“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.
