer quarters. His descendants built other similar estates for their own use, of which Choquequirao may also be one, and thus Machu Picchu was abandoned after Pachacuti’s death.

Bingham’s own attributions of Machu Picchu’s function were to come much later, as he tried to digest what he had discovered. In 1911, on the return from Espíritu Pampa, he did not even bother to revisit the actual site when he passed by, despite having a day in hand. He left the clearing and mapping of it to the two
least experienced members of his team and pressed on to try to climb Mt Coropuna, which he duly did. When he took altitude readings on the top, he discovered to his natural disappointment that it was not the highest mountain in the Americas – Mt Aconcagua beat it, as do others – but it still remains a very impressive climb of a 20,800-feet peak, over an untried route.

Only when it came to writing up his experiences back home did he start to tease out the problem and the potential of Machu Picchu. His initial expedition reports talked more of the bones ‘of early man’ that they had found than of the Inca sites, but this quickly changed when he realized, to his embarrassment, that the bones were not necessarily as old as had been imagined. Then he wrote an account of his ascent of Mt Coropuna, but this likewise failed to ignite the reading public.

Meanwhile Sir Clements Markham was the first to publish a report on Bingham’s archaeological discoveries in Vilcabamba, ‘a region of peculiar interest’, in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society of December 1911. He makes the briefest of references to a site Bingham had called ‘Macchu-Pichu, where there was a group of Inca edifices, built with large stones beautifully worked. One of the walls contained three windows of unusual size.’ Markham went on to note, in the tones of a concerned school-master, ‘this is the pith of the present instalment of information received from Mr Bingham. I trust that it is the forerunner of a fuller topographical description …’

Bingham decided to give far more than just a ‘fuller topographical description’. After a further season’s excavation at Machu Picchu in 1912 had confirmed its importance, he launched a publicity offensive. He persuaded
National Geographic
both to sponsor his expeditions and to take the unusual step of devoting the entire April 1913 issue of their magazine to his discoveries, with the title ‘In the Wonderland of Peru’. Under the breathless heading ‘The Ruins of an Ancient Inca capital, Machu Picchu’, the magazine proclaimed:

Allowing for a little looseness with dates (Machu Picchu was built approximately 550 years ago, not 2,000), this was the Hollywood image that grabbed the public’s imagination. A dramatic triple fold-out poster was issued with the magazine, showing the city from the viewpoint that was to become so familiar, sprawled across a mountain ridge with Huayna Picchu ascending behind. Machu Picchu had begun its role as the pinup of twentieth-century archaeology.