Chapter 39

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 ripeají, 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 beprudent, 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 theintihuatana, 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 thehaggard 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 greatmontañaand 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.

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, atleast 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 royalllautaabout 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 theintihuatana, 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 fearfullythrough 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 privateñustas, 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 correctionwas 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 dreaduta, 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 wondereach 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!

The descent was harder than the climb; also it was quicker. So slippery was the wet trail at that angle that whenever our heels failed to bite into the soil we sat down emphatically on the backs of our necks some feet further down the slope, fetching it a resounding wallop with the rest of the body. There is talk of some day building an electric line from Cuzco, and a funicular up to the ruins, with perhaps a tourist hotel among them. Fortunately talk does not easily breed action in Peru. One of the chief charms of Machu Picchu is inherent in the difficulty of reaching it; a scene once made accessible to fat, middle-aged ladies is ready to be marked off the traveler’s itinerary and to be turned over to the tender mercies of the tourist.

We ended the descent without broken bones, though not without shattered tempers, and finding the precarious connection with the outer world still sagging between the roaring boulders, climbed the wet jungled bank beyond. Here Rumiñaui, in addition to his regular government wage of twenty cents, was rewarded with a shilling and a handful of coca-leaves, only the latter seeming to be of any interest to him; and here, strangely enough, Tomás was waiting, as he had been ordered, with the four animals, their heads turned toward Cuzco.

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