Savoy forgot to mention in his account, however, that to prevent yellow fever he needed only a simple vaccination that had been developed in the 1930s, that beriberi is a vitamin deficiency disease, that leprosy was extremely rare and even more difficult to contract, that bushmasters and other snakes do not attack “anything on sight” but only if they are startled or stepped upon, that the chances of being bitten by a tarantula are about a million to one and that, even if a bite did occur, the tarantula’s bite is no worse than a bee sting. Despite Savoy’s colorful characterization of the Vilcabamba area as a dangerous green hell, the truth was that Savoy and his team stayed comfortably on the Cobos family’s plantation, which lay in the midst of the Pampaconas Valley, very near the ruins of Espíritu Pampa.
Similarly, although Savoy gave credit to Bingham for having been the first scientist to visit Espíritu Pampa and for having discovered the Inca ruins there, he nevertheless wanted to make sure that he got the credit for discovering the “real” Vilcabamba—which Savoy flatly stated Bingham had failed to do. Bingham, of course, had suggested at one point that perhaps the ruins at Espíritu Pampa and those at Machu Picchu were both known in the sixteenth century as Vilcabamba. It turned out that Bingham was right about the first and wrong about the second: there had never been two Vilcabambas, only one. Savoy could at most claim that he had found more ruins at Vilcabamba than Bingham and that he had correctly identified them.
Like Bingham, Savoy had initially hoped that if he made spectacular discoveries of lost ruins in Peru his exploring career might reach a new level and that he might also win some measure of international fame. Hiram Bingham, however, had gained worldwide recognition because he had discovered Machu Picchu—one of the most photographed and visited archaeological sites in the world. Yet even today, most people have never heard of Vilcabamba or Gene Savoy. Unlike Bingham, Savoy staked everything on becoming an explorer—an odd and tenuous profession at best. Perhaps in order to compensate for his chosen profession’s obvious drawbacks—such as how one is supposed to make a living from it—Savoy eventually transformed himself from his self-created image of a great explorer into that of a great religious leader, the father of the new Messiah and the personal messenger of God. Savoy’s gradual metamorphosis ironically paralleled the plot of one of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories, “The Man Who Would Be King,” in which two white explorers fool the locals in a remote, exotic country into believing that the two are gods. In Kipling’s tale, the explorers’ deceit is eventually exposed and they pay a heavy price for it, one of them losing his head and the other losing both his ill-gotten kingdom and his treasure, escaping with nothing more than his life.
Savoy, by contrast, still continues to preside over the religion he founded in Peru, one that is composed in part of various “secrets” he states that he discovered during his many jungle expeditions. In 1977, Savoy published a book in which he claimed to have discovered the secrets of immortality. For decades, in fact, it appeared to some that Savoy had beaten the aging process altogether. Time, however, eventually did catch up with the maverick explorer and by the year 2004, at the age of seventy-seven, Savoy could no longer ignore his biological clock; he was finally forced to abandon any further expeditions due to poor health. Now Savoy’s son Sean, who was raised in his father’s religion, continues to lead expeditions into the Chachapoyas region of northern Peru. There he helps to keep his father’s discoveries alive by periodically shepherding religious acolytes from Savoy’s church to the Peruvian jungle.
A lifelong devotee of the sun, whose energy Savoy allows to enter his body by gazing directly at it, Savoy believes that the sun’s energy delays the aging process and restores the body. Meanwhile, Savoy continues to write books while no doubt preparing himself for his final mission—an ecstatic reunion with Inti, the Sun God—that golden, celestial orb the ancient Incas once worshipped and adored.
Exploration for other undiscovered Inca ruins in Peru, meanwhile, continues. Vincent and Nancy Lee, now in their sixties, have returned to the ancient province of Vilcabamba nearly every dry season since their first visit there in 1982. And while Bingham spent roughly four weeks in the Vilcabamba area in 1911 and Gene Savoy spent perhaps three months there in 1964 and 1965, the Lees have spent more than two years in that same region during the last few decades—mapping, surveying, and conducting systematic explorations.
Lee has returned a number of times with other specialists to the ruins of Puncuyoc, which he has concluded was a solar observatory that was able to mark both the June solstice and the two equinoxes. Lee believes that Puncuyoc served as the official calendar for the entire Vilcabamba province.
It was clearly a solar observatory. So all of a sudden now we realize why it was so important, why it was worth building such a beautiful little building in the middle of nowhere and why there is a five-thousand-foot staircase going up there. It was clearly the solar observatory for Vitcos. And I think it was built by Pachacuti. He was the one who built the best buildings at Vitcos, and I think he built Puncuyoc as well. It’s a solar observatory—not a sun temple, because the sun temple was at Ñusta Ispanan [Chuquipalta], just up the road from Vitcos. [The archaeoastronomer] Bernard Bell and I are going to do a publication on it because we’ve found all sorts of new information about Puncuyoc. It’s not only an interesting site but it’s completely pristine—no one has disturbed it in over four hundred years!
While Vincent Lee pursues his investigations of Puncuyoc, other areas of the Vilcabamba region have recently yielded up additional Inca ruins. And, as is usual with discoveries of lost ruins, some of these discoveries have also created their fair share of controversies. Lost Inca cities, after all—like any other highly coveted resource—are in short supply; if you find one that is good enough, fame may lie just around the corner. The competition to find and stake a claim to a lost Inca city, therefore, can be fierce.
In 1999, a fifty-three-year-old British-born writer, guide, and Inca specialist, Peter Frost, was leading a hiking tour in the southern Vilcabamba region, near the ruins of Choqquequirau. One of Frost’s clients, Scott Gorsuch, a clinical psychologist from Santa Barbara, California, thought he saw what looked to be ruins on an adjacent ridge in the distance. “We spotted [with binoculars] what appeared to be a sacred platform on one of the peaks,” Gorsuch said, “and it seemed to have significance—it caught the sun’s first rays in the morning and last ones at night.” Frost and his group hiked through brush and reached the ridge, which flanked a 12,746-foot mountain peak called Cerro Victoria that rises up in the southern Vilcabamba Range, about sixty miles northwest of Machu Picchu. There they found various ruins: looted tombs, circular building foundations, and part of what appeared to be an ancient stone aqueduct.
After this initial sighting, Frost passed on the information to Gary Ziegler, a fifty-nine-year-old American explorer, archaeologist, and lifelong Vilcabamba aficionado. As a co-owner of the adventure tourism company Manu Expeditions, Ziegler had employed Frost during the recent trek. According to Ziegler, Gorsuch persuaded him and Frost to write a National Geographic grant proposal.
Eventually, the National Geographic Society (whose first sponsored field expedition was Hiram Bingham’s second trip to Machu Picchu in 1912 and which has funded more than eight thousand expeditions since) agreed to provide funds for a research trip to the site, during the dry season of 2001. Frost, Ziegler, and a Peruvian archaeologist, Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, were the co-leaders of the proposed trip. Ultimately, the three put together an expeditionary team that consisted of Peruvian archaeologists, a cartographer, an archaeophysicist, a dozen mule handlers, a helicopter and pilot, and a documentary film team sent along by National Geographic. “I hadn’t been involved in anything of that size, ever,” Ziegler said. “It was an immense team.” It was also the kind of multidisciplinary expedition that Bingham had pioneered in the area some ninety years earlier.
In the Andean winter of 2001, the expedition team finally arrived at remote Cerro V
ictoria. There, on the mountain’s flanks at elevations of between roughly 9,000 and 12,500 feet, they discovered clusters of previously undocumented settlements scattered amidst an area local Quechua speakers called Qoriwayrachina, meaning “where wind was used to refine gold.” The team ultimately discovered more than two hundred structures—storehouses, dwellings, Inca roads, a nearly five-mile-long aqueduct, ceremonial platforms, cemeteries, and funeral towers, scattered across an area of over sixteen square miles. The buildings, at least a hundred of which were circular in shape, were badly worn and were built in the Incas’ rough pirca-style, unlike the imperial-style architecture of carefully cut stones found at Cuzco and Machu Picchu. As with Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu, however, while the scattered ruins of Qoriwayrachina may have been previously unknown to science and thus figured on no maps, the area itself was already inhabited by two peasant families who had apparently made use of some of the abandoned stone structures.
Preliminary results indicate that Qoriwayrachina may have been inhabited for more than a thousand years before the Inca Empire, the Incas then presumably expanding into the area after the initial conquests of Pachacuti. Unlike Machu Picchu, which was used as a seasonal resort for the Inca emperor and his royal descent group, Qoriwayrachina during the time of the Incas was more than likely a settlement of non-Inca miners—men who had been imported into the area in order to perform their labor tax by working the nearby silver mines on Cerro Victoria. An Inca road clearly connected the mining community of Qoriwayrachina with Choqquequirau, less than ten miles away, and from there roads connected to Vitcos, Vilcabamba, and Machu Picchu.
The international press, however, soon played up the discovery, sometimes with provocative titles such as “High in Andes, a Place That May Have Been Incas’ Last Refuge.” The lead paragraph in that story began,
Every generation or so, explorers of the high Andes of Peru come upon an elaborate sacred place or city that had been unknown to archaeologists studying the Inca civilization. The most impressive still is Machu Picchu, discovered in 1911, and no important “lost city” has come to light since the 1960’s [a reference to Savoy’s identification of Vilcabamba]. Not, it seems, until now.
Toward the end of the 2001 expedition, however, Frost and Ziegler had a falling out. With the lure of a potential National Geographic feature article, the pressure of the film crew, the size of the expedition, and the fact that instead of a single leader, there were three co-leaders, perhaps that shouldn’t have been surprising. Ziegler decided to depart with a small group in order to do some additional exploring on his own. Ziegler later said:
One of our wranglers had after our previous trips come back and had cleared a little farm on the trail over to Choqquequirau—he had actually been down in that canyon. And he said “Jefe, I found some walls down there—you ought to go down there and take a look.” So I did. That was Froilan Muñoz, one of our wrangler-employees who has worked for us for years.
Less than two miles from the ruins of Qoriwayrachina yet nearly four thousand feet below them, on an isolated bench or mesa some one and a half miles long perched above the Yanama River, Muñoz led Ziegler, the English explorer Hugh Thomson, and his team to what was clearly an Inca site. It was an area that had previously been called Cotacoca, a location that they soon discovered was completely cut off from the rest of the world. As Ziegler described it:
You can’t get to it by going down or up the [Yanama] river. The river is about two hundred or three hundred feet below the site and at one time must have been right at the site because there are canals. It’s like a time warp—this Lost World just sitting there. And of course it was all covered with this heavy vegetation and because of the heavy impenetrability of the canyon nobody had gotten there.
The Inca site contained more than thirty structures, among them a seventy-five-foot-long Inca-style meeting hall, or kallanka, a large walled compound enclosing a central plaza, and numerous rectangular houses as well as circular-shaped structures similar to those found in abundance at Qoriwayrachina and Vilcabamba. According to Ziegler, Cotacoca possibly served as an Inca administrative center and/or as a supply tambo. It is located along the main Inca road that once led from the interior of the Vilcabamba province and then crossed the Apurímac River via an immense hanging bridge before heading into the Apurímac region beyond. Ziegler states that:
I think Cotacoca controlled the access to Choqquequirau and to the upper Apurímac River. Manco’s warriors may have used it in the post-conquest period to stage attacks across the Apurímac against the Spaniards. We also finally identified how the Incas got to Choqquequirau—they went from Cotacoca straight down to the upper Apurímac and had a hanging bridge there—but before they got there they had a branch up to Choqquequirau.
The following summer, Peter Frost returned to Qoriwayrachina, still working under the auspices of the National Geographic Society, while Ziegler returned with his own exploration team to Cotacoca. In February 2004, National Geographic magazine published a feature article on Qoriwayrachina, authored by Frost, in which Frost mentioned Ziegler just once and only in relation to Ziegler having been led by a “local farmer” to another set of ruins nearby. In the various press releases put out by the National Geographic Society about the expeditions to Qoriwayrachina, Gary Ziegler was not mentioned at all.
The fact that two of the leaders of a highly publicized “lost city” expedition had a falling out, of course, no doubt had as much to do with the potential high stakes of discovery as it had to do with anything else. One has only to look at the scramble to gain credit for the discovery of Machu Picchu and Vilcabamba, however, to understand that Frost and Ziegler are in good company. The need to “strive for magnificence” as Bingham put it, to attach one’s name to something immortal and permanent seems to be a universal human motivation. Such a need presumably drove Pachacuti to build Machu Picchu in the first place; in doing so, the Inca emperor echoed the same craving for immortality as have other ancient cultures and civilizations.
Manco Inca, unlike Pachacuti and his other royal ancestors, however, had little time to make his architectural mark on history. He had no time to build royal retreats, no time to redesign cities, no time to invent new architectural styles. Manco’s capital of Vilcabamba was much like himself—undeveloped in the arts of anything other than as a seat for waging guerrilla warfare and for administering the remnants of a once mighty empire. Although he had been born in a united realm with his father, Huayna Capac, on the throne, Manco was ultimately forced to choose between ruling as a puppet emperor or trying forcibly to eject the Spaniards from his ancestors’ lands. Manco, of course, eventually chose the latter. Yet in the end, he was unable to preserve any more than a vestige of the vast empire he had inherited: his capital was sacked, his physical body was burned and destroyed, while the frontier city he had transformed into a guerrilla capital was ultimately left to be consumed and nearly obliterated by the jungle.
Had Manco succeeded in retaining his independent kingdom and had his sons arrived at an accommodation with the Spaniards, then the Kingdom of Vilcabamba might even today be represented at the United Nations, with a Quechua-speaking ambassador and an Inca monarch perhaps still presiding over the throne. The same tourists who currently visit Machu Picchu, in fact, would then have been able to proceed on to the Amazonian-based, still inhabited Inca capital, one that no doubt would have displayed bronze statues of its ancient leader, Manco Inca, perhaps sitting astride a Spanish horse with a harquebus in one hand and a Spanish sword in the other. Demonstrations of quipu reading, meanwhile, or of the ancient arts of Inca stonecutting might have been taught, or at least might have been made available on DVD. Like the Inca Empire, however, which was prematurely extinguished after an existence of a mere ninety years, Manco’s rebel kingdom, too, was ultimately aborted while he and his followers’ valiant efforts came to naught.
Peruvian history since Manco’s death, of course, has been a rather sordid one. The Incas, although an
authoritarian monarchy, had succeeded nevertheless during their short reign not only in creating a massive empire, but perhaps more importantly in guaranteeing all of the empire’s millions of inhabitants the basic necessities of life: adequate food, water, and shelter. It was an achievement that no subsequent government—Spanish or Peruvian—has attained since.
Perhaps partly due to the fact that they lived in a land beset by periodic earthquakes and destructive El Niños, the ancient Incas once believed that history unfurled itself in a succession of ages that were separated from one another by violent upheavals called pachacutis, or “overturnings of the world.” Each upheaval was believed to completely reverse the natural order of things: what had once been upper became lower; what had once been strong became weak, soft became hard, and so on. A pachacuti was believed to have ushered in the creation of the Inca Empire; it was not a coincidence, therefore, that the emperor responsible for creating the Inca Empire adopted that word as his name. Similarly, the Spanish invasion and conquest were believed to have been the manifestations of another pachacuti, ushering in the “upside-down” world that continues to this day. According to Inca beliefs, however, previous epochs do not recede into the past; rather they remain dormant in the Inca underworld, awaiting a new pachacuti that may one day cause their return. Many inhabitants of the Andes still believe that the next pachacuti may as yet usher in the return of the previous Inca world.
The Last Days of the Incas Page 53