by Tim Cahill
Throughout Antisuyo one senses an obsessiveness: “Where did the Chachapoyas originate and who were their forerunners … from an explorer’s point of view, the work has only just begun—with three million square miles of tropical forest still to be archaeologically explored, one hardly knows where to begin. I believe that tropical Amazonas holds the vestige of ancient cultures of which we know nothing—perhaps a civilization of far greater magnitude than we suspect (the size of the Chachapoyan ruins, which surpass those of Cuzco, hint at such a possibility).” Unstated in Antisuyo is a glittering vision: the great mother metropolis with its massive towers and battlements and plazas, out there—somewhere—in Amazonia. The cradle of the continent’s civilization. The final discovery.
When Pizarro landed in 1532, Peru was bleeding in the aftermath of a brutal civil war. Following the death of the Inca Huayna Cápac in 1525, Atahuallpa, the Inca’s son by a concubine, launched a war against Huáscar, the legitimate heir. Huáscar’s forces were defeated, he was imprisoned, and Atahuallpa assumed the throne.
Pizarro and less than two hundred men crossed the mountains and established themselves in the great Inca plaza at Cajamarca. Atahuallpa and an unarmed retinue of thousands entered the plaza in good faith to meet the strange white men. There, Pizarro’s chaplain approached the Inca and informed him that a certain God the Father, who was actually a Trinity, had created the world and all the people in it. But, because people had sinned, God the Father had to send His Son, part of the Trinity, to earth, where He was crucified. Before that happened, the chaplain explained, the Son, whose name was Jesus Christ, had conferred His power upon an Apostle, Peter, and Peter had passed that power on, successively, to other men, called Popes, and one of these last Popes had commissioned Charles the Fifth of Spain to conquer and convert the Inca and his people. Atahuallpa’s only hope of salvation, the chaplain concluded, was to swear allegiance to Jesus Christ and to acknowledge himself a tributary of Charles the Fifth.
Atahuallpa then informed the chaplain that he, the Inca, was the greatest prince on earth and that he would be the tributary of no man. This Pope, he said, must be crazy to talk of giving away countries that didn’t belong to him. As for Jesus Christ Who had died, the Inca was sorry, but—and here he pointed to the sun—“my God still lives in the heavens and looks down on his children.”
The conquistadores lay in wait, hiding in the massive buildings that surrounded the square. When the chaplain returned with the Inca’s reply, Pizarro, his foot soldiers, and cavalry erupted into the plaza. Muskets and cannons firing, they slaughtered between two thousand and ten thousand unarmed Indians that day and took the Inca prisoner.
Atahuallpa, in captivity, spoke often with the Spanish, and he understood soon enough—all talk of Popes and Trinities notwithstanding—that it was the love of gold which brought the white men to his country. He offered Pizarro enough gold to fill a room measuring seventeen by twenty-two feet to a height of nine feet.
It would be a simple matter, Atahuallpa told his captors, for the interiors of the temples at Cuzco were literally plated with gold and all ornaments and utensils used in religious ceremonies were fashioned of gold or silver. There were immense silver vases and statues, and silver reservoirs to hold water. Even the pipes which carried water into the sacred buildings were made of silver. In the temples and royal palaces there were gardens of gold and silver: sculpture representing corn, potatoes, and other crops grew from a glittering soil of gold dust.
Before the king’s ransom had been completely paid, Huáscar was murdered in his prison cell. Pizarro said Atahuallpa had issued the order, and a swift trial was followed by a swifter execution. Pizarro had seen that the Inca empire was an absolute theocracy and that without the Inca—especially in the wake of a bloody civil war—the Indians would fall into disorganization and despair.
The gold and jewels that the Spaniards took out of Peru in the following years is estimated at over $11 billion. And yet, after the conquest, the Incas themselves told the Spaniards that they had seen only a small fraction of the actual wealth of the empire. During the time of the ransom, most of the gold—tears of the sun, the Incas called it—had been hidden in the jungles or thrown into the lakes. (One treasure, mentioned in some chronicles, is a massive chain of gold, seven hundred feet long, fashioned in celebration of Huáscar’s birth.) Many historians and treasure hunters believe that the gold of the Incas was smuggled over the Andes, into the eastern land that was called Antisuyo.
The day after our night on Kuélap, we drove south along the Utcubamba River to the town of Leimebamba. This area must have been important to the cloud people, judging by the number of ruins to be found there. Leimebamba itself consists of a paved square and about half a dozen rock-strewn mean streets where black wiry-haired pigs doze in the sun and goats root among the rocks, and the old white-haired Indian women in black robes sit cross-legged in the dust, spinning wool.
We sat at a rickety table in the Bar El Caribe, a dank, dirt-floored restaurant just off the square, and studied our maps and diagrams. The owner, a sly, hatchet-faced man with a severe crewcut, lurked about—a pace or two away—staring over our shoulders.
“You have come for the gold,” he informed us. “You have a metal detector.”
Laszlo told him that we were only tourists, not interested in gold, and that metal detectors are too heavy to carry up mountains in a backpack.
The man would not be taken for a fool. “There are portable metal detectors,” he said.
As was usual in Amazonas, where gringos are seldom seen, we were surrounded by friendly people who simply stared for minutes on end before opening up with questions.
“You search for gold?”
“No.”
“You are huaqueros?”
“No.”
“Why have you drawn your own maps then?”
Leimebamba was rife with rumors about Gene Savoy: he had come into the area with experts, had followed the old Inca road, and had found a body of water which he called the Lake of the Condors. There he sent a scuba diver down, and when the diver came up he and Savoy had a fight about the gold. People believe that the treasure of the Incas is buried in the ruins; that it is gleaming there, beneath the waters of the Lake of the Condors.
Savoy, so the rumor goes, returned to Leimebamba alone. Later he was seen, it is said, crossing the mountains on the trail to Balsas, which is on the Marañón River. With him were two heavily laden mules. No one who tells the story doubts that those mules carried gold. Here the details get a little fuzzy. At Balsas, Savoy was arrested, or perhaps only detained. Some say he was deported as a huaquero. Others say he escaped to Ecuador.
The owner interrupted to show us a prize possession. It was a cassette tape recorder and he stroked it as if it were a favorite pet, then slipped a tape into its mouth. It was American music, country and western, and the song we heard was about a bunch of cowboys who find a fortune in gold and end up killing each other.
There are, in Amazonas, several stories of people who have entered or violated ruins and these people invariably have sickened and died, victims, it is said, of el abuelo—the grandfather—an unpleasant transference in which all the diseases of the gathered dead enter and infest the interloper’s body.
The first person we met who actually showed fear approaching the ruins was one Manuel Anunsación Hidalgo Garcia, nineteen, but he was very cagey about it. After guiding us along an easy trail from Leimebamba to a high meadow near the mountain ruins of Congona, he simply pointed into a wall of thorny brush and left us to machete our way the remaining quarter-mile.
The odor was sharper than at Kuélap, more like licorice or anise, though still pervaded by that melancholy smell of faded lilacs. Congona was thick with a massive-trunked tree that adapts itself to the jungle canopy by sending out thick branches in grand horizontal thrusts. These branches were hung with green streamers and moss, and wherever a branch found the sun, there were large, sharp-petaled red flowers.
Where Kuélap had been awesome, Congona was a marvel of symmetry and grace. There was an ineffable beauty to it, even in ruin. Huge yellow flowers grew around the rim of the central towers and green creepers fell along the mossy walls. There was no apparent military value in the towers and they suggested nothing so much as a place of worship, a cathedral in the jungle.
After we established camp at the top of the towers, I hacked my way, alone, through vines and creepers, the odor of licorice thick in the dying twilight. The inside of one of the less ornate circle habs I found had been cleared, and the work had been done, at a guess, two or three years previously. Moving into the ruin, I saw something wrong and bad, something that seemed palpably evil, and I felt, for a chill moment, the Thing that had caused Manuel Anunsación Hidalgo Garcia to leave us at the lip of the jungle.
There, dead center in the floor of the ruin, I saw a grave-shaped hole, five feet deep, three wide, four long. The sides of the hole were covered with thick green moss. Huaqueros—grave robbers—had been to Congona.
A few feet above the hole, four or five flat black insects, like wasps or hornets, hovered in formation. It was a simple matter, in the near darkness, to let oneself go, to feel a dread like paralysis taking hold of the arms and legs. I could imagine the golden priests atop the central towers and the people of the clouds strolling among the most graceful achievements of their culture. Momentarily, in that mood and in the presence of a defilement, I tried to believe that we were wrong to be there, that these ruins were best left to time and the jungle.
In the morning, that shivery sense of blasphemy seemed a conceit, a romance. Early that afternoon we returned to Leimebamba, walking three abreast and filling the narrow streets. There were scratches on our arms and faces and our machetes swung by our sides. We were giants, taller and heavier than the biggest men in town. The old women gathered up the children and shooed them indoors as we passed. We had come from Congona, and something in the eyes of the people begged us to swagger. We were brave men, foolish men. Soldiers of fortune. Huaqueros.
When the owner of the Bar El Caribe delivered our drinks and asked if we had found gold, we smiled and gave noncommittal answers.
There is no such thing as a good map of Amazonas, and we have Ecuador to thank for that. In July of 1941, that country, claiming the land from its border south to the Marañón River, launched an undeclared war against Peru. At the battle of Zarumilla, Peruvian forces won a stunning victory and Peru retained control of 120,000 square miles of land. There are Ecuadorians who object to this state of affairs and, in the hinterlands of Amazonas, one still hears of sporadic border clashes.
Good, detailed contour maps of the state, then, have a military significance and they are impossible to obtain. Additionally, the Guardia Civil, a national police force, maintains control points along the only road into the jungle; there foreigners must show their passports and explain what they are doing in that area of Peru.
Hotels are required to obtain the same information, as is the PIP (pronounced “peep”), the Peruvian Investigative Police, an FBI analog, Officers of the PIP—we called them pipsqueaks—wear plain clothes and strut around looking significant. My favorite was the chief—El Jefe—of the Chachapoyas division. One night at the Bar Chacha, four pipsqueaks surrounded our table and told us there was some problem with our papers and that we must go with them to headquarters. We were shown into a large room where El Jefe, a fat man of middle years, pretended not to notice us. His flowing black hair gleamed under the electric light and smelled strongly of rose water. He wore blue-tinted aviator glasses, an iridescent blue raincoat, and a blue-and-white polka-dot ascot. On one side of his desk there was a neat pile of official documents without stamps. On the other side was a smaller pile of official documents that had been stamped. In the middle of the desk, just behind the nameplate that read “Miguel Zamora,” there were half a dozen different stamps. Miguel took his time with a couple of documents, looked up with an oleaginous smile, and asked, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
“Can you walk like a duck?” is the only appropriate response to that question; but, of course, we didn’t say that. There were many things we didn’t say to police officers during our stay.
Carlos Gates, the supervisor of archaeological monuments, was actually beginning to like us. We were well read, well prepared, and we were persistent. Between trips to the known ruins we visited him a total of four times, and missed him on three other passes. Finally, Señor Gates stopped talking about permits and broke out the gin in the middle of one of our visits. We were getting somewhere.
Because our Spanish was not the best, Gates spoke slowly and distinctly, and tended to shout a bit, as if we were also hard of hearing. He helped us out with gestures and expressions. If something was large or interesting or beautiful, Carlos would widen his eyes as if awestruck. If something was difficult or dangerous, he would snap into a serious expression and pretend to brush lint off his shirt front with his right hand.
Yes, Gates said, he was the man mentioned in Savoy’s book, and no, he didn’t believe for a moment the rumors we had heard in Leimebamba. People in Amazonas, he said, are jealous of their history and they delight in its mystery. He knew Savoy wasn’t a huaquero because he had worked with him, had helped the American plan his expeditions.
And now he was willing to help us. We knew, of course, that most of the known Chacha ruins were located on high forested peaks near the Utcubamba River. This was clear. Many of the ruins were fortified cities: a fortress at the highest point surrounded by circle habs. There were a dozen or more of these in the Utcubamba basin and the main doors of the forts always faced Kuélap. Gates drew a simplified sketch.
The known ruins lay in a rough semicircle, east of Kuélap. The area west of Kuélap had yet to be explored. Gates drew a second diagram.
On this diagram Gates indicated that there would be ruins in the area west of Kuélap. It was his theory that the Chachas would have had cities or fortresses there for reasons of defense and symmetry. If we were willing to share our findings with him, Carlos said, he would introduce us to Don Gregorio Tuesta, a landowner in the area, who could find us a guide who knew the trails there.
We looked at our map. There were no trails marked in the area, and only one pueblo. “What’s the land like there?” Laszlo asked.
Carlos said he’d never been there, but from what he’d heard, it was (here Señor Gates popped his eyes for us), but also (he brushed lint off his shirt).
One cool, misty morning I found myself just outside of a seven-hut pueblo called Choctamal, a four-hour walk west of Kuélap. Not far away, on a heavily forested ridge, there was a fortress known as Llaucan, the last known Chacha ruin west of the Utcubamba. This day we were to push on: climb the mountains separating the Utcubamba River basin from the Marañón River basin. There would be, we fervently hoped, unknown ruins ahead. In a sense, it was the start of our expedition.
I was squatting in the bushes with the last of the confetti they call toilet paper in Peru. The local pigs had just demonstrated to me, in the most concrete manner, that they would eat anything. Not only that, but they seemed to prefer it directly from the horse’s mouth, as it were. For this reason, I was clutching a long sturdy stick, the better to crack the porcine bastards as they made their move. So they milled about, just out of range, squealing and grunting and fixing me in their beady little hungry pink eyes. Not an auspicious start for an expedition of discovery.
Don Gregorio Tuesta, fifty-five, the man whom we had met through Carlos Gates, was big, five feet ten inches and 175 pounds—a giant of a man for Amazonas. He had eleven children, was a rich man, and walked a lot like John Wayne, only fa
ster. Carlos Cruz, twenty-two, a local potato farmer and hunter, tended the mule carrying our supplies. Carlos was a little over five feet tall, dark of skin, and poor. He and Tuesta chewed coca leaves together in a friendly fashion.
“You need coca to make you strong to climb to the ruins,” Tuesta said. Strictly in the interests of good journalism, I chewed about a pound of primo coca. Taken along with a taste of quicklime, called cal, it tended to depress the appetite, deaden the tongue, and overcome fatigue. The rush was minor and somewhat disappointing: about what you’d expect from a chocolate bar eaten late in the afternoon of a particularly hectic day.
“What’s the trail like ahead?” we’d ask Tuesta.
“Muy fácil,” very easy, he would lie. We came to calibrate the difficulty ahead by a system I called the coefficient of coca. If Carlos and the Don plunged on with only a single mouthful, it would be a bearable climb; three or more mouthfuls meant we were in for hell on a hill.
At ten thousand feet we came on some small circle habs. There were three of them, in very poor condition. It was not an impressive set of ruins, but it was unknown to scientists and explorers.
It was there, at our first discovery, that I was treated to an example of Carlos’s humor. In a steep clearing, the loose forest loam turned muddy and I slid a fast dozen yards down the slope on my back. Dirt poured into my pants, and, when I finally managed to turn over and pull myself to a halt by grabbing handfuls of ground cover, I saw Carlos laughing like a lunatic at a parade.
“Don Timoteo,” he said, “ichunga.”
Ichunga, I found to my discomfort some moments later, is a small prickery plant that imparts a painful chemical sting that lasts for half an hour. The palms of my hands were on fire and the dirt in my pants was full of ichunga. Carlos could hardly stand it. He kept muttering “Don Timoteo” and chuckling to himself for minutes at a stretch. I was convinced that he had the brain of a hamster.