The Last Days of the Incas Read Free Page A

first visited him the day before. The words were difficult to make out, filtering as they did past the thick gruel of coca leaves. “Chu Picchu,” it sounded like the second time. Finally, the short peasant had firmly grabbed the American’s arm and, pointing up at a massive peak looming above them, he uttered two words: “Machu Picchu”—Quechua for “old peak.” Arteaga turned and squinted into the intense brown eyes of the American explorer, then turned toward the mountain. “Up in the clouds, at Machu Picchu—
that
is where you will find the ruins.”
    For the price of a shiny new silver American dollar, Arteaga had agreed to guide Bingham up to the peak. Now, high on its flank, the three men looked back down at the valley floor, where far below them tumbled the Urubamba River, white and rapids-strewn in stretches, then almost turquoise in others, fed as it was by Andean glaciers. The river would eventually flatten outand coil its way down into the Amazon River, which stretched eastward for nearly another three thousand miles, across an entire continent. Fifty miles to the southeast lay the high Andean city of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas—the “navel” or center of their once nearly 2,500-mile-long empire.
    Almost four hundred years earlier, the Incas had abruptly abandoned Cuzco, after the Spaniards had murdered their emperor and installed a puppet emperor on the throne. A large number of them had then headed en masse down the eastern side of the Andes, eventually founding a new capital in the wild
Antisuyu
—the mostly jungle-choked eastern quarter of their empire. The Incas called their new capital Vilcabamba and for the next nearly four decades it would become the headquarters of a fierce guerrilla war they would carry out against the Spaniards. In Vilcabamba, Inca warriors learned to ride captured Spanish horses, to fire captured Spanish muskets, and often fought alongside their nearly naked Amazonian allies, who wielded deadly bows and arrows. Bingham had been told the remarkable story of the Incas’ little known rebel kingdom a year earlier, while on a brief trip to Peru, and was amazed that no one seemed to know what had become of its capital. A year later, Bingham was back in Peru, hoping that
he
would become the person to discover it.
    Thousands of miles from his Connecticut home and clinging to the side of a cloud forest peak, Bingham couldn’t help but wonder if his current climb would result in a wild-goose chase. Two of his companions on the expedition, the Americans Harry Foote and William Erving, had remained on the valley floor in camp, preferring that Bingham go off in search of the ruins himself. Rumors of ruins often remained just that—rumors—they no doubt thought. One thing his companions knew well, however, was that no matter how tired
they
were, Bingham himself always seemed tireless. Not only was Bingham the leader of this expedition, but he had also planned it, had selected its seven members, and had raised the financing bit by difficult bit. The funds that now allowed Bingham to be hiking in search of a lost Inca city, in fact, had come from selling a last piece of inherited family real estate in Hawaii, from promises of a series of articles for
Harper’s
magazine on his return, and from donations from the United Fruit Company, the Winchester Arms Company, and W. R. Grace and Company. Although he had married an heir to the Tiffany fortune, Bingham himself hadno money—and never had.
    The only son of a strict, fire-and-brimstone Protestant preacher, Hiram Bingham III had grown up in near poverty in Honolulu, Hawaii. His impoverished youth was no doubt one of the motivations for why Bingham, even as a boy, had always been determined to climb his way up the social and financial ladders of America or, as he put it, “to strive for magnificence.” Perhaps one episode from Bingham’s younger years best illustrates how he presently came to be scrambling up a high