The Last Days of the Incas (66 page)

Comparing the two locations, Lee soon realized that the chroniclers’ assertions that Vilcabamba was the largest city in the area now made sense: there was indeed no other city of equal size anywhere else in the province, including Machu Picchu. As Savoy had already noted, the roof tiles, too, were a critical find. According to the British historian John Hemming, in fact, the ruined city that first Bingham, then Savoy discovered at Espíritu Pampa was “the only known Inca ruin in the Andes where scorched, Spanish-style roof tiles are found scattered among the remains.” As Lee well knew, the Incas had set fire to Vilcabamba before Spanish forces had occupied the city in June 1572, no doubt scorching the roof tiles in the process.

Still, despite his team’s discoveries, Lee realized that one of the main obstacles preventing anyone from making sense not only of the ruins of Vilcabamba but also of how those ruins fit into the wider context of the entire Inca province was the simple fact that no one had ever bothered to map the ruins in the area. Lee, the professional architect, was determined to change all that. He later wrote:

And change it did. Lee knew that the Spaniards had fought the Incas at the site of another Inca fort just prior to their sacking of Vilcabamba. The Incas had called the place Machu Pucará, or “Old Fort.” After carefully combing the area, Lee and his team sure enough discovered the second fort just where the chronicles said it should be. Click. Another piece of the Vilcabamba puzzle had fallen neatly into place.

Having retraced the invading Spaniards’ presumed route and having rediscovered two lost forts that were located exactly where the sixteenth-century chronicles said they should be, Lee had now gathered additional evidence supporting Savoy’s thesis that the ruins of Espíritu Pampa were indeed those of Manco’s Vilcabamba. Lee and a friend now decided to break off from the main expedition and go in search of the ruins that Savoy had suggested might exist nearby. “There’s supposed to be a beautiful two-story building made of white limestone somewhere up in the Puncuyoc Mountains,” Savoy had said. “If I were going back, that’s where I’d go.” After three days of slogging through steep cloud forest along with two
campesino
guides, Lee and his companions discovered that Savoy had been right. Puncuyoc, it turned out, was a group of surprisingly well-preserved ruins located at an elevation of 12,850 feet. The main ruin was a tall and rather unusual two-story building with associated structures nearby; it was in excellent condition and still stood upright in a gap between two mountain peaks. As Lee later wrote:

Unbeknownst to Lee at the time, however, the American writer and explorer Victor von Hagen’s expedition had actually discovered the ruins of Puncuyoc in 1953 while exploring the Incas’ road network. Von Hagen had recounted the discovery in his 1955 book,
Highway of the Sun.
Savoy most likely had either read or remembered von Hagen’s account, then had passed along his suggestion to Lee. In any case, after returning to Wyoming, Lee gave Savoy a call, telling him about his “discovery” of Puncuyoc and the two Inca forts—Huayna Pucará and Machu Pucará—and also about the maps and site plans that he planned to create based upon his discoveries. Savoy, Lee said, sounded extremely interested, especially in the ruins of Puncuyoc. The veteran explorer suddenly informed Lee that he had recently decided to update the material in his 1970 book,
Antisuyo
, and would soon publish a new book on the same subject. Lee’s recent discoveries, Savoy said, would be perfect to include in his new book. Was Lee interested? And could Lee fly out to Reno when his drawings were done and make a presentation of them to Savoy’s Andean Explorers Foundation? Flattered, Lee told Savoy that he would be honored to have his material included in Savoy’s book and that he would also be happy to present his new findings.

In the fall of 1984, as snow thickened outside his Wyoming home, Vincent Lee sat in his wood-lined study where, with his field notebooks in hand, he began the process of creating precise maps and three-dimensional reconstructions of the ruins that he had located and taken the measurements of in Peru. For the first time in more than four hundred years—ironically in a studio at the base of the Rocky Mountains—the outlines of ancient cities and settlements in Manco’s distant province of Vilcabamba began to emerge, just as remarkably as the outlines of Machu Picchu had once been revealed by Hiram Bingham in the on-site chemical baths he had used to develop his photos. Wrote Lee:

Lee now felt ready for his presentation to Savoy.

Three months later, Lee stood before a select group that Savoy had assembled in Reno and began showing them his slides of the various ruins. Savoy, Lee said, was keenly interested in Lee’s photos and drawings and was increasingly fascinated with his “discovery” of Puncuyoc. After the presentation, Savoy said that if Lee could write up his findings and submit a manuscript to him by June of 1985, then he would include them in his new book. He couldn’t pay Lee anything, Savoy said, as there “was no money in it”—but he
would
give Lee fifty copies of the new book to do with as he pleased. Excited at the thought of having his discoveries published, Lee agreed. And, as a gesture of gratitude to the man who in a sense had inspired his own explorations, Lee left Savoy duplicates of all of his recent drawings and maps.

Three months later, while busily working to meet the publishing deadline, Lee received a phone call from Gene Savoy. After an absence of fifteen years, Savoy abruptly told him, he had decided to travel back to Peru—and had just returned from the ruins that Lee had “discovered.”

A few weeks later, Lee had his worst suspicions confirmed. A friend of Lee’s in New York City, a documentary filmmaker, had received a form letter written by Gene Savoy that had been sent out
to a large number of people, although Lee was not one of them. Gene Savoy, the letter said, had recently returned to Peru after a long absence and had immediately made an exciting “new discovery” of an Inca “Temple of the Sun,” set high up in the mountains of Vilcabamba. Savoy was determined to return to the site to do a more thorough exploration, but needed money to help defray the costs. Savoy had thus hit upon an ingenious solution: he had decided to publish a limited edition of 250 copies of
Antisuyo, Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon
that would be distributed among expedition members and friends at a cost of $250 per book. As an added bonus, Savoy said, the new edition would contain photographs, maps, and architectural renderings of the ruins—all unpublished up to now.

Lee did some quick calculations: 250 books at $250 per copy equaled more than $60,000. “So much for there being no money in it,” he later said, shaking his head. Of course there were maps and architectural renderings of the ruins, all unpublished up to now—because Lee had
created
the maps and renderings but had not yet
published
them. Since the book was slated to be published in June 1985—the very month that Savoy had asked Lee to submit his manuscript for inclusion in his “new book”—it appeared to Lee that Savoy had sent him on a “snipe hunt” of sorts, ensuring that Lee couldn’t possibly publish his material before Savoy did. Lee later wrote:

Savoy never responded—nor was his book on his “new discoveries” in the Vilcabamba area ever published.

Both Gene Savoy and Vincent Lee ultimately helped to gather
the evidence that proved for the first time and beyond a shadow of a doubt that the final capital of the Incas—Vilcabamba—had indeed been rediscovered after having been lost to the rest of the world for centuries. Hiram Bingham—despite a lifetime of insisting that Machu Picchu was in fact ancient Vilcabamba—had clearly been wrong. Now that the location of the real Vilcabamba had been discovered, however, the original question inevitably turned itself on its head: for if Machu Picchu was
not
Vilcabamba, then what on earth was Machu Picchu?

TO UNDERSTAND HOW VILCABAMBA AND MACHU PICCHU were once intertwined, one has to go back to the decades in which both were constructed: presumably in the mid-fifteenth century.
^*
In the early part of that century, the ethnic group known as the Incas lived within a small kingdom centered around the valley of Cuzco, one of many such small kingdoms in the Andes and on the coast. The Incas told the Spaniards that they were led by an old Inca king named Viracocha Inca. Faced with an approaching army from the powerful kingdom of the Chancas, the Inca ruler fled, leaving his adult son, Cusi Yupanqui, behind. The latter quickly took charge, raised an army, and somehow miraculously
defeated the invaders. Cusi Yupanqui then deposed his father, arranged for his own coronation, and changed his name to Pachacuti, a Quechua word that means “earth-shaker” or “cataclysm,” or “he who turns the world upside down.” The name was a prescient one, for Pachacuti would soon revolutionize the entire Andean world.

According to Inca oral history, Pachacuti also had had a profound religious experience when he was young, a sort of epiphany that revealed to him both his divine nature and a vision of a nearly unbounded future. Wrote the Jesuit priest Bernabé Cobo: