“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.Go!”
Kipling: “The Explorer”
Inca Land
Explorations in the Highlands of Peru
By
Hiram Bingham
Director of the Peruvian Expeditions of Yale University and the National Geographic Society,
Member of the American Alpine Club,
Professor of Latin-American History in Yale University;
author of “Across South America,” etc.
With Illustrations
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1922
This Volume
is affectionately dedicated
to
the Muse who inspired it
the Little Mother of Seven SonsPage vii
Preface
The following pages represent some of the results of four journeys into the interior of Peru and also many explorations intothe labyrinth of early writings which treat of the Incas and their Land. Although my travels covered only a part of southernPeru, they took me into every variety of climate and forced me to camp at almost every altitude at which men have constructedhouses or erected tents in the Western Hemisphere—from sea level up to 21,703 feet. It has been my lot to cross bleak Andeanpasses, where there are heavy snowfalls and low temperatures, as well as to wend my way through gigantic canyons into thedense jungles of the Amazon Basin, as hot and humid a region as exists anywhere in the world. The Incas lived in a land ofviolent contrasts. No deserts in the world have less vegetation than those of Sihuas and Majes; no luxuriant tropical valleyshave more plant life than the jungles of Conservidayoc. In Inca Land one may pass from glaciers to tree ferns within a fewhours. So also in the labyrinth of contemporary chronicles of the last of the Incas—no historians go more rapidly from factto fancy, from accurate observation to grotesque imagination; no writers omit important details and give conflicting statementswith greater frequency. The story of the Incas is still in a maze of doubt and contradiction.
It was the mystery and romance of some of the Page viiiwonderful pictures of a nineteenth-century explorer that first led me into the relatively unknown region between the Apurimacand the Urubamba, sometimes called “the Cradle of the Incas.” Although my photographs cannot compete with the imaginativepencil of such an artist, nevertheless, I hope that some of them may lead future travelers to penetrate still farther intothe Land of the Incas and engage in the fascinating game of identifying elusive places mentioned in the chronicles.
Some of my story has already been told in Harper's and the National Geographic, to whose editors acknowledgments are due for permission to use the material in its present form. A glance at the Bibliographywill show that more than fifty articles and monographs have been published as a result of the Peruvian Expeditions of YaleUniversity and the National Geographic Society. Other reports are still in course of preparation. My own observations arebased partly on a study of these monographs and the