Cloud Road (37 page)

The path up to Sacsaywaman became a fine broad Inca stair. Soon I was walking under a wall made from Gargantuan stones, but I continued to the back of the site to begin where the rising ground gave a view of the
fortress. I found the large circular structure, like the arena of an amphitheatre, discovered only in 1985, and believed to be a water cistern. It may have been of religious importance, as well as supplying the fortress with a water supply; the Incas preferred to unite, rather than divide, functions.

It is often said, without contemporary authority from any Inca source I know of, that Cuzco was built in the shape of a puma, with Sacsaywaman as its head. If so, it is a spiky, shaggy head, the defensive walls built in zigzags. It was a technique that lengthened the
battlements
, allowing more defenders to attack assailants, and, by creating a variety of angles from which to attack, making shields less effective. In a conventional masonry wall, the physical weak point of such a structure is the tip of the tooth, which assailants can attack from two sides. But these stones were so colossal such attacks were futile. Cieza de León marvelled, ‘There are stones of such size and magnificence in these walls that it baffles the mind to think how they could be brought up and set in place, and who could have cut them, for they had so few tools.’ The largest individual stone stands twenty-eight feet high and weighs 360 tons. It is one of the largest stones in any building anywhere in the world. Still more monstrous stones were abandoned lower down the hill.

It was begun by the Inca Pachakuti around 1440 after Cuzco had been all but destroyed by an uprising of the Chankas. Over a thousand feet of three-tiered wall was largely complete when the Spanish arrived ninety years later. Although the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega was called fanciful for saying 20,000 men worked on Sacsaywaman, Cieza de León agrees, and says the native
records for it remained in his lifetime, proving they worked in shifts for sixty-eight years. The records were kept on
quipus
, devices that look like skirts of knotted string, and worked something like abacuses. From these soft, woollen records, we know the depth of the toil: 4,000 quarried and cut stone, 6,000 hauled with leather or hemp ropes, 10,000 dug ditches, laid foundations and cut timbers. The stones were worked mostly with stone tools, preferably the tough iron ore haematite, which might be meteoric in origin: a fortress for a sun-king, hand-made with tools from the stars. Bronze tools were used for cutting holes, and sand and water to polish the final surface. Percy Harrison Fawcett, the British explorer and fabulist, reported a friend’s tale of finding a pot in an Inca grave. It was knocked over, spilling a liquid on the ground. When they went back to it they found the liquid had dissolved the rock, and it could be smoothed like wet cement. Such myths are not necessary. Modern archaeologists have demonstrated how stone tools can be used with a rapid, bouncing action, to shape all the rocks used in Inca structures. Time and patience are the only mysteries required.

I walked down to the hollow and crept below the main walls. I had expected to be impressed: I wasn’t. I was overwhelmed, slightly stunned, by the combination of the mass of the stones, the size of the ramparts and the precision of the work. I wound my way up the ramparts’ terraces through trilithon gateways up onto the small plateau where the three keep-like towers once stood.

The first Spanish entered Cuzco peaceably in March 1533. Soon the puppet Inca Manco was in place, another son from the fertile bed of Wayna Capac. Spanish
treatment of him showed the conquistadors were deficient in almost every requirement of government except brutality. Despite his being chosen as their own puppet, they treated Manco with vicious contempt. One day, Gonzalo Pizarro, who despite serious competition was easily the most unpleasant of the Pizarro brothers, decided he should have an Indian princess, though they seldom married Incas except for dowries. He decided it should be Manco’s principal wife (who was also his sister), Cura Ocllo. It was a profound insult to her, and to Manco, for it was not just a formal marriage of state, they were much in love. When the High Priest, the second most important man in the Inca hierarchy, protested, Gonzalo told him, ‘If you don’t keep quiet I’ll slit you open alive and cut you in pieces.’ Manco let her go when he realised he would be imprisoned if he didn’t. Within a year, he saw no way forward but rebellion. In 1536, he seized Sacsaywaman and took control of most of Cuzco.

The lack of effective Inca weapons to kill armoured men and horses cost them their empire. Without them, they even failed to retain Sacsaywaman. Traditional weapons included clubs, slings and spears. The slings were their most dangerous weapons, nearly as good as a gun, thought one Spaniard. The Incas had conquered Amazonian groups who used bows, but never seem to have adopted their wholesale use. They had some metal weapons, though no iron until the Spanish arrived. But they had no means to mass-produce them, so there was no way to equip the rank and file soldiers with metal weapons. In any case, metals were associated with status and rank, not utility.

The decisive action was a hand-to-hand battle, fought
around the three towers. Things had gone poorly for the Spanish. Juan Pizarro, the best of the Pizarros, affable and generous, as well as brave, was struck on the jaw by a stone, which swelled until he was in too much pain to wear his helmet. Rather than rest, he fought the next day without a helmet, and in the evening was struck on the head again, and died soon after. All seemed lost until a Spaniard called Hernán Sánchez, fighting alone, climbed a scaling ladder and slipped into a window on the ground floor of the greatest tower. He attacked all those inside so ferociously they fled up the tower. An Inca lord wearing a captured Spanish helmet defended the roof, ferociously wielding a sword and an axe, attacking not just the Spanish, but any Inca soldier who talked of surrender. He was wounded, but carried on as if nothing had happened. He was wounded again, and fought on. In grudging admiration Hernando Pizarro ordered him captured alive. The Spanish wore down the defenders until the Inca lord fought on alone. When he saw it was hopeless, he hurled his weapons at the Spanish, climbed the walls, filled his mouth with earth, gouged bloody lines down his cheeks, and hurled himself from the battlements.

The towers were subsequently plundered for stone to build new Spanish palaces; today they are just masonry rings in the turf. But the retaining walls were too massive to dismember. They run for nearly a quarter of a mile along the hill. Cieza de Leon: ‘This was the grandeur of the Incas, the signs they wished to leave for the future.’ How the signs of that greatness must have changed value in their minds, as they saw the Spanish had won. The strangers had not been amusing dupes, temporarily useful to deploy in their civil war, but their nemesis. Society, like
empire, would unravel, be re-woven into a coarse new cloth that itched and never sat well. Young Cieza de Leon, a boy soldier, saw this sadness take over. ‘I remember seeing with my own eyes old Indians who, when they came within sight of Cuzco, stood looking at the city and making a great outcry that afterwards turned to tears of sadness, contemplating the present and recalling the past, when for so many years they had had rulers of their own in that city who knew how to win them to their service and friendship in a different way from that of the Spaniards.’

The ageing Inca historian Huaman Poma, never more content than when he was censoring others, had opinions on how the various groups conducted themselves after the conquest. He thought Indians affecting beards ‘looked like boiled prawns’, while Spaniards without beards ‘looked like old tarts in fancy dress’. As for the ordinary Christianised Indians, he thought they would do all right if only they could resist the temptation to get drunk and drugged at festivals, and commit incest with their sisters.

With this, we take our leave of Huaman Poma. He worked on his
Letter to a King
for decades, as kings came and went. He died, aged about ninety, in 1615, leaving a chaotic and eccentric manuscript of 1,400 pages. It was sent to Spain where it lay unread for 300 years: his witness as mute to the monarchs of Spain as the Bible had been to Atahualpa at Cajamarca. It is just as well. Had it been read while he was alive, they would have seen that his praise was decorous and formal, while his criticism came right from the heart. Of all the chroniclers, he provides the most laughs, though there is something Pooterish in him, and when he rides his hobby-horses
about the new and infamous times, sometimes I would have been laughing at him, not with him. His manuscript ends with a sentiment any writer understands:

Farewell.

If Sacsaywaman is the head of Cuzco’s puma, the tail is the confluence of the two small rivers which were canalised to run sweetly and cleanly through the streets of the city. Within it lies Qoricancha, the most important precinct in Cuzco. From the main square I cut down a long, narrow alley, now known again by its original Inca name, Inti K’ikllu, Passage of the Sun. The Spanish renamed it to reflect new business: Prison Street. Its
left-hand
side is the largest extant wall of any Inca building in Cuzco, belonging to the Temple of the Virgins. One block lower is a small park, a rare green space in the dense city, lying below terraces where flowering shrubs blazed yellow, and lizards skip-flicked into crevices in the walls. Once, the bushes and the lizards were pure silver and gold.

The Temple of the Sun, which commanded these gardens, is regarded by many as the greatest temple in all the Americas. Once gold or silver was brought into Cuzco, it was forbidden to take it out again, on pain of death. It became the greatest display of power, prestige and wealth
in all the empire. This is the last time we shall hear from Garcilaso de la Vega. He finished his history of the Incas, or
Royal Commentaries,
very late in life. He died, still in Spanish exile, on 22 April 1616, the day before Shakespeare. He was aged about seventy-six. Miguel Cervantes died the same ill-starred year. Garcilaso’s unconsidered remains were buried in a Spain that remembered him only because his dangerous history reminded Peruvians of their magnificent Inca past. In the nave of El Triunfo church is a small flight of stone steps which leads down into a small stone vault whose walls are lined with semi-circular niches like pigeon holes. It looks like an empty post office. There is no tomb, just silver letters embossed on a black plaque, recording that King Don Juan Carlos I of Spain and Doña Sofia brought home his remains on 25 November 1978. With his mixed parentage, Garcilaso was the first hybrid voice of the Americas. His heart was pulled both ways, suffering the crisis of identity that still bedevils many four centuries later. His ability to move comfortably in both camps makes him the most complex of the chroniclers. Remembering Qoricancha, Garcilaso considered the other chroniclers and reflected that ‘nothing they have written, nor anything that I might add, could ever depict it as it really was’. Only three Spaniards ever saw it intact, when they were sent ahead to speed up the delivery of Atahualpa’s ransom to Cajamarca. They are our only window on its finest treasures, but they were illiterate louts, and remembered little but the weight of the loot. There was a solid gold statue of a man, his arm raised in command, that might have been the god Wiracocha. There was a field of silver maize with golden corncobs, growing
from clods of golden earth. Nearby grazed a flock of twenty llamas, fashioned from 18 carat gold, one of which was weighed at 58 lbs. Looking after them were golden shepherds with golden slings, leaning on golden staves. All the trees and plants of the area were reproduced in precious metal. There were snakes and lizards; butterflies and birds danced on the slender boughs; snails snuggled on the leaves.

Nearly all this was melted down into ingots; only tantalising scraps of the artistry remain. A little was sent intact to Philip of Spain so he could see for himself the brilliance of the empire which was now his. Seville goldsmiths examined miniature golden necklaces and admitted they could not copy them, the work was too fine. Philip at first refused even to look at the remnants of Peru’s treasures, but he did eventually show it off, to King Henry VIII and others, before consigning it to the furnace.

To mourn this loss is not falsely to impose modern cultural insights on the sixteenth century. Albrecht Dürer was the son of a goldsmith, and was once apprenticed to become one himself. He saw comparable articles in Cortés’s Mexican treasure and wrote: ‘I have seen the things which they have brought to the king out of the new land of gold. In all the days of my life, I have seen nothing which touches the heart as much as these for, among them, I have seen wonderfully artistic things, and have admired the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands. Indeed I do not know how to express my feelings about what I found there.’ The young priest Cristóbal de Molina watched, and condemned, the melting down. ‘Their only concern was to collect gold and silver to make themselves rich, without thinking that they were doing wrong and wrecking and
destroying. For what was being destroyed was more perfect than anything they enjoyed and possessed.’

The site of Qoricancha was contained by a curtain wall, four hundred feet long, of sublime, unsurpassed quality. Fine stretches of it survive to this day, brought to perfect courses, the face of each stone minutely cushioned. Below the top of the wall, running all the way round the outside, was a band of gold two hand-spans high and four fingers thick, fixed so cunningly that the Spanish could not at first remove it. Perhaps it took its name from this band; Qoricancha means Golden Enclosure. The temple is now entered through the gates of a Dominican friary built on top of it. Santo Domingo Friary suffered poetic justice in 1950 when an earthquake flattened it, leaving the palace almost untouched. Unfortunately, it was rebuilt. I arrived at opening time to miss the crowds, and was alone there for three-quarters of an hour, in warm sunshine. The Inca buildings are under cover, around the sides of the Dominican cloister. Once thatched, they are now roofless, standing like a row of small chapels; no ornament remains other than the perfection of the stonework. Despite the willingness of guides and guidebooks to allocate each bare space to a particular deity or role, there is no evidence of what each one was. All we know is that in these spaces, there was continual observation, not just of rites and sacrifice, but of the heavens. The most remarkable piece of masonry is the observatory, the most important part of the most sacred building in the empire. The wall narrows to the top and is inclined inwards to make it appear lighter. The profile of the wall slope is not perfectly straight, but bows outwards in the centre. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the human eye, a straight inclined wall
seems to sag in the middle; the bow corrects the illusion.