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Before dark we reached the village of Pampaconas, a few small huts scattered over grassy hillsides, at an elevation of 10,000 feet. In the notes of one of the military advisers of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo is a reference to Pampaconas as a "high, cold place." This is correct.
None of these things will grow at Pampaconas. The Indians who raise sheep and white potatoes in that cold region come to San Fernando to make chacras or small clearings. The three or four natives whom we found here were so alarmed by the sight of brass buttons that they disappeared during the night rather than take the chance of having a silver dollar pressed into their hands in the morning!
Harper's Magazine, CXXIX, 452-463, August, 1914. Illus., map. The Pampaconas River. The Geographical Journal, XLIV, 211-214, August, 1914. 2 pl., map. The Story of Machu Picchu. National Geographic Magazine, XXVII, 172-217, February, 1915. Illus. Types of Machu Picchu Pottery. American Anthropologist, XVII, 257-271, April-June, 1915. Illus., 1 pl. The Inca Peoples and Their Culture.
From San Fernando, we sent one of our gendarmes back to Pampaconas with the mules. Our carriers were good for about fifty pounds apiece. Half an hour's walk brought us to Vista Alegre, another little clearing on an alluvial fan in the bend of the river. The soil here seemed to be very rich.
There is now no valley in this vicinity called Simaponte, so far as we have been able to discover. The Mañaries Indians are said to have lived on the banks of the lower Urubamba. In order to reach their country Tupac Amaru probably went down the Pampaconas from Espiritu Pampa. From the "Pampa of Ghosts" to canoe navigation would have been but a short journey.
National Geographic Magazine, XXIV, 387-573, April, 1913. Illus., maps, plans. The Investigation of Pre-Historic Human Remains Found near Cuzco in 1911. American Journal of Science, XXXVI, No. 211, 1-2, July, 1913. The Ruins of Espiritu Pampa, Peru. American Anthropologist, XVI, No. 2, 185-199. April-June, 1914. Illus., 1 pl., map. Along the Uncharted Pampaconas.
He said his hardest task was to get money with which to send his children to school in Cuzco and to pay his taxes. The only way in which he could get any cash was by making chancaca, crude brown sugar, and carrying it on his back, fifty pounds at a time, three hard days' journey on foot up the mountain to Pampaconas or Vilcabamba, six or seven thousand feet above his little plantation.
It would have been pleasant to prolong our studies, but the carriers were anxious to return to Pampaconas. Although they did not have to eat monkey meat, they were afraid of the savages and nervous as to what use the latter might some day make of the powerful bows and long arrows. At Conservidayoc Saavedra kindly took the trouble to make some sugar for us.
In the chacra we saw corn stalks eighteen feet in height, near a gigantic tree almost completely enveloped in the embrace of a mato-palo, or parasitic fig tree. This clearing certainly deserves its name, for it commands a "charming view" of the green Pampaconas Valley. Opposite us rose abruptly a heavily forested mountain, whose summit was lost in the clouds a mile above.
As the Indians hereabouts were averse to penetrating the wilds of Conservidayoc and were also likely to be extremely alarmed at the sight of men in uniform, the two gendarmes who were now accompanying us were instructed to delay their departure for a few hours and not to reach Pampaconas with our pack train until dusk.
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