The Last Days of the Incas (62 page)
On the day following our arrival at the town of Vilcabamba [the New], the
Gobernador
, Condoré, taking counsel with his chief assistant, had summoned the wisest Indians living in the vicinity, including a very picturesque old fellow whose name, Quispi Cusi, was strongly reminiscent of the days of Titu Cusi. It was explained to him that this was a very solemn occasion and that an official inquiry was in progress. He took off his hat—but not his knitted cap—and endeavored to the best of his ability to answer our questions about the surrounding country. It was he who said that the Inca Tupac Amaru once lived at Rosaspata. He had never heard of Vitcos or Vilcapampa Viejo, but he admitted that there were ruins in the
montaña
[jungle] near the village of Conservidayoc. Other Indians were questioned by Condoré. Several had heard of the ruins of Conservidayoc, but, apparently, none of them, nor anyone in the village had actually seen the ruins or visited their immediate vicinity…. One of our informants said the Inca city was called Espíritu Pampa, or the “Pampa of Ghosts.” … Although no one at Vilcabamba [the New] had seen the ruins, they said that at [the village of] Pampaconas, there were Indians who had actually been to Conservidayoc. Accordingly we decided to go there immediately.
The next day, Bingham, Foote, Sergeant Carrasco, a muleteer, two local officials, and nine pack animals loaded with food, equipment, and camping supplies left the old Spanish mining town,
located at 11,750 feet, and headed off toward the village of Pampaconas. Bingham hoped that he might find there someone who knew more about where to find Vilcabamba Viejo, Old Vilcabamba, the final refuge of the last four Inca emperors: Manco Inca, Sayri Tupac, Titu Cusi, and Tupac Amaru. After crossing over the 12,500-foot Colpacasa Pass, Bingham and his party began heading down into the adjacent valley. Soon, the trail became a slippery, muddy mess that zigzagged down the slopes. Just before nightfall, they arrived at Pampaconas, which consisted of a scattering of huts set upon a grassy hillside at an elevation of ten thousand feet.
We were conducted to the dwelling of a stocky, well-built Indian named Guzmán, the most reliable man in the village, who had been selected to be the head of the party of carriers that was to accompany us to Conservidayoc…. We carried on a most interesting conversation…. He had been to Conservidayoc and had himself actually seen Inca ruins at Espíritu Pampa. At last the mythical “Pampa of Ghosts” began to take on, in our minds, an aspect of reality.
Through sheer persistence and the relentless grilling of informants, Bingham now found himself employing a local guide who claimed to know where the rumored Inca ruins were located, some two to four days ahead. Could these be the ruins of Manco’s capital of Vilcabamba? Or would this turn out to be another wild-goose chase? Bingham was determined to find out. Three days later, amid thick, warm jungle at some 4,900 feet in elevation, Bingham, Foote, and the rest of the team arrived at the house of a local planter named Saavedra, who had cleared parts of the surrounding jungle in order to grow bananas, sugarcane, coffee, sweet potatoes, tobacco, peanuts, and manioc.
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 most welcome to anything he had, but that he would do everything to enable us to see the ruins, which were, it seemed, at Espíritu Pampa, some distance farther down the valley, to be reached only by a hard trail passable for barefooted
savages, but scarcely available for us unless we chose to go a good part of the distance on hands and knees.
The next day, Bingham was guided to the tiny village called Espíritu Pampa, consisting of nothing more than a number of huts of a local ethnic group called the Campas—natives who wore long cotton cloaks down to their ankles, had long black hair, and hunted in the forest with bows and arrows. The Incas, Bingham knew, had allied themselves with Antis Indians in the Amazon jungle. Perhaps the Campas were their descendants. In any case, the Campas now guided Bingham’s party through dense rain forest until suddenly they halted. There, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding foliage, rose the unmistakable form of a roughly hewn stone wall.
Half an hour’s scramble through the jungle brought us to a … natural terrace on the banks of a little tributary of the Pampaconas [River]. They called it Eromboni [Pampa]. Here we found several artificial terraces and the rough foundations of a long, rectangular building 192 feet by 24 feet…. Near by was a typical Inca fountain with three stone spouts…. 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 ashlars…. Below it was a partly enclosed fountain or bathhouse, 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.
Although the buildings appeared to have been constructed by the Incas, their architectural style was nevertheless rough. Most of the walls were made of uncut stones laid in mud and had none of the fine, classic Inca stonework such as Bingham had seen at Machu Picchu or in Cuzco. Giant strangler figs towered above while thick vines coiled and twirled down from the canopy to the ground. The swollen roots of strangler figs had even pierced some of the ruined walls. Spider
monkey calls drifted in, causing the Campa natives to occasionally pause and listen, then to point up at the canopy, speaking excitedly to one another in a language that, to Bingham, sounded “like a succession of low grunts, breathings, and gutturals.”
As the Campas cleared the vegetation and revealed more stone walls, the metal of their machetes occasionally twanging against the stones, Bingham couldn’t help but wonder whether this roughly hewn, difficult-to-find cluster of buildings could actually be the Vilcabamba the Old described in the chronicles. Having begun his expedition in the frigid highlands and now finding himself in a greenhouse-like environment where he was constantly swatting at flies, bees, and mosquitoes, Bingham had his doubts. He found it difficult, in fact, to believe that
the [Inca] priests and Virgins of the Sun … who fled from cold Cuzco with Manco … would have cared to live in the hot valley of Espíritu Pampa. The difference in climate is as great as that between Scotland and Egypt. They [the Incas] 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, particularly at Machu Picchu, together with a cool, bracing climate and food stuffs more nearly resembling those to which they were accustomed. Finally, Calancha says “Vilcabamba the Old” was the “largest city” in the province, a term far more applicable to Machu Picchu … than to Espíritu Pampa.
Indeed, after two days of clearing the area, Bingham and his team had found only a few dozen buildings; the jungle, however, was so thick that it was difficult to know unequivocally if these were the only structures around. Still, it was hard for Bingham to imagine—even if there
were
more buildings—that such rough ruins could have ever constituted a major Inca capital or could have housed a succession of Inca emperors. Besides, an additional feature that didn’t correspond to the chronicles’ descriptions of Vilcabamba was that it had taken Bingham and his team
five days
to travel from Puquiura to Espíritu Pampa, whereas Calancha had stated that the journey from Puquiura to Vilcabamba had taken either “two long days” or three regular ones.
On the other hand, Bingham had found
roughly made Spanish roofing tiles on the ground near some of the ruins.
With one exception everything about the fragments of pottery and the architecture of the houses was unquestionably Inca. This exception was the presence of a dozen or fifteen roughly made Spanish roofing tiles of varying sizes. On account of the small number of them … it seemed to me possible that these had been made experimentally by recent Peruvians or possibly early Spanish missionaries, who might have come to this place centuries ago. The Indians could offer no explanation of the mystery. Apparently none of the houses ever had tile roofs, as the number of fragments was not enough to cover more than a few square feet, and nearly all were outside the buildings.
Before their contact with the Spaniards, the Incas had constructed their buildings with typical, high-gabled, thatched roofs; they did not use clay tiles, an idea that was only later imported from Spain. Once the Spaniards had occupied Cuzco and other Inca cities, however, the Spaniards had gradually replaced the Incas’ traditional thatched roofs with roofing tiles, which they preferred for keeping out the rain. “Perhaps an Inca who had seen the new red tiled roofs of Cuzco had tried to reproduce them here in the jungle, but without success,” Bingham wrote, not believing their presence to be especially significant.
Using interpreters to question the local Campa natives, Bingham repeatedly asked them what name they used to refer to this site. The Campas responded with two names: the first was in Spanish and meant “Plain of Ghosts” while the second was in Quechua, meaning “Sacred Plain.” Bingham jotted both down. “Espíritu Pampa or Vilcabamba is the name of the whole place,” he wrote in his notebook. Despite the Campas’ use of the Inca name Vilcabamba, however, Bingham remained unsure as to the actual identity of the ruins he had found; they would simply have to await further study.
After spending two days at Espíritu Pampa, Bingham began running low on food. He and his team, therefore, soon began the long, slow trek back up into the highlands and eventually back to the United States. Although Bingham would lead two more expeditions to Peru—in 1912, and in 1914–1915—and during those expeditions would discover more
ruins associated with Machu Picchu, he would never again duplicate the amazing series of important discoveries he made during the short, intensely fertile, four-week period between July and August of 1911. In April 1913,
National Geographic
magazine would devote an entire issue to Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu, thus officially introducing Bingham’s lost city to the outside world. The spectacular, photogenic ruins, often smothered in clouds, would soon become South America’s most famous landmark and a worldwide icon; their discovery would also make Hiram Bingham famous. Yet although the ruins of Machu Picchu were visually spectacular, Bingham nevertheless struggled to find an explanation for them. As a historian, Bingham was surprised that he was unable to find either Machu Picchu or Huayna Picchu described in the Spanish chronicles.
How could ruins that looked so spectacular, Bingham wondered, not have an equally spectacular history? Bingham, of course, was neither an Inca specialist, nor an archaeologist, nor was he an anthropologist. As Machu Picchu’s fame continued to grow, however, so, too, did the pressure upon Bingham to devise a theory to explain the ruins’ significance. Eventually—and perhaps partially in response to that pressure—Bingham devised a set of theories that were almost as spectacular as the ruins of Machu Picchu themselves.
Far from being an isolated, little-known citadel located on the edge of the Inca Empire, Bingham claimed, Machu Picchu had actually been the original epicenter of that empire. What Paris was to France and Rome was to Italy, Bingham boldly implied, Machu Picchu was to the Inca Empire. Based upon the flimsiest of evidence, Bingham eventually proposed that the city he had discovered had actually been the first city the Incas had inhabited; thus, according to Bingham, Machu Picchu was the cradle of the entire Inca civilization. Further, based upon what later turned out to be one of his team member’s erroneous examination of bones recovered from numerous burials at the site, Bingham theorized that Machu Picchu had been occupied exclusively by female “Virgins of the Sun.” After Manco Inca’s failed siege of Cuzco, Bingham asserted, Manco had retreated to the ruins of Machu Picchu, the site that, Bingham now believed, was Vilcabamba. Even after Tupac Amaru had been executed, Bingham said, the history of Machu Picchu had still not ended. One of the ironies of Inca history, Bingham explained, was that the citadel that had given
birth to the Inca Empire had in the end witnessed that same empire’s last breath.
In its last state it [Machu Picchu] became the home and refuge of the Virgins of the Sun, priestesses of the most humane cult of aboriginal America. Here, concealed in a canyon of remarkable grandeur, protected by art and nature, these consecrated women gradually passed away, leaving no known descendants, nor any records other than the masonry walls and artifacts to be described in another volume. Whoever they were, whatever name be finally assigned to this site by future historians, of this I feel sure—that few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca Land.
It was a decidedly romantic story and one that Bingham clung to until he died, in 1956, at the age of eighty-one. In the last book Bingham wrote on the subject,
Lost City of the Incas
, published in 1948 when he was seventy-three years old, Bingham staked his worldwide reputation on the fact that Machu Picchu was indeed
The “Lost City of the Incas,” favorite residence of the last Emperors, site of temples and palaces built of white granite in the most inaccessible part of the grand canyon of the Urubamba; a holy sanctuary to which only nobles, priests, and the Virgins of the Sun were admitted. It was once called Vilcapampa but is known today as Machu Picchu.
Such was Hiram Bingham’s stature in the archaeological world that few dared question his interpretation of his own discovery, at least during his lifetime. Only a year after Bingham’s death, however, in 1957, another American explorer arrived in Peru—an explorer who quickly began to suspect that the great Hiram Bingham had gotten it completely and utterly wrong.