ange that
Uiticos could ever be written "Biticos." The Quichua language has
no sound of V. The early Spanish writers, however, wrote the capital
letter U exactly like a capital V. In official documents and letters
Uiticos became Viticos. The official readers, who had never heard
the word pronounced, naturally used the V sound instead of the U
sound. Both V and P easily become B. So Uiticos became Biticos and
Uilcapampa became Vilcabamba.

Raimondi's marvelous energy led him to penetrate to more out-of-the-way
Peruvian villages than any one had ever done before or is likely to do
again. He stopped at nothing in the way of natural obstacles. In 1865
he went deep into the heart of Uilcapampa; yet found no Uiticos. He
believed that the ruins of Choqquequirau represented the residence of
the last Incas. This view had been held by the French explorer, Count
de Sartiges, in 1834, who believed that Choqquequirau was abandoned
when Sayri Tupac, Manco's oldest son, went to live in Yucay. Raimondi's
view was also held by the leading Peruvian geographers, including
Paz Soldan in 1877, and by Prefect Nunez and his friends in 1909, at
the time of my visit to Choqquequirau. [7] The only dissenter was the
learned Peruvian historian, Don Carlos Romero, who insisted that the
last Inca capital must be found elsewhere. He urged the importance
of searching for Uiticos in the valleys of the rivers now called
Vilcabamba and Urubamba. It was to be the work of the Yale Peruvian
Expedition of 1911 to collect the geographical evidence which would
meet the requirements of the chronicles and establish the whereabouts
of the long-lost Inca capital.

That there were undescribed and unidentified ruins to be found in the
Urubamba Valley was known to a few people in Cuzco, mostly wealthy
planters who had large estates in the province of Convencion. One
told us that he went to Santa Ana every year and was acquainted with
a muleteer who had told him of some interesting ruins near the San
Miguel bridge. Knowing the propensity of his countrymen to exaggerate,
however, he placed little confidence in the story and, shrugging his
shoulders, had crossed the bridge a score of times without taking
the trouble to look into the matter. Another, Senor Pancorbo, whose
plantation was in the Vilcabamba Valley, said that he had heard vague
rumors of ruins in the valley above his plantation, particularly
near Pucyura. If his story should prove to be correct, then it wa