Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) Read Online Free PDF

Occasionally the sun broke through the upper layer and made the upper surface of the lower layer look like snow fields and peaks in the Andes.
    On his return from France, he entered politics and enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Republican Party, with appointments tumbling over themselves so fast that at one point he held three ascending posts in as many days. Just as with John Glenn many years later, the aura of an explorer was a powerful one. Bingham was helped also by the fact that he stood a head taller than all his colleagues in photographs.
    By 1925 he was a Senator, although his career was to be a rocky one. He received a full censure from his colleagues, an unusual disgrace, although his offence (employing a lobbyist) seems to have been more a casual disregard for procedures than anything more venal. The New Deal swept him aside, and other troubles beset him after he lost his senatorial seat: he separated from his wife amidst complicated financial arguments and a suspicion that hehad behaved less than honourably in administrating her fortune.
    But in 1948 came a diversion. He had always kept his principal occupation as ‘explorer’ in
Who’s Who in America
, despite the appointments to Yale, the air force and the Senate. His account of his wartime experiences was titled
An Explorer in the Air Service
. Now he decided to return to his first love for a last book. The result,
Lost City of the Incas
, is Bingham’s final distillation of the full meaning of what he had found in that heart-stopping month in 1911, when he was a young man.
    The book is divided into three sections: Part 1 gives a historical survey of the Incas; Part 2 tells the story of his initial journey to Choquequirao in 1909 and the Yale Peruvian expedition of 1911, although he reserves an account of the discovery of Machu Picchu for Part 3, which also analyses the results of the further excavations.
    Modern scholars might question his description of Inca rule as ‘benevolent despotism’, and archaeologists deplore his rough-edged approach to excavation (his workers used crowbars), but there can be no doubt of the energetic sense of inquiry that the book reveals, and its acute breadth of reference. Bingham is always capable of surprising observations – like the sudden remark that the ‘ruins [of Choquequirao] today present a more striking appearance than they did when they were covered with thatched roofs’. And he did not accept descriptions blindly from those who had gone before him: his careful placing of the ‘fortress’ at Ollantaytambo in quotation marks and his statement that ‘it is likely that this “fortress” became a royal garden’, are remarkably close to the views of modern scholars: he was the first to state them.
    Even though he may have been wrong in his attribution of Machu Picchu, his achievement was still immense. Almost a century after his discoveries in the Vilcabamba, many explorers and archaeologists are still just adding footnotes and elucidations to his pioneering work.
    I like to imagine him writing this book at the end of his days when, like his fictional contemporary Charles Foster (Citizen) Kane, he could at last set aside the frustrated years of politicaloffice, with all their controversy and failure, and look back again with compressed perspective to a moment of recreated triumph, the moment in which he first came over the crest of a rise to see a whole city laid out before him.
    It is this added quality of emotion recollected many years later that helps make
Lost City of the Incas
such a powerful account of what was a remarkable achievement.

BINGHAM’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF MACHU PICCHU
    ‘Would anyone believe what I had found? Fortunately, in this land where accuracy of reporting what one had seen is not a prevailing characteristic of travellers, I had a good camera and the sun was shining.’
Hiram Bingham,
Lost City of the Incas
    When Hiram Bingham climbed up from the Urubamba valley on July 24th, 1911, and