The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  Continuing his research, Lee soon discovered that Gene Savoy was still alive and that he was now the head of a church in Reno. Lee called the church, was given the address of Savoy’s house—and then sent a letter there, introducing himself and asking Savoy for information and advice. Eventually, an assistant of Savoy’s responded briefly to the letter, but provided none of the information Lee had requested. Lee, however, was not about to give up; he was now not only determined to return and explore the Vilcabamba area but he was just as determined to meet and speak with the mysterious and reclusive Gene Savoy. The only solution, it seemed, was to fly to Reno and try to meet with the fifty-six-year-old explorer. Thus, in November 1983, Lee and his wife, Nancy, eventually found themselves standing in front of Savoy’s International Community of Christ in Reno, Nevada. Lee later wrote:

  A visit to his [Savoy’s] church confirmed that we had come to the right place, but a somewhat other-worldly woman informed us that Reverend Savoy was “in retreat” and thus not available to receive visitors. Disappointed, we decided to drive across town to the residential area where … the explorer lived. There was no missing the house, a large, Frank-Lloyd-Wright affair plunked in the midst of a hilly cluster of conventional suburban homes. In case one couldn’t figure out where the neighborhood explorer lived, the double masts of a sizeable sailing ship towered above the fenced-in back yard, apparently beached there during some past oceanic cataclysm. As we drove by the house, a man in jeans and a snap-front, western shirt was out in the driveway, washing his car. I immediately recognized him as Gene Savoy from his picture in Antisuyo and stopped. Once we identified ourselves, he hastily invited us in for a cup of coffee.

  Savoy, it turned out, still had the slicked-back hair, mustache, and Hollywood good looks that had been evident in the photographs in his books. Savoy knew of the Lees, he said, from the letter they had sent. He apologized for not having personally answered. The decade he had spent in Peru, Savoy told them, had occurred a long time ago and had not had a very happy ending. In fact, Savoy told the Lees, sipping from a cup and peering at them intently, he had tried to put the entire experience behind him. When the Lees told Savoy of their plans to return to Vilcabamba to do more exploring, Savoy wished them well, but assured them that he himself would never again return to Peru. During the meeting, Lee noted, Savoy sat with his back to a brightly lit window, making it difficult for them to see him clearly.

  He exuded a certain unsettling charisma, but at the same time struck us both as a bit humorless and self-important…. Maybe a bit of stand-offishness was to be expected of someone who had literally fathered his own religion, but Nancy and I had both come away from that first meeting feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

  Nevertheless, six months later, in May of 1983, the Lees made a short, follow-up trip to visit Savoy, just before heading off to Peru. Savoy was a bit friendlier this time; he seemed to be less suspicious and more relaxed. Savoy surprised the Lees, in fact, by offering them a flag to take along—blue, white, and red and with the words “Andean Explorers Foundation” stenciled onto it. Staring gravely at the Lees, Savoy suggested that his club be the “cosponsor” of their trip. Although the proposal felt a bit awkward, the Lees were nevertheless flattered. Before they left, Savoy offered them a final bit of advice, advice that had obviously been distilled from more than a dozen years of bushwhacking for lost ruins in Peru:

  “Exploring in South America is serious and sometimes nasty business…. Don’t think you can just crash around blindly in the jungle and find anything … you can’t. Listen to the campesinos [the local peasants]. They know where everything is. Pay attention to their tips and look for old [Inca] roads. Follow them. They all go somewhere.”

  The veteran explorer—discoverer of a host of lost ruins, founder of his own church, and the personal messenger of God—leaned forward toward the Lees, looking at them with his intense brown eyes, and warned them, with the light from the window creating a kind of halo behind him:

  “If you’re careful and keep a low profile, you’ll come out okay…. There’s supposed to be a beautiful two-story building made of white limestone somewhere up in the Puncuyoc Mountains. If I were going back, that’s where I’d go…. One thing, though: don’t trust anyone.”

  Lee, his wife, and six companions ultimately did travel to Vilcabamba and spent two months in the area. Although Lee had no experience in archaeology, he was a skilled architect and thus knew how to create detailed site maps. Using nothing more than an altimeter, a compass, a fifty-foot measuring tape, a notebook, and probably one of the first satellite maps anyone had ever taken into the area, Lee and his team began systematically to explore and map the ruins that lay in the Vilcabamba Valley, first at Vitcos and then at the shrine of Chuquipalta. In nearby Huancacalle, Lee made an unexpected discovery: the same Peruvian family that had guided Gene Savoy to the ruins at Espíritu Pampa some twenty years earlier, the Coboses, had relocated to Huancacalle and agreed to guide them to Espíritu Pampa. Soon, Lee and his team began hiking along the old Inca road that led down into the Pampaconas Valley.

  On this, his first exploring trip, Lee was surprised that it didn’t take long to make a significant discovery of his own. Reading in the Spanish chronicles that in 1572 the Incas had fought a battle with the invading Spaniards at a fort called Huayna Pucará (New Fort)—described as a high, narrow ridge with a stone fort on top—Lee and his companions began searching the area until they found it. On the ridge above the trail, Lee had read, the native warriors under Tupac Amaru had positioned giant boulders in order to roll them down and crush the Spaniards below. Many of those boulders were still there, Lee discovered, still waiting to be pushed downhill, as some four centuries earlier the Spaniards had surprised the Incas by seizing the heights behind them and, under the cover of their harquebus fire, had captured the fort. Lee recalled:

  My barometer read 6,500 feet and the air was warm, heavy, and moist. …The tropical night closed in with startling suddenness. Reflecting around the fire, we could scarcely believe our luck. There we were, a bunch of neophytes not yet an entire day into the exploration phase of our trip, and we had already found something important, a major ruin that had eluded all our predecessors. Huayna Pucará, the long-lost New Fort, was back on the map.

  Although the discovery of Huayna Pucará was exciting in itself, it had an added significance: clearly, the route they were presently following down to the ruins of Espíritu Pampa matched the chroniclers’ descriptions of the route the invading Spaniards had taken to Vilcabamba. It was an additional piece of evidence supporting Savoy’s claim that the ruins of Espíritu Pampa were those of Vilcabamba. Arriving at the site of the ancient city, which was covered over in jungle again, Lee and his team began carefully to clear and map the area. One piece of information that Lee had—but which Bingham had been unable to use and which Savoy had apparently missed—was a Spanish chronicle that not only provided new descriptive details of Vilcabamba but also contained a crucial piece of evidence. A Mercedarian friar, Martín de Murúa, it turned out, had written in 1590 that the roof of at least one of the buildings in Vilcabamba had been covered not in traditional thatch, but in Spanish roof tiles:

  The town has, or it would be better to say had, a location half a league [1.75 miles] wide, like the layout of Cuzco, and [covering] a long distance in length. In it they used to raise parrots, hens, ducks, local rabbits, turkeys, pheasants, curassows, guans, macaws, and a thousand other kinds of birds…. The good disposition of the land and the water with which they irrigated it … gave forth to [tropical] pepper orchards in great abundance, coca, sugar cane to make honey and sugar with, manioc, sweet potatoes, and cotton. There are numerous guavas, pecans, peanuts, lucumas, papayas, pineapples, avocados, and many other cultivated and wild trees. The palace of the Inca [emperor] had different levels, [was] covered in roof tiles, and was something well worth seeing.

  The Spanish friar’s description of macaws and tropical crops, Lee realized, matched perfe
ctly the ruins at 4,900 feet in elevation at Espíritu Pampa but not at all those at Machu Picchu, at 8,000 feet.* In addition, Lee and his team soon discovered more than four hundred structures at Espíritu Pampa, constituting a city that stretched for more than a mile in length and perhaps a half a mile in width. Lee knew that Machu Picchu, by contrast, was composed of about 150 residential buildings, which covered an area roughly a tenth of a mile long and only a fraction of that in width. Machu Picchu was a citadel, not a city. And, even though the ruins looked spectacular, Machu Picchu probably housed fewer than 750 inhabitants, while Vilcabamba had probably housed three or four times that number.

  Comparing the two locations, Lee soon realized that the chroniclers’ assertions that Vilcabamba was the largest city in the area now made sense: there was indeed no other city of equal size anywhere else in the province, including Machu Picchu. As Savoy had already noted, the roof tiles, too, were a critical find. According to the British historian John Hemming, in fact, the ruined city that first Bingham, then Savoy discovered at Espíritu Pampa was “the only known Inca ruin in the Andes where scorched, Spanish-style roof tiles are found scattered among the remains.” As Lee well knew, the Incas had set fire to Vilcabamba before Spanish forces had occupied the city in June 1572, no doubt scorching the roof tiles in the process.

  Still, despite his team’s discoveries, Lee realized that one of the main obstacles preventing anyone from making sense not only of the ruins of Vilcabamba but also of how those ruins fit into the wider context of the entire Inca province was the simple fact that no one had ever bothered to map the ruins in the area. Lee, the professional architect, was determined to change all that. He later wrote:

  After more than a century of exploration, there still was no accurate map [in 1984] of the province…. Yet anyone serious about piecing together the bewildering jigsaw puzzle that was Inca Vilcabamba needed to have all the pieces, or at least all those that were known, laid out on the table. It couldn’t be done. Theories abounded, but no one was playing with a full deck. Lying there in the dark, waiting for dawn, I told myself: that, at least, was about to change.

  And change it did. Lee knew that the Spaniards had fought the Incas at the site of another Inca fort just prior to their sacking of Vilcabamba. The Incas had called the place Machu Pucará, or “Old Fort.” After carefully combing the area, Lee and his team sure enough discovered the second fort just where the chronicles said it should be. Click. Another piece of the Vilcabamba puzzle had fallen neatly into place.

  Having retraced the invading Spaniards’ presumed route and having rediscovered two lost forts that were located exactly where the sixteenth-century chronicles said they should be, Lee had now gathered additional evidence supporting Savoy’s thesis that the ruins of Espíritu Pampa were indeed those of Manco’s Vilcabamba. Lee and a friend now decided to break off from the main expedition and go in search of the ruins that Savoy had suggested might exist nearby. “There’s supposed to be a beautiful two-story building made of white limestone somewhere up in the Puncuyoc Mountains,” Savoy had said. “If I were going back, that’s where I’d go.” After three days of slogging through steep cloud forest along with two campesino guides, Lee and his companions discovered that Savoy had been right. Puncuyoc, it turned out, was a group of surprisingly well-preserved ruins located at an elevation of 12,850 feet. The main ruin was a tall and rather unusual two-story building with associated structures nearby; it was in excellent condition and still stood upright in a gap between two mountain peaks. As Lee later wrote:

  Continuing up the final stairway through a dense grove of tangled, moss-covered trees, we arrived at the object of our search and found all our efforts of the past few days repaid several times over…. It struck me that our “discovery” of Puncuyoc was exactly the unexpected surprise I had dreamed of…. Puncuyoc … was a truly magnificent find. Unlike the historic but tumbled ruins we had found along the trail to Vilcabamba the Old, the significance of Puncuyoc seemed to have no known history but was instead a virtually undisturbed relic from the world of the Incas. From my reading, I knew that made it an almost incredible rarity. Better yet, its near-perfect state of preservation (more pristine, in fact, than anything at Machu Picchu) and its complex design made it a veritable laboratory for the study of Incan building techniques. With the expedition all but over, it looked like we had hit the jackpot. Like Bingham, seven decades earlier, we were blessed with unbelievable good luck.

  Unbeknownst to Lee at the time, however, the American writer and explorer Victor von Hagen’s expedition had actually discovered the ruins of Puncuyoc in 1953 while exploring the Incas’ road network. Von Hagen had recounted the discovery in his 1955 book, Highway of the Sun. Savoy most likely had either read or remembered von Hagen’s account, then had passed along his suggestion to Lee. In any case, after returning to Wyoming, Lee gave Savoy a call, telling him about his “discovery” of Puncuyoc and the two Inca forts—Huayna Pucará and Machu Pucará—and also about the maps and site plans that he planned to create based upon his discoveries. Savoy, Lee said, sounded extremely interested, especially in the ruins of Puncuyoc. The veteran explorer suddenly informed Lee that he had recently decided to update the material in his 1970 book, Antisuyo, and would soon publish a new book on the same subject. Lee’s recent discoveries, Savoy said, would be perfect to include in his new book. Was Lee interested? And could Lee fly out to Reno when his drawings were done and make a presentation of them to Savoy’s Andean Explorers Foundation? Flattered, Lee told Savoy that he would be honored to have his material included in Savoy’s book and that he would also be happy to present his new findings.

  In the fall of 1984, as snow thickened outside his Wyoming home, Vincent Lee sat in his wood-lined study where, with his field notebooks in hand, he began the process of creating precise maps and three-dimensional reconstructions of the ruins that he had located and taken the measurements of in Peru. For the first time in more than four hundred years—ironically in a studio at the base of the Rocky Mountains—the outlines of ancient cities and settlements in Manco’s distant province of Vilcabamba began to emerge, just as remarkably as the outlines of Machu Picchu had once been revealed by Hiram Bingham in the on-site chemical baths he had used to develop his photos. Wrote Lee:

  It was a fascinating process…. Slowly, as each new bit of information was added, the essence of sites completely unintelligible in the field re-emerged after four hundred years of obscurity. By early November everything we had seen of Inca Vilcabamba was shown on eleven large blue-line print sheets and I put together several hundred of our best slides to augment the drawings.

  Lee now felt ready for his presentation to Savoy.

  Three months later, Lee stood before a select group that Savoy had assembled in Reno and began showing them his slides of the various ruins. Savoy, Lee said, was keenly interested in Lee’s photos and drawings and was increasingly fascinated with his “discovery” of Puncuyoc. After the presentation, Savoy said that if Lee could write up his findings and submit a manuscript to him by June of 1985, then he would include them in his new book. He couldn’t pay Lee anything, Savoy said, as there “was no money in it”—but he would give Lee fifty copies of the new book to do with as he pleased. Excited at the thought of having his discoveries published, Lee agreed. And, as a gesture of gratitude to the man who in a sense had inspired his own explorations, Lee left Savoy duplicates of all of his recent drawings and maps.

  Three months later, while busily working to meet the publishing deadline, Lee received a phone call from Gene Savoy. After an absence of fifteen years, Savoy abruptly told him, he had decided to travel back to Peru—and had just returned from the ruins that Lee had “discovered.”

  “[I] Just returned from an expedition to Puncuyoc,” he [Savoy] said. “Quite a place!” This, from a man who had only three months earlier assured us he would “never go back” to Peru. It was obvious he had begun planning the expedition before we even left Reno and had the drawings I le
ft behind to show him the way. With the help of the local campesinos, he said, he took his family up there for a few days to look around and photograph the ruins. I was stunned! In a matter of seconds, it looked like my mentor had become a competitor, and a formidable one at that.

  A few weeks later, Lee had his worst suspicions confirmed. A friend of Lee’s in New York City, a documentary filmmaker, had received a form letter written by Gene Savoy that had been sent out to a large number of people, although Lee was not one of them. Gene Savoy, the letter said, had recently returned to Peru after a long absence and had immediately made an exciting “new discovery” of an Inca “Temple of the Sun,” set high up in the mountains of Vilcabamba. Savoy was determined to return to the site to do a more thorough exploration, but needed money to help defray the costs. Savoy had thus hit upon an ingenious solution: he had decided to publish a limited edition of 250 copies of Antisuyo, Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon that would be distributed among expedition members and friends at a cost of $250 per book. As an added bonus, Savoy said, the new edition would contain photographs, maps, and architectural renderings of the ruins—all unpublished up to now.

  Lee did some quick calculations: 250 books at $250 per copy equaled more than $60,000. “So much for there being no money in it,” he later said, shaking his head. Of course there were maps and architectural renderings of the ruins, all unpublished up to now—because Lee had created the maps and renderings but had not yet published them. Since the book was slated to be published in June 1985—the very month that Savoy had asked Lee to submit his manuscript for inclusion in his “new book”—it appeared to Lee that Savoy had sent him on a “snipe hunt” of sorts, ensuring that Lee couldn’t possibly publish his material before Savoy did. Lee later wrote: