One hundred years ago this month, a young lecturer in history at Yale University named Hiram Bingham made what at the time was celebrated as an historic, indeed heroic, climb through the Peruvian Andes at the climax of which, as Mark Adams puts it in this entirely delightful book, “he stumbled across the geometric splendor of Machu Picchu.” Honored at the time as one of the greatest explorers of the day — it was the day, mind you, of Peary and Scott and Amundsen — he has since lost a good deal of his luster, in part because Machu Picchu had been known for years to many Peruvians before his “discovery” and in part because of Yale’s adamant refusal until late last year to return to Peru the hundreds of antiquities he carried away.
It occurred to Adams, a magazine editor in New York, that “the revised version of Bingham’s tale had the makings of a great story: hero adventurer exposed as villainous fraud.” Poring over Bingham’s voluminous papers at Yale, he realized that Bingham was a considerably more complex (and interesting) figure than “the revised version” had suggested and that he wanted to go to Peru and retrace Bingham’s steps: “Bingham’s search had been a geographic detective story, one that began as a hunt for the Lost City of the Incas but grew into an all-consuming attempt to solve the mystery of why such a spectacular granite city had been built in such a spellbinding location: high on a secluded mountain ridge, in the misty subtropical zone where the Andes meet the Amazon. Fifty years after Bingham’s death, the case had been reopened. And the clues were still out there to be examined by anyone with strong legs and a large block of vacation time.”
So Adams went to Peru and connected with John Leivers, an Australian in his 50s “who’d been recommended . . . as one of the best guides in South America.” As Adams doubtless would be the first to admit, he couldn’t have undertaken the project without an experienced guide. Though he was married to a Peruvian and had visited Lima often, he “had never hunted or fished, didn’t own a mountain bike and couldn’t start a fire without matches if ordered to do so at gunpoint.” His self-portrait is refreshingly candid:
“Have you ever seen Mr. Travel Guy? He’s the fellow who strides through international airports dressed like he’s flying off to hunt wildebeests — shirt with dozens of pockets, drip-dry pants that zip off into shorts, floppy hat with a cord pulled tight under the chin in case a twister blows through the baggage claim area. All of this describes exactly what I was wearing. Between my microfiber bwana costume and the bags of candy that [a Peruvian] kept foisting on me, I could have been trick-or-treating as Hemingway.”
He was game, though, so he set off from Cusco with Leivers, accompanied as well by a legendary Peruvian mule driver, a diminutive cook, a half-dozen mules and a couple of guys to drive them. As outlined by Leivers over breakfast, the trek looked manageable: “About a hundred miles of walking, by my rough calculations. From the sound of what John had described, we’d go north, cut through the mountains, bear left toward the jungle, then double back toward Cusco. For the big finish, all we had to do was follow the river and turn right at Machu Picchu. This last part sounded like a pleasant afternoon stroll, something to kill a few hours and work up an appetite for dinner.”
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