Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (22 page)

The Count de Sartiges’ description made us realize how much we were indebted to the labours of the treasure-seeking company for uncovering buildings whose presence otherwise would never have been suspected.

Apparently Choqquequirau was a frontier fortress that defended the upper valley of the Apurímac, one of the natural approaches to Cuzco, from the country occupied by the Chancas and the Amazonian Antis. There were undoubtedly several less important outlying fortresses lower down the river, situated in such a way as to be able to prevent the incursions of small parties of wild savages and give notice of any large expeditions that might attempt to march on Cuzco.

The Prefect of Apurímac was much disappointed that I was unable to indicate to him the possible whereabouts of any buried treasure. The chief satisfaction derived by the local gentry who had invested several thousand dollars in the unsuccessful enterprise was their claim that they had laid bare the capital of the last of the Incas. For this they took considerable credit.

Peruvian writers like Paz Soldan and the great geographer Raimondi were positive that Choqquequirau was really Manco Inca’s ‘Vilcapampa’. They based their belief on the fact that Father Calancha says Puquiura was ‘two long days’ journey from Vilcabamba’. Raimondi calls attention to the fact that Choqquequirau is in fact two or three long days’ journey from the present village of Puquiura and therefore must have been the last Inca capital.

This belief was not shared by Don Carlos Romero, one of the chief historians of Lima, who assured me that the Spanish Chronicles contained enough evidence to show that the last Inca capital was not at Choqquequirau but was probably over beyond the ranges in the region where I had seen snow-capped
peaks.

Those snow-capped peaks in an unknown and unexplored part of Peru fascinated me greatly. They tempted me to go to see what lay beyond. In the ever famous words of Rudyard Kipling there was ‘Something hidden! Go and find it! Go and look behind the ranges – Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’

¹
In Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas.

²
Local Spanish for Yankee, or North American.

I
n the summer of 1910 while I was reading the proof sheets of
Across South America
, my friend, the late Edward S. Harkness, asked me when I was going on another expedition to South America and said he would be glad to contribute the cost of sending a geologist with me. That was an exciting idea. Just about that time I had been asked to review Professor Adolph Bandelier’s scholarly book
The Islands of Titicaca and Koati
. In one of his footnotes he casually remarked that he believed it ‘likely’ that Mount Coropuna in the Peruvian Coast range near Arequipa ‘is the culminating point of the continent’. He said that ‘it exceeds 23,000 feet in height’, whereas Aconcagua is only 22,763 ft.

My father had taught me to love mountain climbing. He took me for my first steep climb when I was just four years old. Later we had climbed together a number of mountains in the suburbs of Honolulu. So I knew the thrill of that great and hazardous sport. My sensations when I read Bandelier’s footnote are difficult to describe for I did not remember ever having heard of Coropuna. On many maps it did not exist but I finally found it on one of Raimondi’s large-scale sheets and was thrilled to find that that great explorer gave its height as 8 metres higher than Aconcagua, which is actually the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. It lay about a hundred miles north of Arequipa, near the 73rd meridian, almost due south of Choqquequirau and the hidden lands ‘behind the ranges’ where possibly Manco II had had his last capital.

So I asked myself whether it would not be a good idea to make
a cross-section of Peru along the line of the 73rd meridian from the head of canoe navigation on the Urubamba river to tide water on the Pacific, exploring the hinterland for historical and archaeological remains and climbing Coropuna.

That winter at a class dinner at the Yale Club in New York I was called upon for a ‘speech’. Naturally I spoke of what was on my mind. To my great surprise one of my classmates, the late Herbert Scheftel, came to me offering to pay the expenses of a topographer on the expedition now fairly launched in my mind’s eye! Other friends soon offered to furnish a surgeon, a naturalist, and a mountain-climbing engineer. An undergraduate offered to come as an assistant. And so the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 was organized in the hope that we might climb the highest mountain in America, collect a lot of geological and biological data, and above all try to find the last capital of the Incas.

At my invitation Professor Isaiah Bowman became our geologist-geographer; Professor Harry W. Foote our naturalist; Dr William G. Erving our surgeon; Kai Hendrikson our topographer; H. L. Tucker our engineer; and Paul B. Lanius our assistant. We left New York early in June.

In Lima Señor Carlos Romero showed me some paragraphs in Calancha’s chronicle about Vitcos. As soon as we got to Cuzco I began to ask the planters of the Urubamba river about the places mentioned in Calancha. They had never heard of most of them but two or three did say there were Inca ruins in various places down the valley. And one old prospector said there were interesting ruins at Machu Picchu. His statements were given no importance by the leading citizens; and the professors in the University of Cuzco knew nothing of any ruins down the valley. They thought Choqquequirau was the old Inca capital although, as has been said, the historian Carlos Romero did not think so. He placed Vitcos ‘near a great white rock over a spring of fresh water’.

We had with us the sheets of Antonio Raimondi’s great map which covered the region we proposed to explore. His map contained references to Inca ruins but none at all in the Urubamba
valley below Ollantaytambo or in the Vilcabamba valley. In 1865 this remarkable explorer, who spent his life crossing and recrossing Peru, went deep into the heart of the Cordillera Vilcabamba, yet found no Vitcos. He did locate a small town bearing the name Vilcabamba, but obviously it was not Inca and had been built by the first Spanish settlers, who were interested in working a gold mine in that vicinity. We did not know until after our return to New Haven that the French explorer Charles Wiener had heard there were ruins in Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu which he was unable to reach. Naturally we did not have with us the 1,000-page folio volume of Father Calancha’s Chronicle of the Augustinians. We only had a few notes that I had been able to make in Lima under the guidance of Romero. These referred to the places in the vicinity of Vitcos.

The last refuge of the Incas lies about 100 miles from the Cuzco palace of the Spanish Viceroy, in what Prescott calls ‘the remote fastnesses of the Andes’. One looks in vain for Vitcos on modern maps of Peru, although several of the ancient maps give it. In 1625 ‘Vitcos’ is marked on de Laet’s map of Peru as a mountainous province north-east of Lima and 350 miles north-west of Vilcabamba! This error was copied by some later cartographers, including Mercator, until about 1740, when ‘Vitcos’ disappeared from all maps of Peru. The map-makers had learned that there was no such place in that vicinity. Its real location was lost for about three hundred years.

In July with the aid of Don Cesar Lomellini, a courteous Italian merchant, we organized a good mule train, left Cuzco and its wonderful Inca ruins, and went over to the Urubamba Valley, little suspecting what was in store for us.

We saw snow peaks ahead of us but were totally unprepared for the wonderful view that suddenly breaks on the traveller as he comes to the end of the arid plateau and finds himself on the edge of an enchanting great valley, 3,000 feet deep.

Uru
is the Quichua word for caterpillars or grubs,
pampa
means flat land.
Urubamba
is the ‘flat-land-where-there-are-grubs-or-caterpillars’. Had it been named by people who came up from a warm region where insects abound, it would hardly
have been so denominated. Only people not accustomed to land where caterpillars and grubs flourished would have been struck by such a circumstance. Consequently, the valley was probably named by the plateau dwellers who were working their way down into a warm region where butterflies and moths are more common.

Notwithstanding its celebrated caterpillars, we found Urubamba’s gardens to be full of roses, lilies, and other brilliant flowers. There were orchards of peaches, pears, and apples; there were fields where luscious strawberries are raised for the Cuzco market. Apparently, the grubs do not get everything. This is the valley of Yucay where Sayri Tupac lived. No wonder it was a favourite resort of the Incas.

The first day down the Urubamba Valley brought us to romantic Ollantaytambo, described in glowing terms by Castelnau, Marcou, Wiener, and Squier many years ago. It has lost none of its charm, even though Marcou’s drawings are imaginary and Squier’s exaggerated. Here, as at the town of Urubamba, there are flower gardens and highly cultivated green fields. The brooks are shaded by willows and poplars. Above them are magnificent precipices crowned by snow-capped peaks. The village itself was once the capital of an ancient principality whose history is shrouded in mystery. There are ruins of Inca gabled buildings, storehouses, ‘prisons’, or ‘monasteries’, perched here and there on well-nigh inaccessible crags above the village. Below are broad terraces which will stand for ages to come as monuments to the energy and skill of a bygone race, who were great agriculturists.

The ‘fortress’ is on a little hill, surrounded by steep cliffs, high walls, and hanging gardens so as to be difficult of access. Centuries ago, when the tribe which cultivated the rich fields in this valley lived in fear and terror of their savage neighbours, this hill offered a place of refuge to which they could retire. It may have been fortified at that time. As centuries passed in which the land came under the control of the Incas, whose chief interest was the peaceful promotion of agriculture, it is likely that this ‘fortress’ became a royal garden. The six great slabs of reddish granite
weighing 15 or 20 tons each, and placed in line on the summit of the hill, were brought from a quarry several miles down the valley and at a lower level, so they had to be dragged up hill with an immense amount of labour and pains. They were probably intended to be a record of the magnificence of an able ruler. His name may have been Ollantay, a celebrated Prince.

Fortunately for those who are interested in ancient Peru, Ollantaytambo can now be reached from Cuzco both by train and automobile. The scenery en route alone makes the trip memorable.

Before the completion of the Urubamba river road, about 1895, travellers from Cuzco to the lower valley had a choice of two routes. One was by way of the Pass of Panticalla, followed by Wiener in 1875. Near this pass are two groups of ruins. One of them, extravagantly referred to by Wiener as a ‘granite palace, whose structural plan resembles the more beautiful parts of Ollantaytambo’, was only a storehouse. The other was probably a
tampu
, or inn, for the benefit of official Inca travellers. The other route was by way of the pass between Mts Salcantay and Soray, followed by the Count de Sartiges in 1834 and Raimondi in 1865. Both passes are higher than the top of Pike’s Peak. Both are dangerous during the rainy season, when they lie under deep snow and violent storms are frequent. The mountainous wilderness between these two routes was practically unknown and had been inaccessible for almost four centuries. Up to the time of our visit it had not been described in the geographical or archaeological literature of southern Peru. Thanks to the new road we were able to avoid the high passes and go straight down the Urubamba river, asking all the local Indians to show us Inca ruins, and in particular a place where there was a ‘great white rock over a spring of water’.

At Salapunco (
sala
– ruins;
punco
– gateway), the road skirts the base of precipitous cliffs. They are the beginnings of a wonderful mass of granite mountains which have made Vilcapampa more difficult of access than the surrounding highlands, which are composed of schists, conglomerates, and limestone. This is the natural gateway to the ancient province, but it was closed for
centuries by the combined efforts of nature and man. The Urubamba river, in cutting its way through the granite range, forms rapids too dangerous to be passable and precipices which can be scaled only with great effort and considerable peril, if at all. At one time a footpath probably ran near the river, where the Indians, by crawling along the face of the cliffs and sometimes swinging from one ledge to another on hanging vines, were able to make their way to the alluvial terraces down the valley. Another path may have gone over the cliffs above Salapunco, where we noticed, in various inaccessible places, the remains of walls built on narrow ledges. They were too narrow and too irregular to have been intended to support agricultural terraces. They may represent the foundations of an old trail. To defend these ancient paths we found that the Incas or their predecessors had built, at the foot of the precipices, close to the river, a small but powerful fortress, fashioned after famous Sacsahuaman and resembling it in the irregular character of the large polygonal building blocks and also by reason of the salients and re-entrant angles which were intended to prevent the walls from being successfully scaled.

Passing Salapunco, we skirted high granite cliffs and verdure-clad precipices and entered a fascinating region, where we were surprised and charmed by the extent of the ancient terraces, their length and height, the presence of many Inca ruins, the beauty of the deep, narrow valleys, and the grandeur of the snow-clad mountains which towered above them.