It was barely even a town, housing fewer than a thousand people on a regular basis and those were generally considered to be only priests and their attendants. Even then, it was only inhabited for half a century, before the apparently ravages of plague and the falling of an empire made it disappear into history.
Machu Picchu effectively froze in time 500 years ago, with no Incan priesthood to return to its stonewalls and temples, and for most of the world became lost among the emerald mountains that hid it from plain view. Now that it has been rediscovered, almost a century ago, people once again flow through its elaborate stonework.
But there are hours, at dawn or dusk, when there are no crowds, no loud chattering masses of people. In fact, when I had the chance to sit down in the grass among the buildings to watch the sunset, the distant sounds of people that can be heard, barely audible through the intricate streets and byways and so often in a foreign tongue, felt natural. In their ethereal quality, bouncing from stone to stone before reaching me as I lay under one of the ancient trees that rise up amongst the edifices, they might as well have been coming to me from another, quiet distant, time.
It was that very feeling that would become the defining moment of Machu Picchu for me. Leaning against a tree that had grown during twenty-five generations of my family, among stones that were carved before Columbus even sailed west, hearing voices that, in my heart, could have been coming from one of the original inhabitants. A priest, solemnly walking to the temple, preparing himself for the ritual that tied the sun to the earth, to ensure its return in the morning. A caravan-master hurrying around, collecting his servants, eager to head out before the gushing rain returns to the mountains. It was their feet that had left paths in the grass before any tourist group had walked amongst the open-air buildings, and it was their voices that the walls had been built to accept.
When those kinds of ghosts, even if only imagined, walk amongst you, it is impossible to not feel the history of a place. In Machu Picchu, that feeling comes with every blink of an eye, with every moment that your mind can forget that it is not Incas walking past you. History bleeds from the walls with every distant voice, every echoed footstep. It is enough to forget, or choose to not believe, the modern clothes that you wear, the bus that you came on, the civilized world that you’ll return to.
It doesn’t have to be a drop, falling among the pathos of a cityscape trapped within a time centuries ago. Instead it can be a simple taste, soaked in gently, but once appreciated the landscape becomes both alive within imagination and even emptier to the sight due to what it no longer holds.
Within Machu Picchu, these sensations fall upon you like rain drops, with every running of your hand against the stones and every casual glance through a window into what was once a private domain. I felt it all around me, under that tree, and, on my own level, understood the impact all of that had on me. It was like seeing myself from miles and miles in the air, but not in a physical sense… rather, a sense of where I fit within annals of time. Even if I might have felt small, it still helped me feel like I was part of something bigger.
My trip back to the United States was calm and uneventful, courtesy of the flawless organization of South Star Tours for which I was thankful. As I relaxed in my airplane seat, air-conditioned and padded, I was able to reminisce upon a moment only a few days old that had me feeling coarse bark in my back, hot sun on my face and whispering spirits all around me.
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