by Mark Adams
I used to think that the musicians who play Andean pan-flute music in subways around the globe—those guys are probably Peru’s thirdlargest export, after precious metals and Machu Picchu souvenirs—were just annoying. Bingham would have agreed; he described llama herders playing “weird, monotonous airs” of “simple strains . . . varied with high, screechy notes.” But as I walked back through Huancacalle after my abbreviated phone call, it occurred to me that living in the chilly shadow of the Andes, you probably acclimate to melancholy just like you do to the altitude. It’s no wonder pan-flute virtuosos can make a rendition of “Walking on Sunshine” (which I later heard at the Cusco airport) sound like a funeral dirge. The Andes are a lonely place.
Juvenal had invited everyone over to his home for lunch. The house was a carbon copy of Valentin’s: two rooms, mud brick, thatch roof. This was evidently a semiformal occasion, for Mateo had not only removed his wool hat but combed his hair and put on a clean soccer jersey. John was wearing his nicest baseball cap. Rosa, Mateo and the Señora Cobos ate next to the fire in the cooking area. I sat at the table in the other room with John, Juvenal and Justo. The menu was roast chicken with seven or eight varieties of potato, offered in a palette of colors straight out of the J.Crew fall catalog, from ecru and rust to cinnamon and grape. We ate with our hands. The chicken was lean and gamy—even the breast meat tasted like a cross between duck and the drumsticks I knew at home. I asked Justo where he’d found it. His mouth full, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder out the open door toward the garden, where a small flock of poultry was pecking the ground.
“Juvenal found this one out there an hour ago. He’s quieter in here.” He patted his flat belly.
After the meal, we drank an herbal infusion made from greens picked in the Cobos’s garden, which magically dissolved the lump of meat and potatoes in my gullet. Juvenal, who was usually too busy performing his twin roles as jefe and mule whisperer to chat, was relaxed at the head of the table and seemed open to answering some random questions. I asked how expeditions through this area had changed since Hiram Bingham’s time.
“Well, the mules are easier to work with,” he said. “Back then the mules were much more wild and forceful. Now they’ve been bred to behave.”
I asked about a trick Bingham had boasted of using in this region—slipping a coin into the hand of Quechua farmers, which by custom required them to drop everything to work for his expedition, no matter how much they pleaded to be left behind and tend to their crops.
“You mean the obligatorio,” Juvenal said. “Oh yes, that was definitely true. It was the tradition that if someone gave you money, then you had to do what they asked.”
“It was a holdover from the Inca practice of mit’a,” John said. “You were obligated to give a certain number of weeks each year to the state—farming, or weaving, or fighting in the army—and in turn the state would make sure everyone was always clothed and fed. Of course the Spaniards exploited it.”
“Do you recall when you first started hearing about Machu Picchu?” I asked Juvenal.
“I think it was around 1940. My grandfather mentioned it around that time and it seemed like people had started talking about it. I visited Machu Picchu with my school in the early 1950s on what we called a ‘promotion,’ which was a group outing. What was it like? More or less the same as it is now, but more dangerous. There were no fences or anything back then, just straight drops two thousand feet down to the river. Guides used to tell stories all the time about people who took one step too far and—adios!”
“Bingham mentioned visiting a town called Tincochaca on his way to Vitcos. Any idea where that might have been?”
“We’re in Tincochaca now. It’s the same place as Huancacalle, just with a different name.”
“Really? In that case, have you ever heard of a Spanish ore-crushing mill?” Bingham saw one about five feet in diameter and took that as a sign he was nearing Puquiura—and therefore the White Rock. It seemed like the sort of thing that might have been big enough to stick around for a century. “Any guesses where it might have been?”
“I don’t know where it was then, but right now it’s in my cousin Jose’s backyard. Just knock on his door and tell him I sent you.”
I stopped by Jose’s house that afternoon, hoping to touch the stone that Bingham had, but no one was home. A neighbor assured me that he’d be back any minute, but I’d had enough waiting for one day. Rosa told me later that he wasn’t expected to return for another week.
TWENTY-THREE
The Haunted Hacienda
Huadquiña, Peru
The day after his mountaintop excursion with Melchor Arteaga, Bingham continued down the Urubamba Valley. He knew that he’d seen something spectacular on that ridge; he just wasn’t sure what he’d seen. It didn’t match the geographic descriptions he had for either Vitcos or Vilcabamba, and he had no time for a second look, since he was expected at the Huadquiña hacienda, a half day’s walk from Machu Picchu. On July 25, 1911, the day after Bingham made the discovery that would catapult his name into the pantheon of great explorers, the South Pole teams led by Amundsen and Scott were huddled in Antarctica, waiting out the austral winter’s months of darkness and monotony. (“This journey has beggared our language,” one of the survivors of Scott’s expedition later wrote. “No words could express its horror.”) Hiram Bingham was seated at the dining room table of “the finest sugar plantation and cattle ranch in this part of the valley,” sipping red wine and enjoying a dinner cooked especially for him.
Huadquiña was a two-hundred-square-mile plantation and “a splendid example of the ancient patriarchal system,” according to Bingham. The haciendas were holdovers from the earliest days of the Conquest, when Pizarro handed out large land holdings to his loyal supporters. When I’d asked Juvenal at lunch what he knew about the old estates in the area, he shrugged his broad shoulders and said, “There isn’t much left to see.” Bingham’s beloved hacienda system had lingered until the late sixties, when a leftist dictator ordered Peru’s largest agricultural landholdings seized and redistributed to farmers, many of whom had been working under near-feudal conditions for generations. During one trip in the Land Cruiser, we passed near Huadquiña and I asked if we could stop and have a look.
I was glad that Bingham had taken a photo of the place in its prime, because the buildings I saw had decayed beyond recognition. The elaborate front gate was still standing, but the walls around the property had crumbled. Waist-high weeds thrived in cracks between paving stones. Much of the main Spanish-style house had collapsed, and its tile roof was covered in corrugated steel sheets. Hand-carved wooden balconies, where Bingham may have sat and gone over his notes as he puzzled over what he’d found at Machu Picchu, were slowly disintegrating. All the doors were padlocked.
“I understand why the land reforms happened, but how could the farmers around here just let this place fall apart?” I asked John as we tried, and failed, to find a path down to what had been Huadquiña’s spectacular riverfront gardens. Comparing what I saw to the photograph Bingham had taken, the only recognizable feature was the campanile, which still held its two bronze bells. “Couldn’t they find a use for it?”
“ ‘Hacienda’ is still a dirty word in these parts,” John said.
Through a wrought-iron gate, we looked into what had likely been the dining room. The interior had been stripped clean except for some built-in shelves that held stacks of yellowed papers. It was probably the room in which Bingham had shown off his first freshly developed photographs of what he had seen at Machu Picchu. “They were struck dumb with wonder and astonishment,” he remembered of his hosts’ reactions. “They could not understand how it was possible that they should have passed so close to Machu Picchu every year of their lives since the river road was opened without knowing what was there.”
From Huadquiña, Bingham continued on to another hacienda, Santa Ana. The owner introduced him to a friend, “a crusty old fellow” named Evaristo M
ogrovejo, the lieutenant governor of a nearby town. Bingham offered Mogrovejo a silver dollar for each Inca ruin that he could show him. Mogrovejo accepted the proposal. One place Mogrovejo strongly urged him to visit was called Rosaspata, a name that mixes Spanish and Quechua to mean “hill of roses.” It stood on a hill above the towns of Tincochaca—the modern Huancacalle—and Puquiura. If this was the same Puquiura that Calancha had described, Bingham knew, “Vitcos must be nearby.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The White Rock
At Vitcos
Like Bingham, the rebel king Manco Inca had thought long and hard about the location of Vitcos. In the middle of 1537, he realized that with Spanish reinforcements constantly pouring into the former Inca empire, he couldn’t hold out for long at the fortress of Ollantaytambo. He called his chiefs together and delivered a rousing thank-you speech, concluding with what sounded like the imperial equivalent of resigning to spend more time with one’s family. Manco informed his audience that he would be departing Ollantaytambo for an extended visit to the Antis, a jungle tribe that had been conquered by his great-grandfather, Pachacutec. The Antis lived in the Antisuyu, the easternmost of the four quarters of Tawantinsuyu. The land of the Antis was where the mountains collided with the Amazon jungle—the Spaniards are believed to have begun using the name Andes based on the name of the tribe.
On its well-fortified mountaintop, Vitcos was a good choice for a new headquarters. The move must have been planned as a permanent one. Manco brought along the mummies of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was joined by his queen and favorite wife, Cura Ocllo, who had escaped from her captivity in Cusco. As they withdrew, Inca soldiers attempted to destroy the trails behind them, as if to slam the door on any Spaniards who came sniffing around. Manco’s respite was a short one, however. Just weeks after the Inca left Ollantaytambo, a Spaniard named Rodrigo Orgoñez led a team of three hundred men toward the Antisuyu. The army stampeded into Vitcos, where one of the Incas’ heavy drinking festivals was under way. The conquistadors found riches worthy of a king: glittering housewares forged from gold and silver; a golden sun idol; jewels; fine cloths; thousands of llamas and alpacas; several suits of stolen Spanish armor. Orgoñez even captured Manco’s five-year-old son and the mummies of his royal predecessors. Mesmerized by these treasures, the Spaniards didn’t notice Manco escaping with Cura Ocllo.
When Bingham followed Mogrovejo to the top of the ridge at Rosaspata, he took note of the mountain panorama, which seemed to match one Spaniard’s description of views that encompassed “a great part of the province of Vilcabamba.” On the far end of the bluff he spied the remains of an enormous building, which also squared with written accounts he’d read. The lintels of its doors were “beautifully finished,” as would befit a royal residence, and the stonework was of a higher quality than he had seen at Choquequirao. Between the masonry and the site’s proximity to Puquiura, Bingham was almost certain that he’d found a match. “If only we could find in this vicinity that Temple of the Sun which Calancha said was ‘near’ Vitcos,” he knew, “all doubts would be at an end.”
Once you’ve reached Huancacalle, it’s a bit easier to find Vitcos these days. John and I walked there in under an hour from Sixpac Manco. We entered along a narrow crest that widens into a main plaza, like the stem of a wineglass expanding into the bowl. Row upon row of mountains unfolded in all directions, like the pews in an enormous natural cathedral. Crossing over to the plaza reminded me of my days as an altar boy, waiting nervously in the church vestibule for the organist to begin playing. Justo had tried to explain the apus to me while we sat in Puquiura munching popcorn. “They’re sort of like God, Señor Mark. They watch over things. But it’s like faith—you have to believe in them. If you don’t believe in them, they don’t exist.”
“You’ll notice that Vitcos, Choquequirao and Machu Picchu are all at the junction of rivers or have rivers winding around them,” John said, tracing his gloved hand in a semicircle. “That’s no coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that Machu Picchu and Espiritu Pampa”—the modern name for Bingham’s Vilcabamba—“are almost equidistant from this exact spot.”
John pulled out a notebook and sketched a diagram of the trails that led from Vitcos in Manco’s time. It looked like a child’s drawing of the sun, with lines shooting out in all directions. “Everything had to be interconnected for the Incas. Vitcos is a hub of the Inca trail system. There were four major trails to Vitcos, branching into maybe twenty others, which branched off into others. It all connected, like it was, er, Minneapolis.” He paused to let his unexpected analogy sink in. “You could have walked from the south of Colombia to the center of Chile. Look over there—that’s the trail that Bingham took to Espiritu Pampa.”
The main building at Vitcos was enormous, much larger than anything at Machu Picchu—like a Walmart built with stone. When Bingham saw it, it was largely in ruins, torn apart by Spanish religious fanatics infuriated by Inca paganism and generations of Andean treasure seekers looking for Inca gold. (Harvard’s Farabee had warned him: “Any good find ought to be thoroughly explored before leaving it or it will be destroyed by the natives.”) Vitcos has since been rebuilt by the INC, but even as rubble a hundred years ago, its suitability for the Sapa Inca must have been obvious. “It is 245 feet by 43 feet,” Bingham wrote, awestruck by the dimensions. “There were no windows, but it was lighted by thirty doorways, fifteen in front and the same in back. It contained ten large rooms, plus three hallways running from front to rear.... The principal entrances, namely, those leading to each hall, are particularly well made.”
“Here, try this,” John said. He walked over to the perfectly rhomboid central doorway of the main building, walked through, turned around and came back. “Now you try.”
I tried. The portal narrowed as I entered. Then it narrowed as I exited. Wait a second, wasn’t that physically impossible? “How did they do that?” I asked.
“The Incas were big on special effects,” he said.
John and I ascended to the upper level of the site. Except for one young woman from the INC—Vitcos is so far off the main tourist trail that they don’t even bother charging admission—we had the entire place to ourselves. John whipped out his GPS and began to take readings.
On my first trip to Cusco, John had taken me to a bookstore and loaded my arms with reading material. Then we waited ninety minutes for the proprietor to return from “right next door” with one final volume. (At one point he called the shop to pass along the message that he was “in a taxi, two minutes away.”) The delay was worth it, for that book was Johan Reinhard’s Machu Picchu: Exploring an Ancient Sacred Center. In it, Reinhard suggests that trying to understand places like Machu Picchu and Vitcos as individual, self-contained sites misses a larger point. These monuments were built in relation to the sun, the stars, the mountains—and to one another. Trying to wrap my head around such an idea, sitting in the middle of Manhattan, was like trying to understand what the color red looks like based on its dictionary definition. Standing center stage at Vitcos, though, the Sacred Center theory started to make sense. Kind of.
“See that small fort on the hilltop ahead?” John said. “A straight line leads from that fort through the middle of the site here to”—he turned around—“Inca Tambo, a very important peak, which is almost exactly due north of here. The walls of the building up here are perfectly north-south east-west, but the main building below us is a slightly different angle. I’m wondering if . . .” He waited for his GPS readings to update. “Look at that. That building has perfect alignment to Choquequirao. Amazing. How did they do that?”
Bingham had his own puzzle to solve while standing up here. He needed to find Yurak Rumi, the White Rock. Calancha’s Coronica had pinpointed the White Rock’s location through the story of two Spanish friars, Marcos and Diego. This pair, having heard that Indians were communicating with Satan up at a gigantic rock on the other side of Vitcos, decided to put a stop to the diabolical pra
ctice. They collected some converts and firewood and marched up from Puquiura. Bingham, having spent his childhood watching firsthand the effects of uninvited missionaries cramming their beliefs down the throats of natives, must have found a tale of dogmatic Christian proselytizers butting heads with the Incas irresistible.
Next to the White Rock was a large and important sun temple; beneath the boulder was a spring of water in which the Devil himself had been reported to have appeared. Having decided that a full exorcism was in order, the friars raised a cross, piled the kindling around the rock and its adjacent buildings, “recited their orisions,” as Bingham put it, and torched the whole thing. Only the charred boulder remained intact. Calancha proudly recorded that “the cruel Devil never more returned to the rock nor to this district.” Nor, most likely, did the friars, since the Incas were not amused by an act that, had the roles been reversed, could have been equated with blowing up St. Paul’s Cathedral.
John and I followed a route down from Vitcos that wound around the mountain, dotted with the ruins of small Inca outbuildings. Most had deep holes burrowed in each corner. “Of course some of the huaqueros dug those,” John said. “There’s looted tombs everywhere here. They think it’s where the Incas would have buried some gold.”
We had seen almost nothing but blue skies since leaving Cachora, but today it was overcast gray with thick cottony clouds. “I think we’ll have a big rain tomorrow or the next day,” John said. The gray above contrasted with the lush green meadow we came to at the bottom of the trail. This field is known as the Andenes, Spanish for “terraces.” The Incas landscaped the gentle slope into tiers, like the gardens of an English duke’s country home. Scattered about were rounded granite boulders of various sizes. Several had geometric shapes carved into their faces; others had been cut into sofa-like banquettes. Many had flattened tops as smooth as if they’d been power-sanded. At least one rock had been chiseled into a perfect scale model of the hill right behind it. None that I could see, however, seemed to fit the description that Bingham had taken from Calancha.
