SUSAN ABROAD Lost City Of Incas Out Of This World

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29906, 21 August 1962, Page 2

SUSAN ABROAD Lost City Of Incas Out Of This World

I do not suppose that in all my travels I have ever been further out of this world than I was at Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, the still-binding ruins of an ancient fortress and sanctuary perched high on a peak in the natural mountain stronghold of the Peruvian Andes.

At the foot of this peak, and almost encircling it for added protection, flows a tempestuous river which only a little further down. as distance is measured in the vast country, plunges into the steaming jungle as the mightiest of all rivers, the formidable Amazon. In a sense, obviously. Machu Picchu is lost no longer, since the intrepid and persistent American explorer Hiram Bingham discovered it in 1911. But the haunting name of Lost City still suits it well, in that its essential mysteries—the how, when and why of its very existence —are still basically unsolved.

Indeed they may always remain so unless further discoveries of other lost cities believed to exist in the vicinity offer more conclusive clues to the origins of this intricate and amazing relic of a vanished civilisation. Baby Juggernaut To reach it I left Cuzco—which goodness knows is rich and strange enough in itself—very early one morning in a preposterous little rail-car that reminded me of the Darjeeling sequence in one of the Cinerama films. This bossy little baby juggernaut zigzagged furiously up and over the rim of the surrounding mountains and down the other side of the Andes into the Amazon basin.

For a while we jiggled and rattled over a wide cultivated plain. whistling through primitive Indian villages and sometimes stopping to be swarmed over by dimunitive Indian children who wrung the last drop of pathos out of a shy smile, held out their dirty little paws and lisped the one English word they knew. “Money? Money?” A few of the villages were trim and neat, the mud huts clustered picturesquely among trees and flowers. Others were indescribably filthy, even when the river flowed right by their doors, and I would not be too reluctant when the little train jogged on again into the clean, sweet air of the cornfields. Beast of Burden One isolated scene is indelibly photographed on my retina. Picture a wide blue sky. a broad green field, feather screens of eucalyptus trees to the right and left and a jagged line ot snowy peaks as a backdrop. Through the middle of the field a family is plodding to market. There is a young woman with the fragile build, dark skin, white teeth and gmve dignity of the Indian, wearing the 'distinctive white stove-pine hat on her black plaits and enveloped in layer uoon layer of voluminous skirts of brilliantly dyed hand-woven llama and alpaca wool.

Slung in a gaudy blanket on her thin back is a crippling load, probably of potatoes or corn or dried meat and from underneath this load dangle two skinney little brown human legs. It looks grotesque and dreadful, as if a little dead boy were stowed in there tinder the potatoes. But in all probability the baby is slung underneath in a separate blanket where it can bounce the more comfortably against the mother’s thin but manyskirted haunches.

By the left hand the mother leads a stolid wooly swaddled toddler, and by the right hand, as befits its superior status in the family’s economy. she leads a very large fat pig which she is taking to market.

Bringing up the rear of the procession with considerable poise and dignity is the man of the house—handsome. proud, magnificently ponchoed and sombreroed head high, unburdened, unshackled. riding a splendid horse.

As you may know. I am no militant feminist and am always happy to acknowledge the male as boss. But I felt

this was going a little too far.

Evidently the arrival of our mad little train served as an alarm clock, reminding the sencr that time was getting on. The short wmp cracked. The horse broke into an easy trot. The woman broke into the graceful longpaced run so typical of her Kind. The potatoes and the baby bounced more rapidly. The toddler broke into a howl and was smartly walloped over the ear. and the pig broke into an absurd protesting waddle. As the train swept round a corner and out of sight, they were still jogging across the cornfield, miles and miles and miles from anywhere

By now the jungle was becoming greener and denser, and crowding in more closely over the track. The river we were following wound more □nd more tortuously through steeper cliffs and taller mountains until it seemed to tie a tangled knot in itself. Here we jumped out of our quaint train into an equally exuberant little bus, which bounded up the hairraising precipice like a mountain goat, throwing us all into one another’s laps in a very matey and hilarious manner. But 2000 feet further up our laughter was suddenly hushed. Even our breathing seemed to stop. For we, too, had found the Lost City, the centuries-old citadel which the Incas managed to conceal throughout the Spanish conquest of Peru. Here were the grey stone palaces and temples, the terraces and waterworks, the fortifications that in the end became their tombs. For long-dead mummies, tied up in embryo form, were the only occupants that Hiram Bingham found. Strangely enough, there is nothing sinister. nothing frightening here. Remote and

mysterious in its majestically beautiful setting, Machu Picchu today is a place of pervading peace and calm, where time has stood absolutely still for centuries. The spell it casts does not take very long to work. Within an hour, at the most, it is the world that seems remote.