However baffling its story, it is not difficult for one who has wandered along the Andes to build up a picture of the living city of the past as he sits here in the declining day, lulled yet excited by the ceaseless music of the Urubamba far below, mysterious, Indian-like in its impassiveness, as if it knew, but were sworn forever to guard, the secret it has girdled with its impregnable precipices for unknown centuries. Before the inner eye the many stone stairways take on life. Up and down them move unhurriedly, yet actively, thick-set men and women with broad, copper-tinted faces, noiseless in their bare feet, their garments a constant interweaving of many bright colors. The hundreds of peaked gables take on gothic-steep roofs of thatch, symmetrical, carefully made, perhaps with decorated ceilings within, at least in the temples and palaces. Llamas step silently through the narrow streets, gazing with haughty dreaminess about them. From all the crowded city rises the hum of busy, bucolic life, yet not noisily, for the general tone is peaceful industry and a phlegmatic preoccupation. Now and again the hollow boom of a wooden gong rises and dies away in one of the sacred temples. As the shadows lengthen, bare-legged workmen, a cheek swollen with a cud of coca, mount up the breakneck terraces below, waving with Indian corn or purple with potato-blossoms, pass silently along the brow of the intihuatana hill, and hurry unhurriedly on to their cobble-stone huts in the crowded outskirts. A greater hush than before falls on all the scene, except for the never-varying voice of the Urubamba, as the Inca, majestic of mien, the royal llauta about his forehead, attended a certain distance by respectful nobles bearing the symbolic burden on their shoulders, mounts to the sacred rock. There, alone, or attended at respectful aloofness only by the high-priests of the little temple behind, he watches the god of the Peruvians of old sink swiftly, as it was sinking now, behind the snow range that stands out cold and clear to the west, and sees the labyrinth of shaggy, wooded ranges beyond the bottomless void below melt and merge into one common, fading-purple whole. Off in a corner of the city, on the brow of the headlong precipice, comes faintly to the imperial ears the sound of stone striking stone, where the miscreant sentenced that day to carve a new seat in an over-carved boulder before the coming of the new moon plies his task. With full darkness even this ceases. The faint smoke-columns of the supper-fires die away, and before the night is an hour old the entire city is sunk in slumber, save only the watchmen in their towers and aeries behind and above, and along the city wall in the hollow beneath. From these come faint glows to punctuate the darkness of the Andean night, then nothing, and from a living city Machu Picchu returns to what it is, an utterly unpeopled mountain-peak cut off from all the known world, into which have intruded three hob-nailed beings of noisy modern days, and their stony-eyed serving-man briefly loaned from that world of long ago.
The temple of the three windows, an unusual feature of Inca architecture
“Rumiñaui” seated on the intihuatana, or sun-dial, at the top of the town, from which the world falls away a sheer 2000 feet to the Urubamba below
Martinelli was inclined to sleep in the sacred cave under the circular tower. To this the professor objected, as too “snaky,” and they compromised on the long stone bench above, near the finest wall in Machu Picchu. When they were settled, I piled my bedding on the back of Rumiñaui, and drove him away into the humid, viper-teeming darkness. Sailing under sealed orders, he tore his way fearfully through the undergrowth that clutched at him with a thousand unseen fingers, down through the jungle-grown heart of the town and knee-deep across the sacred plaza, its three great windows staring all but invisible at us in the night. On I pursued the trembling wretch into the three-sided high-temple, the most imposing structure of Machu Picchu, and three times bade him pile his load up on the stone altar before he would believe his ears. When I murmured “illimni” (“all right”), he turned tail and fled so suddenly that he forgot even the customary leave-taking.
Above, below, and all about me the night was chanting its mysterious pagan song. The distant roar of the Urubamba came up clear and sharp. In the sky above, myriad stars shone forth with that unusual brightness of upper heights. The rest was blackness. I cleared away a few plants and parasites from the altar and the niches above. It was an immense cut-stone fourteen feet long and five high, but a bare three feet wide, and a long drop for an uneasy sleeper. I rolled out saddle-blanket and ponchos to form the “bed” of many an Andean night; then unconsciously, in an instant, I solved the niche problem that has been harassing Peruvian antiquarians for centuries. Nothing could be simpler! The bygone race broke the long surfaces of their walls with these half-openings neither as settings for their idols nor as stations for their guards, but as convenient places in which to lay their leggings, hobnailed boots, and tin watches for the night. I am by no means the only one who will be glad to have the problem solved at last.
It would have been easy for the high priest to have dropped in on me during the night, or to have sent his henchmen to do likewise with a few rocks and boulders, even if he could not have arranged for me a dance of his private ñustas, especially as the temple is now roofless. But I slept the night through monotonously undisturbed, waking only once to congratulate myself on being so far removed from the disturbing living world, and falling asleep again without even feeling to find whether my revolver still hung within easy reach.
Long wilderness travel seems to develop in the nostrils a power to scent the dawn. I had finished dressing when the night began to pale along its eastern rim, and striding away through the dew-dripping jungle and down the great central stone stairway, I came upon the professor and Martinelli huddled together end to end on their roofless stone couch, snoring oblivious of the fact that the daylight in which no true traveler sleeps had already come. The opportunity for correction was too precious to lose. Close beside them I drew my revolver and fired a roaring 38-caliber shot into the rosy dawn overhead. Mere words are powerless to picture the slothful pair as they exploded forth from their coverings, with the rampant hair and fist-like eyes of Puritans suddenly fallen upon by a band of Indians in the good old days when Puritans were fair prey. In the sacred cave below I found Rumiñaui also sitting up in his “bed,” scratching the sleep out of his eyes, and having sent him for my possessions set to boiling coffee while listening to the sad story of my companions.
Barely had I left them to their own protection the evening before when Martinelli thought he felt a snake strike his boot, and shouted in alarm. (By morning light he found a cactus-spine had pricked him through the leather.) Then Rumiñaui had come with a long and dolorous Quichua tale of the tribes of “víboras” that had their nests in the interstices of the wall beside and above them, and only awaited the stillness of the night to sally forth on their deadly errands. This in turn recalled to the professor that the so-called circular “snake-windows” were in this very building, and caused him to scrunch down, head and all, into his sleeping-bag, hoping against hope that no deadly viper could bite through its several thicknesses. To make life even more miserable, another gnat had stung him on another knuckle,—a voracious creature, evidently, so bent on destruction that it had made a special trip up from the valley below for this nefarious purpose, since insects do not commonly inhabit Machu Picchu. Now, it might be that the first bite had not injected the dread uta, but surely no ordinary man could hope to survive a second. So that all the bitter night through the professor lay—or, more exactly, curved—rigid and motionless within his six-foot sleeping-bag on the extreme outer edge of the stone divan, as far as possible from the viperous wall, yet always in fear of taking the awful two-foot drop to the reptilian ground beneath, while before his sunken eyes passed in cinematographic succession the picture of the dread “rot” he could distinctly feel creeping and crawling through all his frame, devouring it limb by limb, feature by feature, the awful news seeping out into the Middle West that one of his most cherished citizens had been brought to grief by a mere insect of the Andes! But enough of the harrowing details! Yet the worst is still to be heard. All the endless night through things kept dropping down upon the sleepers from the wall above. To my unromantic mind these were bits of twigs and leaves, yet in the subtle silence of the tropical night small wonder each was a possible sudden-death to the sufferer within the sleeping-bag, assuring himself a thousand times that no viper could bite through it, yet lacking faith in his own assurance. The most anguishing moment of all was that when there dropped squarely upon him, with a soft, reptile-like thud, something that proved by daylight that he had hung carelessly in the Incaic niche above one of his woolen socks!