MYSTICAL MACHU PICCHU : FABLED RUINS OF THE INCAS INSPIRE AWE - AND DISMAY.

Byline: Galen Rowell Universal Press Syndicate 

Perhaps the Incas planned it this way.

With each step away from the arid highlands of Peru's Andes into moist, forested Amazonia, a sense of times past, of spirituality, became stronger. On the edge of these two worlds, where lizards bask in the sun and orchids bloom in the jungle, the Incas had perched their sacred town, hidden behind green-clothed monoliths.

As we walked the last downhill mile, the jungle and orchids grew more profuse, the road receded from view, and then we were there, at the classic overlook of the fabled ``Lost City of the Incas,'' Machu Picchu.

Stretched out before us lay the most splendid integration of landscape and architecture I have ever seen. The site had clearly been selected to create a bold coherence between the intentional design of a stone city and the natural splendor of sheer rock walls rising out of the jungle.

At that moment, the intangible rewards of adventure travel became clearly defined. But my exultation was tempered by something I'd seen on the approach to the city. At the Sun Gate of Intipunku, a notch floored by a walled plaza, painted white numbers glared from a nearby stone wall. The markings, obviously of this century and not of Inca origin, were vaguely disturbing and puzzling. The solution to this mystery would come later and fill me with dismay.

Machu Picchu is inaccessible by road. Visitors walk in or arrive by narrow-gauge railroad from Cuzco, the old Inca capital. Many young travelers hike the trail on their own, but most hire porters or join an organized group, where each trekker's gear is carried and all camps and meals are prepared. We booked our tour - which included 10 travelers plus porters - months earlier in the United States and we planned to return by train.

Before setting off on the Inca Trail, we visited Inca ruins at Sacsayhuaman and Pisac and spent a night in Ollantaytambo, populated by Quechua Indians in colorful native dress, in the Urubamba Valley, the sacred valley of the Incas. Ollantaytambo, along the railroad to Machu Picchu, is the closest modern counterpart of a living Inca village.

It is well we made the visit, for there are no towns along the Inca Trail today where we might find an echo of those ancient times. The trail, a mosaic of hand-carved granite blocks laid down more than 400 years ago, twists 32 miles through jungle and three mountain passes. It begins at 8,000 feet in the gorge of the Urubamba River and climbs rapidly upward out the moist forest into open grasslands at 13,500 feet at the first pass. From there on, secluded Inca ruins begin to appear in the high cloud forest between the passes.

As the eastern sky turned crimson behind icy peaks after our fourth and last night on the trail, our party emerged from surrounding tents to capture this last dawn before reaching Machu Picchu, where we would spend two nights in a hotel beside the ruins.

On a ridge above camp we were joined by Francisco, one of our porters, wearing a native Quechua poncho and earflapped woolen cap. While Francisco played his Andean flute in the cloud forest beneath the icy pyramid of 20,000-foot Salcantay, I imagined his Inca ancestors standing on that spot, when the trail was the ``royal highway'' to the sacred town.

The name of this last campsite is Puyupatamarca, Cloud-level Town, in the Quechua tongue of the ancient Incas and modern Indians. It was coined by Hiram Bingham, an American amateur archaeologist who found the Inca Trail grown over and without modern residents after he visited Machu Picchu in 1911.

Bingham was braving the jungle in search of the lost city of Vilcabamba, the Incas' legendary last refuge from invading Spaniards. He was led to the partially exposed ruins of Machu Picchu by local peasants. In fact, 19th-century Andean explorer Antonio Raimondi had drawn a map with the words ``Machu Picchu'' in the correct location.

Whether or not Bingham was the discoverer of Machu Picchu, he was certainly the revealer and popularizer of its existence to the developed world.

Only in recent decades has it become clear that the true magnificence and importance of the city are due to its not being what Bingham thought he had found. Instead of a town built hastily in an unlikely, well-hidden location by Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion of the 1530s, Machu Picchu is the finest surviving example of the late imperial Inca style of architecture untainted by European influences.

Much of the site's significance is based on its improbably fine construction and endurance over the centuries. The Inca stonework took decades to complete and shows a reverence for precision far beyond that of modern stone masons. Blocks weighing many tons with up to 12 sides have been fitted together without mortar so perfectly that I could rarely fit so much as a knife blade between them.

The walls of Machu Picchu have stood well against the forces of nature, but they are succumbing to the influence of Disneyland. Like the Spaniards on the track of the mythical gold of the Incas, the Peruvian tourist industry is seeking to maximize its benefits from the lost city.

The mystery of the painted numbers on the stones of Intipunku was solved when I came across government workers in the process of rebuilding parts of the ruins. Using mud for mortar, they were fitting together an assemblage of stones beginning at ground level with numbered ones carefully removed from crumbling walls. So far, so good, but the tops were a fabrication of added stones from the surrounding area, completing what the original structure ``might'' have looked like.

A supervisor had a schematic of numbered rocks as they had been taken down. It ended with the incomplete jagged outline of a typical ruin, but the reconstructed wall concluded with a perfect turret of unnumbered rocks several feet higher than what Bingham had uncovered. Behind that turret was another rebuilt turret, and another, and another.

The workers were building a virtual Machu Picchu. When I asked the supervisor why, he gestured toward hundreds of people coming into the ruins who had just arrived on the morning train and said, ``Turismo.''

The Peruvian government, its economy still reeling from civil unrest, hopes to mimic the success of American theme parks by reforging Machu Picchu into a caricature of its former glory.

When it came time to leave, I felt I'd had too much of hotels and crowds, but not enough of the Inca Trail. After learning that our train would not depart from Machu Picchu until 3 p.m. the next day, I decided to start out at dawn and run the trail in reverse. Being an experienced mountain runner, I was confident I could complete the 32 miles and 9,000 feet of elevation gain, but less sure about reaching the train on time.

As I ran past the far smaller, but unretouched Inca ruins that rise out of the jungle beside the Inca Trail, they took on a new significance. Like photographs in a scrapbook, they represented visions out of the past that could be trusted. Machu Picchu, however, is becoming more like one of those digitally manipulated advertising images in which every reality is suspect.

On a misty morning ideal for running, I reached the railroad with hours to spare. A Quechua family invited me into their hut for a cup of tea and a bowl of fruit. Their simple life and carefree happiness made me feel lucky to have experienced the Inca Trail before it, too, becomes more contrived for tourism.

ON LOCATION

Before setting out, we'd been concerned about guerrilla terrorism in Peru, even though we'd heard it had ended with the capture of the leader of the Shining Path in 1992. But we weren't satisfied until a returning wilderness guide reported that the level of personal safety seemed similar to that in Nepal or India, where we had trekked many times without problems.

A sampling of outfitters running trips to Machu Picchu:

Geographic Expeditions, [phone] or [phone]; 12 days, $2,200, not including air fare.

Mountain Travel Sobek, [phone]; up to 15 days, $1,700, not including air fare.

Overseas Adventure Travel, [phone]; 15 days, $2,490 includes air fare from Miami.

Wilderness Travel, [phone]; 12 days, $1,995, not including air fare.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos, Box

Photo: (1,2--color) A llama wanders near fabricate d turrets that threaten to turn Machu Picchu into an echo of its former glory. Below, an overlook of the ancient village.

(3) In the name of tourism, a worker assembles stones to re-create what the ancient city of Machu Picchu might have looked like.

Galen Rowell/Universal Press Syndicate

Box: ON LOCATION (see text)