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In front of us, up to the northwest, we saw the highest point of the region, a peak that we called
“Último Punto.” We climbed the ridge up to that high point, at an altitude of 3,600 meters, where
we found that the summit was totally covered by another platform, even more asymmetrical in
shape, that had five corners, and was shaped like a squashed bullet, with its point toward the
northeast. This platform was a little shorter than the other, with sides of 10 meters and 9 meters
in length, of 6 meters width on the rear side, and with a wall of 8 meters in length and another of 5
meters meeting at the front to form the “point of the bullet.” It had a height of a little less than one
meter. Its location, at 72 degrees-11 minutes-30 seconds longitude west, by 12 degrees-25
minutes-40 seconds south latitude, overlooked two separate river systems: to the southwest was
the Río Yavero, and to the northeast lay the headwaters of the Río Timpía. Its location seemed
most strategically placed.
We noted that these two platforms constituted the most distant Incan remains yet found directly to
the north of Cusco.
Our return began the next morning, the 16 th of June. We pushed on to the south and southwest,
and we arrived at the settlement of Sacramento, above the sub-tropical Río Yavero, where we
passed the night camped in front of the house of our mule driver, Mario. The 17 th of June Paulino
left us early in the morning in order to walk as fast as possible to the town of Quebrada, over the
range of Lares-Lacco in the valley of the Río Yanatile, in order to use the public phone there to
call Cusco and arrange for our vehicle to meet us the following day at the closest frontier point
accessible by dirt road, called Abra Bellavista. The rest of us advanced more slowly to the
southwest, crossing a bridge over the Río Yavero, until we reached the small settlement of
Bellavista in the Lares-Lacco range.
The next morning, we found a stone chullpa, an above-ground tomb, on a nearby forested
hillside. Its shape was circular, and its stone roof formed by a roughly corbeled vault topped by a
long stone slab. It had a circumference of almost 8 meters, and was in exactly the same style as
the “Chullpas de Ninamarca,” the complex of identical circular tombs to be found in the high area
just south of the famous town of Paucartambo, a totally different area extremely far to our
southeast. And Ninamarca, strangely enough, had been reliably attributed to the pre-Incan
Lupaca culture based in the Lake Titicaca area over a hundred miles away. There were as well
other more typically Incan structures in the surrounding forest.