Machu Picchu

For starters, they weren’t Incas. They were the Quechua peoples and the Incas were their God/Kings of mystic military might. To call them Incas would be the same as calling the Egyptians Pharoahs or the Romans Caesars. But only a few scholars appreciate the designation so the label persists. Incas.

Like Alexander before them they conquered pre-existing civilizations with stunning swiftness and ruled with detested benevolence. They emerged as a coherent civilization around 1100 CE and established Cuzco at 11,000 feet on the Amazonian side of the Andean continental divide as the navel of their universe. They figured out plant genetics hundreds of years before Mendel, imbedded Solstice and Equinox indicators in their architecture within a few years of Galileo, and dressed multi-ton rocks to millimeter tolerances and with them fashioned earthquake-proof structures in the clouds without the benefit of mortar.

Between 1400 and 1530 they subjugated all the peoples of the Andes from 2 degrees north latitude to 37 degrees south — Mohicas, Waris, Nascas, Chancas, Guanacos — an empire encompassing territory from present-day Colombia through Ecuador and Peru to the middle of Chile and connected for commerce and communication by cobbled paths rivaling Roman iters.

To their object rulers they offered two options: provide fealty and taxes; or die. The Incas were shrewd enough to know that loyalty thus purchased with intimidation brought equal measures of envy and hatred so invited the parents of their subject rulers to Cuzco as permanent guest/hostages, and their children as students of Incan arts and mathematics and superiority.

Machu Picchu may have been established as the Incan Harvard for these princelings, or as a temple, or as a refuge for the Inca’s chosen virgins. Nobody knows. What is known is that in the hundred years before Pizarro appeared with his pikes and boom sticks the Incas built Machu Picchu in about half the time it took to build La Cathedral de Notre Dame a Paris. The precipitous gorge of the Arambalu River horeshoes around three sides of its lofty site. A cliff seals off the fourth.

Even though the Incas abandoned it for a site far into the Amazonian jungle, the Spaniards never found it and so the tendrils and vines slowly smothered its terraces and walls and altars and dormitories and refectories and observatories, preserving Machu Picchu in the cloud rack until local farmers guided a Yale archeologist there a century ago so that today’s adventuresome first-world travelers could swarm it as the conquistadores never did.