The Last Days of the Incas (69 page)

Bingham was not only the first person to inform the world about the existence of Machu Picchu, but he also led three, multidisciplinary scientific teams that mapped, excavated, measured and explored the site and the surrounding area.
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Thus, even though Hiram Bingham was certainly not the first visitor since the fall of the Inca Empire to wander about the abandoned ruins of Machu Picchu, he was incontestably the site’s first scientific discoverer. Other scientists and explorers had come close—Antonio Raimondi, Charles Wiener, Albert Giesecke—but Bingham had beaten them all. As the writer Anthony Brandt wrote in the introduction to a modern edition of Bingham’s 1922
Inca Land
, “Bingham was an explorer, not an archaeologist; it was not his destiny to understand Machu Picchu, only to find it.”

Thirty-seven years after discovering Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham briefly returned to Peru, in order to attend the inauguration of the first paved road to zigzag up the hill to the ruins from a railway station on the valley floor. As the still gaunt, now gray-haired explorer stood in full view of the Incas’ sacred peaks, representatives of the Peruvian government
christened the new road the Carretera Hiram Bingham (“The Hiram Bingham Highway”). Eight years later, in 1956, at the age of eighty-one, Hiram Bingham passed away. The boy who had longed for “magnificence”—and who had become a lieutenant colonel, a U.S. senator, and had discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu—was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. The ancient Inca ruins that Bingham had been fortunate enough to stumble upon one fine July day in 1911, meanwhile, are now visited on average by more than one thousand people per day and overall by more than half a million people a year.

If Hiram Bingham tended to seize the lion’s share of the credit for his discoveries and took liberties with or suppressed certain facts in order to enhance his own reputation or to support his theories, the American explorer Gene Savoy tended to venture even further off the path of historical accuracy and to plunge head over heels into his own self-created myths. Even though by the time Savoy ventured into the Vilcabamba area he was able to travel by railway alongside the Urubamba River and then by truck on a road that was being built up into the Vilcabamba Valley, Savoy’s description of the Vilcabamba region could have been lifted directly from a Victorian travelogue. As with Bingham’s popular books, the familiar theme of the brave white explorer in search of fabled lost ruins in the midst of a hostile jungle is forcefully pounded home in Savoy’s 1970 book,
Antisuyo: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon:

Savoy forgot to mention in his account, however, that to prevent yellow fever he needed only a simple vaccination that had been developed in the 1930s, that beriberi is a vitamin deficiency disease, that leprosy was extremely rare and even more difficult to contract, that bushmasters and other snakes do not attack “anything on sight” but only if they are startled or stepped upon, that the chances of being bitten by a tarantula are about a million to one and that, even if a bite did occur, the tarantula’s bite is no worse than a bee sting. Despite Savoy’s colorful characterization of the Vilcabamba area as a dangerous green hell, the truth was that Savoy and his team stayed comfortably on the Cobos family’s plantation, which lay in the midst of the Pampaconas Valley, very near the ruins of Espíritu Pampa.

Similarly, although Savoy gave credit to Bingham for having been the first scientist to visit Espíritu Pampa and for having discovered the Inca ruins there, he nevertheless wanted to make sure that he got the credit for discovering the “real” Vilcabamba—which Savoy flatly stated Bingham had failed to do. Bingham, of course, had suggested at one point that perhaps the ruins at Espíritu Pampa and those at Machu Picchu were
both
known in the sixteenth century as Vilcabamba. It turned out that Bingham was right about the first and wrong about the second: there had never been two Vilcabambas, only one. Savoy could at most claim that he had found more ruins at Vilcabamba than Bingham and that he had correctly identified them.

Like Bingham, Savoy had initially hoped that if he made spectacular discoveries of lost ruins in Peru his exploring career might reach a new level and that he might also win some measure of international fame. Hiram Bingham, however, had gained worldwide recognition because he had discovered Machu Picchu—one of the most photographed and visited archaeological sites in the world. Yet even today, most people have never heard of Vilcabamba or Gene Savoy. Unlike Bingham, Savoy staked everything on becoming an explorer—an odd and tenuous profession at best.
Perhaps in order to compensate for his chosen profession’s obvious drawbacks—such as how one is supposed to make a living from it—Savoy eventually transformed himself from his self-created image of a great explorer into that of a great religious leader, the father of the new Messiah and the personal messenger of God. Savoy’s gradual metamorphosis ironically paralleled the plot of one of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories, “The Man Who Would Be King,” in which two white explorers fool the locals in a remote, exotic country into believing that the two are gods. In Kipling’s tale, the explorers’ deceit is eventually exposed and they pay a heavy price for it, one of them losing his head and the other losing both his ill-gotten kingdom and his treasure, escaping with nothing more than his life.

Savoy, by contrast, still continues to preside over the religion he founded in Peru, one that is composed in part of various “secrets” he states that he discovered during his many jungle expeditions. In 1977, Savoy published a book in which he claimed to have discovered the secrets of immortality. For decades, in fact, it appeared to some that Savoy had beaten the aging process altogether. Time, however, eventually did catch up with the maverick explorer and by the year 2004, at the age of seventy-seven, Savoy could no longer ignore his biological clock; he was finally forced to abandon any further expeditions due to poor health. Now Savoy’s son Sean, who was raised in his father’s religion, continues to lead expeditions into the Chachapoyas region of northern Peru. There he helps to keep his father’s discoveries alive by periodically shepherding religious acolytes from Savoy’s church to the Peruvian jungle.

A lifelong devotee of the sun, whose energy Savoy allows to enter his body by gazing directly at it, Savoy believes that the sun’s energy delays the aging process and restores the body. Meanwhile, Savoy continues to write books while no doubt preparing himself for his final mission—an ecstatic reunion with Inti, the Sun God—that golden, celestial orb the ancient Incas once worshipped and adored.

Exploration for other undiscovered Inca ruins in Peru, meanwhile, continues. Vincent and Nancy Lee, now in their sixties, have returned to the ancient province of Vilcabamba nearly every dry season since their first visit there in 1982. And while Bingham spent roughly four
weeks in the Vilcabamba area in 1911 and Gene Savoy spent perhaps three months there in 1964 and 1965, the Lees have spent more than
two years
in that same region during the last few decades—mapping, surveying, and conducting systematic explorations.

Lee has returned a number of times with other specialists to the ruins of Puncuyoc, which he has concluded was a solar observatory that was able to mark both the June solstice and the two equinoxes. Lee believes that Puncuyoc served as the official calendar for the entire Vilcabamba province.

While Vincent Lee pursues his investigations of Puncuyoc, other areas of the Vilcabamba region have recently yielded up additional Inca ruins. And, as is usual with discoveries of lost ruins, some of these discoveries have also created their fair share of controversies. Lost Inca cities, after all—like any other highly coveted resource—are in short supply; if you find one that is good enough, fame may lie just around the corner. The competition to find and stake a claim to a lost Inca city, therefore, can be fierce.

In 1999, a fifty-three-year-old British-born writer, guide, and Inca specialist, Peter Frost, was leading a hiking tour in the southern Vilcabamba region, near the ruins of Choqquequirau. One of Frost’s clients, Scott Gorsuch, a clinical psychologist from Santa Barbara, California, thought he saw what looked to be ruins on an adjacent ridge in the distance. “We spotted [with binoculars] what appeared to be a sacred platform on one of the peaks,” Gorsuch said, “and it seemed to have
significance—it caught the sun’s first rays in the morning and last ones at night.” Frost and his group hiked through brush and reached the ridge, which flanked a 12,746-foot mountain peak called Cerro Victoria that rises up in the southern Vilcabamba Range, about sixty miles northwest of Machu Picchu. There they found various ruins: looted tombs, circular building foundations, and part of what appeared to be an ancient stone aqueduct.

After this initial sighting, Frost passed on the information to Gary Ziegler, a fifty-nine-year-old American explorer, archaeologist, and lifelong Vilcabamba aficionado. As a co-owner of the adventure tourism company Manu Expeditions, Ziegler had employed Frost during the recent trek. According to Ziegler, Gorsuch persuaded him and Frost to write a National Geographic grant proposal.

Eventually, the National Geographic Society (whose first sponsored field expedition was Hiram Bingham’s second trip to Machu Picchu in 1912 and which has funded more than eight thousand expeditions since) agreed to provide funds for a research trip to the site, during the dry season of 2001. Frost, Ziegler, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, were the co-leaders of the proposed trip. Ultimately, the three put together an expeditionary team that consisted of Peruvian archaeologists, a cartographer, an archaeophysicist, a dozen mule handlers, a helicopter and pilot, and a documentary film team sent along by National Geographic. “I hadn’t been involved in anything of that size, ever,” Ziegler said. “It was an immense team.” It was also the kind of multidisciplinary expedition that Bingham had pioneered in the area some ninety years earlier.

In the Andean winter of 2001, the expedition team finally arrived at remote Cerro Victoria. There, on the mountain’s flanks at elevations of between roughly 9,000 and 12,500 feet, they discovered clusters of previously undocumented settlements scattered amidst an area local Quechua speakers called Qoriwayrachina, meaning “where wind was used to refine gold.” The team ultimately discovered more than two hundred structures—storehouses, dwellings, Inca roads, a nearly five-mile-long aqueduct, ceremonial platforms, cemeteries, and funeral towers, scattered across an area of over sixteen square miles. The buildings, at least a hundred of which were circular in shape, were badly worn and were built in the Incas’ rough pirca-style, unlike the imperial-style architecture of carefully cut stones found at Cuzco and Machu Picchu. As with Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu, however, while the scattered ruins of Qoriwayrachina
may have been previously unknown to science and thus figured on no maps, the area itself was already inhabited by two peasant families who had apparently made use of some of the abandoned stone structures.

Preliminary results indicate that Qoriwayrachina may have been inhabited for more than a thousand years before the Inca Empire, the Incas then presumably expanding into the area after the initial conquests of Pachacuti. Unlike Machu Picchu, which was used as a seasonal resort for the Inca emperor and his royal descent group, Qoriwayrachina during the time of the Incas was more than likely a settlement of non-Inca miners—men who had been imported into the area in order to perform their labor tax by working the nearby silver mines on Cerro Victoria. An Inca road clearly connected the mining community of Qoriwayrachina with Choqquequirau, less than ten miles away, and from there roads connected to Vitcos, Vilcabamba, and Machu Picchu.

The international press, however, soon played up the discovery, sometimes with provocative titles such as “High in Andes, a Place That May Have Been Incas’ Last Refuge.” The lead paragraph in that story began,