Extremely gratified with the result of our conferences in Santa Ana, yet reluctant to leave the delightful hospitality and charming conversation of our gracious host, we decided to go at once to Lucma, taking the road on the southwest side of the Urubamba and using the route followed by the pack animals which carry the precious cargoes of coca and aguardiente from Santa Ana to Ollantaytambo and Cuzco.  Thanks to Don Pedro’s energy, we made an excellent start; not one of those meant-to-be-early but really late-in-the-morning departures so customary in the Andes.

We passed through a region which originally had been heavily forested, had long since been cleared, and was now covered with bushes and second growth.  Near the roadside I noticed a considerable number of land shells grouped on the under-side of overhanging rocks.  As a boy in the Hawaiian Islands I had spent too many Saturdays collecting those beautiful and fascinating mollusks, which usually prefer the trees of upland valleys, to enable me to resist the temptation of gathering a large number of such as could easily be secured.  None of the snails were moving.  The dry season appears to be their resting period.  Some weeks later Professor Foote and I passed through Maras and were interested to notice thousands of land shells, mostly white in color, on small bushes, where they seemed to be quietly sleeping.  They were fairly “glued to their resting places”; clustered so closely in some cases as to give the stems of the bushes a ghostly appearance.

Our present objective was the valley of the river Vilcabamba.  So far as we have been able to learn, only one other explorer had preceded us—­the distinguished scientist Raimondi.  His map of the Vilcabamba is fairly accurate.  He reports the presence here of mines and minerals, but with the exception of an “abandoned tampu” at Maracnyoc ("the place which possesses a millstone"), he makes no mention of any ruins.  Accordingly, although it seemed from the story of Baltasar de Ocampo and Captain Garcia’s other contemporaries that we were now entering the valley of Uiticos, it was with feel-hags of considerable uncertainty that we proceeded on our quest.  It may seem strange that we should have been in any doubt.  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 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.  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.