While we were wondering whether the Incas themselves ever lived here, there suddenly appeared the naked figure of a sturdy young savage, armed with a stout bow and long arrows, and wearing a fillet of bamboo.  He had been hunting and showed us a bird he had shot.  Soon afterwards there came the two adult savages we had met at Saavedra’s, accompanied by a cross-eyed friend, all wearing long tunics.  They offered to guide us to other ruins.  It was very difficult for us to follow their rapid pace.  Half an hour’s scramble through the jungle brought us to a pampa or natural terrace on the banks of a little tributary of the Pampaconas.  They called it Eromboni.  Here we found several old artificial terraces and the rough foundations of a long, rectangular building 192 feet by 24 feet.  It might have had twenty-four doors, twelve in front and twelve in back, each three and a half feet wide.  No lintels were in evidence.  The walls were only a foot high.  There was very little building material in sight.  Apparently the structure had never been completed.  Near by was a typical Inca fountain with three stone spouts, or conduits.  Two hundred yards beyond the water-carrier’s rendezvous, hidden behind a curtain of hanging vines and thickets so dense we could not see more than a few feet in any direction, the savages showed us the ruins of a group of stone houses whose walls were still standing in fine condition.

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Figure

Ruins in the Jungles of Espiritu Pampa
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One of the buildings was rounded at one end.  Another, standing by itself at the south end of a little pampa, had neither doors nor windows.  It was rectangular.  Its four or five niches were arranged with unique irregularity.  Furthermore, they were two feet deep, an unusual dimension.  Probably this was a storehouse.  On the east side of the pampa was a structure, 120 feet long by 21 feet wide, divided into five rooms of unequal size.  The walls were of rough stones laid in adobe.  Like some of the Inca buildings at Ollantaytambo, the lintels of the doors were made of three or four narrow uncut ashlars.  Some rooms had niches.  On the north side of the pampa was another rectangular building.  On the west side was the edge of a stone-faced terrace.  Below it was a partly enclosed fountain or bathhouse, with a stone spout and a stone-lined basin.  The shapes of the houses, their general arrangement, the niches, stone roof-pegs and lintels, all point to Inca builders.  In the buildings we picked up several fragments of Inca pottery.

Equally interesting and very puzzling were half a dozen crude Spanish roofing tiles, baked red.  All the pieces and fragments we could find would not have covered four square feet.  They were of widely different sizes, as though some one had been experimenting.  Perhaps an Inca who had seen the new red tiled roofs of Cuzco had tried to reproduce them here in the jungle, but without success.