10
Past Stories, Recent Searches
During my first trip to Guayaquil in 2006, I interviewed Gastón Fernández Borrero, who organized the first official expedition to the Tayos Caves in 1969.
His faculties and memory were affected from a recent illness and an accident, but I can only say the man I met was a colorful person, who was also honest and direct. His main concern was that in that same year (2006), the English would reveal a secret document of the expedition of 1976, after the Public Records Act could be applied thirty years after the event.
Gastón, as people called him on the Ecuadorian coast, had recently published a work of notes and memos of the expedition of 1969 (My Two Trips to the Tayos Caves and The Border Problem between Ecuador and Peru).
What bothered Gastón was that, as he said, “the English left without leaving a final report of the expedition.” This obsession would lead him to send letters to the British queen—which of course went unanswered—to highlight his theory that archaeological pieces and plates from the metallic library had been extracted during that expedition. We know that there was tension between the Ecuadorian archaeological division, led by Father Porras and Hernán Crespo Toral, and the British scientists. With his own eyes Aguado witnessed the priest throwing himself over one of the loads, trying to prevent it from being taken up to the surface.
The archaeologist and TV producer Presley Norton, who would also participate in the 1976 expedition, said, “Ecuadorians found remains of civilizations that dated back to 1000–1500 BC.” It seems Father Pedro Porras, who worked for the archaeology department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE) carbon-dated the artifacts, and his results were more reliable than those of the British, who used the thermoluminescence system.
Norton told Gastón the British Empire always chose the best alumni from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford to send to the other side of the “Black Wall,” meaning a training site in the Tibetan Himalayas, where they were trained as superspies, who then served in Scotland Yard and MI9. While there is not yet proof that Hall was part of British intelligence, it is the hypothesis of many involved in the Tayos mystery.
During the July 1969 expedition, Gastón asked Moricz why the affluent of the Santiago River was called the Coangos (or Kuankus), and he answered that cuk means kitchen in almost every language in the world, because in ancient times heated stones were used for cooking. Cuk means stone and angus means angels, so the name of the river meant stone angels. He also derived other Ecuadorian words from Magyar roots: Guayaquil, for example, came from gus, meaning first; haya, which means mother; and quil, which tranlates to town.
When asked about the metallic library and the 1969 expedition, Gastón told me, “The conversations with Moricz after we left Guayaquil for Limón Indanza were recurring and repetitive about his theory of the metallic library in the caves—written in Magyar— whose discovery and dissemination would cause a world revolt.”
The 1969 expedition group left from Guayaquil to Cuenca by car and truck, then from Limón on muleback until they reached El Pescado, Tres Copales, La Esperanza, and La Unión. They continued by canoe to La Puntilla, a peninsula on the Santiago River, near its connection to the Coangos River. They went on by foot to the Jíbaro land in Jukma, the domain of a Coangos witch, and they continued to the camp settlement in the part of the Jíbaro land that belonged to Guajaro or Guajare, a shaman.
In the cave, they descended 262 feet, and at the bottom they found an avenue 197 feet wide and about a third of a mile long, with 12 percent grade in relation to the ceiling or mountains at the surface. Moricz calculated that this thoroughfare was 500,000 years old. He stated that “there are other passageways and symmetrical halls that lead to other avenues; some are lower and others are higher than the central avenue; all are made with natural slab stone, crafted by men. There is no doubt these were used as refuge for ancient humans who have been forgotten with time.”
Moricz was the first to be surprised by the weird stones and symmetrical blocks inside the caves. He wondered out loud, in front of the whole expedition, “Why were the stones cut and moved to the second gallery, stacked up like a loaf of bread, and cut in slices with evident use of precision devices?” (See plate 13, which shows slabs of cut rock.)
JARAMILLO ENTERS THE SCENE
Gastón Fernández Borrero’s testimony brings me to the story of Jaramillo, as Borrero had once tried to invite Jaramillo on an expedition. Captain Petronio Jaramillo Abarca told his story to Patricia Aulestia, the archaeologist Costales, Andrés Fernández Salvador Zaldumbide (who told it to Borrero), and Moricz. Later, Jaramillo would also share his story with Stanley Hall.
Years ago in Ecuador they had a tradition of raising children from the mountains with the Jíbaro children. When Jaramillo gained the rank of second lieutenant, the graduates had to do at least one year of service in the east. One night he was dining in the Jíbaro land, close to the meeting of the Santiago and Coangos Rivers, when he noticed a Jíbaro staring intently at him. He suddenly recognized a childhood friend—a boy who had been raised with Jaramillo’s family. Because of this friendly relationship, the Jíbaro offered to take him to a place he had only shown to his father. He mentioned he had promised not to show this place to anyone else; otherwise, he and his family would be punished.
Jaramillo promised he wouldn’t tell the secret to anyone, and they organized a trip along the Santiago River. They even had to swim short distances to enter a small cave that had nothing special in it. But after they had walked a few feet, the cave started getting bigger. They kept on walking and found a large cave with giant metal animals such as giraffes and elephants. But the most important thing was not these animals, but the library, written in the Magyar language on metallic plates, although they never specified which kind of metal.
Gastón Fernández Borrero wrote in his book: “I should mention that when I did my first trip to the caves with Juan Moricz, who had never talked to me of Captain Petronio Jaramillo Abarca, and before my second trip with the military men, I coordinated, with my good friend Andrés Fernández Salvador Zaldumbide, an expedition to the caves with Captain Jaramillo, whom I located in the city of Esmeraldas. I visited him and invited him to a possible expedition, and he politely said he would not join us. This was the background I had. Some of this information I came across casually, and other information I researched before I knew anything about Juan Moricz, with whom I always maintained a cordial friendship.”
Years before, Jaramillo had noted:
The exact location is marked by hearing an increase in the murmur of the waterfall. He said the chamber could be found after a thirty-minute walk through the cave, and when thunder and lightning strike, the metallic library could be seen.
Jaramillo also described crystal boxes and golden skeletons. He could have been talking about two places: Loja, founded in 1536, or Zamora, which is 33.5 miles from Loja.
Years before, Hall had written, “The search should focus on the province of Pastaza, south of the community of Canelos—15.5 miles south of Puyo—in the territory that goes as far as the limits of the Pastaza River. There is a system of caves in the jaguar country, one day and a half walk southeast of Canelos, near the confluence of the Bombonoza and Umupi Rivers. The region is filled with caves where tayos birds live, but in a smaller amount than the Coangos caves.” However, the main entrance is located on the banks of the Pastaza River, a two-hour walk downriver from the hanging bridge in the land of the Sharupi. (To see photos of me exploring these caves, see plates 14, 15, and 16.)
JARAMILLO’S STORY
Jaramillo’s widow would tell us that she didn’t believe her husband.
I knew it wasn’t true. Jaramillo first told his story after he tried to find Mashutaka, who was also called Pinchupe or Shushubin, known as Daniel Vega. This man’s father knew where to find the cave that allegedly had the treasures, but it isn’t true he grew up as a child with the Jíbaro Mashutaka. My husband had an amazing imagination, and he was very talented, but his imagination was one of a kind.
He had many dreams; one of them was to take the Government Palace. Sometimes in our house there would be forty or fifty guests camping during the weekend; they would all come from Ecuador. At this time he was trying to organize a peaceful public force to lead a revolution. He had a way with words.
In the army he had a bad reputation. Since he had no discipline, they would send him to the wildest and furthest places, like the area of Limón Indanza in eastern Ecuador.
This is why we have to review the original testimony, which we have thanks to Pino Turolla, the Italian-American explorer who interviewed Jaramillo in the late seventies. Nearly twenty years later, Stanley Hall would also interview Jaramillo; but he wasn’t like Turolla, who blindly believed every word because he believed this was his last chance to rescue a story that was vanishing after the 1976 expedition and that had barely survived Moricz’s death.
Here is Jaramillo’s story as told by Turolla:
Mashutaka and his father, the Jíbaro chief called Samakache, took me to a place called Piedras Blancas, White Stones. We got to the entrance of a small cave, and as we started going into the cave I noticed we were walking down perfectly symmetrical steps.
We arrived at a large vault, a basilica, carved with architectonic lines. The right side of the entrance had several torches against the wall which the natives had left on purpose. We lit one and kept on walking toward a circular platform that had openings leading to various levels. We walked straight to a canal that had water flowing three feet deep.
We stepped into the water, fording the canal, and got to the other side of the cave, to a vaulted chamber where a little sunlight penetrated somewhere through the ceiling and made the crystalline rocks shine. I suddenly realized this chamber was not made from natural stones. These stones had been crafted by men; there were white, green, and black stones, perfectly arranged in an architectonic design.
This vault was as wide as the others we had seen before, and it had the dimensions of one of the biggest cathedrals in Quito. Right in the center of the vault there was a curved couch large enough to fit twelve thin people, or seven larger ones.
In another multicolored hall I noticed the ground was filled with “little balls” Ecuadorians call jorutos or pildas. The Aurichi tribes used them as toys. Some were made of a yellow metal and others had strange writings on them, something like modern shorthand or handwriting.
Then Samakache threw a stone and a round slab turned. He then told me the revolving stone door would go back to its original position at dusk because it moved with the light or darkness. When we entered the new hall, we were surround by hundreds of stone animals, among which were elephants, mastodons, reptiles, like snakes, and also coyotes, jaguars, horses, and birds. They all measured about 11.8 inches tall.
The weirdest thing of all was what we found in the center of the hall: a crystal coffin with walls that were 1 inch thick. Inside it had a human skeleton coated in gold. It was 9.1 feet tall.
Jaramillo compared it to the height of the natives in the Achuyanos tribe, who were slaves of the Auchiri. They had white skin, yellow hair, and blue eyes. The descendants of this “golden skeleton” would be the Achuyanos.
They moved on to a third room where they found eight figures that were half human, half animal. Some had the upper half of a falcon and the lower half of a horse. There were also figures of men with wings instead of arms, elephant feet, pig snouts, and long web-footed legs.
In that same hall there was a cauldron made of a yellow metal; behind it was the figure of a man with the head of a monster with golden teeth. “I looked inside the cauldron and found twelve children figurines, thinking they had been cooked and devoured there,” Jaramillo told Turolla.
After those visions, they decided to spend the night in the cave, where the light from the outside reflected on the crystal rocks. The following day they continued their exploration and examined the other hall, where an arch held fifteen cylindrical columns that were 65.4 feet high.
From there, they entered another hall that had shelves made of yellow metal, on which there were hundreds of huge books made of a golden metal with red covers. They were two feet square and six inches thick. The pages had symbols similar to those engraved on the little balls. Others were completely filled with geometrical figures. “They were geometry books,” affirmed Jaramillo without a doubt.
The origin of the coastal cultures can be tracked to the Amazon basin. A large part of the eastern Andes is too high to take advantage of its trees, and these areas were uninhabited during the time these cultures developed until seven thousand years ago, and many of us think they could have taken refuge in the deep caves.
This would explain why, from the period between 18,000 and 9000 BCE, humanity could have transitioned from primitive hunter and gatherer groups to a highly superior and evolved culture, or at least a culture that was more sophisticated than the previous ones. This was a period of high volcanic activity and constant earthquakes, so the caves could have given refuge against earthquakes and landslides.
Temperatures got warmer twenty thousand years before our era, but the following ten thousand years had cyclical fluctuations from warm to cold temperatures, like those we have today, with or without global warming or the greenhouse effect. It is not so crazy to believe that cultures could have taken refuge in the depths of the Andes from the many catastrophic variations we had in the last fifty thousand years, especially during the last twelve thousand years.
Jaramillo told Andrés Fernández Salvador Zaldumbide he knew of a cave in eastern Ecuador that had megalithic shapes and excavations built by an ancient civilization. Many others, like Jaramillo, knew of Andrés’s wealth, because he was an owner of one of the most famous mineral-water companies—Guitig Fine Water. Jaramillo also asked him if he could help with an expedition to return to what could be called “the Cave of Wonders.” But Andrés was skeptical of Jaramillo’s testimony, especially when he mentioned the oilbirds, because he knew there are many caves with these birds in eastern Ecuador and Latin America.
In 2008 and 2009 I tried to convince Andrés to come with me in an expedition where he suspected Jaramillo’s cave was located. These new coordinates were not the same ones Hall had given us in 2005. Andrés believed Jaramillo’s cave was located between Méndez and Limón Indanza, and he thought he could find it.
We talked for months while he continued his private expeditions to find the treasure of Atahualpa in the Llanganates, a priority that had consumed almost half a century of expeditions, deceptions, and hopes, as well as new incursions to the problematic zone of the Tayos.
When I returned to Guayaquil in the fall of 2009, Andrés was not as excited to go find Jaramillo’s cave, especially not in his two-person plane, which he used to run away from the stress of the city with his beautiful wife to head to their coastal estate.
We had talked for over a year about organizing an expedition together in which we would fly over the area first and then continue by land once we knew the exact location, using his vast experience as a pilot and as an accomplished explorer.
As I said, Andrés believed the cave was between Méndez and Limón Indanza, an area that encompassed sixty-two miles and countless rivers that could take months or years to explore. But I soon realized he was hesitant, or he didn’t have enough information about the cave system Jaramillo had found.
Aguado’s papers contained notes explaining there are three doors to the Tayos Caves, and they are all supposed to be carved stones. The first door was near the meeting of the Pastaza and Morona Rivers, the second on the Tuna Chiguaza River, and the third one in the land of the Jíbaro chief Anguasba, in the Pastaza area. The entrances looked like a sort of door, and they all had a tola*8 before them, which were used as burial sites in the Andes and other jungle regions.
Before closing, there is one more version of Jaramillo’s story that should be considered: his own! What follows is Jaramillo’s early experience prior to Moricz’s claims.
THE TESTIMONY OF JARAMILLO TO TUROLLA
My cave may prove to be one of the more important discoveries ever made in South Ameica. I was taken there by a Jíbaro Indian chieftain, a great cacique named Samakache, and his son Mashutaka.
These two are very powerful Indians, and they are the only ones in the Amazon who know the location of this incredible cave. They were my guides. They led me throughout the caverns of the Cueva de los Tayos, and I tell you, it was an experience that has changed my whole life.
The background of this story begins in 1941, when I was barely twelve years old. I lived with my uncle, a captain in the Ecuadorian army, in Loja, the capital of Loja province in the south of Ecuador. One day my uncle brought into our home a Jíbaro Indian boy about my age.
The boy was given by his father to my uncle to be educated. The little one’s father was Samakache, who was a cacique—or chief—of a large number of clans of the Jíbaro tribe. This tribe lives in the South Oriente, and they are very savage, uncivilized Indians. The little boy’s name was Mashutaka. Later he acquired the name of my Uncle Gilberto, so that he was called Gilberto Mashutaka. That is a custom among the Indians of this area: giving a godchild the name of the godparent.
Mashutaka and I established the very cordial and sincere friendship which comes naturally to the young and he once told me that in the eastern jungles of his homeland there was an enormous cave inhabited by big birds. That is just how he described them—big birds called tayos, with large eyes. He said it was a very deep, dark cave, and only a few of the most powerful leaders of his tribe knew where it was. That is all I can tell you about the start of my story in 1941. But the memories of this cave, this description, has stayed with me all my life.
Many years later, in 1956, I was an artillery lieutenant stationed in the Oriente. In that part of the country it was our practice to go out on routine patrols, and on one of these patrols I had a very strange experience—very dangerous and very impressive. My patrol and I were on the eastern side of the mountains, in the eastern jungles, and we woke one morning to find ourselves surrounded by fifty Jíbaros—fifty menacing men, threatening my soldiers and me.
I looked at the man who was leading this group, and I saw a face that had not changed a great deal. It had only grown older with time. It was Gilberto, my friend of former days. He recognized me, and it was this recognition that saved my whole group from being killed.
Gilberto explained that he would have to take us prisoners and lead us back to his compound to request permission from his father, Samakache, to spare our lives. This was something that could only be granted by the cacique. When we reached the compound, there was one more requirement. Gilberto demanded of me that I repeat his Indian name so that he could be fully convinced that I was really his boyhood friend. I can assure you that under other circumstances, to retrieve that Indian’s name from my memory would have been very difficult. But standing before him and seeing his face, it came back automatically, and I could call out his name: Mashutaka. When we were released and left his compound, Mashutaka invited me to come back someday. I did so later, and that is where this story really begins.
After I returned to my garrison, I applied for permission to visit Samakache’s tribal compound again. This was granted and shortly afterwards I made the necessary arrangements. With me I had the badge of army captain to present to the greatest cacique, Samakache. By tradition we, the military, bestow the insignia of rank of captain on the chiefs or caciques of high authority in the jungle. This enormously pleased Mashutaka. We spent the next few days discussing the customs, myths, and legends of his tribe—a tribe that in the past, Mashutaka believed, was descended from the fearsome nation known as the Auchiris.
Slowly I guided the conversation to that large cave he had told me about in his youth, with the big black birds. After much discussion with his father, Mashutaka told me he would take me to see the cave.
Samakache, Mashutaka, and myself, on a two-day walk to reach this cave, far in the interior. No one else but my two guides knows the secret of the cave, and even today I cannot reveal its exact location. I will not do so until the proper time comes, when an organization will appear which, under God’s protection, may support the full investigation of this secret, not only for the benefit of my own country but for all humanity. Until then, the location of this cave must be deeply guarded, in the depths of my innermost being.
As we walked, my guides told me more of this cave, and in my mind it became transformed from a rustic black hole into an immense underground cavern. They said that it had many entrances, some of them separated by a distance of a two-day or even three-, four-, or five-day hike. It was an immense cavern, with chambers fashioned by the hand of man, possibly in an epoch long before the Christian era.
From what they told me, I calculated that it must have been approximately sixty-four square miles in area. If we gathered together a hundred basilicas in the Roman Catholic world, even then you would not have an idea of the immensity of what I later saw.
This cave was just one of hundreds that honeycomb the eastern mountain range of Ecuador, where the Andes meet the lowlands of the Amazon basin. They are enormously large caverns, very deep, very long, with a great number of hillocks and peaks inside, a great number of levels, and many mysteries. All of this awes the spirit, much more so when one enters suddenly—as I did when, late in the second day, we reached our destination, and Samakache and Mashutaka led me into one of these caves.
For two days we had hiked and climbed for many kilometers into the interior. We crossed deep ravines and gorges, and then a plateau surrounded by high peaks known as Penas Blancas—white peaks.
Finally we climbed over the top of another small plateau and looked down and saw at our feet a good-sized stream. We jumped into it from a considerable height—something I had never done before in my life—and crossed it. Then we came to what looked like the entrance to a small cave. But as we entered it, leaving the water behind us, I realized I was treading on steps made in perfect symmetry. Now we found ourselves in a great vault, a basilica, hewn with architectural lines. On the right side of the entrance were several torches standing against the wall, left there previously by the Indians.
We each lit one and walked toward a large round platform, which in turn led to a great number of levels.
We walked ahead and came to a canal through which water was flowing at a depth of three to four feet. We lowered ourselves into the water, forded this canal, then moved up onto the other side of the cave.
We had been climbing steadily though a series of caves that apparently followed the crest of one of the ranges of the Andes. We came to a great vaulted chamber that was quite light, as the sun shone through many crystal rocks.
These were not natural rocks that formed this chamber. They had been worked and formed by hand—shiny rocks, white rocks, greenish rocks, some of them black—perfectly arranged as if the result of some architectural design. This vault was wider than any of the others we had seen, and had the dimensions of the largest of the cathedrals in the city of Quito. Right in the center of the vault was a large curved seat, big enough to accommodate twelve slender persons, or seven large or fat ones.
We continued along the left side of this vault, up some steps, and then found ourselves on a higher level until we finally came to a plateau, from which there were several different ranks of steps leading in different directions to other rooms. We followed one of these and came to the door of a large room.
Samakache and Mashutaka told me not to enter, but to look inside.
The room showed all the colors of the rainbow—yellow, white, pale pink, sky blue, red, and purple rock. On the floor were many bolitas, or balls, known in this country as jorutos or pildas, which the Auchiris say were a traditional toy of their ancestors. They were scattered on the floor, and clustered on the side of the room—some of them were of yellow metal, and others yellow-green. I looked closely and saw that all had inscriptions on them in a strange script, something like modern shorthand.
Then Samakache told me to step back to a safe place, and he threw a rock at the threshold of this room. As the rock hit, a great stone slab rolled down—a rush of black stone, which splintered Samakache’s rock.
Samakache told me that this stone door would roll back to its raised position overnight. As they explained it, it used light and darkness to close and then open again. I have no other way to explain it.
We went back down the steps, then up to a second room. We walked in—there was no stone door in this room to fall on us—and there we found ourselves surrounded by a great number of carved stone animals. I touched them with my hands. There were representations of elephants, mastodons, reptiles, snakes, coyotes, jaguars, horses, birds. Some of these statues stood on small stands; others were placed on the floor. Nearly all were about thirty centimeters high. But there was one animal that impressed me exceptionally by the purity of its form. It was a brown cat standing on a triangular pedestal, and it had brilliant red eyes.
Strangest of all, lying in the center of this room was a large crystal coffin, its sides about 2.5 centimeters thick. Inside was a human skeleton fashioned in gold. It was quite large—2.8 meters long: I measured it with the spread of my hand. It was complete, with all the bones of the human skeleton, and each bone was fashioned of gold, as if to preserve the form of human beings who lived in another time.
The Achuyanos, a tribe living in the deep Amazon today, were often slaves of the Auchiris. The Achuyanos have white or fair skin, yellow hair, and blue eyes, and they are all more than 2.5 meters in height, very strong, and high-spirited. So I imagine that the Achuyanos are the descendants of the people who made this skeleton in the crystal coffin.
We went back to the central room, then took another flight of steps, even a greater number, to a third room. This room was something to terrorize any spirit. There were perhaps eighty figures—half human and half animal. Some had the upper half of a hawk and the lower half of a horse. There were figures of men who had wings instead of arms, or elephants’ feet, pigs’ hocks, or large fowls’ feet. In a corner of this room was a large cauldron on a stand, both made of a yellow metal that must have been gold or very like gold. Behind it was the figure of a man with a head like a monster and gold teeth. His mouth was open, his hair hung down, his ears and feet were very large. He was sitting behind the cauldron, staring into it. I looked inside and saw in the spot some ten or twelve figures of children. I was deeply shocked, and my mind raced to those strange times when children may have been cooked and eaten.
We left this frightening room and went back to the central chamber. It was becoming dark. Night was falling, and the light that normally came in through cracks and openings in the rock, refracting and multiplying as it spread from one crystal rock to another, was fading. Here we spent the night and slept.
The next day we got up very early and spent all the morning, into the early afternoon, examining another hall. This hall was not made of pink, yellow, blue, and red rock as the others had been. This new chamber had an arch completely made of crystal of a very special color. The arch was supported by about fifteen cylindrical columns, between twenty and twenty-five meters high, some of which were reddish crystal, some yellow, some blue—but all similar in that they had at the center a core of completely white crystal, like the steel frame within a reinforced concrete structure.
We walked through this vaulted chamber, and my guides led me into a wide room, some twenty by twenty meters square. I looked around and felt fortunate indeed. The room was filled with shelves, as in a library. There were shelves on all the walls, and also standing in the middle. And all the shelves were made of yellow metal.
On these shelves were books of yellow metal with deep red backs. The books measured about two feet square and were about six inches thick. The pages were sheets of very, very thin greenish-yellow metal, with inscriptions impressed or engraved into the metal. On some of these sheets there was writing in the same strange script, resembling shorthand, that we saw on the small balls in the first room. There were also straight lines, broken lines, geometric figures, triangles, trapezoids, circles and half circles, tangent lines. In other words, they resembled books of geometry.
In all, there were about two hundred of these books. I took some down from the highest shelves, but could not put them back up again. They were very heavy—they seemed to weigh about fifty kilos—and it was quite impossible to heave them back into place. Samakache said it was quite all right to leave them on the floor. I wanted to uncouple one of the sheets, but my guides said that I could not possibly take anything with me. Everything was sacred.
They told me there were other such libraries, far away, and that it would take a long hike to reach them. This was impossible; my leave was coming to an end, and I had to get back to my garrison.
Our departure from the cave was as extraordinary, frightening, and dangerous as our arrival. We had to retrace our steps through all those strange chambers and again head for the canal in order to get out. I returned to the village, to my garrison, and this was the end of my experience in the Cueva de los Tayos.
But among all the hundreds of caves that exist in the area of the Tayos, this cave is a very special one. This cave I believe, is El Dorado. Francisco de Orellana, the great Spanish discoverer of the Amazon, heard this legend and left Quito with four hundred Indians in 1542, traveling east, to find it. He was unsuccessful, but he did discover the Amazon River and took this information back to Spain. Later he returned to the New World to look for El Dorado again. On his last expedition he vanished in the jungles of the Amazon.
We all have read about that endless legend, believing that it is a city. Now I can say, yes, El Dorado is a city, but a city that is deeply buried.
And now I would like humbly to investigate the great ancient culture that inhabitated this cave, in a scientific manner, without offending the interest of my country, and above all without offending those Jívaros I love and respect, especially Mashutaka, my boyhood friend, who will someday be the tribal cacique of his clan.
The first son of Mashutaka was born when the night sky was tinted with red flashes, and the tribal legends said that this was to be the omen that he was to be named Yucalchiri—yu, or god, and chiri, meaning son. He is a kind of Son of God. When Yucalchiri grows up, not only will he be cacique of his tribe but he will also acquire the knowledge to decipher all those hieroglyphs, all those passages written in the strange script I have seen in the Cueva de los Tayos.
Mashutaka, following in the tradition of his own father, brought his son, Yucalchiri, to me to educate as Mashutaka himself had been educated by my uncle many years before. To pay for the education of his son, Mashutaka gave me a large golden piece shaped like a pear, and many other gold pieces through the years. I sold them, and with this money I was able not only to educate Yucalchiri but also to travel to many countries in South America to increase my knowledge. I know Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Colombia.
In 1966, ten years after he brought his son to me, Mashutaka came out of the Oriente to my town, snatched Yucalchiri away from me, and took him without giving me any explanation.
I have kept the secret of the Cueva de los Tayos for many, many years on account on my boyhood friendship with Mashutaka. Yet now he has taken his son away from me with no explanation, and he has threatened to kill me.
But I do not think the Jívaros are the sole proprietors of the great archaeological museum. They are only the guardians, because they do not know just what it means. I am very resentful that Mashutaka took his son away from me. I protected that boy morally and intellectually, and I received financial support from Mashutaka for us both. It was this support that allowed me to travel in many countries. Now I am unable to travel, and this secret, which belongs not only to Ecuador but to the world, remains unknown.
I have thought long and deep on this, and I believe there should be an organization of international scope which can provide the scientific support to achieve this discovery. The secret must be told.
I am determined to take serious people to the cave, although I understand that it will involve great and imminent danger for me. I am not afraid: this is a simply a fact. But we must go forward and overcome these difficulties.
Although he tried very hard for several years to bring researchers and explorers, such as Pino Turolla in the seventies and Stanley Hall in the nineties, the expedition of return and rediscovery never happened. Jaramillo was killed by one of his sons at his house, half a mile from the University of Esmeraldas, where he was teaching geopolitics during the last years of his life.