by Mark Adams
After two days the team was exhausted (the Campas had “determined to make the night hideous with cries, tom-toms, and drums,” Bingham recalled) and running low on food. Bingham was eager to sort through his discoveries and start preparing for his Mount Coropuna climb. The team retraced its steps to Saavedra’s house and began the journey back toward civilization. Bingham would never return to the ghost town in the jungle.
With Vitcos and possibly Vilcabamba in the bag, Bingham turned his attention to his last major objective: climbing the “virgin peak ” of Coropuna. (His one other goal, to measure the depth of Lake Parinacochas, was a total bust—he’d brought along a thousand feet of line to plumb a body of water less than five feet deep.) The explorer had met up with his rival, Annie S. Peck, on the ship down from Panama to Peru and claimed to have come away unimpressed. In a letter to Alfreda, he dismissed Peck as “a hard-faced, sharp tongued old maid of the typical New England type.” Thanks to her 1909 ascent of Mount Huascaran, though, Peck also happened to be something that Bingham was not: one of the most famous alpinists in the world. Because of Bingham’s busy schedule, she also had a head start. A Boston Post story published while Bingham was en route to Peru, headlined MISS PECK IS RACING YALE MAN, hinted at his true feelings: “It is an open secret to [Bingham’s] friends that he has been chafing under his routine work ever since he heard that Miss Peck had started on the first lap of the race.”
Peck was well aware that she had gotten under Bingham’s skin. Upon learning that she had a rival for the summit of Coropuna, she had written Bingham a teasing letter inquiring if she might fill him in on any details of the mountain that he proposed to climb. Before sending the note, she inserted a clause noting that unlike some people she could name, she had observed Coropuna “from nearer than the railway.” Bingham’s reply was less than gallant: “Under the circumstances do you not think it would be more sportsmanlike, now that this expedition has been definitely announced and approved by the Yale Corporation, for you to postpone your investigation of Coropuna until we had finished our work?”
When he arrived in Arequipa to begin his assault on Coropuna, Bingham was greeted with the deflating news that Peck had succeeded in climbing the peak while he had been fixated on his glacial bone discovery outside of Cusco. One news account reported that Peck, a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, had planted a flag reading VOTES FOR WOMEN at the summit. Yet Peck, who had never shown a reluctance to blow her own horn in the past, was uncharacteristically silent about her triumph. Other than one newspaper story, Bingham couldn’t find any further confirmation of her feat. The reason was simple. Coropuna is a horizontal mountain with multiple peaks. Faced with a choice of summits, Peck had selected the wrong one to climb. “No wonder she doesn’t talk about it much,” Bingham wrote to Alfreda, with no small satisfaction.
Today, most mountaineering outfitters rate the Coropuna climb as moderately difficult and can get a reasonably fit client to the peak and back in a few days. Bingham couldn’t have known this, of course, and so deserves credit for possessing the nerve to attempt to reach what he believed was the highest point in the hemisphere outfitted in metal spikes and a bulky cardigan sweater. The climb was miserable. The deep snow near the top melted each day in the afternoon sun, creating a slushy mess in the clouds, and Bingham was hit hard by altitude sickness. On October 15, after some guesswork as to which of Coropuna’s peaks was the highest, the team reached the top of what appeared to be its tallest summit. Utilizing two specially made aneroid barometers (“each as large as a big alarm clock,” and which gauged altitude based on air pressure) and a hypsometer (a sighting device used to triangulate heights), Bingham made some quick calculations and realized that the peak they stood atop was, in all likelihood, several hundred feet lower than Chile’s Mount Aconcagua.
Bingham’s son Alfred later wrote an entire book to make the not-entirely-convincing case that his father was more interested in climbing Coropuna than in finding Vilcabamba. But while that seems a stretch, it is true that among all the photographs Bingham was careful to pose for at each of his achievements, the snapshot at the summit of Coropuna is unique. Despite the headache and nausea brought on by soroche, the director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition is flashing a tooth-baring grin.
THIRTY
The Old Woman’s Secret
At Espiritu Pampa, continued
Espiritu Pampa felt a bit like summer camp for archaeologists: no girls, no grown-ups, lots of guys disparaging one another’s anatomical shortcomings and punching one another in the arm. John, Javier, Paul and I walked toward the main site down a tunnel hacked through the jungle. As we rounded a bend, Paul grabbed my sleeve and said, “Hombre, you’ve got to try this!” A giant liana vine hung down from the canopy into the middle of the path. A tree stump served as a jumping-off point for anyone who wanted to take a Tarzan-style swing, which was, naturally, pretty much everyone. Paul leapt up on the stump, grabbed the vine and hurled himself forward, brushing the ferns on either side of the trail as he swung like a pendulum. When he dismounted, he handed the vine to me. It was like flying.
Being far off the tourism path, Paul and Javier were left alone to excavate, and they were pulling some extraordinary relics out of the ground. As we walked to the site’s sun temple, Paul told me about some ceramics that they had found that seemed to tell the history of Manco Inca. “There are pictographs all around the outside,” he said. “Sort of like hieroglyphics.”
This seemed a little far-fetched. After all, if such a pot were found at Machu Picchu, the discovery would be broadcast around the globe; National Geographic would dispatch a video crew, and Peru’s president would appear on TV crowing about this fine example of his country’s proud patrimony. (John had taken part in a minor discovery near Machu Picchu a few years back that had generated a flurry of hyperbolic international media coverage.) But archaeologists are just starting to scratch the surface—literally—at Espiritu Pampa. As we stood just below a spot where Bingham once posed for a famous photograph in his fedora, standing rakishly over an Inca doorway, the camp’s intern/ cook/factotum, a teenager named Roni, leaned over and picked up a piece of ceramic—a pot handle shaped like a puma’s head. Beneath our feet were piles of red tiles just like the ones that baffled Bingham. Paul and Javier’s team had found intact roofing tiles, hand-painted with symbols. “They are so beautiful,” Paul said, holding his hand over his heart.
“Could we see them?” I asked.
“Are you serious? I thought you’d never ask,” Javier said.
We walked back to the compound, exchanged greetings and friendly insults with the potsherd scrubbers, and entered a dark, barnlike building. We sat down on benches at a handmade table near a wedge of sunlight that peeked through the open door. Roni served sweet, milky punch in metal cups. Javier ducked under a plastic tarp and started to pull out items. The first piece was a giant roof tile with three serpents painted onto it. He and Paul shouted simultaneously, “Amaru!”—Quechua for “snake.” “The serpents symbolize the Pachamama,” Paul explained. Javier showed off some burned corncobs, possibly leftovers from a four-hundred-year-old dinner. A small pot in the shape of a soup tureen looked like it could have been purchased at Crate and Barrel. Finally, Javier pulled out the Manco Inca pot, which had been glued back together.
“Here, hold it,” Javier said, passing the ceramic to John so that he could trace the illustrations that circled its perimeter. “Look, there are the local natives, there’s a serpent, there’s a Spanish horse. This piece is totally unique. There’s nothing like it anywhere else.”
The pot was mesmerizing, quite possibly a direct link to Manco himself. At that very moment, Peru and Yale were gearing up for a custody battle over relics that Bingham brought back from Machu Picchu. I’d been to Yale’s Peabody Museum and had come away confused; press reports in Lima about the Yale versus Peru controversy had made it seem like Bingham had run off with King Tut’s treasure, but nothing at Yale was half as interesting a
s what John held in his hands.
“Do you know that what you’ve got here is more impressive than anything Bingham found at Machu Picchu?” I said to the INC men across the table. Javier looked at Paul, then back at me.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. Neither he nor Paul could imagine that anything their humble digging had found could compare to the ancient wonders that Bingham was assumed to have unearthed.
In the morning, John, Justo and I made a circuit of the main ruins. Even as a ghost town, Espiritu Pampa keeps growing. Javier had told us that a few years ago archaeologists believed there were four hundred buildings here. Now they knew of at least seven hundred, stretching over an area more than a mile square. “We’ve been told that there’s another settlement hidden in the forest here, a gigantic stone surrounded by buildings,” Javier told us. “But no one knows where it is. A Japanese team came here a few years ago especially to find it, and they couldn’t do it, either. There are a lot of things still out there.”
The abandoned village seemed marginally less spooky in the morning sun. A massive boulder, similar to the one near Vitcos, anchored one corner of the clearing like a sleeping elephant. The rock looked even bigger when Justo stood next to it. He had first come to Espiritu Pampa as the cook on an expedition forty years ago, when the site was virtually unchanged from Bingham’s visit. “This looks completely different,” he said, swiveling his head to take everything in. “But also the same.” Then he wandered off.
Javier asked one of his vigilantes, a kid named Juanito, to take us deeper into the forest to get a sense of what Bingham had been able to see. We crossed the plaza and continued into the woods, uphill, and over a river.
This was the most serious jungle that I’d walked through. The ground was a spongy carpet of leaves out of which sprouted trees, vines, and broad-leafed plants that competed for the little sunlight that trickled down from above. The only animals visible were small birds. “The monkeys around here come out mostly at night,” Juanito said. We walked close enough to a river for its current to drown out our voices, yet I never saw the raging water. It’s no wonder that anthropologists believe that there are still uncontacted tribes living in the Peruvian Amazon.
Juanito told us that there was an usnu up ahead, which naturally got John excited. After twenty minutes of thigh-burning work that made me think fondly of the switchbacks at Choquequirao, we stood atop the 750-foot-high slope. There were no ruins, just a nice overview of the site, which stretched on for a couple miles, maybe more—we may never know how big this place was in its heyday. Still, between the fiasco at Huayna Picchu and the lack of drama after this climb, I was definitely starting to doubt that these usnu ascents were worth the effort.
Javier had invited us to swing by the weekly Espiritu Pampa soccer match on our way home, but I was exhausted and begged off to go wash up in the spring at the campsite. Like Bingham when he departed Espiritu Pampa, we were headed back to civilization the next day and I wanted to look presentable.
And like Bingham, we were running low on supplies. Justo’s conga drums were empty except for dehydrated soy chunks and noodles, which he’d served yesterday. I gave him $10 to buy one of the chickens roaming the campsite, so our valedictory dinner was pasta with soy chunks and stringy poultry that brought to mind the storks Bingham had survived on in Venezuela. As we ate, John pulled out photocopies of pages from Antisuyo, a book written by American explorer Gene Savoy after his expeditions to Peru in the 1960s. (Juvenal’s father and brothers had been Savoy’s guides.) Savoy’s work here had helped to start the unraveling of Bingham’s reputation, years after the Yale man had died. John was more interested in a story Savoy had told of an old Machiguenga Indian—a subset of the Campas—a woman spurned by her son the chief, who in return for some food had told the explorer:that if we went to a high, cold place, to a mountain peak (known to us) and to a certain lake that had been guarded by Machiguengas for centuries, we would find great ruins. But she warned us to be careful of the enchantment. Every person that has gone to these two places has coughed blood and died.
John was spellbound by the tale, which wound back all the way to the final hours of Vilcabamba. At 10 A.M. on June 24, 1572, the Spaniards had marched on foot into the last Inca capital. Four hundred houses smoldered in the city center. Stores of food were still smoking. “They found the entire town had been sacked,” so thoroughly that “if the Spaniards and [their ally] Indians had done it themselves, it could not have been worse,” wrote the Spanish missionary Martin de Murua. Not a soul was to be found. Tupac Amaru had vanished into the Amazon with his pregnant wife. The Spaniards pursued the Inca on rafts and coerced details of his progress from the natives they encountered. After chasing their quarry more than two hundred miles, the Spaniards found Tupac Amaru and his wife huddled over a campfire. They had been fleeing on foot, because she was afraid of the river.
Tupac Amaru was dragged up the steps from Vilcabamba with a golden chain around his neck and led to Cusco for a brief show trial, at which he was sentenced to death. Before a crowd of curious Spaniards and wailing natives in the Plaza de Armas, Tupac Amaru lay his neck on the chopping block. The executioner severed his head with a single blow.
The Spaniards then made a grave tactical error by placing Tupac Amaru’s head on a pike in the main square. Rather than take the gruesome display as a warning, natives began to worship the head. Over time, the deaths of Tupac Amaru and his uncle Atahualpa merged into what became known as the Inkarrí myth. This story, passed orally through the generations, foretold the resurrection of a great Inca, whose severed head would join his buried body to overthrow the conquerors and return Tawantinsuyu to its former glory.6
John was convinced that when the Spaniards approached Vilcabamba, the sun king’s treasure had been carried off by Indians into the woods surrounding Espiritu Pampa, to be kept under guard until a new Inca returned. He pulled out a satellite map of the area and pointed to a spot near where we were sitting. It was Gene Savoy’s secret mountain. Savoy never made it.
“Do you think anyone’s ever been up there?” I asked.
“I’ve been up there,” John said.
“And?”
“That’s serious country. There’s nothing up there. You have to bring your own water in. I was carrying eighty-five pounds on my back. I remember taking off my pack and almost going into shock from the stress.”
“So was the old lady telling the truth?”
“I don’t believe there’s any major ruins up there—it’s too miserable. That was quite a trip down, though.”
“What happened?”
“The day I decided to leave I could see the clouds coming in. Uh-oh. I started plowing through the grass, which was shoulder high. I cut across a ridge, thinking I’d save a day. The drop-off was almost a thousand feet. I was cutting brush, just barely hanging on sometimes, and it started to rain. I was carrying a lot of weight, of course. The slope must have been seventy degrees. And there was a moment when my foot started to slide. I knew that if I didn’t stop it, I was going to die.”
“What’d you do?”
“I shoved my stick into the ground with as much force as I could and used it to arrest my foot. Then I very slowly tied my daypack and backpack to a bush, gathered my strength, and worked my way back up the slope.”
“Did your life flash before your eyes?”
“No, no. You have to keep your cool, Mark. Without discipline, you’re dead. I can tell you this, though. At the moment my foot started to go, I did think of that old lady and her curse.”
A normal person—let’s use me as an example—might take such an experience as a sign that it was time to dial back on exploring for lost ruins. John disagreed.
“There are no more Machu Picchus to be found—probably—but there’s still a lot to be found out there. There was a city full of people here until July 24, 1572. When the Spaniards arrived no one was left—the city was burning! Where did everyone go? The Campas had run into the forest.�
�� John looked longingly in the direction of the Indians’ no-go zone. “I bet they’re still guarding things if they haven’t forgotten them.”
In the morning, the muleteers broke down camp for the last time, amid plenty of giggling and practical jokes. Mateo, who was a very good actor, briefly convinced me that he’d lost a mule. Justo, who couldn’t keep a straight face at his mother’s funeral, was less successful when he slapped his forehead and claimed that he’d forgotten to boil the water we were drinking—the extremely hot water that he had just poured us out of a steaming kettle. We hiked a few hours out to the roadhead, where Edgar was waiting for us in the Land Cruiser. The town looked like a village of garden sheds. It had been slapped together to meet the newest end of the ever-lengthening road. “None of this was here three years ago,” John said.
Mateo and Julián prepped the mules for the walk back to Huancacalle. As a farewell gesture they grabbed Justo, hoisted him over their heads and threatened to lash him to the roof of the truck with the rest of the luggage. I handed out payments, we shook hands—firmly with Mateo, softly with Julián—and the rest of us took seats in the Toyota, except for Juvenal, who climbed in the back among the bags and fell asleep. “Good luck, Papi!” Mateo shouted into our dust, waving as we drove off.
“How about a little music?” Edgar asked.
Among the ideas I’d had time to chew over while walking was a theory about the surfeit of bad eighties music in Peru. Here’s my best guess: around 1992, the record companies in New York and London gathered together all the millions of cassettes and CDs that they couldn’t sell, even marked down to 99 cents at truck stops, and shipped them off to Peru, where they were air-dropped all across the country. How else to explain the fact that Edgar possessed a copy of the album that Pat Benatar released two albums after the album that had “Love Is a Battlefield” on it? How else to explain the extraordinary “Worst of the Eighties” mix that he played on repeat for the six-hour drive to Quillabamba? “Playing with the Queen of Hearts” was followed by “99 Luftballoons,” which segued into “Sister Christian” and “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.” Peru doesn’t give out knighthoods, but if they ever start, Kenny Loggins should probably get his tux pressed.