CHAPTER XVII
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.