In 1911, Hiram Bingham was a young scholar specialising in modern Latin American history at Yale University, Connecticut. He was thirty-six years old and married to Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany diamond empire; they had six children and lived in a thirty-roomed mansion on top of a hill. Bingham was a man who seemed to have all the comforts of life, but he was restless and driven. During a field trip to Peru in 1909, he was invited by his guide to see an ancient Inca site high up in the Andes Mountains. This set him on a path that would change his life forever.