by Tim Cahill
An hour above the first circle habs, we explored a sparse, almost dry jungle where we came upon a series of high, natural rock walls. Where these walls met the forest floor there were a number of overhangs, some of which contained small caves. In a rock pile under one of the overhangs, Don Gregorio spotted a human jawbone. Tom crawled back into a cave and came out with three complete skulls, two of which were bleached pure white and one was a pale muddy brown.
We found nearly a dozen skulls in all. The beige pottery fragments scattered among the skulls had a red line around the inside lip, just above a contiguous series of broad red spirals. The fragments were similar in size, shape, color, and design to a bowl I had seen in Lima at the National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. That bowl had been taken from Kuélap and was dated at 1000 A.D.
These bones had lain in place perhaps a thousand years or more. They were not, as I had expected, brittle, but were, instead, very flexible. Perhaps it was the dampness or the acid in the soil, but you could squeeze these skulls at the temple and they would give several inches. Then, slowly, they would settle back into shape. The urge was strong to squeeze each skull.
A heavy cloud rolled up from the Río Tingo below and cast everything in a pale, leaden light so that the dry moss on the trees hung gray and lifeless. What had earlier been a slight breeze became a chill wind and, at odd intervals, we heard the caw of an unseen bird. It was a harsh, mechanical sound and it contrasted eerily with another animal noise, a soft mournful cooing that seemed to be very near.
Don Gregorio anointed our fingers with a fragrant oil; protection, he said, against the antimonia, a supposed disease caused by breathing the dust of archaeological excavations. A person suffering from the antimonia, it is said, will die coughing up the entire volume of his body’s blood.
The mountains that form the watershed between the Utcubamba and Marañón rivers rise to 12,000 feet and higher. Above 10,400 feet or so, the jungle gives way to puna, cold, wind-whipped grasslands. At night the temperature drops well below freezing and cold stars howl in the sky.
There was a pass, Abra Asomada, behind us, and we were making our way through a region of intermontane passes that seldom dropped below eleven thousand feet. (Don Gregorio had returned to Chachapoyas, and now Carlos led, forging the trail with uncanny skill.) The ground looked like easy walking, but it was treacherous. High green-brown grasses hid impassable marshes and there were sinkholes deep enough to drop a man from the face of the earth.
Coming out of the marshes, we followed a ridge toward a high stone outcropping. Nearing the outcropping, we came upon a round grassy indentation. It was, unmistakably, a circular habitation. The hill above was pockmarked with circle habs, twenty-five to thirty of them scattered like a skirt before the rock above. To the north, over a gentle ridge, there were twenty more.
And the rock outcropping itself: where there were gaps in the natural stone, we saw high limestone walls. It was a fort, and we hurried to climb our way to the top. At 11,720 feet, the highest point in the fort proper, there was a small tower, similar in shape to the one we had seen at Kuélap.
To my knowledge, this miniature Kuélap was the first Chachapoyan fort to be found above the cloud forests. Located as it was, on a commanding position over a natural Marañón-to-Utcubamba route, I imagined the fort was Kuélap’s defense early warning point. The vision goes like this:
The tower lookout spots suspicious movement from the Marañón side. A staggered series of runners is dispatched to Kuélap. A drum sounds, and those in the circle habs, warriors all, march out to meet the invading army. Repulsed by superior numbers, they retreat to the fort, which they can hold indefinitely. The invaders, anxious to claim richer prizes below, march off toward the Utcubamba.
Where the warriors of Kuélap are lying in ambush.
I don’t know why this should be, but finding a fort, a military installation, is more thrilling than coming upon the remains of an ancient but apparently peaceful community. It has an effect on the ego and, I suspect, this is especially true of rank amateurs like myself who enter into expeditions not really convinced there is anything out there to find. We become Explorers, with a capital E, and that gives us the right to call things by any name we choose.
Never mind the handful of local hunters who know of the place and call it something or other in some goddamn foreign language. Just because a sheer accident of birth and geography put them there first, just because we are talking about their country and their ancestors, these arrogant bozos think they have the right to go around slapping names on things willy-nilly. The hell with them, I say.
It’s up to us Explorers to name these places. We rush into print, the better to screw our expeditionary friends. It gives us near orgasmic pleasure to consider the other fellow—Laszlo Berty, let’s say—reading our report in a mounting fury. We like to think that now—at this very moment—the color is rising in his face, making it all red and mottled, like a slice of raw liver. We chuckle over our typewriters. We are Explorers. We get to name things.
Okay?
Okay.
Henceforth, let the fort above Abra Asomada be known as Fort Big Tim Cahill. This is a good name, and I think it sings.
The passes and the puna formed a natural boundary line, like a river, and I imagined that Fort Cahill would be the last Chacha construct we would find west of the Utcubamba. I was wrong. We swept down out of the cold grasslands onto a forested ridge with three prominent peaks. There were dozens of circle habs on each peak and, inexplicably, there was no evidence of fortification. In case of attack, the people of Three Peaks must have retreated back over the puna—which seemed unlikely because of the distance and the cold—or they massed at some yet-undiscovered fort, another Kuélap perhaps, on the Marañón side.
Dropping from 10,500 feet at Three Peaks to 9,250 feet at a grassy area called Laguna Seca, we chose a steep ridge-running trail. At 9,300 feet, we came upon a score of circle habs just off the trail and, rising with the ridge, we found dozens more. This was one of the wetter jungles we had seen and the walls of the ruins were badly crumbled. In places we would come upon a high, unnaturally round mound of earth. A machete sank two feet into soft loam before striking solid stone. We attempted to clear one of these buried circle habs, but it was painstaking work. Wrist-thick roots had burrowed through the stone, and it was difficult to remove them without damaging the structure.
There were perhaps a hundred circle habs on the ridge, and still we found no evidence of fortification. At one point, we came upon three rectangular buildings, each thirty feet long, sixteen across, separated by alleys six feet wide. Rectangular construction was characteristic of the Incas, and a good guess would be that these had been built sometime in the 1480s, just after Túpac Yupanqui conquered the Chachas.
Following the ridge from about 9,500 feet to 8,300 feet, we found over a hundred more circle habs and about twenty-five rectangles among them.
Below the ridge, the jungle opened into bright green broadleaf plants, and the trees were hung with brilliant red and yellow and green creepers, so that it was rather like walking through a continuous bead curtain. Dozens of large black butterflies with white Rorschach patterns on their wings rested on the broadleafs and darted among the creepers.
On my map of the area, I found one pueblo, Pisuquia, and the trail brought us there early one steamy afternoon. The pueblo consisted of four or five stone and mudpack houses, a few huts, one haggard young man, a suety señora, two bony pigs, a flock of decrepit chickens, and half a dozen of the dirtiest, most sullen children in the universe. There were, the young man told us, ruins on that ridge—he pointed south—and that one—east—and that one—west. Not to mention the two hundred and some ruins we found on the ridge that brought us into Pisuquia.
The people of Pisuquia farmed with wooden plows and lived in dirt-floored huts that crumble in about twenty years. It was boggling to think that a thousand years ago there were not only more people living in the area, but th
at they were certainly more accomplished builders, and probably better potters, jewelers, and farmers than the present locals. The Chachas of prehistoric Peru were, by all objective standards, more civilized than the people of Pisuquia.
Three hours beyond Pisuquia, there is a pueblo called Tribulón, and Carlos directed us to a large house where some of his relatives lived. Half a dozen men sat on a low bench in front of the house and in front of them there was a dented metal can that might once have held kerosene. Occasionally one of the men would rise unsteadily and dip their only cup, a cracked wooden bowl, into the can. He would then shout “jugo do caña” and down the pale liquid in a rush that left half the contents streaming down his shirt front. The men had a glazed and sanguine look about the eyes and their lips were green from the coca they chewed.
It was the eve of the feast of the Virgin of Carmen, reason enough to drink, and the men greeted us warmly. We were offered bowls of jugo de caña, which is fermented sugar-cane juice. Tom took a few polite sips, but Laszlo and I downed several bowls. It had a thin, sugar-water taste, rather like super economy orange Kool Aid, and the alcoholic content seemed small. It tasted good after a long, hot walk and Laszlo and I drank quite a lot of it.
An hour or two after sunset, when things started getting blurry, we were ushered into a dark, smoky, dirt-floored room some eight feet wide and thirty long. We sat with the men at a low table with benches a foot or two off the ground and ate corn soup with what I took to be bits of grilled pork floating on top. There were eight or nine women who didn’t eat, but who sat opposite us, on the floor, talking quietly among themselves. In the far corner, one of the women tended a small wood fire and she hurried to pour more soup when the men called for it. The only other light in the room was a small candle set high on a wooden ledge above the women. There were bits of stringy-looking meat hanging out to dry on the underside of the ledge.
Between bowls of jugo de caña and sips of soup, I watched the guinea pigs, called cuy, scurrying about in the corners of the room. The small ones made high keening sounds and hid under the women’s skirts. Larger ones, snow white and the size of small rabbits, moved across the room in a stately waddle. Cuy have been a source of protein in Peru since prehistory. I glanced up at the meat hanging under the ledge, watched one of the big guinea pigs relieve itself near my foot, and examined the little piece of gray meat on my spoon.
“Más jugo de caña,” I said. Every time I drank, I seemed to lose half the bowl down my shirt front. Laszlo was developing the same problem.
Tom noted that Carlos had turned out to be a terrific guide: he knew the jungles and trails as if by instinct. I drank to that. Then I drank a couple of bowls in celebration of Carlos’s rotten sense of humor.
Laszlo said that he noticed that “caramba” was the strongest word Carlos ever used. Caramba translates to something like “Great Scott.” Laszlo said he really liked Carlos and was going to teach him some great American swear words and how they could be used in potent combination. He started with the word “fuckload” to indicate a great amount. Carlos seemed acutely embarrassed by this information.
Sometime later, after more bowls of jugo de caña, I found myself in another room where Tom was playing “Oh! Susanna” on his harmonica and I was dancing with Carlos’s brother-in-law, who was sweating profusely and whose lips were green. The thing to do, it seemed, was hop around on one foot or the other, machete flopping by your side, with the right hand raised in a fist high above your head and the left held steady behind the back, like a fencer. Faces swam up out of the crowd and most of them seemed to be laughing hysterically.
About midnight we were allowed to spread our bags out in a room on the second floor. Laszlo held forth for some time about all the things he had to do and about how he was going to get up at 3:00 A.M. in order to accomplish them all. There was no doubt about this. He would be up at three. Absolutely. He could do it. He didn’t see how all the Peruvians could have gotten so drunk on jugo de caña since he had drunk more than anybody and didn’t feel a thing. I was stricken with sudden unconsciousness just after that last statement.
About 6:30 the next morning, I woke to a very imperfect world. Laszlo was still there and I would have said he was dead except that he was snoring painfully. Though seriously ill, I made one of those superhuman efforts you read about—a young mother lifts an auto off her child, that sort of thing—and worked up a passably bright and alert tone.
“Laszlo, Laszlo,” I shouted, alarmed and concerned, “its after three. You have things to do, places to go, people to meet.”
He opened one eye. The lid came up slowly, as if it were operated by several tiny men straining away at some heavy internal crank.
“Shut up,” he croaked.
Laszlo lurched to his feet several hours later and, despite the fact that he hadn’t been drunk, even though he drank more than anybody, his bladder had failed in the night. He had to hang his bag up to dry. It was absolutely filthy. Sucio. Laszlo would have to sleep in that stained and stale bag for the remainder of the expedition. You can imagine how I felt.
In a remote valley called Santa Rosa there is a town called Pueblo Nuevo, and just above the town there are two wattle-and-daub huts belonging to Marino Tuesta, the brother of Don Gregorio Tuesta. We had a letter of introduction.
Marino took us above his farm to a forest where most things—tree trunks, rocks, the ground itself—were covered with a soft ferny moss called musco. Everything felt fuzzy and gentle, even the circle habs we found there. Somewhat below the highest point, we came to a gently sloping area where the sun burst through the jungle canopy in oblique golden pillars, highlighting a high, sharp-cornered wall. Probably Inca. I cleared away the foliage while Tom paced off the wall for his map of the city. This is an inexact process because you must walk on broken ground and over fallen trees, hacking your way through where the jungle is thick.
Twenty-five minutes later I caught sight of Tom. He was coming the other way. It had taken him nearly half an hour to pace off the building. It was immense—150 feet by 150 feet—and I saw on Tom’s face a glazed and incredulous expression. His map indicated that this, the largest single ruin we had found, was the central plaza of a symmetrical jungle city. The arrangement recalled governmental plazas seen in many modern American cities, and something about that realization set the mind diving into chilly waters. There is, in us all, an idiot pride which argues that our age alone possesses civilization. Standing in the midst of indisputable proof to the contrary can be terrifying, like a sudden premonition of death.
The city of the great plaza had been discovered by Miguel Tuesta, the father of Gregorio and Marino. He called it Pueblo Alto, the high city, and Marino said we were the only other people he knew who had ever seen it. He considered the ruins beautiful and went up there often, to think.
On another day, we walked across the Santa Rosa Valley to explore a mountain visible from Marino’s front door. There, in a jungle thick with bejuco—moss-covered hanging vines the size of a man’s wrist—we came on another city. The grand plaza here was larger than the one at Pueblo Alto—270 feet by 261 feet—and it was apparent that the two cities would be visible to each other when the jungle was cleared. We called this place Pueblo Alto South.
On a rise above the plaza we found three very large, very well-preserved circle habs. One had a bisecting wall inside as well as a number of small niches set at about chest level. In the niches we found five hibernating bats. Carlos plucked them from the niches, threw them in a heap on the ground, and, before we could stop him, stomped them all to death with a satisfied smile. They were, he said, vampire bats, and they preyed on the local livestock.
Within minutes, we were engulfed in a heavy downpour during which I reflected on the relámpago. This is a belief, common in Amazonas, that those who venture too close to the ruins will hear the thunder roll before they are incinerated by a bolt of lightning. As it was, we only got a little wet. None of us ever spat up any blood, so the antimo
nia didn’t get us; and we didn’t have any problems with el abuelo, unless all those dead Chachas suffered from chronic loose bowels. I like to think that our expedition succeeded and that we escaped retribution because we took nothing from the ruins, because we weren’t huaqueros. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because we were pure of heart and lived in harmony with one another.
Back in Lima, we took our notebooks to Dr. Ruth Shady of the National Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. We told her about the burial site and the fort above Abra Asomada, about the city on Three Peaks, about the hundreds of ruins on Pisuquia’s ridge, about Pueblo Alto and Pueblo Alto South. Dr. Shady took a few sketchy notes and excused herself. The new American ambassador to Peru was visiting and she didn’t have time to listen to a lot of excited talk and speculation about the Chachapoyans, none of whom had ever paid a cent to visit the museum.
So I am forced to draw my own conclusions. We proved that the Chacha culture existed west of Kuélap and extended, in force, into the Marañón River basin. I think there may be a Kuélap-like fort somewhere near the area we explored. We found no evidence of fortification past Fort Cahill, although the Chachas of the Marañón must have had at least one strong defensive position. I think our findings tend to support Savoy’s hypothesis: the jungles of the montaña could and did support a vigorous culture. That culture was probably larger and more far-flung than most archaeologists now believe. It is, then, all the more possible that part of the great migration south from Mexico and Central America took place overland, through the jungles. The mother metropolis could be there still, somewhere in the vast rain forest of the Amazon basin.
In the end, I am pleased with the lack of response from the museum and Dr. Shady. It means that vast areas of our world are going to remain unexplored and unstudied. Mystery is a resource, like coal or gold, and its preservation is a fine thing.