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.
