Two days later we left Conservidayoc for Espiritu Pampa by the trail which Saavedra’s son and our Pampaconas Indians had been clearing.  We emerged from the thickets near a promontory where there was a fine view down the valley and particularly of a heavily wooded alluvial fan just below us.  In it were two or three small clearings and the little oval huts of the savages of Espiritu Pampa, the “Pampa of Ghosts.”

On top of the promontory was the ruin of a small, rectangular building of rough stone, once probably an Inca watch-tower.  From here to Espiritu Pampa our trail followed an ancient stone stairway, about four feet in width and nearly a third of a mile long.  It was built of uncut stones.  Possibly it was the work of those soldiers whose chief duty it was to watch from the top of the promontory and who used their spare time making roads.  We arrived at the principal clearing just as a heavy thunder-shower began.  The huts were empty.  Obviously their occupants had seen us coming and had disappeared in the jungle.  We hesitated to enter the home of a savage without an invitation, but the terrific downpour overcame our scruples, if not our nervousness.  The hut had a steeply pitched roof.  Its sides were made of small logs driven endwise into the ground and fastened together with vines.  A small fire had been burning on the ground.  Near the embers were two old black ollas of Inca origin.

In the little chacra, cassava, coca, and sweet potatoes were growing in haphazard fashion among charred and fallen tree trunks; a typical milpa farm.  In the clearing were the ruins of eighteen or twenty circular houses arranged in an irregular group.  We wondered if this could be the “Inca city” which Lopez Torres had reported.  Among the ruins we picked up several fragments of Inca pottery.  There was nothing Incaic about the buildings.  One was rectangular and one was spade-shaped, but all the rest were round.  The buildings varied in diameter from fifteen to twenty feet.  Each had but a single opening.  The walls had tumbled down, but gave no evidence of careful construction.  Not far away, in woods which had not yet been cleared by the savages, we found other circular walls.  They were still standing to a height of about four feet.  If the savages have extended their milpa clearings since our visit, the falling trees have probably spoiled these walls by now.  The ancient village probably belonged to a tribe which acknowledged allegiance to the Incas, but the architecture of the buildings gave no indication of their having been constructed by the Incas themselves.  We began to wonder whether the “Pampa of Ghosts” really had anything important in store for us.  Undoubtedly this alluvial fan had been highly prized in this country of terribly steep hills.  It must have been inhabited, off and on, for many centuries.  Yet this was not an “Inca city.”