A new direction - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 310

at all comfortable with this thin air so far above the ocean. Arriving at
11,000 feet and going hiking right away was a dumb thing to do; we
should have taken it easy for the first day. The hotel sta¤ gave us some
tea brewed from the leaves of the coca plant, the local remedy for high
altitude sickness. It didn't help. I took several aspirin and went to bed.
The next morning, fortunately, I felt pretty good, so we packed up
and boarded the little train that runs from Cuzco to Machu Picchu.
The Andes are so steep that the train climbs by means of a series of
switchbacks. First it goes forward up a short section of straight track
and stops. The engineer gets out and switches the track, and the train
goes backward up the next section—and so on, back and forth, until
it gets over the mountain. Then it follows the same procedure to go
down the other side.
Finally the mountain train arrived at the little station at the foot of
the steep mountain of Machu Picchu. The ancient Inca citadel sits 1,800
feet above the station and is surrounded by majestic peaks towering
thousands of feet above. Built as a remote royal estate and religious re-
treat for the Inca kings, it was used up to the mid-sixteenth century
and then abandoned, remaining undiscovered for 400 years until 1911,
when historian and explorer Hiram Bingham learned of its existence
from a local peasant.
We boarded a Chevy van that took us up the narrow dirt switch-
backs to the top. On reaching the summit we looked down hundreds
of feet, where we made out the rushing turbulence of the Urubamba
River, carrying the melting snows of the Andes to join the Amazon.
We were awestruck by the majesty of the setting and the mystery of
the place as we tried to imagine the lives and activities of those who
once lived here.
Dozens of stone buildings are mostly intact, lacking only their long-
ago disintegrated wooden roofs. They are constructed of granite blocks,
some weighing as much as a hundred tons, hand cut from natural out-
crops and shaped so that they literally locked together and anchored
to the mountain itself. The Incas' engineering and construction skills
were truly amazing. Although they lived in one of the most geologi-
cally unstable regions of the world, the buildings still stand after hun-
dreds of years and untold numbers of earthquakes.