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He was satisfied that Choqquequirau was Manco's refuge because it was far enough from Pucyura to answer the requirements of Calancha that it was "two or three days' journey" from Uilcapampa to Puquiura. A new road had recently been built along the river bank by the owner of the sugar estate at Paltaybamba, to enable his pack animals to travel more rapidly.
Yet before our visit nearly all the Peruvian historians and geographers except Don Carlos Romero still believed that when the Inca Manco fled from Pizarro he took up his residence at Choqquequirau in the Apurimac Valley.
The prefect insisted that the ruins represented the residence of the Inca Manco and his sons, who had sought refuge from Pizarro and the Spanish conquerors of Peru in the Andes between the Apurimac and Urubamba rivers. While Mr. Clarence L. Hay and I were on the slopes of Choqquequirau the clouds would occasionally break away and give us tantalizing glimpses of snow-covered mountains.
As readers of "Across South America" will remember, these ruins were at Choqquequirau, an interesting place on top of a jungle-covered ridge several thousand feet above the roaring rapids of the great Apurimac. There was some doubt as to who had originally lived here.
The word choqquequirau means "cradle of gold" and this lent color to the legend that Manco had carried off with him from Cuzco great quantities of gold utensils and much treasure, which he deposited in his new capital. Raimondi, knowing that Manco had "retired to Uilcapampa," visited both the present villages of Vilcabamba and Pucyura and saw nothing of any ruins.
His brother, Pio Mogrovejo, had been a member of the party of energetic Peruvians who, in 1884, had searched for buried treasure at Choqquequirau and had left their names on its walls.
Proceedings of Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, LXV, 505-507, September, 1913. 1 pl. Amphibians and Reptiles from Southern Peru Collected by Peruvian Expedition of 1914-1915. Proceedings of U.S. National Museum, LVIII, 609-620, 1921. Hiram Bingham: The Ruins of Choqquequirau. American Anthropologist, XII, 505-525, October, 1910. Illus., 4 pl., map. Across South America.
Finally Calancha says "Vilcabamba the Old" was "the largest city" in the province, a term far more applicable to Machu Picchu or even to Choqquequirau than to Espiritu Pampa. On the other hand there seems to be no doubt that Espiritu Pampa in the montaña does meet the requirements of the place called Vilcabamba by the companions of Captain Garcia.
Raimondi's marvelous energy led him to penetrate to more out-of-the-way Peruvian villages than any one had ever done before or is likely to do again. He stopped at nothing in the way of natural obstacles. In 1865 he went deep into the heart of Uilcapampa; yet found no Uiticos. He believed that the ruins of Choqquequirau represented the residence of the last Incas.
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