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  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