by Mark Adams
“Did I miss something?” I asked John. He pointed ahead and to the right.
“This way.”
Moments later, we came around the hill, and there it was—a gigantic boulder, fifty feet long and twenty-five feet high, a giant abstract sculpture that, when I squinted, looked like a large tugboat had been dropped into the middle of the Andes.
Once completely white, the rock was now coated with gray lichen. A wide horizontal stripe was carved into the side facing us, from which cube-shaped pegs protruded. (“It is significant that these stones are on the northeast face of the rock, where they are exposed to the rising sun and cause striking shadows at sunrise,” Bingham wrote.) The spring beneath the rock had long ago dried up. Underneath, though, were some beautifully carved niches, possibly seats of some sort. John bent underneath for a closer look.
“I think that’s where the princesses—the ñustas—sat,” he said. “The top of the rock was for llama sacrifices.” Bingham shared this opinion and noted that a small channel ran down from the flat top, possibly a gutter that carried away the blood from sacrifices. One spot was still white, a splotch at the very top of the rock. It looked familiar. I opened one of Bingham’s books and compared the photo he had taken. “Look at this,” I said to John. “The spot hasn’t changed in a hundred years.”
“There might be something in llama blood, or even some chemical they added to it, that prevents the lichen from growing,” John said.5
We circled the rock. On the opposite side was a series of steps—whether they were altars, sacrificial platforms, or just an uncomfortable set of bleachers, we’ll probably never know. This was the side adjacent to the sun temple that the friars had burned. In his book For-gotten Vilcabamba the explorer and architect Vincent Lee has a fascinating drawing depicting what he thinks this spot looked like in Manco’s day. If it’s accurate, the Spanish priests had plenty to worry about. The White Rock was the center of a large religious complex.
“That was a major temple entrance, what’s left of it,” John said, pointing to the remains of what had once been a very impressive stone door frame. Nearby was an enigmatic torpedo-shaped rock with a hole drilled into it.
“This rock looks important,” I said. “Must have been part of a ceremony.”
“Actually . . . no. I call that the penis rock, on account of the shape. Because everyone thinks there’s gold inside these rocks, someone drilled a hole into this one to stick in a piece of dynamite. Instead of blowing up the rock, the dynamite flew out like a rocket.”
As usual, proximity to Inca ruins had charged John’s batteries, so instead of retracing our steps back up and around on the INC-approved path, he suggested that we return to Huancacalle by going over the thousand-foot-high hill, which was covered by thick vegetation. “Come on, Mark, let’s do a bit of Bingham work,” he said, a reminder that regardless of how nice the sleeping accommodations might have been on the 1911 expedition, Bingham wasn’t afraid to cut his own path when he suspected there was something good hiding in the vegetation. John led us up the steep slope through vines and brambles, whacking branches out of the way with his bamboo pole. We couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.
We emerged at the top an hour later, scratched and filthy. At the summit stood the remains of an Inca structure with jagged ten-foot walls like those at Sacsahuaman. A variety of plants sprouted from every crevice, making it look like the Lost Chia Pet of the Incas. I guessed that no one had visited the hilltop in a long, long time.
“Bingham was here,” John said softly as he gazed out over the valley. Watching him scribble down notes as he prowled the tops of the fortress ramparts, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that I was seeing another omnivorous explorer doing the same thing a hundred years ago.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Road to Vilcabamba
Somewhere in the Peruvian Rain Forest
Back at the Sixpac Manco, Juvenal and Rosa were sitting around a table, laughing and sharing a liter of beer. They may have been celebrating Juvenal’s success in convincing John and me that even though we’d used up most of our food and had dumped some empty gas canisters, we still needed six mules to get us to Espiritu Pampa. I was hoping they’d invite me to join the festivities when the garden gate swung open and in walked a caravan of mules and several weary-looking arrieros, bearing gear for a dozen Swedish trekkers. In minutes, our quiet oasis was thronged with chatty Scandinavians unpacking their bags and making bottomsup hand gestures as they pointed at the half-empty bottle of beer. Checkout time.
The next morning, we were back on an old Inca trail, the very route Manco had used to flee from Vitcos. “Can’t you just see Manco running over these stones, the conquistadors in pursuit?” John said.
After sneaking away from Vitcos as the Spaniards looted, Manco spent months trying to rebuild his rebel army. Painfully aware that he would never be able to defeat the occupying Spanish forces in traditional combat, he settled for guerilla warfare. His followers began to attack merchants who traversed the road from Lima to Cusco. The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador and traveler Cieza de León recalled that those who were killed after being robbed were considered lucky. As for the unfortunate survivors, Manco’s insurgents allegedly “tortured them in the presence of their women, avenging themselves for the injuries they had suffered, by impaling them with sharp stakes forced into their victims’ lower parts until they emerged from their mouths.” A thriving bodyguard business soon sprang up.
Manco decided to make his new home at a remote Inca trading settlement called Vilcabamba. The capital that he ordered hastily built sat about one hundred miles from the old one at Cusco, which had been established at a dry eleven thousand feet. Vilcabamba was constructed in rain forest below five thousand feet. “The difference in climate” between the two cities, Bingham noted, was “as great as that between Scotland and Egypt, or New York and Havana.”
Manco used Vilcabamba much as Yasir Arafat employed his headquarters in Gaza: to rule his shadow kingdom and plot attacks on his enemy. One ambush killed twenty-eight Spanish soldiers who’d come to capture him. In April of 1539, the furious governor Francisco Pizarro dispatched “three hundred of the most distinguished captains and fighting men” in his army to take revenge, led by a man Manco despised—the youngest and nastiest Pizarro brother, Gonzalo. This was the same man who in Cusco had stolen Manco’s favorite wife, Cura Ocllo, and then ordered Manco to be put in chains.
The search party paused at the deserted settlement at Vitcos, then marched through the windy, desolate Kolpacasa Pass. As they descended into the tropics, the vegetation became almost impenetrable. Horsemen in full armor were forced to abandon their mounts and proceed on foot, often single file and sometimes on all fours. Within this jungle labyrinth, the Incas had constructed diversionary bridges to funnel the Spaniards into a narrow defile. There, three dozen invaders were crushed by boulders that Manco’s troops rolled from the tops of the surrounding hills.
The Incas had constructed a rock barrier that blocked the path to Vilcabamba. Rather than lay siege to this stronghold, Gonzalo Pizarro ordered some of his men to conduct a decoy attack while the rest of his troops circled around. Manco’s defenders soon found themselves pinned down under harquebus and crossbow fire from above. Three quick-thinking Indians swept up their king and carried him to the river, where he swam across. From the far bank he shouted, defiantly, “I am Manco Inca! I am Manco Inca!” He declared that he had killed two thousand Spaniards and would kill the rest, too. Then he escaped once more into the jungle.
Their path cleared, the Spaniards descended the winding stone staircase into Vilcabamba. Here they found a new Inca capital hidden in the jungle—hundreds of stone dwellings, temples and even a massive White Rock to match the one at Vitcos. The city was all but deserted. The troops tore apart Vilcabamba, searching for treasure. Manco’s wife Cura Ocllo was bound and taken prisoner.
Governor Francisco Pizarro received word in Cusco that Manco might now lay down hi
s arms and enter negotiations toward his surrender. Delighted, Pizarro dispatched three attendants to the Inca, bearing exquisite gifts and a pony. Manco had the envoys put to death and killed the pony for good measure.
Pizarro channeled his fury at Cura Ocllo. The governor commanded that the Inca queen be stripped, beaten and tied to a post. A team of Cañari Indians, enemies of the Incas, shot her with arrows. Horrified Spaniards looked on as their leader ordered the queen’s body dumped into a basket and dropped into the river, so that it would float downstream toward Manco’s army. Several high-ranking Incas who were imprisoned in Cusco protested their queen’s murder. They were burned alive in the central plaza.
When Manco’s men retrieved Cura Ocllo’s body from the river and reported the news to their ruler, the Inca wept uncontrollably.
TWENTY-SIX
Off the Map
Crossing Kolpacasa Pass
The Spaniards who ventured into the jungles of the Vilcabamba region in pursuit of Manco were entering terra almost entirely incognita. Reports claimed that the Antis were not merely cannibals but would slice pieces of flesh off their prey like sashimi, allowing the victim to witness himself being eaten alive. The tales were false, but as I’d learned from the devil goat episode at Valentin’s house, the mischievous twins of Superstition and Legend tended to thrive in the Andes. Bingham got a taste of this after two local residents reviewed the passages from Calancha that referred to Vilcabamba. They guessed that the Lost City might actually be a place called Concevidayoc. This obscure settlement could be reached from Vitcos by following the Inca trail that ran west alongside the Pampaconas River—the same trail that Gonzalo Pizarro had used.
When Jose Pancorbo, the rubber baron who told Bingham about the ruins near Puquiura, heard that Bingham was planning to descend the trail to Concevidayoc, he asked the American to desist. Concevidayoc, Pancorbo said, was ruled by a fellow named Saavedra, “a very powerful man having many Indians under his control and living in grand state, with fifty servants, and not at all desirous of being visited by anybody.” The Indians, he warned, were “very wild and extremely savage. They use poisoned arrows and are very hostile to strangers.” Bingham and his naturalist, Harry Foote, tallied the pros and cons. Their supplies had begun to run low. The two men were tired and would need to press-gang a new team of porters using the old silverdollar obligatorio trick. On the other hand, Pancorbo’s warnings were likely motivated by his own fears of being caught exploiting the local natives; rubber barons were despised by their Indian laborers, who were often beaten, tortured and treated as slaves when they weren’t being worked to death. And the magical city of Vilcabamba might be just a few days away. Bingham and Foote decided to forge ahead.
John and I headed northwest with the mule team, passing beneath the tiny town of Vilcabamba the New. Bingham had stopped there to ask if anyone might point him toward the original Vilcabamba. One Indian told him that he might need to look beyond Concevidayoc to a place called Espiritu Pampa, or the Plain of Ghosts. Bingham was about to step off the map of the known world. “Would the ruins turn out to be ghosts?” he wondered. “Would they vanish on the arrival of white men with cameras and measuring tapes?”
The farther we traveled from Cusco, the more closely our movements mirrored Bingham’s hundred-year-old travelogue. “We crossed the flat, marshy bottom of an old glaciated valley,” he wrote, exactly describing our progress. “Fording the Vilcabamba River, which here is only a tiny brook, we climbed out of the valley and turned westward.” John and I walked uphill to the Kolpacasa Pass, where a galeforce wind whipped our sweaty shirts like flags. “This is the gateway to the jungle,” John shouted. I could barely hear him because my teeth were chattering so hard. John clambered atop a former usnu. I turned to look at the ground we’d covered that day. Far off in the distance we could see a row of snowy peaks, which turned out to be the Pumasillo Range. I could scarcely believe that this was the backside of one of the mountains that I’d seen from the top of the ruins at Choquequirao.
“There’s a whole series of platforms like this leading all the way down to Espiritu Pampa,” John shouted through the wind. “I’m sure Manco came up here and did his bit.” John believed that usnus like this one may have been plated with gold or silver, so that when the sun shone on them, a chain of brilliant explosions linked the countless valleys of the Inca empire, like a game of telephone. “Can you imagine the impact something like that would have on the subjects? They must have been completely awed.” His GPS readings showed that we were directly on the solstice line from Espiritu Pampa; on certain important days of the year, the usnus lined up directly with the point on the horizon where the sun rose—as well as with several important Inca sites, including the one to which we were headed. “It just blows my mind,” John said.
According to Bingham’s maps, when he reached the top of the Kolpacasa Pass, he should have been standing in the middle of the Apurimac River, the same one that flows beneath Choquequirao. In fact, the Apurimac is about twenty miles south of Kolpacasa. His later surveys showed that Bingham had entered “an unexplored region, 1,500 miles in extent, whose very existence had not been guessed before 1911.” It was as if the ghost of Manco Inca had whispered the words, “Open sesame.”
As John and I descended, the arid land became greener and haze clung to the hills. We stopped for lunch in an empty, marshy valley, where Justo and Juvenal were having a heated argument over what had been the largest fish ever spotted in a nearby river. Juvenal, as he always did with Justo, got the last word when he said, “One time I saw a fish bite a dog’s head off.”
The next day we entered the cloud forest, misty, mountainous terrain like that which surrounds Machu Picchu. We reached a suspension bridge, the kind that wobbles like Jell-O when you walk on it. The trick, John told me, was to move quickly rather than tiptoe across—a steady pace limited the shaking. “Once we cross this bridge, it’ll be out of the fridge and into the oven,” he said as we walked above the river. Bingham said essentially the same thing; he called the drop ahead of us “4,000 feet through the clouds by a very steep, zigzag path, to a hot tropical valley.”
On the far side of the river we were startled by the first person we’d seen in hours. He was an old campesino, so withered that his hands and feet curled like claws. He asked us the same two questions everyone around there did, and received an affirmative response to both: Yes, we knew Juvenal, and yes, he could have a pinch of our coca. As he reached into John’s plastic Baggie, I noticed that the farmer had raccoon circles around his eyes, which on closer inspection turned out to be coca leaves pasted around his sockets. “My eyes are in very bad shape,” he told us, before bowing his head in thanks and trudging across the bridge and into the mist.
When I mentioned the stranger with the bad eyes to Justo later, after we’d suffered some serious bad luck, he was amazed that I hadn’t recognized a bad omen when it stared me in the face. “The eyes, Señor Mark,” he said, shaking his head. “The eyes never lie.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Trouble
Approaching Vista Alegre
After seven years of hideous fortune, Manco finally caught a break. The Spaniards who had chased him from Vilcabamba received word of bigger problems in Cusco and A abruptly abandoned their pursuit. Manco returned to his jungle capital in exile and entered his first period of relative calm since he’d fled Cusco. He was able to split his time between Vilcabamba and Vitcos undisturbed. Attacks on Spanish travelers resumed with surprising ease.
In Cusco, a civil war had broken out between the Pizarro brothers and Diego de Almagro, one of Francisco Pizarro’s two original business partners in the conquest of Peru. Almagro had arrived late to the bloodbath at Cajamarca and received only a small fraction of the bonanza from Atahualpa’s ransom; he also deeply resented the title that the king of Spain had bestowed upon his partner. In revenge, Almagro seized control of Cusco. The Pizarro brothers overran Almagro’s army in a battle outside of the city, after w
hich Almagro was captured and executed in the Plaza de Armas. A group of surviving Almagristas retaliated by bursting into a dinner party at Francisco Pizarro’s house in Lima and chasing down the sixty-three-year-old conqueror of Peru. Pizarro killed two of his attackers before his own throat was cut. His last act, William Prescott wrote, was “tracing a cross with his finger on the bloody floor,” which he was bending over to kiss as he received a blow to the head that ended his life.
In an early example of the country’s magical realist politics, seven of Pizarro’s murderers sought asylum with Manco. The Inca allowed them to live in comfort at Vitcos, and in return they instructed their hosts in horsemanship, European weaponry and recreational games. While playing horseshoes in 1544, one of Manco’s guests pulled out a dagger and stabbed the emperor from behind. The Spaniards, who had plotted the regicide in the hope of ingratiating themselves with the new post-Pizarro regime in Cusco, crowded around the Inca and knifed him repeatedly. They mounted their horses and fled, but Manco’s men discovered them hiding in a thatched hut, which was set afire. The assassins were shot with arrows and clubbed to death as they attempted to flee. Three days after the attack, the great rebel Inca died at Vitcos of his wounds.
