Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (25 page)

With the contemporary accounts in our hands and the physical evidence before our eyes we could now be fairly sure that we had located one of Manco’s capitals and the residence known to the Spaniards, visited by the missionaries and ambassadors as
well as by the refugees who had sought safety here from the followers of Pizarro and had unfortunately put Manco to death. While it was too near Puquiura to be his ‘principal capital’, Vilcapampa, it certainly was Vitcos.

So we went back up the Hill of Roses to make further studies and to do some excavating.

On the south side of the hilltop, opposite the long palace, is the ruin of a single structure, 78 feet long and 25 feet wide, containing doors on both sides, no niches, and no evidence of careful workmanship. It may have been a barracks for Manco’s soldiers, but the absence of any niches leads me to believe that it was built by Manco’s order for the Spanish soldiers who had fled from Cuzco and taken refuge with him. Another reason for my belief is that between this building and the palace is a
pampa
which might have been the scene of those games of bowls or quoits, which were played by the Spanish refugees. Here may have occurred that fatal game when one of the players lost his temper and killed his royal host.

Our excavations yielded a mass of rough potsherds, a few Inca whirl-bobs, and bronze shawl-pins, and also a number of iron articles of European origin, heavily rusted horseshoe nails, a buckle, a pair of scissors, several bridle or saddle ornaments, and three jews’ harps. My first thought was that modern Peruvians must have lived here at one time, although the necessity of carrying all water supplies up the steep hill would make this unlikely. Furthermore, the presence here of artifacts of European origin does not of itself point to such a conclusion. In the first place, we know that Manco was accustomed to making raids on Spanish travellers between Cuzco and Lima. He might very easily have brought back with him a Spanish bridle. In the second place, the musical instruments as well as the saddle ornaments may have belonged to the refugees, who might have enjoyed whiling away their exile with melancholy twanging. In the third place, the retainers of the Inca probably visited the Spanish market in Cuzco, where there would have been displayed at times a considerable assortment of goods of European manufacture. Finally, Rodriguez de Figueroa speaks expressly of two pairs of scissors he brought as a present to Titu Cusi. That no such array of European artifacts has been turned up in the excavations of any other important sites in the province of Vilcapampa would seem to indicate that they were abandoned before the Spanish Conquest or else were occupied by natives who had no means of accumulating such treasures.

All our expeditions in the ancient province of Vilcapampa have failed to disclose the presence of any other ‘white rock over a spring of water’ surrounded by the ruins of a possible ‘House of the Sun’. Consequently it seems reasonable to adopt the following conclusions: Ñusta Isppana is the Yurak Rumi of Father Calancha. The Chuquipalta of today is the place to which he refers as Chuquipalpa. This is the ‘Viticos’ of Cieza de Leon, a famous military chronicler, a contemporary of Manco, who says that it was to the province of Viticos that Manco determined to retire when he rebelled against Pizarro, and that ‘having reached Viticos with a great quantity of treasure collected from various parts, together with his women and retinue,
the king, Manco Inca, established himself in the strongest place he could find, whence he sallied forth many times and in many directions and disturbed those parts which were quiet, to do what harm he could to the Spaniards, whom he considered as cruel enemies’.

The ‘strongest place’ of Cieza de Leon, the Guaynapucara of Garcia, is now called Rosaspata. Ocampo had called it ‘the fortress of Pitcos’, where, he says, ‘there was a level space with majestic buildings’, the most noteworthy feature of which was that they had two kinds of doors and both kinds had white stone lintels. Finally, the modern village of Pucyura in the valley of the river Vilcabamba is the Puquiura of Father Calancha, the site of the first mission church in this region, as assumed by Raimondi. The fact that the distance from the ‘House of the Sun’ is not too great for the religious procession, and that its location is near the fortress, all point to the correctness of this conclusion.

Our identification of these localities mentioned by Calancha and the other Spanish chroniclers has now been accepted by Peruvian archaeologists and historians. Rosaspata is the present name of the military and political capital of the last four Incas, which is variously given in the chronicles as Vitcos, Pitcos, Viticos, and Uiticos.

A
lthough the refuge of Manco is frequently spoken of as Vitcos by the contemporary writers, the word Vilcapampa, or Vilcabamba, is used even more often. In fact Garcilasso, the chief historian of the Incas, himself the son of an Inca princess, does not mention Vitcos. Vilcabamba was the common name of the province. Father Calancha says it was a very large area, ‘covering fourteen degrees of longitude’, about 700 miles wide. It included many savage tribes ‘of the far interior’ who acknowledged the supremacy of the Incas and brought tribute to Manco and his sons. ‘The Manaries and the Pilcosones came a hundred and two hundred leagues’ to visit the Inca.

The name is derived from two Quichua words meaning the
pampa
where the
huilca
grows. The
huilca
tree is sub-tropical in habit, and does not live in the temperate zone. The Quichua dictionaries tell us
huilca
is a ‘medicine, a purgative’. An infusion made from the seeds is used as an enema. Also from seeds of the
huilca
a powder is prepared, sometimes called
cohoba
, a narcotic snuff ‘inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube’. All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent mutterings were regarded as prophecies or revelations of hidden things. In treating the sick, the physicians made use of it to discover the cause of the malady or the person or spirit by whom the patient was bewitched.

Clearly, from the point of view of priests and soothsayers, the place where
huilca
was first found and used in their incantations would be important. Mr O. F. Cook found the
huilca
tree growing near the bridge of San Miguel, below Machu Picchu. It is not strange to find therefore that the Inca name of the Urubamba river was Vilca-mayu, the ‘
huilca
river’. The
pampa
on this river where the tree grew would probably receive the name Vilcapampa. If it became an important city, then the surrounding region might be named Vilcapampa after it. This seems to be the probable origin of the name of the province. Anyhow, it is worth noting that denizens of Cuzco, coming down the river in search of this highly prized narcotic, must have found the first trees not far from Machu Picchu.

As has been said, until quite recently the Vilcabamba valley was an unknown land to most Peruvians, even to those who lived in the city of Cuzco. Had the capital of the last four Incas been in a region whose climate appealed to Europeans, whose natural resources were sufficient to support a large population, and whose roads made transportation no more difficult than in most parts of the Andes, it would have been occupied from the days of Captain Garcia to the present by Spanish-speaking
mestizos
, who might have been interested in preserving the name of the ancient Inca capital and the traditions connected with it. However, there was nothing to lead any one to visit the upper Vilcabamba valley or to desire to make it a place of residence.

It is probable that after the gold mines ceased to pay, and before the demand for rubber caused the San Miguel valley to be appropriated by the white man, there was a period of nearly three hundred years when no one of education or of intelligence superior to the ordinary Indian shepherd lived anywhere near Puquiura or Lucma. And until Señor Pancorbo opened his new road to Lucma, Puquiura was extremely difficult of access. Nine generations of Indians lived and died in the province of Vilcapampa between the death of the last reigning Inca, Tupac Amaru, and the arrival of the first modern explorers. The great stone buildings constructed on the ‘Hill of Roses’ in the days of
Manco and his sons were allowed to fall into ruin. Their roofs decayed and disappeared. The names of those who once lived here were known to fewer and fewer of the natives. It was not until the renaissance of historical and geographical curiosity in the nineteenth century, that it occurred to any one to look for Manco’s capital.

We felt sure we had found Vitcos; nevertheless it was quite apparent that we had not yet found all the places which were called Vilcapampa. Examination of the writers of the sixteenth century shows that there may have been several places bearing that name; one spoken of by Calancha as Vilcabamba Viejo (‘the Old’), another also called Vilcapampa by Ocampo, which was founded by the Spaniards.

The soldiers of the last expedition which came to capture Tupac Amaru spoke of it as being in the
montaña
, the jungle forests from which the savages with bows and arrows had come to serve Titu Cusi when Rodriguez de Figueroa visited him. At any rate I wanted to be sure, and to see what ruins, if any, could be found there and identified. We must try to find Vilcapampa. The only town which bears this name on the maps of Peru is near the source of the Vilcabamba river, not more than three or four leagues from Puquiura. We determined to visit it.

We found the town to lie on the edge of bleak upland pastures, 11,750 feet above the sea. Its full name is San Francisco de la Victoria de Vilcabamba. Instead of Inca walls or ruins, Vilcabamba has three score solidly built Spanish houses. At the time of our visit they were mostly empty, although their roofs, of unusually heavy thatch, seemed to be in good repair.

The solidity of the stone houses was due to the prosperity of gold diggers, who came to work the quartz mines which were made accessible after the death of Tupac Amaru. In the rocky cliffs nearby are the remains of the mines begun in Ocampo’s day. The present air of desolation and absence of population is probably due to the decay of that industry. The site was ‘where the Spaniards who first discovered this land found the flocks and herds’, and modern Vilcabamba is on grassy slopes, well suited to ‘flocks and herds’. On the steeper slopes potatoes are still
raised, although the valley itself is given up today almost entirely to pasture lands. We saw horses, cattle, and sheep in abundance where the Incas must have pastured their llamas and alpacas.

The fact that we saw no llamas or alpacas in the upland pastures, but only domestic animals of European origin, would also seem to indicate that for some reason or other this region had actually been abandoned by the Indians themselves. It is difficult to believe that if the Indians had inhabited these valleys continuously from Inca times to the present we should not have found at least a few of the indigenous American camels here.

Captain Ocampo, in his
Description of the Province of St Francis of Victory of Vilcapampa
, says: ‘To this city of Vilcapampa, when it was first peopled, after 1572, there came the monks of our Lady of Mercy and founded a convent. They were given land for building and for sowing. They built a living house and a church where they said mass.’

We found that the ancient church was in very bad repair and we were told that mass was seldom said here now.

When Don Pedro Duque of Santa Ana was helping us to identify places mentioned in Calancha and Ocampo, the reference to ‘Vilcabamba Viejo’, or Old Vilcapampa, was supposed by two of his informants to point to a place called Conservidayoc. Don Pedro told us that in 1902 Lopez Torres, who had travelled much in the
montaña
looking for rubber trees, reported the discovery there of the ruins of an Inca city. All Don Pedro’s friends assured us that Conservidayoc was a terrible place to reach. ‘No one now living has been there.’ It was ‘inhabited by savage Indians who would not let strangers enter their villages’.

When we reached Paltaybamba, Señor Pancorbo’s manager confirmed what we had heard. He said further that an individual named Saavedra lived at Conservidayoc and undoubtedly knew all about the ruins, but was very averse from receiving visitors. Saavedra’s house was ‘extremely difficult to find’. ‘No one had been there recently and returned alive.’ Opinions differed as to how far away it was. Señor Pancorbo himself, although he admitted that he had heard there were Inca ruins near Saavedra’s
station, begged us to desist from the attempt. He said Saavedra was ‘a very powerful man having many Indians under his control and living in grand state, with fifty servants, not at all desirous of being visited by anybody’. The Indians were ‘of the Campa tribe, very wild and extremely savage. They use poisoned arrows and are very hostile to strangers.’