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Javier had a slightly less romanticized view. He’d only seen the Campas once, when they came down from the hills, wearing their traditional costumes. That visit was enough for one lifetime. “Mark, if you meet any natives in the forest, run away,” he told me. “They live by their own laws.”

Unlike the spiffy ruins at Machu Picchu and Choquequirao, the village square at Espiritu Pampa looks like it might have been found last year. Families had hacked out small farms along the entrance path, wherever an acre or two could be reclaimed from the foliage. The welcome sign was a sun-bleached wood plank hand carved in block letters, nailed to the trunk of a looming, hundred-foot-tall matapalo tree: BIENVENIDOS A ESPIRITU PAMPA. There was a sense that the jungle was just barely being kept at bay. Small teams of roving teenagers called vigilantes—the name in Spanish simply means “watchmen”—wielded machetes to make sure it didn’t happen. Matapalos trees—the strangler figs that smother their hosts—had grown over and under and through buildings, to the point where trees and buildings were inseparable. Many of the stone walls were propped up with two-by-fours.

Bingham’s Campa guides led him to “a natural terrace on the banks of a little tributary of the Pampaconas [River],” a spot they called Eromboni Pampa. Almost immediately, one Indian showed the explorer the foundation of a huge building, which measured 192 feet in length. Nearby was a three-spouted Inca fountain. Several hundred feet away, “hidden behind a curtain of hanging vines and thickets so dense we could not see more than a few feet in any direction,” they found a group of stone houses whose construction materials and style “pointed to Inca builders.”

The next day, Bingham’s cutters found two well-preserved Inca buildings in good condition and a stone bridge. The buildings were of “superior construction, well-fitted with stone pegs and numerous niches, very symmetrically arranged,” the explorer observed. There the discoveries ended abruptly. “Saavedra’s son questioned the savages carefully,” Bingham wrote. “They said they knew of no other antiquities.”

One minor discovery struck Bingham as “very puzzling.” These were “half a dozen crude Spanish roofing tiles, baked red . . . of widely different sizes, as though some one had been experimenting. Perhaps an Inca who had seen the new red tiled roofs of Cuzco had tried to reproduce them here in the jungle, but without success.”

Having seen the high-altitude Inca architecture of Cusco and Vitcos, the insect-choked ruins Bingham found at steamy Espiritu Pampa were a letdown. The geographical clues he’d found in the Spanish chronicles indicated that he was standing in the lost city of Vilcabamba. But Bingham found it difficult to imagine that an emperor who had settled with his followers in those spectacular mountain aeries could ever have convinced them to live in a modest jungle exurb. “It does not seem reasonable,” he hypothesized, that such people “would have cared to live in the hot valley of Espiritu Pampa.”

After two days the team was exhausted (the Campas had “determined to make the night hideous with cries, tom-toms, and drums,” Bingham recalled) and running low on food. Bingham was eager to sort through his discoveries and start preparing for his Mount Coropuna climb. The team retraced its steps to Saavedra’s house and began the journey back toward civilization. Bingham would never return to the ghost town in the jungle.

With Vitcos and possibly Vilcabamba in the bag, Bingham turned his attention to his last major objective: climbing the “virgin peak ” of Coropuna. (His one other goal, to measure the depth of Lake Parinacochas, was a total bust—he’d brought along a thousand feet of line to plumb a body of water less than five feet deep.) The explorer had met up with his rival, Annie S. Peck, on the ship down from Panama to Peru and claimed to have come away unimpressed. In a letter to Alfreda, he dismissed Peck as “a hard-faced,