Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) by Hiram Bingham Read Free Book Online

have presented itself to the Incas when they arrived from Cuzco along what is now known as ‘the Inca Trail’. But after that each photographer is on his or her own, and can roam freely through the intricate and playful buildings, seduced by Machu Picchu’s infinite variety into shooting endless images.
    Why is it that Machu Picchu holds the camera’s gaze so well?
    Perhaps it is partly the nature of classical Inca architecture which makes photographing the site so endlessly beguiling. Two of the guiding organisational principles of Inca design are the open window and the blind niche. One reveals the view, theother constantly encloses and hides it, and it is the constant play between these two impulses that continually draws the camera on. For every niche, every immaculate dead end, every sculpture like that at the heart of the Torreón with its mysterious and shell-like containment, there is a corresponding and heart-stopping opening – the sudden views granted by the Temple of the Three Windows to the Urubamba below, or the great expanse of the Central Plaza. Now you see it, now you don’t.
    This curious sense the photographer can have of catching the fleeting moment at Machu Picchu, despite the very stationary nature of the subject (Bingham: ‘we do not have to take pictures of the fastest moving objects’), is compounded by the constantly changing light. No two shots of the city will ever be the same. Positioned to face north and therefore track the subequatorial sun, its aspect continually changes as the sun moves across its face. This is accentuated by the broken cloud formations that so often hang over the cloud-forest, causing slashes of illumination to pick out unexpected features.
    The final explanation for Machu Picchu’s long and continuing affinity for the camera is the simplest of all – its spectacular positioning.
    Most first-time visitors to the site are already aware that Machu Picchu lies on top of a mountain ridge and dominates the valley below. Few necessarily appreciate that the city is itself ringed by a set of yet higher mountains. Presented by that first ‘pack-shot’ view from the Watchman’s tower, while surrounded by the Urubamba and Vilcabamba ranges, the overwhelming effect is of looking down from the top of a roller coaster and yet simultaneously being at the bottom of a vast amphitheatre, a visually kinetic knock-out punch. No wonder that even the most stolid of visitors should go weak at the knees and reach for the widest of wide-angle lenses, just as Hiram Bingham did.
    So Eastman Kodak’s sponsoring of Bingham’s 1912 expedition has proved a worthwhile long-term investment. A century later, it is estimated that millions of rolls of film have been shot at Machu Picchu: the silver recovered from the processing alone must be worth an Inca’s ransom.
Hugh Thomson 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    I would like to thank Richard Burger, David Drew, Susan Emanuel, John Hemming, Vincent Lee, Roderick Simpson and the staff of the Royal Geographical Society for their invaluable help in the preparation of this new edition of
Lost City of the Incas
.
    The opening maps, drawn by John Gilkes, incorporate elements from previous maps of Gasparini & Margolies, John Hemming, Michael Moseley, Peter Frost, Gary Ziegler and many others, to all of whom grateful acknowledgement is made.
    The final map, showing Bingham’s various routes across the Vilcabamba, compiles his own many diagrams and maps from the early National Geographic reports and his subsequent publications. As always, the spellings of Inca place names have many small variants. I have tried to follow Bingham’s spellings, although he was not always consistent: he interchanges the terms Vilcabamba and Vilcapampa, for instance. The reader should also note that the site Bingham described as Cedrobamba is now more generally known as Sayac Marka.
Hugh Thomson 2001

 
LOST CITY
OF THE INCAS
HIRAM BINGHAM

PREFACE
    FEW PEOPLE realize how much they