Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [71]
The abandoned village seemed marginally less spooky in the morning sun. A massive boulder, similar to the one near Vitcos, anchored one corner of the clearing like a sleeping elephant. The rock looked even bigger when Justo stood next to it. He had first come to Espiritu Pampa as the cook on an expedition forty years ago, when the site was virtually unchanged from Bingham’s visit. “This looks completely different,” he said, swiveling his head to take everything in. “But also the same.” Then he wandered off.
Javier asked one of his vigilantes, a kid named Juanito, to take us deeper into the forest to get a sense of what Bingham had been able to see. We crossed the plaza and continued into the woods, uphill, and over a river.
This was the most serious jungle that I’d walked through. The ground was a spongy carpet of leaves out of which sprouted trees, vines, and broad-leafed plants that competed for the little sunlight that trickled down from above. The only animals visible were small birds. “The monkeys around here come out mostly at night,” Juanito said. We walked close enough to a river for its current to drown out our voices, yet I never saw the raging water. It’s no wonder that anthropologists believe that there are still uncontacted tribes living in the Peruvian Amazon.
Juanito told us that there was an usnu up ahead, which naturally got John excited. After twenty minutes of thigh-burning work that made me think fondly of the switchbacks at Choquequirao, we stood atop the 750-foot-high slope. There were no ruins, just a nice overview of the site, which stretched on for a couple miles, maybe more—we may never know how big this place was in its heyday. Still, between the fiasco at Huayna Picchu and the lack of drama after this climb, I was definitely starting to doubt that these usnu ascents were worth the effort.
Javier had invited us to swing by the weekly Espiritu Pampa soccer match on our way home, but I was exhausted and begged off to go wash up in the spring at the campsite. Like Bingham when he departed Espiritu Pampa, we were headed back to civilization the next day and I wanted to look presentable.
And like Bingham, we were running low on supplies. Justo’s conga drums were empty except for dehydrated soy chunks and noodles, which he’d served yesterday. I gave him $10 to buy one of the chickens roaming the campsite, so our valedictory dinner was pasta with soy chunks and stringy poultry that brought to mind the storks Bingham had survived on in Venezuela. As we ate, John pulled out photocopies of pages from Antisuyo, a book written by American explorer Gene Savoy after his expeditions to Peru in the 1960s. (Juvenal’s father and brothers had been Savoy’s guides.) Savoy’s work here had helped to start the unraveling of Bingham’s reputation, years after the Yale man had died. John was more interested in a story Savoy had told of an old Machiguenga Indian—a subset of the Campas—a woman spurned by her son the chief, who in return for some food had told the explorer:
that if we went to a high, cold place, to a mountain peak (known to us) and to a certain lake that had been guarded by Machiguengas for centuries, we would find great ruins. But she warned us to be careful of the enchantment. Every person that has gone to these two places has coughed blood and died.
John was spellbound by the tale, which wound back all the way to the final hours of Vilcabamba. At 10 A.M. on June 24, 1572, the Spaniards had marched on foot into the last Inca capital. Four hundred houses smoldered in the city center. Stores of food were still smoking. “They found the entire town had been sacked,