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
One of the buildings was rounded at one end. Another, standing by
itself at the south end of a little pampa, had neither doors nor
windows. It was rectangular. Its four or five niches were arranged
with unique irregularity. Furthermore, they were two feet deep, an
unusual dimension. Probably this was a storehouse. On the east side
of the pampa was a structure, 120 feet long by 21 feet wide, divided
into five rooms of unequal size. The walls were of rough stones
laid in adobe. Like some of the Inca buildings at Ollantaytambo,
the lintels of the doors were made of three or four narrow uncut
ashlars. Some rooms had niches. On the north side of the pampa
was another rectangular building. On the west side was the edge of
a stone-faced terrace. Below it was a partly enclosed fountain or
bathhouse, with a stone spout and a stone-lined basin. The shapes of
the houses, their general arrangement, the niches, stone roof-pegs
and lintels, all point to Inca builders. In the buildings we picked
up several fragments of Inca pottery.
Equally interesting and very puzzling were half a dozen crude Spanish
roofing tiles, baked red. All the pieces and fragments we could find
would not have covered four square feet. They were 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.
At dusk we all returned to Espiritu Pampa. Our faces, hands,
and clothes had been torn by the jungle; our feet were weary and
sore. Nevertheless the day's work had been very satisfactory and
we prepared to enjoy a good night's rest. Alas, we were doomed to
disappointment. During the day some one had brought to the hut eight
tame but noisy macaws. Furthermore, our savage helpers determined
to make the night hideous with cries, tom-toms, and drums, either to
discourage the visits of hostile Indians or jaguars, or for the purpose
of exorcising the demons brought by the white men, or else to cheer
up their families, who were undoubtedly hiding in the jungle near by.
The next day the savages and our carriers continued to clear away as
much as possible of the tangled growth near the best ruins. In this
process, to the intense surprise not only of ourselves, but also of
the savages, they discovered, just below the "bathhouse" where we had
stood the day before, the well-preserved ruins of two buildings of
superior construction, well fitted with stone-pegs and numerous niches,
very symmetrically arranged. These houses stood by themselves on a
little artificial terrace. Fragments of characteristic Inca pottery
were found on the floor, including pieces of a large aryballus.
Nothing gives a better idea of the density of the jungle than the
fact that the savages themselves had often been within five feet of
these fine walls without being aware of their existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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