Incahuaracana consists of two typical Inca edifices—­one of two rooms, about 70 by 20 feet, and the other, very long and narrow, 150 by 11 feet.  The walls, of unhewn stone laid in clay, were not particularly well built and resemble in many respects the ruins at Choqquequirau.  The rooms of the principal house are without windows, although each has three front doors and is lined with niches, four or five on a side.  The long, narrow building was divided into three rooms, and had several front doors.  A force of two hundred Indian soldiers could have slept in these houses without unusual crowding.

We left Lucma the next day, forded the Vilcabamba River and soon had an uninterrupted view up the valley to a high, truncated hill, its top partly covered with a scrubby growth of trees and bushes, its sides steep and rocky.  We were told that the name of the hill was “Rosaspata,” a word of modern hybrid origin—­pata being Quichua for “hill,” while rosas is the Spanish word for “roses.”  Mogrovejo said his Indians told him that on the “Hill of Roses” there were more ruins.

At the foot of the hill, and across the river, is the village of Pucyura.  When Raimondi was here in 1865 it was but a “wretched hamlet with a paltry chapel.”  To-day it is more prosperous.  There is a large public school here, to which children come from villages many miles away.  So crowded is the school that in fine weather the children sit on benches out of doors.  The boys all go barefooted.  The girls wear high boots.  I once saw them reciting a geography lesson, but I doubt if even the teacher knew whether or not this was the site of the first school in this whole region.  For it was to “Puquiura” that Friar Marcos came in 1566.  Perhaps he built the “mezquina capilla” which Raimondi scorned.  If this were the “Puquiura” of Friar Marcos, then Uiticos must be near by, for he and Friar Diego walked with their famous procession of converts from “Puquiura” to the House of the Sun and the “white rock” which was “close to Uiticos.”

Crossing the Vilcabamba on a footbridge that afternoon, we came immediately upon some old ruins that were not Incaic.  Examination showed that they were apparently the remains of a very crude Spanish crushing mill, obviously intended to pulverize gold-bearing quartz on a considerable scale.  Perhaps this was the place referred to by Ocampo, who says that the Inca Titu Cusi attended masses said by his friend Friar Diego in a chapel which is “near my houses and on my own lands, in the mining district of Puquiura, close to the ore-crushing mill of Don Christoval de Albornoz, Precentor that was of the Cuzco Cathedral.”

------
Figure

Pucyura and the Hill of Rosaspata in the Vilcabamba Valley
------

One of the millstones is five feet in diameter and more than a foot thick.  It lay near a huge, flat rock of white granite, hollowed out so as to enable the millstone to be rolled slowly around in a hollow