The real hero of Machu Picchu

The city of gold begins in the first half of the 19th century, when little Rudolph August Berns, born in Krefeld in western Germany in 1842 and obsessed with legends about Julius Caesar and the legendary Rhine gold, spends time in his father’s tent. Fantasizing about the legendary city of the Incas draws inspiration from Johann Jakob von Tschudi’s tantalizing tales of his trip to Peru, which detail the wonders of this distant land dotted with deposits of noble metals and precious stones and dazzling buildings and palaces. gold.

These chronicles describe how, with the arrival of the Spanish, the Incas were forced to reveal the locations of their great temples and cities in the jungle, despite doing everything possible to thwart the greed of the Westerners. They cannot save themselves from the ambition to conquer the legendary sacred city of El Dorado, from its location in the most complex part of the jungle and in the great mountain ranges.

Gonzalo Pizarro had already searched for it in vain, going so far as to explore the resources of the Amazon, but found no trace of its mysterious location. Likewise, the researcher Alexander von Humboldt, who appears in the novel as an old man and becomes the young hero’s mentor or model, went on exploratory adventures throughout the Andes in search of such a legendary city.

Determined to find her, our hero embarks on a perilous journey from Berlin across the Atlantic, past the menacing Cape Horn and across the Pacific to the ancient kingdom of Peru, immersed in the final wars of independence against Spain. From the first moment of the land fight against the armored frigate Numancia in the port of El Callao. After the country has calmed down, he enters the virgin forests of the interior, where, after dangerous adventures, projects and disappointments, he manages to intuit or glimpse, masked between the luxuriant tidal wave of overwhelming tropical botanicals and the extreme altitudes of the Andes. Ruins of the ancient city known as Machu Picchu. All this is told and presented with the most expressive chromaticism, brilliant plasticity and a vivid taste of reality.

Further adventures take our character, already specialized in tropical engineering, to both the United States and to participate in the work of the Panama Canal, and eventually to set foot in his beloved Peru. There he plans a joint stock company for the operation of the legendary city. This third part of the novel is fascinating because of its extraordinary narrative pulse and subtle psychological examination of the characters and Lima society of the time; It leaves an ironic smile at the end, with an implicit and powerful final moral dimension. We face persistent and resonant vulnerabilities of our common human condition.

Fluent reading and lively dialogues are due to Bernd Dietz, whose translation of the work into Spanish has carried out a difficult and masterful work due to the abundance of certain words and other technicalities and the vocabulary specific to certain industrial tasks of the nineteenth century. the southern and forest horizons where the study took place.