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Glaciers Between Cuzco and Uiticos The Spaniards who attempted to follow Manco found his position practically impregnable. The citadel of Uilcapampa, a gigantic natural fortress defended by Nature in one of her profoundest moods, was only to be reached by fording dangerous torrents, or crossing the mountains by narrow defiles which themselves are higher than the most lofty peaks of Europe.
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.
It is on a high eminence surrounded with rugged crags and jungles, very dangerous to ascend and almost impregnable. Nevertheless, with my aforesaid company of soldiers I went up and gained the fortress, but only with the greatest possible labor and danger. Thus we gained the province of Uilcapampa."
It would have been a difficult matter to have constructed rafts, for most of the trees that grow here are of hard wood and do not float. On the other side of the Urubamba was young Tupac Amaru, surrounded by his councilors, chiefs, and soldiers. The first hostile forces which in Pizarro's time had endeavored to fight their way into Uilcapampa had never been allowed by Manco to get as far as this.
By a curious lapse Montesinos ascribes this attempt to the Inca Manco, who had been dead for ten years. In 1555 there came to Lima a new viceroy, who decided that it would be safer if young Sayri Tupac were within reach instead of living in the inaccessible wilds of Uilcapampa.
Yet we were soon to find ruins enough to explain why such a fortress as Salapunco might possibly have been built so as to defend Uilcapampa against Ollantaytambo and Cuzco and not those well-known Inca cities against the savages of the Amazon jungles.
Sayri Tupac's regents permitted the messenger to enter Uilcapampa and deliver the viceroy's invitation, but were not inclined to believe that it was quite so attractive as appeared on the surface, even though brought to them by a kinsman.
To any one who has clambered over the passes of the Cordillera Uilcapampa it is not surprising that this military expedition was a failure or that the Inca, warned by keen-sighted Indians posted on appropriate vantage points, could have succeeded in defeating a small force of weary soldiers armed with the heavy blunderbuss of the seventeenth century.
Towers of Jesuit Church With Cloisters and Tennis Court of University, Cuzco On the slopes of the hill which overshadows the University are the interesting terraces of Colcampata. Here, in 1571, lived Carlos Inca, a cousin of Inca Titu Cusi, one of the native rulers who succeeded in maintaining a precarious existence in the wilds of the Cordillera Uilcapampa after the Spanish Conquest.
Since the historical Uilcapampa is not geographically identical with the modern Vilcabamba, the name applied to this river and the old Spanish town at its source, I shall distinguish between the two by using the correct, official spelling for the river and town, viz., Vilcabamba; and the phonetic spelling, Uilcapampa, for the place referred to in the contemporary histories of the Inca Manco.
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