The Last Days of the Incas (65 page)
There can be no doubt that the sun picks up—and responds to—human thoughts, as we suspected. The sun cannot simply be an incandescent ball of nuclear fire—it is a center of consciousness. Man is intimately related to the sun by a sensory makeup not recognized, as yet, by secular science…. As man learns to specialize in absorbing solar radiation and receiving cosmic information, he will automatically become
part of the whole. He will transcend his physical being and gain access to cosmic knowledge—stored information far beyond anything that can be learned on this planet. The cumulative effect of all this information from within solar energy will be to give this new breed of man—futuristic man—access to the information locked up in the stars. With this knowledge, death will be overcome, for man will no longer be earthbound, or even individualistic, as we presently know individuality.
The secrets of immortality, Savoy informed his followers, had been revealed to him in the jungles of Peru. Savoy’s claim was lent more credibility by the fact that, throughout his forties and fifties, he retained his movie-star good looks and appeared to be years younger than he actually was.
Deeply involved in his new church, Savoy never responded to the various letters he received over the years from people interested in his previous archaeological discoveries in Peru. For the Most Right Reverend Douglas Eugene Savoy, Peru and his life as an explorer there were now officially closed chapters in his past.
Savoy’s reluctance to discuss his years of exploration continued, in fact, until one day in 1983 when two of the more persistent of these letter writers suddenly showed up on the doorstep of his home in Reno. The visitors were an American architect and his wife, both of whom had a newly found passion for searching for lost Inca ruins in Peru. The visitors said that after fruitless attempts to contact him, they had decided that they simply had to meet the man they considered to be the most famous living American explorer. Momentarily taken aback, Savoy paused for a moment, then invited the couple into his home for coffee. The visitors were Vincent and Nancy Lee; their sudden appearance on his doorstep would ultimately propel Savoy back to the jungles of Peru, where he would make one of his most controversial discoveries.
Vincent Lee first went to Peru to go mountain climbing. An architect by profession, an ex-Marine, and a mountaineering guide who lived near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Lee had come across Savoy’s 1970 book,
Antisuyo: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon
, in a local library. Although Lee found the story of Manco Inca and Vilcabamba interesting,
he was even more intrigued by Savoy’s mention of a sheer granite rock, shaped like a giant human head, called Icma Coya—which in Quechua means “Widowed Queen.” The giant formation apparently rose out of the southeastern Peruvian jungle, in an area called Vilcabamba, and had yet to be climbed. Inspired by Savoy’s account, the six-foot-tall, bearded, blue-eyed, forty-two-year-old and two mountaineering friends made the journey to Peru in 1982 in order to climb the peak. Lee and his companions eventually took the train past Machu Picchu, then climbed onto the back of a truck that took them all the way to Huancacalle, into the heart of the Vilcabamba region. Hiking along the trail to the Pampaconas River, Lee was amazed to find the remains of so many Inca ruins, many of which appeared to have been untouched by the intervening centuries. By the time they arrived at the base of Icma Coya, Lee was hooked. “I couldn’t believe all of the ruins that we were finding,” Lee recounted. “The whole place looked unexplored. As an architect, I was fascinated by the types of buildings the Incas had left. And I wanted to know why they had built them in such an inaccessible location.”
After the successful climb, Lee returned to his home in Wyoming and soon began to read everything he could about the Incas and especially about Manco Inca and his sons, the last of the Inca emperors. Lee also reread Savoy’s
Antisuyo
, paying careful attention to Savoy’s claim of having discovered the real Vilcabamba, which lay buried in thick jungle not far from where Lee had gone climbing. Although Lee was impressed with Savoy’s story, as an architect he was nevertheless disappointed that the only drawing Savoy had published of the ruins was sketchy at best and included few details. The photos Savoy had published in his book were also very poor—partly due to the thick vegetation—and revealed very little.
As Savoy had no archaeological credentials and had provided little solid documentation to substantiate his claims, a number of Inca specialists, Lee soon discovered, had their doubts about whether the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were really what Savoy claimed they were. Where were the detailed site maps of the supposed city, they asked? Where were the various nearby forts and battle sites mentioned in the chronicles? The only way to definitively
prove
that the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were indeed those of Manco Inca’s lost capital would be to take the time to carefully map the city and then look for other nearby ruins that were described in the
chronicles. Just as Hiram Bingham had confirmed that the ruins of modern-day Rosaspata must be those of ancient Vitcos by discovering the nearby rock shrine of Chuquipalta, only by discovering additional, related sites could anyone definitively prove that the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were really those of Manco’s Vilcabamba.
Continuing his research, Lee soon discovered that Gene Savoy was still alive and that he was now the head of a church in Reno. Lee called the church, was given the address of Savoy’s house—and then sent a letter there, introducing himself and asking Savoy for information and advice. Eventually, an assistant of Savoy’s responded briefly to the letter, but provided none of the information Lee had requested. Lee, however, was not about to give up; he was now not only determined to return and explore the Vilcabamba area but he was just as determined to meet and speak with the mysterious and reclusive Gene Savoy. The only solution, it seemed, was to fly to Reno and try to meet with the fifty-six-year-old explorer. Thus, in November 1983, Lee and his wife, Nancy, eventually found themselves standing in front of Savoy’s International Community of Christ in Reno, Nevada. Lee later wrote:
A visit to his [Savoy’s] church confirmed that we had come to the right place, but a somewhat other-worldly woman informed us that Reverend Savoy was “in retreat” and thus not available to receive visitors. Disappointed, we decided to drive across town to the residential area where … the explorer lived. There was no missing the house, a large, Frank-Lloyd-Wright affair plunked in the midst of a hilly cluster of conventional suburban homes. In case one couldn’t figure out where the neighborhood explorer lived, the double masts of a sizeable sailing ship towered above the fenced-in back yard, apparently beached there during some past oceanic cataclysm. As we drove by the house, a man in jeans and a snap-front, western shirt was out in the driveway, washing his car. I immediately recognized him as Gene Savoy from his picture in
Antisuyo
and stopped. Once we identified ourselves, he hastily invited us in for a cup of coffee.
Savoy, it turned out, still had the slicked-back hair, mustache, and Hollywood good looks that had been evident in the photographs in his books. Savoy knew of the Lees, he said, from the letter they had
sent. He apologized for not having personally answered. The decade he had spent in Peru, Savoy told them, had occurred a long time ago and had not had a very happy ending. In fact, Savoy told the Lees, sipping from a cup and peering at them intently, he had tried to put the entire experience behind him. When the Lees told Savoy of their plans to return to Vilcabamba to do more exploring, Savoy wished them well, but assured them that he himself would never again return to Peru. During the meeting, Lee noted, Savoy sat with his back to a brightly lit window, making it difficult for them to see him clearly.
He exuded a certain unsettling charisma, but at the same time struck us both as a bit humorless and self-important…. Maybe a bit of stand-offishness was to be expected of someone who had literally fathered his own religion, but Nancy and I had both come away from that first meeting feeling awkward and uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, six months later, in May of 1983, the Lees made a short, follow-up trip to visit Savoy, just before heading off to Peru. Savoy was a bit friendlier this time; he seemed to be less suspicious and more relaxed. Savoy surprised the Lees, in fact, by offering them a flag to take along—blue, white, and red and with the words “Andean Explorers Foundation” stenciled onto it. Staring gravely at the Lees, Savoy suggested that his club be the “cosponsor” of their trip. Although the proposal felt a bit awkward, the Lees were nevertheless flattered. Before they left, Savoy offered them a final bit of advice, advice that had obviously been distilled from more than a dozen years of bushwhacking for lost ruins in Peru:
“Exploring in South America is serious and sometimes nasty business…. Don’t think you can just crash around blindly in the jungle and find anything … you can’t. Listen to the campesinos [the local peasants]. They know where everything is. Pay attention to their tips and look for old [Inca] roads. Follow them. They all go somewhere.”
The veteran explorer—discoverer of a host of lost ruins, founder of his own church, and the personal messenger of God—leaned forward toward the Lees, looking at them with his intense brown eyes, and
warned them, with the light from the window creating a kind of halo behind him:
“If you’re careful and keep a low profile, you’ll come out okay…. There’s supposed to be a beautiful two-story building made of white limestone somewhere up in the Puncuyoc Mountains. If I were going back, that’s where I’d go…. One thing, though: don’t trust anyone.”
Lee, his wife, and six companions ultimately did travel to Vilcabamba and spent two months in the area. Although Lee had no experience in archaeology, he was a skilled architect and thus knew how to create detailed site maps. Using nothing more than an altimeter, a compass, a fifty-foot measuring tape, a notebook, and probably one of the first satellite maps anyone had ever taken into the area, Lee and his team began systematically to explore and map the ruins that lay in the Vilcabamba Valley, first at Vitcos and then at the shrine of Chuquipalta. In nearby Huancacalle, Lee made an unexpected discovery: the same Peruvian family that had guided Gene Savoy to the ruins at Espíritu Pampa some twenty years earlier, the Coboses, had relocated to Huancacalle and agreed to guide them to Espíritu Pampa. Soon, Lee and his team began hiking along the old Inca road that led down into the Pampaconas Valley.
On this, his first exploring trip, Lee was surprised that it didn’t take long to make a significant discovery of his own. Reading in the Spanish chronicles that in 1572 the Incas had fought a battle with the invading Spaniards at a fort called Huayna Pucará (New Fort)—described as a high, narrow ridge with a stone fort on top—Lee and his companions began searching the area until they found it. On the ridge above the trail, Lee had read, the native warriors under Tupac Amaru had positioned giant boulders in order to roll them down and crush the Spaniards below. Many of those boulders were still there, Lee discovered, still waiting to be pushed downhill, as some four centuries earlier the Spaniards had surprised the Incas by seizing the heights behind them and, under the cover of their harquebus fire, had captured the fort. Lee recalled:
My barometer read 6,500 feet and the air was warm, heavy, and moist. …The tropical night closed in with startling suddenness. Reflecting around the fire, we could scarcely believe our
luck. There we were, a bunch of neophytes not yet an entire day into the exploration phase of our trip, and we had already found something important, a major ruin that had eluded all our predecessors. Huayna Pucará, the long-lost New Fort, was back on the map.
Although the discovery of Huayna Pucará was exciting in itself, it had an added significance: clearly, the route they were presently following down to the ruins of Espíritu Pampa matched the chroniclers’ descriptions of the route the invading Spaniards had taken to Vilcabamba. It was an additional piece of evidence supporting Savoy’s claim that the ruins of Espíritu Pampa were those of Vilcabamba. Arriving at the site of the ancient city, which was covered over in jungle again, Lee and his team began carefully to clear and map the area. One piece of information that Lee had—but which Bingham had been unable to use and which Savoy had apparently missed—was a Spanish chronicle that not only provided new descriptive details of Vilcabamba but also contained a crucial piece of evidence. A Mercedarian friar, Martín de Murúa, it turned out, had written in 1590 that the roof of at least one of the buildings in Vilcabamba had been covered not in traditional thatch, but in Spanish roof tiles:
The town has, or it would be better to say had, a location half a league [1.75 miles] wide, like the layout of Cuzco, and [covering] a long distance in length. In it they used to raise parrots, hens, ducks, local rabbits, turkeys, pheasants, curassows, guans, macaws, and a thousand other kinds of birds…. The good disposition of the land and the water with which they irrigated it … gave forth to [tropical] pepper orchards in great abundance, coca, sugar cane to make honey and sugar with, manioc, sweet potatoes, and cotton. There are numerous guavas, pecans, peanuts, lucumas, papayas, pineapples, avocados, and many other cultivated and wild trees. The palace of the Inca [emperor] had different levels, [was] covered in roof tiles, and was something well worth seeing.
The Spanish friar’s description of macaws and tropical crops, Lee realized, matched perfectly the ruins at 4,900 feet in elevation at Espíritu Pampa but not at all those at Machu Picchu,
at 8,000 feet.
*
In addition, Lee and his team soon discovered more than four hundred structures at Espíritu Pampa, constituting a city that stretched for more than a mile in length and perhaps a half a mile in width. Lee knew that Machu Picchu, by contrast, was composed of about 150 residential buildings, which covered an area roughly a tenth of a mile long and only a fraction of that in width. Machu Picchu was a
citadel
, not a city. And, even though the ruins looked spectacular, Machu Picchu probably housed fewer than 750 inhabitants, while Vilcabamba had probably housed three or four times that number.