The Lost City
An explorer's encounter with the ruined city of Sacyamarca, the best-known symbol of the Suri civilisation
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Tobias Vellacott, an explorer and academic, reached the Sarapo highlands in 1911 with his sights set on what he expected to be the crowning accomplishment of his career: pushing into the little-known country that lay west of Tambara, once the capital of the Suri empire high in the Sarapo mountains. What he was after were the ruins of Karcona, the settlement that had served as the civilisation's final seat of power. Tambara itself stands on a high plateau more than 3,000 metres up, and Vellacott's plan was to work his way down from there by following the Waylla, a river whose winding course threads through steep gorges and mountain ridges before reaching the lowland jungle.
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Setting off down the Waylla in the closing days of July, Vellacott's party had something earlier travellers had gone without: a path had lately been blasted through the canyon walls so that mules could carry cocoa up from the forest below. Those who had come before had almost always left the river at Paccar, crossing the mountains by a high pass and rejoining the water some way downstream; this trimmed a good deal off the journey, but it also meant that none of them ever came near the country around Sacyamarca.
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By 22 July the group had been descending the valley for several days. That morning was slow to get going, with Vellacott busy rounding up enough mules for the next leg of the trek. The evening before, a local herder named Ismael Quenaya had mentioned some ruins on a hill not far off, yet none of Vellacott's companions felt the slightest urge to climb up and see them with him. The weather being grey and damp, Vellacott too had little appetite for the climb. As he tells it in his book, The Lost City of the Suri, he set out up the slope with not the faintest hope of finding anything worthwhile at the top.
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The account of that climb in Vellacott's book is written with real colour. He opens by dwelling on the ever-present threat of venomous snakes — creatures, as he puts it, 'able to lunge a fair way when chasing their prey' — though as it happens he meets none. After that the reader senses his mounting excitement: first broad sweeps of terracing, then a tomb, then great ceremonial staircases, and at last the towering ritual halls of Sacyamarca. 'The whole scene felt like some impossible dream,' he wrote; 'I stood rooted to the spot, held fast by what lay before me.'
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It is worth remembering, though, that The Lost City of the Suri is a work of hindsight, not written until 1948, long after the expedition. The diary he kept at the time paints a different picture, one of much slower awareness of what he had done. He spent the afternoon among the ruins, noting the measurements of a building or two, then rejoined his companions, to whom he said next to nothing about the find. At that point neither the scale of the place nor its importance had struck him, still less the use he might one day make of it.
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Before long, though, it dawned on him that the discovery might be the making of his name. By the time he came to write the piece for the Geographic Chronicle that broke the story to the wider world in April 1913, he knew a bold idea was called for. Could the place, he asked, have been the birthplace of Yawar the First, the earliest of all the Suri rulers, and could it likewise be what the old chronicles termed 'the last city of the Suri'? That name referred to Illawara, the bolt-hole to which the Suri had fled when Almiran invaders poured in during the 1530s. For the best part of forty years Vellacott struggled to prove this claim. His vision of Sacyamarca as at once the birthplace and the burial ground of the Suri world was a magnificent one, and yet it was wrong: Illawara, as we now know, lies some 65 kilometres away, deep in the jungle.
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Ever since Vellacott's time, a single question has puzzled tourists, historians and archaeologists alike: why the site appears to have been left empty even before the Almiran Conquest. No Almiran chronicle refers to it at all, and had those writers had any idea that such a place stood so close to Tambara, they would certainly have come looking for gold. The view that has gained wide acceptance in recent years is that Sacyamarca was a sayana, a country estate raised by a Suri emperor as a refuge from the harsh winters of Tambara, somewhere the elite could enjoy grand architecture and magnificent views. What is more, the distinctive style of its buildings points to its being built in the reign of Rumaya (c. 1440–72), the greatest of all the Suri emperors. Custom dictated that each of Rumaya's descendants put up a similar estate of his own, and so Sacyamarca would have been abandoned after his death, roughly fifty years before the Almiran Conquest.
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Question 1 - 7
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
A widely shared explanation
The purpose behind the expedition
Two versions of one expedition
An unfamiliar path down the valley
Little eagerness to investigate
Making the find public
A vivid, spellbinding account
Winning others' backing