2. To Kill a King:
Ingapirca to Cajamarca

Ingapirca

During the night I enjoyed being woken by the rattle of rain on the roof, and curled up tighter, happy to have more than two slender skins of fabric between me and the sky. In the grey morning, I was lying on the hotel room floor in my long-johns doing back exercises when the maid walked in, blushed and walked out. I hope it didn't put her off marriage for good. My spine was holding up well, though my body felt generally exhausted. After two breakfasts I strolled round the village, feeling light as air without the backpack. The town was a rough gridiron just four or five blocks long. Street vendors fired up oil-drum stoves with logs to cook stew, or blew on coals under iron grills. In the lanes, a boy whistled a clear melodious tune, and stalked songbirds with his catapult. A large sow scratched herself luxuriously against a frayed steel cable supporting a telegraph pole. It danced and swayed to her rhythm. A blind beggar came up the hill blowing a yellow plastic whistle, feeling his way with two long and slender white poles, like a rescuer after an avalanche, probing for life. He stopped precisely opposite the shrine of the Virgin, crossed himself and moved on.

There is little written in English about Ingapirca, and not much more in Spanish; yet its existence has long been known; it wasn't a hidden mystery like Machu Picchu. Young Pedro de Cieza de Leon saw it less than twenty years after the conquest. The La Condamine expedition visited it in 1748, and Humboldt in 1801. They all looked at its terracing, massive stonework and powerful defensive position, and concluded it was a military fortress. But now we know the truth is both more complex and more interesting. Ingapirca was not founded by the Incas; they had conquered the area just three generations before the Spanish Conquest, defeating the Cañari nation, who put up fierce resistance before recognising they would not win, and negotiating peace. The Cañari had been here a long time. Recent linguistic studies have suggested they came from central America, and shared origins with those mighty masons, the Toltecs. They were dark-skinned, said Leon, and much given to shouting. They had a southern capital at modern-day Cuenca, but here, for their northern base, which they called Hatun-Cañar, they selected this fascinating site where the natural route from the highlands curled down into old and rich volcanic soils. Here a promontory commands all the rich farmland below where the Cañar River begins its long fall to the sea. On the end of that promontory stands the Inca temple, and, on the connecting neck of land, the houses of the rich, and the storehouses of the wealth of empire. Descending from it, into the little valley, is a ladder of stone-lined baths for bathing and ritual cleansing. All this is surrounded to the north by tall hills with rippled flanks.

There is no intact Cañari architecture, here or anywhere else. A waist-high holy stone stands by an oval of river boulders that mark a Cañari tomb. These meagre remains are now flanked by circular Inca storage pits, where wealth was collected and distributed. But the Cañari themselves were adventurous traders, acquiring alluvial gold from the Amazon, and trading with rainforest tribes, including the infamous Jívaro, who measured prestige by the number of shrunken heads a man possessed, struck from enemies taken in battle, their lips sewn together, the threads pulled out through the nostrils. The Cañari submitted to Inca rule but did not forget, becoming willing allies of the Spanish against Atahualpa.

Beautiful llamas grazed the site, their coats a deep brown with hints of purplish black. Some noise, inaudible to me, came from the village. The dominant male ran to the highest terrace and stood there, all courage and concern for his family. The others followed, stayed respectfully behind him and stared past his quivering flanks. I walked towards the temple. The Incas organised space to express and wield power. I wanted to explore the core in order of increasing sacredness, finishing at the small temple of the sun, on the very top of a feature like a low oval keep. Firstly, I entered the gridiron precincts of the apartments of the elite; then I crossed a small square, where the public would be admitted only on great feast days, to a ten-foot high trapezoidal door. The lintel stones had been drilled to take locking bars. Each step I took was a greater sacrilege. Had I, as a poor scribe, five hundred years ago, tried to enter, I would have been killed. These were the quarters of the sun virgins. When girls reached nine or ten years old, the prettiest and most personable were selected and taken into convents (using the equivalent Christian terms, for convenience) such as this, where nuns would educate them in religion and all manner of domestic duties. When they reached thirteen or fourteen years of age, inspectors came from Cuzco to select the most beautiful and accomplished to go to the capital, and be presented to the Inca. He would choose those he wanted for his own household, as servants or concubines. Others would go to reward his supporters in the same way; the remainder would enter the religious houses, especially the Temple of the Sun, and some would be trained to be the next generation of teaching-nuns.

A father could only refuse to let his young daughter go into the nunnery if he could prove she was not a virgin; no help, since the punishment for adultery or fornication was death. If found guilty of either, she would end her life next to her lover, both hung naked by the hair to die from thirst or attacks by birds of prey. Despite the terrible punishments, lovers still spurned the rules. One lament comes down to us; a poem sung by convicted fornicators:

Father condor, take me,

Brother falcon, take me,

Tell my little mother I am coming,

For five days I have not eaten or drunk a drop,

Father messenger, bearer of signs, swift messenger,

Carry me off, I beg you: little mouth, little heart,

Tell my little father and my little mother, I beg you,

that I am coming.

I looked round the simple rooms, where the girls served and waited below the temple wall, in hope or fear, for the call to the Inca's bed.

The site was plundered up until 1966, when the Government and the Museum of the Bank of Ecuador created a local commission to care for the site. Today it gets little or no state money, and the five-dollar entrance fee for foreign tourists does much to keep it secure. The building which dominates the site is a rare thing in Inca architecture: an oval structure. They are usually sacred spaces, and this 140 foot long enclosure was no exception. Its wall has the best stonework on the site: better than the temple itself, above. There had been subsidence, but the resulting rise and fall of the courses had the elegance of the brim of a well-turned hat. From the end view, it looked like the base of a powerful lighthouse, curved to take the buffeting of the endless waves of the passing years: time's injury. The face of the rock was spalling slightly, flakes coming away, but there were still many places where you could not get a penknife blade between the stones.

On the opposite side to the house of the sun virgins, the land was close to being a cliff. It descended in four tall terraces, each just three feet wide, sloping outwards to a fall of 150 feet. On the highest, an old gardener with a small sickle, its split wooden handle wired together, was unconcernedly weeding. Back near the entrance to the house of the virgins was a broad stair, which turned right to face another trapezoidal doorway. Passing through it, I was faced by a narrower stone stair, leading to the oval's flat summit, and, in the centre of it, a small rectangular temple, now plain, once weighted with gold. The holy of holies was just large enough for the priests to make their sacrifices and pin down the mystery of the turning seasons, the fleeing years.

The Incas' plotting of the sun's movements is well known. But the movement of another feature was more fundamental to their map of the heavens: the Milky Way. They called it Mayu: the celestial river. The Milky Way is the soft cloud of innumerable stars which we see when we look towards the centre of our spiral galaxy, into the greatest depth of stars. The earth's equator is not parallel to this plane, so, as the earth turns, we see it from a continually changing angle. To us, the Milky Way seems to oscillate in the sky, daily changing its orientation between NE-SW to SE-NW. Every year it completes a cycle of movement, which makes an X in the heavens dividing it into four quarters. The solstices of these movements occur at the start of the dry and the rainy seasons. This X provided the framework for the Incas' map of the heavens, and for the empire of the son of heaven, which was called Tawantinsusyu, the land of the four quarters. The Incas were such careful observers that they not only recognised groups of stars, but also dark shapes in the Milky Way caused by inter-stellar gas clouds blocking out the light from the stars beyond. They named them the Llama, the Toad, the Fox and the Serpent. Lunar cycles dictated when to plant, and other heavenly bodies gave the times for various agricultural tasks. In a modern community near Cuzco, ethnographer Gary Urton found that the farmers still measured out the year as their ancestors did, marking the movement of key stars against the hills and buildings around them. Young men complained that crops had been left to decay in the field, because respected village...