PERU: Explorer’s Return

For the occasion, the 72-year-old hero of the day, snow-thatched Hiram Bingham, ex-Senator from Connecticut (1924-33), ex-Yale professor and explorer, had come all the way from New Haven, Conn. He was greeted by an archbishop, a prefect, two senators, the mayor of Cuzco, and the U.S. ambassador. Together they celebrated the opening of a new highway up Andean cliffs to Machu Picchu (pronounced manchew peaktu), the ancient Inca capital discovered by Explorer Bingham in 1911. The roadway’s name, proclaimed by Peru’s President Luis Bustamante: the Hiram Bingham Highway (pronounced Eeram Bingam Igwye).

After the flowery speeches, the old explorer climbed the steep slopes of Machu Picchu to show his friends one of the New World’s greatest archeological glories. Here was the granite observatory where Inca priests marked the solstices and claimed, each June 21 (when their freezing subjects feared midwinter starvation), that they had tied the sun to a stone. There stood the Emperor’s palace, and beyond, the convent of the Vestals of the Sun. Just below were the terraces, where corn, potatoes and tomatoes grew long before the white man ever heard of them.

The Search. The erect old guide told how he came to find Machu Picchu. After searching old texts, studying old charts, he said, he had concluded that somewhere in the Andes was an Inca capital that the Spanish never reached. Thereupon, he had gone out from Cuzco with a group of eager young scientists, had struck down the might gorge of the Urubamba canyon. Finally, on a muleteer’s grudging tip, Bingham crawled up the peak known as Machu Picchu. There, under trees and matted vines, lay the lost city.

Many scholars think that it was built as an impregnable fortress to defend the Inca empire’s eastern approaches. Bingham has a different theory, which he develops in his forthcoming book Lost City of the Incas (Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $5).

The Theory. Bingham is convinced that the city he found is older, perhaps a thousand years older, than Cuzco, which dates from about 1100. To this spot, he believes, the pre-Inca ruler Pachacuti retreated before Amazonian hordes. On the mountain terraces, the pre-inca civilization survived to go forth with manco, the first Inca, to Cuzco and the far-flung empire (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador) that the Spaniards found. To this peak the last Incas fled to live out their days in cloudswept palaces that no white man saw till, in 1911, Hiram Bingham found them.