Page 58 - All About History - Issue 28-15

The City In The Sky

How one of the world’s most mysterious historical

sites came to be, and then fell to ruin Written by Alex Hoskins

iram Bingham had exhausted the advice to Bingham and the others to follow him. Just a
given to him about where to look for the few moments walk from the hut, they trudged
lost city long ago. He had taken to being led through rain-drenched foliage and saw it for the
up rocky tracks and through undergrowth first time: the ruined city of Machu Picchu.
H and even to the edge of danger in search Straight in front of them, hundreds of feet
of Vilcabamba Viejo, but few of these journeys had long, they saw magnificent rows of stone houses,
given him any real hope of finding the notorious abandoned centuries ago and left to ruin, but
Peruvian lost city of the Incas. However, on 23 still undoubtedly a former scene of civilised
July 1911, a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga life. Bingham knew it was Inca stonework,
told Bingham, through his Quechua interpreter, unmistakable even beneath the vines and trees
that there were extensive ruins in the mountains, that had begun to encase it since abandonment.
untouched by experts. Machu Picchu, meaning ‘old This, surely, was the place they had come to find,
peak’, was the place, he said, as he pointed to the and Vilcabamba Viejo was no longer lost.
cloud-covered mountains behind Bingham. But it was not the place Bingham
The next morning, through a thick film of drizzle thought it was. This was arguably
and further up into the thinning air, Arteaga led something much more important.
Bingham and his interpreter up the old mountain. The city he was searching
The rest of the expedition crew, including Yale’s for, Vilcabamba Viejo,
best archaeologists, had declined to take yet
another trip into the unknown for potentially little
reward. After gruelling travel up the treacherous
pathways, they came to a hut used by local farmers.
Arteaga spoke to a young boy, who then gestured

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