technically advanced race.
Not for the first time I was reminded of how difficult archaeologists
found it to provide accurate dates for engineering works like roads and
drystone walls which contained no organic compounds. Radiocarbon was
redundant in such circumstances; thermo-luminescence, too, was useless.
19 Royal Commentaries of the Incas, p. 233.
20 Ibid., p. 237.
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And while promising new tests such as Chlorine-36 rock-exposure dating
were now being developed their implementation was still some way off.
Pending further advances in the latter field, therefore, ‘expert’
chronology was still largely the result of guesswork and subjective
assumptions. Since it was known that the Incas had made intensive use of
Sacsayhuaman I could easily understand why it had been assumed that
they had built it. But there was no obvious or necessary connection
between these two propositions. The Incas could just as well have found
the structures already in place and moved into them.
If so, who had the original builders been?
The Viracochas, said the ancient myths, the bearded, white-skinned
strangers, the ‘shining ones’, the ‘faithful soldiers.’
As we travelled I continued to study the accounts of the Spanish
adventurers and ethnographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries who had faithfully recorded the ancient, pre-contact traditions
of the Peruvian Indians. What was particularly noticeable about these
traditions was the repeated emphasis that the coming of the Viracochas
had been associated with a terrible deluge which had overwhelmed the
earth and destroyed the greater part of humanity.
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Chapter 7
Were There Giants Then?
Just after six in the morning the little train jerked into motion and began
its slow climb up the steep sides of the valley of Cuzco. The narrowgauge tracks were laid out in a series of Z shapes. We chugged along the
lower horizontal of the first Z, then shunted and went backwards up the
oblique, shunted again and went forward along the upper horizontal—
and so on, with numerous stops and starts, following a route that
eventually took us high above the ancient city. The Inca walls and colonial
palaces, the narrow streets, the cathedral of Santo Domingo squatting
atop the ruins of Viracocha’s temple, all looked spectral and surreal in
the pearl-grey light of a dawn sky. A fairy pattern of electric lamps still
decorated the streets, a thin mist seeped across the ground, and the
smoke of domestic fires rose from the chimneys over the tiled roofs of
countless small houses.
Eventually the train turned its back on Cuzco and we proceeded for a
while in a straight north-westerly direction towards our destination:
Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, some three hours and 130
kilometres away. I had intended to read, but lulled by the rocking motion
of the carriage, I dropped off to sleep instead. Fifty minutes later I awoke
to find that we were passing through a painting. The foreground, brightly
sunlit, consisted of flat green meadows sprinkled with little patches of
thawing frost, distributed on either side of a stream across a long, wide
valley.
In the middle of my view, dotted with bushes, was a large field on which
a handful of black and white dairy cows grazed. Nearby was a scattered
settlement of houses outside which stood small, dark-skinned Quechua
Indians dressed in ponchos, balaclavas and colourful woollen hats. More
distant were slopes canopied in fir trees and exotic eucalyptus. My eye
followed the rising contours of a pair of high green mountains, which
then parted to reveal folded and even more lofty uplands. Beyond these
soared a far horizon surmounted by a jagged range of radiant and snowy
peaks.
Casting down the giants
It was with understandable reluctance that I turned at last to my reading.
I wanted to look more closely at some of the curious links I thought I had
identified connecting the sudden appearance of Viracocha to the deluge
legends of the Incas and other Andean peoples.
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Before me was a passage from Fr. Jose de Acosta’s Natural and Moral
History of the Indies, in which the learned priest set out ‘what the Indians
themselves report of their beginning’:
They make great mention of a deluge, which happened in their country ... The
Indians say that all men were drowned in the deluge, and they report that out of
Lake Titicaca came one Viracocha, who stayed in Tiahuanaco, where at this day
there are to be seen the ruins of ancient and very strange buildings, and from
thence came to Cuzco, and so began mankind to multiply ...1
Making a mental note to find out more about Lake Titicaca, and the
mysterious Tiahuanaco, I read the following passage summarizing a
legend from the Cuzco area:
For some crime unstated the people who lived in the most ancient times were
destroyed by the creator ... in a deluge. After the deluge the creator appeared in
human form from Lake Titicaca. He then created the sun and moon and stars.
After that he renewed the human population of the earth ...2
In another myth
The great Creator God, Viracocha, decided to make a world for men to live in. First
he made the earth and sky. Then he began to make people to live in it, carving
great stone figures of giants which he brought to life. At first all went well but
after a time the giants began to fight among themselves and refused to work.
Viracocha decided that he must destroy them. Some he turned back into stone ...
the rest he overwhelmed with a great flood.3
Very similar notions were, of course, found in other, quite unconnected,
sources, such as the Jewish Old Testament. In Chapter six of the Book of
Genesis, for example, which describes the Hebrew God’s displeasure with
his creation and his decision to destroy it, I had long been intrigued by
one of the few descriptive statements made about the forgotten era
before the Flood. According to the enigmatic language of that statement,
‘There were giants in the earth in those days ...’.4 Could the ‘giants’
buried in the biblical sands of the Middle East be connected in some
unseen way to the ‘giants’ woven into the fabric of pre-Colombian native
American legends? Adding considerably to the mystery was the fact that
the Jewish and Peruvian sources both went on, with many further details
in common, to depict an angry deity unleashing a catastrophic flood upon
a wicked and disobedient world.
On the next page of the sheaf of documents I had assembled was this
Inca account of the deluge handed down by a certain Father Molina in his
Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Yngas:
In the life of Manco Capac, who was the first Inca, and from whom they began to
1 José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Book I, Chapter four, in
South American Mythology
, p. 61.
2 Ibid., p. 82.
3 D. Gifford and J. Sibbick, Warriors, Gods and Spirits from South American Mythology,
Eurobook Limited, 1983, p. 54.
4 Genesis 6:4.
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boast themselves children of the Sun and from whom they derived their idolatrous
worship of the Sun, they had an ample account of the deluge. They say that in it
perished all races of men and created things insomuch that the waters rose above
the highest mountain peaks in the world. No living thing survived except a man
and a woman who remained in a box and, when the waters subsided, the wind
carried them ... to Tiahuanaco [where] the creator began to raise up the people
and the nations that are in that region ...5
Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish nobleman and an Inca royal
woman, was already familiar to me from his Royal Commentaries of the
Incas. He was regarded as one of the most reliable chroniclers of the
traditions of his mother’s people and had done his work in the sixteenth
century, soon after the conquest, when those traditions had not yet been
contaminated by foreign influences. He, too, confirmed what had
obviously been a universal and deeply impressed belief: ‘After the waters
of the deluge had subsided, a certain man appeared in the country of
Tiahuanaco ...’6
That man had been Viracocha. Wrapped in his cloak, he was strong and
august of countenance’ and walked with unassailable confidence through
the most dangerous badlands. He worked miracles of healing and could
call down fire from heaven. To the Indians it must have seemed that he
had materialized from nowhere.
Ancient traditions
We were now more than two hours into our journey to Machu Picchu and
the panorama had changed. Huge black mountains, upon which not a
trace of snow remained to reflect the sunlight, towered darkly above us
and we seemed to be running through a rocky defile at the end of a
narrow valley filled with sombre shadows. The air was cold and so were
my feet. I shivered and resumed reading.
One thing was obvious amid the confused web of legends I had
reviewed, legends which supplemented one another but also at times
conflicted. All the scholars agreed that the Incas had borrowed, absorbed
and passed on the traditions of many of the different civilized peoples
over whom they had extended their control during the centuries of
expansion of their vast empire. In this sense, whatever the outcome of
the historical debate over the antiquity of the Incas themselves, nobody
could seriously dispute their role as transmitters of the ancient belief
systems of all the great archaic cultures—coastal and highland, known
and unknown—that had preceded them in this land.
And who could say just what civilizations might have existed in Peru in
the unexplored regions of the past? Every year archaeologists come up
5 Fr.. Molina, 'Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de los Yngas', in South American Mythology,
p. 61.
6 Royal Commentaries of the Incas.
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with new finds which extend the horizons further and further back in
time. So why shouldn’t they one day discover evidence of the penetration
into the Andes, in remote antiquity, of a race of civilizers who had come
from overseas and gone away again after completing their work? That
was what the legends seemed to me to be suggesting, legends that most
of all, and most clearly, had immortalized the memory of the man/god
Viracocha striding the high windswept byways of the Andes working
miracles wherever he went:
Viracocha himself, with his two assistants, journeyed north ... He travelled up the
cordillera, one assistant went along the coast, and the other up the edge of the
eastern forests ... The Creator proceeded to Urcos, near Cuzco, where he
commanded the future population to emerge from a mountain. He visited Cuzco,
and then continued north to Ecuador. There, in the coastal province of Manta, he
took leave of his people and, walking on the waves, disappeared across the
ocean.7
There was always this poignant moment of goodbye at the end of every
folk memory featuring the remarkable stranger whose name meant ‘Foam
of the Sea’:
Viracocha went on his way, calling forth the races of men ... When he came to the
district of Puerto Viejo he was joined by his followers whom he had sent on
before, and when they had joined him he put to sea in their company and they say
that he and his people went by water as easily as they had traversed the land.8
Always this poignant goodbye ... and often a hint of science or magic.
Time capsule
Outside the window of the train things were happening. To my left,
swollen with dark water, I could see the Urubamba, a tributary of the
Amazon and a river sacred to the Incas. The air temperature had warmedup noticeably: we had descended into a relatively low-lying valley with its
own tropical micro-climate. The mountain slopes rising on either side of
the tracks were densely covered in green forests and I was reminded that
this was truly a region of vast and virtually insuperable obstacles.
Whoever had ventured all this way into the middle of nowhere to build
Machu Picchu must have had a very strong motive for doing so.
Whatever the reason had been, the choice of such a remote location had
at least one beneficial side-effect: Machu Picchu was never found by the
conquistadores and friars during their days of destructive zeal. Indeed, it
was not until 1911, when the fabulous heritage of older races was
beginning to be treated with greater respect, that a young American
explorer, Hiram Bingham, revealed Machu Picchu to the world. It was
realized at once that this incredible site opened a unique window on pre
7 The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, p. 237.
8 Juan de Batanzos, 'Suma y Narracion de los Incas', in South American Mythology, p. 79.
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Colombian civilization; in consequence the ruins were protected from
looters and souvenir hunters and an important chunk of the enigmatic
past was preserved to amaze future generations.
Having passed through a one-horse town named Agua Caliente (Hot
Water), where a few broken-down restaurants and cheap bars leered at
travellers from beside the tracks, we reached Machu Picchu Puentas
Ruinas station at ten minutes past nine in the morning. From here a halfhour bus ride on a winding dirt road up the side of a steep and
forbidding mountain brought us to Machu Picchu itself, to the ruins, and
to a bad hotel which charged us a nonsensical amount of money for a not
very clean room. We were the only guests. Though it had been years since
the local guerrilla movement had last bombed the Machu Picchu train, not
many foreigners were keen to come here any more.
Machu Picchu dreaming
It was two in the afternoon. I stood on a high point at the southern end of
the site. The ruins stretched out northwards in lichen-enshrouded
terraces before me. Thick clouds were wrapped in a ring around the
mountain tops but the sunlight still occasionally burst through here and
there.
Way down on the valley floor I could see the sacred river curled in a
hairpin loop right around the central formation on which Machu Picchu
was based, like a moat surrounding a giant castle. The river showed deep
green from this vantage point, reflecting the greenness of the steep
jungle slopes. And there were patches of white water and wonderful
sparkling gleams of light.
I gazed across the ruins towards the dominant peak. Its name is Huana
Picchu and it used to feature in all the classic travel agency posters of this
site. To my astonishment I now observed that for a hundred metres or so
below its summit it had been neatly terraced and sculpted: somebody had
been up there and had carefully raked the near-vertical cliffs into a
graceful hanging garden which had perhaps in ancient times been
planted with bright flowers.
It seemed to me that the entire site, together with its setting, was a
monumental work of sculpture composed in part of mountains, in part of
rock, in part of trees, in part of stones—and also in part of water. It was a
heartachingly beautiful place, certainly one of the most beautiful places I
have ever seen.
Despite its luminous brilliance, however, I felt that I was gazing down
on to a city of ghosts. It was like the wreck of the Marie Celeste, deserted
and restless. The houses were arranged in long terraces. Each house was
tiny, with just one room fronting directly on to the narrow street, and the
architecture was solid and functional but by no means ornate. By way of
contrast certain ceremonial areas were engineered to an infinitely higher
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standard and incorporated giant blocks similar to those I had seen at
Sacsayhuaman. One smoothly polished polygonal monolith was around
twelve feet long by five feet wide by five feet thick and could not have
weighed less than 200 tons. How had the ancient builders managed to
get it up here?
Machu Picchu.
There were dozens of others like it too, and they were all arranged in
the familiar jigsaw puzzle walls of interlocking angles. On one block I was