Tale of lost treasure that proves true

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VALVERDE'S GOLD: IN SEARCH OF THE LAST GREAT INCA TREASURE

By Mark Honigsbaum

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 348 pages

REVIEWED BY BART McDOWELL

This treasure tale is true. And the treasure itself is dazzlingly documented, with words to whet one's greed.

Historians have long known that in the Peruvian Andes in the year 1532, Francisco Pizarro took prisoner the ruling Inca, Atahualpa, and demanded that his subjects pay a huge ransom in gold and silver -- "more than fifteen thousand men could carry on their backs," it was reported. After the Indians paid much of the ransom, Pizarro murdered Atahualpa.

William Prescott describes the metalwork -- "goblets, ewers, salvers . . . curious imitations of various plants and animals" and even a garden with "a fountain in gold and silver that . . . sent up a sparkling jet of gold, while birds and animals of the same material played in the waters at its base."

The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega noted that not all the treasure was seized by Pizarro, that "most of the riches were buried by the Indians . . . so carefully concealed that they have never been found."

Many adventurers have tried, among them, the author of this book. Mark Honigsbaum is a Briton who went to South America seeking information about botany. Mr. Honigsbaum was writing a book about a 19th-century scholar who had come to Ecuador in 1857, seeking plants that might cure malaria, one Richard Spruce.