Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (27 page)

After a rainy night we set out again.

Our carriers were good for about fifty pounds apiece. Half an hour’s walk brought us to Vista Alegre, another little clearing
on an alluvial fan in the bend of the river. Opposite us rose abruptly a heavily forested mountain, whose summit was lost in the clouds a mile above. To circumvent this mountain the river had been flowing in a westerly direction; now it gradually turned northward. Again we were mystified, for, by Raimondi’s map, it should have gone southward.

We now entered a dense jungle, where the narrow path became more and more difficult for the bearers. Crawling over rocks, under branches, along slippery little cliffs, on steps which had been cut in earth or rock, over a trail which not even a dog could follow unassisted, slowly we made our way down the valley. Owing to the heat, the humidity, and the frequent showers, it was mid-afternoon before we reached another little clearing called Pacaypata. Here, on a hillside nearly 1,000 feet above the river, our men decided to spend the night in a shelter 6 feet long and 5 feet wide. Professor Foote and I had to dig a shelf out of the steep hillside with a hatchet in order to pitch our tent.

The next morning, not being detained by the vagaries of a mule train, we made an early start. As we followed the faint little trail across the gulches tributary to the river Pampaconas, we had to negotiate several unusually steep ascents and descents. Twice we had to cross the rapids of the river on primitive bridges which consisted only of a few logs lashed together and resting on slippery boulders. The carriers suffered from the heat. They found it more and more difficult to carry their loads.

By one o’clock we found ourselves on a small plain (4,500 ft.) in dense woods surrounded by tree ferns, vines, and tangled thickets, through which it was impossible to see for more than a few feet. Here Guzman told us we must stop and rest awhile, as we were now in the territory of
los salvajes
, the savage Indians who acknowledged only the rule of Saavedra and resented all intrusion. Guzman did not seem to be particularly afraid, but said that we ought to send ahead one of our carriers, to warn the savages that we were coming on a friendly mission and were not in search of rubber gatherers; otherwise they might attack us, or run away and disappear into the jungle. He said we should never be able to find the ruins without their help. The carrier who was
selected to go ahead did not relish his task at all. Leaving his pack behind, he proceeded very quietly and cautiously along the trail and was lost to view almost immediately. There followed an exciting half-hour while we waited, wondering what attitude the savages would take towards us, and trying to picture to ourselves the mighty potentate, Saavedra, who had been described as sitting in the midst of savage luxury with fifty servants, and directing his myrmidons to checkmate our progress.

Suddenly we were startled by a crackling of twigs and the sound of a man running. We were instinctively holding our rifles a little higher in readiness for whatever might befall – when there burst out of the woods a pleasant-faced young Peruvian
mestizo
, quite conventionally clad, who had come in haste from Saavedra, his father, to extend to us a most cordial welcome! It seemed scarcely credible, but a glance at his face showed that there was no ambush in store for us. It was with a sigh of relief that we realized there was to be no shower of poisoned arrows from the impenetrable thickets. Gathering up our loads, we continued along the jungle trail, through woods which gradually became higher, deeper, and darker, until presently we saw sunlight ahead, and, to our intense astonishment, the bright green of waving sugar cane. A few moments of walking through cane fields found us at a large comfortable hut, welcomed very simply and modestly by Saavedra himself. A more pleasant and peaceable little man it was never my good fortune to meet! We looked furtively around for his fifty savage servants, but all we saw was his good-natured Indian wife, three or four children, and a wild-eyed maid-of-all-work, evidently the only savage present. We asked our host what was the name of his estate. He said some called it ‘Jesus Maria’ because that is what they exclaimed when they saw it. He himself had given it the hybrid name of Conservidayoc because it was a lifesaver for him. The word means ‘a spot where one may be preserved from harm’.

It is difficult to describe our feelings as we accepted Saavedra’s invitation to make ourselves at home, and sat down to an abundant meal of boiled chicken, rice, and sweet cassava (manioc). Saavedra gave us to understand that we were not only
welcome to anything he had, but that he would do everything possible to enable us to see the ruins. They were, he said, at Espiritu Pampa, some distance farther down the valley, to be reached only by a hard trail passable for barefooted savages but scarcely for us unless we chose to go a good part of the distance on hands and knees.

Saavedra’s plantation, being rich in humus, had produced more sugar cane than he could grind. In addition to this, he had bananas, coffee trees, sweet potatoes, tobacco, and peanuts. Instead of being ‘a very powerful man having many Indians under his control’ – a kind of Poo-Bah – Saavedra was merely a pioneer. In the utter wilderness, far from any neighbours, surrounded by dense forests and a few savages, he had established his home. He was not an Indian potentate, but only a frontiersman, soft-spoken and energetic, an ingenious carpenter and mechanic, a modest Peruvian of the best type.

Near the sugar mill were some very interesting large jars unquestionably Inca, which Saavedra was using in the process of boiling the juice and making crude sugar. He said he had found them in the jungle not far away. Four of them were of the familiar aryballus type. Another was of a closely related form, having a wide mouth, pointed base, single incised, conventionalized animal-head nubbin attached to the shoulder, and band-shaped handles attached vertically below the median line. Although capable of holding more than 10 gallons, this huge pot could be carried on the back and shoulders by means of a rope passing through the handles and around the nubbin. Saavedra said that he found near his house several bottle-shaped cists lined with stones, with a flat stone on top – evidently ancient graves. The bones had entirely disappeared. The cover of one of the graves had been pierced; the hole was covered with a thin sheet of beaten silver. He had also found a few stone implements and two or three bronze Inca axes. The bronzes and the pottery eloquently told us that, beyond a doubt, Incas had once lived down here in this damp jungle.

We finally left Conservidayoc by the trail which Saavedra’s son and our Indians had been clearing. We emerged from the
thickets near a promontory where there was a fine view down the valley and particularly of a heavily wooded alluvial fan just below us, the Indian village of Espíritu Pampa, or ‘Pampa of the Ghosts’. In it were two or three small clearings and the little oval huts of savages.

On top of the promontory was the ruin of a small, rectangular building of rough stone, probably an Inca watch-tower. Our trail now followed an ancient stone stairway, about 4 feet in width and nearly a third of a mile long. It was built of uncut stones. Possibly it was the work of Titu Cusi’s soldiers whose chief duty it was to watch from the top of the promontory. We arrived at the principal clearing just as a heavy thunder shower began. The huts were empty. We hesitated to enter the home of a savage without an invitation, but the terrific downpour overcame our scruples, if not our nervousness. The hut had a steeply pitched roof. Its sides were made of small logs driven endwise into the ground and fastened together with vines. A small fire had been burning on the ground. Near the embers we saw two black
ollas
of Inca origin, hundreds of years old.

In the little clearing, cassava, coca, and sweet potatoes were growing in haphazard fashion among charred and fallen tree trunks. Near by were the ruins of eighteen or twenty circular houses arranged in an irregular group. We wondered if this could be the ‘Inca City’ which Lopez Torres had reported. It seems likely that they represent the dwellings of the fierce Antis whom Rodriguez de Figueroa saw with Tito Cusi.

While we were wondering whether the Inca themselves ever lived here, there suddenly appeared the naked figure of a sturdy young savage, armed with a stout bow and long arrows, and wearing a bamboo fillet. He had been hunting, and he showed us a bird he had shot. Soon afterwards there came two adult savages we had met at Saavedra’s, accompanied by a cross-eyed friend, all wearing long tunics. They offered to guide us to other ruins. It was very difficult for us to follow their rapid pace. Half an hour’s scramble through the jungle brought us to a natural terrace on the banks of a little tributary of the Pampaconas. They called it Eromboni Pampa. Here we found several artificial
terraces and the rough foundations of a rectangular building 192 feet long. The walls were only a foot high. There was very little building material in sight. Apparently the structure had never been completed. Near by was a typical Inca fountain with three spouts. Two hundred yards beyond the water-carriers’ rendezvous, hidden behind a curtain of hanging vines and thickets so dense we could not see more than a few feet in any direction, the savages showed us the ruins of a group of Inca stone houses whose walls were still standing in fine condition. The walls were of rough stone laid in adobe. Like some of the Inca buildings at Ollantaytambo, the lintels of the doors were made of three or four narrow uncut blocks. Below a stone-faced terrace was a partly enclosed fountain with a stone spout and a stone-lined basin. The shapes of the houses, their general arrangement, the niches, stone roof-pegs and lintels, all pointed to Inca builders. In the buildings we picked up several fragments of Inca pottery.

The next day, led by Saavedra’s energetic young son, the savages and our carriers continued to clear away as much as possible of the tangled growth at Eromboni Pampa near the best ruins. In this process, to the intense surprise not only of ourselves, but also of the savages, they uncovered, just below the little fountain where we had stood the day before, the well-preserved ruins of two Inca buildings of very superior construction, well-fitted with stone-pegs and niches, symmetrically arranged. These houses stood by themselves on a little terrace. In them were fragments of characteristic pottery. Nothing gives a better idea of the density of the jungle than the fact that the savages themselves had often been within 5 feet of these fine walls without being aware of their existence.

Encouraged by this important discovery of the best Inca ruins found in the valley, we continued the search, but all that anyone was able to find was a carefully built stone bridge. Saavedra’s son questioned the savages carefully. They said they knew of no other ruins.

There appears to me every reason to believe that the ruins here are those of one of the favourite residences of Titu Cusi. It may have been the place from which he journeyed to meet
Rodriguez in 1565. The houses are of late Inca pattern, not of a kind which would have required a long period to build. The unfinished buildings may have been under construction during the latter part of the reign of Titu Cusi.

Who built the best buildings of Eromboni Pampa? Was this the ‘Vilcabamba Viejo’ of Father Calancha, that ‘University of Idolatry where lived the teachers who were wizards and masters of abomination’, the place to which Friar Marcos and Friar Diego went with so much suffering? Was there formerly on this trail a place called Ungacacha where the monks had to wade, and amused Titu Cusi by the way they handled their monastic robes in the water? They called it a ‘three days’ journey over rough country’. Calancha speaks of Puquiura as being ‘two long days’ journey from Vilcabamba’. It was ‘rough country’ all right, but it took us five days to go from Espiritu Pampa to Puquiura. It did not seem to be reasonable to suppose that the priest and Virgins of the Sun (the personnel of the ‘University of Idolatry’), who fled from cold Cuzco with Manco and were established by him somewhere in the fastnesses of Vilcapampa, would have cared to live in this hot valley. The difference in climate is as great as that between Scotland and Egypt. They would not have found in Espíritu Pampa the food which they liked. Furthermore, they could have found the seclusion and safety which they craved just as well in several other parts of the province, together with a cool, bracing climate and foodstuffs more nearly resembling those to which they were accustomed. Finally Calancha says ‘Vilcabamba the Old’ was ‘the largest city’ in the province, a term hardly applicable to anything here.

On the other hand there seemed to be no doubt that Eromboni Pampa and the Pampaconas Valley met the requirements of the place called Vilcabamba by the companions of Captain Garcia. They spoke of it as the town and valley to which Tupac Amaru, the last Inca, escaped after his forces lost the ‘young fortress’ of Vitcos.

In 1572, when Captain Garcia took up the pursuit of Tupac Amaru, the Inca fled ‘inland toward the valley of Simaponte to the country of the Manaries Indians, a warlike tribe and his
friends, where
balsas
and canoes were posted to save him and enable him to escape’. There is now no valley in this vicinity called Simaponte. The Manaries live on the banks of the lower Urubamba. In order to reach their country Tupac Amaru probably went down the Pampaconas. From the ‘Pampa of the Ghosts’ to the head of canoe navigation is but a short journey. Evidently his friends who helped him to escape were canoemen. Captain Garcia gives an account of the pursuit of Tupac Amaru in which he says that, not deterred by the dangers of the jungle or the river, he, Garcia, constructed five rafts on which he put some of his soldiers and, accompanying them himself, went down the rapids, escaping death many times by swimming, until he arrived at a place called Momori, only to find that the Inca, learning of his approach, had gone farther into the woods. Nothing daunted, Garcia followed him, although he and his men now had to go on foot and barefooted with hardly anything to eat, most of their provisions having been lost in the river, until they finally caught Tupac and his friends; a tragic ending to a terrible chase, hard on the white man, and fatal for the Incas.