小站有没有人去过？好像那条路要走四，五天。
Machu Picchu, The lost city floating in a kingdom of clouds, highin the Andes Mountains of Peru, a mysterious settlement that the Incasbuilt, occupied, and deserted, all in less than a century. For hundredsof years the city was hidden in the jungle. Then, in 1911, HiramBingham led a university expedition to the Peruvian Andes. On a valleyfloor along the Urubamba River, he met a farmer who guided him up tothe ruins of the hidden city, the only Incan site that hadn't beenlooted or destroyed during the previous four centuries.
MachuPicchu spans a mountain saddle between green jungle peaks. Thesettlement has only 200 residences, suggesting a population of about1,000 people. The city contains a large number of religious buildingsthat were constructed with great care. One of them, the Temple of theSun functioned as an observatory focused on the heavens. A mark cut ona rock at the center of the tower lines up, through a window, with theexact spot where the sun rises on the June solstice. In the temple'srecesses the Incas placed religious statues or offerings.
Anothersmall cave at Machu Picchu served as an observatory for tracing theDecember solstice. Ritual religious bathing may have been done at theFountains, a series of 16 small [color=#388F2A ! important][color=#388F2A ! important]waterfallbaths where the sacred focus may have been water. But the principalshrine at Machu Picchu was probably the intihuatana, the "hitching postof the sun", a stone that the Incas may have used to observe theheavens and mark the seasons. No one knows for certain how the stonewas used. Near the settlement lie other intriguing sites. TheIntipunku, or Sun Gate, is a notch cut in a mountain ridge that framesthe rising sun during fixed periods on the calendar. The famous IncaBridge is located along an ever-narrowing mountain trail that, at someplaces, is cut into a sheer cliff. The builders cleverly left a gap ina buttressed section of the trail that they could bridge with two logs.As needed, the logs could be removed to make the road impassable tooutsiders. Perhaps it is no wonder that this nearly inaccessiblemountain city remained hidden and unknown to outsiders for centuriesafter the Incas abandoned Machu Picchu. |
发表于 2009-5-19 19:07:05
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