Vagabonding down the Andes / Being the Narrative of a Journey, Chiefly Afoot, from Panama to Buenos Aires

by Harry Alverson Franck

One of the many stairways of Machu Picchu. “The eye could scarcely detect where the building of nature left off and the planning of man began”

The resounding gorge of the Urubamba, with terraces of the ancient inhabitants on the inaccesible left bank

I pushed on toward the outskirts. The social inequalities of to-day were as native to the civilization of this lost race. As one left the center, the houses grew less and less like the cut-stone palaces; on the edges of the town hung mere cobblestone hovels, little better than the miserable dens of the modern Indian. All about them now was rampant cane jungle. On the slopes, from the interstices between the rocks, even on the thatched roof of last year’s shelter of the workmen, grew big yellow calabashes, like gypsy pumpkins. Then there was wild corn and self-sown potatoes, bushes of ripe ají, the beloved peppers of the Incas, in deep reds and greens. These were no doubt the chief products of olden times, constantly threatened with suffocation by the belligerent tropical vegetation. Monarch of all he surveyed—and it was much—the ruler of this aery probably lived chiefly on corn and frozen potatoes, ground in such carved stone mortars as are still to be found here; and he could not have been overwhelmingly troubled with a longing for the fleshpots or for other excitement than that his enemies gave him. For he does not seem to have often visited other towns, and even “los yanquis” found no ruins of theater or billiard-hall.

The Incas, using the word broadly, showed an extraordinary liking for building where they had an unbroken outlook over all the surrounding world. Lovers of nature, perhaps, though the apparently complete indifference of their descendants to its charms and moods makes this debatable, they were, above all, practical fellows, moved less by esthetic reasons than by an overwhelming dislike of being awakened from an afternoon siesta by a well-aimed boulder. Yet had their only quest been unrivaled situations, that of Machu Picchu could scarcely have been improved upon. Mere words or pictures give faint idea of the unique charm of the place. Men not merely of iron will and endless patience, they must also have had a fixed and unchanging policy for generations, for with such tools as they possessed it is inconceivable that they could have built Machu Picchu in less than a century. Not even their ambitionless descendants of to-day have less of the wanderlust than they; and what a conviction of the perpetual endurance of the status quo was theirs, to take such infinite pains in their building that they need not even be repaired for centuries. Were they driven out by the fierce Aymarás from the south, or by the dreaded “huari-ni,” the “breechless” tribes from the hot-lands below, which the meek Indian of the highlands fears to this day; were they suddenly wiped out by an epidemic; or did they gather strength and courage after centuries of hiding in this lofty nest and sally forth with the avowed intention of conquering the world, perhaps to be destroyed, and the secret of their city with them? Every traveler knows how isolated groups of men gradually come to fancy themselves superior to all the rest of the universe. Whatever the cause of the migration, it must have taken stern renunciation to leave behind so much of the work of themselves and their ancestors.

I was aroused from my musings by a crashing in the jungle, and the professor hailed me with, “Wait! I want your advice!” It was that awful bite on the knuckle again. By this time it had grown to nearly the size of the second letter of this word, was a pale red in color, and about it was a swelling that could plainly be seen under a microscope, or without one by a man with good eyes and a badly worried imagination.

“Now of course this might not turn out to be uta,” said the victim, in an agitated voice, “but if it should, twenty-four hours delay might make all the difference in the world, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be prudent, at least, to go down now and get started back to Cuzco.”

I examined the alarming symptom with care. There was no doubt that it was the dreaded “rot”—bally rot, in fact. As to the swelling, had not I myself more than once been so swollen by tropical insects that my best friends would not have recognized me in a bar-room? Moreover, I was not to be cheated out of the night I had promised myself in the abandoned city, and from words of sympathy and reassurance, I led the conversation deftly and gently back through the mention of the professor’s large life-insurance policy, to the dangers of life here in the days of the Incas, who had not even those post-mortem sops to make existence bearable, until the terror of the tropics, inherent in all men of the temperate zone, was buried beneath the fascinating mystery of the fathomless past.

The earth offers few such views as that from the intihuatana, the “place where the sun was tied,” at the top of the town. There the great topping boulder has been carved into an upright shaft of stone, of symbolic sacredness no doubt in those bygone days when the people of Peru made the error of worshipping the sun instead of bowing down before wooden images, though it looks as much like a beheading-block as a sun-dial. The scene is best enjoyed alone. The intrusion of modern man seems to break the spell, and the imagination halts lamely in its striving to build up the past. Literally at my feet the world dropped away sheer to the Urubamba, like a copper thread all but encircling the entire city with what is virtually one precipice. The altitude of Machu Picchu is put at 8500 feet and that of the river at 2000 less, yet it is surprising how distinctly the roar of the stream comes up to the very top of the invulnerable city. Utterly unpeopled, the visible world is one tumbled mass of gigantic forest-clad mountains rolling away to inaccessible distance-blue ranges, rising afar off to snow-capped crests mingled with the sky. Here are not the haggard and sterile Andes of elsewhere, but softened, undulating forms, so densely wooded that nowhere is a spot of earth visible. Swing round the circle, and on the other side the gaze falls as precipitously into the Urubamba. There three great ranges rise one behind another, fading from blue to the purple of vast distances, until the icy wall of the Central Cordillera shuts off all the world beyond. In another direction the rolling purple ranges die enticingly away one beyond the other into the great montaña and the hot-lands of the Amazon, while masses of pure white clouds come floating majestically up out of Brazil beyond. One regrets having to return as he came, always a misfortune, and the gaze falls again to the hoarse thread of river below, watching it wind away into the mystery of the unknown, to break through the central range beyond where the eye loses it, and so on away, away. But the chief hardship of travel is renunciation.

Here, in what is to-day the home only of the condor, one may muse, but muse in vain, on the history of Machu Picchu. A thousand years old; and a thousand years hence it will still be here! Why is man of such perishable stuff that mere rocks and stones may laugh at the brevity of his existence? If only one could call back the ancient inhabitants to tell their story! Did they build so long before the Conquest that the city was already overgrown and forgotten when the bearded centaurs first appeared to startle and undo their descendants? Or was this some secret holy spot the Indians concealed by silence even from the garrulous descendant of Huayna Ccápac? Were its existence known to them, why did not Tupac Amaru and his followers set up a defence here against the Spaniards? For even in those days the place would have been invulnerable against anything but treachery from within.