Cuzco Fruit Seller

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - "Cuzco," Part 3:  It was to Cuzco in 1532 that Pizarro and a small band of Conquistadors, the only Europeans in South America at the time, took the captured Emperor Atahualpa, Pachacuti's great grandson, after they lured him and 30,000 of his best troops to a meeting in the plaza of Cajamarca, then incited a panic by discharging three hidden canons (devices unknown to Atahaulpa's people) while unleashing a cavalry (horses and riders were similarly unknown) of 100 armored lancers and men firing harquebuses (ditto) into the crowd, filling the plaza with smoke and capturing Atahualpa while slaughtering vast numbers of Incas and paralyzing the empire.

Elaison!

La Catedral, Cuzco, begun, 1559

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Twenty years after Pachacuti's death Columbus would set foot on an island he would call, "Hispanola." It took another 34 years for Pizarro to reach Pachacuti's empiire ruled by Pachacuti's grandson, Huayna Capac. The year was 1526, the emperor was young, his empire was thriving. Three years later when Pizarro returned to begin the process of claiming Huayna Capac's land and subjects for Spain, he found Huayna Capac dead, killed by smallpox, a disease unknown here before Columbus. 

Cuzco Morning, 2012

Thucydides: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: He called himself, "Pachacuti," earthshaker.  He was the ninth Inca of the Kingdom of Cuzco, and the founder of an empire. He called his new empire, "Tawantunsuyo,"  the four parts united., and he divided Tawantunsuyo into four regions, Chinchaysuyo, Collasuyo, Cuntisuyo and Antisuyo and where the four regions met was his capital, Cuzco. He laid out highways to the expanding corners of his growing nation and established a system of administration. They tell us he sought control not plunder - a productive nation profits all. To those who submitted he brought peace and trade. Those who resisted he destroyed.  He enforced the peace and levied taxes in labor. He and his son, Topac Inca, and his grandson Huayna Capac enlarged Tawantunsuyu until it spread from the great ocean in the west up over the Andes 20,000 foot peaks and down into the Amazon jungle in the east, and it stretched from the middle of present day Chile in the south into Columbia in the north; it was the nation that Pizarro would name, "Inca," and Cuzco was its center.

Some historians think the place we call, "Machu Picchu," was built for Pachacuti.

Inca Night

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" concluded):   Final whispers.... one more "sandcastle" shot, this one in the shadowed hush after the sun has passed beyond the ruins, the tourists have nearly all gone home, and the empty city sleeps. My camera is helpless before my obsession. 

Deliquescence

JAMES TYBERONN: "The 'double vortex' is two concentric energy rings that act as templates for the both the magnetic and electrical vortexes around Machu Picchu. In this concentric circular template an outer energetic ring of clockwise motion draws energy into the perimeter of Machu Picchu. This magnetic vortex has a diameter of approximately 7-10 kilometers. The inner electrical vortex has a diameter of approximately 2 kilometers. It circulates counter-clockwise and is fed by an outpouring of vertical columns of light from locations within the inner circle. The opposite directions of clockwise magnetic (inward) and counter-clockwise electric (outward) telluric flows are unique."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 17):  Why here? Looking for the Incas behind Machu Picchu is nibbling at the precipice beside a cloud forest of science, pseudo-science and prehistory. The more we stare into the empty mist the more fantastic the shifting, shadowy shapes become, but the city is innocent of all that.  Is that the final truth of Machu Picchu?  I rub my eyes from staring too fixedly.

Parapet View

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 16): What led the Inca's to one of the most inaccessible places on the planet?  One answer is that it's hard to imagine them not coming here. Their science had calculated the position of the equator, their spiritual life followed the rhythms of the sun and moon. One goes to the highest spot, the top of the mountain to learn more about such things. 

When they first came here, did they already understand the profound connections that bind parts to the whole, the interconnectedness of all things, of all planes of being; or did they gain that knowledge by coming here? Had they already precisely regulated their farming to astronomical events? Had they already developed the systems of conservation that regularly produced surplus goods, the terraced farming methods that made idle land productive, the ingenious systems of irrigation? Where did they learn those tricks for accurately dividing stones and for seamlessly binding them into interlocking walls that resist the shaking of the earth? Where did the principles of their intricate statecraft come from that set the relationship of the individual to the community and the community to the divine monarch? Were the roots of the state only in the evolution of familial and tribal institutions, or were some of them learned here first? 

Of course people have always, gone to the mountaintops to receive "truth." What is to be learned there? The higher we keep going, the lonelier we seem. Did the Incas feel that too? They went to mountaintops to tether the sun to keep it from abandoning them. There's also power, energy that many of us feel there, whatever its source. What do we take from that energy? What wisdom can we learn there to take back home?

Dialogue

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 15): Photographing at Machu Picchu was not what I expected it would be. I went there for the sandcastle magic that had thrilled me the first time I saw a postcard picture of the city. The reality of the place was much different. One can't help but be awed by the grandeur of the valley and the mountains and the architecture, but it's more than the immensity. Immensity made tangible? It's like no other heights I've stood upon. I lack the words and struggle to capture it in images. 

It was hard to imagine people living here in the cold stone huts, hard to imagine the walls hung with Inca rugs, mats on the floor, hard to imagine living beings inhabiting there, no matter how much I felt the Inca presence.

Also, I hadn't anticipated the shutter-triggering frisson and energy from the clash of careful Inca stonework against the raw, mountain monoliths arrayed everywhere as far as I could see.

Best of all, however, was the light show as the sun set. It was a short window of light while I was there, but it was enough to know that Machu Picchu is a funhouse of light for photographers, and I want to go back.

Grazing the Edge of the Precipice

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here," part 14):  

Angling

The Inca Bridge is always closed now; 

too fragile, 

too dangerous, 

unsafe.  

Standing at the edge looking across the gap 

was 

an anticlimax, 

no crossing over the precipice

swinging on a walkway of vines,

of rounding the next bend,

looking back,

triangulating.

My walk brought me back

just as a low squinting sun  

serenaded shadows

across the ruins 

and the mountains

and the clouds.

As I came off a high terrace 

to get a different angle, 

there were the llamas below me, 

grazing at the edge 

of the precipice and 

the cloud forest.

Sun Gate Road

KIM MacQUARRIE from The Last Days of the Incas: "The Spaniards, meanwhile, still had a very weak grasp of just how complex the empire that they had only partially conquered was. While they had immediately recognized the overall similarities with the Old World's culture of kings, nobles, priests, and commoners, they knew little of the actual mechanisms that enabled the Inca Empire to function. The Inca's genius -- like that of the Romans -- lay in their masterful organizational abilities. Amazingly, an ethnic group that probably never exceeded 100,000 individuals was able to regulate the activities of roughly ten million people. This was in spite of the fact that the empire's citizens spoke more than seven hundred local languages and were distributed among thousands of miles of some of the most rugged and diverse terrain on earth."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here," part 13):   At the end of our first day at Machu Picchu, our only evening, I took a long walk alone to a spot called the Inca Bridge where the Incas had thrown a removable catwalk of logs, a drawbridge, between two parts of the trail and across a face of sheer, verticle rock.  The trail was part of one of the two Inca roads into the city. It hugged a jungle cliff, high along the west side of the mountain, above the Urubamba.  Among their other achievements at the time Pizarro arrived in Peru, the Incas had paved 10,000 miles of road like this to knit their empire together. 

Roads and runners were enough. With only knotted chords to record their figures, local chiefs, warlords, and administrators rendered population-based taxes, usually in labor, to the king and his administrators. The taxes built an agricultural surplus that fed the nation and filled emergency warehouses.  Did the terms of the social compact protect every citizen from times of drought and famine? How might such compassion be squared with the ruthless and brutal tyranny for which Atahualpa was also known? What kind of paternal justice balanced the well-being of the Inca nation and the well-being of each of its citizens? Whatever the case, it seems Inca administration had been bountiful, even after some years of civil war. 

The Inca drawbridge was a simple defensive device, but its effectiveness depended on an alert guard and his absolutely superior vantage point that prevented anyone from getting near the bridged gap without being exposed and vulnerable. The Inca's, was a labor-driven economy.

Hanging Gardens

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 12): If built as a nobleman's estate, the nobleman must have controlled great power to have built a city with terraced gardens to feed it, 2000 feet up in a mountain, where even the dirt had to be carried in by llamas.

Were the laborers greatly oppressed slaves, or did they work in the shelter of fervent belief in a god that bestowed grace and favor upon them, their nation and their children?

The Incas had no real writing. Yet their ruins tell of cultural resources accumulated over generations - not just religious teachings but engineering, agricultural knowledge, systems of broad scale governance and a dispersal and conservation of that knowledge, a class of people who knew how to plan and design and innovate.

Pizarro arrives at the end of a great civil war that divided a nation that stretched through the Andes and to the edges of the jungle from Quito in the north to Cuzco 1000 miles south. Through Pizarro we get a picture of a highly organized society, communities linked by a network of roads and runners, a primitive internet, bringing Atahualpa, the king, constant news of his kingdom. It is a society that treats Atahualpa with loyal reverence and to which he always returns haughty disdain. As Pizarro makes clear, Atahualpa was a ruler of utmost wisdom, courage and composure, and he was sorry for having him garroted.

NOTE: This is a three-shot panorama capable of being printed fairly large. The people walking at all levels of the terraces are clear and sharp down to distinguishing camera bag and backpack straps.

Agricultural Huts

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 11): Recent scholars contend that Machu Picchu was built as the country estate of a powerful Inca nobleman or ruler, a retreat with good views.

Grand Stair

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 10):  Until we learn why the Incas were here, we will continue imagining orchidaceous rites and surreal sacraments while knowing that the truth was far more startling than anything Hollywood can envision though perhaps totally mundane in its daily aspect. To be there is to feel the intoxicating, stony reality of it all.

Tampu Tocco

HIRAM BINGHAM: "The principle temple faces south where there is a small plaza or courtyard. On the east side of the plaza was another amazing structure, the ruins of a temple containing three great windows looking out over the canyon to the rising sun. Like its neighbor, it is unique among Inca ruins. Nothing quite like them in design or execution has ever been found. Its three conspicuously large windows, obviously too large to serve any useful purpose, were most beautifully made with the greatest care and solidity. This was evidently a ceremonial edifice of particular significance. Nowhere else in Peru, so far as I know, is there a similar structure conspicuous for being 'a masonry wall with three windows.' It will be remembered that Salcamayhua, the Peruvian who wrote an account of the antiquities of Peru in 1620, said that the first Inca, Manca the Great, ordered, 'works to be executed at the place of his birth consisting of a masonry wall with three windows.' Was that what I had found? If it was, then this was not the capital of the last Inca but the birthplace of the first. It did not occur to me that it might be both." 


 PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 9): I was so used to thinking that Inca terraces are for growing crops, that it didn't occur to me until I stood here, that these terraces were used very differently. This stairway cuts across the long central square around which the city of Machu Picchu is organized. Suddenly it was easy for me to understand the power of those three, large windows, aligned to the sun like the other temples of the sacred precinct all the way up to the Intihuatana at the top of the adjacent mound. The imagination riots at the infinite variety of liturgies that might be played out in the complex space below that was the center of life here. What did those liturgies look like? -sound like? -What celestial events summoned their cadences?

Bingham offers a possible script and actors. When he excavated graves on the hillsides around the city he found the vast majority held the bones of women. There must have been men to cultivate the fields, he reasoned. Where were they buried? Where had they lived? Clearly this was a sanctuary primarily for women. Inca stories led him to conclude that Machu Picchu had been a holy retreat and shrine dedicated to the Acilas, women chosen for their beauty to serve the sun. In news stories they were called, "Virgins of the Sun," though I've read that the concept of virginity was unknown to the Incas. Bingham thought Machu Picchu was where they were trained and perhaps occasionally sacrificed in their quest to become either holy Mamacones who serve the sun god and the Inca priests, or become faithful wives who serve Inca noblemen.

Were Acilas wed here? Whatever ceremonies took place must have used this elaborate stage machinery, the levels of terraces from which one may speak up or down and command an audience. I'm told that a voice speaking loudly at the top of the Intihuatana can be heard clearly in the rock shell of the plaza. Could the setting sun inhabit those Three Windows to dramatic effect at the Sun's ceremonial betrothal? In the morning they focus three ominous rectilinear beams on the temple floor that grow erect as the equinox approaches. Can we yet hear the forgotten sacraments still echoing along canyon walls? Or was it some other music that played here?

Peak Powers

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 8):   BIngham also came to believe that what he had found was not only the last refuge of the Incas but also the holiest place of their origins, the site where Manco Cápac, first ruler of the Inca nation was born from the union of the sun and the moon. Bingham identified temples and monuments at all corners of the city that, even today, are tuned to the solstice and the equinox and other celestial events. Stonemasons set their stones, we are told, to mark astral passages by annually rendering light and shadow harmonies of the rhythms that govern life.

Balance

NOTE: "Just Photographs," this weekend, July 20-22, at the Sherman Center. Help spread the word. 

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 7):   Structures at Machu Picchu show the skills of the greatest Inca stonemasons, designers who made stone sing, who shaped stones into 3D jigsaws so that not a hair's gap showed where the complex angles met. Their skills would have been prized and were reserved for the most important structures.

Those men worked here.  At numerous places in the city I stopped and gasped at the sheer virtuosity of their craft and the genius of their art. Why were they brought here? ...Outpost?  Fortress? While I was in Machu Picchu, wherever I looked, I always felt at the center of something.

Terraces in the Cloud Forest

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 6):   Another theory is that Machu Picchu was built as an outpost of the Inca Empire, a fortress at the edge of the jungle where civilization ended, and where the Incas had need to defend or at least guard against hostile tribes that lived in the interior.

Grand Plaza, Huayna Picchu, and Cloud Forest

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 5):   ...Beyond tourists (if it can be managed), beyond Vilcabamba and the exploits of Conquistadors and archeologists, even beyond whatever business or rituals occurred in this grand plaza where Inca's gathered, for me this is a place where silences echo loudly the vague shapes and shadows of the culture lost.

Composition in Stone with Watchman's Tower

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 4):   Vilcabamba? How might the city have withstood the pressures of suddenly expanding to feed and house a retreating, desperate aristocracy and their retainers and their defenders?  The question is moot. Scholars have identified a different spot as the real Vilcabamba, another site Bingham had passed through and explored.

Of Stone and Vapor

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 3):   ...What care the builders of Machu Picchu took to lay out their city into districts, to set aside a large central plaza, to make optimum use of a compact, difficult site and to bring in and distribute water from the nearby mountain for drinking, irrigation and conservation! What care they took in the placement of each stone! ...

Amidst Cloud Forest

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL ("Why Here?" part 2):  What led the people we call Inca to build Machu Picchu in one of the most inaccessible and least visited places on the planet?  Bingham was looking for Vilcabamba, the last secret refuge of the Inca's after the Spanish had conquered all Inca lands. As a place for hiding, Machu Picchu is hard to beat, surrounded by sheer cliffs east, north, and west and only accessible across a narrow, vulnerable ridge on the south. Two trails that led to that ridge are long and treacherous, the region remote. No one was going to stray here blindly or get here without being seen. That and several details from contemporary sources convinced Bingham he'd found Vilcabamba.  ...

details - In the Clouds on Huayna Picchu

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  ...Even then we are not likely to notice the distant traces of terraces, towers and ceremonial structures along the ridge from the peak of Machu Picchu to the peak of Huayna Picchu (shown here) connected by a precipitous trail that defines an axis north-south through the city; people on the trail will be barely visible specks, but their path is aligned to the constellations and kept teathered to the seasons by the Intihuatana.

Of Stone

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (Part 3 of 4) It is not until we have penetrated the city, perhaps climbed to the Intihuatana or emerge, as here, from an avenue through the city, and look back, that we notice Machu Picchu the mountain, "Old Peak," behind us and towering above all that the Inca stonemasons created. ...

Huayna Picchu at Sunset

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (part 2 of 4) The Intihuatana catches the full arc of the sun from its small hill on the west side of the city which is anchored to, seems almost to grow from, the hard granite ridge that runs between Huayna Picchu ("Young Peak") and Machu Picchu ("Old Peak"). Huayna Picchu (shown here) rises like a tusk from the valley floor where the Urubamba River makes a tight loop around its base. The topography forces all access to come from the south with Huayna Picchu's familiar profile at the back of the Inca city of stone and an indivisible part of the architectural whole. ...

detail 2, City with Intihuatana

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: (part 1 of 4) Machu Picchu, the city, emerges from the mountains' rock much as Michelangelo's Bound Slaves emerge from marble, mind rising live from cold stone, the secrets of its form preexisting within the unformed mass.  What sixth sense enabled the Inca builders to probe the earth to the mountain's core as they balanced stones that have remained unshakable amid quakes for 500 years? At the top of the city is the Intihuatana (shown here on left with tourists), the so called, "hitching post of the sun,"  that allowed the Inca's to remain tuned to the winter solstice and the movement of the spheres. ...

Llamas

HIRAM BINGHAM [Describing the discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911. The narrative picks up just after Bingham and his escorts have crawled across a rude  bridge suspended from frail vines above the cold, rushing rapids of the Urubamba River.]:

"Leaving the stream, we now struggled up the bank through dense jungle, and in a few minutes reached the bottom of a very precipitous slope. For an hour and twenty minutes we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance we went on all fours, sometimes holding on by our fingernails. Here and there a primitive ladder made from the roughly notched trunk of a small tree was placed in such a way as to help one over what might otherwise have proved to be an impassable cliff. In another place the slope was covered with slippery grass where it was impossible to find either handholds or footholds. Arteaga groaned and said that there were lots of snakes here. Sergeant Corrasco said nothing but was glad he had good military shoes. The humidity was great. We were in the belt of maximum precipitation in Eastern Peru. The heat was excessive and I was not in training. There were no ruins or andenas of any kind in sight....

Shortly after noon, just as we were completely exhausted, we reached a little grass-covered hut 2000 feet above the river where several good-natured indians, pleasantly surprised at our unexpected arrival, welcomed us with dripping gourds full of cool, delicious water. Then they set before us a few cooked sweet potatoes. It seems two indian farmers, Richards and Alvarez had recently chosen this eagles' nest for their home. They said they had found plenty of terraces here on which to grow their crops. Laughingly they admitted they enjoyed being free from undesirable visitors and officials looking for army 'volunteers' or collecting taxes."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL "Why Hear?" Part 1: Why did the people we call Incas build here in a spot impossible to reach?  What is it we rush here to find? 

The terraces that the Inca's built here are filled with soil they hauled by hand from the valley 2000 feet below. Those terraces form the largest arable farmland at this beneficial altitude in this part of the Andes, and the llamas are very happy here. I cower. It's a matter of scale.

detail 1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What units measure my distance from the people who built these terraces? How do I weigh the gap? How far are they, am I, from the hovering walls of the dark gorge?  A visit here is a sublime assault of spiritual vertigo. They tell me it's just the altitude, but I believe it's a matter of scale and proximity and forces we lack the tools to plumb. 

The dark monolith in the center of the image, just behind the watchman's tower, is the sheer face of a mountain cliff. Trees cling to the cliff and you can just make out a flag on a pole at the top. In reality it would stand tall next to the watchman's tower. The distance between is deceptive, the distance down, too far to fall. The Urubamba River swirls there for several million years, and smaller than a sparrow; my time at the top, too short to note.

This image is a detail extracted from yesterday's panorama. Look at the previous image to see where it fits. With time to stroll, I'd climb up and down the terraces walking back and forth, framing images with my long lens, ecstatic with vertigo, watching how the guard tower danced with the mountain peak between the garden terraces and the mountain walls, till the sun dropped, and the gorges were sealed.

At the Knob of the Knot

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Some years ago, attending a photo workshop in Nova Scotia, the leader's challenge was to make an "original" photograph of a lighthouse. We all understood his assignment. Lighthouses are iconic, especially along the northern Atlantic Coast. They are washed with salt air, barnacles, yellow slickers and mythology, just as they are surrounded by rocks, breakers, a horizon and are often limited in the number of natural photographic perspectives. As photographs, lighthouses come almost ready-made. Many have been frequently and well-photographed, sometimes with rare winds passing and memorable water. Our assignment was to find something new, something to make the viewer look at the lighthouse in a new way or to rediscover the icon as if for the first time.

As it turns out, the lighthouse we were to shoot was the much photographed one at Peggy's Cove. If you have in your mind an image of an old, Yankee, fishing village, there's a good chance your image is Peggy's Cove. It's not only iconic but singular. Movies have been filmed there. Everyone who arrives with a camera takes the shot from the head of the cove with the fishing boats docked along the left side by piers and related fishing shacks; houses clustered on the rocks behind, and beside the mysterious gateway leading to the sea. People stand at the head of the harbor and try to shoot that view even at times of day when the sun makes it almost impossible. Everyone following the only road into Peggy's Cove reaches that spot that looks as if the whole village had been composed around it, singular, unique.  They take a picture, and most are happy to have it as a document to help remember when they stood there.

At Machu Picchu everyone stops to photograph at the Watchman's Tower. That was the first view an ancient Incan would have has as well. Should we be surprised such master builders made sure it was a picture? However, the classic shot should include the tower; one begins to climb and scramble for angles from farther up and west.  Ramiro led us around the terrace steps to an area he had found, and I thank him for this guidance.

Such places are a dilemma for the photographer who arrives when the weather is ordinary, doesn't want to take the same, old, tired shot but who may have an audience who will be disappointed if he fails to record the singular view. Once he has taken that shot, he is free to photograph anything. 

However, if he has arrived at a place that has filled his dreams, it will not let him alone. He craves to experience its singular presence, to hear, smell, taste its music. This was what drew him on his pilgrimage, and he will want to make an image that attempts to communicate some part of what he is feeling even if the effort is doomed to failure.

HIRAM BINGHAM DESCRIBES MACHU PICCHU DISCOVERY

Rio Urubamba

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Our train follows the Urubamba River from Ollantaytambo to the end of the track in Aguas Calientes, directly beneath Machu Picchu.  Between Pisac and Ollantaytombo the Urubamba River and its broad banks are gracious and hospitable.  Its waters fall slowly, in 35 miles, just 640 feet or about 18.3 feet per mile. Its surface is almost always smooth, fish are plentiful, the livin' is easy.  Between Ollantaytambo and Aguas Calientes, a distance of 18 miles, Rio Urubamba falls 2,970 feet or 165 feet every mile. It is always churning. 

As the river cuts its way deep into the mountains it winds like a snake and the canyon gets ever narrower. A couple of miles out of Ollantaytambo a foot bridge is suspended over the foaming river. Those who go by foot will cross the bridge and climb out of the canyon to follow the old Inca Trail over the mountains and past ancient fortresses and sanctuaries that have for centuries populated this wilderness where massifs collide. Those following the trail from here will require at least 4 days. 

Until the track was laid in the 1920s, passage up the valley was strenuous, the swirling river, perilous. Seven winding miles further down the gorge the vegetation starts to change; temperatures are warmer. The river and train track have dropped 1000 feet; this is the edge of the jungle.  Before Bingham, this was a trek only for the most rugged of missionaries; adventurers eyed it only as a prospect.

Further on, the serpentine river slides by the ruins of Choquesuysuy. Nearby at Chachabamba is another access point to the Inca Trail. Those who climb over the mountain from here can be at Machu Picchu in six hours. The train will be in Aguas Calientes in a dozen minutes. 

We have wound our way into the center of a knot. We are in a region where the river rages, and the mountains rise almost vertically around it, and we feel as if when the train finally stops, it does so because it can penetrate no further. Aguas Calientes is a dense cluster of rickety-looking, mud block buildings, piled 3 or 4 stories high and crammed in where two more rivers tumble from gorges into the Urubamba chasm. 

The town lies within spitting distance of Machu Picchu so long as one spits from Machu Picchu, several thousand feet above us.  Buses carry tourists up and (more terrifyingly) down the tortuous, "Hiram Bingham Highway,"  comprised of 14 narrow, dirt switchbacks up the cliff wall to Machu Picchu. When Hiram Bingham got here, there was no "highway."  

Trains, buses, rushing water, and the constant movement of tourists make Aguas Calientes feel as if it is choked with traffic, this town, deep in a knot of mountains where no road reaches.