PERU’S WONDER CITY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 71, 10 January 1947, Page 3

PERU’S WONDER CITY

MACHU PICCHU OF THE CLOUDS GLORY OF THE INCAS

Seventy miles from this treasure house of Inca and Spanish memories, the Peruvian Government has started to build a motor road that will make history. It will climb from the wild gorge of the Urubamba River, at the foot of a ring of Andean peaks and crags, cliffs and precipices, up a sheer mountainside to Machu Picchu, that ruined pre-Inca city of incomparable beauty and mystery, which almost every traveller who has visited it has acclaimed as the shining climax of his travels.

Discovered by an American, few foreign visitors to Peru have ever seen it, because of the discomfort and actual danger of the trip. The Peruvian Government’s motor road, though it will have its full share of hairpin turns, will be like a metropolitan boulevard compared to the path of appalling narrowness which every visitor to Machu Picchu must now travel on fot, or by horse or mule, often within a few inches of seemingly bottomless chasms. The primitive path of today, however, is itself a highwa’y compared to the rude trail which the American discoverer of Peru’s city in the clouds, Hiram Bingham, had to hack for himself 35 years ago on his way to the peak, where, Indians had told him, a city had stood for centuries —solitary, almost invisible beneath the forest growth, and forgotten by all except the few descendants of its once numerous citizens scattered in the area.

Ancient Glories of Machu Picchu

In later years, Hiram Bingham long represented his native State of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate; I but nothing ever brought him fame I similar to that he won by discoverI ing Machu Picchu. Today’s approach to the mountain city ends at a little hotel—it has room for .only 10 guests—built i a few years ago by the Peruvian Government. This will also be the terminus of the motor road which will be completed in less than a year —if Government dreams come true. Directly above lie the ruins of the cloudy city. Its walls blend with the crags surrounding it; its stone houses, once stately, now lie broken and roofless, exposed to the storms of the Andes. Its “Palace of the Princesses” no longer shelters lovely ladies but only melancholy memories of their loveliness.

Thousands of steps, hewn in the solid rock, lead among the mountain’s edge to the city’s temple, to its main square and lofty solar observatory, to its “Divan of the Priests,” to its commanding lookout tower, built of great granite blocks fitted together with unbelievable skill-, from which sentinels once craned their necks in search of enemies creeping forward from valleys thousands of feet below.

The Revealing Motor Road

All this would be, in itself marvellous enough to satisfy the most exacting sightseer—but when it is placed, as it is at Machu Picchu, in a frame of overwhelming natural beauty—in a halo like that of Rio De Janeiro, but with three towering sugar-loaf peaks instead of one; like the Grand Canyon, but endowed with even more multi-coloured enchantment—it is easy to understand the awed enthusiasm with which, in the years since Hiram Bingham and his American helpers brought it back to life, Machu Picchu has been hailed by the adventurous few who braved that hairraising ascent.

Soon, its glories will be revealed to the many. The Peruvian Government’s projected motor road up the mountainside to Machu Picchu is no rosy dream. Already its construction is well under way. On the way up the present rough path to Machu Picchu I saw scores of workmen digging and trading in the gorge of the Urubamba. While my mule was picking its steps gingerly along the brink of a precipice

—which was one of the most unwelcome experiences of my life— I could hear loud blasts of djmamite as thousands of tons of rock were dislodged for the new mountain highway.

When the road is completed, a larger hotel will be erected just below the ruined city and tourists will come to Machu Picchu in great numbers. Its grandeur will not suffer. Nothing can spoil the calm beauty of Peru’s city in the clouds.