A journey into Peru and back in time

The White Rock

An Exploration of the Inca Heartland

Hugh Thomson

The Overlook Press: 316 pp., $27.95

*

The grand tradition of English travel writing is very much alive in Hugh Thomson’s “The White Rock.” Thomson is a fine representative of that tribe of ambulatory explorers who, with their percipient amateur eyes, bring back to readers at home tales of strange and distant places and people.

His book begins a bit uncertainly. It is 1982, and Thomson is 21, working in a London pub. He hears a story about a mysterious place deep in the Andes of Peru, an Inca ruin seen by few, talked about by more. There being nothing better to do, he decides to go look for it.

At this point, the reader is entitled to wonder if we’re going to be treated to just another self-conscious gringo dialogue about travel among the Latin unwashed, like something by a latter-day Paul Theroux.

Thomson quickly lays those queasy doubts to rest. Once he gets going, we know we are in the hands of a strong storyteller.

“The White Rock” is a gem of a book, an intelligent, balanced and indeed original look at the empire of the Incas, told from what we know of them historically and what we can see in their strange and magnificent ruins in the towering, jungle-clad mountains of Peru that tumble down into the Amazon basin.

In “The White Rock” he combines history, archeology, anthropology, and a fine and sympathetic eye of his own to draw a fairly persuasive picture of Inca civilization, as nearly as we can know, or guess.

Thomson went on from his youthful exploratory venture to become a filmmaker for the BBC and PBS with credits such as the “Out of India” series and “Great Journeys: Mexico.”)

The Incas, by conquering, created an empire that ran at its height from Chile north to Ecuador.

Its center was Cuzco in Peru, where you can still see the remarkable, fine and massive stonework of its temples and palaces at the base of the churches and convents that the Spanish conquistadors built atop them in the 16th century.

The life of the Inca empire was short: It grew 100 years before the conqueror Francisco Pizarro and his brothers arrived, and there was a broken, defeated remnant that endured for less than 50 years afterward. The descendants, though, still inhabit the high and hard to penetrate Andes, still speaking Quechua and Aymara, still resistant to the lowlanders, who are mostly Spanish and mestizo.

The empire was connected by roads, which fascinate Thomson. For they ran not straight along level lands, as did, say, the Romans’, but straight up and down the sides and over the peaks of immense, steep mountains. The difference, Thomson speculates, was the llama, the beast most happy above 13,000 feet, who can walk sure-footedly up and down steep slopes, unlike the horse or the mule.

In addition to Cuzco and other cities, the Incas built still-mysterious sites deep in the mountains. The best known of these is Machu Picchu, brought to the world’s attention by Hiram Bingham after his exploration in 1911. “The White Rock” of Thomson’s title is another such site, deep in the mountains, mentioned by explorers but rarely visited. This was the goal of Thomson’s successful first expedition and a focal point of his return 20 years later.

As described by him and captured in his excellent accompanying photographs, the White Rock, Chuquipalta, rises with great majesty and force from the surrounding jungle. Like Machu Picchu, the site is relatively small, and the view from it is likewise magnificent, a fine panorama of cloud-swept mountains and vast chasms. Thomson speculates that these great sites were not religious, as earlier explorers assumed, but rural retreats for the Inca emperors and their retinues. He believes these sites indicate that the Incas may well have had an artistic reverence for both great works of stone and splendid views.

In the end, “The White Rock” transcends the travel-writing genre. With its excellent maps, its glossary of Spanish and Quechua terms, its thorough review of the historical and scholarly literature, and its genealogical chart of the Inca emperors, it serves as an excellent introduction to the Incas and what is known about them.

Yet the lure of the unknown, the Holy Grail of travelers, is still there. “The real appeal,” Thomson writes, “ is that there are clearly still ruins to be found out there: the cloud-forest and the Amazon have by no means given up all their secrets.”