The
Nephites followed king Limhi and Ammoron through a secret pass and into the
wilderness
Now the word “secret” as found in the 1828 Webster American Dictionary of the English Language, tells us that the word came from the the Latin secretus, that is: “seg” is to separate, as in Latin seco—to cut off. Properly, “to separate,” hence, hid; concealed from the notice o knowledge of all persons except the individual concerned; unseen, private, secluded; removed from sight, unknown; not seen, not apparent; kept from observation; a thing not discovered and therefore not known.
Consequently, in the Land of Promise, there has to be a major city—the city of Nephi—where there is a back pass that is secret, i.e., one not known to others, or one difficult to find and know about. Gideon, as the king’s chief captain over the military, had acquainted himself with all the land about the city as would be expected by the military commander of the fortress, and was aware of this secret pass that by definition would have been unknown to others.
In Andean Peru, there is a set of intricate passages and a network of underground galleries located in Cusco, very close to Sacsayhuaman that connected the fortress with the valley below. Some of these passages pass through what is known today as the Rodadero and one in particular goes around the esplanade and the complex behind the fortress and into the wilderness, or undeveloped country beyond.
A secret passage through the rock
hill known as Rodadero behind Sacsayhuaman
Around these mysterious constructions, that were made by the hand of man in some remote past, along with parts that were natural, many myths and legends have developed over the millennia. One of those tales is that one of the tunnels from Sacsayhuaman was subterranean and provided a path to the valley below the temple there.
Entrance to one of the subterranean
tunnels behind Sacsayhuaman
In fact, the Jesuit Priest Agnelio Oliva wrote a few years after the Conquest that a vast subterranean network existed in the Andes, which inferred engineering skills of the highest caliber which the early inhabitants of South America obviously possessed. He tells us that the megalithic stonework of Tiahuanaco was ancient even at the time of the Conquest, nor could the Indians of the period provide an answer as to the identity of the megalithic builders.
The Roman Catholic Society father recorded the words of an old Inca quipu reader to the effect that the real Tiahuanaco was a subterranean city exceeding the one above ground in vastness. It was believed that the entrance to the underground apartments could be gained through four tunnels. Last century one passage was evidently found as treasure hunters managed to get in, to look for gold, but only one came out. He brought out with him two gold bars but left behind his sanity. After this incident the Peruvian government decided to wall up the cave entrance..."
He also wrote that there were splendid and large buildings in the labyrinth below and to it was attributed the construction of the underground labyrinth which were exits to the border roads, bridges, fortresses and other buildings. “
One of the tunnel entrances
In a chronicle of 1590, written by Father Mercedario Fray Martín de Murúa, in Chapter IX he states: “[they] made a path under the earth in the fortress of this city of Cuzco to Curicancha which was where they had the temple and oratory of the sun and the moon and of all the other huacas they worshiped, until the entrance of this socabón [tunnel] in the said fortress where they called the chingana although everything is already lost and finished, because there is no one who can see where it is going, but it is only the entrance, because in entering some stretch they are lost and they cannot find the way. Because there is no memory of it in the said place of the Curicancha and they…had it closed because no one entered inside” (Martín de Murúa, Historia general del Piru, Chapter IX, 1590,
Another chronicler of the conquest was Garcilaso de la Vega, who stated: “A network of underground passages, as long as the towers themselves were all connected. The system was composed of streets and malls starting in all directions, all with identical doors. It was so complicated that even the bravest did not venture into the labyrinth without an orientation guide that consisted of a roll of rope or thick brabant attached to the entrance door to be unwound as it advanced through the tunnels. As a child I used to go to the fort with the boys my age, but we did not dare to go far, always staying in places where there was sunlight, because we were very afraid of getting lost, after hearing all the stories that Indians told us about the place.”
Investigations into these labyrinths became important again in 2003, when the international press echoed after the discovery of a large underground tunnel just over one mile-long in the Cusco subsoil at the time of the Koricancha Project (L. Norman Shurtliff, The City of Nephi, Author House, Bloomington Ind., 2018).
For centuries rumors persisted that a series of tunnels existed under Cuzco, even in Inca times, who it is claimed by many historical figures (Incans and Spaniards) from the era of the Spanish Conquistadors who stated that the Incas kept a well-guarded secret of underground tunnels crisscrossing Bolivia and Peru. They also attested that those ancient tunnels hundreds of miles long were built by an unknown peoples many years before them!
This, of course, was always considered merely myth until a series of tunnels were discovered and confirmed by Pi Rambla. What we know about these tunnels, where they lead, and their original purpose is not now. However, it bespeaks of a secret pass as we find in Mosiah: “back pass, through the back wall, on the back side of the city… we will pass through the secret pass on the left of their camp when they are drunken and asleep” (Mosiah 22:6-7).
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