Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of PeruBingham, Hiram
History
Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru
Bingham, Hiram
Incas; Peru -- Antiquities; Peru -- Description and travel
treasure, but he was totally unable otherwise to comprehend our desire
to find the ruins of the places mentioned by Father Calancha and the
contemporaries of Captain Garcia. Had we first met Mogrovejo in Lucma
he would undoubtedly have received us with suspicion and done nothing
to further our quest. Fortunately for us, his official superior was
the sub-prefect of the province of Convención, lived at Quillabamba
near Santa Ana, and was a friend of Don Pedro's. The sub-prefect had
received orders from his own official superior, the prefect of Cuzco,
to take a personal interest in our undertaking, and accordingly gave
particular orders to Mogrovejo to see to it that we were given every
facility for finding the ancient ruins and identifying the places
of historic interest. Although Mogrovejo declined to risk his skin
in the savage wilderness of Conservidayoc, he carried out his orders
faithfully and was ultimately of great assistance to us.
Extremely gratified with the result of our conferences in Santa
Ana, yet reluctant to leave the delightful hospitality and charming
conversation of our gracious host, we decided to go at once to Lucma,
taking the road on the southwest side of the Urubamba and using
the route followed by the pack animals which carry the precious
cargoes of coca and aguardiente from Santa Ana to Ollantaytambo and
Cuzco. Thanks to Don Pedro's energy, we made an excellent start;
not one of those meant-to-be-early but really late-in-the-morning
departures so customary in the Andes.
We passed through a region which originally had been heavily forested,
had long since been cleared, and was now covered with bushes and
second growth. Near the roadside I noticed a considerable number of
land shells grouped on the under-side of overhanging rocks. As a boy
in the Hawaiian Islands I had spent too many Saturdays collecting
those beautiful and fascinating mollusks, which usually prefer the
trees of upland valleys, to enable me to resist the temptation of
gathering a large number of such as could easily be secured. None of
the snails were moving. The dry season appears to be their resting
period. Some weeks later Professor Foote and I passed through Maras
and were interested to notice thousands of land shells, mostly white in
color, on small bushes, where they seemed to be quietly sleeping. They
were fairly "glued to their resting places"; clustered so closely in
some cases as to give the stems of the bushes a ghostly appearance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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