Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (23 page)

Across the Urubamba river at Qquente, and near the mouth of the Pampaccahuana river, on top of a series of terraces, we saw an extensive ruined city. It looked as though it had possibilities, so I asked Mr Herman Tucker, one of our topographers, to cross the Urubamba and see what he could find out about it. He spent several days in that vicinity and reported that the name of the city was Patallacta (
pata
– height or terrace;
llacta
– town), an Inca town of importance. It contains about one hundred houses. One wonders why it was abandoned. Above it, in the valley he visited, are several important sites at Pauccarcancha, Huayllabamba, Incasamana, or Ccolpa Mocco, and Hoccollopampa,
which we later surveyed. None of the places in this vicinity fitted in with the accounts of Vitcos. Their history can only be surmised. Their identity remains a puzzle, although the symmetry of the buildings, their architectural idiosyncrasies such as niches, stone roof-pegs, bar-holds, and eye-bonders, indicate an Inca origin. At what date these towns and villages flourished, who built them, why they were deserted, we do not yet know; and the Indians who live hereabouts are ignorant, or silent, as to their history. It is possible that this region was fully occupied and cultivated before the Incas were able to control the Cuzco valley and other more accessible arable lands. The original inhabitants must have been hard put to it for room, to have spread into the upper valleys of this inhospitable region. In a way it fits in with the theory which will be advanced in a later chapter that the original inhabitants of Cuzco were pushed out of their fertile valleys by a horde of barbarians coming from the Bolivian altoplanicie, and found a refuge for several hundred years in this mountainous country, where they finally became too crowded to be comfortable and fought their way back to Cuzco.

On the other hand, since the architecture appears to be ‘Late Inca’, the chances are that they were occupied at the time of the Conquest and were abandoned when the Viceroy Toledo in 1573 wiped out a large part of the population. At all events we found practically no one living in these ancient towns.

Father Calancha’s Chronicle gives a story of mass slaughter which followed the martyrdom of Friar Diego and the death of the Viceroy’s ambassador. Toledo was led to take fearful revenge on the hapless Indians.

At Torontoy, the end of the cultivated temperate valley, we found another group of interesting ruins, possibly once the residence of an Inca noble. Some of the buildings showed very fine stone cutting, the work of patient artisans.

Torontoy is at the beginning of the Grand Canyon of the Urubamba, and such a canyon! The river road ran recklessly up and down rock stairways, blasted its way beneath overhanging precipices, spanned chasms on frail bridges propped on rustic
brackets against granite cliffs. Under dense forests, wherever the encroaching precipices permitted it, the land between them and the river was terraced and once cultivated. We found ourselves unexpectedly in a veritable wonderland. We marvelled at the exquisite pains with which the ancient folk had rescued incredibly narrow strips of arable land from the tumbling rapids. How could they ever have managed to build a retaining wall of heavy stones along the very edge of the dangerous river, which it is death to try to cross? On a bend near a foaming waterfall some Inca chief built a temple, whose walls tantalize the traveller. He must pass by within pistol shot of the interesting ruins, unable to ford the intervening rapids. High up on the side of the canyon, several thousand feet above this temple, are the ruins of Ccorihuayrachina (
kori
– gold;
huayra
– wind;
huayrachina
– a threshing floor where winnowing takes place). Possibly this was an ancient gold mine of the Incas. Half a mile above us on another steep slope some modern pioneer had recently cleared the jungle from a fine series of ancient Inca terraces.

Then we reached a hut called ‘La Maquina’, where travellers frequently stop for the night. It is now (1948) the terminus of the narrow gauge railroad from Cuzco. The name comes from the presence here of some large iron wheels, parts of a ‘machine’ destined never to overcome the difficulties of being transported all the way to a sugar estate in the lower valley, and years ago left here to rust in the jungle.

As there was little fodder, and there was no good place for us to pitch our camp, we pushed on over the very difficult road, which had been blasted out of the face of a great granite cliff, 2,000 feet high. Part of the cliff had slid off into the river. The breach thus made in the road had been repaired temporarily by means of a frail-looking rustic bridge built on a bracket composed of rough logs, branches, and reeds, tied together, and surmounted by a few inches of earth and pebbles to make it seem safe to the cautious cargo mules who picked their way gingerly across it. No wonder ‘the machine’ rested where it did and gave its name to that part of the valley.

Dusk falls early in this deep canyon, the sides of which are
considerably over a mile in height. It was almost dark when we came to a little sandy plain two or three acres in extent, which in this land of steep mountains is called a
pampa
! Were the dwellers on the
pampas
of Argentina – where a railroad can go for 250 miles in a straight line – to see this little bit of flood-plain called
Mandor Pampa
, they would think someone had been joking or else grossly misusing a word which means to them illimitable space with not a hill in sight. However, to the ancient dwellers in this valley, where level land was so scarce that it was worthwhile to build high stone-faced terraces to enable two rows of corn to grow where none grew before, any little natural breathing space in the bottom of the canyon was a
pampa
.

The story of our stay at Mandor Pampa, of its sole resident, Melchor Arteaga, and of the ruins he showed me above the precipices on the slopes of Machu Picchu mountain, I shall relate in detail in Chapter VII (Part III), which tells of the discovery of Machu Picchu. Suffice it to say that the ruins he showed me were not near a ‘great white rock over a spring of water’ and that there was no evidence that this was Vitcos, Manco’s capital for which we were looking. So a few days later we crossed the river on the fine new bridge of San Miguel and pushed on down the Urubamba Valley asking for ruins, offering cash prizes for good ones, and a double bonus for any that would fit the description of the Temple of the Sun which Father Calancha had said was ‘near Vitcos’.

Our first stop was at the hospitable plantation of Huadquiña, which once belonged to the Jesuits. They planted the first sugar cane and established the mill. After their expulsion from the Spanish Colonies at the end of the eighteenth century, Huadquiña was bought by a Peruvian. It was first described in geographical literature by the Count de Sartiges, who stayed here for several weeks in 1834 when on his way to Choqquequirau. He says that the owner of Huadquiña ‘is perhaps the only landed proprietor in the entire world who possesses on his estates all the products of the four parts of the globe. In the different regions of his domain he has wool, hides, horsehair, potatoes, wheat, corn, sugar, coffee, chocolate, coca, many mines of
silver-bearing lead, and placers of gold’. Truly a royal principality.

Our hosts, Señora Carmen Vargas and her family, read with interest my copy of those paragraphs of Calancha’s Chronicle which referred to the location of the last Inca capital. Learning that we were anxious to discover Vitcos, a place of which they had never heard, they ordered the most intelligent tenants on the estates to come in and be questioned. The best informed of all was a sturdy
mestizo
, a trusted foreman, who said that in a little valley called Ccollumayu, a few hours’ journey down the Urubamba, there were ‘important ruins’ which had been seen by some of Señora Carmen’s Indians. Even more interesting and thrilling was his statement that on a ridge up the Salcantay Valley was a place called Yurak Rumi (
yurak
– white;
rumi
– stone) where some very interesting ruins had been found by his workmen when cutting trees for firewood. We all became excited over this, for among the paragraphs which I had copied from Calancha’s Chronicle was the statement that ‘close to Vitcos’ is the ‘white stone of the aforesaid house of the Sun which is called Yurak Rumi’. Our hosts assured us that this must be the place, since no one hereabouts had ever heard of any other Yurak Rumi. The foreman, on being closely questioned, said that he had seen the ruins once or twice, that he had also been up the Urubamba Valley and seen the great ruins at Ollantaytambo, and that those which he had seen at Yurak Rumi were ‘as good as those at Ollantaytambo’. Here was a definite statement made by an eye-witness. Apparently we were about to see that interesting rock where the last Incas worshipped. However, the foreman said that the trail was at present impassable, although a small gang of Indians could open it in less than a week. Our hosts immediately gave orders to have the path to Yurak Rumi cleared for our benefit.

Meanwhile we spent a few days exploring the ruins of Ccollumayu, only to meet with disappointment, as there was little besides the foundations of some very primitive huts.

Finally the trail to Yurak Rumi was reported finished. It was with a feeling of keen anticipation that I started out with the
foreman to see those ruins which he had just revisited and now declared were ‘better than those of Ollantaytambo’. It was to be presumed that in the pride of discovery he might have exaggerated their importance. Still it never entered my head what I was actually to find. After several hours spent in clearing away dense forest growth which surrounded the walls I learned that this Yurak Rumi consisted of the ruins of a single house! No effort had been made at beauty of construction. The walls were of rough, unfashioned stones laid in clay. The building was without a doorway, although it had several small windows and a series of ventilating shafts under the house. The lintels of the windows and of the small apertures leading into the subterranean shafts were of stone. It was really only intended by the Inca builders to be a useful storehouse to provide food for travellers.

Yurak Rumi is on top of the ridge between the Salcantay and Huadquiña valleys, probably on the ancient road which crossed the province of Vilcapampa. As such it was interesting, but to compare it with Ollantaytambo, as the foreman had done, was to liken a cottage to a palace or a mouse to an elephant. It seems incredible that anybody having actually seen both places could have thought for a moment that one was ‘as good as the other’. To be sure, the foreman was not a trained observer and his interest in Inca building was probably of the slightest. Yet the ruins of Ollantaytambo are so well known and so impressive that even the most casual traveller is struck by them and the natives themselves are enormously proud of them.

Obviously, we had not yet found Vitcos. So, bidding farewell to Señora Carmen, we crossed the Urubamba on the bridge of Colpani and proceeded down the valley past the mouth of the Lucumayo and the road from Panticalla, to the hamlet of Chauillay, where the Urubamba is joined by the Vilcabamba river. Both rivers are restricted here to narrow gorges, through which their waters rush and roar on their way to the lower valley. A few rods from Chauillay was a fine bridge. The natives call it Chuquichaca. Steel and iron have superseded the old suspension bridge of huge cables made of vegetable fibre, with its narrow
roadway of wattles supported by a network of vines. Yet it was here in 1572 that the military force sent by the Viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, under the command of Captain Garcia, found the forces of the young Inca drawn up to defend Vitcos.

Eventually we reached the town of Santa Ana at the head of canoe navigation on the Urubamba, and the site of fine sugar and coca plantations, which had formerly been a Jesuit Mission. Two hundred Indians are employed here in raising sugar cane, making
aguardiente
, ‘fire water’, cultivating coca and drying the leaves to be sold in the markets of the highlands.

We were most kindly welcomed here by Don Pedro Duque, who took great interest in enabling us to get all possible information about the little-known region into which we proposed to penetrate. Born in Colombia, but long resident in Peru, Don Pedro was a gentleman of the old school, keenly interested not only in the administration and economic progress of his plantation but also in the intellectual movements of the outside world. He entered with zest into our historical-geographical studies. The name Vitcos was new to him, but after reading over with us our extracts from the Spanish chronicles he was sure that he could help us find it. And help us he did. Santa Ana is less than thirteen degrees south of the equator; the elevation is barely 2,000 feet; the ‘winter’ nights are cool; but the heat in the middle of the day is intense. Nevertheless, our host was so energetic that as a result of his efforts a number of the best-informed residents were brought to the conferences at the great plantation house.

Of Vitcos, as well as most of the places mentioned in the chronicles, none of Don Pedro’s friends had ever heard. It was all rather discouraging, until one day, by the greatest good fortune, there arrived at Santa Ana another friend of Don Pedro’s, the
Teniente Gobernador
of the village of Lucma in the valley of the River Vilcabamba – a crusty old fellow named Evaristo Mogrovejo. His brother, Pio Mogrovejo, had been a member of the party of energetic Peruvians who, in 1884, had searched for buried treasure at Choqquequirau. Evaristo Mogrovejo could understand searching for buried treasure, but
he was totally unable otherwise to comprehend our desire to find the ruins of the places mentioned by Father Calancha. Had we first met him in Lucma he would undoubtedly have received us with suspicion and done nothing to further our quest. Fortunately for us, his official superior was the sub-prefect of the province, who lived near Santa Ana, and was a friend of Don Pedro’s. The sub-prefect had received instructions from the prefect of Cuzco to further our undertaking, and accordingly gave particular orders to Mogrovejo to see to it that we were given every facility for finding the ancient ruins and identifying the places of historic interest.