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Hernandarias, it must be said, makes one of the most remarkable figures of all the high officials of the River Plate. He proved himself a strenuous warrior, and, anxious to extend his frontiers, he carried on a tremendous warfare with the fierce Indians of the Pampa. The Governor, moreover, was gifted with no little foresight and practical common sense.
However, to the ancient dwellers in this valley, where level land was so scarce that it was worth while to build high stone-faced terraces so as to enable two rows of corn to grow where none grew before, any little natural breathing space in the bottom of the canyon is called a pampa. The Road Between Maquina and Mandor Pampa Near Machu Picchu
Such was the home of the potentate from whose abode "no one had been known to return alive." The Pampa of Ghosts Two days later we left Conservidayoc for Espiritu Pampa by the trail which Saavedra's son and our Pampaconas Indians had been clearing.
To be sure, there are months in some years when so much moisture falls on the slopes of the coast range that the hillsides are clothed with flowers, but this verdure lasts but a short time and does not seriously affect the great stretches of desert pampa in the midst of which we now were. Like the other pampas of this region, the flat surface inclines toward the sea.
The Spaniards who found themselves face to face with the Araucanian Indians, and with those of the Pampa on the other side of the Andes, had a far more strenuous tale to tell.
The very thought of this poor Natalia, or Dona Nata as she was called, long dead and turned to dust in that far pampa, troubles my spirit even now and gives me the uncomfortable feeling that in putting her portrait on this paper I am doing a mean thing.
On the pampa such incidents are far from rare; for the burrows of the biscachas are carried like galleries underground, and therefore dangerous to any heavy quadruped so unfortunate as to sink through the surface turf. In short, to ride across a biscachera would be on a par with passing on horseback through a rabbit warren.
Unfortunately, a very small portion of the edifice was still standing. Most of the rear doors had been filled up with ashlars, in order to make a continuous fence. Other walls had been built from the ruins, to keep cattle out of the cultivated pampa.
There are also acres and acres of the many- flowered camomile and numberless other plants; while large tracts of low-lying land are covered with coarse pampa grass, affording shelter for numberless deer, and many varieties of ducks, cranes, flamingoes, swans and turkeys.
Until some one can find the ruins of another important place within three days' journey of Pucyura which was an important religious center and whose skeletal remains are chiefly those of women, I am inclined to believe that this was the "Vilcabamba Viejo" of Calancha, just as Espiritu Pampa was the "Vilcabamba Viejo" of Ocampo.
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