Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [57]
Their path cleared, the Spaniards descended the winding stone staircase into Vilcabamba. Here they found a new Inca capital hidden in the jungle—hundreds of stone dwellings, temples and even a massive White Rock to match the one at Vitcos. The city was all but deserted. The troops tore apart Vilcabamba, searching for treasure. Manco’s wife Cura Ocllo was bound and taken prisoner.
Governor Francisco Pizarro received word in Cusco that Manco might now lay down his arms and enter negotiations toward his surrender. Delighted, Pizarro dispatched three attendants to the Inca, bearing exquisite gifts and a pony. Manco had the envoys put to death and killed the pony for good measure.
Pizarro channeled his fury at Cura Ocllo. The governor commanded that the Inca queen be stripped, beaten and tied to a post. A team of Cañari Indians, enemies of the Incas, shot her with arrows. Horrified Spaniards looked on as their leader ordered the queen’s body dumped into a basket and dropped into the river, so that it would float downstream toward Manco’s army. Several high-ranking Incas who were imprisoned in Cusco protested their queen’s murder. They were burned alive in the central plaza.
When Manco’s men retrieved Cura Ocllo’s body from the river and reported the news to their ruler, the Inca wept uncontrollably.
TWENTY-SIX
Off the Map
Crossing Kolpacasa Pass
The Spaniards who ventured into the jungles of the Vilcabamba region in pursuit of Manco were entering terra almost entirely incognita. Reports claimed that the Antis were not merely cannibals but would slice pieces of flesh off their prey like sashimi, allowing the victim to witness himself being eaten alive. The tales were false, but as I’d learned from the devil goat episode at Valentin’s house, the mischievous twins of Superstition and Legend tended to thrive in the Andes. Bingham got a taste of this after two local residents reviewed the passages from Calancha that referred to Vilcabamba. They guessed that the Lost City might actually be a place called Concevidayoc. This obscure settlement could be reached from Vitcos by following the Inca trail that ran west alongside the Pampaconas River—the same trail that Gonzalo Pizarro had used.
When Jose Pancorbo, the rubber baron who told Bingham about the ruins near Puquiura, heard that Bingham was planning to descend the trail to Concevidayoc, he asked the American to desist. Concevidayoc, Pancorbo said, was ruled by a fellow named Saavedra, “a very powerful man having many Indians under his control and living in grand state, with fifty servants, and not at all desirous of being visited by anybody.” The Indians, he warned, were “very wild and extremely savage. They use poisoned arrows and are very hostile to strangers.” Bingham and his naturalist, Harry Foote, tallied the pros and cons. Their supplies had begun to run low. The two men were tired and would need to press-gang a new team of porters using the old silverdollar obligatorio trick. On the other hand, Pancorbo’s warnings were likely motivated by his own fears of being caught exploiting the local natives; rubber barons were despised by their Indian laborers, who were often beaten, tortured and treated as slaves when they weren’t being worked to death. And the magical city of Vilcabamba might be just a few days away. Bingham and Foote decided to forge ahead.
John and I headed northwest with the mule team, passing beneath the tiny town of Vilcabamba the New. Bingham had stopped there to ask if anyone might point him toward the original Vilcabamba. One Indian told him that he might need to look beyond Concevidayoc to a place called Espiritu Pampa, or the Plain of Ghosts. Bingham