The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland: 432 [Paperback]

It is a measure of Hugh Thomson's skill as a writer, historian and explorer that The White Rock is such a pleasure...' (Justin Marozzi THE SPECTATOR )

In The White Rock, the whole continent becomes a plot with suspense and a cast of outrageous characters...This is Bruce Chatwin with cojones.' (Andy Martin THE INDEPENDENT )

The White Rock is the long-awaited definitive travel book on Peru.' (John Hemming, author of The Conquest of the Incas )

A riveting account of South American exploration and Peruvian culture, full of unforgettable stories and amazing facts.' (THE BOOKSELLER )

A record of one man's obsession with the Incas over a period of 20 years...an obsession that led him to search out (and in one case discover) Inca ruins in the most inaccessible places, far beyond the reach of tourists.' (Anthony Daniels SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

'Engrossing... the sort of book that fires the armchair traveller with a desire to follow in its author's footsteps.' (Geoffrey Moorhouse NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW )

One of the strongest debuts I have read for a while.' (Anthony Sattin SUNDAY TIMES )

It is the mixture of historian, traveller and film-maker that makes The White Rock come alive as few other books about South America have done.' (Ulick O'Connor SUNDAY INDEPENDENT )

'Time and again he brings the Incas to life as real people.' (Matthew Parris RADIO 4 )

'Thomson's account of his travels through the Inca heartlands weaves geographical, spiritual, personal and historical strands to an effect as rich and vivid as a Peruvian shawl.' (Juliet Clough DAILY TELEGRAPH )

It is Thomson's generosity of spirit which stands out and makes this a great book...a work that is both accessible and academically rigorous.' (Isabel Cockayne EASTERN DAILY PRESS )

'Thomson's wit, eye for detail and reverence for humanity set him aparthe is as good a companion as a traveller could hope for.' (PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY )

'The White Rock is a gem of a book, an intelligent, balanced and indeed original look at the empire of the Incas' (LOS ANGELES TIMES )

'I'll look forward to all his future stories if they're even half as well told, as vivid and funny and human, as this one.' (Alan Peter Ryan WASHINGTON POST )

‘In The White Rock, the whole continent becomes a plot with suspense and a cast of outrageous characters'

‘A fascinating tale, intelligently told, and one of the strongest debuts I have read for a while’

‘It is Thomson’s generosity of spirit which stands out and makes this a great book'

‘It is a measure of Hugh Thomson’s skill as a writer, historian and explorer that The White Rock is such a pleasure'

The lost cities of South America have always exercised a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The ruins of the Incas and other pre-Colombian civilisations are scattered over thousands of miles of still largely uncharted territory, particularly in the Eastern Andes, where the mountains fall away towards the Amazon. Twenty-five years ago, Hugh Thomson set off into the cloud-forest on foot to find a ruin that had been carelessly lost again after its initial discovery. Into his history of the Inca Empire he weaves the story of his adventures as he travelled to the most remote Inca cities. It is also the story of the great explorers in whose footsteps he followed, such as Hiram Bingham and Gene Savoy.

Hugh Thomson has led many research expeditions to Peru, about which he has written an acclaimed series of books: THE WHITE ROCK, and its sequel, COCHINEAL RED. TEQUILA OIL saw him return to South America after 30 years and was serialised by BBC Radio 4 as their Book of the Week. He has also edited Hiram Bingham's classic account of the discovery of Machu Picchu, LOST CITY OF THE INCAS. An expedition to a usually inaccessible part of the Himalayas and the source of a legend resulted in NANDA DEVI: A JOURNEY TO THE LAST SANCTUARY. He is also a film-maker and has won many awards for his documentaries, which include INDIAN JOURNEYS WITH WILLIAM DALRYMPLE, and DANCING IN THE STREET: A ROCK AND ROLL HISTORY. He lives in Oxfordshire.

INTRODUCTION

Peru now occupies the same place in the popular imagination as Tibet used to have in the latter days of Empire, before the communist invasion made it more a place of pity than of mystery - a Shangri-La where the imagination is licensed to allow all manner of utopias and adventure.

In 1982, I returned from the Andes to find Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in British cinemas. The opening sequence, in which Harrison Ford rolled down a series of booby-trapped tunnels in order to seize a solid gold idol was a tour-de-force. It managed in just ten minutes to pack in every conceivable myth about South American exploration: the silhouetted Indians padding through the shafts of light thrown by the jungle canopy; the lone explorer, let down by treacherous assistants but determined to find the temple come what may; the battered map almost disintegrating in the sunlight. Best (and perversely most true to life) was the moment when Indiana Jones loses the idol to his arch rival, René Belloq, the suave but of course treacherous French archaeologist, simply because he hasn’t taken the time to learn the local language: ‘If only you had learnt Hovitos,’ sneers Belloq (who has), as Jones flees the on-coming Indians with their arrows and poisonous blow-pipes.

Seen at full volume in a West End cinema when I was fresh from Peru and, it was terrific, even if far removed from the less glamorous reality I had been experiencing. ‘Raiders’ was a replay of many a matinee movie cliché, like the old deodorant ad in which the hero or heroine, sprayed with a symbolic ‘v’ on their back, hacks up to the top of an ancient temple and still emerges with the sprayed area immaculate.

Since then, the computer game Tomb Raiders has provided endless cybernetic variants of the same story. Players can live out Indiana Jones type adventures of discovery as they advance into pseudo-Incaic labyrinths. What’s more, their leader Lara Croft has the considerable advantage of being more nubile and less bossy than your average sweaty, real-life explorer.

As a powerful mythopoeic base on which to build fantasies of confrontation with an alien culture, the Inca world has few rivals. But just as the lure of the Inca myth has increased, so any actual understanding of the Incas themselves has become obscured, let alone of the true nature of exploration in the Andes.

The White Rock is an attempt to present a clear-sighted view of that Inca culture, drawing on my journeys throughout the Inca heartland near Cuzco and across the vast empire they created. Along the way I travelled to some of the most remote Inca sites and talked to leading archaeologists and explorers working in the area.

As I did so, I became more and more aware of the discrepancy between popular preconceptions about the Inca and the actual evidence on the ground. Deciphering that evidence is complicated by the fact that the Incas left no written history and almost all that we know about them comes from the often biased accounts of Spanish conquistadors and from the suppositions of archaeologists. Inca studies, compared to Egyptology or our knowledge of the Classical World, are still in their infancy.

The very familiarity of Machu Picchu causes problems and can lead us to forget how little we still know about the people who built the place. Few visitors to Peru travel beyond it.

I have taken Chuquipalta - ‘The White Rock’ of the title, deep in the Vilcabamba - as being emblematic of that hidden and lost Inca world which is rarely visited and which I have tried to explore.