Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [56]
“Bingham was here,” John said softly as he gazed out over the valley. Watching him scribble down notes as he prowled the tops of the fortress ramparts, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that I was seeing another omnivorous explorer doing the same thing a hundred years ago.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Road to Vilcabamba
Somewhere in the Peruvian Rain Forest
Back at the Sixpac Manco, Juvenal and Rosa were sitting around a table, laughing and sharing a liter of beer. They may have been celebrating Juvenal’s success in convincing John and me that even though we’d used up most of our food and had dumped some empty gas canisters, we still needed six mules to get us to Espiritu Pampa. I was hoping they’d invite me to join the festivities when the garden gate swung open and in walked a caravan of mules and several weary-looking arrieros, bearing gear for a dozen Swedish trekkers. In minutes, our quiet oasis was thronged with chatty Scandinavians unpacking their bags and making bottomsup hand gestures as they pointed at the half-empty bottle of beer. Checkout time.
The next morning, we were back on an old Inca trail, the very route Manco had used to flee from Vitcos. “Can’t you just see Manco running over these stones, the conquistadors in pursuit?” John said.
After sneaking away from Vitcos as the Spaniards looted, Manco spent months trying to rebuild his rebel army. Painfully aware that he would never be able to defeat the occupying Spanish forces in traditional combat, he settled for guerilla warfare. His followers began to attack merchants who traversed the road from Lima to Cusco. The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador and traveler Cieza de León recalled that those who were killed after being robbed were considered lucky. As for the unfortunate survivors, Manco’s insurgents allegedly “tortured them in the presence of their women, avenging themselves for the injuries they had suffered, by impaling them with sharp stakes forced into their victims’ lower parts until they emerged from their mouths.” A thriving bodyguard business soon sprang up.
Manco decided to make his new home at a remote Inca trading settlement called Vilcabamba. The capital that he ordered hastily built sat about one hundred miles from the old one at Cusco, which had been established at a dry eleven thousand feet. Vilcabamba was constructed in rain forest below five thousand feet. “The difference in climate” between the two cities, Bingham noted, was “as great as that between Scotland and Egypt, or New York and Havana.”
Manco used Vilcabamba much as Yasir Arafat employed his headquarters in Gaza: to rule his shadow kingdom and plot attacks on his enemy. One ambush killed twenty-eight Spanish soldiers who’d come to capture him. In April of 1539, the furious governor Francisco Pizarro dispatched “three hundred of the most distinguished captains and fighting men” in his army to take revenge, led by a man Manco despised—the youngest and nastiest Pizarro brother, Gonzalo. This was the same man who in Cusco had stolen Manco’s favorite wife, Cura Ocllo, and then ordered Manco to be put in chains.
The search party paused at the deserted settlement at Vitcos, then marched through the windy, desolate Kolpacasa Pass. As they descended into the tropics, the vegetation became almost impenetrable. Horsemen in full armor were forced to abandon their mounts and proceed on foot, often single file and sometimes on all fours. Within this jungle labyrinth, the Incas had constructed diversionary bridges to funnel the Spaniards into a narrow defile. There, three dozen invaders were crushed by boulders that Manco’s troops rolled from the tops of the surrounding hills.
The Incas had constructed a rock barrier that blocked the path to Vilcabamba. Rather than lay siege to this stronghold, Gonzalo Pizarro ordered some of his men to conduct a decoy attack while the rest of his troops circled around. Manco’s