Chapter 6

He Came in a Time of Chaos

Through all the ancient legends of the peoples of the Andes stalked a tall, bearded, pale-skinned figure wrapped in a cloak of secrecy. And though he was known by many different names in many different places he was always recognizably the same figure: Viracocha, Foam of the Sea, a master of science and magic who wielded terrible weapons and who came in a time of chaos to set the world to rights.

The same basic story was shared in many variants by all the peoples of the Andean region. It began with a vivid description of a terrifying period when the earth had been inundated by a great flood and plunged into darkness by the disappearance of the sun. Society had fallen into disorder, and the people suffered much hardship. Then

there suddenly appeared, coming from the south, a white man of large stature and authoritative demeanour. This man had such great power that he changed the hills into valleys and from the valleys made great hills, causing streams to flow from the living stone …¹

The early Spanish chronicler who recorded this tradition explained that it had been told to him by the Indians he had travelled among on his journeys in the Andes:

And they heard it from their fathers, who in their turn had it from the old songs which were handed down from very ancient times … They say that this man travelled along the highland route to the north, working marvels as he went and that they never saw him again. They say that in many places he gave men instructions how they should live, speaking to them with great love and kindness and admonishing them to be good and to do no damage or injury one to another, but to love one another and show charity to all. In most places they name him Ticci Viracocha …²

Other names applied to the same figure included Huaracocha, Con, Con Ticci or Kon Tiki, Thunupa, Taapac, Tupaca and Illa.³ He was a scientist, an architect of surpassing skills, a sculptor and an engineer: ‘He caused terraces and fields to be formed on the steep sides of ravines, and sustaining walls to rise up and support them. He also made irrigating channels to flow … and he went in various directions, arranging many things.’⁴

Viracocha was also a teacher and a healer and made himself helpful to people in need. It was said that ‘wherever he passed, he healed all that were sick and restored sight to the blind.’⁵

This gentle, civilizing, ‘superhuman’, Samaritan had another side to his nature, however. If his life were threatened, as it seems to have been on several occasions, he had the weapon of heavenly fire at his disposal:

Working great miracles by his words, he came to the district of the Canas and there, near a village called Cacha … the people rose up against him and threatened to stone him. They saw him sink to his knees and raise his hands to heaven as if beseeching aid in the peril which beset him. The Indians declare that thereupon they saw fire in the sky which seemed all around them. Full of fear, they approached him whom they had intended to kill and besought him to forgive them … Presently they saw that the fire was extinguished at his command, though stones were consumed by fire in such wise that large blocks could be lifted by hand as if they were cork. They narrate further that, leaving the place where this occurred, he came to the coast and there, holding his mantle, he went forth amidst the waves and was seen no more. And as he went they gave him the name Viracocha, which means ‘Foam of the Sea’.’⁶

The legends were unanimous in their physical description of Viracocha. In his Suma y Narracion de los Incas, for example, Juan de Betanzos, a sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler, stated that according to the Indians, he had been ‘a bearded man of tall stature clothed in a white robe which came down to his feet and which he wore belted at the waist’.⁷

Other descriptions, collected from many different and widely separated Andean peoples, all seemed to identify the same enigmatic individual. According to one he was:

A bearded man of medium height dressed in a rather long cloak … He was past his prime, with grey hair, and lean. He walked with a staff and addressed the natives with love, calling them his sons and daughters. As he traversed all the land he worked miracles. He healed the sick by touch. He spoke every tongue even better than the natives. They called him Thunupa or Tarpaca, Viracocha-rapacha or Pachaccan …⁸

In one legend Thunupa-Viracocha was said to have been a ‘white man of large stature, whose air and person aroused great respect and veneration’.⁹ In another he was described as a white man of august appearance, blue-eyed, bearded, without headgear and wearing a cusma, a jerkin or sleeveless shirt reaching to the knees’. In yet another, which seemed to refer to a later phase of his life, he was revered as ‘a wise counsellor in matters of state’ and depicted as ‘an old man with a beard and long hair wearing a long tunic’.¹⁰

Civilizing mission

Above all else, Viracocha was remembered in the legends as a teacher. Before his coming, it was said, ‘men lived in a condition of disorder, many went naked like savages; they had no houses or other dwellings than caves, and from these they went forth to gather whatever they could find to eat in the countryside.’¹¹

Viracocha was credited with changing all this and with initiating the long-lost golden age which later generations looked back on with nostalgia. All the legends agreed, furthermore, that he had carried out his civilizing mission with great kindness and as far as possible had abjured the use of force: careful instruction and personal example had been the main methods used to equip the people with the techniques and knowledge necessary for a cultured and productive life. In particular, he was remembered for bringing to Peru such varied skills as medicine, metallurgy, farming, animal husbandry, the art of writing (said by the Incas to have been introduced by Viracocha but later forgotten), and a sophisticated understanding of the principles of engineering and architecture.

I had already been impressed by the quality of Inca stonework in Cuzco. As my research in the old town continued, however, I was surprised to discover that by no means all the so-called Inca masonry could be attributed with any degree of archaeological certainty to the Incas. It was true that they had been masters in the manipulation of stone, and many monuments in the Cuzco area were indisputably their work. It seemed, however, that some of the more remarkable structures routinely attributed to them could have been erected by earlier civilizations; the evidence suggested that the Incas had often functioned as the restorers of these structures rather than their original builders.

The same appeared to be true of the highly developed system of roads connecting the far-flung parts of the Inca empire. The reader will recall that these roads took the form of parallel highways running north to south, one along the coast and the other through the Andes. All in all more than 15,000 miles of surfaced tracks had been in regular and efficient use before the time of the Spanish conquest, and I had assumed that the Incas had been responsible for all of them. I now learned that it was much more likely that they had inherited the system. Their role had been to restore, maintain and unify a pre-existing network. Indeed, though it was not often admitted, no expert could safely estimate how old these incredible highways were or who had built them.¹²

The mystery was deepened by local traditions which stated not only that the road system and the sophisticated architecture had been ‘ancient in the time of the Incas’, but that both ‘were the work of white, auburn-haired men’ who had lived thousands of years earlier.¹³

One legend described Viracocha as being accompanied by ‘messengers’ of two kinds, ‘faithful soldiers’ (huaminca) and ‘shining ones’ (hayhuaypanti). Their role was to carry their lord’s message ‘to every part of the world’.¹⁴

Elsewhere there were phrases such as: ‘Con Ticci returned … with a number of attendants’; ‘Con Ticci then summoned his followers, who were called viracocha’; ‘Con Ticci commanded all but two of the viracocha to go east …’¹⁵; ‘There came forth from a lake a Lord named Con Ticci Viracocha bringing with him a certain number of people …’¹⁶; ‘Thus those viracochas went off to the various districts which Viracocha had indicated for them …’ .¹⁷

The work of demons?

The ancient citadel of Sacsayhuaman lies just north of Cuzco. We reached it late one afternoon under a sky almost occluded by heavy clouds of tarnished silver. A cold grey breeze was blowing across the high-altitude tundra as I clambered up stairways, through lintelled stone gates built for giants, and walked along the mammoth rows of zig-zag walls.

I craned my neck and looked up at a big granite boulder that my route now passed under. Twelve feet high, seven feet across, and weighing considerably more than 100 tons, it was a work of man, not nature. It had been cut and shaped into a symphonic harmony of angles, manipulated with apparent ease (as though it were made of wax or putty) and stood on its end in a wall of other huge and problematic polygonal blocks, some of them positioned above it, some below it, some to each side, and all in perfectly balanced and well-ordered juxtaposition.

Since one of these astonishing pieces of carefully hewn stone had a height of twenty-eight feet and was calculated to weigh 361 tons¹⁸ (roughly the equivalent of fiive hundred family-sized automobiles), it seemed to me that a number of fundamental questions were crying out for answers.

How had the Incas, or their predecessors, been able to work stone on such a gargantuan scale? How had they cut and shaped these cyclopean boulders so precisely? How had they transported them tens of miles from distant quarries? By what means had they made walls of them, shuffling the individual blocks around and raising them high above the ground with such apparent ease? These people weren’t even supposed to have had the wheel, let alone machinery capable of lifting and manipulating dozens of irregularly shaped 100-ton blocks, and sorting them into three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles.

I knew that the chroniclers of the early colonial period had been as perplexed as I was by what they had seen. The respected Garcilaso de la Vega, for example, who came here in the sixteenth century, had spoken with awe about the fortress of Sacsayhuaman:

Its proportions are inconceivable when one has not actually seen it; and when one has looked at it closely and examined it attentively, they appear to be so extraordinary that it seems as though some magic had presided over its construction; that it must be the work of demons instead of human beings. It is made of such great stones, and in such great number, that one wonders simultaneously how the Indians were able to quarry them, how they transported them … and how they hewed them and set them one on top of the other with such precision. For they disposed of neither iron nor steel with which to penetrate the rock and cut and polish the stones; they had neither wagon nor oxen to transport them, and, in fact, there exist neither wagons nor oxen throughout the world that would have sufficed for this task, so enormous are these stones and so rude the mountain paths over which they were conveyed …¹⁹

Garcilaso also reported something else interesting. In his Royal Commentaries of the Incas he gave an account of how, in historical times, an Inca king had tried to emulate the achievements of his predecessors who had built Sacsayhuaman. The attempt had involved bringing just one immense boulder from several miles away to add to the existing fortifications: ‘This boulder was hauled across the mountain by more than 20,000 Indians, going up and down very steep hills … At a certain spot, it fell from their hands over a precipice crushing more than 3000 men.’²⁰ In all the histories I surveyed, this was the only report which described the Incas actually building, or trying to build, with huge blocks like those employed at Sacsayhuaman. The report suggested that they possessed no experience of the techniques involved and that their attempt had ended in disaster.

This, of course, proved nothing in itself. But Garcilaso’s story did intensify my doubts about the great fortifications which towered above me. As I looked at them I felt that they could, indeed, have been erected before the age of the Incas and by some infinitely older and more 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; thermoluminescence, too, was useless. 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.