For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/197078
For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/197078
For photos, see greatmirror.com
Great Zimbabwe had given me a new appreciation of stone walls, so later that year I went to Cuzco. I had never been there, or even to Peru, but foreign names become familiar very quickly. Colcampata, Sacsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo: no problem. I took a pass on Machu Picchu, but not because of its name. Instead, it’s because one evening at a hotel in Urubamba I heard busloads of Germans getting prepped for their morning departure: “Vier Uhr scharf!” I don’t like being told what to do, and I sure don’t like crowds. I suppose someone will say that I’m just too damned lazy to get up early, and there’s something to that.
If now I was showing Cuzco to a friend, I’d begin at the plaza outside the San Cristobal church. It’s on a steep hill and looks south over the historic north end of Cuzco and, stretching into the distance, the more recently built-up area that extends about ten miles to the south and completely fill the narrow Cuzco Valley. Further expansion means building on hills, a process already underway. A city of twenty-five thousand people in 1900, Cuzco a century later had three hundred thousand, and by 2010 it had added another hundred thousand. I know nothing about the local real estate market, but I bet that somebody has made real money off those hillsides.
It’s probably a good thing I didn’t start my own visit at San Cristobal, because I would have thought that I was seeing a fine example of a Spanish colonial city, with a Plaza des Armas and a plaza-fronting cathedral. Around the plaza I would have seen, kitty-corner to the cathedral, a Jesuit church and, reaching out in every direction, a grid of streets derived from ancient Roman town-planning. In other words, I would have completely missed at least two things: first, that the plaza is a remnant of an even larger Inca plaza, and, second, that the street layout is not Roman but was planned by the Inca to resemble a mountain lion, a none-too-subtle reminder that the Inca Empire wasn’t all sweetness and light.
Fortunately, instead of starting at San Cristobal, I walked around the Plaza des Armas. A nearby museum had a poster of a photograph taken by the pioneering Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi. It was captioned “English Dandy,” and it showed a young man visiting Cusco in 1925. He was very British in a fine suit, a bowler hat and a cane. I mention him because I saw thousands of tourists but not one as well-dressed as that young man. Jeans and t-shirts are bad news for hoteliers and restaurateurs or really anyone whose job has a French name, but a town can do all right if it has enough jeans and t-shirts. Cuzco has plenty. My South American Handbook recommends four hotels, but that’s the 1928 edition. If I consult the 2017 edition, I see 23 recommended hotels plus a note that “Cuzco has hundreds of hotels in all categories.” Without those jeans and t-shirts, most of the city’s hotels, restaurants, and craft shops that would fold. The tenacious street-sellers would have to return to desperately poor villages. The police would lose their own jobs, especially the officers who make the street sellers’ lives miserable by repeatedly telling them to move on. And cab drivers. One morning I heard there would be a protest. Everybody knew about it in advance, and the town was shut down. I eventually found a cabbie willing to take a chance because, as he said, he needed the money. He chose his route carefully so he could keep his windshield.
I remember walking down the Cuesta de Santa Ana at the north end of the valley. The sidewalks here have been thoughtfully laid out as steps, and I was secretly pleased to see young tourists dragging their suitcases uphill and occasionally pausing for breath. Down at the bottom of the hill the Plaza Kusipata had once been joined to the Plaza des Armas. The Spanish, used to plazas of a certain size, split the Inca plaza in two, separated by a line of two- and three-story buildings.
A street of shifting names runs east and west along the south side of the Plaza des Armas. Had I gone west, I would have passed under a triumphal arch commemorating the short-lived confederation of Peru and Bolivia. Marshal Andres de Santa Cruz thought it was only logical that they should be joined once again, as they had been in the Inca Empire. The confederation lasted for three years, and after a rough patch the marshal retired to Versailles. A couple of decades after his departure, the arch was raised another level. Isn’t it odd that people still tremble at the grandeur that was Rome? We’re happy to knock our own political leaders down a peg or two or ten, but for some reason Julius and Augustus get a pass. We just can’t help deferring to people who woke up speaking Latin
Cuzco has a Starbucks, of course, and of course it’s at the city’s prime commercial spot, which is right between the cathedral and the Jesuit church. I think I got something to drink there, which means I was willing to stand in line, which tells you how desperate I was. I had flown overnight from DFW, my home away from home, and I was running on fumes, especially at eleven thousand feet.
I got rid of the cup and climbed some stairs in the Jesuit church to get a view over the Plaza des Armas, the one cut back by the Spanish to a mere three hundred by five hundred feet. In the nineteenth century it had been a busy public market. Then the merchants were pushed out, and a public park was created. A century later, mature trees were replaced by a half-dozen tedious triangles of grass arranged around a central statue of Pachacuti, the Inca under whom the empire expanded most dramatically. I assumed that the statue had been here a long time—statues aren’t as popular as they used to be—but Pachacuti was, after all, an indio, and the rulers of Peru for the last several centuries would not have been caught dead with anyone thinking of them as having Indian blood. Turns out, the statue was installed in the year 2000. I think of it as the Peruvian equivalent of a statue of Martin Luther King.
I went over to the cathedral, whose most peculiar feature was its two enormous altars, one about a foot in front of the other and almost completely hiding it. The hidden one is of unpainted and oak-colored wood and stands mostly as a symbol of piety. The one blocking it is made of silver and stands mostly as a display of wealth, which is much better. (The Jesuit church across the street, by the way, tops both with an altar of gold.) Still, as Ronald Reagan almost said, how many Spanish Gothic cathedrals do you have to see? I’m glad I saw the one in Toledo, but what is Cuzco’s, other than imitation? Come to think of it, the Cuzco cathedral has something else in common with Toledo’s. That 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. Cuzco’s is on the site of an Inca palace or temple similarly demolished so it couldn’t remind the indios of what they had lost.
The cathedral, as I say, stands on a foundation built by the Inca, but a more visible display of Inca masonry survives and is on display a ten-minute walk away. I’m thinking of the church and monastery of Santo Domingo, built on the site of the Inca’s Coricancha, the “golden enclosure” and the most important Inca temple. Several above-ground Incan walls survive in the church’s cloisters, but you have to pay to see them. I did this grudgingly, because paying to see a sacred place, no matter the denomination, means that the site managers no longer really consider the site sacred. It also means that visitors are left counting their change, which more or less means venerating money. You don’t have to go to Peru to do that.
Fortunately, some much more important bits of Inca masonry survive outside the Coricancha and free for all to see. I’m thinking of a wall of greenish andesite, perfectly smooth and shaped like the hull of a submarine. Yes, that’s a disturbing comparison, but that’s what the wall does look like, There’s a sharply curved bow, a short bit of hull on the side abutting the apse of the church, and a long, gently curved 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. I imagine a cartoon wolf trying to blow down a little pig’s house, and I see the house walls leaning in the gale. So it is with this Coricancha wall, which is not only curved in its footprint but leaning vertically. This is a complex and ingenious design, but it contains a puzzle. I mean that the architect set up a stone yard where masons made thousands of identical stone blocks, each about the size of a breadbox, yet the blocks of this wall are not quite identical. They fit together as perfectly as the plates of a submarine hull, but the blocks vary slightly in size, and some are not rectangular at all but have rectangular bits cut out of them, like the shape of Utah. For some reason, the architect allowed the masons a modicum of freedom, like a restaurant owner who allows the chef to improvise.
Is the wall beautiful? This is a tricky question, so let me ask a question back: can an automobile be beautiful? We commonly say that of course it can, and I myself swoon at the sight of a clean Jaguar XK-150. If I ever win the lottery—an unlikely event, since I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life—I might buy one of those cars, probably in maroon unless my wife insisted on British racing green. And here’s my problem: the Jaguar’s elegance demanded boatloads of rigorous calculation, along with a host of workers who in a factory in Coventry obeyed the orders of a hierarchy of supervisors. There was very little freedom in that factory. For that reason I think there was very little humanity in that factory, and for that reason I think the cars for all their elegance are not beautiful.
Not to worry if you disagree. Most people do. But, just to make my case a bit more impregnable, let me recall that in talking about Great Zimbabwe, I contrasted the beauty of a cell phone with the beauty of a baby. I said that really there was no contest, no matter how many brilliant engineers labored on the phone. It’s the same with the XK150. And it’s the same with the wall outside the Coricancha, whose hints of freedom are overwhelmed by calculations and architectural control. But—and here’s the good news—there are many styles of Inca masonry, some exhibiting less freedom than the Coricancha wall but others exhibiting much more. I want to explore three of them, arrayed on a scale of less-to-more.
By this time I had picked up a rental car. I drove over the ridge to the east of Cuzco and visited Pisac and Ollantaytambo, where the Inca built royal estates atop steep ridges overlooking the narrow valley of the Vilcanota. I’m not interested here in that river, a tributary of the Amazon, or in the palaces atop those ridges. Instead, I’m interested in the agricultural terraces on the steep slopes below the palaces.
I have gone out of my way to see terraces in many countries, from the famous terraces of Banaue in northern Luzon to the even more famous terraces of Bali, and from the less famous terraces of the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan to the not famous at all terraces high in Oman’s Jebel Akhdar. The Filipino and Balinese terraces were built to grow rice as a subsistence crop. The Pakistani terraces support apricots, dried to form an exotic subsistence crop. The Omani terraces, atop profoundly rugged canyons, grow an even more exotic crop, roses grown for the production of rose oil.
Much as I love these places, I have to say that they are amateur productions alongside the terraces of Ollantaytambo and Pisac. I know this sounds dismissive, but I’m really not being dismissive. I’m just stating a fact. I mean that the Asian terraces were built by skilled villagers employing traditional and intuitive technologies. The Inca terraces were built by men who deserve to be considered as professional engineers.
On one or more of the slopes below the palaces, gullies had been converted into broad steps—16 set in one set at Ollantaytambo, 20 steps at one terrace set at Pisac. The terrace platforms at Ollantaybambo are roughly eighty feet long by 10 feet wide. At Pisac, some of the terrace walls are 700 feet long, and the terrace platforms are 50 feet wide. The rocks at Ollantaytambo are all of gray andesite, and those at Pisac are of different rocks and of different colors, many very dark. In both cases, the rocks are minimally shaped. They are also uncoursed, unmortared, and of various sizes, though perhaps averaging the size of basketballs. The calculation I’m talking about is in the design of the walls, which are as symmetrical as 20 giant fingernail clippings or crescent moons and so perfectly aligned with one another that you can stand at the bottom of the lowest terrace, look up the slope, and instead of seeing 16 or 20 walls, each six or seven feet high, see instead what looks like a single wall laid up the gulley slope.
The perfection of these terraces 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 improve on nature. If we think of this as a uniquely Western delusion, we’re wrong.
There’s an even better example at Tipon, about an hour’s drive south of Cuzco, where the terrace walls are andesite blocks shaped and coursed. Kenneth R. Wright, an American civil engineer who has studied Tipon in detail, calls it “stonework poetry.” I disagree. A dozen terraces are arrayed in a row stretching uphill 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 makes the field a bit over one acre. The slope of the set 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 Incan times, corn was the crop of choice, and Wright calculates that a crop at this location requires twenty-two inches of water. Tipon’s spring, he says, delivers about two-thirds of a cubic foot per second. That’s more than enough to sustain two annual corn crops, and that’s not counting rain, which at 50 inches annually is abundant but also highly seasonal. Not content with rain supplemented by spring water, the Inca built a standby canal that could bring water from the next valley. There’s even a ceremonial plaza built off to one side of the terraces where Inca nobles could admire their own tour de force. It’s reminiscent of Sir Francis Bacon’s advice to study nature to command her, but of course the Inca didn’t learn from Bacon. It’s not just that they couldn’t read. It’s because Francisco Pizarro more or less put an end of Inca civilization in 1533, 30 years before Francis Bacon was born.
Poetry? I don’t think so, not unless you think Hoover Dam is poetry in concrete. And there’s another problem. The American anthropologist Susan Niles writes that “founding of an estate was the duty of each Inka; to sustain his cult and support his descendants after he became a mummy.” Conquered peoples did the work, and like the slaves on an antebellum plantation, they remained with the estate generation after generation. Where’s the poetry in that?
This is probably not a question asked by the tourists panting their way up the long flight of stairs flanking the terraces at Ollantaytambo. They might be more likely to wonder about these things if they saw people slaving on the terraces, but there aren’t any. Local farmers would be happy to grow corn here—it’s grown in lots of places a mile away—but Peruvian farmers today are not slaves, and they want to use oxen. The nervous authorities, afraid that hooves will damage the terraces, insist on traditional foot plows. No way, say the farmers, and so the terraces grow grass cut with string trimmers, which makes Tipon in particular look like an array of tennis or volleyball courts with a fringe of precisely built stone channels full of babbling spring water.
Which brings me to a second kind of Inca wall. Remember that hillside from which, next to the San Cristobal church, we overlooked the city? Had I the observational skills of a two-year-old, I would have turned around and noticed the wall behind me. It’s the surviving bit of the Colcampata, Pachacuti’s Cuzco palace. Leave it to him to choose the best view in town.
The wall is about ten feet high and a hundred feet long. It’s punctuated by a half dozen blind niches or alcoves, trapezoidal like most doorways built by the earthquake-conscious Inca. The stones in this wall are roughly about the size of a beachball. They all have smooth faces but are irregularly shaped, some roughly square and others pentagonal. They are uncoursed, or, as some architects say, “cellular.” That name makes sense, if you think of a microscopic cross section of a plant stem, with all the vascular tubes bundled together tightly but not in a tidy pattern. The pattern reminds me of a corn cob whose kernels refuse to form rows.
The remarkable feature of this style of wall is that every stone has a countersunk margin, which emphasizes rather than minimizes the joints between the stones. Why did the Inca, who knew how to make perfectly smooth blocks—witness the submarine hull of the Coricancha—do this on a prestige building like Pachacuti’s palace? Part of the answer, or part of one answer, was provided in the 1940s by John Howland Rowe, an American archaeologist who actually taught a class I took about 1961. He was too shy to be a good teacher in a class with a hundred students. I’m not criticizing him, only the situation we found ourselves in. Funny that this question of freedom crops up in so many places.
Rowe in any case had a theory about walls whose stones have countersunk edges. I’m going to quote him at some length. He writes that
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. They weather to a grey color, something like that of the local stones, and the walls have a surface texture entirely different from either stone or adobe construction. Each turf acquired a rounded face, curving back on the edge to leave the chinks countersunk, much in the fashion of rusticated masonry.
Now, Inca masonry of the ashlar, or regular course type, generally has a surface appearance that 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.
I wish Rowe had gone one step further and asked why the Inca Pachacuti wanted to imitate in his palace the sod walls of common houses. My suspicion is that mighty Pachacuti had a streak of humanity that demanded to be liberated from all the hierarchies and behavioral rules of Inca society. It’s like Citizen Kane, where the dying titan’s last breath recalls a childhood toy.
When you start seeing this kind of countersunk stonework—sometimes coursed as Rowe mentions but sometimes not, as at the Colcompata—you start seeing it in lots of places. Step outside Starbucks and look down the long, straight alley to the left. The wall on the left side was built of such countersunk blocks and originally bordered a kind of Inca harem. In Spanish times, and with high irony, it became a nunnery. Today it shares space with Starbucks and a hotel, some of whose rooms have a wall made of blocks whose other sides border the street. There can’t be many hotels in the world whose guest rooms have a wall 500 years old.
By now I had discovered the third kind of Inca wall that I want to mention. The most famous example is on display just up the hill behind the Colcampata. There are stairs up to it, which I heartily recommend for athletes in training, but sensible seniors can drive up and around, then walk straight in. There are lots of people milling around most of the time, but I came at first light and was on my own. Welcome to Sacsayhuaman, wretchedly dubbed “sexy woman” for foreign idiots.
The entrance leads into a roughly rectangular flat area a couple of hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long, bounded on both of the 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 tourist feet.
The hill on the north, despite features of interest, is easy to overlook because it’s so completely overshadowed by the hill on the south. The grass there abuts a wall composed of stones that Polyphemus could not lift. The footprint of the wall is serrated instead of straight, and was intended to suggest the teeth of a puma. To me it looks more like a giant ripsaw laid on the ground with about twenty teeth, Each tooth rises about fifteen feet from the ground and point to point measures about seventy feet neighbor to neighbor. If you stand on the hill to the north, you can see that there are three ripsaws, rising en echelon on the southern hill.
The ripsaws are too long to be easily comprehended, but the blocks of stone forming each tooth catch every visitor’s attention—and have done so since the Spanish arrived in the 1530s. Some of the blocks are about the size of a big chest freezer. A few are so much bigger that if you recreated them as giant marshmallows, you could squeeze into the goo a Cadillac Eldorado from the glory days.
One obvious question is how the Inca lugged these stones around. The Venezuelan architect Graziano Gasparini has rightly dismissed this question as trivial. He says 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 built atop the ridge.
The trickier question is not how the walls were built this way but why. Juan Pizarro, Francisco’s brother, didn’t worry about this. Before he died here during a furious assault in 1536, he described Sacsayhuaman as “a very strong fort surrounded with masonry walls of stone.” Hiram Bingham, the Indiana Jones who found Machu Picchu for the National Geographic, had another idea. In 1911 he pointed out that “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…. 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.”
Visitors to Sacsayhuaman generall don’t ask themselves what kind of society thinks that your gods will be pleased if you build a capital city in the shape of a mountain lion, its body suggested by the town’s street pattern and its jaw suggested by a wall at a parade ground. Compared to Cuzco, the Nuremberg parade ground is sissy stuff, and Juan Pizarro was smart, or at least fortunate, not to understand all the symbolism. I think it would have spooked him. It would certainly have spooked me. There’s also the question of what freedom means, if anything, to people living in such a society.
Ironically, the teeth of Sacsayhuaman suggest that the totalitarian rule of the Inca was not complete. 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 thirty-three 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 much harder. My wife calls these cutouts “keys” and insists they make the wall stronger. She’s probably right, but like the Coricancha stone shaped like Utah, the cutouts also give each stone personality.
The palaces atop the ridges at Pisac and Ollamtaytambo have their own cyclopean walls, not as monstrous as those of Sacsayhuaman but still full of trapezoids and nicked-out corners. Unlike the stonework of pharaonic Egypt, these stones, too, like Sacsayhuman, have personality, which is to say that they were the work of artists.
The most famous example is a 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 its bubbling central fountain, it looks like a Relais et Chateau property in Spain or Italy. It’s nice, unless you start worrying 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.
As every visitor to Cuzco knows, I’m here not for the museum or the house but for its foundation walls. Guidebooks usually say that they were the foundation of the palace of the Inca Roca, but the evidence for this is scant, and an American art historian, Adam Rummen, has argued that these foundation 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 measured, the stones here are idiosyncratic.
I suspect that of a thousand visitors to Cuzco, well over nine hundred have photos of themselves posing at the extraordinary stone, the hatun rumiyoc It’s a lot like crowds mobbing the Mona Lisa, but come early enough and the stone is alone. It’s not especially large, maybe three feet high and five feet wide. The base is politely horizontal, but 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, of which four are either obtuse or acute. You do have to wonder why masons would play this way.
The fixation visitors have on 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, fitted together as snugly as those of the Coricancha but also intercalated with occasional, small stones like children.
Some of the blocks, perhaps no more than a tenth of the total, 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. It’s as though the masons were smiling as they worked. How many people are able to do that? I only wish that on my way back home I could say that I found so much happiness in the terminal walls at DFW.