• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 443 0

the lush green meadow we came to at the bottom of the trail. This field is known as the Andenes, Spanish for “terraces.” The Incas landscaped the gentle slope into tiers, like the gardens of an English duke’s country home. Scattered about were rounded granite boulders of various sizes. Several had geometric shapes carved into their faces; others had been cut into sofa-like banquettes. Many had flattened tops as smooth as if they’d been power-sanded. At least one rock had been chiseled into a perfect scale model of the hill right behind it. None that I could see, however, seemed to fit the description that Bingham had taken from Calancha.

“Did I miss something?” I asked John. He pointed ahead and to the right.

“This way.”

Moments later, we came around the hill, and there it was—a gigantic boulder, fifty feet long and twenty-five feet high, a giant abstract sculpture that, when I squinted, looked like a large tugboat had been dropped into the middle of the Andes.

Once completely white, the rock was now coated with gray lichen. A wide horizontal stripe was carved into the side facing us, from which cube-shaped pegs protruded. (“It is significant that these stones are on the northeast face of the rock, where they are exposed to the rising sun and cause striking shadows at sunrise,” Bingham wrote.) The spring beneath the rock had long ago dried up. Underneath, though, were some beautifully carved niches, possibly seats of some sort. John bent underneath for a closer look.

“I think that’s where the princesses—the ñustas—sat,” he said. “The top of the rock was for llama sacrifices.” Bingham shared this opinion and noted that a small channel ran down from the flat top, possibly a gutter that carried away the blood from sacrifices. One spot was still white, a splotch at the very top of the rock. It looked familiar. I opened one of Bingham’s books and compared the photo he had taken. “Look at this,” I said to John. “The spot hasn’t changed in a hundred years.”

“There might be something in llama blood, or even some chemical they added to it, that prevents the lichen from growing,” John said.5

We circled the rock. On the opposite side was a series of steps—whether they were altars, sacrificial platforms, or just an uncomfortable set of bleachers, we’ll probably never know. This was the side adjacent to the sun temple that the friars had burned. In his book For-gotten Vilcabamba the explorer and architect Vincent Lee has a fascinating drawing depicting what he thinks this spot looked like in Manco’s day. If it’s accurate, the Spanish priests had plenty to worry about. The White Rock was the center of a large religious complex.

“That was a major temple entrance, what’s left of it,” John said, pointing to the remains of what had once been a very impressive stone door frame. Nearby was an enigmatic torpedo-shaped rock with a hole drilled into it.

“This rock looks important,” I said. “Must have been part of a ceremony.”

“Actually . . . no. I call that the penis rock, on account of the shape. Because everyone thinks there’s gold inside these rocks, someone drilled a hole into this one to stick in a piece of dynamite. Instead of blowing up the rock, the dynamite flew out like a rocket.”

As usual, proximity to Inca ruins had charged John’s batteries, so instead of retracing our steps back up and around on the INC-approved path, he suggested that we return to Huancacalle by going over the thousand-foot-high hill, which was covered by thick vegetation. “Come on, Mark, let’s do a bit of Bingham work,” he said, a reminder that regardless of how nice the sleeping accommodations might have been on the 1911 expedition, Bingham wasn’t afraid to cut his own path when he suspected there was something good hiding in the vegetation. John led us up the steep slope through vines and brambles, whacking branches out of the way with his bamboo pole. We couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.

We emerged at the top an hour later, scratched and filthy. At the summit stood the remains of an Inca structure with jagged ten-foot walls like those at Sacsahuaman.