I choose not to recall the time I passed a kidney stone there, or another occasion when a Japanese woman wearing high-heeled shoes, just ahead of me, fell to her death off Huayna Picchu. Notwithstanding these dramas, Machu Picchu has been very kind to me, and I’ll honor her (she is female, of course) with one of my fondest memories.
Back in the nineteen-eighties I was dragging my hot, sweaty boots down the last leg of the Inca Trail past Intipunku, facing that amazing view, when I noticed that something unusual was afoot down on the esplanade.
A crowd, tiny at this distance, swarmed around the eastern terraces, and as I watched, formed up and seemed to settle into place. Then I heard strange noises, formless and eerie, which resolved themselves into the sound of an orchestra tuning its instruments.
The volume swelled as I neared the Watchman’s Hut and coalesced into the opening bars of a classical piece. After a brief hassle with the authorities — who inevitably thought everyone should pay extra for this unannounced privilege but weren’t sure how much they should charge, or whether they should really charge at all, or whether actually a small tip would do the trick — I found myself seated with a group of my trekking clients and other visitors on the terraces below the Temple of Three Windows.
Gathered across the esplanade from us, solemnly attired in black and white on that warm, sunny day, sat the very same Lima Symphony Orchestra that will be playing there — probably on that very same spot — before the incoming and outgoing politicos and assorted dignitaries this week.
Why that spot? Because orchestras know a thing or two about acoustics, and so, evidently, did the Incas. The orchestra and choir had taken their stand within a large recess at the foot of what Hiram Bingham charmlessly named the Industrial Sector. The sound, often wispy and fugitive in open-air settings, leapt at us off the terraces, full-throated in the mountain air.
Inspired by the Incas’ acoustical magic, the musicians surpassed themselves. They were peforming Mozart’s Requiem, a piece that would wring blood from a stone.
Memory is hazy here, but I seem to remember that the performance was followed by a rapt, lengthy silence. Then the audience recovered its senses and remembered to clap.
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