Cloud Road (40 page)

Hiram Bingham’s personal journey here had been tough. His expedition had followed Bolívar’s Andean route from Venezuela to Colombia. He began the journey from Cuzco on 1 February 1911 and suffered the worst month’s rain for twenty-five years. He was looking for Vilcabamba, known from historical records as the last secret hiding place of Inca Manco. He had visited one ‘lost city’, Choqquequirun, which means Cradle of Gold, just to
please local officials. He had also talked to a local man who recommend he try a hill called Machu Picchu. Bingham was up for it but his colleagues cried off next morning. He went with a few companions, treading carefully; fer de lance vipers are common all round Machu Picchu. On 24 July, they explored a little over two hours along the valley bottom, then began climbing. The two farmers had partially cleared terraces of trees. He saw the Temple of the Sun almost immediately, and declared it, with only a little exaggeration, as good as the best stonework in the world. ‘It fairly took my breath away,’ he said, ‘the sight held me spellbound.’

In 1912, he agreed to mount a joint Yale and National Geographical Society expedition, with the support of President Augusto Leguia. In their excitement, they took risks. K. C. Heald, a topographer, investigated Huayna Picchu following bear tracks, and was almost killed in a fall. He spent some time dangling over an abyss, holding on to the stem of a rather small shrub, waiting for help. It took three attempts to reach the top. The local natives had long ago lost the Inca work ethic. They had no desire to camp away from home, and wasted much time commuting from their own village, when they showed up at all. The vegetation was far more energetic, and had to be cut back three times in four months. The five hundred photos which made Machu Picchu world famous were taken after the final trim. Perhaps because of the effort involved, he was, like Columbus, unwilling to admit he might have got the wrong place. Having examined it all, Bingham boasted ‘no one now disputes it is Vilcabamba’. In dry season Bingham found he could scarcely obtain from Machu Picchu’s springs sufficient water for his expedition and the
local labourers. He speculated that water shortages were responsible for its abandonment, a strange idea, as he thought it had taken centuries to construct, during which time any deficiency would have been obvious.

Early theories focused on the Lost City myth. But this was not a Shangri’la where heirs-in-waiting for the
sunthrone
lived a life outside time waiting for the next
pachakuti
to overthrow this mad interlude of rule by foreign barbarians. There are very few houses here, just enough to accommodate the high officials and priests, but not the hundreds of builders, farmers, weavers and ordinary toilers whose bent, uncomplaining backs held them aloft so they could talk to the stars. One interesting detail, little talked about, is found in a local Quechua place name which goes back to the days of the Incas. If you can find three connections between things, you are probably on the right track.

The exiled Inca’s final redoubt of Vilcabamba bears a name that combines the words
huilca
and
pampa.
This was what Hiram Bingham, a historian, not an archaeologist, was actually looking for.
Pampa
means plain and
huilca
is a very interesting sub-tropical tree. Its seeds were used as an enema, or powdered and sniffed as a hallucinogen, in which form it was known as
cohoba.
Priests used it to see spirit worlds, doctors to diagnose bewitchment. A second clue to the importance of this plant is now hidden by a change of name. The Urubamba River is a Quechua name, but it is not the original Inca name for the river, which was
Vilca-mayu:
the
Huilca River.
Thirdly, the climate of Cuzco is too cold and dry for this tree, but the nearest sub-tropical habitat to the capital where it can grow is on the slopes below Machu Picchu.
The location of the area, the naming of the rivers and citadels, all point at a ceremonial use centring on contact with the gods through drug-induced trances. Machu Picchu and adjacent late Inca sites may well have been spiritual investments by desperate rulers seeking a way to regain control of their world. It was magnificent, but maybe not of any military importance to the last of the Incas, except as a place that was out of the way, and not yet fitted out with the precious metals that interested the Spanish. Here, ritual could continue without interference.

Like Stonehenge or Easter Island, enough remains to fascinate, but so much has gone that the truth may never be known. The field is open for the annual publication of a book or Discovery Channel programme subtitled
The Final Answer to the Riddle of Machu Picchu.
The end of the occupation is as enigmatic as everything else. There is no damage from warfare, siege or demolition. The site was evacuated in such an orderly way that no house yielded any goods at all. There were rich pottery finds below the Temple of the Three Windows, by which I stood, and where I found the rock which seems to mimic in miniature the skyline of the mountains behind it, across the river gorge. But the pots had been ritually smashed. No gold was found, not even in the burial of the High Priestess. For a long time, skeleton after skeleton was exhumed and determined to be female: 150 out of 173. Archaeologists deduced a convent society attended by a minimum staff of male attendants: more fantastic visions of a distant life glimpsed darkly through a veil. But when the bones were revisited with the help of modern pathology, the skeletons were found to be a normal mix of men and women. Only two objects dating after the conquest have
been unearthed, both minor items. It is likely that Machu Picchu was spared a Spanish rape.

My walks led to one last place, a lawn just below the high point on which the
Intihuatana
casts its shadow. On the lawn was a single tree, the tree my teenage self had put a finger to, on the page of a magazine. I picked up a dried leaf from the tree. Its neat oval is before me now.

In the hotel, I re-read the final chapters of
Don Quixote,
all except the last. Because I know what happens to him then. He comes home defeated in combat, sworn to stay at home in penance. He falls ill, and in the final chapter, renounces his knight-errantry. Sancho Panza realizes, like Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional general, that while illusion won’t feed us, it will nourish us. He begs the bed-ridden Quixote to resume the romances which, for nine hundred pages, he has been trying to dissuade him from. This recanting looks like cowardice from the character and the author, but Cervantes had to cover his back. He was a humanist, and his religion far from orthodox. The novel takes great risks portraying events as quite different when seen through different characters’ eyes, or by the same person at different times. In the second part, published much later, our heroes meet people who have read the first book and know who they are: they become celebrities within their own book. None of these subjective and relativist views appealed to a church that insisted on one correct view of the world: theirs. So I stopped reading while he still holds on to that rich pluralism, while he still dreams of living through books and ideas.

It was Sunday 25 August. I had a ticket to the coast on the overnight bus. I still had to see some of the strangest,
and largest, archaeological remains on the planet: the Nazca lines.

I was leaving the Sierra for the last time. It had been my home for five months. Dr Johnson said, ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.’ I think I had always thought meanly of myself for not having made a journey of real endeavour. I am sure many people go happily to their graves without making one. I am glad for them. I could not have. Slowly, in my life, I have learned that I was born to be a wanderer. It has simply taken time to lose the fear, and do it. Let Don Quixote speak for me one last time: ‘For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy.’ I had walked 700 miles, about two million footsteps, and completed another 1,300 miles of travel. I had been an alien to the people I met, sometimes leaving a trail of
incomprehension
behind me. I had picked up a little understanding, seen some of this secret country, the undeclared Andean nation, this archipelago above the clouds.

The coach pulls away over the rim of Cuzco’s bowl. We drive at the setting sun, the sky all copper and lead,
snow-capped
peaks far right. The earth is a red and green patchwork: familiar today, but soon becoming to me part of an alien past I can hardly believe I lived. But for now, people and animals are coming home, centred, simple, self-sustaining, ancient, unforgettable. We crest the hill; five months fall into the dirt blown up behind us.

I shuddered awake in blackness; the bus was juddering horribly. The whole frame strained to hold together, rivets vibrating like furious cymbals; as if the bus were trying to shed a painful skin. The drumming came up through my pelvis, up my spine and into my skull. I snatched the curtain aside, and looked with disbelief at the small circle I could see at the edge of the headlights. The bus was throwing out a wake; we were travelling through water. I could now just pick out land to our right, fifty or sixty yards away. We were driving down a broad river. In a quarter of a mile, the driver slowed and went down through the gears. There was a lurch, and we tipped backwards. Boulders spun under the rear wheels; at last, they gripped, and we groaned up onto the bank.

At six twenty, in growing light, we crossed Dead Bull Bridge, and began descending a bare, uninhabited
landscape
, watched by cautious llamas bunched on the ridge. The first three houses we saw were little more than hovels, their tin roofs held down by stones. Three well-dressed passengers got out and let themselves into one. The hills were still bare and expectant, as if something was coming to colonise them but was inexplicably late. Lower down, cactuses appeared, including some very dark ones that lay prostrate on the floor, like expiring tarantulas.

Parched cotton plants struggled on the irrigated valley floor. A pink church beyond the fields marked the centre of Nazca, framed by acacias, eucalyptuses and palms. I shared a taxi into the centre with a red-haired young man from County Cork. ‘Hotel Algeria,’ he said to the driver, and, seeing his confusion, added ‘Jesus!’ and stabbed a
freckled finger at the street map in his guide. The driver nodded. Red-head sighed ‘These people!’ In a few minutes he was dropped at the Hostal Alegría: the Happy Hostel.

Nazca was a prosperous coastal civilisation, famous for its textiles and multi-coloured pottery. The modern town of 30,000 people is drab, except for the pink church and the clouds of gaudy bougainvillaea, but for mysteries, Nazca is up there with Stonehenge, Easter Island and Machu Picchu. The hieroglyphs can only really be seen properly from the air. I took a flight in a Cessna 172, my stomach sinking whenever we dropped off the edges of strong thermals. We saw the whale, the hummingbird, spider, monkey and, yes, the figure that looks like an astronaut. Although some of the animals, the monkey in particular, do not live anywhere near Nazca, they all represent animals of symbolic importance to shamans. The spider represents weaving and the ability to ensnare enemies, and whales fight powerful spirits under the oceans. There are also Nazca pots showing faces whose nostrils are streaming, like those of the hallucinating shamans of Chavín. The shamans used these creatures to work for them in the spirit world. It is likely they also made a psychoactive brew from the San Pedro cactus. The famous lines are made by turning over oxidised stones to reveal a dull purple surface. They survive for two reasons. The first is that it never rained here, until the nearby Marcona mine blasted so much dust into the air it formed clouds and rain discoloured the surface and obscured the lines. The second is a woman called Maria Reiche.

Needing a taxi to visit the museum that was her house, I searched out Juan Pineda, who had known her for many years. We hurtled over the near-white desert beneath bare,
rocky mountains, along a modern highway. ‘They drove the Panamerican right through the middle of the lines,’ he waved his long thin hand either side of the car. ‘Imagine what else would have happened without Maria.’

She was born in Dresden on 15 May 1903, and studied mathematics at Hamburg University, before applying for a job as governess to the German Consul in Cuzco, who was also the director of the Cuzco brewery. In time, she moved to Lima, translating German technical journals at the museum, and supervising the conservation of newly discovered textiles at Paracas, between Nazca and Lima, working with the same Julio Tello who had excavated Chavín. The Nazca lines, discovered by commercial pilots in 1926, were starting to attract serious archaeological attention, but it wasn’t until 1941 that she took the bus to Nazca, and dedicated her life to the lines. To care for them, she lived in penury at the edge of the Panamerican Highway, surveying and striving to understand them, often fighting the Peruvian establishment to prevent their destruction.

Juan stopped outside whitewashed walls splashed with bougainvillaea. The bare rooms where she lived and worked were furnished as spartanly as if someone was living rough for a weekend: a Primus stove, one pot, a kettle, a sagging bed, a plain wooden desk, a wooden chair and sheets of dusty drawings of her beloved lines. ‘She was never confident speaking Spanish,’ said Juan, ‘and always spoke clearly and slowly to make sure she was understood, and almost always about the lines and their preservation. When she was forty-five, she learned to use stilts so she could see the lines better. When she was
fifty-two
, she persuaded the Peruvian Air Force to tie her to the
strut outside a helicopter so she could photograph them.’

The geometrical lines all seem to point at a mountain from which the rains for that area will come. The most likely explanation of the animal sculptures is that they were ritually walked to invoke that spirit. Every design can be walked without re-tracing your steps. Even the finest features, like the spider’s legs, are drawn with two lines, quite unnecessary if you only want to depict it, essential if you need to walk it. She was a fanatic. Always frugal in her diet, when the big estates began to spray their irrigated land with chemicals she stopped eating fruit, and lived solely on cereals, becoming as spare and parched as the desert. Maria was a fanatic, but only a fanatic could have preserved the site.