Perhaps there were more ruins at Espíritu Pampa than Bingham had found, Savoy theorized. Bingham may have discovered only a portion of what might still lie buried in thick jungle. Besides, unlike Bingham, who firmly believed that highland Incas wouldn’t have felt at ease living in the Amazon, Savoy was a firm believer that the Amazon might actually have given birth to certain highland cultures. In any case, there was really only one way to find out: if Machu Picchu was not Vilcabamba, then clearly there had to be a city larger than Machu Picchu located somewhere else in that same province.
So it was that on the morning of July 2, 1964, thirty-six-year-old Gene Savoy, his twenty-three-year-old Canadian assistant, Douglas Sharon, and an amateur archaeologist from Cuzco, Antonio Santander, boarded a train in Cuzco and headed for Huadquiña, a village that lay some five miles downstream from Machu Picchu.* More than half a century earlier, Bingham’s mule journey down the Urubamba Valley had been greatly facilitated by a road that had recently been carved and blasted into the valley’s walls. In the 1902s, a railway had been built in place of the road, which now allowed Savoy and his team to reach in six hours what had previously taken a mule train three long days. Wrote Savoy:
The Vilcabamba plan was simple enough. Pick up the [Inca] roads and follow them using historical references, including those of Bingham and other explorers who had visited the area off and on over the past seventy years or so. According to the findings, the arrow pointed to a place called Espíritu Pampa, Plain of the Ghosts. I stuck a red flag on the [Andean Explorers] Club map to a remote region less than a hundred nautical air miles northwest of Cuzco.
In Huadquiña, Savoy and his companions threw their gear onto a truck that took them across the Urubamba River and then headed up into the valley of the Vilcabamba River. Twenty-five minutes later, the road ended; from here on Savoy would have to travel like Bingham, on foot and on mule back.
During the following week, Savoy followed in Bingham’s footsteps, revisiting the major Inca sites that Bingham had encountered and examining for himself the ruins and the terrain. Savoy first came to a village called Pucyura, which, like Bingham, Savoy assumed was the site of the Puquiura of the chronicles—the same village where Friar García’s church had been and where the emperor Titu Cusi had suddenly died. Next, he visited Rosaspata, which Savoy agreed must be the site of Vitcos, the city where Manco Inca had been assassinated. Savoy then visited the nearby shrine of Chuquipalta (also known as Ñusta Ispana) that Bingham’s friend Harry Foote had discovered—the giant “white rock” that rose up beside a natural spring. All of these sites, Savoy concluded, seemed to match what the various Spanish chroniclers had reported for this area.
Five days later, and again following Bingham’s lead, Savoy and his team arrived at Espíritu Pampa. When Bingham had arrived here in 1911, a planter named Saavedra had guided him to the ruins. Five decades later, a family named Cobos now farmed the area. Wrote Savoy:
Our mules negotiate a wide stone Inca road that staircases down the slope into the valley. Overgrown by thick vegetation, it is only partially cleared. A second road drops down from the upper regions. A quarter of an hour later we pull up in front of the Cobos house. It is made of field-stones cemented with mud and thatched with sugarcane, there being no paja [straw] grown in the valley. Two men, later introduced as Benjamin and Flavio, eldest sons of Julio Cobos, step out into the hot midmorning sun to greet us. I can tell from their faces they have been following us hawkeyed from the moment we first appeared on the promontory. We are invited into the hut, and treated to coffee locally grown on the chacra and freshly ground on large stones. I inquire about the Inca road we have been following. Benjamin Cobos informs me that it disappears into the great forest, beyond the coffee fields. I ask if he knows the location of the Eromboni ruins. He explains he and his father were shown these ruins in 1958 by the Machiguengas [natives] who abandoned Espíritu Pampa several years ago for a new camp farther down the river. My next question animates his black, piercing eyes. “Will you guide me to these ruins?” He mulls over the matter, tosses a glance at his younger, thinner brother. “Bueno,” he replies.
That very same day, with the help of the Cobos family, Savoy located and began to clear the ruins that Bingham had been shown some fifty-three years earlier. Whereas Bingham had searched the area for only a few days, however, Savoy was determined to stay for at least several weeks. Savoy had also hired a large number of workers to help him clear away the jungle. Soon, ancient buildings and temple complexes that Bingham had never discovered gradually began to emerge.
The [Inca] road we have been following comes to a halt. Rather than retrace our steps, we decide to keep going in the same direction hoping to pick it up again. I have the men spread out. It is a half hour before we find two groups of buildings. The stonework is of better quality than what we have seen before. It is evident that the cut white limestone blocks had once fit snugly together, although many had now been broken by feeder vines that had wormed their way between the stones and pried them apart. One of the buildings, a rectangular construction with two doorways, guards a green-lit temple; a high elevated bulwark of stone consisting of rooms with niches and fallen door lintels, inner courtyards and enclosures. It must have been very impressive when the Incas lived here. A large huaca [sacred] boulder rests beside one of the walls. It looks as if it may have fallen from the top of the platform wall. A magnificent matapalo [strangler fig] tree with a spreading crown some one hundred feet above our heads locks one of the walls in a grip of gnarled roots. Some of the rocks are squeezed out of place by its vicelike grip. Rattan vines hang down from its upper branches, forming a screen through which we must cut our way.
After a week of prying ruin after ruin from the jungle’s grip, Savoy gradually began to realize that the ruins he was discovering were not just the few dozen scattered buildings that Bingham had located in 1911 but were actually the remains of a substantial city. As Savoy later wrote:
Bingham had reached the outskirts of this old Inca city. There is no doubt of that. By failing to press on to discover additional ruins he dismissed its importance. This explains why he wrongly assumed Machu Picchu to be the Lost City of Vilcabamba. All he could find on the Eromboni Pampa was the one Inca group, the Spanish Palace, consisting of the road leading into the city, a small watchtower, the fifteen to twenty round houses on the edge of the forest, the bridge, fountain and traces of terraces near the twenty-four-door structure. Our findings show the site to be far more extensive.
Like Bingham, Savoy also discovered clay roofing tiles on the floors of some of the ruined buildings. Unlike his predecessor, however, Savoy immediately grasped their significance.
Who had used these tiles? Unknown in old Peru, roofing tile was introduced by the Spaniards shortly following the conquest. The Incas preferred ichu straw. Then I remembered that Manco had taken Spanish prisoners of war. These and the Augustinian friars under Titu Cusi may have passed on the use of this permanent roofing material. The Incas would have been adept at making such tiles; they had worked clay for centuries. The Viceroy had ordered the city of Cuzco tiled in the year 1560, a preventative against fire (Manco had put the old capital to the torch in 1536). From our findings it would appear that the Incas of Vilcabamba learned the art of manufacturing roofing tile and were utilizing it in their modern building; proof that they were experiencing a kind of transition, absorbing Spanish refinements while retaining their own. While he [Bingham] dismissed this find as vague and unimportant, I seized upon it at once. To me it was a key find.
After several weeks of work, Savoy and his crew had partially cleared a site that consisted of hundreds of Inca buildings and stretched for more than five hundred acres. The center of the newly exposed city actually lay some seven hundred yards northeast of the buildings that Bingham had originally found, revealing a jungle metropolis whose existence Bingham had not even suspected.
For the first time I realize what we have found. We are in the heart of an ancient In
ca city. Is this Manco’s Vilcabamba—the lost city of the Incas? I am certain we are in parts of it. I experience an overwhelming sense of the history the ruins represent. For four hundred years they have remained in the realm of legend. Some even doubted they existed. But I always knew they were there, somewhere, awaiting discovery. To me they were the most important historical remains in Peru. Important because Manco was a glorious hero who gave dignity to Peru when all was lost. Important because so many great names had looked for them. Some would expect to find cyclopean walls covered with sheets of gold, or finely cut stone of the classic Cuzco style. Old Vilcabamba wasn’t this at all. She was old and worn. The walls of her buildings were toppled, covered with thick, decaying vegetable matter; their foundations under tons of slide and ooze. She had been put to the torch by the Incas who had built her and ransacked by the Spaniards who were looking for gold. Four centuries of wild jungle had twisted that part which remained. But she had not lost her dignity. One could easily see she had been a great metropolis, a colossus of the jungle…. The city represented everything for which the Incas stood. It was a monument to their industry, their struggle with nature, their fight for freedom against overpowering odds. This was immortal Vilcabamba—that legendary city of a thousand history books. If I never succeeded in finding another city it would not matter. Legend had been turned into history.
Bingham, Savoy realized, had made the error of not having spent enough time to investigate the area properly. Hindered by the heavy mantle of jungle and by his own preconceptions, Bingham had discovered only a few scattered clusters of buildings, never realizing that a large, nearly invisible city actually lay stretched out before him, a city many times larger than the citadel he had discovered only three weeks earlier at Machu Picchu. Because the chronicles had made it clear that ancient Vilcabamba was the largest city in the province, however, and because he had found so few buildings at Espíritu Pampa, Bingham decided that Machu Picchu was a better candidate to claim the title of Manco’s lost city of Vilcabamba.
Gene Savoy eventually led three expeditions in 1964 and 1965 to the site he now called Vilcabamba the Old, clearing, mapping, and exploring the ruins and the surrounding region. Satisfied that he had discovered and correctly identified the Inca capital that Hiram Bingham had been searching for, Savoy later turned his considerable energies to searching for ruins in the cloud forests of northeastern Peru. There he made a series of discoveries of ancient Chachapoyan cities, vestiges of a cloud forest culture that had once flourished in the region for at least half a millennium before the conquest of the Chachapoyas by the Incas. Later, in 1969—and obviously inspired by Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki voyage—Savoy supervised the construction of a reed raft he called The Feathered Serpent, eventually sailing it for two thousand miles, from Peru to Panama. Savoy made the voyage in the hope of providing support for one of his cherished theories, that ancient cultures in Peru, Central America, and Mexico had once had maritime contact.
In 1970, after thirteen years of exploration in Peru, Savoy went through a tumultuous time, divorcing his wife, marrying another Peruvian woman, and leaving Peru with a bitter taste in his mouth. Relocating to Reno, Nevada, Savoy nevertheless reestablished his exploring club, which he now called the Andean Explorers Foundation and Ocean Sailing Club, and also founded his new church, called the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, a tax-exempt organization. Savoy remained president and chief explorer of his exploring club while also retaining the position of head bishop and official messenger of God of his church. Putting his years of exploration in Peru behind him, Savoy now turned his attention completely to spiritual affairs, writing Jamil: The Child Christ and a series of seven religious tomes called The Prophecies of Jamil.
As Savoy continued to develop and elaborate upon his new church’s doctrines, he began teaching his followers that, among other things, one could obtain immortality by staring directly at the sun, thereby absorbing God as raw energy in its purest form. Just as the Incas and the inhabitants of other ancient agricultural societies had worshipped the sun, Savoy, too, believed the sun to be divine. Savoy wrote in his book Project X:
There can be no doubt that the sun picks up—and responds to—human thoughts, as we suspected. The sun cannot simply be an incandescent ball of nuclear fire—it is a center of consciousness. Man is intimately related to the sun by a sensory makeup not recognized, as yet, by secular science…. As man learns to specialize in absorbing solar radiation and receiving cosmic information, he will automatically become part of the whole. He will transcend his physical being and gain access to cosmic knowledge—stored information far beyond anything that can be learned on this planet. The cumulative effect of all this information from within solar energy will be to give this new breed of man—futuristic man—access to the information locked up in the stars. With this knowledge, death will be overcome, for man will no longer be earthbound, or even individualistic, as we presently know individuality.
The secrets of immortality, Savoy informed his followers, had been revealed to him in the jungles of Peru. Savoy’s claim was lent more credibility by the fact that, throughout his forties and fifties, he retained his movie-star good looks and appeared to be years younger than he actually was.
Deeply involved in his new church, Savoy never responded to the various letters he received over the years from people interested in his previous archaeological discoveries in Peru. For the Most Right Reverend Douglas Eugene Savoy, Peru and his life as an explorer there were now officially closed chapters in his past.
Savoy’s reluctance to discuss his years of exploration continued, in fact, until one day in 1983 when two of the more persistent of these letter writers suddenly showed up on the doorstep of his home in Reno. The visitors were an American architect and his wife, both of whom had a newly found passion for searching for lost Inca ruins in Peru. The visitors said that after fruitless attempts to contact him, they had decided that they simply had to meet the man they considered to be the most famous living American explorer. Momentarily taken aback, Savoy paused for a moment, then invited the couple into his home for coffee. The visitors were Vincent and Nancy Lee; their sudden appearance on his doorstep would ultimately propel Savoy back to the jungles of Peru, where he would make one of his most controversial discoveries.
Vincent Lee first went to Peru to go mountain climbing. An architect by profession, an ex-Marine, and a mountaineering guide who lived near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Lee had come across Savoy’s 1970 book, Antisuyo: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon, in a local library. Although Lee found the story of Manco Inca and Vilcabamba interesting, he was even more intrigued by Savoy’s mention of a sheer granite rock, shaped like a giant human head, called Icma Coya—which in Quechua means “Widowed Queen.” The giant formation apparently rose out of the southeastern Peruvian jungle, in an area called Vilcabamba, and had yet to be climbed. Inspired by Savoy’s account, the six-foot-tall, bearded, blue-eyed, forty-two-year-old and two mountaineering friends made the journey to Peru in 1982 in order to climb the peak. Lee and his companions eventually took the train past Machu Picchu, then climbed onto the back of a truck that took them all the way to Huancacalle, into the heart of the Vilcabamba region. Hiking along the trail to the Pampaconas River, Lee was amazed to find the remains of so many Inca ruins, many of which appeared to have been untouched by the intervening centuries. By the time they arrived at the base of Icma Coya, Lee was hooked. “I couldn’t believe all of the ruins that we were finding,” Lee recounted. “The whole place looked unexplored. As an architect, I was fascinated by the types of buildings the Incas had left. And I wanted to know why they had built them in such an inaccessible location.”
After the successful climb, Lee returned to his home in Wyoming and soon began to read everything he could about the Incas and especially about Manco Inca and his sons, the last of the Inca emperors. Lee also reread Savoy’s Antisuyo, paying careful attention to Savoy’s claim of having discovered
the real Vilcabamba, which lay buried in thick jungle not far from where Lee had gone climbing. Although Lee was impressed with Savoy’s story, as an architect he was nevertheless disappointed that the only drawing Savoy had published of the ruins was sketchy at best and included few details. The photos Savoy had published in his book were also very poor—partly due to the thick vegetation—and revealed very little.
As Savoy had no archaeological credentials and had provided little solid documentation to substantiate his claims, a number of Inca specialists, Lee soon discovered, had their doubts about whether the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were really what Savoy claimed they were. Where were the detailed site maps of the supposed city, they asked? Where were the various nearby forts and battle sites mentioned in the chronicles? The only way to definitively prove that the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were indeed those of Manco Inca’s lost capital would be to take the time to carefully map the city and then look for other nearby ruins that were described in the chronicles. Just as Hiram Bingham had confirmed that the ruins of modern-day Rosaspata must be those of ancient Vitcos by discovering the nearby rock shrine of Chuquipalta, only by discovering additional, related sites could anyone definitively prove that the ruins at Espíritu Pampa were really those of Manco’s Vilcabamba.
The Last Days of the Incas Page 49