It turned out, needless to say, to be considerably more challenging than that, both because of the physical rigors entailed in walking — hiking and climbing were more like it — through some of the world’s most beautiful but rugged terrain, and because, like countless others before him, Adams was trying to unravel the incredibly complex tangle that is Inca history. “Separating fact from fiction in Inca history is impossible,” he writes, “because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq, written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Saddam Hussein published in Arabic, and you’ll get some idea of the problem historians face.”
Not merely is Inca history difficult to pin down, but Machu Picchu itself is an enduring mystery. “No one could say with confidence exactly why this extraordinary complex of stone buildings had been constructed in the first place,” Adams writes. “Was it a fortress? A sun temple? A really elaborate granary? A spiritual portal to the fourth dimension, constructed by extraterrestrial stonemasons?” Only Bingham — organized and self-confident to the nth degree — was confident he had the answer: he “was certain that he’d found the legendary Vilcabamba, famous as the Lost City of the Incas,” a theory that is dismissed by “modern Machu Picchu experts” as “ridiculous.”
(Dutton) - ‘Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time’ by Mark Adams. Dutton. 333 pp. $26.95
Leivers had his own theory. He “believed that Inca sites like Choquequirao and Machu Picchu weren’t so much separate entities as parts of a vast Inca network,” like “organs and vessels, the circulatory system in a . . . very big living body” that covered “thousands of square miles.” Others believe that it was built as the tomb of the great Inca emperor Pachacutec, or as (in the recent words of two scholars) “merely one of [a] number of personal royal estates built by an Inca king in the remote countryside,” or as, in combination with the Inca Trail, a “pilgrimage route.” Adams gives all of these theories their moment, but finally concludes that “Machu Picchu is always going to be something of a mystery. Which is, of course, part of its allure.”
En route to this judgment Adams makes his way to a number of extraordinary places, all of them spectacular but pale by comparison with Machu Picchu. He has a few adventures and a scare or two, and gets a considerably deeper immersion in Peruvian life and culture than he’d previously been exposed to in Lima. “Peru is a wonderful place,” he writes. “It is also wonderfully weird.” He cites the strange behavior of its criminals, some of whom have held high elective office, and finally decides: “It’s possible that all this craziness is just geography as destiny. Peru’s borders contain some of the world’s most varied topography and climate. Measured in square miles, the country is not especially large. On a globe it looks like a swollen California. Within that space, though, are twenty-thousand-foot peaks, the world’s deepest canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), unmapped Amazon jungle and the driest desert on earth. . . . Scientists have calculated that there are thirty-four types of climatic zones on the face of the earth. Peru has twenty of them.”
Peru also has “la hora peruana, Peruvian Time.” Anyone who has ever made an appointment with a Peruvian plumber or delivery service knows all about it: “This is the code, indecipherable to North Americans, by which Peruvians determine the latest possible moment that it is acceptable to arrive for an appointment. The statement ‘I’ll be right back’ can mean just that, or it can mean that the speaker is about to depart via steamship for Cairo. . . . By one estimate, each Peruvian arrives a total of 107 hours late each year, a number that is shocking only because it seems so low. My friend Esteban, an Ivy League-trained businessman living in Lima, needed to lie to his mother in order to get her to his wedding on time. He told her the ceremony began at noon when it actually started at 4 p.m. She arrived at ten minutes to four, red-faced and puffing.”
Jonathan Yardley
is the author of the newly published “Second Readings: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited.” The contents first ran as a series of essays in The Washington Post.
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