Cuzco and Around (Peru)

For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/197078

For photos, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

In 2018 I went to Peru for the first time.  I might have worn a t-shirt saying “Great Zimbabwe Sent Me” or “Pohnpei Sent Me,” because it was the stonework in those places–their unmortared walls, really–that made me go.  I didn’t even leave Lima’s airport.  Instead I went straight to Cuzco, where I surprised myself by becoming comfortable in a few days with extra-terrestrial names like Colcampata, Sacsayhuaman, and Ollantaytambo.  I visited those places, but took a pass on the place everybody talks about.  That’s part of why I skipped it, but at a hotel in Urubamba one evening I heard a voice instructing a busload of tourists:  “Vier Uhr scharf!”   I hate being told what to do, and I sure hate checking out of hotels at four in the morning.  So sue me.  I skipped Machu Picchu. 

If now I was showing Cuzco to a friend–this of course would never happen–I’d begin at the plaza outside the San Cristobal church.   It’s partway up a steep hill and about 200 feet above the  historic part of the city, which is at the north end of the narrow Cuzco Valley.   Cuzco in 1900 had twenty-five thousand people.  A century later, it had three hundred thousand, and it took only 10 years to add another hundred thousand.  The Valley, stretching some ten miles from the San Cristobal Church, is now filled with city–perhaps I should go clinical and say “filled with urban tissue”--and buildings are creeping up the Valley’s steep sides. 

The San Cristobal church is the best place for an overview of the Valley and certainly the historic city at your feet, but it’s good that I didn’t start my own visit there because I would have completely misunderstood what I was looking at.  I would have thought that I was seeing a fine example of a Spanish colonial city, with a street grid, a central plaza, and a plaza-fronting cathedral, all derived from ancient Roman models.  Cuzco does have a grid and a central plaza and a cathedral, but the street pattern was laid out by the Inca, not the Spanish, the plaza is a remnant of an even larger Inca plaza, and the cathedral rests on the foundation of an Inca building the Spanish demolished. 

Fortunately, I started at the plaza.  My hotel wasn’t far, and to get there I walked down the Cuesta de Santa Ana.  The sidewalk had been thoughtfully laid out as steps, and my heart was warmed at the sight of young tourists dragging suitcases up those stairs and pausing now and then for breath.  (A few years ago I saw some young people playing on the walls of some Maya ruins.  In a theatrically gruff voice, I said, “Just wait.”  They got the joke.)  

The Spanish, used to plazas of a certain size, split the Inca plaza in two and separated the pieces with a ribbon of two- and three-story buildings.  A street of shifting names--that’s always fun--runs east and west along the south side of the two plazas.   If I had gone west, I would have passed through a triumphal arch commemorating the short-lived confederation of Peru and Bolivia.   Marshal Andres de Santa Cruz thought it was only logical that the two countries should be united, as they had been under the Inca.  The confederation lasted for three years before the marshal gave up and eventually retired to Versailles.  A couple of decades after his departure, the arch was raised another level.  I don’t know why, but even today, people are impressed by the Caesars in a way they’re not by their own leaders.  Maybe it’s because Julius and Augustus spoke Latin at breakfast, unless–and this is even more intimidating–they were in the mood for Greek.

Cuzco has a Starbucks, of course, and of course it’s at the city’s prime commercial spot, which is smack between the cathedral and, kitty-corner to it on the plaza, the city’s Jesuit church.  I got something to drink, which means I was willing to stand in line, which tells you how desperate I was.   I had flown overnight from DFW, and at 11,000 feet above sea level I was running on fumes.      

I drank whatever was in the cup, got rid of it, and climbed some stairs in the Jesuit church to get a view over the plaza.  This was the Plaza des Armas, not the smaller Plaza Kucipata.  In the nineteenth century it had been a busy public market.  Then the merchants were pushed out and replaced by a park.  The mature trees had now been cut down and replaced by a half-dozen triangles of grass arranged around a central statue of Pachacuti.  He was the Inca under whom the empire expanded most dramatically, and I assumed that the statue had been in place a long time.  Shows how little I knew: the rulers of Peru for the last several centuries would not have been caught dead celebrating an Indian, and the statue was installed in the year 2000.  I think of it as the Peruvian equivalent of a statue of Martin Luther King.

The most interesting feature of the cathedral, for my money, was its two enormous altars, one smack in front of the other and hiding it.  The hidden one is unpainted and made of wood.  I got up close but could only see the edges.   I liked it because it seemed humble alongside the magnificent silver braggart that stands a few inches in front of it.  In a fine display of cosmic justice, the Jesuits in their church across the street built an equally enormous altarpiece but made it of gold.  The upstaged cathedral is still grand, but as Ronald Reagan almost said, how many Spanish Gothic cathedrals do you need?  I’m glad I saw the one in Toledo, in Spain, but what is Cuzco’s, other than imitation?   Come to think of it, the Cuzco cathedral does have something else in common with Toledo’s, because Cuzco’s cathedral is on the site of that Indian palace or temple that the Spanish demolished so it couldn’t remind the Indians of their former greatness.  The Toledo cathedral was built on the site of a synagogue that Alfonzo VI had promised to protect but which a clever bishop demolished while Alfonzo was out of town.

A still visible display of Inca masonry is a quarter-mile southeast of the cathedral.  It’s the church and monastery of Santo Domingo, which occupies the site of the Inca’s Coricancha, the “golden enclosure” that was the most important Inca temple.  Several above-ground Inca walls survive inside the church, but you have to pay to see them.  I did this grudgingly, because I think that charging admission to a sacred place amounts to desanctifying it.  I walked into the church while still counting my change, which comes close to venerating money, and I don’t have to go to Peru for that.

Fortunately, a more impressive bit of Inca masonry survives just outside the church.  It’s a wall of greenish andesite, perfectly smooth and shaped–I apologize for this metaphor–like the hull of a submarine.  There’s a sharply curved bow, a short bit of hull on the side abutting the apse of the church, and a long stretch of hull or wall about twenty feet high extending on the other side for almost a hundred feet.  

Go to where the wall breaks off at the far end of the long section, and you can see the wall in cross-section.  You know that cartoon where the wolf tries to blow down the little pig’s brick house, and the brick walls for a few seconds lean and tremble, as though a hurricane threatens their collapse.  The Coricancha wall similarly leans vertically.

The wall is complex in another way, too.  Masons shaped thousands of stone blocks, each about the size of a breadbox and each perfectly rectilinear, yet the blocks are not identical.  They fit together as perfectly as the plates of a submarine hull but vary slightly in size.  Some even have rectangular bits cut out of them, like maps of the state of Utah.  I don’t know if these variations were planned by the architect, but I hope that the architect instead allowed his masons a bit of freedom, like a restaurant owner allowing the chef to improvise.  Maybe he did.
 
Is the wall beautiful?  This is a tricky question, and I can’t answer it because I don’t know if the masons were artists or slaves.  I’m putting it too starkly, so let me rephrase it.  Can an automobile be beautiful?  Most people would say yes, of course, and since adolescence I have swooned at the sight of convertible Jaguar XK-150s.   But here’s my problem: automobiles demand boatloads of calculation, along with workers who obey the orders of a hierarchy of supervisors.  There is very little, if any, freedom in that factory, and little enough in the design studio.  For that reason I think that automobiles, though sometimes elegant, are never beautiful.  I think it’s the same with the wall outside the Coricancha, where hints of freedom–those aberrant Utahs–are up against a tyrannical boss probably reducing the masons to slaves.  Wage slaves, possibly.  I didn’t know it at the time, but my wandering around amounted to my looking for walls built by men who weren’t slaves.

I rented a car and left Cuzco for a couple of days so I could visit two so-called royal estates.  The road headed east and climbed a thousand feet before dropping down into the Urubamba Valley.  There I stopped at Pisac, the first of the two estates.The other was Ollantaytambo, still in the Urubamba Valley but 35 miles downstream.  Both estates are located at the top of spurs with fine views up and down the main valley, but Pisac is fully 1500 feet above the valley floor, while Ollantaytambo is much lower, perhaps 200 feet above the floor.  

Both estates are popular with tourists, mostly for the ruins of ridgetop palaces, which have lost their originally thatched roofs and are now open to the sky but which retain tremendous stone walls, sometimes with perfectly fitted blocks like those on the “submarine” wall of the Coricancha and at places precisely trimmed at the base to elegantly hug the natural curve of the bedrock.  There are also megaliths that have been dragged for miles before being planted on the ridgetops.  I hazard the guess that guides don’t say that these estates were built by conquered peoples who, like the slaves on antebellum plantations, remained on the estate generation after generation.   The American anthropologist Susan Niles writes that the “founding of an estate was the duty of each Inka; to sustain his cult and support his descendants after he became a mummy.”  It’s the stuff of nightmares, though I know I’m not supposed to be judgmental.

What impressed me most about these estates was the agricultural terraces fitted to the steep slopes below the palaces.  I’m a sucker for terraces.  They can be for rice, as they are on Bali and at the Banaue terraces north of Manila.  They can be for apricots, as they are in the Hunza Valley north of Islamabad.  They can be for rose oil, as they are on the terraces of Jebel Akhtar in Oman.  On these royal estates of the Inca, the terraces were for corn, but they are different from all the others I’ve mentioned in two other ways.  The first is that the terraces in all those other places were built by farmers employing traditional technologies.  The terraces at Pisac and Ollantaytambo were built by professional engineers.  I don’t want to fight about definition, but you’ll see what I mean when I describe the terraces.  They are, so to speak, high-tech terraces.  The other difference is that the terraces on Bali and the rest grew crops from economic necessity.  The corn grown on these terraces, like the terraces themselves, was wildly uneconomic but was an emotionally gratifying demonstration of the Inca’s mastery of nature.

At both Pisac and Ollantaytambo, gullies had been converted into broad steps.  At Ollantaytambo, there’s a terrace set of 16 steps, each step roughly eighty feet long and 10 feet wide.  At Pisac, there’s a gully converted into 20 steps, and some of the risers, if I can use carpenter’s language, are 700 feet long, with treads 50 feet deep.  The rocks of the risers at Ollantaytambo are all of gray andesite, and those at Pisac are of different kinds and colors of rocks.  In both cases, the rocks are minimally shaped.  They are also uncoursed, unmortared, and of various sizes, perhaps averaging the size of basketballs.  But I am misleading you if I make the stonework seem crude, because the risers themselves are as perfect as crescent moons, and they are so perfectly aligned with one another that you can stand, as you might at the base of a giant’s staircase, look up the slope, and instead of seeing 16 or 20 steps, see instead a single wall replacing the natural gully with a slope that seems to be perfectly machined. 

This perfection reminds me of the obsession many Americans have with perfect lawns--not a brown spot, not a single dandelion, not a blade of grass of any species other than the chosen bluegrass or fescue or Bermuda.  The Inca terraces were built for the same reason, to make the Inca bosom swell with pride at Inca mastery of mountains, plants, and–let us not forget– people.  I can hear a television documentary showing all the hardware as something to marvel at while sidestepping the software, which is dark.  

There’s an even better example of what I might as well fess up and call Inca totalitarianism at Tipon, about an hour’s drive south of Cuzco.  Curiously, to get there I drove down through the Cuzco valley and continued a few more miles.  The thing that’s curious is that I was following the Huatanay River which, close to Tipon, joins the upper Urubamba and flows east before turning north and heading to Pisac and Ollantaytambo.  The Amazon’s upper tributaries get very confusing.

Tipon has a dozen terraces arrayed in a row stretching for thirteen hundred feet.  The terraces are rectangular, and the largest—in the middle of the set—is a square measuring about 225 feet on a side.  That’s a bit over one acre.  The slope of the set of terraces is constant at about twelve degrees, just steep enough for stone-lined canals to deliver irrigation water expeditiously from the spring at the head of the valley. 

In Inca times, corn was grown on these terraces.  Kenneth R. Wright, an American civil engineer who has studied Tipon in detail, calculates that a crop of corn at this location requires twenty-two inches of water.  Tipon’s spring, Wright says, delivers about two-thirds of a cubic foot per second.  That’s more than enough to sustain two annual corn crops on the terraces, and that’s not counting rain, which at 50 inches annually is abundant but also highly seasonal.  Not content with rain and spring water, the Inca built a standby canal that could bring water from the next valley.   

Wright calls it “stonework poetry,” and the Inca might have agreed with him, because they also built a ceremonial plaza built off to one side of the terraces so they could admire this tour de force.  You might think that the Inca had studied the work of Sir Francis Bacon, who urged his countrymen to study the natural world so they could control it, but Francisco Pizarro had more or less destroyed the Inca empire 30 years before Bacon was born.  

Oddly enough, the terraces at all these places today should, in the spirit of authenticity, grow corn.  Local farmers would be happy to do so, if they were allowed to plow with animals.  The authorities in charge of the sites fear that hooves might destroy the terrace stonework, so the farmers are told they must use traditional footplows.  I am pleased to say that the farmers say, “No dice. No way. Fat chance.”  And so the terraces today grow grass cut with string trimmers, which is pretty but pretty thoroughly inauthentic and makes Tipon in particular look like an array of tennis or volleyball courts elegantly fringed by neat stone channels full of babbling water.

I went back to Cuzco and went up to the San Cristobal church with its panoramic view of the city. By this time I had seen a lot of Inca walls, but I had not seen a wall like the wall directly behind me now.  It was the surviving bit of the Colcampata, Pachacuti’s Cuzco palace.  Leave it to him to choose the best view in town.

The wall was about ten feet high and a hundred feet long.  The stones were about the size of a beachball.  They are uncoursed.  Some architects call the pattern “cellular,” which makes sense, but I think of a corn cob whose kernels jumble together and refuse to form straight rows.  

The remarkable feature of the wall is that every stone, though smooth as a bathtub on its face, has a countersunk margin, which emphasizes rather than minimizes the joints between the stones.  The Inca knew how to join blocks as perfectly as a submarine’s hull plates, so why did they put this crude finish on the wall here, a prestige building if there ever was one?  

A part of at least one answer comes from a book published in the 1940s by John Howland Rowe, an American archaeologist who taught a class I took much later, about 1961.  He was too shy to be a good teacher in a class with a hundred students, and I was just a cipher to him.  Less than that.   I’m not criticizing him, only the situation we found ourselves in.  Funny that freedom crops up in so many places.

Rowe had a theory about this style of wall.  I’ll let him explain it:

…an observant traveler in the Cuzco Valley cannot help noticing that many boundary walls and even houses are not built of either stone or adobe, but of square-cut blocks of sod.  The turfs are 10 to 15 centimeters in thickness and are laid up in rows with the topside down…  Each turf acquired a rounded face, curving back on the edge to leave the chinks countersunk, much in the fashion of rusticated masonry.

Rowe continues to say that the masonry in Pachacuti’s wall

…is too similar to that of a sod wall to be accidental. The stones are cut with a rounded surface and countersunk joints, details which serve no structural purpose, are not natural to the medium of rectangular blocks, and hence are purely a decorative convention.  Sod construction is the most likely source for such a convention.

A moment ago I said that Rowe provided a part of an answer.  The part he sidesteps is why the Inca Pachacuti’s palace imitates the sod walls of the houses of little people.  My guess is that mighty Pachacuti, like a lot of other people, wanted to escape his society’s hierarchies and rules.  It’s like Citizen Kane, where the titan in his last breath recalls a toy from childhood.  

It’s hard not to like a wall like that, and I found others like it, including one bordering an alley that stretches south from Starbucks. It once framed the home of a kind of Inca harem that ironically became a Spanish nunnery. Now part of the wall belongs to a hotel, some of whose rooms are walled on one side by the same stones you can touch as you walk down the alley.   There can’t be many hotels in the world whose guest rooms have a wall 500 years old.  I wonder how many guests lie in their bed and put a hand on one of those blocks.  

Farther uphill from the San Cristobal church there’s another wall.  There are stairs up to it, which I recommend for athletes in training.  Sensible seniors can drive up and walk straight in.  Lots of people are usually milling around, but I came at first light and was alone.

I walked from the parking lot into a roughly rectangular field, flat and smooth.  It was a couple of hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long, and it was bounded on both of its long sides by hills.  Once it was an Inca parade ground.  Later it was dug up by treasure hunters.  A century ago, it was planted in cereals.  Today it’s in grass tough enough to survive lots of shoes.  

The hill on the north is overpowered by the hill on the south, which is bordered by a wall of stones that Polyphemus could not lift.  The wall is not straight.  Instead, it’s serrated and was intended to suggest the bared jaw of a puma.  To me it looks more like a giant ripsaw laid on the ground.  Either way, it has about twenty teeth, and there’s about 70 feet from the tip of one tooth to the tip of the next, and the teeth stand about 15 feet tall.   If you stand on the hill to the north, you will see that there are three of these jaws or saw blades, and they rise one above the other on the hill. 

Some of the blocks that comprise the wall are about the size of a big chest freezer, but a few are so big that if you duplicated them as marshmallows, you could squeeze a Cadillac Eldorado into the goo without so much as a fin protruding.

An obvious question is how the Inca lugged these stones around, but the Venezuelan architect Graziano Gasparini has dismissed this question as trivial.  He writes that “with the backing of an all-powerful organization that has no manpower problems and that can gather in a moment one or ten thousand workers, the potential for erecting impressive works is almost limitless.”  Over at Ollamtaytambo, you can still see the long ramp—it looks like a service road, and that’s what it was—used to drag huge cubes of stone to the palace atop the ridge.  

The trickier question is not how but why the walls here–the place is called Sacsayhuaman–were built this way.   Before dying here during a furious assault in 1536, Juan Pizarro, Francisco’s brother, described this place as “a very strong fort surrounded with masonry walls of stone.”  He seems not to have wondered why it was built with such huge stones.  I don’t know who the first person to ask this question was, but Hiram Bingham, the Indiana Jones who found Machu Picchu for the National Geographic, offered an answer in 1911.  He writes 

…equally strong defenses against an enemy attempting to attack the hilltop back of Cuzco might have been constructed of smaller stones in an infinitely shorter time, with far less labor and pain….  

So why build this way? Here’s Bingham answer:

It seems to me possible that Sacsayhuaman was built in accordance with their desires to please their gods....  This seems to me a more likely object for the gigantic labor involved in the construction of Sacsayhuaman than its possible usefulness as a fortress.”   

Bingham did not ask what kind of society pleases its gods by building a wall evoking the jaws of a puma?  Why kind of god is pleased by such a wall?  I suppose it’s not hugely different from a nation that chooses an eagle or a lion as its symbol, but Sacsayhuaman is a reminder that the world is a lot grimmer than I would like to believe.  I found the site more threatening than the Nuremberg parade ground, and I bet that if someone had told Juan Pizarro about the giant teeth here he might have looked for another point to launch his attack.

On the other hand, always looking for a ray of light, there’s a hint of freedom in these teeth.  Take one side of one tooth.  By itself, it’s a wall of forty blocks, perfectly assembled with the tightest of unmortared joints.   But of those forty stones, only about thirty are even roughly cubical.  Some of the others have corners cut out, like a chessboard missing a1, a2, b1, and b2.  Still others are trapezoidal, which forces their mates to match.  These rocks were quarried from a limestone as homogeneous as Styrofoam, yet the masons often chose to cut irregular blocks, even though this made the task of fitting them together harder. 

The palaces atop the ridges at Pisac and Ollamtaytambo also have cyclopean walls, not as monstrously huge as those of Sacsayhuaman but still full of trapezoids and nicked-out corners.  Unlike the identical blocks of pharaonic Egypt, the irregularity of these walls suggest the freedom of artists at work.  It’s odd, when you think that the men building huge public works in our time–say, the Panama Canal–had zero room to improvise.

When it comes to Inca walls where the masons were free to work as they liked, the type specimen is one block east of Starbucks and on the same street as the fake Roman arch.  This stretch of the street is called Hatun Rumiyoc, literally “Great Rock” or “Extraordinary Stone” street.  Early in the twentieth century a building here became an archbishop’s palace and, within a few years, a museum of religious art, which it remains.  Inside, there’s a small, ornate chapel and there are rooms with elegant inlaid ceilings.  So far as the interior goes I vote for the courtyard.  With its square colonnade under a pantile roof and with a bubbling central fountain, it looks like a Relais et Chateau property. It’s nice, until you worry how the slim columns might fare in an earthquake.  The two most recent were in 1650 and 1950, and they weren’t kind to the city.  There was logic behind the battered walls and trapezoidal doors of the Inca. 

I’m here not for the museum or the house but for its foundation walls, which guidebooks usually say are the remnants of the palace of the Inca Roca.  Evidence for this is scant, and Adam Rummen, an art historian, has argued that these walls supported not a palace but a sacred agricultural terrace where corn was planted ceremonially each year to insure a successful crop across the empire.  It sounds like Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, but where everything there is calculated, the stones in these walls are idiosyncratic.  

I suspect that of a thousand visitors to Cuzco, half have photos of themselves posing at the “great rock”  or "extraordinary stone."  It’s a little sad, like crowds mobbing the Mona Lisa, but come early enough and the stone is waiting quietly.  It’s flat, gray, and maybe three feet high and five feet wide.  Its charm is at the margins, because the base is timidly horizontal, the greater part of the left side leans trapezoidally, and the top has been cut into an irregular stairway of four treads.  Altogether, I count twelve sides and twelve angles--perhaps I made a mistake--of which four are either obtuse or acute.   You do have to wonder why masons would play this way.  

The attention visitors give to this one stone means that they ignore the rest of the wall, especially the wall around the corner, which stretches for about fifty feet and rises about fifteen feet above the sidewalk before yielding to Hispanic plaster and vigas.  The wall consists mostly of four courses of massive but uniquely shaped blocks.  Some have one or two protruding bumps.  They emerge from the face like half a cucumber, stuck end out.   Perhaps the bumps helped in moving the stones, but some authors have suggested that they were ornamental, perhaps suggestive of breasts.  All the more reason to wonder how the masons, laboring for austere masters, got away with it.  The masons were smiling at a world brimming with life.  It’s so inventive that I felt the freedom of the men who built it.  On my way home, I could only dream of seeing walls this happy at the airport.