A FORGOTTEN CITY OF THE ANDES
The traveler of to-day is seldom granted the pleasure of visiting really
new territory. How much more rarely comes the joy of being one of the
first of modern men to tread the streets of an entire city, unrivaled in
location and unknown to history! Such, however, is the privilege of
those who come up to Cuzco in these days with the time and disregard for
roughing it necessary to visit Machu Picchu.
The mysterious, white-granite city of the Incas or their predecessors
now called by that name was unknown to civilized man and the world until
Professor Hiram Bingham of Yale visited the site in 1911, to come back a
year later in charge of the expedition that cleared it of the rampant
jungle growth and the oblivion of ages. Here was uncovered what are
perhaps the most splendid pre-Columbian ruins in the Western Hemisphere,
most splendid because, in addition to being the most important—except
Cuzco itself—discovered since the Conquest, they have not been wrecked
by treasure-hunters or confused with Spanish building. The account of
the find had overtaken me in Lima, and all the four-hundred-mile tramp
across Peru to the ancient City of the Sun had been gladdened by the
anticipation of visiting a spot that not only promised extraordinary
interest in itself, but had the added attraction of being difficult of
access.
I had planned to travel to Machu Picchu alone and afoot. In Cuzco,
however, it was my good fortune to run across Professor R—— of our
Middle West, and to change in consequence my customary mode of
transportation. We called on the prefect together. His mind wandered, as
do those of all his class, to his _cholita_ or whatever it is that sends
the Andean official wool-gathering, even while he puzzled to account for
the joint appearance of a famous sociologist recommended by the
President of the Republic and a tramp who had arrived on foot. His
secretary at length delivered an impressive document informing whomever
it might concern that we were going to “Mansupisco.” When I protested,
the prefect assured the professor it was often spelled that way. I
insisted, whereupon he and the secretary sneaked off and found a
geography, and this time got all right except the date. That was a week
behind time, which was perhaps in keeping with the local color.
Martinelli of the cinema, who volunteered to accompany us, owned a coast
horse and a wise gray _macho_, leaving the prefect to obey his
telegraphic orders only to the extent of furnishing another animal
capable of keeping the professor’s feet off the ground. This was not so
easy as it may sound, for the professor had finally halted in his
physical rise in the world about midway between the six and seven foot
mark, and the horses of the Andes are rarely spoken of without tacking
on the Spanish diminutive, _ito_.
Having already spent more than a year among the people of the Andes, I
was by no means so surprised as the professor when, upon descending in
full road regalia to the cobbled street at six, we found no sign of the
horse the prefect had solemnly promised to have standing saddled at our
hotel door at five. Some things come to him who waits—long enough—even
in Peru, however, and by the time the third round of anecdotes was
ended, there broke the street vista and drifted down upon us a Peruvian
soldier in full accoutrements, bestriding a sorrowful little black mule
and leading as gaunt and decrepit a _chusco_ as even I had ever seen
among those shaggy ponies that masquerade under the name of horse
throughout the Andes. The soldier dismounted and saluted. The professor
stood gazing abstractedly down upon the animal, no doubt drawing a
mental picture of himself in the rôle of Don Quixote, with the added
touch of dragging his toes on the ground over 150 miles of Andean
trails. With a snort, and a speed that proved his four years in the
United States had not been entirely misspent, Martinelli disappeared in
the direction of the prefectura. Before another hour had drifted into
the past he reappeared, followed by a second soldier leading a real
horse from the corral of the officers of the garrison.
“How did you manage it?” I asked, in admiration.
“I raised hell,” said Martinelli, tightening the girth of his own
animal.
“What Peru most needs,” mused the professor, who has the happy faculty
of now and then giving his professional vocabulary a furlough, “is about
ten thousand of you young fellows educated abroad to come home here and
raise hell.”
Plainly the professor was already beginning to get a real mental grasp
on South America.
We transferred the government saddle to the real horse and by eight were
clattering away over the cobblestones of the City of the Incas, the
soldier on his sorrowful black mule bringing up a funereal rear. This
was doing very well indeed. To get off on the same day planned, at any
hour whatever, is no slight feat in the Andes. Such of Cuzco as had
already lifted its frowsy head from the pillow gazed hazy-eyed out upon
us as we wound and clashed our stony way up out of the city by that
breakneck stairway down which I had descended from my trans-Peruvian
journey. The morning sunlight fell weirdly upon the City of the Sun
below when we reached the notch in the hills where all Indians pause
before the last view of the sacred capital of their ancestors to murmur,
with bared heads, “O Cuzco, Great City, I bid thee adieu!”
As we jogged on in the sunny October morning across the bare, colorful,
cool hills of Cuzco toward the lofty pampa beyond, I turned to ask the
soldier behind:
“Cómo te llamas?”
“Tomás,” he replied, with a military salute, “Tomás Cobino, sargento de
la Gendarmería Nacional.”
“Can you be that same Tomás who was with the Americans in Machu Picchu?”
“Sí, señor, I attended _los yanquis_ three months in their
treasure-hunts.”
The means has not yet been found of convincing the people of the Sierra
that digging about old ruins can have any motive other than that of
seeking the traditional treasures of the Incas.
A few miles out, the road was in the throes of “repair” by a large gang
of Indians, under command of the alguaciles of the neighboring hamlets,
who stood haughtily by, firmly grasping their silver-mounted staffs of
office. They looked not at all like worldlings, but like men from Mars
commanded by sixteenth-century pirates. At first we met many
mule-trains, Cuzco-bound, the leaders wearing about their necks long
jangling bells with wooden clappers. The Cuzco Indian, of the color of
old brass, with his bare legs, scanty knee-breeches, and flat,
black-and-red _montera_, sneaked noiselessly by with the air of a
whipped cur, fawningly removing his pancake hat and murmuring an abject
“Amripusma.” The greeting sounded like Quichua, but is merely what
becomes of the Spanish “Ave María Purísima” in the mouth of the
aboriginal. The professor showed great astonishment to find even the
women raising their hats in salutation, but Martinelli and I had long
since grown to expect it. In his democracy he touched his own hat and
repeated “Buenos días, señor” to each Indian’s greeting, instead of
acknowledging it with a surly grunt or haughty silence, in the Peruvian
fashion. He would have been astonished to know how the startled native
cudgeled his primitive brain all the way home, there to roll about his
mud hut telling his fellows how he had met a “kara” so roaring drunk
that he called him “señor,” as if he were a white man.
Within an hour the trail swung to the right. Away over our left
shoulders lay that splendid Plain of Anta, rich with cattle and
historical memories of the Conquistadores. The distant bleat of sheep
now and then drew our eyes to a bedraggled little Indian shepherdess,
armed with a sling, and spinning incessantly, automatically, the crude
native yarn on her cruder spindle of a quinoa-stalk run through a potato
as whirl-bob, as she edged cautiously away. These lonely guardians of
the flocks are not infrequently pursued with impunity by native
travelers, and are even known to resort to mechanical means to frustrate
attack. In this treeless region the doors of the Indians’ dismal mud
hovels were of stiff, sun-dried, hairy cowhides. As the bare world rose
still higher, even these miserable dwellings died out, and only the
bleak, brown uplands of the Andes spread about us on every hand.
In mid-morning we topped a great bare _puna_, from the chilly summit of
which the white-crested Central Cordillera stretched like some mighty
wall across the entire horizon, the snow-peaks and glaciers thrusting
their hoary heads through the less-white banks of clouds. Then a vast
Andean valley, like those that had long since grown so familiar to me,
yet were always beautiful, opened out before us, in its lap the town of
Maras, tinted the pale red of its aged tile roofs. The great rolling,
red-brown basin was surrounded by age-wrinkled mountainsides speckled
with little shadowed valleys and perpendicular _chacras_, or tiny Indian
farms, hung on their flanks like small paintings on slightly inclined
walls. We halted for dinner with the gobernador, and for _chala_, as the
Incas called dried cornstalks with half-matured ears; and to admire the
far-reaching view and the cut-stone doorways of mud houses sculptured
with bastard Inca-Christian designs.
We went on again over the high, brown, barren world, the wind-swept
summit of each succeeding land-wave bringing again above the horizon the
great snow-crested wall that each time seemed near, yet all the jogging
day appeared not a yard nearer. At three we came suddenly to a vast
split in the earth, into which we began to go down and ever down by
acute zigzags and stony _cuestas_ that grew so steep we had to dismount
and lead our animals. Before and below us spread the magnificent cañon
of the Urubamba, that river of many names which, rising near Titicaca,
at length adds its bit to the giant Amazon. Spring plowing was in
progress on the valley floor, walled by mountains as far as the eye
could reach in either direction. Over this rampart the sun still peered
when we reached the level of the river at last and, picking up the road
from up the valley, jogged down along it.
Stone-faced terraces of the Incas were frequent; here and there far up
the sheer enclosing bluffs were the ruins of pre-Conquest watch-towers
of rough stone. At times the road was itself one of these ancient
terraces, the retaining wall of the one above rubbing our left elbows, a
sheer drop of some eight feet to that below close on our right. In
places the river itself was faced and narrowed by massive cut-stones.
The exotic iron bridge, replacing to-day the former one of braided
withes, by which we crossed to Ollantaytambo had a central pier of those
enormous boulders which the bygone race seemed to toss about at will.
We rode to the bare, mud-hutted plaza past splendid wrought-stone walls
of what had once been palaces little inferior to those of Cuzco. The
local “authority” bowed low over our “passport” and turned the
_gobernación_ over to us for the night. This was an all but windowless
second-story room opening on the unfurnished plaza, with a springy earth
floor laid on poles. Into it shrinking alguaciles lugged our baggage and
a rheumatic table and bench, without once releasing their staffs of
office. Tomás, our soldier-servant, had found the bringing up of the
rear a heavy task, and he and his worn and sorrowful black mule arrived
with the last rays of the setting sun. Meanwhile, the egg supply of
Ollantaytambo having been greatly reduced, we spread our saddle-blankets
and lay down with heads to the walls; for the slope of the floor was
such that to stretch along them would have been to fetch up before
morning in a tangled confusion in the middle of the room.
Like Limatambo, near which Chusquito had ended our joint career,
Ollantaytambo was one of the four fortresses and rest-houses, each about
twelve leagues out on the Inca highways that sallied forth from Cuzco to
the “Four Corners of the Earth.” Its ruins, among the most striking in
South America, consist of fairly recent Inca structures alternating with
remains of unknown antiquity. Unquestioned history, however, has little
to say of the great wrought-stone fortress in the best “Inca style” on
the hill overlooking the town; the several splendid defensive walls, on
the general plan of Sacsahuaman, being topped off with any chips of
stone at hand, as if at the sudden appearance of besiegers. This might
suggest that a later race of less energy had taken advantage of the
works of more hardy ancestors, but for the mystery of the “Tired Stones”
of porphyry, the largest 25 by 10 by 5 feet in dimensions, which lie
abandoned all the way from the town to the quarry far up near the top of
the mountain wall across the river, down the face of which they were
tobogganed.
Ollantaytambo unquestionably was once densely populated. On all sides it
is surrounded by remarkable terraces, some still under half-hearted
cultivation, long and flat, with barely a foot difference in each
succeeding level, on the valley floor; narrow and high-walled on the
swift mountainsides and for miles up a side gully to the east. The
inhabitants of to-day, unemotional, bath-fearing, Quichua-speaking
Indians, as in all this region, still occupy much of the old “Inca”
town, with its shoulder-wide streets between massive stone walls that
grow more and more careless in construction in direct ratio to their
distance from the center. Whole blocks of these ancient houses are still
intact, except for the roofs, a single doorway giving entrance to each
block. Strangely enough, this was the same unbroken exterior wall around
an interior court common to the Moor and Spaniard. Had it fallen to men
of the Anglo-Saxon race to overthrow the empire of the Incas, they would
have been vastly more struck by the aboriginal architecture than were
the Conquistadores.
Enormous cut-stones are here and there incorporated with the buildings
of to-day; as in Cuzco, many an adobe second-story has been superimposed
on the walls of what must have been at least a king’s palace. Far up the
sheer bluff behind the ancient town hangs the “school,” bright yellow in
color, constructed, according to the alcalde, of some concrete-like
substance that has not disintegrated under the rain and sunshine of
centuries. From below it looks more like a five-story building than the
five terraces piled one above the other on the inaccessible face of the
mountain, which it really is. If, as is commonly accepted, it was a
school for children of the nobles—for the Incas, like the priests who
have inherited their power, did not believe in education for the common
people—a daily climb to and descent from it eliminated any necessity for
a course in physical training. Whether the “school” was built by another
race, or whether those whose massive monuments cover the site below
could not carry their blocks of stone so far aloft, is but another of
those baffling mysteries that hover forever over the ruins of the Andes.
About the town are several “baths” of carved stone, which may rather
have been reservoirs for drinking water—I for one will not believe that
a bath was ever a part of the equipment of the Andean Indian. As
everywhere within a radius of many miles about Cuzco, every possible
boulder, ground-stone, or rock-ledge is carved into seats, steps,
dungeon-like grottoes, every fantastic shape a tyrannic mind could have
conceived, a score of grotesque forms that can only be accounted for as
the whims of some despot. The ancient Peruvian emperors seem to have
believed, as firmly as the windjammer’s “bo’s’n” who sets his crew to
picking oakum, in the relationship between idle hands and mischief, and
to have assigned the otherwise unengaged the task of carving the nearest
boulder.
With the remaining half of the seventy-five miles from Cuzco to
Mandorpampa before us, we were away betimes in the soft, early-summer
morning, tinged with coolness from off the half-hidden snow-clads above,
as we rode northeastward into the sunrise down the right bank of the
Urubamba. Gradually, as the morning warmed, the blue-white glaciers of
Piri and its neighbors shook off their night wraps of clouds, until they
stood forth above us in all their massive grandeur. The valley narrowed
to a cañon, and that to a gorge, with repulsive, bare mountain walls
standing precipitously more than a thousand feet into the sky on either
hand. Here and there the rock-broiling river was hurried between
retaining walls laboriously constructed by the bygone race. Often these
alone held us up, as the precipice shouldered us to the sheer edge of
the stream; sometimes, indeed, the road was hewn out of the
perpendicular mountainside and carried tremulously across from one solid
foothold to another on patched-up props of stone. Straight above us on
virtually unassailable crags were the ruins of walls, and perhaps small
forts, the holders of which might have showered down boulders squarely
upon us—had they not centuries since been laid away in their
bottle-shaped graves, hugging their osseous knees. On the inaccessible
left bank were scores of ancient terraces. For miles every available
inch of the mountainside had once been prepared for cultivation. Small,
indeed, must have been the laborer’s wage, a daily handful of beans and
corn, in this once densely populated cañon, where the struggle for
existence forced the construction of an eight-foot wall of stone to
uphold a four-foot shelf of cultivation.
[Illustration:
Spring plowing in the Urubamba Valley. The woman in front is
scattering manure, the man behind dropping seed potatoes and
covering them by a flip of the bare foot]
Hourly it grew more perfect summer, and ever more delightful views and
magnificent vistas broke unexpectedly upon us, contrasting strangely
with the bleak, wind-swept puna of the day before. The old trail from
Cuzco to the tropical montaña climbed sulkily away up a side quebrada
toward the dreary uplands. This new road to Santa Ana had only recently
made accessible for the first time in modern days this marvelous cañon
of the Urubamba. It was nowhere steep. We went down by frequent little
stony descents, with no corresponding rises, half-aware of now and then
standing in our stirrups as our animals dropped from under us, the
conscious self gazing at the enthralling scene below and above. Frequent
pack-trains passed us, bound upward out of the hot-lands with cargoes of
fiery native aguardiente, in leather skins inside cloth-wrapped wooden
frames, or long cylindrical packages of coca-leaves such as the drivers
were chewing. Often the meetings were at points where only extreme
vigilance saved us from being pushed over the precipice; for, though our
right of way gave us the mountainside, the pack-animals, shy of the
roaring stream below, sought to crowd in between us and the wall, in
spite of the threatening cries and whistling of their arrieros.
At eleven we stopped for “breakfast.” By the time we were in the saddle
again the vegetation began to grow frankly tropical. The approach to the
vast Amazonian lowlands was heralded by trees, then by whole forests
climbing the lower flanks of the hills that cut in alternately from
either side; then they began clothing the lower ridges and the flanks of
the mountains themselves, in delightful contrast to the dreary
treelessness of the upper heights. The first full-grown trees of the
montaña, crowding in among the hardy shrubs of the lower highlands,
began to stand forth against the irregular patches of sky ahead. Jungle
brush and undergrowth sprang up about us. Moss and tropical herbage took
to draping the moist rocks and boulders, until even the perpendicular
face of the mountain clothed itself in lush-green vegetation. Ferns, the
first I had seen in months, appeared, and quickly grew to their gigantic
tropical forms. Orchids were plentiful, and other flowers of brilliant
colors. The government telegraph wire that had followed us across the
bleak, wind-swept puna the day before, on poles shriveled with the cold,
began to jump gaily from parasite-laden tree to tree. Brooks of
sparkling clear water came leaping down from the unseen glaciers and
frozen heights above, to the joy of both man and beast. A condor,
volplaning on motionless wings high above the mountain wall, looked like
a sparrow mingled with the white clouds that flecked the summer sky. A
soft wind caressed us, and upon us fell that lazy, contented mood that
always follows a descent from the cold, nerve-straining páramo.
As we descended still deeper into the fastnesses of the Andes, the solid
granite precipices, rising sheer thousands of feet from the foaming
rapids to the clouds, remained at the same height; but the valley of the
river continued to descend, and gave us the curious effect of seeming to
see the mountains that shut us in rise ever higher into the sky. The
cañon of the Urubamba had shrunk to a resounding gorge of sharp V-shape,
with virtually no room left for cultivation, so that even the hardy
_andenes_ of the ancients were crowded out of existence, and only the
imperious river forced its way through the mountains, permitting the
narrow road to follow on the precarious footholds blasted for it along
one of the towering granite walls. We began to meet yellow, fever-eyed
walking skeletons, straggling languidly up from the tropical valleys.
These increased until all the few travelers were gaunt and hollow-eyed,
and of a lifeless cast of countenance. Now a humid jungle hemmed us in;
impenetrable tropical forest covered all the tumbled mountain world
about us, the further ranges blue-black with distance, an unbroken
wilderness in which might lie buried a score of forgotten cities. Trees
assumed those fantastic shapes that startle or mock the tropical
traveler. Lianas, those great climbing vines over which the northern
school-boy dreams before his open geography while the snow swirls about
the shivering window, swung languidly from these giants of the jungle.
The rampant vegetation clutched playfully at us along the way; now and
again a branch reached forth and whipped us in our sweated faces. The
drowsy chorus of the jungles sounded about us; the tropical joy of life
took possession even of the professor, rousing him to song, so that the
cañon resounded with discordant, rumbling Middle-Western noises.
Toward four the beautiful jagged peak of Huayna Picchu came into sight
down the winding gorge, puffs of white clouds hovering about it; and we
knew we were approaching our goal. But things moved with ever more
tropical languor. In places the road became a stony stairway down which
we must pick our way step by step; in others it was pieced together with
slivers of rock to keep it from falling sheer into the angry stream
below. The impending crags squeezed the trail to the extreme edge, so
that an unwary horseman, gazing at the riches of nature about him, was
not infrequently rapped on the head by jagged points of rock left by the
dynamite of the trail-builders. Tropical birds of startling plumage
flitted in and out of the impenetrable undergrowth; the pungent,
death-suggesting, yet enticing scent of the tropics filled our nostrils.
The sun abandoned us early, and left us with a sense of being down in
some great well dreamily wondering whether we should ever again reach
the broad, open world above.
Dusk was falling when the road wandered out upon a bit of flat meadow,
squeezed between the mountain wall and the now calmer river, facing the
breakneck slopes of Huayna Picchu. This was Mandorpampa. A
grass-thatched hut on poles served as tambo. As we hung our alforjas
over the unhewn beams, an unattractive half-breed, past middle age and
scented with fire-water, appeared from the adjoining hut he occupied
with a flock of Quichua-speaking women and children. It was he who had
first guided _los yanquis_ to the then jungle-hidden Machu Picchu. He
had long known of the ruins, as had other natives, but had never
considered them extensive or important. Indeed, he seemed still to have
a distinctly low opinion of them as “things of the Gentiles,” not to be
compared with the Cathedral of Cuzco, with its tin saints and tinseled
Virgins. He promised to climb to the site with us in the morning,
however, for a consideration, and I fell to preparing supper over my
miniature cooking-range.
After it, we sat for a time in the heavy, humming, tropical night,
listening to the _chirrido_ of jungle crickets and striving by anecdote
and song to keep up the professor’s spirits, drooping under the dread of
snakes and vipers and the thousand subtle dangers of the tropics. For
the night we arranged that Martinelli should share with the family
chickens the pole couch of the Indian’s “guest-room,” knowing that, as a
Peruvian, he preferred to sleep in as airless a spot as possible, while
the professor and I prepared to hoist ourselves up into the garret of
small poles under the low thatched roof of the tambo. It was like
stowing a piano on an upper bookshelf, but we got a bit of our “beds”
bunched under us at last, and when the poles had ceased to sag and
creak, I fell asleep.
The humid darkness was showing signs of fading when I woke the professor
from a night during which, by his own testimony, he had not slept a
wink. The cause of his insomnia was not lack of comfort, for the
professor is an experienced man of the woods, but a great mental
anguish. An insect had stung him on a knuckle. Now the professor had
just come from investigating that dread disease of the Andes knows as
_uta_, from the Quichua word for rot, which, beginning in just such an
insect bite, eats away the victim’s flesh until he is hurried at
breakneck speed into the grave. His was too fixed a place in the life of
our Middle West to afford to be rotted away here in the Peruvian jungle
by a mere insect. Naturally he wanted our earnest examination and
experienced opinion whether we should, after all, climb to Machu Picchu
or hurry back to Cuzco to call a conference of the medical wiseacres. I
examined the bite solicitously. There was no doubt that it was merely
the preliminary nibble of the myriad insects that would have fallen upon
us in earnest, and tattooed us with the strange patterns I had already
often worn, had we descended another five thousand feet into the real
tropics. But one cannot put such things cruelly and baldly to a
companion weighed down by the intangible dread of the subtle,
pest-infested hot-lands, from which no man is free upon his first
descent into them. Between us we convinced the professor that he would
in all probability outlive the day, and by fog-bound six we were off.
[Illustration:
“As we rode eastward into the sunrise down the gorge of the Urubamba,
glacier-clad Piri above threw off its night wraps of clouds”]
[Illustration:
The semicircular tower and some of the finest stone-cutting and
fitting of Machu Picchu. The vegetation had already begun to grow up
again but a few months after the site had been cleared]
The lover of ardent waters had concluded that he could not possibly get
his various activities in shape to accompany us before eight, and we
decided to hobble along without his historical assistance. We paid him
two _soles_ to keep the animals well fed and, lest the matter slip his
mind, left Tomás with him as a perpetual reminder. This left us well
burdened with our “beds” and the supplies necessary to pass the night,
for I would not hear of paying the forgotten city only a flying visit.
Being the only one in Andean training, I volunteered to carry the
surplus and, bowed under a bulky sixty-five pounds held by a llama-hair
rope across my chest, like any Indian cargador, I led the way back along
the road, planning to boast myself forever after the equal of any
aboriginal burden-bearer of the Andes. Barely had I reconciled myself to
the perpendicular climb in store for us under such a load, however, when
we came upon a gang of Indians chopping the boulder-imbedded roadway
higher back under the edge of the cliff for flood-time. The foreman
offered us carriers. None of them were large; beside the professor the
impassive fellows approached dwarfishness, and I uttered a protest when
Martinelli waved a thumb at by no means the largest. But my fancied
equality to the human freight-trains of the Andes oozed away as suddenly
as the rotundity of a pricked wine-skin. When, the Indian had swung upon
his back the burden I had been staggering under on a level roadway,
Martinelli nonchalantly tossed his twenty-five pounds on top of it. A
bit further on that unfeeling savage paused at one of the pole-and-leaf
shelters of the workmen under the edge of the impending cliff and added
a pair of blankets, a coca-bag, and several other personal odds and
ends, then waltzed away as lightly as a prairie chicken under its
tail-feathers—faster than we cared to follow.
Perhaps two miles back, a hidden path plunged swiftly down through the
wet, clinging jungle to the sapling bridge that hung precariously from
rock to boulder across the river. Beyond the snarling stream, which
snatched impotently at us as we passed, sagging, a perpendicular jungled
mountainside, apparently impenetrable, stared impassively down upon us.
But when we had clambered and tripped some distance over the rocks and
jagged boulders at the edge of the raging torrent, a hole in the
undergrowth, like the lair of some wild animal, proved to be the
beginning of a trail, now overgrown almost to nothing.
The first mile up was through densest wet jungle. We climbed clutching
at the vegetation as at the hair of some giant head we were striving to
surmount. The average slope was perhaps sixty-five degrees, though there
were places virtually perpendicular where to lose an Andean
level-headedness would have been to pitch many yards down toward the now
hoarse river below. According to local repute, this section was
notorious for its venomous snakes, particularly a little ten-inch
_víbora_ whose bite is certain death unless the victim instantly adopts
the heroic measures of the Indians and carves out a Shylockian chunk of
flesh, cauterize the wound with a hot iron, and retire a half-year to
recuperate. But as with all tales of robbers, dangers, and sudden death
on the road ahead, that behind me trailed out harmless and unexciting.
Gradually the heavy jungle gave way to a lighter, stunted growth that
had once been burned over and on which the sun blazed down mercilessly.
Up the all but sheer face of this the trail sweated in sharp zigzags.
Rumiñaui, as we had dubbed our stony-eyed carrier, kept steadily above
us, and though he panted a bit, it was the least burdened of us who
called now and then for a breathing-spell. Dry-tongued with thirst, we
came at last to an almost level shelf of the mountain, with a patch of
shade. In it grew a “Spanish tomato” shaped like a huge strawberry, of a
double acidity that throttled our thirst for the moment. Somewhat higher
we found ourselves mounting ancient agricultural terraces. These were
walls of rough stone, head high, that sustained level spaces of like
width. Far from being under cultivation, the rich, black soil of these
artificial mountain shelves nourished an all but impassable tangle of
new jungle growth; and the trunks of great trees that had been felled
and charred over cut us off in many directions. By working our way
laboriously back and forth, and gradually mounting several terraces, now
by a canted tree-trunk, now by the four projecting stones set stair-like
in the faces of the walls, by which the prehistoric husbandmen mounted
and descended, we found a terrace along which we could tear our way, and
came out at last, nearly two hours above the river, on the sheer edge of
things. Machu Picchu lay before us.
My first impression was tinged with disappointment. Aside from the
universal experience of finding a long-heralded scene striking in
inverse ratio to the length of time the imagination has fed upon it, my
mental picture of a city seemed to call for skyscrapers crowded together
over a vast area that could be bound closely together only by a
rapid-transit system. Measured by these subconscious standards, the town
the Incas or their predecessors had left here in the beautiful
fastnesses of the Urubamba was small. But at least it had been our good
fortune to catch the first sight of it from a splendid point of vantage.
Well below us, and across a gully so deep as to be almost a valley, the
abandoned city lay spread out under the gorgeous Andean sunshine in all
its white-granite brilliancy; and if all the town could not be included
in a view from this point, or from any other, that view included all the
finer buildings, and left out chiefly the extensive _andenes_ and the
third-class houses of those who lived on and worked them. Though
roofless, it was otherwise a complete city, in so fine a state of
preservation that the beholder felt like one of the old Spanish
Conquistadores in those enviable years when there were still new worlds
to discover.
On a gigantic scale, its site was that of an ancient feudal castle. A
mountain ridge defended by nature in one of her most solitary moods, and
including within its confines the steeple-pointed peak of Huayna Picchu,
fell away on every side by tremendous precipices into the fearful void
of the Urubamba, a sheer unbroken two thousand feet to the thread-like
river that makes a three fourths circle around it; while beyond,
pregnant with mystery of impassable jungle and the story of a bygone
race, lay a wonderful wilderness of Andean ranges, shaggy with dense
forest, pitched and tumbled and fading away in the blue-black of
unfathomable distance. Yet how strange that an entire city, a mere two
days’ ride from Cuzco, should thus have remained for centuries unknown!
Only he who knows the Latin-American will comprehend how Machu Picchu
could be so seldom visited even now, after _los yanquis_ have uncovered
it; though the cuzqueños who passively wait for foreigners to come and
do what they themselves should long since have done blandly assume
credit for the newly discovered city, as if they had some part in it
because the blood of its builders runs in their veins. Yet to the world
at large its existence was never suspected. Squier, noted for his
accuracy, says self-confidently: “Ollantaytambo was the frontier town
and fortress of the Incas in the valley of the Ucayali, as it is to-day
of their conquerors. There were outlying works some leagues lower down
at Havaspampa, but the bulwark of the Empire against the savage Antis in
this direction was Ollantaytambo.” Small wonder he heard nothing of a
place not a whisper of which has crept into all the writings of Peru
since Pizarro’s secretary first took to setting down the prowess of his
commander.
Machu Picchu was indeed a city of refuge. There is no need of Incaic
lore and the furrowed brow of the archeologist to be certain of that.
Only men scared beyond the functioning of goose-flesh would have
scurried away into this most inaccessible nook of the Andes and
scrambled up these appalling cliffs to escape their pursuers; only men
to whom labor was nothing as compared with the fear of bodily violence
would have toiled a century fitting together these gigantic boulders,
rather than sally forth and take their chances against the slings or
poisoned arrows of their enemies. The slinking, hare-hearted Cuzco
Indian of to-day may easily be their lineal descendant.
Effectively defended by nature though they were, these champions of
precaution left no loopholes. Across the gully between where we sat and
the lost city they had thrown two massive stone walls from sheer
precipice to sheerer. Outside this were most of the agricultural
terraces, for within the city proper was scant space for cultivation,
and in case of attack the peasants no doubt abandoned their fields and
raced to town. Between these walls lay a dry moat, deep and wide, while
at the city gate the fortress was constructed on the “salient” system of
Sacsahuaman, so that while a besieger was gently knocking for admittance
some member of the goose-flesh clan could stroll out on the wall above
and drop a boulder on his astonished head. Nor was that all. In every
least crevice or foothold across which the champion trapeze performer or
tight-rope artist of the besieging tribes could by any stretch of the
trembling imagination have squirmed his way, the defenders built little
patches of rock-wall, in places he only will believe who has climbed to
see; and on the tiptop of the neighboring heights, on Machu Picchu
mountain, on the steeple-point of Huayna Picchu, in every crow’s-nest
the most athletic Indian could hope to reach, were stone watch-towers,
sometimes invisible, from which certainly the sentinels had some
telegraphic means of passing word down to the cautious city. There were
no adventurers among the builders of Machu Picchu. They took no chances.
When we had drunk in this comprehensive view of the forgotten city, we
descended by projecting terrace stones and jungled zigzags and finally
by a great stone stairway to the dry moat, then by a graded approach to
the city gate, always tearing our way through thick undergrowth. For
though “los chapetes” had cleared away the dense tropical forest that
had hidden the city from civilized man since historical time began, the
rampant vegetation was striving quickly to conceal it again, as if
jealous of its beauty or guardian of its secret. Being far more
determined in its efforts than the apathetic Peruvians, it bade fair to
succeed. Already the _caña brava_ waved impudently head-high everywhere,
and what might grow to such trees as had been felled in hundreds were
already sprouting forth again here and there from between the
interstices of the splendid walls. A deserving-politician caretaker had
been appointed by the government, but he was caring for both Machu
Picchu and Ollantaytambo by living in Cuzco on his salary.
[Illustration:
“We came out on the edge of things and Machu Picchu lay before us”]
We sent Rumiñaui ahead to stack our junk under the weather-blackened
thatch roof supported by four slender legs, down in a central space that
might have been a parade-ground or a garden to fall back upon in time of
siege. There we hastened to disentangle the canvas bucket and bade him
“Unuta apamuy.” But it was more easily ordered than brought. The
cut-stone basins to which small _acequias_ had once carried water down
off the shoulders of the range behind had gone stone-dry, and as we lay
choking in the welcome shade, surviving only on the anticipation of the
cooling draughts soon to come, the Indian came wandering back with that
apathetic expressionlessness of his race—the bucket empty. Martinelli
rose up, cursing in three tongues, to lead him, and soon returned to say
that a well-filled bucket was following close behind. But Martinelli was
a Peruvian, given like all his race to counting his chickens before the
eggs are laid. After fighting his way through the jungle to the edge of
the hollow “where the spring really is,” he had neglected to descend ten
yards further through the bushes to find whether the spring really was.
So that a few yards behind his resuscitating announcement came trailing
Rumiñaui, more stony-eyed than ever, still carrying a collapsed bucket.
Audible expression of our inmost sentiments would have been the opposite
of thirst-quenching, and as each day consists of a limited number of
hours, even in the waterless tropics, I slung my kodak over a shoulder
and set out to see as much as possible before preservation of life might
force a hurried descent to the river. The fancied disappointment of the
first view had worn completely away. As the mind adapted itself to
pre-Columbian standards, the abandoned city assumed its true aspect,
that of a delicate work of art of intensive construction. Here in this
eagle’s nest of the Andes, virtually cut off from the rest of the world,
had lived an artistic and adaptable people with a capacity for
concentration of effort, for sustained endeavor, and a high grade of
efficiency now lost among the Peruvians. Virtually all the stone work of
the better part of the city was of the very best “Inca style” in plan,
cut, and fit. Nothing I had seen in all the length of the Andes, from
Cañar in the far north, could surpass these walls, rivaled only by those
of Cuzco; and even those of the City of the Sun cannot match the
charming uniform color of this white-gray granite, approaching in beauty
to pure marble. Whereas Sacsahuaman and Ollantaytambo seemed massive,
cyclopean, this new city of old gives the effect of a delicate gem in a
peerless setting—though the man of to-day ordered to tote the smallest
block in the average wall would not exactly refer to it as delicate.
Like the remains of Cuzco, the ruins are exclusively confined to walls.
The Inca civilization seems to have been of that utilitarian turn of
mind that gives its attention chiefly to the practical, with the result
that to-day there is not a statue in the length and breadth of Peruvian
ruins; and the grass-thatched roofs beyond which these unrivaled
stone-cutters did not advance may have fallen in centuries before
Pizarro first herded his pigs among the foothills of Estremadura. But as
walls they are unsurpassed, fitted with so tireless a nicety that, even
without mortar, they stand to-day, except where the roots of trees have
crowded in between them, striking illustrations of that time-worn phrase
of all Peruvian chroniclers from Garsilaso to Squier, “so that a
knife-blade cannot be inserted between them.” Marble-white walls there
were so splendidly symmetrical that time after time the enraptured eye
stole along them as over a beloved form. As with all Inca architecture,
everything,—walls, doors, niches—decreased in size toward the top, at
about the slope of the surrounding precipices, carrying the mind back to
Karnak and the ruins of the Nile. Every possible ground-boulder or
rock-ledge and mountain-platform was made full use of, and the eye at
times hardly detects where the building of nature leaves off and the
planning of man begins.
Hidden away from the iconoclastic, gold-thirsting Spaniards, and so far
distant from the dwellings of his effete descendants that transportation
of its blocks for their own botching is impossible, Machu Picchu has
escaped the common fate of the other pre-Columbian ruins of the Andes
and remains a city intact, like Pompeii, as genuine as when its
inhabitants abandoned it, carrying off perhaps their household gods and
the revered remains of their ancestors. But for the missing roof, scores
of buildings are as well preserved as on the day their dwellers
departed. Rough-stone, windowed gables—though both Humboldt and Prescott
deny the existence of gables or windows in ancient Peru—stand everywhere
peaked above the general level, sometimes still bearing the stump of a
great tree the roots of which had curled and twined in among the stones
wherever a handful of soil was to be found to feed upon. The ruins
seemed to sprout flowers and trees. Giants of the forest grew wherever
there was a suggestion of foothold; with a Jewish persistency they had
crowded in between apparently inseparable stone blocks; great trees had
sprung up and grown to man’s estate in unbelievable places, on the very
peaks of frail stone gables, even out from between the still
tight-fitted granite boulders. The task of “los yanquis” had been no
sinecure. They had felled an entire tropical forest, with giant trees a
century old, the charred trunks of a few of which lay as they had
fallen, like gluttonous bandits overtaken at their stolen feast,
convenient stairways now from one terrace to another. But much care had
been necessary. Many a stump must be left where it stood, for even to
attempt its removal would frequently have brought down half the
structure it grew in. Besides clearing it of the concealing vegetation,
the Americans had dug away in places several feet of soil and had
presented at last the entire city, with its alignment of streets, its
“baths,” temples, palaces, and blocks of dwellings. The finest ruins of
the Western Hemisphere, the mystery of this city of the unpeopled
wilderness trebles its fascination. How could such a place have
completely eluded the foraging Spaniards? How could long centuries have
passed during which Ollantaytambo was accepted as the last monument of
importance in the valley of the Urubamba? How—
But just then a cry of “Cancha unu!” from Martinelli, who affected
Quichua since he found I had some knowledge of it, brought me tearing
back through the undergrowth to the roof on legs. Back along one of the
terraces a trickling supply of water had been found, and now we might
take time to view the ruins more leisurely. We concocted a lunch and
sent Stony-Eye to carry our possessions to a “sacred cave” among the
palaces.
The town centers about the main plaza, with its splendid wrought-stone
temple, backed by the priest’s dwelling with the sacred hill piled up
behind it. Here, too, is the temple of the three windows, so unusual a
feature of prehistoric Peruvian architecture that the chief of the
excavators connects it with the tradition of the three brothers who came
out of as many windows to found the Empire of the Incas. “Al principio
del mundo,” as Garsilaso puts it,—“In the beginning of the world, say
the Indians who live to the east and north of the city of Cuzco, three
brothers sallied forth through some windows in some rocks, which they
called royal windows.” Certainly, if this is the original Tampu Tocco
from which came the founders of the Empire, they improved little in
their building during the long years between Machu Picchu and the
construction of Cuzco. Its sponsor considers the city a thousand years
old. Yet though the virile simplicity of its construction is untouched
by the beginning of that ornateness that marks decadence in all
civilizations, there is something of delicacy and artistic splendor,
even amid a curious mixture of the crude and primitive, that does not
seem to bespeak an older and less-developed people than the builders of
Cuzco.
The long, solid walls are broken, as in most Inca structures, by niches
large and small, mere shallow closets without doors, with cylindrical
projecting stones alternating between them. These have been fancied,
among other things, to have wardrobes and hooks for clothing, but the
habit of their descendants suggest that the builders were content to
hang their garments on the floor. Though larger than the average Andean
dwelling of to-day, houses of more than one room are rare. The ancient
Peruvians were evidently as indifferent to lack of privacy as their
modern successors. Along the walls are stone couches as comfortable as
those of sun-baked mud which the weary traveler is fortunate to find in
the better-class houses of the interior to this day. They probably had
as little furniture as their descendants, and the host of long ago no
doubt greeted his guest with that selfsame “Tome asiento” (Be seated)
and a wave of the hand toward a six-inch block of wood or a sharp corner
of stone. They lived apparently more thickly than in any modern
tenement-house, and the problem of increase of population must have been
acute. Was it this internal pressure that forced them finally to abandon
their eagle’s-nest? Every square foot of ground was utilized, the rooms
densely crowded together, with even subterranean dwellings, and long
rows of rough-stone houses stand steeply one above the other on the
swift precipices of the city.
For all its ups and downs—and it was next to impossible to go somewhere
else in Machu Picchu without climbing or descending—intercommunication
was amply provided. Scores of stairways of all lengths and sizes, often
laboriously cut out of a single ground-boulder, lead everywhere. Mrs.
Tocco had no difficulty in dropping in on Mrs. Huasi simply because she
lived in another clan-group or up over her head. Tunnels, too, were
common to this ingenious race of stone-cutters, and fat men must have
been as rare as among the Indians of to-day, or distinctly limited in
their movements. No nation under blockade ever made more intensive use
of its agricultural possibilities. Within a radius of several miles not
a possible foot of ground escaped cultivation. The soil, carried perhaps
from a great distance, was richly fertile, and to these men of a bygone
race the building of a massive stone wall to support half its size in
arable ground was all in the day’s work. The terraces on the north side
of the mountain, half agricultural, half defensive, drop swiftly away as
long as there is a suggestion of foothold, and those on the west of the
sacred plaza and below the _intihuatana_, or sun-dial, go down so
vertiginously hand over hand that there could have been no dizzy heads
among the husbandmen of long ago. It was easy for the peasant of those
days to do away with an enemy; he had only to reach down from his own
field and push his rival off his three-foot farm into bottomless
oblivion.
[Illustration:
One of the many stairways of Machu Picchu. “The eye could scarcely
detect where the building of nature left off and the planning of man
began”]
[Illustration:
The resounding gorge of the Urubamba, with terraces of the ancient
inhabitants on the inaccesible left bank]
I pushed on toward the outskirts. The social inequalities of to-day were
as native to the civilization of this lost race. As one left the center,
the houses grew less and less like the cut-stone palaces; on the edges
of the town hung mere cobblestone hovels, little better than the
miserable dens of the modern Indian. All about them now was rampant cane
jungle. On the slopes, from the interstices between the rocks, even on
the thatched roof of last year’s shelter of the workmen, grew big yellow
calabashes, like gypsy pumpkins. Then there was wild corn and self-sown
potatoes, bushes of ripe _ají_, the beloved peppers of the Incas, in
deep reds and greens. These were no doubt the chief products of olden
times, constantly threatened with suffocation by the belligerent
tropical vegetation. Monarch of all he surveyed—and it was much—the
ruler of this aery probably lived chiefly on corn and frozen potatoes,
ground in such carved stone mortars as are still to be found here; and
he could not have been overwhelmingly troubled with a longing for the
fleshpots or for other excitement than that his enemies gave him. For he
does not seem to have often visited other towns, and even “los yanquis”
found no ruins of theater or billiard-hall.
The Incas, using the word broadly, showed an extraordinary liking for
building where they had an unbroken outlook over all the surrounding
world. Lovers of nature, perhaps, though the apparently complete
indifference of their descendants to its charms and moods makes this
debatable, they were, above all, practical fellows, moved less by
esthetic reasons than by an overwhelming dislike of being awakened from
an afternoon siesta by a well-aimed boulder. Yet had their only quest
been unrivaled situations, that of Machu Picchu could scarcely have been
improved upon. Mere words or pictures give faint idea of the unique
charm of the place. Men not merely of iron will and endless patience,
they must also have had a fixed and unchanging policy for generations,
for with such tools as they possessed it is inconceivable that they
could have built Machu Picchu in less than a century. Not even their
ambitionless descendants of to-day have less of the wanderlust than
they; and what a conviction of the perpetual endurance of the status quo
was theirs, to take such infinite pains in their building that they need
not even be repaired for centuries. Were they driven out by the fierce
Aymarás from the south, or by the dreaded “huari-ni,” the “breechless”
tribes from the hot-lands below, which the meek Indian of the highlands
fears to this day; were they suddenly wiped out by an epidemic; or did
they gather strength and courage after centuries of hiding in this lofty
nest and sally forth with the avowed intention of conquering the world,
perhaps to be destroyed, and the secret of their city with them? Every
traveler knows how isolated groups of men gradually come to fancy
themselves superior to all the rest of the universe. Whatever the cause
of the migration, it must have taken stern renunciation to leave behind
so much of the work of themselves and their ancestors.
I was aroused from my musings by a crashing in the jungle, and the
professor hailed me with, “Wait! I want your advice!” It was that awful
bite on the knuckle again. By this time it had grown to nearly the size
of the second letter of this word, was a pale red in color, and about it
was a swelling that could plainly be seen under a microscope, or without
one by a man with good eyes and a badly worried imagination.
“Now of course this might not turn out to be uta,” said the victim, in
an agitated voice, “but if it should, twenty-four hours delay might make
all the difference in the world, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be
_prudent_, at least, to go down now and get started back to Cuzco.”
I examined the alarming symptom with care. There was no doubt that it
was the dreaded “rot”—bally rot, in fact. As to the swelling, had not I
myself more than once been so swollen by tropical insects that my best
friends would not have recognized me in a bar-room? Moreover, I was not
to be cheated out of the night I had promised myself in the abandoned
city, and from words of sympathy and reassurance, I led the conversation
deftly and gently back through the mention of the professor’s large
life-insurance policy, to the dangers of life here in the days of the
Incas, who had not even those post-mortem sops to make existence
bearable, until the terror of the tropics, inherent in all men of the
temperate zone, was buried beneath the fascinating mystery of the
fathomless past.
The earth offers few such views as that from the _intihuatana_, the
“place where the sun was tied,” at the top of the town. There the great
topping boulder has been carved into an upright shaft of stone, of
symbolic sacredness no doubt in those bygone days when the people of
Peru made the error of worshipping the sun instead of bowing down before
wooden images, though it looks as much like a beheading-block as a
sun-dial. The scene is best enjoyed alone. The intrusion of modern man
seems to break the spell, and the imagination halts lamely in its
striving to build up the past. Literally at my feet the world dropped
away sheer to the Urubamba, like a copper thread all but encircling the
entire city with what is virtually one precipice. The altitude of Machu
Picchu is put at 8500 feet and that of the river at 2000 less, yet it is
surprising how distinctly the roar of the stream comes up to the very
top of the invulnerable city. Utterly unpeopled, the visible world is
one tumbled mass of gigantic forest-clad mountains rolling away to
inaccessible distance-blue ranges, rising afar off to snow-capped crests
mingled with the sky. Here are not the haggard and sterile Andes of
elsewhere, but softened, undulating forms, so densely wooded that
nowhere is a spot of earth visible. Swing round the circle, and on the
other side the gaze falls as precipitously into the Urubamba. There
three great ranges rise one behind another, fading from blue to the
purple of vast distances, until the icy wall of the Central Cordillera
shuts off all the world beyond. In another direction the rolling purple
ranges die enticingly away one beyond the other into the great _montaña_
and the hot-lands of the Amazon, while masses of pure white clouds come
floating majestically up out of Brazil beyond. One regrets having to
return as he came, always a misfortune, and the gaze falls again to the
hoarse thread of river below, watching it wind away into the mystery of
the unknown, to break through the central range beyond where the eye
loses it, and so on away, away. But the chief hardship of travel is
renunciation.
Here, in what is to-day the home only of the condor, one may muse, but
muse in vain, on the history of Machu Picchu. A thousand years old; and
a thousand years hence it will still be here! Why is man of such
perishable stuff that mere rocks and stones may laugh at the brevity of
his existence? If only one could call back the ancient inhabitants to
tell their story! Did they build so long before the Conquest that the
city was already overgrown and forgotten when the bearded centaurs first
appeared to startle and undo their descendants? Or was this some secret
holy spot the Indians concealed by silence even from the garrulous
descendant of Huayna Ccápac? Were its existence known to them, why did
not Tupac Amaru and his followers set up a defence here against the
Spaniards? For even in those days the place would have been invulnerable
against anything but treachery from within.
However baffling its story, it is not difficult for one who has wandered
along the Andes to build up a picture of the living city of the past as
he sits here in the declining day, lulled yet excited by the ceaseless
music of the Urubamba far below, mysterious, Indian-like in its
impassiveness, as if it knew, but were sworn forever to guard, the
secret it has girdled with its impregnable precipices for unknown
centuries. Before the inner eye the many stone stairways take on life.
Up and down them move unhurriedly, yet actively, thick-set men and women
with broad, copper-tinted faces, noiseless in their bare feet, their
garments a constant interweaving of many bright colors. The hundreds of
peaked gables take on gothic-steep roofs of thatch, symmetrical,
carefully made, perhaps with decorated ceilings within, at least in the
temples and palaces. Llamas step silently through the narrow streets,
gazing with haughty dreaminess about them. From all the crowded city
rises the hum of busy, bucolic life, yet not noisily, for the general
tone is peaceful industry and a phlegmatic preoccupation. Now and again
the hollow boom of a wooden gong rises and dies away in one of the
sacred temples. As the shadows lengthen, bare-legged workmen, a cheek
swollen with a cud of coca, mount up the breakneck terraces below,
waving with Indian corn or purple with potato-blossoms, pass silently
along the brow of the intihuatana hill, and hurry unhurriedly on to
their cobble-stone huts in the crowded outskirts. A greater hush than
before falls on all the scene, except for the never-varying voice of the
Urubamba, as the Inca, majestic of mien, the royal _llauta_ about his
forehead, attended a certain distance by respectful nobles bearing the
symbolic burden on their shoulders, mounts to the sacred rock. There,
alone, or attended at respectful aloofness only by the high-priests of
the little temple behind, he watches the god of the Peruvians of old
sink swiftly, as it was sinking now, behind the snow range that stands
out cold and clear to the west, and sees the labyrinth of shaggy, wooded
ranges beyond the bottomless void below melt and merge into one common,
fading-purple whole. Off in a corner of the city, on the brow of the
headlong precipice, comes faintly to the imperial ears the sound of
stone striking stone, where the miscreant sentenced that day to carve a
new seat in an over-carved boulder before the coming of the new moon
plies his task. With full darkness even this ceases. The faint
smoke-columns of the supper-fires die away, and before the night is an
hour old the entire city is sunk in slumber, save only the watchmen in
their towers and aeries behind and above, and along the city wall in the
hollow beneath. From these come faint glows to punctuate the darkness of
the Andean night, then nothing, and from a living city Machu Picchu
returns to what it is, an utterly unpeopled mountain-peak cut off from
all the known world, into which have intruded three hob-nailed beings of
noisy modern days, and their stony-eyed serving-man briefly loaned from
that world of long ago.
[Illustration:
The temple of the three windows, an unusual feature of Inca
architecture]
[Illustration:
“Rumiñaui” seated on the _intihuatana_, or sun-dial, at the top of the
town, from which the world falls away a sheer 2000 feet to the
Urubamba below]
Martinelli was inclined to sleep in the sacred cave under the circular
tower. To this the professor objected, as too “snaky,” and they
compromised on the long stone bench above, near the finest wall in Machu
Picchu. When they were settled, I piled my bedding on the back of
Rumiñaui, and drove him away into the humid, viper-teeming darkness.
Sailing under sealed orders, he tore his way fearfully through the
undergrowth that clutched at him with a thousand unseen fingers, down
through the jungle-grown heart of the town and knee-deep across the
sacred plaza, its three great windows staring all but invisible at us in
the night. On I pursued the trembling wretch into the three-sided
high-temple, the most imposing structure of Machu Picchu, and three
times bade him pile his load up on the stone altar before he would
believe his ears. When I murmured “illimni” (“all right”), he turned
tail and fled so suddenly that he forgot even the customary
leave-taking.
Above, below, and all about me the night was chanting its mysterious
pagan song. The distant roar of the Urubamba came up clear and sharp. In
the sky above, myriad stars shone forth with that unusual brightness of
upper heights. The rest was blackness. I cleared away a few plants and
parasites from the altar and the niches above. It was an immense
cut-stone fourteen feet long and five high, but a bare three feet wide,
and a long drop for an uneasy sleeper. I rolled out saddle-blanket and
ponchos to form the “bed” of many an Andean night; then unconsciously,
in an instant, I solved the niche problem that has been harassing
Peruvian antiquarians for centuries. Nothing could be simpler! The
bygone race broke the long surfaces of their walls with these
half-openings neither as settings for their idols nor as stations for
their guards, but as convenient places in which to lay their leggings,
hobnailed boots, and tin watches for the night. I am by no means the
only one who will be glad to have the problem solved at last.
It would have been easy for the high priest to have dropped in on me
during the night, or to have sent his henchmen to do likewise with a few
rocks and boulders, even if he could not have arranged for me a dance of
his private _ñustas_, especially as the temple is now roofless. But I
slept the night through monotonously undisturbed, waking only once to
congratulate myself on being so far removed from the disturbing living
world, and falling asleep again without even feeling to find whether my
revolver still hung within easy reach.
Long wilderness travel seems to develop in the nostrils a power to scent
the dawn. I had finished dressing when the night began to pale along its
eastern rim, and striding away through the dew-dripping jungle and down
the great central stone stairway, I came upon the professor and
Martinelli huddled together end to end on their roofless stone couch,
snoring oblivious of the fact that the daylight in which no true
traveler sleeps had already come. The opportunity for correction was too
precious to lose. Close beside them I drew my revolver and fired a
roaring 38-caliber shot into the rosy dawn overhead. Mere words are
powerless to picture the slothful pair as they exploded forth from their
coverings, with the rampant hair and fist-like eyes of Puritans suddenly
fallen upon by a band of Indians in the good old days when Puritans were
fair prey. In the sacred cave below I found Rumiñaui also sitting up in
his “bed,” scratching the sleep out of his eyes, and having sent him for
my possessions set to boiling coffee while listening to the sad story of
my companions.
Barely had I left them to their own protection the evening before when
Martinelli thought he felt a snake strike his boot, and shouted in
alarm. (By morning light he found a cactus-spine had pricked him through
the leather.) Then Rumiñaui had come with a long and dolorous Quichua
tale of the tribes of “víboras” that had their nests in the interstices
of the wall beside and above them, and only awaited the stillness of the
night to sally forth on their deadly errands. This in turn recalled to
the professor that the so-called circular “snake-windows” were in this
very building, and caused him to scrunch down, head and all, into his
sleeping-bag, hoping against hope that no deadly viper could bite
through its several thicknesses. To make life even more miserable,
another gnat had stung him on another knuckle,—a voracious creature,
evidently, so bent on destruction that it had made a special trip up
from the valley below for this nefarious purpose, since insects do not
commonly inhabit Machu Picchu. Now, it might be that the first bite had
not injected the dread _uta_, but surely no ordinary man could hope to
survive a second. So that all the bitter night through the professor
lay—or, more exactly, curved—rigid and motionless within his six-foot
sleeping-bag on the extreme outer edge of the stone divan, as far as
possible from the viperous wall, yet always in fear of taking the awful
two-foot drop to the reptilian ground beneath, while before his sunken
eyes passed in cinematographic succession the picture of the dread “rot”
he could distinctly feel creeping and crawling through all his frame,
devouring it limb by limb, feature by feature, the awful news seeping
out into the Middle West that one of his most cherished citizens had
been brought to grief by a mere insect of the Andes! But enough of the
harrowing details! Yet the worst is still to be heard. All the endless
night through things kept dropping down upon the sleepers from the wall
above. To my unromantic mind these were bits of twigs and leaves, yet in
the subtle silence of the tropical night small wonder each was a
possible sudden-death to the sufferer within the sleeping-bag, assuring
himself a thousand times that no viper could bite through it, yet
lacking faith in his own assurance. The most anguishing moment of all
was that when there dropped squarely upon him, with a soft, reptile-like
thud, something that proved by daylight that he had hung carelessly in
the Incaic niche above one of his woolen socks!
The descent was harder than the climb; also it was quicker. So slippery
was the wet trail at that angle that whenever our heels failed to bite
into the soil we sat down emphatically on the backs of our necks some
feet further down the slope, fetching it a resounding wallop with the
rest of the body. There is talk of some day building an electric line
from Cuzco, and a funicular up to the ruins, with perhaps a tourist
hotel among them. Fortunately talk does not easily breed action in Peru.
One of the chief charms of Machu Picchu is inherent in the difficulty of
reaching it; a scene once made accessible to fat, middle-aged ladies is
ready to be marked off the traveler’s itinerary and to be turned over to
the tender mercies of the tourist.
We ended the descent without broken bones, though not without shattered
tempers, and finding the precarious connection with the outer world
still sagging between the roaring boulders, climbed the wet jungled bank
beyond. Here Rumiñaui, in addition to his regular government wage of
twenty cents, was rewarded with a shilling and a handful of coca-leaves,
only the latter seeming to be of any interest to him; and here,
strangely enough, Tomás was waiting, as he had been ordered, with the
four animals, their heads turned toward Cuzco.