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.
“As we rode eastward into the sunrise down the gorge of the Urubamba, glacier-clad Piri above threw off its night wraps of clouds”
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