Machu Picchu - The Incas' last stronghold

When the golden empire of the Incas fell to Pizarro and his soldiers, the city of Machu Picchu, high and lonely in the central Andes, provided an unconquerable refuge. The last Incas may well have died there one by one, leaving the forest to hide all traces of their mysterious stone fortress.

Perched Dizzily astride a mountain saddle between two jagged peaks of the Peruvian Andes, yet sheltered by the towering walls of the surrounding precipices, is a magnificent abandoned citadel which for over half a century has been. luring scholars and sightseers from all over the world. They come to marvel at one of the most fascinating archaeological puzzles of the Western Hemisphere and to gaze at a vista of incomparable majesty.

No one knows the city's real name-that is buried with the bones of its people -but it is called Machu Picchu, or Old Peak, after one of its two guardian mountains, and is also known as the 'Lost City of the Incas'. For centuries before its discovery in 1911 by Hiram Bingharn, then a young assistant professor of Latin-American history at Yale University', Machu Picchu's ingeniously-built granite temples, its aqueducts, fountains, tombs, terraces and endless staircases were hidden by forests, vines and debris.

Who built Machu Picchu, and when, and why? Some investigators believe the city was built about a hundred years before the Spanish Conquest, although Bingham felt it antedated this period by centuries and was the Incas' earliest city. Its superb craftsmanship suggests dwellers of royal rank. However, its cemetery caves,yielded a curious discovery. In its last years Machu Picchu was apparently a city of women. Of 173 skeletons unearthed, some 150 were female. It is thought that a remnant of the shattered Inca Empire, known as the Chosen Women, fled to this ancient retreat to escape the Spanish conquistadores, and lived there in state until they died and the forest covered their secret. One reason Machu Picchu remains a mystery is that the Incas had no written language. Much of our knowledge of them comes from chronicles written during the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru.

The Inca Empire, at its height in about 1450, included what is now Peru, most of Ecuador, Bolivia and the northern parts of Chile and Argentina. It was an autocratically ruled state that, as Hiram Bingham said, 'allowed no one to go hungry or cold', and the Inca (the emperor) bound together his diverse empire of snow-capped mountains, bleak desert and impenetrable jungle with a network of roads. A system of trained runners was well organized that it is said the ruler in his mountain citadel could enjoy fresh fish from the Pacific. Visitors to Machu Picchu used to finish the trip by mule up a narrow mountain with a precipice yawning beside them.

Today an airliner takes you from Lima at sea-level to 11,155-foot Cuzco, the picturesque old Inca capital. By rail-car running on narrow-gauge tracks, you go from Cuzco down the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba River. Then you plunge into the grim wild canyon that repelled Pizarro, the great conquistador, and his musketeers. The tracks wind between dark' overhanging Cliffs and the snarling, rock-strewn rapids of the Urubamba. Before-you lies the final cliff, a 2,000-foot-high precipitous slope; here the Inca's fighting men once repelled strangers with sling-shots and knobbed maces. Today the Hiram Bingham Highway a narrow five-mile road with fourteen hairpin bends, climbs the slope.

The highway ends at an attractive small inn it the base of the old city. When you are ready to exert yourself in the thin air, 8,800 feet up, an indian guide will lead you through the labyrinth of 200 roofless houses and temples.

The silent streets are peopled by ghosts of richly-garbed kings and their ladies priests, warriors and workers now centuries dead. The Inca elite, dressed in full panoply, must have presented a striking, spectacle. Many wore mantles, of fine vicuna wool woven in intricate and colorful designs; other qlinted like the jungle birds whose brillient plumage they used in head-dresses or wove into long capes.

In July 1911, Bingham, with two scientist friends, some indian helpers and a police-sergeant who had been sent to protect them, set out by mule train along the Urubamba Canyon to track down one more vague lead. For three days, while the Indians chopped the way clear, they plodded and crawled over treacherous hillside trails where even the mules sometimes slipped and had to be hoisted back to save them from the abyss beneath.

One morning a planter appeared at their camp. He told them the familier story of ruins on the mountaintop across the river. It was a cold, drizzly day, and Bingharn's exhausted partners had no heart for the climb. Bingham hardly expected to find anything but he persuaded the reluctant planter and the sergeant to join him. First they crawled over the foaming rapids on a fragile Indian bridge tied together with vines. Then they scrambled up the slope on all fours, using shrubbery for handholds, while the planter shouted warnings about tile venomous fer-de-lance snakes, which later killed two of their mules. At the end of a gruelling 2,000-foot clirnb they came suddenly upon a grass hut. Two Indians gave them a drink of cool water. Just round the corner, they said, were some old houses and walls.

Bingham rounded the hill and halted in amazement at a spectacle now compared with the Great Pyramid and the Grand Canyon rolled into one. First lie saw a flight of nearly a hundred beautifully constructed stone-faced terraces hundreds of feet long-an enormous hillside farm stretching to the sky. Untold centuries ago, armies of stonemasons had built these walls, cutting the rocks and moving them by rnanpower, without wheels, steel or iron. Mote armies of workers had carried tons of topsoil, perhaps from the valley below, to, make, arable land that is still fertile. Beyond the terraces lay more marvels then partly concealed by undergrowth. The following year Bingham led a full scale scientific expedition to the spot. Machu Picchu was opened to the, world.

Its greatest glory is its array of superb, tapering walls. On the citadel's crown, where the Incas are believed to have worshipped their 'ancestor' the Sun, temples made of the world's finest primitive stonework represent the toil of generations of master artisans. Men who know tools and building methods gather in admiration round these granite walls and speculate in many languages.

They note that no two blocks are alike: each was carved for its special place, with odd angles and protuberances meticulously fashioned to fit its neighbors, like, a piece in a Jigsaw Puzzle. The builders of these walls used no mortar. Yet so fine was their, workmanship that, not even a knife blade can be inserted into the rnortarless joints. The builders' tools were bronze chisels, heavy bronze crowbars, and perhaps sand used as an abrasive. Many of the blocks weigh several tons, and must have been pullod into place over skids and rollers crews of men tug in at ropes made from vines. About a mile away, on the hill above the city is the old stone quarry where giant half-hewn blocks still suggest work in progress.

The main streets of this city in the clouds are starways. There are over a hundred of them, large and small, The central avenue of steps leads from the lowest level past dozens of houses to the city's crest. Tha Machu Picchu water-supply system is an ingenious procession of fountains, roughly bisecting the city from the top to bottom, which once brought water within easy distance of the thousand or so inhabitants. In recent times the site has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been the subject of concerns about the damage of tourism.

Most travelers to Peru land in either Lima or La Paz and take a flight to Cusco, the capital of Inca empire. Train services are available from Cusco to Aguas Calientes at the base of Machu Picchu. You may also travel by bus or car to Ollataytambo, about a halfway, and take the train from there through the Urubamba River canyon. There is no road through the canyon. There are many hotels and restaurants in Aguas Calientes to fit any budget. At the upper end hotels in and around Machu Picchu Pueblo have suddenly gotten very expensive.