Free The Grammarian by Annapurna Potluri Page A

failed him—he wondered if the maids thought him a fool. But they—uneducated and lower class as they were—had no standing to judge him. He shrugged it off.
    T HAT MORNING , A LEXANDRE had Subba Rao go into town to a store where last month’s European papers were sold. Adivi had put the servants at Alexandre’s disposal, and they catered to him while the house busied itself, not just with the normal daily tasks but with wedding preparations. The cook was preparing to go to the market and shyly addressed him in her lower-class Telugu, “Sir, Miss Mohini has asked for shrimp for dinner and Miss Anjali has asked for squash. Is there anything you would like?”
    Alexandre smiled and told her he’d be happy with whatever she bought.
    He read the newspapers in the evening: there was a September issue of Le Journal . On the cover was another story about Hiram Bingham’s discovery of that ancient South American town thousands of feet above sea level. Lautens closed his eyes, sipping coffee.
    B INGHAM HAD , BETWEEN schooling at Yale and a research post in Bolivia, heard of Vilcabamba—a mythic town of the South Americas—mentioned in the yellowing originals of the first European diaries written on that southern continent. It was said to be the last foothold of the old empire, at once so vast it had had in its hold all that is Ecuador, Peru, Chile . . . it ended only when the sea began. Pizarro’s men had killed in a fraction of an hour all Emperor Atahualpa’s mightiest men—men whose bodies had generations before adapted to the place’s thinair and could, without great effort, run the endless, rugged coastline of the empire. Atahualpa crushed underfoot the Bible offered him by Pizarro. He and his men would not convert even under threat of Spanish swords. He cried, “I am no man’s tributary!” and moments later, his men around him dead and dying, the weary emperor was imprisoned by the Spaniards and bargained for the mercy of strangulation with roomfuls of gold and silver. The last of his few living soldiers raced up the treacherous South American hills carrying their wives and children where European legs could not go. They went to Vilcabamba, and there lived out the last years of empire unmolested and undiscovered by Pizarro’s men.
    Bingham’s colleagues in Incan and Mayan studies in North America had humored him, had heard the name in passing. But they were men of science, and the quest for this South American Atlantis was of little interest to them. Years passed, but Bingham soon found himself again in Bolivia and Peru. Wandering the ancient Bolivian back roads, short of breath for the sheer altitude of the place, he saw it, shrouded in grass and vines, as if nature had conspired to hide it. He and his men were eight thousand feet above sea level and in front of his eyes was a seamless meeting of the red earth and blue sky. Vilcabamba—Machu Picchu, as it would be called. The city in the sky. Bingham and his team hacked at plants. But before doing so marveled at the patience of grass—how the tenacious growth of hundreds of years could conceal all the glory of man’s great achievement of the city. Monuments of stone and cement emerged—the stubborn vines clinging to them like jealous lovers, the sun showing on buildings it hadn’t touched in hundreds of years. The buildings were so austere, as if no humans had ever inhabited them. There were none of the human signs—no bones, notools or etchings on walls. The sky was so clear, like only a mirror that may shatter and fall into the ancient city.
    Bingham had family money and a European education; he had seen the ruins of Greece and Italy, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids of Giza. And yet, under the vast blue sky, gasping for breath in the under-oxygenated air, sweating under the South American heat, Bingham was at a loss for words, and, mouth agape, he took in the marvel in silence, his European eyes the first in four hundred years to set sight upon the